SciFi Weekend: Doctor Who? The Wedding of River Song

October 2, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Like last year’s season finale, The Big Bang, Doctor Who ended the season by resetting the universe and with a wedding. The Wedding of River Song mostly answered the questions raised over the past season of Doctor Who. Earlier episodes of the season provided two possible ways in which there could be a replica of the Doctor who might be the one to die at Lake Silencio. A two-part story  earlier in the season (The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People) dealt with doppelgangers, including one who had replaced Amy Pond. Let’s Kill Hitler introduced the Teselecta, a time traveling ship with miniaturized people which takes the shape of a person. I thought that the Gangers were a more plausible explanation for who took the Doctor’s place, believing that a Ganger would be more likely to go into a regeneration cycle than a Teselecta if shot, but apparently Steven Moffat didn’t see it this way. I imagine that the Doctor, knowing that the Teselecta was going to simulate his death, managed to develop the appropriate special effects to make the death scene look convincing.

In order to create the drama for this season, as well as to prevent the Doctor from changing history to solve other problems,  the concept of a fixed point in time was established. The Doctor revealed in The Fires of Pompeii that he couldn’t change the events of history as this was a fixed point. Similarly the destruction of the base in The Waters of Mars was a fixed point in time which could not be changed. But what happens if a time traveler does change the events of a fixed point?  The Wedding of River Song showed what happened when River Song did change a fixed point by initially failing to kill the Doctor. When River failed to kill the Doctor, there was a bizarre traffic jam in time, in which events from a variety of eras got lumped together:

The description of a time traffic jam in the above video is preferable to the description given by Winston Churchill of all of history happening at one time. Even though the clocks did not move, there was obviously a concept of time as events were occurring. We saw Charles Dickens being interviewed about his upcoming Christmas story despite the fact that the calendars were not moving towards December 25, and we saw the Holy Roman Emperor (Winston Churchill) seek out the Doctor, who had previously been imprisoned. All of history could not have been happening at once or we would have seen every British leader in history, along with everyone else who has every lived in London.

Seeing time getting messed up made for memorable scenes, regardless of whether it made sense. Additional highlights of the episode included an homage to Nicholas Courtney (the Brigadier) while an off-screen homage to Elisabeth Sladen started the season, the homage to the Indiana Jones movies, River seeing the Doctor in the eye of the Teselecta, and “Pond, Amy Pond.” It seemed totally consistent with her character to have Amy remember the Doctor as opposed to wasting time in the episode finding a way to restore her memory, but I wonder what the people around her thought of all the weird pictures on her wall. In other revelations, the eye patches turned out to be “eye drives,” a way in which to store memory of the Silence, and there was more foreshadowing of the Doctor’s future. Some questions have not been answered, such as where the picture of Amy holding Melody in the orphanage came from.

Some of the key events of the episode, such as the wedding of River Song and the death of Madame Kovarian, occurred in an time line which was reset. It appears likely that the wedding remains real based upon events in other episodes.  The major change to occur in this episode is that, after becoming too prominent a hero in earlier episodes, the universe must now think that the Doctor is dead. One possible explanation is that the Doctor can cheat the fixed point in time as he did  by remaining alive, but the history books must still record that he died at Lake Silencio. Presumably, if the Doctor could later reveal it was all a trick and he is alive he would have done so to save River from going to prison. Instead River must spend her days in prison and nights traveling around the universe with her husband, the Doctor. There is another possible interpretation below. More on River Song’s story was reviewed on Doctor Who Confidential, with a copy of the video posted here.

The God Complex gave the Doctor reason to question the prominence of his role. This episode caused him to realize that, “My friends have always been the best of me.” Besides changing the character of the Doctor into a hero who must act behind the scenes, the episode seems to foreshadow the Doctor’s future. Presumably talk of when the Eleventh will fall refers to the Eleventh Doctor, while the question in plain sight has been asked before: “Doctor Who?” Does this foreshadow the next regeneration, or just another moment in which the Doctor must cheat destiny and prevent his fate from taking place? Perhaps the survival of the Doctor ensures that it is the Silence who will fill at the fields of Trenzalore. The Doctor pretended to be trapped in order to surprise the Silence in Day of the Moon. I wonder if the real reason the Doctor must now appear dead is to once again surprise the Silence, to ensure that it is the Silence who fall and not the Eleventh.

Other than the Christmas episode, which has started filming, we will probably have to wait around a year for more new episodes. Doctor Who Confidential will not be around when the series resumes, having been discontinued due to BBC budget cuts. There is this one brief episode of Doctor Who to watch. The winner of a writing contest held among school children was filmed as a mini-episode, Death Is The Only Answer:

Posted in Science Fiction, Television. Tags: , , , , , , , , . No Comments »

SciFi Weekend: Doctor Who and Torchwood:Miracle Day; Steven Moffat on River Song

September 5, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Night Terrors was an enjoyable,  99 percent stand-alone, episode of Doctor Who written by Mark Gattis. We were first led to believe it was about a boy who feared  monsters in his closet. We ultimately found that the monsters were real and that it wasn’t Narnia in his cupboard. It turned out that the most important fears were not really of the monsters but a child’s fear (even if the child wasn’t human) of being rejected.

I have one complaint about the episode. Although it seemed to deal with problems George had his entire life, everything major happened one night. This included getting the distress call to the Doctor to save him from the monsters to George making people in his apartment complex, along with the visitors from the TARDIS, all disappear. There was no indication that he did this to people he feared before this night. Gattis should have worked in some reason to claim that George’s powers were stronger that night to explain these things.

In an episode dealing with children’s fears, Mark Gattis was asked to write a nursery rhyme to tie into the season’s arc:

Tick tock goes the clock
And what now shall we play?
Tick tock goes the clock
Now summer’s gone away?

Tick tock goes the clock
And what then shall we see?
Tick tock until the day
That thou shalt marry me

Tick tock goes the clock
And all the years they fly
Tick tock and all too soon
You and I must die

Tick tock goes the clock
We laughed at fate and mourned her
Tick tock goes the clock
Even for the Doctor

Tick tock goes the clock
He cradled her and he rocked her
Tick tock goes the clock
Even for the Doctor…

This season’s arc is even more remarkable as River Song’s story goes back to well before this season. Viewing Let’s Kill Hitler suggested that, while Steven Moffat may have had a general idea for River Song’s story, he hadn’t planned it all out ahead of time. If he had, it would have only made sense to have such a good friend of Amy’s be seen in previous episodes. Some idea of how the storyline came about can be seen in Maureen Ryan’s interview of Steven Moffat. Reading the full interview it is obvious that it occurred before Let’s Hill Hitler.

I’m interested in the conception of the River Song story. In ‘Silence in the Library,’ did you already know she was going to be the daughter of a companion?
Oh no, no. I mean, it was one possible theory. Why is it somebody who’s got such connections, who would that be? Is it just a future companion? What if it’s somebody’s got a lifelong commitment to the Doctor or his companion? So when I introduced Amy, I kept my options open [and used the name Pond]. I thought I was doing [the name thing] in plain sight and nobody [caught] it for a long while. But I didn’t know at the time Karen was going to stay long enough for that story to come off. I didn’t know if Alex would keep coming back.

So Plan A held, but there were other ones, including the [Plan B] that maybe River never came back at all and you could just imagine that she knows the 59th Doctor in the far future.

Actually I, and I’m sure many others, were suspicious of a connection between the names Pond and River for quite a while, and there was considerable speculation that River was Amy’s daughter before this was confirmed.

Later in the interview:

With River Song and her meeting the Doctor “backwards,” is that important to the character? Is that something that needs to be explained?
When she says that, she’s being poetic, to some degree. The broad sweep of how she meets the Doctor is out of sequence. It’s not necessarily always exactly out of sequence. It’s been taken to mean, by some people, but that every time they meet, it’s the exact reverse. We already know that’s not true. And we’ve seen it not be true.

But look at it from River’s point of view — it feels as though every time she meets him [it's backwards], and she knows the day is coming when he won’t know her at all. There’s an adventure she hasn’t had yet where the Doctor doesn’t know her. She knows it’s coming. She is generalizing: “Most of the times I meet him, generally he’s younger and knows me slightly less well.”

Will we ever know why that was the case? Does it matter for her character?
Why should we always meet people in the right order?

I don’t know, it might help time-travel dummies like me.
But who says you would [meet people that way]? It’s actually highly improbable that if you traveled around in time — why would you meet people in the right order? What law, what ticking clock is making that [happen]?

With River Song and her meeting the Doctor “backwards,” is that important to the character? Is that something that needs to be explained?
When she says that, she’s being poetic, to some degree. The broad sweep of how she meets the Doctor is out of sequence. It’s not necessarily always exactly out of sequence. It’s been taken to mean, by some people, but that every time they meet, it’s the exact reverse. We already know that’s not true. And we’ve seen it not be true.

But look at it from River’s point of view — it feels as though every time she meets him [it's backwards], and she knows the day is coming when he won’t know her at all. There’s an adventure she hasn’t had yet where the Doctor doesn’t know her. She knows it’s coming. She is generalizing: “Most of the times I meet him, generally he’s younger and knows me slightly less well.”

Will we ever know why that was the case? Does it matter for her character?
Why should we always meet people in the right order?

I don’t know, it might help time-travel dummies like me.
But who says you would [meet people that way]? It’s actually highly improbable that if you traveled around in time — why would you meet people in the right order? What law, what ticking clock is making that [happen]?

I’ve been suspecting that Russell T. Davies pitched the general idea of Torchwood: Miracle Day and was given ten episodes before he had any idea as to how he would fill this many episodes. Some episodes felt like they were just filler. Even this week’s episode, The Gathering, seemed to be killing time when they had the authorities search Gwen’s home not once, but twice. It would have been better to limit to one search, and spend more time showing events which were limited to discussion this episode.

I am having difficulty figuring out the motivation here for such aggressive action against Category 1 individuals. I can see the justification (ignoring the moral issues) of burning them if they are using up limited hospital facilities, but it wouldn’t be worth extensive police resources to hunt out people kept at home. It would be different if they knew that Gwen was robbing pharmacies for supplies, but they clearly have no suspicion of that.

The episode did show a move towards despotism. Rather than searching out Category 1 individuals, I would suspect that instead we would be seeing forced sterilizations to offset the population growth from the near-absence of death.

An even bigger complaint about how the series has been playing out has been that the Torchwood team might some discoveries, such as about the stock pile of pain medications and what was happening in the camps, but the really important clues seem to just occur.  The episode ended giving the appearance that Jack and Gwen might find the Blessing not due to their own detective work but from a drop of Jack’s blood showing the way. Plus we learned that it is possible to dig all the way to China.

How the series concludes, and how it answers the many remaining questions, will ultimately determine how the show is evaluated. Here’s is the extended UK/Australian trailer for next week’s concluding episode:


It is not known if Torchwood will return for any future seasons, but there is hope now that Starz and the BBC have entered into a multi-year agreement.

Posted in Science Fiction, Television. Tags: , , , , , . 1 Comment »

SciFi Weekend: Doctor Who, Let’s Kill Hitler & Torchwood: Miracle Day

August 28, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Tonight we had a rare event,which will reoccur for a brief time: new episodes of both Doctor Who and Torchwood. Even rarer, both are at a point where they are starting to give answers. Who Killed Hitler gave a lot of answers regarding the season-long arc as well as the multi-season story of River Song. Major spoilers follow.

The story began with Amy and Rory near home, having built a signal for the Doctor in a corn field. There’s no explanation of how the two got back to earth after the Battle of Demons Run, and this is just one of many plot-holes which it is best to ignore to enjoy this over-the-top story. They are  joined by their childhood friend, Mels, who is obsessed with the Doctor and blames all evil in the world on the Doctor’s failure to fix things. This leads to a trip through time to kill Hitler, who spent most of the episode locked in the cupboard.

Mel’s attempt to kill Hitler was interrupted by the Tesselector, a ship full of time travelors disguised as a shape-shifting robot which tortures historical villains who otherwise went unpunished. They shifted their target from Hitler to who they described as the worst war criminal in history–the woman who killed the Doctor.

This is all interspersed with flashbacks of Mels growing up with Amy and Rory. The later two had a relationship just as we might imagine. Rory was infatuated with Amy but Amy, who really did like Rory, assumed he was gay because he never showed any interest in other girls. At least Amy did run after Rory when Mels pointed out the flaw in her thoughts about Rory.

Mels got killed in  Hitler’s office and regenerated into a confused version of River Song. Leave it to Steven Moffat to have Amy name her daughter after her old friend Mels, who was actually River Song/Melody Pond all along. In a strange way, Amy and Rory did get to raise their child.

River was programmed to kill the Doctor and kissed him with poisonous lipstick, with regeneration also somehow prevented. Meanwhile, Amy and Rory got miniaturized and beamed into the Tesselector. This set up Rory for one of the great lines of the episode:  “I’m trapped inside a giant robot replica of my wife. I’m really trying not to see this as a metaphor.”

Meanwhile the Doctor, who already had a new coat and who was now in the midst of dying, spent much of his remaining time getting dressed up in formal wear. We got the rumored scenes with post-companions, but they were just projections from the TARDIS. There continued to be adventure  aboard the Tesselector, which for some unknown reason was packed with giant killer jellyfish. Amy prevented the Tesselector from killing River by destroying the mechanism which kept the jellyfish from killing everyone aboard–both a morally questionable move as well as one with obvious dangers.

The Doctor convinced River she didn’t want to go through life knowing she had killed her true love before they even got involved. As the Doctor put it, ““She did kill me, and then she used her remaining lives to bring me back. As first dates go, I’d say that was mixed signals.”

By River giving up her remaining regenerations to save the Doctor, she set up her own death in Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead. I wonder if this also means the Doctor will have additional regenerations, providing one way for Moffat to get around the previously established (and certain to be bypassed) limitation on regenerations.

All this went on with very little of Hitler in the actual story. Here is Adolph Hitler’s reaction to his appearance in Doctor Who:

In this episode, the Doctor learned about his future death and presumably is now plotting some way around this. We learned that the Silence isn’t really a species but a religious movement obsessed with a first question reminiscent of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. There were further references to The Graduate with the relationship between River and the Doctor. There was even this poster referring to Silence at the school which Amy and Mels attended:

While there are still gaps, we now know much more about River Song’s life:

River was conceived in the Tardis after the Amy and Rory’s wedding, giving a whole new meaning to the episode title, The Big Bang. She was born on Demons Run and then raised in a creepy orphanage in the 1960′s, while being brainwashed to kill the Doctor.  At some point a picture was taken of her with Amy–perhaps we will see a trip to that orphanage sometime later this season to explain it. She escaped (perhaps intentionally allowed to escape) and wound up in New York where she had what was probably not her first regeneration. She wound up becoming a delinquent friend of Amy and Rory, ultimately getting aboard the TARDIS in this episode. After the  regeneration in this episode, River was left  with the Sisters Of The Infinite Schism. Somewhere along the way she has an affair with the Doctor as well as becoming imprisoned for killing him. The episode ended with her going into archeology so she could stalk the Doctor through time. I also bet she winds up assisting the Doctor in staging his death (or maybe the death of a Ganger) so that this fixed point in time can occur with the Doctor remaining alive.

Things also happened on this week’s episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day, End of the Road, and we seem to be coming towards a conclusion, but generally things just sort of  happen. We don’t really see the Torchwood team taking the lead in solving the mystery as opposed to grabbing bits and pieces of information over time. Perhaps that will change in the final two episodes. While the previous episode featured Gwen capturing Jack because of her family being held captive, this week’s episode quickly dispensed with the threat. Why didn’t Angelo’s granddaughter simply call Jack (or deliver a message thru Gwen) that Angelo was still alive?

There were some good touches. Newman was exposed as a bad guy and Q arrested him. Oswald Danes was shown as really being creepy, but also likely to receive the punishment he deserves now that he is designated Category 0.  For long-time Torchwood fans, there was a reference to Ianto.

Posted in Humor and Satire, Science Fiction, Television. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Karen Gillan on BBC Breakfast

August 26, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Karen Gillan on BBC Breakfast earlier today, talking about tomorrow’s return of Doctor Who and an upcoming role in a romantic comedy.

Posted in Science Fiction, Television. Tags: , , , . No Comments »

Doctor Who Prequel Scene

August 15, 2011 — Ron Chusid

The BBC released this prequel scene  for Doctor Who. It takes place after the Battle of Demon’s Run and before the next episode of Doctor Who, Let’s Kill Hitler, in which the Doctor encounters the worst war criminal in history, and Hitler, while searching for Amy Pond’s kidnapped baby.

Posted in Science Fiction, Television. Tags: , , , . No Comments »

Doctor Who: The Second Half of Season 6

July 24, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Above is the trailer for the second half of Season 6 from Comic Con. The biggest news from the Doctor Who panel today was the announcement of the air date in the US and UK for Let’s Kill Hitler, the first episode when the season returns from hiatus. It will air August 27. There will also reportedly be lots of cliff hangers in the second half of the season, and Karen Gillan, who earlier stated she will be returning for Season 7, teased: “My secret, I’ve still got. And you still don’t know it. It’s so exciting! I feel so powerful now.”

I hope to have video of the Doctor Who panel later tonight or tomorrow to post.

Posted in Science Fiction, Television. Tags: , , , , . No Comments »

SciFi Weekend: Torchwood: Miracle Day & Doctor Who: Let’s Kill Hitler

July 10, 2011 — Ron Chusid

 

Torchwood: Miracle Day has now aired in the United States, Canada, and Australia, but will not be airing until Thursday in the U.K. This post does contain Spoilers, although virtually all of the major events in the fist episode where those revealed in reports prior to airing. Far less is known about the following episodes. The first episode primarily served to introduce Torchwood to American audiences who were not familiar with it, introduce some of the new characters known to appear this season, and set up the situation which the story is about. Miracle Day was the first day in which nobody dies, setting up a catastrophe for the planet as the population will explode beyond the numbers we can support. Length of stay will also increase dramatically in critical care units, creating a crisis for the insurance industry.

As with many science fiction stories, it is necessary to accept something which might not appear possible, and this is acceptable as long as the story remains plausible given the acceptance of the facts established in the story. I found it easier to accept the implausibility of a story where nobody dies when characters within the story also discussed how implausible this is, considering the wide variety of situations which might lead to death. Once the premise of the show was accepted, I had more difficulty believing another aspect– that Oswald Danes would be released because of not dying during his scheduled execution. While in a sense he did serve out his sentence, he was also a convicted child killer. Even if a governor was susceptible to bullying by someone such as Danes. any real governor would be far more concerned about the public’s response to releasing someone who killed a twelve year-old and then said, “She shoulda run faster.”

It was not necessary to know anything about Torchwood going into this episode as viewers learned about the organization as the CIA did. Viewers of the previous seasons would appreciate the references to previous seasons such as Jack going by the  name of Dr. Owen Harper, a character from the first two seasons. Seeing how Jack retconned Esther was reminiscent of when Jack once did the same to Gwen in the first episode. The return of PC Andy also provided a little more continuity with the past. Is there a connection between the the 456 regulations mentioned in this episode and the aliens in Children of Earth being known as the 456?

There are many mysteries to be solved beyond the obvious ones of who is preventing people from dying and how they are doing it. Were they the ones who sent out the email message saying “Torchwood” and why was this done? Jack quickly shut this down with malware destroying all mention of Torchwood, but if he really had this capability I would have expected him to use it after Torchwood was destroyed and Gwen went into hiding. While presumably there is some connection between all of this and Torchwood, it is less clear if Oswald Danes’ survival was coincidental or if triggering Miracle Day on the date of his scheduled execution was intentional. While I suspect that Rex Matheson’s automobile accident was no accident, it would have made more sense to try to harm him on a day when he would have stayed dead. It would have also made more sense to fire upon Gwen’s home prior to Miracle Day, but perhaps they thought she would have turned into a blown up blob who could not have gone after them despite remaining alive.

While nobody dies, they can be injured. The immortal Captain Jack Harkness was surprised to find he could now be injured, with the possibility of his death being one twist in the series which was revealed before the first episode aired. Seeing that he could be inured does not necessarily mean he could be killed. A plausible interpretation might be that Jack has become like everyone else, who can be injured but not die. The preview for the second episode shows that this question might be answered next week (video below):

Rex Matheson has some bizarre ideas in this episode, from obsessing over the charges for crossing a bridge to handling the situation by trying to take Jack and Gwen back to the United States by force. If there was reason to believe that there was a connection between Torchwood and the Miracle, it would make more sense to begin investigating this around Cardiff (even without knowing about the rift). It might also have made more sense to try to recruit them to voluntarily work with the CIA unless there was more reason to mistrust the two surviving members of Torchwood.

We saw with Children of Earth that a continuing story has advantages over trying to come up with a new threat to fight every week. We will have to watch over the course of this season how well they continue with this single storyline. Besides answering the basic questions raised, and solving other problems which come up over the next several weeks, I wonder what this will mean for Torchwood in the long run. Will the organization be reestablished in the U.K. or will next season again have Jack and Gwen interacting with others as free agents? Hopefully we will see the return of Torchwood. It makes much less sense to have an ongoing series named Torchwood about survivors of an organization which no longer exists. I also wonder if some of the characters introduced this season will become regulars for future seasons. In the case of Rex Matheson, this might depend upon whether those who are still living because of Miracle Day remain alive at the end. I would expect that those who would have died due to chronic diseases and aging will remain dead, as well as those who remain severely injured when death returns. Rex Matheson could conceivably survive, with Miracle Day having provided him a chance to heal from his wounds in a way which would not normally have been possible.

The cliff hanger after the first half of the season of Doctor Who, set up in A Good Man Goes To War, is to be continued in an episode named Let’s Kill Hitler. A synopsis for the episode has been released: “In the desperate search for Melody Pond, the TARDIS crash lands in 1930s Berlin, bringing the Doctor face to face with the greatest war criminal in the Universe. And Hitler. The Doctor must teach his adversaries that time travel has responsibilities – and in so doing, learns a harsh lesson in the cruellest warfare of all.”

Alex Kingston discussed her role as River Song on BBC Breakfast last week in the video above.

Posted in Science Fiction, Television. Tags: , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »
«
»