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Comics Reviews (June 3rd, 2015)

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Years of Future Past #1

A very capable homage to a classic motif in X-Men stories, rejigged in terms of Secret Wars. That said, I’m not even reading a ton of these alternate realities Secret Wars books and they’re starting to all feel a bit alike to me; I can’t imagine how they’re reading to people with larger pulls than me.

Secret Wars #3

The settling into something more standard issue is probably inevitable, and the collection of saved heroes is a novel one. I expect this will remain satisfying, but there’s very much a return to ground here after the giddy highs of the kickoff, and the news that #4 has been pushed back to July is worrisome; part of why this is working, frankly, is the high pace of release. I’m not sure I’m still going to give a shit come November, especially with all these auxiliary books.

Crossed: Badlands #78

Zombies vs. Megafauna. Possibly not a comedy. It’s sometimes hard to tell with Gillen. We’re in the mid-story lull here, with neither plot having much conceptual oomph, but it’s capable zombies, prehistoric and otherwise.

Darth Vader #6

At the book’s heart is a scene Gillen basically promised in the initial interviews about the book. Gillen’s take on it is very strong, and it successfully sets up a new status quo for the book. Good, solid fun.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #6

Some solid but not particularly noteworthy jokes about hippos give way to a Welcome to Night Vale-esque separation of narrator and story, followed by smashed cars. Yes, that is a summary. Yes, it also counts as a review.

Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #1

Perhaps just because its concept is an active turn away from the past few years of Spider-Man, but this worked in a way that not all of the Secret Wars minis have. The flash-forward is very well done, setting a new status quo that is at once unlike anything we’ve seen before and an archetypal Spider-Man setup. This is very promising.

The Wicked & The Divine #11

There’s plenty of world in which to enthuse and speculate over the consequences and implications of this issue, including comments here. I have numerous theories and guesses. Those, however, are not the point of a review.

As a comic, as a piece of art and an engagement with culture, as an installment in the serial The Wicked and the Divine, this is superlative. It is one of the best comics of the year, guaranteed. I’ve praised this comic plenty of times as one to watch. The thrill those of us who have been following it got this week, opening our issue, more than justifies that recommendation. Simply, utterly, perfectly brilliant. Indeed, so good it deserves a reaction image.

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Myriad Universes: The Star Lost Part 1: The Flight of the Albert Einstein

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I’m no comics scholar. I’ve said as much in the past, so those who are way more knowledgeable about the subject are free to correct me, but I personally don’t recall trade paperback reprints of current monthly comics to be that big of a thing in the Long 1980s. There were more traditional graphic novels and omnibuses that collected rare and out of print issues, but to my knowledge it wasn’t so common to see compilation editions for lines that were still in circulation. From my admittedly limited experience, that didn’t start to become a standard part of the industry until sometime around the dawn of the 2000s.

Having said that, in 1993, with three years of life still left in the line, DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation started to release trade paperbacks. There were of course things like that Best Of… collection we’ve been talking at length about, but the real curiosity amongst these trades was one of the earliest: The Star Lost, collecting issues 20-24 of the monthly series, five books that comprised what amounted to Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s summer event miniseries for 1991. No other story arc had been collected and reprinted before The Star Lost; this was the one miniseries about which DC’s editors said “You know what? This three year old run of issues is good enough that it deserves to be seen again” and put it on bookstore shelves to stand right alongside more “proper” science fiction novels.

And it is, and it does. Believe me, it really does. 

The Star Lost is imprinted on me like any regular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, probably more so, in fact. I owned this trade paperback, possibly one of the first Star Trek books I ever got, and if I stretch my perception back I can almost remember pouring over it over and over again with nervous trepidation in a dark corner of my bedroom, which is the only way to properly approach a story like this at that age. For years The Star Lost was a story that truly haunted me: I long, long ago lost my copy of the book to who knows where who knows when, and in the decades that followed my memory of this part of my history with Star Trek: The Next Generation faded away. Nobody archived or preserved the licensed comics, and none of the official literature ever addressed them. The Master Narrative of history all but effaced this story to me to the point I would almost feel like I had imagined it.

And yet The Star Lost was a story whose images refused to leave me no matter how much time would pass-An offhand recollection of some crewmembers stranded in a shuttlecraft somewhere in deep space, or of Captain Picard giving a solemn oration in a sunlit green meadow, or of Jerome K.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.02: The Night Lands

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State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister
Dragons of the Dothraki Sea: Daenerys Targaryen
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Bears of the Dothraki Sea: Jorah Mormont
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Ships of Dragonstone: Davos Seaworth
Kraken of Pyke: Theon Greyjoy
The Direwolf, Arya Stark
Burning Hearts of Dragonstone: Stannis Baratheon, Melisandre
Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn
Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
Winterfell lies empty.
The episode is in twelve parts. The first part runs four minutes and is set on the Kingsroad north of King’s Landing. The opening image is of Arya pissing by a stream. 
The second runs six minutes and is set in King’s Landing; the transition is by hard cut, from Arya and Gendry looking nervous to Tyrion whistling “The Rains of Castamere.”
The third runs four minutes and is set at Craster’s Keep north of the Wall; the transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion talking about the Night’s Watch to the Night’s Watch.
The fourth runs three minutes and is set in the Red Waste east of the Dothraki Sea; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Daenerys Targaryen. 
The fifth runs two minutes and is set in Pyke; the transition is by hard cut, from a wide shot of the Red Waste to Theon Greyjoy’s ship.
The sixth runs eight minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is four minutes long; the transition is by image, from Theon having sex to prostitutes having sex. The other is four minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Ros to Podrick’s hand pouring wine for Tyrion. 
The seventh runs four minutes and is set on the Kingsroad north of King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion and Bronn talking about killing Robert’s bastards to Gendry.
The eighth runs seven minuets and is set in Pyke. The transition is from hard cut, from Gendry lying on the ground to Theon arriving in Pyke.
The ninth runs four minutes and is set in Dragonstone. The transition is by dialogue, from the Greyjoys talking about ships to Davos on the shore.
The tenth runs three minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Davos riding off to Tyrion and Cersei. 
The eleventh runs four minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion and Cersei discussing Stannis, among other things, to Stannis.
The last runs two minutes and is set at Craster’s Keep north of the Wall. The transition is by theme, from Melisandre working her magic with Stannis to Craster working his with his son. The final image is of Craster clubbing Jon Snow for sneaking about the camp looking for the answer to a riddle whose answer is chess. 
Analysis
It is not by any means the first time that the title of an episode has come from a relatively small portion of the episode.
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Myriad Universes: The Lesson

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“The Lesson” is a story that could never have been made on the TV series. This is highly unusual to say, because, with the exception of a particularly lavish holodeck environment, the entire story takes place on the Enterprise and there’s not a single “effects shot” apart from the exterior view of the ship in the first panel. Normally, one would expect the comic book to tell stories that were too complex or expensive to film, but this is an extraordinarily intimate and low-stakes story the existence of which reveals some odd truths about how curiously inverted the roles of the two main series have become by now.

“The Lesson” is also perfect Star Trek: The Next Generation, standing shoulder to shoulder with “The Wounded” as something utterly and incomparably definitive.

It’s not so much a story as it is an interlocking series of vignettes all centred around the concept of learning and growth. Beverly confesses to Deanna that it’s her birthday today and she’s depressed not because anybody forgot, but because she thinks shes getting older and feels past her prime. Commander Riker is giving a guest lecture to the Enterprise school about the American Revolution and how it could have been prevented (a subject he did his master’s thesis on) and caution’s Wesley (who’s still aboard at this point in time and attending the school) that he won’t let personal feelings get in the way in an academic environment. Worf reads a letter from Jeremy Aster, who confides in him his uncertainty about pursuing his crush because there’s another boy who he thinks he doesn’t stand a chance against. Geordi and Miles O’Brien are sitting in ten forward talking about unique celebrities from around the galaxy who live outrageous lives they’d like to emulate, and they rope Data in to get a third perspective.

As a present to Beverly, Deanna prescribes her a “special” unorthodox treatment on the holodeck where they traverse a rugged and breathtakingly beautiful amalgam alien landscape as they hike through dense forests, cross waterfalls and scale mountains. Though she complains all the way, at the top Beverly is taken aback by the view and remembers that age is just a state of mind. Wesley catches Will in a factual slip-up and corrects him in front of the class, which embarrasses him, but Will thanks him afterwards saying that if he wasn’t going to give Wes any special treatment, he shouldn’t have expected any in return and confesses he should have prepared better. Meanwhile, as he observes Geordi and Miles’ conversation and, after he’s prompted for his opinion on which celebrity he’d most like to be, Data says he wouldn’t like to be anyone other than who he is and wouldn’t want to live anywhere apart from the Enterprise.

It is deeply, deeply ironic that this story exists here in May 1991, directly contemporaneous with garbage like “The Host” and “In Theory”. For all the writing staff may whine about wanting to do smaller, more intimate stories that just focus on the drama and the characters without having to worry about the allegedly extraneous and superficial science fiction elements, the show itself is *extremely* reticent about doing an episode that doesn’t have an action story as at least a B-plot.…

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Hardhome

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State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:]

Lions of Mereen: Tyrion Lannister
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei Lannister
Dragons of Mereen: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark
Direwolves of Braavos: Arya Stark
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Flowers of the Wall: Gilly
Paws of the Wall: Tormund Giantsbane
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Butterflies of Mereen: Missandei
Coins of Braavos: No one
Flayed Men of Winterfell: Roose Bolton, Ramsey Bolton
With the Bear of Mereen, Jorah Mormont

Dorne is abandoned.

The episode is in eight parts. The first is five minutes long and is set in Mereen. The opening image is an overhead shot of Daenerys’s throne room.

The second is one minute long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Tyrion to Cersei Lannister.

The third is five minutes long and is set in Braavos. The transition is by very hard cut, from Cersei screaming to Arya’s impassive face, accented by a sharply dissonant chord.

The fourth is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from the unnamed girl in the House of Black and White to Cersei’s cell door.

The fifth is four minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in Winterfell. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by theme, from Cersei to Sansa, both prisoners. The second is one minute long; the transition is by dialogue, from Theon talking about Ramsey to Ramsey.

The sixth part is six minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in Mereen. The first section is five minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Ramsey to Theon and Daenerys sitting and drinking. The other is one minute long; the transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to a rack of weapons.

The seventh part is one minute long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Jorah to a spoon.

The last is thirty-one minutes long is in two sections; it is set at and north of the Wall. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by image, from Cersei licking water from a small puddle on the floor to a bowl. The other is twenty-eight minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Sam saying that Jon always comes back to Jon. The final image is an establishing shot of Hardhome fallen to the dead.

Review

The telling moment actually comes in the little “Inside Game of Thrones” thing they do at the end of the episode, where Benioff and Weiss pat themselves on the back for how Hardhome isn’t in the books. That’s true, and the episode is built to milk it, with the looming realization that there’s a big action sequence coming played as an almost decadently long moment of dread.

There’s a real structural cleverness to this. It’s the first “big moment” episode we’ve had; a half-episode one, in the tradition of “The Lion and the Rose” or “The Laws of Gods and Men,” as opposed to a “Blackwater” or a “The Watchers on the Wall,” but nevertheless an episode that is primarily about one thing.…

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Saturday Waffling (May 30th, 2015)

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First of all, the Perdido Street Station post is going to be in June. I foolishly didn’t look at the length of the book before planning my reading for the month, and am only halfway through. Will go back to reading after I schedule this though.

Hoping to clear time to look at the Hugo Packet a bit, if only to get a broader sense of the Puppies. My interview with Day/Beale isn’t quite nailed down yet, but it’s getting close. (He’s still rereading Wasp Factory, which is the main delay. I, in what was in hindsight the wrong call, reread it prior to Seveneves, putting Perdido Street Station after that.)

But for those who have read the Hugo packet, how are things in it? What are your ballots, if you’re not voting No Award in all categories (or if you’re ranking things below No Award, as I am planning to do with the non-Puppy choices, after perusing the Puppy choices to see if there are any surprises there.

Other than that, I’ve wrapped up the Davison revisions and started in on Colin Baker. Friday’s Last War in Albion is a big one. And there’s my first stab at original fiction in years up for people backing the Patreon at $5 or more. See you tomorrow night for Hardhome.…

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Furiosa and Furiosa

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Well, it’s basically a two-hour chase sequence with a few pauses… but yes, it’s amazingly well done.  Old hand George Miller takes advantage of all the modern techniques – hyper-fast editing, CGI, etc – but he uses these things for storytelling purposes, not to show us how fast he can edit or how good his CGI is.  He never sacrifices the clarity of the visual storytelling.  The production and costume design has a gnarly, knotty detail and complexity.  The brazenly ironic and stylised salvagepunk visual world of the movie makes it like an 80s auteur film made on a vast budget and with modern techniques.  The result is jaw-droppingly good.  It instantly makes just about every other blockbuster movie of recent years look quaint and windy.  Mad Max: Fury Road makes Avengers: Age of Ultron look like a Cameron Crowe movie in which the assembled twee, privileged assholes play with action figures and make “boom” noises.

I’m not going to go into much political detail.  I’ve junked most of what I’ve been trying to write about this movie, largely because of this article at Jacobin, which says everything I was groping for, and lots more of interest.  It’s really good… though there are bits where I think the writer, Stephen Maher, goes too far.  (There are also a few snafus which suggest he didn’t quite pay enough attention to the plot.)

Read it?  Okay, then here are some caveats:

I don’t think Maher gets it exactly right.  The film certainly does buy into an orientalist narrative about the supposed sins of pre-modern and/or anti-modern civilisation, and yes this is inevitably tinged with Huntingdonism and Islamophobia.  In the film, patriarchy comes complete with a built-in death-cult, tribal masks, and a harem of the type sheiks always have in racist, orientalist Western fantasies.  But I think the film is less a defence of ‘our’ modernity in the face of such things and more an attempt to implicate modernity in the same supposed sins.  The death cult of the suicide bombers uses Northern European religious ideas (Valhalla), urges itself on with thrash metal music, and Joe decorates himself with Western-style military medals, etc.  Plus the Mad Max movies’ usual anxious appropriation of the camp and performative hyper-masculinity of biker culture.  It’s like the film is saying “see how awful we’d become if we degenerated in the face of a civilisational crisis… it’s buried inside our civilisation, waiting to creep back out… the seeds are already there, around us”.  This is all problematic in itself, but maybe not quite as bad as the review above makes it sound.

It’s still an awesomely entertaining movie (reason enough to see it and enjoy it) with reasonably good gender politics.

Much of a meal has been made of the gender politics of the film, usually through the medium of stories about assorted reactionary bumwipes crying about how it’s a feminist lecture instead of a manly movie filled with manly masculine manliness.  Firstly, this is crap.  Max gets to be incredibly masculine in all those stereotypical ways. …

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The City’s Burdened, Swollen Heart (The Last War in Albion Part 98: The Unprivileged)

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This is the tenth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Several thousand words were spilled upon the subject of Alan Moore’s minor works, culminating with remarks on his two contributions to Fantagraphics’ anthology Honk. The first of these was a piece entitled “Globetrotting for Agoraphobics,” with illustrations from Eddie Campbell.

“Outside the horses walk on cobbles, ringing in the city’s burdened, swollen heart. Cars follow and then more cars; cyclone flow of noise and fume and coloured steel. The factories are born, thrive briefly, turn to husks as the hand lettered signs above the shops give way to corporate logo.” – Alan Moore, The Birth Caul
Figure 783: Moore’s family as depicted by Peter Bagge.
Moore’s other contribution to Honk is a reprint of a piece earlier published by Knockabout Comics, originally with illustrations by Savage Pencil, although the Honk version was illustrated by Peter Bagge. Entitled “Brasso with Rosie,” the piece is one of the few, and by some margin the earliest openly autobiographical piece that Moore has written. It is, to be sure, an exaggerated and at least partially fictionalized piece – Moore’s claim that an elderly relative of his was once “totally immobilized when a thoughtless spouse decided to hang mirrors upon either side of the tiny, damp-scented room in which he customarily sat, presenting the luckless dotard with an infinite succession of doppelgangers arrayed to either side of him,” leading him to believe that he had “been granted some form of X-ray vision, enabling him to see through the peeling walls and into the identical living rooms of his neighbors,” and that “he remained like this for twenty years” is, for example, surely overstating the case by at least half a decade. But underneath the comedic exaggeration is a sardonic and vivid account of the texture of Moore’s childhood, featuring no shortage of details that Moore would go on to revisit in later works, such as his claim that “while it was true that before I was ten years old I had been hung from a tree by my wrists, whipped with barbed wire and buried alive by my schoolchums, there were also moving and poignant memories that I shall carry with me forever,” an account he would eventually revisit in his magical working The Birth Caul. Indeed, “Brasso with Rosie” discusses birth cauls in the context of his grandmother’s “elaborate and obsessive system of Juju and Counter-Juju,” claiming here that she in fact had an “extensive collection” of them that was discovered after her death, as opposed to, in his later account, simply having his mother’s caul.
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“If you believe in peace, act peacefully. If you believe in love, act lovingly.” Redemption

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We always knew it was coming.

The point of convergence where it all leads back to. Perhaps not the greatest moment, but the defining one. In the end, it all comes back to redemption. We will redeem. We will be redeemed.

This is the cliffhanger season finale that looms the largest in my memory. Not my favourite…I think “Time’s Arrow” and “Descent” are probably better, and I have fonder and more vivid memories of them both. I was told, of course, that I was supposed to like “The Best of Both Worlds”, and “The Best of Both Worlds” is certainly very good at what it does. But this is the one that exerts the greatest gravity over the mental landscape of mine Star Trek: The Next Generation belongs to.

The first image that strikes me is, as is always the case with Star Trek: The Next Generation, that of a starship. It’s the image that defines “Redemption” for me: That of the Enterprise being escorted by the Bortas, the first, and archetypal, Klingon Attack Cruiser. To me, this is simply one of the most iconic designs of the series, occupies a primal, fundamental spot in my memories and is one of those images that defines what Star Trek means to me. The Attack Cruiser was designed by Rick Sternbach, and while it’s far from his first or last design for the series, it’s one of his signatures. It showcases a lineage from the old Klingon Battlecruisers of yore as well as taking some cues from Federation aesthetics (intentionally, according to Sternbach, to demonstrate the sharing and exchange of ideas brought about by the alliance).

But the Klingon Attack Cruiser also demonstrates a fastidiousness that’s uniquely Sternbach’s: While Andy Probert’s starship work tended to be defined by clean, organic elegance, Sternbach’s is absolutely loaded up with meticulously thought-out little details-There’s every manner of nook, cranny and panel all over the ship, each of which look like they’re there for a purpose and are doing something important. Indeed, there’s probably a technical manual somewhere that tells you precisely what they all do. It’s a dedication to go above and beyond and a pride in getting all of those details right that’s as much a hallmark of Star Trek creative and fan spaces as it is of anime communities, and it’s here that Rick Sternbach’s real heritage starts to shine through. The Klingon Attack Cruiser is actually far more reminiscent of 1980s sci-fi anime mecha designs than it is of the US Navy- and Golden Age Hard SF-inspired designs that characterized Star Trek’s earlier years, or even of Andy Probert’s unique flavour of artistry. One could very easily imagine it fitting in just as well in Macross or in Dirty Pair as it does here.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: Marcelo Camargo

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This post exists because my Patreon crossed the $310 mark. It’s currently at $318.50, exactly $6.50 away from another bonus post like this on “Night of the Doctor,” which will otherwise wait until the McGann/Eccleston book to be written. You can pledge to help make that happen here.

To recap, in early July 2014 it emerged that a server at a BBC Worldwide had been improperly secured, and that scripts for the first five episodes of Season Eight had leaked. A few days later it became clear that the leak was worse than it had initially appeared as a workprint of Deep Breath also appeared on torrent sites, followed, over the course of the next month and a half, by workprints of Into the Dalek, Robot of Sherwood, Listen, and Time Heist. The files had been prepared for a Brazil-based subtitling company called Drei Marc, and specifically for a gentleman named Marcelo Camargo who, despite having absolutely nothing to do with the leak itself, became the name most associated with it.
 
The first thing to say is both obvious and controversial: it was fine. For all the talk of the leak being “embarrassing” for both Doctor Who and the BBC, there were no meaningful negative consequences. All five leaked episodes performed just fine, both critically and in the ratings. Just like the leak of Rose didn’t hurt anything (and indeed probably helped the series, as the diehard fans hashed out all their arguments over it in advance). Indeed, the truth is that it’s tough to think of any instance where a pre-release leak to torrent sites actually caused any damage. It’s to the point where it’s widely believed that the recent leak of the Supergirl pilot was deliberate on CBS’s part. 
 
No, that’s not the same as saying that leaks can’t hurt shows. Certainly it helps that the five leaked episodes were actually good. It’s hard to hurt good material by letting people see it. Had Capaldi completely bombed in the part such that the buzz around the screener copies was negative it would have been a very different situation. But these were five episodes of television that ranged from the quite good to the excellent, and even with unfinished effects and dodgy musical cues their basic quality was evident.
 
And yes, I suppose at this point I may as well admit that I watched them at the time, especially as Moffat has admitted that he would have watched them. I don’t mean this revelation to indicate some larger ethical principle, to be clear. I just couldn’t resist. My wife and I were nearly a year into a running joke of saying “guess what” with the answer being a very emphatic and happy “Peter Capaldi,” with every syllable emphasized. I was dying to see the new Doctor. So I caved. Lasted a solid week or two after Deep Breath leaked, and avoided the scripts entirely, as what I was interested in was the performance, not the plot, but I caved eventually.
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