Tom Charman

Damn that Michael Moore. He’s spoiled my innocence. I used to be able to watch documentaries and think I’d learned something. Now I’m so mistrustful my brain develops layers and layers of “take that with a pinch of salt” that end up feeling like I’ve taken nothing away at all.

Or maybe they just don’t make documentaries that well any more. I’ve just watched the Tony Robinson documentary on The Da Vinci Code which pretty much attempts to discredit every single thing the book says — fair enough I suppose, but it does it without interviews with the Catholic church or any other church. It discusses the idea that Magdalene and Christ were married yet doesn’t talk to any of the prominent Anglicans who have suggested such a thing.

Basically, whenever it talks to anyone on either side of the fence, they’re either engaging in guesswork, or clearly loonies. And there I was, wanting to know THE TRUTH. It’s depressing being an adult. I hope all the cool stuff I used to watch about Egypt was all true. Otherwise I’m very upset.

This has probably been happening to all sorts of TV shows and I haven’t noticed, but I’m observing a peculiar trend in Melbourne’s ‘Green Guide’ when it comes to Doctor Who.

Last week, they got someone to review it who admitted she’s never liked any sort of TV that involves any ‘un-real’ elements. Thus the brilliant ‘The End of the World’ gets a pathetic write up, being criticised presumably for not being about policemen or nurses. And now this week, the reasonably good ‘The Unquiet Dead’, lauded in the UK by one critic for being the best piece of television that year (which was a bit over-the-top, I’ll admit) is called “a bit crap”.

Of all the places to go, the reviewer asks, why a 19th Century morgue? Erm. Why not? I can’t be sure if it’s the morgue bit or the 19th Century she’s not interested in. Did she notice that last week they blew up the Earth? It seems she was hoping for cross-dressing, given Mark Gatiss’ Leage of Gentlemen work.

Most irritatingly, she claims that Doctor Who is one of those things, like Star Wars, that if you didn’t see as a kid you won’t get, and comments that as Eccleston and Piper are both probably leaving, the show is most likely doomed anyway. She couldn’t have fitted in more off-putting TV reviewing language if she’d tried. Neither reviewer even vaguely alluded to whether children — you know, the “target audience” — would enjoy it. And I know I haven’t either, but Grapefruit is a genre site. The Green Guide is a popular TV guide for everyone, but most of the critics seem more interested in proving their wit and turning people against shows which irritate them for spurious reasons.

Ahem. I didn’t expect that to go on so long. Hmmm. Sorry.

Ah, what could possibly distract from the important task of writing essays and studying? Bearing in mind that these things must be accessible from the same places that I’m supposed to be doing work; i.e. my room.

Trailers. I’ve always enjoyed movie trailers but now Apple has high resolution trailers on their QuickTime High Resolution Gallery. QuickTime 7 introduced a new codec, eloquently named H.264, which makes the movie muchas smaller. The awesome Serenity trailer comes in a resolution of 1920×816, which is even bigger than my rather big 20″ LCD screen. Scary. Obviously these are only for people with bandwidth to burn.

TV. Doctor Who is nearing the end of its first season in the UK and is going from strength to strength. Alias finished with yet another of its trademarked irritating cliffhangers. Frankly, I’m getting a bit weary of the show. If Jennifer Garner and Victor Garber weren’t in it I’d probably abandon it at this point.

Games. Having seen Revenge of the Sith, I’m now able to play through the last third of LEGO Star Wars which is great fun. What I’m itching for is a game that makes some use of my new iMac though. I may have to order Neverwinter Nights quite soon.

Domains. The grapefruits.org domain is up for renewal soon. I’m vaguely tempted to change it to something like thegrapefruit.org given that grapefruits is completely wrong from a grammar point of view. But then, people are pretty used to grapefruits.org. It might well be the most spurious reason I’ve ever had for doing something so complicated.

Web Design. I don’t know how it happened but I’m working on a new grapefruit design. Semi new. Still the same header pics obviously as they’re a lot of work. It started when I dropped the yellow sidebar and as it hasn’t looked that good since I’ve decided to really go for it. Foolishly. But it wouldn’t be swot vac without a grapefruit redesign. It’s like a biological imperative.

I’m typing this through my iMac. Oh, the whiteness. Oh, the speediness. And suddenly I have an awesome TV in my bedroom, kind of.

I’d write more, but I’ve got settings to fiddle with.

Oh, and Revenge of the Sith was quite good.

I apologise for the steady stream of Doctor Who reviews, to all of you who don’t give a rat’s arse. I promise to have a Hitchhikers and a Star Wars review out at some point. That second one isn’t necessarily mine. Or maybe we’ll all do one. I don’t know.

Doctor Who premieres in Australia this weekend. It’s getting a good amount of publicity it seems.

I’m all anxious waiting for my iMac. 2-3 weeks, they said. Well it’s 2 weeks and one day and I can’t stand it. If it comes the day before my Optics assignment is due there’ll be hell to pay. I’d better do it in advance. Oooh yes I will.

Having been reading Darth Vader’s blog, I’m all hyped up for Revenge of the Sith. Not that I’ve got unrealistic expectations, mind you. The only things I’m looking forward to are:

• Darth Vader’s voice.
• Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine, the star of the show.
• The cool lightsaber fights.
• The tying into the old films.

Screw quality dialogue, good acting, any of that crap. Who needs them? I don’t. Well, I do, but for one day only I’m suppressing that part of my brain. Father’s Day gave me plenty to chew on while I’m watching Hayden Christiansen struggle through Lucas’ dire words.

Doctor Who meets Donnie Darko[ftn] and rocks quite severely. ‘Father’s Day’ manages to be the best episode of the season while keeping one foot in reality, one foot in the wacky ideas of the novel series, and yet another foot in brilliant humour. I’ve been whinging about the Doctor failing to obviously save the day for a while now; he doesn’t do it this week either, and yet I couldn’t be happier.

In this story by old New Adventures scribe Paul Cornell[ftn], Rose asks the Doctor if it wouldn’t be too much trouble to pop back and watch her Dad die. Ever eager to impress — a character trait of the Ninth Doctor I really enjoy — her friend takes her right to that point, and… she saves his life instead. From that point on, wackiness ensues, as crazy Time Dragons appear out of nowhere to remove the paradox from existence, and the Doctor finds himself short on options, and rather angry with his best friend…

Christopher Eccleston is on record saying that this is his favourite episode. It’s easy to see why. If the Doctor gets a better story this season I’ll be impressed. Previous episodes have sidelined and neglected him on occasion — ‘Father’s Day’ does the former, but not the latter. The scowl on his face after Rose screws with time; his reaction to the TARDIS’ unexpected dimensions; his stern admonishing of baby Rose; “Just.. say you’re sorry”; updating the congregation on his plans via the pulpit, and looking sheepish while fiddling with the key; his disgust at Jackie’s stupidity. And that’s barely scratching the surface. Christopher Eccleston IS the Doctor, as they say, and I’m expecting to shed a manly tear when he regenerates.

Of course, this story is mostly about Rose and her Dad, and it’s great. I’ve watched a lot of TV about father-daughter relations in my time[ftn]. This one manages to be reasonably fresh while dealing with a lot of things that’ve been said before. The disillusionment of Rose as she sees how her parents really are is something we can probably all relate to in some form. Billie Piper is, as always, fantastic, but Shaun Dingwell gives the best guest performance so far this season as her dear old, useless, Dad. What I love about a show like Doctor Who, or Season One of Angel, is that the format allows a guest actor to come in and get equal screen time and emphasis with the regulars. I’m not necessarily against the large regular cast that accumulates in shows like Alias and Buffy, but it does mean that guest characters usually get shafted in deference to regular characters’ development. Dingwell presents both the pathetic and heroic natures of his character marvellously, and sells his rather clever deductions about what’s actually going on.

Finally, for us nerds, there’s the whole crazy aspect to the time shennanigans this episode. In more clinical Sci-Fi universes, like Stargate‘s, time travel can get a bit awkward. Who‘s universe is the sort of semi-magical one where the idea that Time would actually try to sort herself out fits right in. ‘Father’s Day’ pulls off a bit of a Matrix — there’s enough explanations for everything to make sense the first time, and plenty of room for fun speculation afterwards. Where do the Dragons come from? Who remembers what? What’s the limit of Time’s ability to heal itself? Of course, the danger with such scripts is that some people insist on calling them plot “holes”,[ftn] which hardly seems fair. Maybe one day I’ll write an essay on the difference between the two. But not today. You can all relax.

It seems Doctor Who‘s dull patch is over after one episode. Some shows take whole seasons to break out of such things! We should all be grateful.

Footnotes

1. I’ve been thinking about Donnie. Clearly the events of that film are set before the Time War, and the forces manipulating young Mr Darko are Time Lords doing what they used to do to sort out such things.
2. Author of awesome books such as Timewyrm: Revelation, Love and War and Human Nature. And of crummy ones like The Shadows of Avalon, but you can’t win them all.
3. Pretty much every episode of Alias, for example.
4. Ugh, I’ve just found such an idiot. The sort of person who doesn’t realise that “I don’t understand why this happened” and “This shouldn’t have happened” aren’t the same thing. All people who haven’t worked out on a second viewing why the first Doctor and Rose disappear after Rose interferes — or why the TARDIS is in a different space at the end — and complain about it deserve to be shot.

Is there anything more boring than writing about mediocrity? Possibly reading it, I suppose. I’ll try to keep things lively.

‘The Long Game’ is the first really average episode of Doctor Who to my mind. There were heaps of good elements this week; The Editor, an actual sub-plot, the woman from Black Books, nifty head-opening special effects… But it didn’t all feel like it meshed.

Part of the problem, I felt, was the world-building, or lack thereof. In the year 200,000, the Earth is the centre of a huge empire, we’re told. But there’s no aliens when the Doctor, Rose and Adam step out onto a massive space station — everyone’s human, and the news is just generic reports of disasters and such. While it all turns out to have been part of a clever ruse, I found myself strongly conscious of the budget limitations. If we’d seen some of the news reports, and had them a little more in-depth, the whole thing might have come across better. Perhaps we could have had ‘ad breaks’?

The Editor was a bright spot in a slightly dreary plot. Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead fame) was clearly loving his time as this smarmy, self-satisfied villain, and his scenes were great fun — though he benefited when he had someone to talk to.

“Is a slave a slave if he doesn’t know he’s being enslaved?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I was hoping for a philosophical debate. Is that all I’m going to get — Yes?”
“Yes.”

As I mentioned, we did get a subplot, though. Adam gets split up from the Doctor and Rose early on, and finds that not only is he lacking in the adventuring spirit, but also has a bit of a tendency towards the greedy side of the force. This was great fun: it’s nice to have a character like Adam walking around who could so easily die. The neat connection between the two plots worked nicely, too. The Doctor and Rose’s plot line is somewhat less exciting. After sneaking their way up to the 500th level of the facility, the Doctor has some excellent dialogue with the Editor and then… gets locked up.

And he stays locked up. While someone else saves the day. AGAIN.

In previous episodes, this hasn’t really gotten to me. It made sense for Rose to save the day in ‘Rose‘. Charles Dickens is a pretty big guest star and perhaps deserves his moment in the sun. And it was something of a plot point that the Doctor wasn’t himself in ‘Dalek‘. But there was no obvious reason for the Doctor not to save the day here, and he failed to be clever even in the slightest. Admittedly, he pretty much tells Cathica what to do while chained up, but I’d really like a chance to see him manage a really impressive victory.

The bit players were quite interesting at least; Cathica in particular is a quite believable character stuck in an artificial environment. Tamsin Grieg plays her Nurse with just the right level of salesman to suck poor Adam into his very very bad choice. And Adam himself balances his sneaky greed with a kind of stupid ignorance that almost made me sorry for him. His final talk with the Doctor was excellent, although somewhat spoiled by the lame joke to finish the story off.

So, average Who. I’d cope with it a bit better if there were 22 episodes of the show. As there’s 13, and we’re now over half way, let’s have no more of this mediocrity, please.[ftn]

Footnotes

1. Next week’s ‘Father’s Day’ by New Adventures writer Paul Cornell looks pretty awesome, at any rate.

Back when all the news about the new series was trickling in, there was a big hoo-hah about whether they’d be getting the Daleks back. Basically, a spot of tricky legal manouvring by the writer of the original Dalek story in 1963 has meant that the rights to these most iconic of Doctor Who villains have stayed firmly under the control of Mr Terry Nation’s estate for all this time. Of course, once Who reaches it’s 50th anniversary, we’ll be fine, but until then… If you’d asked me at the time: “Do you care if the Daleks never come back?” I’d have said no. While they’re quite iconic, they’re also kinda silly looking, and they’ve been portrayed pretty badly in the past. Let’s have a new villain.

However, as this new series has progressed, it’s become perfectly obvious where the Daleks should fit in, and why they’d be so perfect. With the Doctor’s home destroyed, how perfect to make the Daleks responsible? Suddenly, these lame-looking dustbins become a credible threat simply by having won on at least one occasion.[ftn] Add this vital ingredient to the general public’s association between the Daleks and the Doctor, and you’ve got yourself a good mix. And it’s one that’s exploited perfectly in ‘Dalek’.

This Ninth Doctor has proven himself a particularly fallible one. More of a galactic backpacker than a superhero,[ftn] he regularly screws things up, having to be bailed out by Rose, historical figures, or lame missile-related plot devices. While I’ve enjoyed all the episodes this year, it’s probably not a coincidence that my favourite is ‘The End of the World‘, which featured a very proactive Doctor, who did at least manage to save a whole bunch of people. In ‘Dalek’, he’s still a bit useless, but at least the story’s about it this time. Specifically, concerning just how damaged he is by the “Time War” that’s gone on somewhere between the TV Movie and ‘Rose’.[ftn] It seems, quite a bit, which is a decent excuse, but he’d still better have an awesome hero moment at some point.

Naturally, they bring this out by placing him face to face with the only representative of the other side in that war — a Dalek. Eccleston’s performance in this first scene is amazing. Some British actors have a knack for going over the top, yet still maintaining the reality of the scene — Eccleston has it in spades. His delivery of “Exterminate” was probably the creepiest mix of joy and hate I’ve ever witnessed; spine-tinglingly good. The rest of the episode is damn fine, but things never quite hit the heights of that first scene.

Part of the (minor, very minor) problem is the Dalek. This episode was under a bit of pressure to make them scary again, and debunk all the popular myths. Easily killable? Nope. Stupid plunger arm? Nup. Stupid? No sir. Unfortunately, when you start debunking myths, you can accidentally hurt yourself. It’s like those McDonalds ads which assured us all that it really was 100 percent Australian Beef. It can make you seem defensive. When it comes time to (again) debunk the belief that Daleks can’t get up stairs, the episode falls into that trap. If Daleks don’t have a problem with stairs, why the hell do they have to wait in front of them for five minutes before starting to slowly glide up them? Why don’t they just damn well shoot the people that they can see on the higher landing? Why don’t they bloody fly up the middle of the stairwell?

And you’ll notice I said “slowly” earlier. This Dalek may be nigh-on invulnerable, but it’s still a slow bugger. If a Dalek moved too fast, then yeah, it’d look silly. But it’s barely moving faster than a brisk walking pace in this story, and that’s a problem for me. I can walk quite briskly.

But when the story isn’t becoming bogged down in ticking off things that Daleks are supposed to be crap at, it’s fantastic. “Why don’t you just DIE?” and the Dalek’s retort are amazing. The inversion of the Doctor/Dalek relationship is pretty cleverly handled. The Doctor should really have a chat to Yoda; we all know that fear leads to anger, leads to hate, leads to suffering.[ftn] Rose gets a bit of the plot for once and does well with it, making her own decisions, and going from being initially foolish to arguing down the Doctor at the end. The Doctor and Rose really are a good partnership; perhaps they’ll both get cool at the same time.

The series’ clichés are begining to show, too, so allow me to present some nostalgia for the Andy era of Buffy reviews with my very own checklist:

• Doctor screws up: Yep, his fear gets the better of him and he spends most of the episode panicking first, thinking later.
• Rose looks cute: “He’s a bit pretty.” “I hadn’t noticed.” Not a fan of the singlet look though, let’s fix that.
• Aliens not as they seem: Well, it turns out the Dalek was as it seemed, but then later switched while the Doctor wasn’t looking.
• Doctor says “Fantastic”: Yes, but it’s more threatening than normal.
• Semi-naked interrogation scene: I list this in the vain hope that Rose is next.
• Climactic action that goes on too long: The aforementioned stairs scene.

Overall, ‘Dalek’ is probably one of the strongest episodes so far — certainly the most moving. The Doctor and his backstory are getting more intriguing all the time. Rose is gaining confidence, and the show itself seems to be developing some style. Now if we could just pack a bit more into the forty-five minutes next time.

Footnotes

1. Well, alright, a draw most likely, given the Doctor’s description this week.
2. Coulthurst, Andrew. Coversations with a Rabid Who Fan, 2005.
3. Or between ‘The Gallifrey Chronicles’ and ‘Rose’ if you’re like me.
4. Gosh, I’ve just realised that The Phantom Menace has a quotable line of dialogue. That’s one more than the Matrix sequels managed between them. They should really be ashamed.

Sorry to swamp the weblog with posts, but I just saw these pictures from the upcoming premiere of Stargate SG-1. They’re probably a bit spoilery, so if you’re a hardcore Stargate fan you might not want to look. Or read my comments.

Ben Browder in an SG-1 uniform is cool. Ben Browder holding a sword is cooler. Claudia Black in an outfit like that is cool on a different scale that’s hard to compare to the previous two. I’m looking forward to the next season more than I’d have thought. It should helpfully turn up just as Doctor Who ends.

I went and installed me a nice, simple stats program the other day — Shortstat by Shaun Inman. You can have a look (oh no you can’t — I’ve got a Mint now) at the grapefruit stats whenever you like, but allow me to summarise some of the amusements from 1 week of uptime.

Firstly — Grapefruit isn’t a super popular site. You all knew that. I just thought I’d get it out of the way. In the last week there have been 208 ‘unique’ viewers. But this includes crawlers and search engines, which account for 41% of our traffic, apparently. I myself am responsible for 13% of our bandwidth, unless someone else out there is using Safari. Our most popular Web browser is Firefox. Go Firefox! Yay! Our most popular country is the USA. Yay America! W00t!

The funny stuff comes from the searches though. Not google searches, because they take you to decent sites that people know about. No, it’s MSN and Yahoo! searchers that come our way. Here’s a few of their strings:

• personnel sex show. Bad spellers out for porn I suppose.
• shannon me riley. Looks like someone wants Marc Blucas and our dear Shannon in a threesome.
• my giddy aunt. Now they want my aunt. Those stinky perverts.
• Angel Cordy Buffy. A much more sensible threesome. This one I’d watch.
• do people come back from the dead. When you’re asking Jeeves about such weighty issues you’ve really got problems. I hope we could help, in a ninth page of results kind of capacity.
• will smith the grapefruit. Further proof that when people search, they add random fruit names to their seaches.
• funny animated gif. Heh. You won’t find any of those on the net. Did you mean…
• “mutating humans” -porn -articles -movies -films -comics. How specific. It didn’t even occur to me that people would have mutating human porn. Now I’m oddly curious. I mean, no I’m not.
• Kate Shearman. This was from an Australian site, too. Googling yourself Kate? You’ll go blind. Well, OK, not googling. But Yahooing doesn’t sounds as funny.

Reassuringly, some people google for things like “buffy girl in question” or “Knights of the Old Republic” and come here. Good to know.