In the mob, there is no reason to expect succession to fall according to birthright. Gangsters choose their leaders when their Don dies, but in this case, Vito retired and he chose Michael against the wishes of his capos. It’s not just that Fredo was older than Michael, but he’d been in the business longer, and he could not have really been that incompetent.
And Sonny was being groomed for leadership of the family, but then he had a really bad day at a toll booth
I strongly disagree with this.
It’s down to RTD, Moffat, and Chibnall.
Moffat, after delivering what were, arguably, the best stories of the RTD era sort of fell down on face when he was handed the reigns. Lots of solid ideas and concepts that never quite gelled into any kind of decent story. It was just a hot mess with a lot of crazy ideas that didn’t go anywhere.
And with this, I become convinced we’ve been watching different TV shows. Doctor Who doesn’t give two shits about continuity, never has, never will.
I never mentioned continuity. I said mythology.
Maintaining any kind of strict continuity within a series like Doctor Who is going to be impossible with all of the time travel going on. Though I do get annoyed whenever someone is surprised to see an alien when, since 2005, it seems like there’s a been at least one high profile alien invasion every year. At least during the UNIT years they kept this stuff on the down low.
Crafting a story where it revealed that the Doctor isn’t just any Time Lord but some kind of magical creature that essentially created the Time Lords, and that there are now dozens or hundreds or thousands of pre-Hartnell Doctors out there gallivanting about the universe alters the very foundations of the series. It’s dreadful storytelling.
Cue a lot of people conveniently forgetting how tired they were of Davies’ Who by the time he left the show before…
Yeah, but in hindsight, the Davies era was probably the strongest. Yes, he gave us those farting aliens and some truly awful episodes (like “Fear Her”), but then Moffat gave us six incoherent seasons that contained a lot of ambitious set-up with no pay-off (rebooting the universe?), and Chibnall’s tenure produced a string of dud episodes (like, “Hey, lets do an entire season of ‘Boomtowns’ and ‘Idiot Lanterns'”) and completely upended decades worth of mythology.
I’m not sure why everyone gets so hung up on Chekov and Khan knowing each other.
Just because Chekov didn’t appear until the next season doesn’t mean he wasn’t serving aboard the Enterprise at that time they recovered the Botany Bay. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that he was there for all of season one, and was promoted to the bridge crew for season two.
Yeah, hopefully “Season 4” will be going — all three episodes of it. (Someone already has it up on Youtube, but it’s in poor quality.)
Regarding season three, it’s too bad they uploaded “Dark Awakening” with the revised ending instead of the original one.
Unless it’s changed under Disney, Star Wars games were never canon.
Before the Disney buyout, the video games (at least the stories/scenarios behind them, not the actual game mechanics) were considered to be low-level canon, behind the movies, tv series, novels, and comic books. I think the original order went: Movies/TV series/90s Books & Comics/LucasArts Games/Everything Else (Marvel comic, holiday special, Han Solo and Lando novels, Droids and Ewoks cartoons). All stories remained canon until something higher up in the chain contradicted it.
Under Disney, the plan seems to have been to have a “Story Group” oversee everything and make sure it all fit together, which would put everything Disney released under the Star Wars banner on the same level of canon. Presumably, video games would have been included as well.
But now it seems like they’re in the process of transitioning to just flinging shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Today’s Amazing Spider-Man, oh dear, let’s retcon retcons galore!
Spoilers please!
https://bleedingcool.com/comics/kindreds-own-sins-past-in-amazing-spider-man-73-spoilers/
I will admit to never having been a regular Spiderman reader, but, holy shit, does that actually make sense to anyone?
Welp, today is “Star Trek Day.”
They’re streaming some panels, presentations, and other stuff on startrek.com tonight. Looks to be a mixed bag with a handful of high profile special guests.
I’m just hoping we get trailers for Picard Season 2, Disco Season 4, and Strange New Worlds.
I found 2 to be one of the most “let’s just make the same film again’ examples of any sequel. There are much worse films
Yes, like Beverly Hills Cop III.
It’s sort of interesting how so many 80s and 90s movies just fall apart in the third sequel.
Poltergeist. Beverly Hills Cop. Robocop. Alien 3. Batman. Hell, even the Godfather.
Generally speaking, the fist one is a classic, the second one is often a retread (though not with Godfather II as such), and the third one is just a mess.
Sort of makes me glad we didn’t get that third Ghostbusters movie.
Even Return of the Jedi and Last Crusade are the least of their trilogies.
And sometimes you get crap with the second movie like Caddyshack II, Highlander II, and Blues Brothers 2000.
It’s Team LeVar for me. No, I didn’t see any of his episodes, but damn do I like that in theory.
I was on Team LeVar, too.
Then I saw his episodes. And they were… not good. Cringeworthy. Probably the worst guest host of the bunch.
The best ones were Mike Richards, Buzzy Cohen, Mayim Bialik, and Joe Buck (which surprised me).
My “pitch” for Star Trek Into Darkness (which featured Khan) was that the Klingons stumbled upon the Botany Bay first, unfroze Khan, he takes over the ship, then Khan goes to Q’onos and conquers the Klingon Empire, and then sets his sites on the Federation. And, actually, all of that would have been in a post-credits scene or teaser, and the main story of the movie would be all-out war between the Khan-led Klingons and Starfleet.
I think that they really missed an opportunity with the Kelvinverse, where it could have been one big “What If,” — What if the Klingons found Khan first? What if Kirk and Co. encountered the Borg? What if the Doomsday Machine came to Earth’s Solar System? An alternate TOS universe, a lot like Marvel’s “Ultimate” line, where they could do crazy shit and alternate takes with the old crew that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
Ha ha, the press release says the exact opposite.
I’m still thinking that they might use Krakoa as a convenient way to drop the X-Men and mutants into the MCU; — they’ve been secretly living on Krakoa for decades and following the Snap and Blip, they’ve slowly started coming out into the world.
That Marvel is going to soldier on with HoxPox, just adds fuel to that fire.
Well, Revelation was aimed at people who haven’t matured much since 1988, but this new one is clearly aimed at kids.
Do kids even care about He-Man?
Seems like most of these 80s toy line revivals — He-Man, Transformers, GI Joe, whatever — are aimed at nostalgic adults in mid-life crisis mode. Most kids I know seem more interested in stuff like Minecraft, Pokemon, and Fortnite than they do about hoarding action figures. Give a kid money for his birthday, and he’s more likely to spend it on in-game purchases than toys.
Even the Star Wars toys… with a 3 3/4″ scale X-Wing retailing for $100 and a same-scale Millennium Falcon for $400, those aren’t being sold to children.
The only big n0n-video game IPs kids seem interested in these days are Marvel and Disney; at Halloween I think half of the costumes I see on trick-or-treaters are Captain America, Iron Man, or Black Panther if they’re boys, or a Disney Princess if they’re girls.
China is so persnickety about what they will and won’t allow in movies that at some point Disney is just going to have to tell them to go fuck themselves. They’re already compromising the movies for the global audience to appease those assholes, and enough is enough.
Science fiction had, traditionally, been considered to be a pulp genre and wasn’t taken seriously as literature until the 1960s when Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land came out. Science fiction wasn’t explicitly aimed at children, though the primary audience would have been as either kids or mentally deficient adults.
While I have no doubt that a lot of kids were reading Dune in the 60s and 70s and 80s, those books had a lot more complexity than seen in Harry Potter or Hunger Games. And even a YA series like Harry Potter has different layers. Reading the Harry Potter series at 9-12 is going to be a far different experience than reading it at 30+. (If you’re ten, then Snape is just going to be a mean teacher, reading it in your thirties, then he becomes a tragic, pathetic character, bitter and twisted by unrequited love, regret, and childhood trauma.) Which is how the best stuff ostensibly aimed at “young adults,” like Star Trek or Star Wars or Doctor Who, works — kids can get one thing out of it, and adults can get another thing.
And another thing to consider is the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. Nearly all media produced before then was aimed at general audiences. Movies were still subject to the Hays Code, television programs were held to stringent standards (separate beds for married couples!), music had to be safe to be played on the radio, and novels did not have explicit sex, graphic violence, or f-bombs. So, really, almost all art and entertainment that came out before the hippies came along and flushed the standards of decent, conservative society, would have been mostly safe for children to view or read, even if it wasn’t aimed at them.
It’s interesting that Doctor Who is considered to be a childrens’ program to this day. Of course it was aimed at kids when it debuted in 1963. All science fiction at that time would, if not been considered to be strictly for children, aimed in that direction.
That said, if Cobra Commander’s hood has been nixed for fear of associating with the KKK or whoever, it’s not that stupid a reason really. If you’re selling a fantasy of good guys vs bad guys you might not want people linking your bad guys with a pernicious force for racism in the real world.
At some point, this fear of offending is getting kind of ridiculous. The Cobra Commander hood doesn’t really resemble a KKK hood at all. It’s blue and it doesn’t come to a point. Looks more like the hood a medieval headsman would wear.
And I also can’t say I’m a fan of Disney changing the name of Boba Fett’s ship from “Slave-1” to “Firespray.” They should have just given him a new ship in The Mandalorian with a new name; the Jawas probably would have stripped that thing bare while he was being slowly digested in the Sarlaac pit, anyway, necessitating the need for a new ship.
I’m not entirely unsympathetic to that aspect. Viewing it on mobile the vid ads actively get in the way of info.
One started, figured I’d wait it out, then it starts another up straight afterwards practically blocking the text again, so I gave up.
I really have to wonder what the point of advertising is when it gets so intrusive and annoying that it not only causes me to stop visiting certain sites, but also makes me absolutely despise whatever product is being sold in that autoplaying, respawning ad that prevents me from reading the article I clicked on.
I detest social media — facebook, instagram, twitter, and the rest — but I can’t say I’m particularly enamored with these pay-to-play subscription models like Substack, Patreon, and OnlyFans.
If this takes off, you’re potentially paying hundreds of dollars a month to get the occasional e-mail or message from your favorite creator. And, since everyone is pre-paying, it gives the creators every incentive to slack off, and suddenly those twenty-two pages a month for $8 become ten pages a month for $8. And then there’s going to be a month where you get nothing but apologies that this month’s installment is late and assurances that it will be worth the wait when it comes out next month.
I think that most of the core seven kids in the movie acquitted themselves at least adequately.
Radcliffe was kind of a weak link, but, damn, it’s one hell of an ask to take a ten year-old and expect him to carry an entire eight-movie franchise until he’s twenty. Especially when he’s up against people like Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, and Robbie Coltrane.
I do think that most of them grew into their roles over the course of the series; they really grew up on the screen. Emma Watson’s Hermione went from a little know-it-all snot to a more thoughtful and nuanced character, Tom Felton’s Draco went from a spoiled little jerk to a tortured, remorseful villain, Matthew Lewis’ Neville Longbottom actually inspired a verb, etc.
By the way, for anyone who’s a fan of Dune… If you could, how would you fix the Dune saga? I’ve been thinking about it, and there’s a couple of ways I’ve thought of, but I haven’t settled on one just yet… I’m curious to know what others think about this… I’m guessing the first step in everyone’s plan would be to get rid of the Brian Herbert books… =P
Just read the first novel, Dune, and pretend the other six hundred books don’t exist.
That’s an interesting theory, DavidM.
Which sort begs the question as to whether or not the Doctor is constantly changing events around himself as he gallivants around space and time in his TARDIS.
The Doctor is a Time Lord; he comes from a race of time travelers. Presumably, the Doctor and the Time Lords would know about a universal threat such as the Daleks. So if the Doctor is out nosing around the Cosmos, he could have set into motion a chain of events that led to the rise of Dalek Empire. Which would certainly explain why the Time Lords spend so much time sitting on their arses and not interfering with events. It’s the butterfly effect. One little change you make in the timestream can ripple and have dire consequences centuries or millennia later.
In which case, the Daleks were a rather minor and insignificant race until the Doctor encountered them and filled them with a lust for conquering the universe. And the Doctor looks like a right arsehole.
As far as the role of Gilderoy Lockheart is concerned though, casting Brannagh was a stroke of genius. He was fantastic in that role.
He really was. I can’t imagine Cumming in the role at all. Or Everett, for that matter.
The casting for the Harry Potter films was really great… Alan Rickman, Gary Oldman, Maggie Smith, Kenneth Branagh, Robbie Coltrane, Helena Bonham Carter, Jason Isaacs, Julie Walters, Imelda Staunton, John Hurt, John Cleese, David Bradley, Ralph Fiennes, David Thewlis, Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, Jim Broadbent… all of them gave faces to their characters and owned the roles.
I think the only real mis-step was Richard Harris as Dumbledore. He sounded good on paper, but in the two films he was in he, he seemed rather feeble. I think Michael Gambon acquitted himself well in the role, feeling old but still hale.
My dream pick for Dumbledore probably would have been Tom Baker. As Doctor Who he came off as wise and powerful, while also being silly and a bit mad. Would have loved to see him introduced to a whole new generation of kids.
Copyright and trademarks are tricky when it comes to titles.
I think a lot of it comes down to how aggressively someone wants to push something (see Marvel vs Defiant over the Plasmer/Plasm). Some things like Star Trek and Star Wars are, obviously, off of the table, and a lot of it comes down to how similar two things of the same title are.
Trademarks generally cover a specific line of products… like Apple Computers and Apple Records (though once Apple Computers got into the music game with iTunes, I would assume they reached some kind of arrangement with Apple Records). For example, “Crest” is a brand of toothpaste. I can’t make another toothpaste or hygiene product and name it “Crest,” though I could, conceivably, create a superhero character named “Crest” because they are two distinct products.
One interesting thing I can recall in recent memory is Alias. The Marvel comic book titled Alias, written by Brian Bendis, and the J. J. Abrams tv series Alias. Both premiered at roughly the same time, and both were sort of mystery/espionage properties featuring a female protagonist. I’m not sure how they ran under the same title, since there could be marketplace confusion. I also recall that Rob Liefeld obtained the rights to produce comic books based on the Alias tv series, though I think they had to be under a different title, like how Grant Morrison’s comic book based on the Avengers tv series had to be titled Steed and Mrs. Peel. Unsurprisingly, the Liefeld Alias book never came out; not sure if had anything to do with the title, or just Rob being Rob.
I say each fan should see both versions and splice together the scenes they individually prefer. To each their own. Personally, I liked the end when he tricked the three into losing their powers. Of course, there were some scenes that were very silly, but if you can mentally edit them out and put in some of Donner’s material in its place, you will have your own Superman 2 movie.
Both versions have some good scenes that aren’t in the other one.
And the original ending is better than the DC ending. If the “Superman spins the world backwards to reverse time” wasn’t bad enough the first time around, Donner gave it to us again. (And, yeah, I know that it was put in the first Superman movie even though it was originally intended for Superman II, but it still feels like a case of “Superman fucks up again, and reverses time to fix everything.” It was a dopey concept to begin with.)
Out of curiosity, it their an American you would like to see a showrunner?
Noah Hawley, based on Legion, would be my first choice.
I expect the replicators are pre-programmed to make all the food low fat whether you like it or not, because the Federation is a nanny state that wants to control your entire life.
Also, I’d be shocked if Starfleet personnel didn’t self-select somewhat to people who were inclined towards athleticism and wouldn’t be particularly over-indulgent when it came to food. But even within that set of parameters, there are people who are a bit overweight like Chief O’Brien and Ensign Tilly and even they engage in strenuous physical exercise like kayaking and running.
I would think that, by Star Trek time, they can probably regulate weight by limiting the body’s ability to turn excess calories into fat. Or something like that.
And, yeah, I know about Scotty in the movies.
It is, apparently, not a 100% effective process.
Maybe it all actually tastes really shit.
https://www.tmz.com/2021/07/27/bob-odenkirk-hospitalized-after-collapsing-on-set-better-call-saul/
Bob Odenkirk collapsed on the set of Better Call Saul yesterday, while he was filming the final season of the tv series, and has been hospitalized. It’s been about ten hours since this was divulged, and there have been no updates on his condition.
Really hope he’s okay, but the lack of any kind of information is troubling.
I think Quentin Tarantino is sort of lost without Sally Menke.
His last three films without her — Django Unchained, Hateful Eight, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — all seem bloated as fuck. Like they’re an hour and a half of story stretched out to three hours. Tarantino films have always been slow burners, but the last three just seem to meander around a lot. The movies she edited could move slowly, but it always seemed like there was something visually interesting going on, or tension being built, or at least some kind of forward momentum.
SF is always using the future as a window into the present though. Star Trek’s morality plays reflect the era any given episode or movie was made in, Star Wars is wall-to-wall Vietnam analogies, cyberpunk as a genre is interrogating the social and economic climate of the early 80s…
George Lucas has been fairly open about how Vietnam inspired Star Wars; the idea of a small band or rebels taking on a vast Empire. (Providing we’re willing to take Lucas at his word; he’s been known to rewrite history from time to time.)
Maybe that’s one reason why Star Wars has struggled to find an identity in the Disney era; it really doesn’t know what it wants to be. Even the reviled Prequels can be seen as a 9/11-War on Terror analogy, though the trilogy was developed before the dreaded event. It’s almost eerie how Attack of the Clones paralleled current events even though the script was already written and the film was in the can when the planes flew into the World Trade Center.
Speaking of Cyberpunk, I had a great deal of interest in it when I was a kid. Back in the 1980s, when I was reading Neuromancer and other books, it really felt like the start of something big, like some kind of big paradigm shift was happening in science fiction, but the genre ultimately burned itself out quickly. At the time, I was thinking that the traditionalist science fiction community worked to kill it, but, in hindsight, it seemed destined to be little more than a fad. Outside of Gibson, whose fiction became more and more mainstream as time went on, none of the other authors of the movement really went anywhere past the 1980s. I suppose one of the problems is what’s cutting edge in 1984 seems dated by 1989. Now, the walls of pay telephones (and lack of smartphones) in Neuromancer seem just as dated as the atomic-powered cigarette lighters of Foundation were when Neuromancer came out.
While I still love Neuromancer and, really, the whole Sprawl Trilogy, and think John Shirley’s Eclipse Trilogy is pretty good, a lot of the cyberpunk novels from that time are a real chore to get through.
I prefer my Ghostbusters movies funny, but sure.
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. This felt more like Stranger Things or, well, 80s Spielberg. Not much like a comedy at all.
Agree that it felt a lot like Stranger Things — and not just because one of the kids from that series is in it, either.
In some ways, it makes me think of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where we revisit an old property after decades. It just makes me think that we should have gotten more movies in the 1990s when the casts were still young. I think I would have felt a little better about KotCS if it was the seventh or eighth Indiana Jones movies instead of the fourth one. Likewise, I think I might be more hyped for Afterlife if it was the sixth Ghostbusters film. (Not counting the atrocious 2016 remake.)
ETA: On the other hand, I think the decades-long span between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 absolutely worked.
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. Reason: "an" not "and"
I can’t really remember the last movie that could successfully pull off that kind of horror comedy for an adult audience that GHOSTBUSTERS, GREMLINS and BEETLEJUICE managed to pull off and I’m not really sure there is still a market for it.
Sometime in the 1990s, I really would have liked to have seen a Ghostbusters/Gremlins/Beetlejuice crossover film. Like Beetlejuice turns a bunch of Gremlins loose, and the Ghostbusters have to stop both of them.
I don’t think Westerns are really comparable to science fiction.
For one thing, all Westerns are, ostensibly, the same. They all took/take place in the same late nineteenth century American milieu. Bonanza, The Rifleman, the Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns, and everything else mostly take place within the same historical context.
Whereas Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Babylon 5, and everything else all take place in their own isolated worlds with their own sense of art design, technology, physics, and mythologies.
As such, these are a lot trickier to pull off than the simple Westerns that were churned out during the middle of the last century, where they could reuse the same sets and costumes and horses. There really wasn’t a lot of world-building going on in them. Just put some cowboys hats on actors, put them on horses, give them guns, and have them shoot Indians and the occasional black hat.
It’s kind of hard to say, but at some point, you might get a “cinematic universe” overload with Stars Trek and Wars, Doctor Who, the MCU, the DCEU, Middle Earth, Ice-n-Fire, the Wizarding World, the Witcher, Transformers, Walking Dead, and whatever else is out there. Most of these things are chasing after the same nerdy fandom (which, admittedly, has expanded greatly in the past couple of decades). These fandoms do cross over into the cultural mainstream, but that fandom tends to be fickle, and the mainstream fans tend to get bored quickly and move onto something else. (Notice how the ratings for The Walking Dead have slipped, and the bad taste the final season of Game of Thrones left so many mouths.)
Re-watched the first Doctor Who story. (Considering a complete re-watch, but it’s a big committment…) Let’s be honest, even for fans it’s a bit rubbish isn’t it? The first episode is very strong, it would definitely have hooked me if it were my first exposure to the series, and then there are three episode of complete meh.
I saw it back in the 80s when my PBS station aired the Hartnell/Troughton Doctor Who stories.
That was my reaction as well. The first installment, “The Unearthly Child,” is really strong. It’s mysterious and engaging, and then the next three installments are a bunch of “ooga-oooga” cavemen. And, lord, there’s nothing more boring than a bunch of cavemen that can’t speak or meaningfully interact with characters.
Interesting point about my PBS showing the old Who stories in the 80s. I remember getting frustrated because they were skipping over episodes, and seemed to be showing them out of order. It wasn’t until about twenty years later and the series was being released on DVD that I learned that many of the episodes of that era were lost. It was really unthinkable (and still sort of is) that a content owner would intentionally junk their inventory of episodes to a classic tv series, never mind that it was still running at the time. It would be like someone at NBC/Paramount/whoever tossing out all of their Star Trek and Twilight Zone episodes either while they series were still running or shortly after they were canceled.
Here:
Now… I am not obligated to (and will definitely not) watch all this.
What do you plan to check out in the upcoming years?
If only Warners could do the same thing with their DC properties in a cohesive universe…
I guess HBO needs to save their money for another Game of Thrones spin-off that nobody wants.
Or not…
https://comicbook.com/tv-shows/news/game-of-throness-reported-flea-bottom-spinoff-cancelled/
I’d like for them to explain how a character named Captain America isn’t inherently political.
Also, who is the dude sitting on top of the holodeck door?
I think that’s actually Q, it looks like his outfit from the episode where he’s turned into a human.
I think it’s the other Q from that episode played by Arnie from L.A. Law. He wore the same outfit that Q did.
Yeah, Kirk died in Generations, so there really wouldn’t be any way to bring in an Old Man Kirk for Shatner to play in the Abrams movie.
They would have needed to do some serious retconning*, or have Shatner play an aged version of the Kelvinverse Jim Kirk.
*And, to be brutally honest, they way they used Kirk and Generations was shit, anyway. I sort of get the feeling that Moore and Braga had a bigger and better movie in development, but Paramount wanted it faster and cheaper, and they kept whittling away at the story until we got the dud that ended up on the screen.
An animated reconstruction of Evil of the Daleks was announced today. Same deal as the other recent ones – full colour with a black and white option, across 3 DVDs or 2 Blu-Ray discs. Out later this year.
It’s pretty cool the amount of Troughton recons that have been done the past few years. I hope they stretch out to doing some Hartnells as well at some point. The Crusade ideally.
I suspect that they’re filling out the Troughton run so they can release them as complete seasons on blu-ray like they’ve been doing with third through the seventh Doctors.
With “Evil of the Daleks” announced, that will only leave “The Highlanders” and “The Underwater Menace” missing from that season (presumably, they would move the two Hartnell stories from season four to season three for a complete season release just to keep the transition neater.)
At this point, Troughton’s second season is only missing “The Abominable Snowmen” and “Wheel in Space.” Oh, and that third episode from “The Web of Fear” that was recovered and then stolen.
And Troughton’s third and final season is only missing “The Space Pirates.”
Makes me wonder if they’ll bother animating the missing historicals like “The Highlanders.” They’re probably kind of low priority, even though “The Highlanders” introduced Jamie.
Hartnell’s first and second seasons are almost complete… the first season is only missing “Marco Polo,” which should probably be presented as telesnaps since, from what I’ve gathered, most of the appeal of that episode is from the sets and costumes, which would be lost in an animated recreation. And then Hartnell’s second season is only missing two episodes of “The Crusade,” which would probably be easy enough to whip out in animation for that season.
Hartnell’s third season is a real mess, though. Tons of missing episodes and stories, I think about seven in all, and one of them is a whopping twelve episodes. There are a few stories like “The Smugglers” and maybe “The Savages” that people might not miss too much, but I’d really like to see them recreate “The Daleks Master Plan,” along with “The Myth Makers” and “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve,” since there’s some continuity between those stories.
Whereas Moffat had a reputation as more of a smart intricate plotter and his version of the show took this stuff a bit more seriously and made the arcs a bit more prominent, so people had different expectations and were disappointed when they were often just as woolly as the RTD era.
That’s what was so frustrating about Moffat for me.
His episodes were always the highlight of the RTD era. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, Silence in the Libary/Forest of the Dead. These were weird and complex and always had a good payoff.
But then Moffat becomes the showrunner, and he’s still setting up all of this neat stuff… Van Gogh painted the TARDIS exploding, and the payoff is some gobbledygook about rebooting the universe. And the Doctor’s enemies put him in the Pandorica, in inescapable prison cube, and he manages to escape from during what amounts to a commercial break. Rory just opened it up with the Sonic Screwdriver. That’s about as bad as Luke tossing the lightsaber over his shoulder…
I will agree that “Heaven Sent” is a brilliant episode (and “Face the Raven” as well), but the payoff in “Hellbent” was terrible.
And “The Day of the Doctor” was quite good as well — I really liked the idea of a lost incarnation of the Doctor — but I was disappointed that the Time War, as presented, just seemed to so mundane. The few things we heard about the Time War — the Nightmare Child, the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, and the Could’ve Been King with his Army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres — made it sound like some kind of hellish Lovecraftian nightmare, barely comprehensible to human minds — and when “The Day of the Doctor” showed us the final days of the Time War it was just a bunch of people and Daleks shooting at each other, and not the fabric of reality being ripped apart.
Replace “long-running plot points” with “The Timeless Child” and “wrapped up” with “written off and never spoken of ever again” and I agree entirely.
I’m thinking also of the Ruth Doctor stuff. I feel like it would be good to address that before Whittaker leaves.
Doctor Who doesn’t really do long-running plotlines very well, does it?
I mean, you had Smith’s Doctor where Moffat had all of this stuff like that crack in spacetime, the exploding TARDIS, the Pandorica, the Silence, the Impossible Astronaut, the wedding of River Song, the Great Intelligence, Tranzalore, and every one of those just fizzled out by the time it ended. A lot of interesting ideas, but absolutely nothing interesting came out of them.
And then, with Capaldi, it sort of promised the search for the Time Lords, but that plotline was DOA. And Clara as the impossible girl or something, and Danny Pink might something important, but no he’s just some guy they killed off, Missy turns out to be the Master and that weird steampunky Mary Poppins storyline ends up being about some harebrained scheme by the Cybermen to rob graves (the fuck, dude?), and Arya Stark becomes immortal because the Doctor gives a trinket, and then the Time Lords sort of came back, but really didn’t. And then there was the final season with Bill and the girl with the star-shaped eye, which was the simplest and most coherent arc of Moffat’s tenure.
And then Chibnall comes along and delivers the dullest season of the modern era, and then takes a massive shit on six decades worth of established canon. Oh, and kills off the Time Lords again because nobody seems to know what the fuck to do with them other than eliminate them.
The irregular release of series now seems to be, at least in part, down to the BBC seemingly being determined to make a few actual episodes of Doctor Who as they can without cancelling it. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the COVID-related reduction in series length was quietly kept as the standard length of the series going foward.
The popularity of Doctor Who seems to have taken a precipitous nosedive after Matt Smith left. Nobody really seemed to warm up to Capaldi, and the people who liked David Tennant and Matt Smith seem to have abandoned ship at that point. The merchandise at places like Hot Topic and Barnes & Noble, which was a mainstay at those stores during the late aughts and early teens, dried up immediately and never returned.
And it also didn’t help that Capaldi’s Doctor was an abrasive asshole, Danny Pink was an annoying side character, and the writing was fucking dreadful. You’d think they would have learned their lesson from the Colin Baker fiasco. Though Danny Pink wasn’t nearly as grating as Mel.
Oh, god, I really hope that’s a preview of Lore in Picard Season Two.
I seem to remember reading about a Marvel event/miniseries being announced ages ago that i cant find any trace of online. The elevator pitch for it was essential “electricity stops working in the Marvel universe”. Have I totally made this up in a fever dream or is this something that came out and disappeared quietly (or didnt come out at all for whatever reason).
“Dark Ages?”
I sort of remember seeing a preview for it where Tony Stark loses a leg.
Or is this the current state of fact-checking at DC now?
AT&T fired most the DC staff not long ago, so the copywriting is probably being cobbled together by interns or something.
The whole premise of the movie just falls to pieces when you think about it.
How did the Saab uncrash itself? It was being driven by an inverted protagonist, but the car itself wasn’t inverted, was it? Does the inverted person have some kind of inversion field around them?
And we saw the broken mirror on the BMW get repaired when the Audi hit it. But where did the broken mirror come from? At some point before the chase, someone would have had to put a broken mirror in the car (an inverted repair).
And the building that gets blown up twice in the final battle, where it is blown up from two different temporal directions. It gets destroyed, reassembles itself, then gets destroyed again. It is only whole at the 5:00 mark at both directions, then it’s shown destroyed in both directions. So how was it built to begin with? At what point did it exist as a whole structure?
The bullets suffer from the same problem as the mirror. Especially the one at the opera house.
Imagine that I’m sitting at home with a gun staring at my wall. I fire the gun at the wall, the bullet lodges into the wall and puts a hole in sheetrock. A week later I pull the bullet out with a pair of pliers and plaster over the hole.
Now, with an inverted bullet, there’s a bullet hole in the wall, I aim the gun, pull the trigger, and the bullet jumps back into the gun and the wall repairs itself. Did the bullet hole exist in the wall when the house was built, or, at some point before pulling the trigger, did I jam the bullet in there with a pair of pliers?
There is also the matter of the protagonist shooting his inverted self in the arm. Once he’s inverted, the wound slowly begins to appear in his arm until he fights with his past self and the bullets gets sucked from his arm. This could possibly explain where the inverted bullet holes and broken mirror come from, though the walls and opera house floor that took the bullets, and the broken car mirror ,were never inverted themselves
It looks kind of cool, and they tried to handwave it away with some lines about time still mostly flows forward, but you’ll tear your hair out if think too hard about it…
How big was the Clone Army supposed to be?
If the “1.3M affair” is supposed to mean 1.3 million clones, then that seems like a terribly low number. I think that something ten million Americans fought in WWII, so if we’re looking at a war on a galactic scale, you’re probably looking at billions of clone troopers.
War on that scale would be almost unimaginable…
And who’s paying for it?
<rimshot>
While warp speed has never been precisely defined (smart), scientist James O’Donoghue (via Science Alert) did some calculating and concluded that warp one is essentially light speed, and warps two through ten are just … faster, somehow. All well and good (though he goes on to demonstrate that at warp one, it would take the ship a disappointing four years plus just to go from Earth to Pluto), but the real problem is in the details. Consider an exciting action sequence in the Star Trek universe. The Enterprise is chasing a Klingon ship at warp one. The Klingons drop out of warp, and one second later, so does the Enterprise. But one second later puts the Enterprise 186,282 miles away. Even a fraction of second puts the ships tens of thousands of miles apart in the emptiness of space.
Someone made a boo-boo. If warp one is the speed of light, it would take about five hours to reach Pluto, not four years. I think they might have meant Alpha Centauri. I would assume that’s an error on the part of the writer of the article, and not scientist James O’Donoghue. It only took New Horizons about nine years to reach Pluto.
The Star Trek writers and producers are wise to keep the specifics of both warp speed and the locations of planets vague. Otherwise, keeping track of this stuff would be a nightmare.
Warp Speed is already sketchy enough as it is, especially when Voyager specifically stated that it would take seventy years to return to Federation space after they were dumped in the Delta Quadrant. Of course, we have seen ships constantly zipping between worlds like Bajor, Earth, Qonos, Vulcan, et al within the span of a year, which would probably be pretty similar to the distance across the galaxy. I’m sure the Enterprise-D probably had at least 75,000 light years on it when it crashed. And, of course, Kirk’s Enterprise went to the center of the galaxy and back within the span on one movie.
I have a simple rule for both Star Trek and Star Wars should always follow:
Never ask:
* How far away is it?
* How long does it take to get there?
* How much does it cost?
Any answer you give to those questions will fuck up decades worth of continuity.
I agree generally that Ditko’s 80s work was taking the piss largely. Squirrel Girl’s debut story is by Ditko and I remember it looking awful. I recently read some early Avengers West Coast, for which Ditko did pencils on the first annual (or the east coast annual it crossed over with, I forget which). Utterly dire stuff. Without his name on it, it’d wouldn’t have been published.
I remember reading — I think it was that big Ditko retrospective Fantagraphics put out a while back — that by that period in Ditko’s career, he was only really interested in doing those Ayn Rand “Chick Tract” books he self-published like Mr. A and Avenging World. He had burned a lot of bridges in the industry and was basically being thrown pity work by editors (stuff like Transformers coloring books) that he half-assed his way through. Turn in some loose pencils, and leave the inker to do all of the heavy lifting. Which seems really un-Objectivist; I mean when Hugh Akston was flipping burgers in Atlas Shrugged, they were best goddamned hamburgers ever crafted by man.
I am just SO ANGRY that they dicked around and wasted Noah Hawley’s time, the fucking fucks. I want to get as much content as possible out of that man before it turns out he’s a terrible asshole like everybody else and has to go away.
God, I hope that Alien series happens.
In the near future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, then get milkshake ducked.
I’m going to make an obnoxious fanboy demand here, but they absolutely need to include a live-action scene in Lower Decks at some point where the voice actors play their characters in real life.
I want a transporter accident where Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford get transported into the fourth dimension…
Quite a ride, the performances are good and any suggestion that the film glamourises or romanticises heroin use is unfounded.
I think that the problem you run into with something like Trainspotting is that when it shows these attractive young junkies (well, at least Jonny Lee Miller and Ewan McGregor) running around saying clever things and doing cool things while kitschy old music blares on the soundtrack, it’s going to glamorize the lifestyle no matter how badly the fuck up their lives. Even the bit where Spud shits his girlfriend’s bed is played for laughs.
It’s kind of difficult to depict drug addiction on screen and not glamorizing it without turning it into a horror show. Even Breaking Bad really on did this once with the tweakers who were trying to break into that stolen ATM machine. Otherwise, the rest of the series just kind of glosses over the rotten teeth and sores to keep showing us what a brilliant badass Heisenberg was.
Which is your preferred Captain Britain costume and why?
I’m a huge Alan Davis fan, but I could never get onboard with the costume he designed. I get his point that the original costume wasn’t a good representation of Britain (the lion is more English than British) but his costume is just a bit much. The flag on the chest AND the helmet (which is in itself ugly) makes it all too complicated, and as for those thigh-high boots… the less said, the better! I get that they’re supposed to be inspired by the Royal Horse Guards, but they also wear this monstrosity on their heads.
The original is a classic costume, IMO – even the wavy hair looks good (in a 1970’s kind of way…) and the sceptre was just cool!
The one on the right.
I like the way it sort of takes the Union Jack design and turns it into a “X,” which is appropriate for the leader of an X-Men offshoot team. (Being an American, my first experience with Captain Britain was in Excalibur.)
Still waiting on Miracleman to be completed so I can buy the whole thing in one big, thick volume.
Almost given up hope that those final nine-twelve issues will ever see the light of day. 
“I’d just as soon kiss a sausage!”
“I can arrange that!”
Yeah, it seems like in the Wizarding World you’re some kind of government employee (bureaucrat, cop) or come from old money like the Malfoys. There seems to be some level of private enterprise — Lockhart was an author, there are at least a few wizarding periodicals, and there are some shops and pubs that are seemingly to limited to magical ghettos. There doesn’t seem to be much of a service industry, though, since most transportation, cooking, maintenance/repairs, and cleaning seem to be done with either with magic or enslaved elves. And the goblins seem to have a monopoly on banking.
For TNG at least, the producers wanted to blaze their own trail to some degree and that was why they only rarely had Vulcan crewmembers, to reduce comparisons with Spock.
…and instead created a new character with basically the same personality traits and emotional dilemma. Which worked brilliantly, though, one has to admit, in no small part due to Spiner’s performance.
The decision not to have a Vulcan main character was a correct one. Spock’s shadow loomed large, and including a Spock 2.0 in TNG would have been a mistake.
Data was a clever alternative, having a machine who wanted to be a man instead of a man who wanted to be a machine. TMP gets shit on a lot, but it does present Spock with an interesting arc, where V’ger presents sort of an ideal for Spock, a paragon of perfect logic that he aspires to be, but he learns that V’ger is ultimately unfulfilled with its existence.
Spock had a great character arc throughout TOS and the films. By the final film, Spock had made peace with who he was, embracing both his Vulcan and Human sides.
I found Data’s character arc, which (maybe?) ended in the first season of Picard to be both horrifying and touching. Data was always striving to be human, and part of being human is dying, which he chose to embrace, even though he could have been immortal. I kind of hated it, but I think it did make sense for the character.
There were a few Vulcans serving aboard the Enterprise-D, though most of them only made single appearances and weren’t recurring characters.
Dr. Selar comes to mind; she was featured prominently in one second season episode, and made no more appearances, though she mentioned in several later episodes. (Too bad Selar wasn’t Crusher’s replacement in season two; Pulaski never seemed to click with crew.)
And then there was Taurik from “Lower Decks,” in season seven.
I’m sure there were a few others that I can’t recall at the moment.
Both Enterprise and DISCO are set in the past before TNG. I would like to have seen what the Andorians, Gorn, etc. are up to in the TNG era. Also, when the Klingons broke the Organian treaty in the DS9 episodes, where were the Organians? Or even in that episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise where the Federation and Klingons were at war?
The writers flagrantly ignore continuity, like in Voyager when they went they time traveled back to the 90’s, no mention of Khan or anything.
The lack of prominent TOS-era aliens in TNG and DS9 was conspicuous.
The Gorn would likely be problematic from a production standpoint; they would need an updated design and more articulation, and would probably be budget busters. Most of the alien designs from the TNG/DS9/VOY period came down to a funny-looking noses, foreheads, or ears.
The redesigns of the Gorn and Tholians in Enterprise were done with CGI; the Gorn was more lizard-like and the Tholian was a full-bodied crystaline entity.
I wonder if the lack of others, like Orions, Tellarites, and Andorians, came down to someone like Berman or Piller thinking they looked silly.
The Eugenics War is something they’ve kind of danced around. When it was introduced in “The Space Seed,” it was only three decades away in real time, and we’ve since passed that time period. I seem to recall an episode of DS9 seemed to mention it as happening two hundred years ago, which it retcon near Enterprise‘s era. That was, of course, before Enterprise was even a gleam in Berman and Braga’s eyes.
I was watching the TOS episode “Errand of Mercy” the other day, where Kirk and Spock beamed to this planet Organia to secure it as a strategic outpost in a future war with the Klingons who were also fighting to occupy it themselves. The people and leaders came across as this hopelessly primitive society who were also pacifists. In the end things weren’t quite as they seemed. It just gets to me how the Organians suckered them both…
I only wished that the future Star Trek shows followed up on some of the TOS material. It would have been nice to have had the Organians appear again (no offense to the Q continuum), as well as revisiting some of the planets that Kirk and crew changed decades ago (although I heard that the Archons went back to worshipping Landru), the Andorians and the Gorn could have been could have been brought back. Trelane? Maybe… but you get the point.
I think that, from the 1980s on, Trek has tried to avoid god-level beings. (Q and the Wormhole Prophets notwithstanding). The TOS crew seemed to bump into them quite frequently — Trelane, The Organians, Metron, Apollo.
I think you sort of hit a point where a galaxy filled with super-evolved god-like aliens becomes boring and filled with deus ex machinas.
And, speaking of the Organians, they did put in appearance in fourth season episode of Enterprise. That took place a century before “Errand of Mercy,” though.
I was confused because I was thinking how can you keep her if you retcon the timeless child.
The “Timeless Child” isn’t, in and of itself, a bad concept. That the Timelords effectively stole the ability to regenerate from an alien entity is actually kind of interesting.
But where it falls flat is that the Doctor is the Timeless Child. It’s just going a bridge too far into the mythology, and it harms the Doctor’s essential nature. Before, the Doctor chose to be special. Now, the Doctor was born special.
And it also opens up a Pandora’s Box where now any writer can start pulling unseen Doctors out of their asses right and left. I thought that the War Doctor was an interesting idea, where there was a “lost” incarnation of the Doctor. Now there are potentially thousands of them out there. God, I can’t even…
If I were in charge, I think the simplest solution would be for #13 to regenerate into Jo Martin, and we would see the flipside of “Fugitive of the Judoon” where we see why she used the Chameleon Arch, hiding her identity from her previous incarnation, and then lied to her about not knowing who she was. All the while she’s off running around searching for the real Timeless Child herself.
(And I really liked Jo Martin’s performance in that episode, and that’s another reason I’d like to see her play #14. She had the gravity that the Doctor has lacked for a long time.)
(Plus, I’ve always thought it might be interesting for the Doctor to meet and interact with their next incarnation. Tom Baker and The Watcher doesn’t count.)
But maybe Chibnall does have some kind of long gameplan in mind, and, as others have said, the Master is an unreliable narrator…
I hope the next Doctor is Jo Martin and the new showrunner retcons the shit out of Chibnall’s Timeless Child crap.
