Castle And Good Stories

We're reaching the last stages of the project, and soon enough we'll be very busy at work. At home, we're taking care of Elay, and enjoying his first reactions to us (smiles, laughs, sounds, and the funniest of them all: raising arms and legs and rolling to one side when very happy).

With all this, we still have enough free time and we do stuff that we like. Recently we finished watching some series, and since there were no new chapters of any of the series that we still follow, we decided to start something new. We decided to give "Castle" a try, since I had heard it was decent enough.

I enjoy browsing this website called TV Tropes. IT's an informal wiki that compiles Tropes. Tropes are tricks and patterns used in all kinds of fiction, or even in real life. For example, the "Evil Genius" Trope is the one where we have some kind of inventor that has some secret lab and performs experiments that will enable them to rule the world or achieve some other selfish objective. It's an easily recognizable pattern, a building block for stories. Using tropes is inevitable, even when you're subverting them by showing how ridiculous they are.  You may use new ones or more obscure ones, but still any story can be analysed in some way using Tropes. And using Tropes is not bad, or it does not make a story bad.

With that in mind, Castle sounds like this: A famous and rich male writer that lives with his mother and his daughter writes about murders and has similarities with Stephen King partners with a female police detective  thanks to his friendship with powerful people, and together they solve murder investigations with the help of other detectives and forensics.

This is a truthful explanation of the series, and it sounds unoriginal and repetitive, like a detective novel mixed with CSI.

However, this show is awesome. We're completely addicted to it.

The trick here is that the premise is rather cliché, but its all in the execution, and in the characters. The characters are alive. They are funny, they are likeable, they have flaws and qualities...they're very human, and they feel very realistic, they seem real. You can imagine people reacting in the way they do.

The show also tries to be realistic in how to investigate crimes, with a few exceptions or pokes to "super agencies" shows where they have computers that do everything. Mixed in all this are lots of jokes, an incredible amount of pokes and funny references to other shows (since the main actor was in Firefly, there's looots of pokes about this) and pop culture (like the x-files special episode about aliens with Bishop) , and in general a very funny feeling, even if there are dramatic moments too.

This shows that good stories do not need to be original, and they don't need to avoid common Tropes. Good stories take these Tropes and use them wisely for the best effect. When it's done correctly the story will be awesome, even when everybody knows what's going to happen.

For example, one of the last chapters that we have seen was not as good. The reasons for that was that it didn't make much sense, characters didn't behave as normal , and the bad guy had all his plans too perfect while nobody figured his intentions, while they're usually smart in other episodes.

This episode was an exception in this show, and we still think most of the rest is awesome and totally worth watching, but it servers to proof that it doesn't matter how typical a show may seem, it's all in how its done...

With a few exceptions, Castle is very well done.

Doctor Who

We just finished watching the last chapter of Doctor Who, aired last Saturday, apparently. Other times I have mentioned this series, but I have never explained much about it...

Doctor Who is an English series, very VERY old one, that started as a way to teach some science things to kids, mixed with fiction. It evolved quite rapidly into a full science-fiction series with different plots, the teaching part mostly forgotten. The tone varied, and even if considered for kids most of the time, there were more adult themes thrown into the mix.

We're talking about lots of years and changes here, it started in 1963 and continued for a long time. In 1989, a big break in the series started, and it was not continued until 2005, with a movie in the middle of it, in 1996.

They got away with all this changes by the fact that the Doctor, the main character, is an alien with human form, that can regenerate when about to die. Using smart applications of that theory, they have changed the actor playing him all along these years. The Doctor is also accompanied by a "Companion", usually a girl, although later years there has been some more variety. To change companions, they just need to show that one of them got tired from travelling with him, and then the Doctor just finds another one (after some brooding). In some cases the companion has accidents and dies or is lost somewhere, but well, the end result is that they change.

The important thing, of course, is that the Doctor travels in a spaceship that is also a time machine (in the shape of a blue police box), so they can explore other planets and universes, the future, the past, even the present, and in some extreme cases, complete other dimensions.

Depending on the writer, things try to make more sense or less, from a scientific point of view, but it always tends to the "less sense", just for the fun of it.

We started watching it after the big break happened, and we have only watched the chapters emitted after 2005. Alba recommended them, and we really enjoyed them^^.

Anyway, the main writer for the first new seasons after 2005 had been Russel T. Davies. The plots had  been complex and interesting, plenty of times with some common theme present in most of the season's chapters.

The actors playing the Doctor in the first 4 new seasons were Christopher Ecclestone and David Tennant. Tennant in particular has done an incredible job, and is one of the best Doctors ever.

Of course, being the main writer does not mean you write all the chapters, there were other writers. One of these writers was Steven Moffat, a fan of the series since he was a kid, that has done work as the writer of other successful series. In the first 4 seasons, Moffat wrote one or two chapters in each of them. And they were awesome. Truly incredible chapters, scary, creepy, interesting, touching, funny chapters, all at the same time.

The chapters are The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
.
Watch them, even if you're not going to watch the rest of the series. Specially, watch Blink.

When Davies decided to end his period and leave it to someone else, that someone else was going to be Steven Moffat. The actor playing the Doctor would change and Tennant would leave too, but the fact that Moffat would take charge promised to be awesome.

The new Doctor ended up being Matt Smith, and even if not as good as Tennant, his doctor is quite interesting too, more goofy and in another world, less serious, but still giving a nice touch to it.

Moffat, however, was a disappointment.

His plots are usually much more simplistic than Davies, and make much less sense (when he starts getting into time travel, the amount of bullshit that doesn't make any sense with everything established beforehand is astounding). He made some awesome chapters before, but when he got free rule over it, lots of chapters resemble pure fan fiction, where he crams 6 different alien species (that appeared in the old series that he watched as a child), without making any sense of why they are here or why they're fighting with or against the Doctor.

Moffat is a fan of not explaining things too much, but you need to draw the line somewhere, and if you killed an entire dangerous alien species, and/or locked it inside some other dimension, when they appear again without further explanation it feels kind of...cheap. As I said, like cheap harry potter fan-fiction, where all of a sudden Hermione falls in love with Draco, logic be damned.

That's half of the chapters...the other half, the problem is another one. In the other half of the chapters, where things make sense, the world feels...empty. Davies was an specialist of showing probable real-life consequences of some alien attack over London (for example, people leaving London for Christmas because every previous one some dangerous thing was happening in there). It's little things that help to create a world that has internal workings and makes sense.

Terry Pratchett, I believe  has mentioned several times that the fictional city of Ankh-Morpork, that he created, makes sense because you can imagine it working even when the heroes are not around. It has a life of its own, it's not only a background scenario where plot happens.

Moffat missed precisely that for a very long time, and there were lots of chapters that felt as if there was no other world population than the 6 characters shown in screen....the feeling was that something was weird in that world, it was not really logic, it was half empty.

The last 2 seasons where Moffat has participated had these big problems, the plot was going all around the place, made little sense, introduced 5 minutes-characters as some kind of star guest and other similar bullshit.

There were good chapters (for example, I liked a lot The Doctor's Wife, done by Neil Gaiman, a writer of books that I really like), but the overall feeling was a disappointment.

However, even with problems, we could enjoy chapters, it's just that not as much as before...and the two-three companions of these 2 season managed to become interesting and nice. After a while, the companions had a life that made sense, and this added much-needed logic to the world.

Anyway, we've noticed that the chapters are getting better, and I really enjoyed this last chapter.

The current season, that stopped months ago and just now is being continued, has had already 2-3 chapters where the "world half-empty" feeling has disappeared. Maybe it's a little thing, but with these chapters, I finally got the feeling that we were in the same universe as the one done by Davies. There was a retarded chapter too (Moffat doesn't understand time travel at all sometimes, or contradicts everything we've seen, including things he has said), but overall things seem to have improved, and it's getting back to a very interesting place...

We'll see how the next chapter goes^^

Sturgeon's Law

Olympics are almost done, and the systems are holding amazingly well, all considered. This translated to the fact that today and tomorrow, when I have night shift giving support to the systems, we won't have anything to do.

After the work done, it's nice to see that for the moment things are easier, but the nights become really really long. Tonight I took the chance of having "free time" to see a couple of Salvados programs. This show is one of the best things that are done nowadays in the spanish TV.

We do not usually watch TV, becasue most of the time we think it's crap. If we want to watch series or movies, it's mutch better to see them when you have time and want to do so, and without interruptions for advertising. I think TV will die pretty soon in its traditional format, since it's so much better to decide for yourself what to watch and when to watch it. We do not have a sintonized TV here in England, and we do not miss it at all.

Anyway, Salvados is a program done by a smart group of reporters. True reporters, that scratch and dig information, make uncomfortable interviews and ask questions that are actually important and nobody dares to ask. Most episodes are very political, and they expose and criticise a certain topic. Even if it's based on spanish problems, with the current economic crisis there is lots of common ground with different people. I would recommend to watch it to anyone who understands spanish (maybe some version has english subtitles, but I do not know).

The result of watching it is the realisation that Spain is currently shit. There are no jobs, the services will become private, everything is going to be more expensive while salaries will drop, and all this crap. There is no apparent solution, and polititians are only offering money to the banks, who do not care about making sure people also gets it. You can watch a couple of the Salvados programs to get the picture....

Spain's problem is quite deep and complex, but part of the cause is the obscene amount of polititians we have, and the system to select them. The main two parties are as corrupt as it gets, and plenty of times I'm under the impression that when they fight, it's just theater, becasue they're quite happy with each other exchanging governments every 4-8 years. I once heard a polititian from another party saying that in Madrid, you could insult a perosn form another party, and when the day finished you could take a coffee with that person in a friendly way. The topics that are treated in there should not allow for that. If you really believe in some political idea, somebody else doesn't, and you reach the point of insults, it's not possible to just have a coffee with them....unless of course you didn't care that much on the first place.

Every time there is an election, I'm expecting people to react to all the stupidity and greediness that the central parliament shows....and every time, milions of people keep voting the 2  main parties only. Even eliminating the tricks that are in place to guarantee that the 2 main political parties win, you would end up with the fact that near 40-50% of the spanish people voted for one or the other. This is extremely depressing, and it's just a reminder of Sturgeon's Law applied to persons. While we have that many people who do not care, or do not think, we'll be in deep shit.

To add insult to injury, one of the parties are the heirs of fascism, and they basically mantain the same ideas, just without adding a dictatorship to it and only using police violence. And they still get 20% of the votes.....this is the type of thing that makes me want indepence for Catalunya. Sure, we have our 90% of shit in here as well, but at least 50% of it is not fascist bastards....

Sorry for the long rant....but people's stupidity always makes me angry....