SIR

ITEM! It's been a day, son. Been to California and back, but didn't see 'Pac.

ITEM! So, uh, Brightest Day? Really? Funny, that - just the day before I read that news I was absent-mindedly thinking to myself, "I guess that's what they're gonna call the sequel, but that's too obvious, it can't really be true." But I guess I can't afford to underestimate these people. So, is this going to be the story of Hal as a White Lantern? Is he going to go back in time and change the course of the Civil War?

ITEM! Honestly, I haven't minded Blackest Night so much - it's pretty much exactly what you could have predicted from the outset, and there's something to be said for a storyline that is very much about meeting its audience's expectations with an absolute clarity of purpose. Now that I've put some time between myself and the level of venom I expelled in my displeasure at Final Crisis, I think the major problem with that series was a fundamental question of expectations: a series called Final Crisis carried with it the expectation of being thematically, structurally and stylistically of a piece with all the previous Crises. it wasn't, and really, the manner in which it flouted the expectations of an audience (including myself) with a very clearly defined idea of what a sequel to the original Crisis on Infinite Earths should look still appears bafflingly combative in hindsight. (Not to single DC out here, Marvel did something similar a couple years back when they revived the Secret Wars brand for an event book that held no resemblance at all to the fondly-remembered original. [And yes, it gets a lot of flack, but the original Secret Wars is definitely fondly remembered by many current fans. ]) But Blackest Night reads exactly as you might have expected a story called Blackest Night to read: if you liked all the build-up in Green Lantern and its associated titles, if you liked the Sinestro Corps storyline, well, this is more of the same only moreso and with everyone else. It's stupid as fuck but damned if it doesn't provide exactly what is advertised on the tin. Makes you wonder if maybe they wouldn't have been better off having Johns write Final Crisis in the first place.

ITEM! Maybe it's a fairly silly qualm, but of all the revived Black Lantern zombies, I have to say the one I most thought would have the wherewithal to resist the ring's programming was Jonah Hex, for some odd reason. I know it probably wouldn't have fit in a one-off crossover book, but it would have been cool to have Hex say something like "I don't kill for free, and I don't wear no damn jewelry," before pulling the ring off his hand and crumbling back into stubborn dust.

ITEM! I've seen a few people express dissatisfaction with Siege so far, stating that for a story claiming to be the culmination of seven years' worth of Marvel stories, it's not really culminating anything so far. Serious question: was anyone expecting some kind of massively dense continuity-heavy saga with all the loose ends from Secret War, Avengers: Disassembled, House of M, Civil War, Secret Invasion and Dark Reign tied up in a neat bundle? All that's going to happen in this story is that in the next-to-last issue Cap, Thor and Iron Man will reunite, yell "Avengers Assemble!" and clobber Norman Osborn at the big finish, before Steve Rogers gives up his uniform for Bucky in order to accept Obama's invitation to be the new head of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Which will probably make Secret Warriors even more useless, but it's already a pretty useless book, I assume Bendis has a plan of some kind.) Then in a special epilogue issue, after Osborn is taken into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, he escapes, finds his last secret cache of Green Goblin gear, and can only be taken down by Spider-Man. See, I just saved you however many shekels.

ITEM! And boy, they sure miscalculated with the whole Hulk thing. Why do you think they're so pathologically insistent on keeping his family of books separate from the rest of the line? How cool would it be if Siege actually featured all of the founding members of the Avengers reuniting? As silly as it seems, the Hulk's absence from the Avengers is one of my little nerd pet-peeves. I'm actually quite fond of the Hulk and am enjoying the current Red Hulk / War of the Hulks storyline for what it's worth - but I can't help thinking it might not have been more effective for them to somehow fold the Hulk's story back into the big Avengers event, if only temporarily.

The Sensational Character Find of 2010

Introducing - Hitler Cat.



And Hitler Cat's special arch-nemesis, Reverse Hitler Cat:



Really not impressed with Hitler Cat:



OK, taking photos of cat food bags on my MacBook, is this one of those "moment of clarity" type things?

This Always Happens!

Just weeks after finishing up all the best of 2009 lists - for places like Popmatters and The Factual Opinion - I come across another 2009 release that would probably have shot to the top of my actual list if I had heard it in time. That release? Sainthood by Tegan and Sara.

I'd never heard them before, but I checked out the album with some Christmas money, based on a positive write-up of the band I'd read in SPIN. To put it mildly, I was blown away and listened to the album like twelve times in the space of a day and a half.



Am I a girl now? Seriously, I dunno. All I can say is that this is one of those rare rock and roll records that somehow manages to make you feel like a teenager again, if only for one deeply puzzled moment of wistful reflection - except it's not really teenage music, it's definitely a bit more earned and significantly less histrionic than most of what passes for teenage rock & roll these days. Grown-ups can write about heartbreak and desperation too, and although they may not look it these ladies are pushing 30. That freaks my mind.

If I could go back in time, this would be my pick for #1 on the Factual Opinion Best Songs list:



I don't really have anything too perceptive to add, except that if you like the rock and the roll, you really should seek this album out and give it a shot. Hell, I bet you spent more on Blackest Night tie-ins you didn't want just so you could get the purple and orange cock rings than you could find this disc for down at your local Best Buy.

And In The End, Part Two

(Spoilers for last week's show, I guess.)

Even something as stupid as hanging around a council flat with Rose and her mother seems, in retrospect, necessary. It was a different kind of Doctor Who, but Eccleston was still recognizably the same Doctor - just having to face a different kind of threat than he had ever faced before. He actually needed people in a very tangible way. And sure enough, by the time he was ready to change into Tennant, he had changed significantly. He had healed quite a bit, and Tennant was - as a result - more confident, brash, downright conceited at times. These traits failed him as often as not, but this fallibility made Tennant a compelling character: he actually failed, because he wasn't always as clever as he thought he was.

One of the nice features of the BBC's general philosophy when casting new Doctors is that new Doctors are usually very different than the previous Doctors. The upside of this is, from a story perspective, it often seems as if new regenerations "correct" personality flaws of their previous incarnations. Pertwee was a genial, dapper swashbuckler where Troughton had been grumpy, disheveled and occasionally conniving. Tom Baker was forbidding and wry, so Davison was friendly, almost to a fault; the latter surrounding himself with an affectionate surrogate family, where Baker had traveled with single companions to whom he often visibly condescended. Colin Baker was arrogant where Davison had been warm; McCoy sly where Baker had been self-righteous.

Where Eccleston was emotional and hesitant, Tennant was self-assured to a fault. And certainly, this confidence - which had fatally curdled into conceit on "The Waters of Mars" - killed him in the end. Tennant was a good Doctor, and one of the best parts of his performance is that he wasn't afraid to make the character unlikeable. (Something similar had been done before with Colin Baker, but a number of other factors conspired to make Baker's tenure a failure, not least of which being substandard writing - at least until the generally very good "Trial of a Time Lord" series - and a truly horrendous costume that would have undercut even Sir Lawrence Olivier.) Sure enough, by the time the end rolled around, he had won but not necessarily through any fault of his own - he had stumbled into victory despite being on the defensive for the entirety of both episodes. He was overconfident and underprepared, and was saved in a moment of crucial indecision by the Master, of all people. And as a result of his failure, he put himself in a position of being undone by his hubris. He failed simply because he hadn't bothered paying attention to what his last friend in the world was doing - that is, being a hero when the Doctor was busy making the problem worse.

But that brings us back to the problems with the episode. In summation, all of these ideas are great, and a kind fan can see in outline all the ideas that Davies was trying to cover. Tennant was a good performer even when the script let him down. But the fact is, the script did let him down, repeatedly. That plot summary above looks great on paper, but I'm eliding the actual nuts-and-bolts of the narrative - with good reason, because there's a pretty wretched gap between conception and execution in this instance.

In thinking about the show over the last few days, the best analogy that came to mind in considering Davies' shortcomings as a writer was, to stay on a nerd tip, Brian Michael Bendis. Sure enough, Bendis is usually supremely sure-footed in terms of character-based drama (if not in giving each character a unique voice). Even his worst stories nevertheless usually have some kind of character-based through-line that makes them readable, even when - as is often the case with the larger crossovers - a little less character work would make for a much nimbler beast. (See "Avengers: Disassembled" House of M and Secret Invasion, all of which suffer more or less on the same account.) Bendis has trouble dealing with any scale and scope above the personal. Sometimes you just need the big panel of all the heroes sitting around a big room with identifying captions next to their heads while Reed Richards explains the story - and Bendis has always been chary about doing the scut work of plot mechanics above the minimum necessary to get from capital-M Moment to Moment. Watching "The End of Time," I was filled with a sensation not unlike that of reading Secret Invasion: I felt that I was watching a good outline for an eventually great story, except that the actual skeleton of the plot around which the nice character bits and grand Moments had been neglected altogether. Beginnings and endings are easy, I guess - it's what comes in the middle that's hard. There were lots of "Wow!" Moments throughout the episode, but shorn of a decent plot the effects were greatly lessened.

So even though the series explicitly tied up a pile of loose ends from across the last five years - and even raised a few new nagging twists that might never be properly addressed* - it somehow still managed to seem perfunctory. Maybe because they didn't have a whole season to build up the plotline properly, but the return of the Time Lords seemed rushed. The fact that the Time Lords initially lost the Time War because the Doctor trapped them at the destruction of Gallifrey in order to save existence itself was a meaty nugget, and certainly the next time I rewatch Eccleston it'll make even more sense to me that he was so scattered and downright bipolar in places. That the Doctor had to make the same choice twice - between the life of his race and the continued existence of the universe - made for good drama, even if the actual staging left quite a bit to be desired.

• So, OK, you're holding a gun to Rassilon, (presumably) one of the most powerful Time Lords who have ever existed, and he's wielding some Infinity Gauntlet-looking badass Power Glove . . . you're poking a British Army service pistol in his face and he's just sort of letting you do that? Was the Doctor too powerful for Rassilon to be able to disintegrate in the same manner he dismissed the dissenting council member at the beginning of the episode? Maybe a bit of dialogue to clear this matter up would have been nice.

• Additionally, the Doctor is standing there all that time and it takes him, what, five minutes to figure out if he just shoots the machine the problem will go away? I daresay even Peri would have figured that one out. I realize the point of the sequence was to make the Doctor's indecision look agonizing and to underscore the gap between his conceit and his abilities (just like on "The Waters of Mars") - but the way the scene is staged makes him look less humbled than merely stupid.

• And what about not just one but two very blatant and superfluous Star Wars homages? I don't mind the cantina scene - it's a genre staple at this point, even Trek has done them - but Xeroxing the scene in the first movie where Luke has to climb into the Millennium Falcon's turret to blast the Tie Fighters was just blatant and stupid. I mean, seriously, an old man and a civilian space junk dealer are going to be able to shoot off dozens of ICBMs? Really. I won't even bother asking why the hell a mining ship doesn't just have automatic firing capabilities far more effective than mere human reflexes, or why none of those ICBMs were carrying nuclear payloads.

• Or what about that deathtrap? Seriously, people: if you're going to build a deathtrap, you've got to make it at least slightly probable. Like, a magically shielded glass room that can absorb all the venting from an out-of-control nuclear reaction. Yes, OK. Assuming the Doctor wasn't just atomized instantly, why the hell couldn't he figure out a way to undo that lock? I know, I know - "not even my sonic screwdriver can help!" Just break the glass and pull the old dude free. Or, you know, use the robot from the end of "Waters of Mars."

• And while we're on the subject, why couldn't the Doctor just get some immediate treatment for radiation sickness? If he was still up and walking around, why couldn't he vent the regeneration energy like he did at the beginning of "Journey's End?" And it sure was convenient that he happened to live on just long enough to say goodbye to every single person he ever knew, save maybe for the guy who runs the BBC catering truck.

• From a purely mechanical standpoint, this was a horribly structured two-parter. How much of the first part was spent with the Doctor and the Master running around a junkyard banging on cans? It sure felt like forever. And considering just how massively important the real bad guys actually were, the revelation sure came out of nowhere (at least, if like me you had studiously avoided any spoilers beforehand). The last half of the story (barring the epilogue) was so rushed it almost seems perverse that the first half was so laconic and stuffed with purposeless red herrings.

• Speaking of which, just what was the point of all the stuff with Obama and Joshua Naismith? They could have accomplished the same plot bits without the extraneous exposition if they had wanted to, but as it is these two additions meant nothing.

I could go on but I'm feeling spent from this particularly bout of nerd rage. I guess, since we did one post on the past, and this post on the present, we have to do another on the future - and the prospects of Mr. Matt Smith. So, next!

---

* OK, I'll submit in a couple suggestions for possible fan-appeasing dialogue insertions for the DVD Directors' Cut:

"The Time Lords were mad enough to resurrect a dead god to lead them to suicide!"

and

">choke< . . . Susan!"

(preferable to ">choke< . . . mom!", considering that everyone knows Time Lords don't have mommies, they have looms.)

And In The End

Anyone who ever criticizes a fan for complaining too loudly and too often should take a step back and realize that, for many fans, that's the fun part of their hobby, and that they feel more involved and more excited the more they get to whine. S'truth. I suspect (without wanting to construct a Straw Man, this is just idle speculation!) that the people who complain that the complaining fans don't seem to be having any fun are probably just jealous because the people complaining - no matter how loud and vociferous those complaints may be - are still more engaged with and immersed in the object of their fan adoration than any casual fan without the necessary bit of self-identification necessary to see their own identity so tightly and inextricably wound up in the process. That's one of the reasons why die-hard sports fans resent fair-weather fans. It's been said before but it bears repeating: it's easy to root for the winning team, but it doesn't quite feel the same if you haven't also been on hand for ten straight losing seasons.

Fans complain, it's in their nature; sci-fi fans complain quite a bit; Dr. Who fans are perhaps the oddest and most dyspeptic sub-species of the latter group. Ergo: Dr. Who fans complain more than just about any other group of people on the planet except for, I don't know, Cubs fans. But they complain because they - we - love. So, anyone who wants to turn off at the inevitable fan complaints about "The End of Time" are probably justified in doing so, but for those who care, it's the Monday morning quarterbacking that makes up half the fun. (Sometimes even ¾.)

But the fact remains, it was a pretty bad episode, and a very poor send-off to one of the better Doctors. The fact that Tennant managed to come off so well despite being undercut by poor, maudlin writing at (almost) every turn really isn't that extraordinary: anyone who knows Doctor Who on more than a casual basis knows that at its best the show can still be pretty bad. Which does not mean that bad is the best to which the show can aspire, just that the reasons why we love it have little to do with "good" or "bad." Most of the old serials - and by "most" I really do mean most of them - are messes in one way or another. Anyone who's sat through a Pertwee or Tom Baker series on DVD in one sitting can attest that even the very best are horribly padded, filled with logical inconsistencies and downright daffy performances from many actors and actresses who should never have been allowed on a soundstage for a national television program (I'm thinking specifically of Peter Davison's companions, not just Adric but every single last one of them). But we love them all the same. Even a really, really good serial, like "The Green Death" or "City of Death" still drags on reevaluation. The villain is never anywhere near as smart or resourceful as their reputation leads the viewer to believe; the plot is overly complicated just to ensure that all the actors have something to do for four or six weeks; all the complications pile up one on top of the other in such a way that it seems less like a logical narrative progression than a particularly deadpan game of Exquisite Corpse. Still: it's great. It doesn't matter what cardboard-and-foam monstrosity the Doctor is facing this week, just seeing the Doctor outsmart bad guys and outmaneuver bad writing makes up for sitting through however many overlong scenes of badly costumed extras running around one of England's many abandoned industrial wastelands.

"The End of Time" was a poor episode not because it failed to live up to some imaginary sterling standard of science-fiction television excellence, but because it wasn't very good, period; and it wasn't very good in ways distressingly familiar to anyone who's followed the new Who closely. It was saved by good performances from good actors working hard despite a script that could have been written by an illiterate child.

But first, let's linger a moment on the good: Russell Davies leaves the show having accomplished a modern miracle, and he should get all the credit in the world for this. As bad a writer as he could be, he was a great producer. If they had brought back a new Who that felt like 1985 it would have flopped after one or two miserable, anachronistic seasons, but Davies was smart enough to know that in 2005, especially in a show now officially targeted at adults and families and not even ostensibly towards children as a primary audience, good TV is character-driven. Story-wise, he managed to change the Doctor's world without actually changing the Doctor himself, which is quite a neat trick: it wouldn't do to upend the Doctor's character and completely alienate the hardcore base, but he needed to be more a involved and more personable character to carry a prime-time drama. So - take substantively the same character but put him into a situation where he was uncharacteristically vulnerable and weak. Force him into a situation where he had to change, ever so slightly, in a way that would feel natural and unforced but made him slightly more identifiable and approachable for non-fans. Of all the modern relaunches of classic sci-fi properties, I would argue that Who has succeeded the best, way better than Star Wars, better even than Trek and Battlestar: Galactica. The reason why is that the show manages to feel simultaneously new and old - a brand new show conceived to fit snugly as an artifact of 2005-2010 pop culture, and yet exactly what Doctor Who should have looked like if it had never been cancelled in 1989 and had remained in continuous production for forty full years.

If you had told the assembled Who fans at the start of the decade that a relaunched Doctor would enter into intimately close relationships with companions, going so far as to actually meet his companions' families (gasp!) and leaning on them for (good heavens!) moral support and ethical guidance - well, they all would have howled to the high heavens. And sure enough, many of them did, but many more did not. And although I admit I disliked Rose (although not so much initially as I came to hate her later on when she just would not leave), found the endless scenes with Rose's mother and Mickey grating, and initially disliked Martha Jones for much the same reasons (even if Martha redeemed herself by being ever so slightly less helpless and cloying than Rose) . . . well, in hindsight, I can see where it was going. The Doctor that we met in 2005 was a hollow shell of the magisterial, imposing figure he had been in 1989 or even (shudder) 1996. He was chastened and shellshocked, for reasons we didn't fully understand until just this last episode. He was a changed man, and while certain elements of Eccleston's Doctor may have made the purists squeal, on the whole it worked because the characters were strong enough to pull it off.

Because he was only the Doctor for one year, Eccleston's Doctor was allowed to have an actual character arc: he changed and grew, came out of his post-war shell and reengaged with the universe. He was erratic and at times desperate, needy and even petulant - not necessarily conditions I would ever have associated with the Doctor before. But personally I was surprised by just how easily it all made sense once I started watching. I had initially dismissed the relaunch, and only relented to watch the first few episodes as a lark. (I distinctly recall them sitting on my DVR for a couple weeks before I got around to watching them out of nothing so much as a sense of resigned duty to another childhood favorite dutifully murdered by ill-conceived revamp.) But as soon as Eccleston walked onscreen and introduced himself as the Doctor, my reservations faded away. It just felt right in a way that, say, the new Star Trek movie did not. Perhaps it's not a good analogy, because in Trek's case there had never been a turnover in performers playing the same characters like last years' soft reboot. But still: I had expected the relaunch to be a misfire. It wasn't, and for all the changes the show experienced it was remarkable how much it still felt like the Doctor - the very same Doctor who had fought the Meddling Monk and the Black Guardian and Davros and worn a sprig of celery on his lapel - the same Doctor I grew up with and had watched every Saturday night at 10:00PM on the local PBS affiliate. It's hard to remember the skepticism now, but it was hard to imagine then that the new Doctor would ever fit so neatly in our imaginations as the logical and necessary continuation of the same old Doctor we all grew up with. That he does, with no reservations regardless of the new series' many faults, is as much or moreso a testament to Davies as Eccleston or Tennant.

Next: Why Tennant was a good Doctor, even if his scripts often failed him.