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.

Damn it.

I want to quit playing video games. I really do. At least cut down. But now E3 comes along and reveals so MANY SHINY THINGS! LOOK AT THEM!! I CAN SEE MY REFLECTION!!!

It’s not fair. And Jade Empire is out. Which isn’t fair either. And Andy has ordered heaps of shiny things from Hong Kong which should be getting here soon. Don’t get me started on how distracting that will be.

After seeing everything this week, I would like to officially announce my retirement from gaming in 2008. I have to be around for the next generation. This date of course is subject to change and will come under review in 2007.

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.

In more heartening news from around our planet:

• In 2001, the Australian government accidentally deported a mentally ill Australian, apparently to the Philippines, because they thought she was an illegal immigrant. No one noticed this until four years later and now they can’t find her. Over the past three years over 100 people have mistakenly been put in detention for being illegal immigrants when they were lawfully in Australia. Oops!
• Florida has passed a law making it legal to shoot someone on the street in self-defence, without trying to get away first. According to one Florida Republican, “This is about meeting force with force. I’m sorry, but if I’m attacked, I shouldn’t have a duty to retreat. That’s a good way to get shot in the back.” Governor Jeb Bush described it as “a good, common sense, anti-crime issue.” It seems that with this law, attempts to prevent a 13 year old girl having an abortion and to deny Terri Shiavo the right to die with just a smidgen of dignity that we can start looking forward to President Bush III from 2008.

And why do I get a strange feeling of deja vu?:

“This election will be about trust,” said Mr Howard, Leader of the Australian ‘Liberal’ Party, August 2004

“…Character is an issue at this election, trust is an issue at this election,” said Mr Howard, Leader of the British Conservative Party, April 2005

“We … have an absolute right to decide who comes to this country, and there is a concern inside the Government, and I suspect in the broader community, that we are fast reaching a stage where we are losing that right because of the increasing numbers of people, illegal immigrants, who are coming to Australia.” said Mr (Aussie) Howard, August 2001

“…People want to know that immigration is controlled. They want to know that the asylum system is being used to protect those genuinely fleeing persecution, and not abused by those seeking a back door into Britain … I want to see a new approach to immigration and asylum – an approach based on clear principles. No one should be allowed to claim asylum when they reach Britain.” said Mr (Pommie) Howard, February 2005

And I thought human cloning was banned. Well, at least it seems that the British will have a little more sense and vote for the slightly less evil party today.

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.

We’re starting a top secret research and surveillance space program here at our house. I just thought I’d tell everyone so that if anyone asks you about it, just deny all knowledge. It’s called the Cheltenham House Optical Overview and Controlled Higher Orbit Offensive. Rockets maybe involved.

The following is a quote from one of the head judges at a Mid-Atlantic Regionals tournament:

One of the players at the event had an entirely foiled Goblin Bidding deck. He used white out correctional tape on all of the text boxes, obscuring the entire box. Then he wrote a different biblical quote on every card. This was caught in a deck check midway through the tournament. Since the correctional tape used to white out the text boxes had no appreciable thickness to it, the cards were not marked in any noticeable way. After the head judge was advised of the matter, he took pictures of the deck, and then talked to the player. The player had the full Oracle text for each of the cards in question, which allowed him to narrowly avert a penalty.

On to the Uba madness… :) Say I’ve got an Uba Mask in play, and a Goblin Welder. In my opponent’s draw step he removes his card from the game, as per Uba Mask. Then he passes priority, and I weld out the Uba Mask (preferably for another Mask). Then we go to his main phase and the removed card can no longer be played, because ‘its’ Uba Mask is gone. Using this trick, I can lock out any card my opponent draws unless it’s an instant. (Which is where the Null Brooch comes in!)

Now, say I’ve got TWO Uba Masks in play, and a Goblin Welder, and a Memory Jar… This is where things get interesting. I’ve got no cards in hand, of course, because the Masks replace actual drawing. So, what happens when I activate the Memory Jar…? (The aim, of course, being to ‘switch off’ any counterspells my opponent ‘draws’.)

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.