Tom Charman

I promised that I wouldn’t post about Macs again until the new iMacs were announced. Well, they have been, so I’m afraid it’s time for some Mac-rambling.

These are sweet machines. I love waiting for these little increments, rather than, say, buying a 15GB iPod for $700 and then next month meeting someone who bought a 20GB one for $600. Not that that happened to anyone I know. The top-of-the-line, 20″ iMac is now $200 cheaper than it used to be, but has an 0.2 GHz processor boost (to 2 GHz), a way better graphics card with twice the video memory, bluetooth and wireless built in, and various other cool things.

I was going to order it online tonight, but I’ve been persuaded that it’d be far more fun to order it and pick it up from the store. Maybe I’ll get me one of these too. But, er, probably not.

The Apple Blogosphere is alight with talk of Tiger. Perhaps soon I’ll be able to use the damned thing.

Is there such a thing as “too silly”? A few months back, discussing Stargate, Shannon and Matt complained that ‘Prometheus Unbound’ was too silly. I scoffed, and said something smug about how good being silly was. And here I am, today, wanting to tell you that this week’s Doctor Who was too silly.

In reality, it’s probably not much more silly than Aliens of London. It just doesn’t have all the good stuff that episode had to balance the package out. Television is like eating; you want a well-balanced meal. So perhaps ‘World War Three’ isn’t too silly, it’s just lacking in other areas. So let’s have a look at what might be the problem.

For starters, we begin with ten minutes of the sort of lame, Scooby Doo-esque running around that I really didn’t ever want to see in Who — or anywhere — again. I don’t mind corridor running, per se, but the moment you distract a previously formidable alien by dropping drapes on its head, you’ve lost me. Fire extinguishers are a bit lame, too. So perhaps it’s lacking gravitas. After zapping the ‘experts’ and killing the nice secretary-man last episode, I was all ready to be a bit afraid of the Slitheen. I didn’t get my wish. Innumerable changing, unsettling and largely unfunny use of the word “naked”,[ftn] and a hesitance to actually reach out and kill people when they have the chance all scupper any chance the Slitheen had of being scary.

In a very funny scene, the Doctor seals himself, Rose, and “Harriet Jones, MP Flydale North” in the secure, metal-walled cabinet room. This was cool — I didn’t see it coming, and it was a cute method of ‘escape’. What was less cool was the way they stayed there for pretty much the rest of the episode. They still managed to do a lot, and luckily, phone home… but something about having the heroes locked up for damn near an entire episode is unsatisfying to me. I like a story where everyone’s running around pursuing their own agendas. You know, a bit like ‘Aliens of London’.

Being locked up is especially irritating if it means you have to pretend that people can launch missiles on the interweb, through the use of one password.[ftn] Good plan, unbelievable execution. Couldn’t we have had a more exciting plan involving bringing the TARDIS to the Doctor, and then sneaking about a ship? Granted, it would have cost a lot more. But I’m not here to accept rational excuses. I’m here to knock down implausible plot elements. I’m fairly sure the idea of a calcium based life form is rather peculiar, but I won’t attack the script for that.[ftn]

‘World War Three’ was disappointing overall, but I must give it credit for the usual superb character development and interaction. And some great jokes. The Doctor’s threat to “triplicate the flammability”. The Doctor and Mickey the Idiot. The Doctor’s refusal to answer Jackie’s question, or to stay for dinner. Rose’s amazingly cute finger point and laugh — “You’re stuck with me…” ‘World War Three’ wasn’t crap. It was just a bit lame.

Awesome explosion, though. I particularly liked how the door stayed up longer than everything else.

Footnotes

1. Coupling taught me about hot women mentioning the word, but skipped how I might feel if fat farting aliens tried it. Now I know. Yay?
2. It’s like the Enigma machine being able to translate Viking runes in ‘The Curse of Fenric’. Aaaargh.
3. Well, I can’t, really. I liked Signs and vinegar, while silly, is a step up from water.

This looks sweet. Reading this review makes me sensibly cautious about fighting and customization — which is a shame, as I really like fiddling around with all the character-building minutae. However, then I read the first few paragraphs again and all is well. Some day soonish, I’m going to be a hero again, not the lame, depressing protagonist of KOTOR II.

I’m not so worried about the load times. They’re excellent for getting cups of tea and snacks. Unless you stretch all the quests ridiculously over all the maps for no purpose except to irritate the player. Hello, Telos in KOTOR II.

Is there a subtext in this review? I think there is. I should really write my review of that disappointment. To think I had it listed along my future iMac and the new series of Doctor Who as one of the best things to be happening this year. Pah! But I must finish it as an evil person first.

Now, back to preparing my physics presentation. [shudder]

Well, the switch from Movable Type to Textpattern, and merging of the blogs, seemed to go well. I even found a shiny picture of Melbourne to use for the header — though I should probably go take my own some time, just to be extra specially legal about it.

Though, if I start worrying about that, the whole damn site starts getting a bit more dull.

Thanks go to Mr Jon Hicks for his series of informative articles on switching to Textpattern. He probably runs my favourite blog in the world — after this one, naturally. A strong focus on Macs, Web browsers, and liking Doctor Who all help. He’s also the bloke who designed the Firefox and Thunderbird icons.

The Hitchhikers movie comes out tomorrow. Damnably, I’ve got an Optics presentation on Friday and I’ll have to see it on the weekend. Hopefully it’s the start of a whole bunch more movie-going on my part. I’ve missed them, but there’s just been nothing to draw me in recently. And given my proximity to the cinema, there’s not that much drawing involved…

It’d be nice to review a film again, too. I don’t want to just do Who reviews for the next 8 weeks. Although, at least it’s keeping me regular. In the reviewing sense, that is.

Picture in your head your typical ‘Alien Invasion’ scenario. I imagine people of this day and age would find themselves somewhat inspired by Independence Day and the like. There’s probably some explosions, some planes, some U.F.O.s.

‘Aliens of London’ is not your typical alien invasion. I wasn’t expecting fat, farting politicians. I wasn’t expecting a pig in a spacesuit.[ftn] ‘Aliens of London’ is very, very silly. Which works in most places, but not so much in other places. There’s enough interesting ideas in the story to carry it, and make it massively enjoyable to watch… but with slightly more subtle handling, it could have been better.

The most notable thing about Russell T. Davies’ scripts so far is his tendency to subvert the old fashioned Who ideas. In ‘Rose’, we saw the end of a typical adventure from the point of view of an outsider who happened to get caught up in it. In ‘The End of the World’, various tropes, such as the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits, and the Doctor’s heritage, were given a new angle. And this week, the Doctor’s previously non-existent relationship with the “domestic” is thrown into the foreground. Rose may well be the first companion to have had her immediate family get into the TARDIS.[ftn]

There’s great comedy value in these ideas — seeing the Doctor struggle to keep the noise down while he watches the invasion on TV is great,[ftn] and gets even better when he has to fight for control of the remote with a toddler. His patronising attitude to Mickey is interesting, too — still upset about the “He’s a THING” line from ‘Rose’? Or, more likely, just jealous. Perhaps Eccleston’s best comic moment is his nervous laugh as he confesses to Rose and her Mum that he may have gotten the time just a wee bit wrong.

Not all the comedy comes off this well, though. Eccleston and Piper can effortlessly ground any ridiculous scene they’re in. But the bits in 10 Downing Street are a bit more ropey. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of fart jokes, but I can deal with them. The initial farts are an important plot point, and not too bad. But later on, they just go too long. Very few things are funny enough to sustain almost twenty seconds of straight repetition. Farts aren’t one of them. It doesn’t help when one of the characters says “I’m shaking my booty” with the worst sort of self-conscious delivery imaginable. Of course, the scene gets better when they kill someone, but tonally, the Downing Street plot just doesn’t seem to fit well with the rest of the episode. Perhaps a little more gravitas was needed initially to make us actually feel like we were in the centre of British politics.

In amongst these comedic hits and misses is a pretty decent plot. Being part one of a two-parter, ‘Aliens’ has a bit more room to breathe, and is better for it. There’s a few interesting twists to the plot, and an excellent (but rather over-egged) cliffhanger. In fact, if it wasn’t for the somewhat cringe-worthy aspects I’ve mentioned,[ftn] it might have been one of the best episodes yet. It’s certainly a delight to see the new Doctor’s vanity on such clear display. As it stands, it’s probably the weakest.

But thankfully, still great fun.

Footnotes

1. Well, alright, I was, but only due to vague spoilers.
2. Unless you count the Master, who’d posessed the body of Nyssa’s father. But I doubt you would. I’m trying to keep these pointless continuity references confined to footnotes.
3. I can completely relate.
4. I’ve got some reservations about the presentation of the Slitheen, but I’ll wait till ‘World War III’ to discuss them properly.

The other day, with the help of that magical thing called the internet, I managed to turn my DVD player into a region free DVD player. I was really excited until I realised I didn’t have any non-region-four DVDs. Then I was indifferent. But now, I’ve realised it means I could buy American DVDs from amazon.com, I’ve cheered up.

In particular, I want The Princess Bride: Special Edition, which has two commentaries and a boodle of extras.

But ideally, I could save money on shipping if other people wanted to order things with me. If anyone fits this criteria, let me know.

‘Film’ doesn’t seem like the right category for this. Perhaps I need a ‘stuff’ category. Or a ‘shinies’ category. Hmmmm.

Didn’t like Blade: Trinity? Well, guess what: nor did Wesley Snipes.

Apparently, Mr Snipes felt that the movie focussed too much on his lame sidekicks — in the hope of spinning them off into their own franchises. And he wasn’t crazy on writer David Goyer being the director either. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he reckons he’s not been paid $3 million dollars.

I never saw these films, but I hope he wins. If stars gain the ability to sue for being in shit movies, perhaps fewer of them will appear? It would certainly cure the nastier side of sequelitis that Hollywood has been exhibiting lately. If only this suit had occurred sooner, we might have been spared Son of Mask.

Delenn’s on Lost! Woah!

Someone’s listed all the Pinky and the Brain ‘pondering’ jokes. Woah!

That’s all I came here to say.

So many times in my illustrious grapefruit career, I’ve wanted to say a particular piece of art is a “love it or hate it” kind of deal. And every damn time, I think about it, and it’s not true. It seems that generalisations are never accurate. I wanted to describe ‘The Unquiet Dead’ in these terms, too, but frankly, I can’t, because I thought it was… meh.[ftn] Not bad, not good. But there are people out there who loved it and there are people out there who hated it. I’ll address that second point later.

In the new Doctor Who‘s first journey to the past, the Doctor and Rose come across a bunch of spooks inhabiting a funeral parlour in Victorian Cardiff.[ftn] Being Doctor Who, it turns out of course that they’re not spooks. I’ll give you three guesses. The plot of the story is a shade more interesting than the last two episodes. Oddly, I felt more surprised by a sudden ending to this story than I did to the last one. The reason for that, and probably also for a lot of Who fandom loving this story, is that it really does feel like ‘old school’ Doctor Who. The set up is a shade slower than previous stories, and with five minutes to go, I was really expecting that we were only half-way through an old four part story.

And then it stopped, which seemed a bit abrupt. That’ll teach me to not keep an eye on the time. I may also have been fooled by the Doctor’s lack of involvement in the climax of the story. Eccleston was fantastic again in this story, but as written, Charles Dickens gets to be more the hero than the usual feller. The Doctor’s relationship with Rose advances a little more, too. There’s a strong understanding between them — the mysterious ‘Time War’ gets mentioned, and she immediately knows that that’s going to press his buttons. It’s a shade less subtle later, when he declares that he’s “so glad” he met her, and grabs her hand. But in three episodes, they’ve really become a believable partnership — it’ll be interesting to see what happens to them next week, back in Rose’s home time.[ftn] Hopefully the Doctor will finally manage some kind of unqualified victory. Just one. To prove he can.

You might be forgiven for thinking that the only problems with new Who are ones of plot and pacing. I’d say that’s almost true — but there’s another, teensy-weensy issue[ftn] with the story, as Lawrence Miles pointed out in the link I mentioned earlier. While this is by no means the first story to have had duplicious aliens play the humans and the Doctor in order to stage an invasion, it’s the first time they’ve done it by playing off humanity’s good points. If you see Doctor Who as something of a morality play — and given the amount of mythologies it’s borrowed from over the years, and it’s target audience of children, it’s hard not to — then this does seem to deviate rather noticeably from the pattern. The Doctor, having made a convincing argument for the acceptance of asylum seekers, is then punished for his tolerant beliefs.

There’s been several rebuttals of this point — Lance Parkin’s is probably the best. Quite a few folk have openly claimed that there’s NO SUBTEXT to the episode, that people who see one are deluded. It may just be the arts student in me, but I was surprised that people actually thought it possible for art not to have a subtext. Even more surprised to hear people saying that if the author didn’t intend it, then it’s not there. At a time when the issue of asylum seekers is huge in both Britain and Australia, though, I don’t think it’s a reading that can be swept under the carpet. Personally — I know as a child what I took away from such shows was not so much what happened, but what the hero said. The Doctor in ‘The Unquiet Dead’ makes a stirring, challenging argument for compassion to refugees. At the end, Rose doesn’t say “You were wrong.” There seems a clear acceptance in the new Who that you have to try to do the right thing: reinforced in ‘[Rose]’.

The Unquiet Dead isn’t bad. But it feels squished. A bit of extra time could have slipped in an explanation of the old lady murdering her grandson, and perhaps dealt more interestingly with the Gelth issue. Having to strip such potentially fascinating ideas down to “We’re good, no wait, we’re evil” does make things so simplistic as to invite these kinds of readings. Just think: we could have skipped all the blathering on outside the TARDIS at the end and avoided this whole controversy. Still. At least this week, we almost had a ‘B’ plot.

Next week: Aliens crash into Big Ben in the start of the season’s first two-parter. Perhaps we’ll finally get some plot heavy Who.[ftn]

Footnotes

1. I’m sure many in history have used the term “meh”, but I feel obliged to point out that I first heard it used by Matthew Cocker. He gets the meh feeling a lot more often than me.
2. That’s in Wales, by the way.
3. And I don’t mean 3.30pm.
4. By teensy-weensy, I mean causing HUGE amounts of discussion, much of it thrillingly rabid.
5. Not that I mind plot-light. The End of the World is still my favourite episode.[ftn]
6. Would you believe, in all the hubbub, I almost forgot to mention how hot Billie Piper looked in Victorian garb. Phwoar.

I promise not to talk about Macs again until I can order my iMac. Cross my heart. But Apple announced the next version of OSX, Tiger, will be available on April 29 today, and put online a whole bunch of new pages and movies about it.

The Dashboard looks particularly sweet. And best of all — all these snazzy effects will work on my new iMac! Because, it’ll be new. And shiny. I saw one in Myer yesterday and it was just beautiful…

OK. That’s it. No more.

… Oh, the watery ripples as the widgets drop into place. I’ll just be doing that for two days …

Ahem.