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Tag: doctor who

Month of Sundays #1

Posted on by Alex Daily

New month, new recurring post concept. Happy Halloween.

Movies

  • It’s hard to do an October horror movie thing when you’re already watching horror all the time. On top of that, between the Rings, the Ju-Ons, and the Elm Street and Friday the 13th reboots, it’s been quite a lot of “watching franchises play their opening gambits over and over again” lately. And then Friday the 13th and Halloween also have a bunch of endings, too.
  • I’ll do, I think, the American Ring and Grudge films, and then maybe take a wee break from horror for a bit.
  • Caught up on Hunger Games before the prequel comes out, but I don’t think I’m quite the target audience for these. I think I’m struggling for the exact reason people often struggle with The Matrix, which I love because I can bring the emotional through-line into focus for myself while blurring out the world and the philosophy a little — but with Hunger Games, because I’m not 14, the emotional through-line doesn’t click into place in the same way so all I can see is the idea that this dumb system has been in place for 75 years somehow.
  • Blank Check status report: Finished Tim Burton. Hitting Michael Mann means I’ve also got Waypoint‘s Mannhunting to listen to, but I didn’t really click with Thief, so this one might be a real chore again. But I really should at least get well into Mann before Ferrari comes out.

Bits from Letterboxd

Saw X (2023):

I get why [Jigsaw’s victims] don’t appreciate John Kramer the Maker or John Kramer the Industrial Designer, but they could at least appreciate John Kramer the Puppeteer.

Past Lives (2023):

I know that tension between the past and the present. I know changing your name, I know becoming ungoogleable. I know being somebody else somewhere else. I know all the things that are harder to say in one language than they are in the other. I know translating for a friend. I know wondering. I know not going there.

La Course (1896):

Good to keep a crowd between us and those horses, wouldn’t want them to rush out of the screen like that train.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023):

an hour in I thought, “really, it’s weird that Jesse Plemons isn’t in this somewhere” and then an hour later there he was

Resident Evil (2002):

this is so 2002

we were always getting stuck in stainless steel laser trap rooms back then

Mac and Me (1988):

at the end the aliens have truly integrated into American society — they’ve gone on a road trip, picked up a few cold ones and a gun, and get shot and blown up by the cops

Dark Water (2002):

quite a strong overlap here with the Koji Suzuki adaptation Hideo Nakata’s best known for, Ring — these huge psychic scars left on the world around a sad death, an intense situation involving a single mother and her daughter, psychic visions, and, of course, they’re both pretty wet films

they’re both also, of course, awfully sad, but Ring gets to be sort of fun, with its over the top silly cursed tape concept, while this one thrives more in its fairly serious depiction of the claustrophobic little world around its urban legend-esque ghost story

an emotionally destructive ending like no other

Television

  • Finished John Wick spinoff The Continental. As we’ve established, it’s mostly bad and boring — on the one hand it sucks that Mel Gibson (boo hiss) is in it, on the other hand it’s nice to see him get shot in the head at the end.
  • If even the Frasier can have a minor queer character casually refer to her wife, there are no excuses left for not having any queer characters on your show.
    Speaking of the Frasier reboot, enjoyed the first two episodes, but it does feel quite a lot like they went “well nobody really wants to come back, so this guy is the new Niles, the new Daphne,” etcetera.
  • Enjoying Goosebumps.
  • The problem with the Jon Hamm character on The Morning Show this year is he’s clearly meant to be Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos, except he’s capable of introspection and change and seems quite nice, and I just don’t think that’s plausible — fundamentally the problem with serialised dramatic storytelling about rich people is that it’s hard to sell them both truly as craven and inhuman AND as rich, developed characters. This is why Succession was so good.
  • Nearly done with The Fall of the House of Usher, whose answer to the above issue is “well, we’ll kill ’em off one by one.”
  • The new Our Flag Means Death suffers a little from everyone involved now knowing what everyone loves about it, but it’s still a lot of fun. I appear to exist in total isolation from its fandom this season, so I’ve no idea how common a theory this is, but: The endgame for all of this is that Ed is “erased” from history and it’s Izzy who becomes the “real” Blackbeard, right? That’s surely where this is going.
  • Wellington Paranormal seems to have aired a full season since I caught up to it. On it. …No, to it. Still a hoot.
  • I’m enough behind on TV that I’m making myself stick strictly (mostly) to broadcast order again — as of this writing it’s Wednesday the 18th in TV land.

Doctor Who

  • Finished Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Gods of the Underworld. Nothing wrong with it, per se, but it’s a real example of a bog standard Benny archeology adventure full of thinly sketched species and cultures, supported by a cast of unoriginal, uninspired characters nobody will ever give a shit about. The clichés are ripe on the ground here, it’s all war races and Blood Messengers and space gangsters, and references both structural and pop cultural to both Indiana Jones and Star Wars feel tacky in the Year of Luigi 2023 in a way they probably didn’t in 2001.
  • Third Doctor Adventures: Intelligence for War. Like all the recasts Treloar and Ashford needed quite some time to truly come into their own, but here they’re on top form. The “Liz may have done some treason” story never feels like the filler it could easily have felt like, and it captures the Pertwee era so well you actually can picture the quiet Norfolk village it’s happening.
  • Odyssey kicks off the Torchwood range’s Ood trilogy.1Yes, it should’ve been called the Oodbvious thing. Strong performances elevate a solid script, though the end is a little The Satan Pit again. Does this just keep happening to poor Ida Scott?
  • I’ve now listened to the full @60 concert, and god, Russell and Murray are gonna kill me from dehydration come November 25th.
  • Started the Zygon Invasion novelisation. All a little straightforward, hard to imagine it meaningfully adds anything.
  • After lying next to my bed for six months, picked up Legends of Camelot again. Rayner finds a really fun way to do all the classic bits of Arthuriana you want without contradicting previous Doctor Who lore, and it’s a hoot to have Dr Who and Donna running around in it.

Podcasts

  • Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later seems to have wrapped up its first season. “The Thick of It but in Roman times” is a solid premise that’s easy to fuck up, and they consistently do not fuck it up. Really funny.
  • I’m so close with Blank Check to catching up to where I was with Mobile Suit Gundam and Screen Test of Time, I’m so close.
  • 1
    Yes, it should’ve been called the Oodbvious thing.

On barnacles

Posted on by Alex Daily

David asked about the Stef Coburn situation — the son of writer Anthony Coburn is claiming his dad had enough of an ownership over the first Doctor Who serial that he, as controller of his estate, now seems to be able to block its re-release1Here’s Gizmodo on the issue. I would recommend strongly against clicking through to Coburn’s Twitter. — and I basically blogged about it in reply.

This is my lightly edited2Coburn doesn’t seem to be particularly litigious towards people writing about this, but for legal reasons I feel slightly less comfortable being very rude here. earnest understanding and assessment of the situation, as I rattled it off at 9:30am this morning after sleeping for twelve hours. I am not a lawyer, and I am not qualified to write about this in any way except that I’m a Doctor Who fan.

Most people writing about this are idiots. I’m probably one of them.

One

Stef Coburn is a misogynist, a conspiracy nutter, a vaccine truther, a racist, a transphobe, an all-round bigot, a typical modern conservative3These are all claims I feel I can back up just by pointing at his Twitter, but rest assured I edited out several things I felt like I couldn’t., who, though I’m sure he hates that Dr Who is played by a Black actor now just by default,4David had linked to a social media post suggesting Coburn was specifically doing this because he was mad Dr Who was Black now. seems to have experienced the show’s very existence as a miserable intrusion upon his awful life, so I think it’s less “Stef is doing this because Ncuti” and more “Stef is doing this because he chooses to,” with a layer of “Stef is doing this now because he knows it’s a time when he’ll get the attention and outrage he seems to crave” — he also tried to claim ownership of the TARDIS using basically the same tricks during the 50th anniversary period.

Personally, I think this kind of thing works best when you get the fandom to rally behind you — I’m generally happy to say, yeah, somebody who made a major contribution early on to something that’s a billion dollar brand now should be recognised beyond what they were paid at the time — but Stef seems to have gone the “I know how to make a stink and I’m gonna make the smell everyone’s problem” route.

Two

The contract situation on old Doctor Who is messy. The rule, generally, is, if something was invented by somebody on BBC payroll, it belongs to the show, and if it was invented by a freelancer, they have some amount of legal ownership over the concept. Terry Nation fully owned the Daleks, now his estate does, and for much of the 60s and 70s he tried to make a standalone Dalek show — typically a 60s-style sci-fi space police thing — happen.5A pilot script was adapted for audio by Big Finish in 2010 as The Destroyers. Bob Baker and Dave Martin owned K9,6See: The relationship between K9 mostly being absent in The Sarah Jane Adventures and the existence of Disney XD’s K9 series. And the perpetually definitely-happening K9: TimeQuake. the Brig has his own long-running military sci-fi novel series fully licensed from the Haisman and Lincoln estates that the BBC has no involvement in7From Candy Jar Books. I like these, but they only did audiobooks for the first few seasons., etcetera.

Some version of this is still happening, even — we know legally RTD invented Captain Jack even though Steven Moffat wrote his first appearance, meaning RTD essentially owns Torchwood, and Moffat seems to have retained some amount of control over the Paternoster Gang concept in the years between Big Finish getting the modern license and them getting to do Paternoster Gang stories of their own. Note also who and what get “created by” credits when in the modern show.

(This is even more of a thing in the various book ranges, where a lot of the ownership of the text has fully reverted back to the authors, and you’ll sometimes see whole books reprinted as self-published versions with the Doctor Who bits stripped out.)

Three

Stef’s TARDIS case a decade ago never went anywhere because when Anthony Coburn contributed the idea of the police box shape for the TARDIS’ interior he was on BBC payroll, a staff writer.8The general concept of the TARDIS was invented by, well, probably Verity Lambert or Sydney Newman or somebody else, look it up yourself. Either way, the BBC has pretty cleanly owned the police box shape since 2002. Coburn was also on payroll when he first conceived of the caveman story he would go on to write, and when he was first commissioned to write it, but then the BBC’s general Script Department was dissolved, and he was re-commissioned to write it as a freelancer. That, ultimately, is where the issue seems to lie.

But: Loads of Doctor Who scripts were written by freelancers, and even when they own their concepts or even everything that happens in the story — the Haisman and Lincoln estates are able to license out the events of Web of Fear to such an extent that the Brigadier in those books is allowed to acknowledge everything that happened except that the people involved were called “the Doctor,” “Jamie McCrimmon,” or “Victoria Waterfield”9They become “the Cosmic Hobo,” “the Scottish lad,” and “the girl with the queen’s name.” — that doesn’t seem to mean the BBC doesn’t own enough of the rights to keep rereleasing them on DVD, Blu-Ray, audiobooks of novelisations, etcetera.

So the big part I’m personally unclear about is — is this situation different in some way I can’t see? Or is this just the first real instance of an estate being controlled by somebody who’s not just happy to cooperate, who’s not just happy to take the occasional licensing paycheck, but is choosing to play nasty? Could they all have been playing nasty this whole time?  Either way, the BBC seem to believe there’s something here. I thought they were just playing it safe when they offered to pay him off — £20k, according to Stef, which he seems to have turned down because he’s being normal about Gary Lineker, I think? — but then yesterday a BBC rep explicitly said they don’t own all the relevant rights10From the Radio Times: “A spokesperson for the BBC said: “This massive iPlayer back catalogue will be home to over 800 hours of Doctor Who content, making it the biggest ever collection of Doctor Who programming in one place but will not include the first four episodes as we do not have all the rights to those.””, which surprised me.

So that’s where this situation is right now. I don’t know how it’s gonna evolve, but I suppose it either ends in the BBC being willing to match Stef’s (undoubtedly very high) asking price, or it going to court. Would court go how Stef wants? I’d imagine he’d rather avoid finding out.

  • 1
    Here’s Gizmodo on the issue. I would recommend strongly against clicking through to Coburn’s Twitter.
  • 2
    Coburn doesn’t seem to be particularly litigious towards people writing about this, but for legal reasons I feel slightly less comfortable being very rude here.
  • 3
    These are all claims I feel I can back up just by pointing at his Twitter, but rest assured I edited out several things I felt like I couldn’t.
  • 4
    David had linked to a social media post suggesting Coburn was specifically doing this because he was mad Dr Who was Black now.
  • 5
    A pilot script was adapted for audio by Big Finish in 2010 as The Destroyers.
  • 6
    See: The relationship between K9 mostly being absent in The Sarah Jane Adventures and the existence of Disney XD’s K9 series. And the perpetually definitely-happening K9: TimeQuake.
  • 7
    From Candy Jar Books. I like these, but they only did audiobooks for the first few seasons.
  • 8
    The general concept of the TARDIS was invented by, well, probably Verity Lambert or Sydney Newman or somebody else, look it up yourself. Either way, the BBC has pretty cleanly owned the police box shape since 2002.
  • 9
    They become “the Cosmic Hobo,” “the Scottish lad,” and “the girl with the queen’s name.”
  • 10
    From the Radio Times: “A spokesperson for the BBC said: “This massive iPlayer back catalogue will be home to over 800 hours of Doctor Who content, making it the biggest ever collection of Doctor Who programming in one place but will not include the first four episodes as we do not have all the rights to those.””

“Then… we go… and kick its arse!”

Posted on by Alex Daily

I thought maybe I’d write something about the new Doctor Who trailer, but it appears I am as of yet still not capable of Being Normal about Doctor Who Being Good again,1Christ, it better be. so I’ll just leave it at the following sincerely held belief I didn’t know I felt this strongly about four hours ago:

They should let Donna drop an F-bomb.

EDIT: Okay, this is low effort microblogging even by my standards. Here’s some thoughts.

  • The line about kicking its ass really is the bit that just made me cry, but in that specific way the Matrix Resurrections trailer scored with White Rabbit made me cry? It just activated me, like the part of me that’s incapable of Being Normal about Doctor Who was somewhere inside as a sleeper agent, waiting for Donna to go kick an ass.
  • So does Kate just get things picked up by chopper all the time, or is that a service she reserves just for Dr Who.
  • In an era where the show very frequently gets ahead of leaks by just dropping a press release, it took them so long to confirm who Neil Patrick Harris is playing that I’d assumed it wasn’t the obvious character, but okay, there we go.
    • And part of why I’d assumed he was playing somebody else is that RTD has occasionally mentioned wanting the BBC to show relevant stories from ’69-’89 when they, say, bring old characters back, and this is the one story that somebody says the N-word in, so, you know, I’d assumed it wasn’t high on the list. (And also it’s mostly missing.)
  • All of this really feels like the 2008 series, Part Deux, and I continue to hope that’s the stunt to draw us all back in and not how the next full series feels.
  • I remember when UNIT’s HQs were secret offices instead of Avengers Tower.
  • Lotta people clamouring for an airdate — we never know this until about two weeks ahead of time.
  • 1
    Christ, it better be.

Sunday #2: It’s Been Edition

Posted on by Alex Daily

One week back in school. What a destructively long Monday.

A lot of info, in the classical start-of-year info dump manner, about what the school year looks like. Go here, do this, do this as soon as possible, accumulate this, write that. I’ve let it just wash over me. It’ll happen, I’ll get there. One year to go.

We share three of our four Monday classes with another class that’s in the same place on a different trajectory, which makes sense, I understand that when there’s just the six of us it doesn’t make financial sense to treat us the same as if we were 25 people, but by gum, you forget how busy 25 19-to-21-year olds can be. How can you possibly have this much to say to each other, you saw each other four days ago! I joked the weekend before that they were about 400 people strong, and was corrected that they have the energy of an additional zero. No kiddin’. I didn’t go to Teacher School to be in a room full of noisy kids, dagnabbit.

(I understand now that eventually we’ll split back up, but what a day.)

Also shot and edited my live-action directorial debut. I’ll share it here when I get permission.

Below the fold this week: Website update notes, notes on an upcoming project. TV thoughts, a YouTube recommendation. Donald Duck comics, some Big Finish.

Continue reading “Sunday #2: It’s Been Edition”

Sunday #1

Posted on by Alex Daily

I’m trying to invent blogging from scratch for myself here. This format is pretty directly inspired by the “weeknotes” a lot of people in tech do, but one, that’s a lot more “job,” and a lot more “journal,” than I’m really doing right now, and two, frankly, the relationship between my life and people in tech is the problem I’m trying to solve here, I’d rather they not be… any kind of guiding light for me in blogging.

So right now these are called “Sunday” recaps, the idea being, here’s some stuff that doesn’t entirely stand on its own but that I still feel should go here, posted some, probably not all, Sundays. When there’s Enough to post. A lot of the time it’ll likely be mostly spare bits of writing, though I’m sure as I come to think blog-first it’ll generate additional, original writing, too. Heck, I wrote this before I added a bunch of notes on updating my website. Here I am, tech-blogging anyway.

Now I just need to start thinking blog-first.

Below the fold, notes on updating my website, some bits and bobs from my Letterboxd, some media diet notes, and a podcast recommendation. Oh, that’s already quite a lot, isn’t it.

Continue reading “Sunday #1”

On second chances

Posted on by Alex Daily

This is a necropost. A version of the following was originally posted as a Reddit comment on 7 August, 2023.

For context: This was in reply to speculation that an upcoming Big Finish announcement might involve the return of actor John Barrowman to the company’s Torchwood range after he was dropped, and a big anniversary story went unreleased, by the company in light of a pattern of repeated, open, and enthusiastic sexual misconduct. Wikipedia at this time calls them “allegations,” but Barrowman and his co-stars were openly talking about this behaviour in public on stage at conventions. It wasn’t a secret then, and it’s not a secret now.

If you’re a Doctor Who fan in the places where I’m a Doctor Who fan, you may have seen calls from other fans to bring him back in some way despite all this, because some people prioritise their fondness for a character over the safety and wellbeing of the cast and crew around the actor portraying that character.

This was my response to one such call, asking for Barrowman to be given a second chance.

I’m preserving it here mostly because I’ve got a feeling this will keep coming up, and I’ll want to be able to pull it back out to repost or reference.

John Barrowman has had his second chance. He behaved the way he did throughout the 00s until he was forced to apologise for it in 2008, both behind the scenes for how he was on set and publicly for doing it on Radio 1, and then… openly kept doing it, consistently, at least as late as his time on Arrow, where he was walking around his co-stars’ trailers naked and sending them pictures of, again, him naked, that he made a crew member take.

He claims in his 2021 apology that his behaviour has changed since 2008, but that’s clearly a lie, then, isn’t it. Perhaps it didn’t include crew members who might not have felt comfortable speaking up or saying no back in 2008 and that’s what’s changed? There’s “another chance,” and then there’s, why would you ever employ this walking liability again?

So, when I say, “RTD knows better,” what I mean is, RTD is a PR-savvy showrunner whose previous run on Doctor Who was mired in controversy that he has somehow managed to escape significant public scrutiny over. Even in the best possible scenario, after a thorough redemption tour for Barrowman — which could happen, but won’t start at Doctor Who — bringing him back, even just at Big Finish, would at the very least attach controversy to the show’s brand that, surely, RTD is sensibly trying to avoid. Why do that to yourself? Why do that to the show?

19 December 2023: Here’s a paragraph I think I might add in the future.

In general, I’m against the idea of permanent banishment as punishment for behaviour in different times, right, but there does come a point where I’m fine saying, actually, yeah, this person probably shouldn’t work in this industry ever again, and John Barrowman is on the wrong side of that line. Every opportunity given to him should instead be given to an up-and-coming queer person who’s not gonna commit sexual violence the second they get a chance.

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