Eruditorum Press

Discontent creators

capaldi

Flatline Review

, 158

This review was brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Please consider joining them. Also, if you’re in the New York area, I’m doing a launch party for TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5 (it’s out, by the way). That’ll be next Saturday, October 25th, at 3:30 PM at The Way Station, in Brooklyn. Copies of all five volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum will be for sale, and I will be signing stuff if you want to bring copies you already own. There’s a Facebook event page here. 

Hello folks. Let’s take the temperature of the world, shall we? Comments thus far are quite positive. GallifreyBase has an impressive 84.4% in the 8-10 range, with 9 being the most popular at 32.69%, which has this at slightly more popular than Mummy on the Orient Express. I’ll be honest, that surprises me a bit, as I was, for the first time this season, a bit underwhelmed.

That said, this one is tricky, and in a way that feels as though there’s an unusually high chance of my revising my opinion on it upon seeing what it’s actually building to. We’re to the point in the season where the finale is tacitly hanging over things, and this one in particular seems to be making some points about Clara that could feel very different in a couple of weeks. But for me, right now, it feels messy and untidy. Like Mummy on the Orient Express, its emotional resolution is consciously ambiguous, in a way that makes it end off feeling slightly less developed than I think the story actually is. This is due in part to the sneaky power of endings to redefine and reimagine everything that has come before, but it’s also due to the ending actually just not quite fitting with what’s come before completely.

So much of what is going on here hinges on the question of what Clara being elevated to having to “be the Doctor” actually means. Which is indeed a complex question, given the way in which the season has largely treated the Doctor as an object of the sublime – at once wondrous and terrifying. And so for Clara to become the Doctor is not merely aspiration.

This is a marked change – typically the “companion steps up” story is about the companion striving to be better. With Clara, it’s not quite. Indeed, there’s a genuine sense that in becoming the Doctor she has become lessened. In a season in which we have repeatedly been asked to consider the idea of a dark Doctor, and have in many cases simply done so unbidden, without the text particularly pushing us to, just by the knowledge that Peter Capaldi is playing him. Instead, however, especially as her relationship with Danny continues to paint her into an increasingly unsympathetic corner, it feels as though it’s in fact a season about a dark Clara.

And the contours of this revelation have been slyly hidden in the way in which the Doctor’s part has never been written as a traditional lead.…

Continue Reading

Mummy on the Orient Express Review

, 162

This review was brought to you by 165 backers on Patreon, who would be very happy if you joined them.

Right. Haven’t even looked at Twitter or e-mail, because they’re both slightly overwhelming, but GallifreyBase, well after both UK and US airings, is 82.66% in the 8-10 range, with 9 being the most popular pick, so this is apparently a popular one. To me, it is, in many regards, something of a baseline episode. It’s not a season highlight, largely because nothing in it ever soars to outright greatness. But it keeps things lively and never screws up. It’s the sort of episode that’s why I ultimately opted against letter grades – because any season of television is going to have a few like this.
What’s interesting to me, though, is that there’s been virtually nothing this season that seems to set out to be baseline. There are things that work better than others, but everything has at least tried to do something new. The only episode you can really accuse of trying to be ultra-traditional is Robot of Sherwood, and it came early enough in the running order that it was innovative in the way that turning a new actor loose on old standards can be in Doctor Who. Other than that, though, the M.O of this season has been trying to find something fresh. Whether it be a new twist on an old standard (The Caretaker, Listen) or something that Doctor Who’s just never really done before (Time Heist, Kill the Moon), the idea has been a real return to Doctor Who being a show that does things that haven’t been done before.
Not everything can be the best. But one really doesn’t get the sense that anything this season has been content to give up trying to be the best at the outset. Everything is trying its damnedest to be the shock favorite. It’s why I’m so inclined to call this my favorite season ever. For the first time since 2005, every episode has felt like it’s written with a hunger and a desperate desire to prove itself. And what that means is that even a baseline episode like this sparkles.
The device of the sixty-six second countdown, forcing the episode into real-time for a sequence, is marvelous. It’s set up and clearly established in the cold open, and then explored meticulously. Crucially, every iteration of it changes the approach or the rules slightly. It’s a fairly high-death episode, but every single death shifts the balance of power or the nature of the problem slightly. We learn new things about the rules of the mummy each time. The episode works like many of the best video games do – it introduces a mechanic and then explores progressive iterations of it. (And the on-screen clock owes no small debt to the visual grammar of the HUD) The fact that the series is now bold enough to casually introduce entirely new visual techniques each week and to take on a new philosophy of what the camera and the screen means is a massive leap forward, and will hopefully be the enduring legacy of the Moffat era.
…

Continue Reading

Kill the Moon Review

, 200

This review is brought to you by 166 lovely people at Patreon. If you would like to join them in supporting these reviews, please do.

Let’s try something different. 
Let’s write this flat-out, without any reference to GallifreyBase, to second watchings, to anything. I have opened up the laptop the moment I finished it, and I am writing first impressions, as an honest, open review. I’ve not looked at Twitter reaction. I’ve not looked at comments. I am making an honest stab at staking out a critical position without any lens of history whatsoever. Because I don’t really care. I don’t want to contexualize this in the immediate critical reaction. I want to charge out all guns blazing and make a point, fully cognizant of the risk that I might turn out to be in a lunatic minority. 
This was the single best episode of Doctor Who ever.
I am using that sentence with perhaps an odd degree of precision. It is better at being Doctor Who than any previous episode, given that so much of what makes it work is that it is an episode of Doctor Who. It is unapologetic, and indeed triumphant about pulling tricks that only Doctor Who can do. “The moon is an egg.” I mean, that’s the most gloriously trolling reveal imaginable. It all but invokes Poe’s Law on a particular segment of criticism of Doctor Who.
And the joke is that the episode as a whole is a decisive move towards the classic themes of science fiction they espouse. Harness was apparently instructed to “Hinchcliffe the shit” out of the first fifteen minutes, and he did, but equally important is the way in which he Lamberted the shit out of it. On a very basic level, this starts like the show did back, well, in the immediate aftermath of two teachers from Coal Hill School confronting a secretive alien in their school. It starts with “here’s a weird place, let’s go explore it.” It does a self-consciously back to basics opening, complete with the Doctor not using the namechecked psychic paper and instead doing a classic, fast, and utterly believable bit of talking his way into command of a situation. There’s a self-conscious move, throughout the start of this episode, to frame Doctor Who in a very classic way.
That’s been a mission statement all season, but with the exception of Into the Dalek, which combined a visually splendid “here’s what Terry Nation wished you could see” with the same warmed over Dalek story we’ve been redoing since 2005, there hasn’t really been the decisive turn to doing the “here’s Doctor Who as you expect it, only not quite” approach that this season has been developing onto something that’s almost entirely composed out of the series’ golden age science fiction heritage. 
The series has gotten very smart about how it handles the near future, fully embracing the fact that it’s going to be proven wrong by longevity and accepting that you can still do interesting television that’s a clear extension of the immediate-term.
…

Continue Reading

The Caretaker Review

, 202

This review was brought to you by 163 backers on Patreon, who would love for you to join them. 

So, since it seems to be the standard opening rhythm for these things, twenty minutes past transmission we’re at 59.7% at 8-10, with 8 being the most popular pick at 29.25%. Thread titles include “this years arc sucks,” “A thing! again,” “Clara’s skirt!,” and “Peter C was on fire tonight,” which, really, seems so utterly standard it’s hard to draw any conclusions. Twitter seems positive. For my part, I liked this a lot, although it definitely took the second viewing for me to really grok it, because I was busy being surprised by its tone on the first pass. I suspect it will watch much more smoothly to people who weren’t foolish (or fannish) enough to have expectations, however.
Ah, yes. Expectations. You know what, let’s take stock of where we are. First episode of autumn proper, halfway point of the season. It’s a good time for taking stock. 
In the UK, it’s well past night-time, to the point where this review is posting after people are largely gone to bed. Here, it’s a bit before sunset. My wife’s just left for her last night of work on the Oncology floor, before she transfers to a different floor to broaden her experience a bit. I’m up for a while yet, planning on writing some of the V for Vendetta chapter after this, after I walk the dog and grab some dinner. The episode’s not on for another three or four hours yet, so this is going to go out into the void to an extent, really playing only to the Americans who pirate it from the UK streams and late night Brits.
Based on the most current news, the program is on a ratings hot streak like it hasn’t seen in a while. All four episodes with final ratings have been in the top ten for the week, and there’s some high-powered competition on the air. This week is particularly dicey for ratings obsessives, as the BBC is confident enough to throw it up against The X-Factor. To be honest, expect a panic tomorrow when people start reporting the overnights, although it’s almost certainly going to stabilize out, whether through time-shifting (which always adds a healthy couple million to Doctor Who’s ratings) or through iPlayer (which doesn’t get counted yet in ratings, but adds another million or so).
There’s several ways in which the program feels like it’s genuinely in a different place than it was a year ago. This is worth noting explicitly in an episode that is, as much as anything, about reaffirming the end of the Eleventh Doctor era. This is the last episode of the half of the season where it was relatively easy to guess what you were going to get. It’s not that it’s been devoid of surprises – hello Listen – but the surprises have generally been within episodes. Every week after Deep Breath, you basically knew what you were going to get if you were paying attention to writers, episode titles, the Doctor Who Magazine descriptions, or, let’s be honest, the script and screener leaks, which vented an awful lot of spoilers into the atmosphere.
…

Continue Reading

Time Heist Review

, 117

This review was brought to you by 155 backers on Patreon. If you like it, please consider joining them – the campaign is just $5.25 in pledges away from giving every backer free copies of my first three books.

Right, so, circumstances mean I can get this review up very quickly, and I’m taking the temperature of the fans who rated it on GallifreyBase within ten minutes of it airing. Two hundred and sixty-one raters, 55.55% of which are rating 8-10. Another 22.22% at a 7. About an hour later, and it’s still running right around there. For comparison, that puts it roughly in line with where the polls on Journey to the Center of the TARDIS and The Bells of St. John settled down, which suggests this one is going to be somewhat harshly remembered (although Rings of Akhaten got something more like 35% 8-10, so it’s merely a rough ride, not a drubbing). I politely disagree – I rather liked it. Although I can see the faults, on the whole, they were not unduly distracting for me. 
Still, it’s notable that this is by one of the less popular recurring writers. If Steve Thompson can be said to have one defining stylistic tic, it is that he is prone to creating elaborate plots and then populating them with thin cartoons of actual characters. The cynic might accuse Moffat of the same thing, although I obviously disagree, and certainly think Time Heist illustrates the difference. Which is to say that Sai is everyone’s first Shadowrun character, and Sabra is blatantly Rogue from the X-Men with the serial numbers filed off and a less sensible superpower, and it’s clear very little thought has gone into either of them past picking where to nick them from, in a way that just flatly isn’t true of… really any Moffat character who gets as many lines as either of them do, but let’s say Clara, just to really make the point. Although in this case, there’s barely any characterization of Clara or the Doctor either – it’s pretty much a straight shot high-paced thriller.
This isn’t, of course, inherently a problem, or, at least, it doesn’t have to be. It’s perfectly possible to have the elaborate plot be interesting enough to carry the story, and Time Heist illustrates this. Its central plot dynamic is terribly clever, in that it allows for exposition and plot twists to happen organically at more or less any moment. The heist itself provides a continual forward momentum, but all the key plot revelations concern things that have already happened, which makes for a neat structure that keeps things moving. 
There are, of course, some proper plot holes. (How exactly did the Doctor seed the bank with all of those cases without triggering the Teller?) But they’re proper refrigerator logic plot holes – ones that you don’t notice them until you sit down and think about it later. (See also the descendants of the murdered Viking settlers in The Curse of Fenric, which took me decades and Tat Wood to notice.
…

Continue Reading

Fear Makes Companions Of Us All (Listen)

, 147

Thanks to the 153 backers at Patreon who made this review possible. If you enjoyed it, please consider joining them in their support for the project. 
 
The best cosplay I’ve ever seen at a convention was a gender-
swapped Link and Navi in which Link led her partner around
on a leash, having scrawled “no you listen” on his chest.
It’s September 13th, 2014. Lilly Wood and Robin Schulz are at number one with “Prayer in C,” while Iggy Azalea, Sam Smith, and Script also chart. In news, Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide, the US has been finding a new way to announce that it’s at war with ISIS, and it’s down to the wire with the Scottish Independence referendum, although really, we should save that for next essay.
 
While on television, Doctor Who does Listen. At the moment, and I’m writing this paragraph about ninety minutes after transmission, this seems set at near universal praise. 85% rating it an 8-10 on GallifreyBase, with a staggering 42.6% giving it a ten out of ten. The immediate post-episode reviews all seem to love it. Blog and Twitter comments are raving, although people who tend not to like Moffat’s stuff seem to really hate this one. Which is to say, ladies and gentlemen, that we seem to have an instant classic.
 
I’ve watched this twice now. And it deserves that and more. It is undoubtedly a “big Steven Moffat statement” of an episode, conceived on the level of The Day of the Doctor or Deep Breath. It is ostentatious and meticulous in the way that Steven Moffat at his best is. This is a writer who knows that he is at the height of his professional career and is cackling madly about it. It is also, unmistakably, him writing the cheap and disposable one with no budget – and doing it, by his own admission, because he wanted to “prove he could still write.” 
 
He’s used the production schedule of Doctor Who very slyly here, doing a story that a twelve episode season requires, as a piece of BBC-produced drama, if it’s going to throw a whacking big CGI dinosaur into the opening three seconds of the season premiere for no reason other than to set up some jokes and a death scene for the Doctor to start investigating a mystery. It’s just that he then wrote it like it was The Big Finale. It draws all its structural tricks from Nick Hurran and Ben Wheatley, and shares its approach with Time of the Doctor and His Last Vow. Except there’s no actual monster – it’s all creepy edits and lighting changes. It could be the Silence. Maybe it is, and we’ll pay that off in some future episode, because this is only episode four and Doctor Who has plenty of surprises left in its back two-thirds. We’re still in the “introduce Peter Capaldi with episodes by the old hands from Seasons One and Two and Five, or who worked on The Sarah Jane Adventures.”
…

Continue Reading

Robot of Sherwood Review

, 166

This review exists because of the generous support of 149 backers at Patreon. Please consider becoming the 150th. Or 151st, or whatever, if someone beat you to it. In any case, you can contribute here. Also, a second reminder that once the comments section gets a certain length, displaying all comments requires you to hunt and click the “load more” link. It’s right above the ad at the bottom of the page.

Right. Top-line assessment is that this one’s a bit more polarizing than the last two, which seemed to be widely liked with an inevitable pool of detractors. The first comment on the episode to come through declared it to basically be the worst thing ever, and GallifreyBase currently has it at 55.48% in the 8-10 range. Which is on the whole still pretty good, but clearly the most mixed reception of the season to date.

For my part… well, look, this was never going to be my favorite episode. I’m not a huge fan of Gatiss, the celebrity historical is not my favorite Doctor Who subgenre, and I’ve seen enough Doctor Who at this point in my life that the business as usual/meat and potatoes episodes, while often enjoyable, aren’t exactly highlights. And this was, at the end of the day, a meat and potatoes celebrity historical written by Mark Gatiss.

But none of those are reasonable things to hold against the episode on any level other than ranking it in the list at the end of the review. One can’t critique a beach for not being a paperclip. Instead, what jumps out is that everyone involved knows exactly what they’re doing. This alone puts it ahead of Gatiss’s previous swing at a celebrity historical, in which nobody quite seemed to know what tone to go for at any given moment. Here, everybody from Gatiss on down understands that they’re doing a fluffy one.

Perhaps more to the point, however, everybody gets how best to approach one of these. Gatiss is at his best when he’s taking an old and well-worn structure and giving it a spit and polish to modern tastes (The Unquiet Dead, Cold War, The Crimson Horror), and so this is firmly in his wheelhouse. There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about the script (indeed, when the first five scripts leaked, more than a few people proclaimed four of them good and this one to suck), but it moves through its set pieces and knows what it’s doing at any given moment.

But this isn’t a story about the clever script. It’s a story about dancing merrily through the obligatory set pieces. Gatiss holds up his end of the bargain by getting them all in and keeping the pace up. But the heart of this one is the execution, and it’s there that this does sparkle. It’s pure melodrama, and everybody gets that. The episode would be completely derailed if either of the two major guest roles (Robin and the Sheriff) pulled a Graham Crowden (or, if you want a more recent option, a Roger Lloyd-Pack).…

Continue Reading

Into the Dalek Review

, 200

This review was generously funded by 145 backers at Patreon. If you enjoy it, please consider joining them in supporting the remaining reviews. 

There is a certain perspective from which, going in, this looked like the most cynical thing imaginable. Since every Doctor requires a Dalek story, they get it out of the way up front, treating it as something to get over with instead of something to anticipate. Accordingly, you take the Daleks and an unapologetically high concept premise and basically give Capaldi a second episode of having lots of other stuff going on to cover as he beds into the role. And with Gatiss having finally cracked the problem of how to pander to the sorts of fans who want a return to the classic series without losing the other 100% of the audience last season with Cold War, an unabashedly straightforward “just like you imagine Doctor Who being” episode becomes the order of the day. Fair enough, but equally, the sort of episode that a segment of fandom (by which I really just mean myself) looks at and (along with next week) goes “well, at least there’s a proper Moffat episode coming on the 13th.”

(Mind you, there’s a logic to it. Matt Smith got the same basic treatment with River Song and the Weeping Angels in his first two episodes. This time they actually shot Capaldi’s first two episodes first, so they put the Paternoster Gang and the Daleks in to smooth out the transition. And the series can’t serve up my kind of episode every week because, again, the other 100% of the audience would rightly object.)

So with the caveat that this is not an episode after my own heart and that I went in with fairly minimal expectations, I thought this was quite good. I seem to not be alone – comments so far on the post are broadly positive, Twitter’s pretty enthusiastic, and the GallifreyBase poll has it running slightly better than Deep Breath was. (72.7% in the 8-10 range, but skewed higher in the range) I suspect that a year’s hindsight will help Deep Breath and hinder this a little, but we’re all about the now here, and this seems, in the immediate aftermath of broadcast, to have scratched the itch it aimed for.

The script, obviously, is primarily bibs and bobs of other Dalek stories, most obviously the ones by Rob Shearman. But this is not entirely unsurprising. Phil Ford’s an odd writer – his best script prior to this was, of course, the one Russell T Davies rewrote entirely. His next best was an episode of Torchwood. And then there’s a succession of Sarah Jane Adventures that range from the quite good (The Lost Boy, Prisoner of the Judoon) to the bizarrely lightweight and disposable (Eye of the Gorgon, The Eternity Trap). The late addition of a cowriting credit for Moffat suggests that in this case he was commissioned as a matter of production expediency – that he was there, in effect, to provide the broad shape of a script for Moffat to tinker with.…

Continue Reading

Deep Breath Review

, 200

This review is supported the kind patronage of 140 people at Patreon. If you enjoy it, please consider becoming a patron and supporting future reviews. 

If anyone cares, the number one single is Nico and Vinz’s “Am I Wrong.”

Let’s work from Cardiff, shall we? It’s a late summer day, with the temperature peaking at 16 degrees, and not really moving far off of that. The episode starts at 7:50, a carefully chosen timeslot that sits ten minutes before even the earliest of childrens’ bedtimes, making it nearly impossible to keep them from watching. Twenty-nine minutes in, just as the Doctor is realizing that he’s Scottish and the story finally starts to bother with the plot, the sun sets. (In London, it’s twelve minutes earlier, just as Clara is seeing through Vastara’s veil and the Doctor is climbing up on the rooftops.) Fifteen minutes from the end, as the Doctor asks the cyborg what he thinks of the view, civil twilight gives way to nautical twilight. (In London, it’s right as Clara passes out because she can’t hold her breath anymore.) US transmission skews later – I’m typing this bit half an hour before transmission, right as the sun is going down, so it’ll start in civil twilight and continue through to the nighttime proper.

This feels like something that the series, under Moffat, has been working towards and never quite getting. Moffat has been complaining about the problematic relationship between barbecue forks and Doctor Who ever since the end of Season Five, and now, finally, he gets a run of episodes that starts in the dying days of summer and will run right through the height of autumn, before coming back for one last flourish for the solstice. And the first one transmits right across the sunset, starting right in the golden hour. The orange glow of the late day and the coming autumn permeates the episode. So this is our mission statement: a crepuscular series.

The early returns seem largely positive. A fair number of people seem unimpressed with anything that isn’t Peter Capaldi, though virtually everyone is at least on the same page about him, it seems. GallifreyBase’s episode poll is around 72% rating it as an 8-10, with only six people proclaiming that they’d rather listen to a tape loop of leaf blower noise, which is pretty good, but it’s worth noting that of that 72%, 31.87% are picking 8/10. So well-liked but not an insta-classic, apparently.

Which seems fitting. This is an episode with a lot to do. A premiere of a new Doctor is as much about showing the potential of the rest of the season as it is about being brilliant in its own right. Ultimately, more important than whether people absolutely adore Deep Breath is whether they stick around for Into the Dalek. And clearly, this is something the production team is mindful of, as they decided to just drop the inevitable Dalek story into the second slot to try to offer as big an opening one-two punch as they could possibly manage.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 5 6 7 8