Torchwood: Because I had to.

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

As a fan of all things Doctor Who, I felt it was time I turned my attention to the spinoff series Torchwood. Now I had actually seen an episode of TW before I saw a single Doctor Who episode, and I didn't like it. To be fair, it was the final part of a five-part mini-series and I didn't know who any of the characters were, save one, and I didn't fully understand the stakes. All this in mind, I still thought it was a bit melodramatic and ended on an extremely dark note. But, again, I'm a completist and I like the crap out of DW, so after a few months, I thought I'd give it another chance. Luckily, all of Torchwood is available for instant play on Netflix. God. Bless. Netflix.


First some context. In the first season of the revived Doctor Who, a character was introduced in the last five episodes. His name was Capt. Jack Harkness and he at first appears to be a normal WWII American Air Force pilot on loan to the British. He is quickly revealed to be a 51st Century Time Agent-cum-Con Artist. He's a roguish character, the Han Solo of the series. He's morally ambiguous and a bit of a loose cannon, but never the less a loyal companion to The Doctor. Capt. Jack is played by openly gay actor John Barrowman, which I'm sure aided in the decision to make the character Omnisexual (men, women, aliens, monsters, etc.) and added yet another layer to his already colorful personality. The showrunner of the updated series was Russell T. Davies, the creator of Queer as Folk, and I think in general it was a very brave awesome thing to do to introduce a main character on a "family" show who is GLBT. At the end of the season, Capt. Jack is killed by a Dalek only to be brought back to life by the energy of time. He is, however, stranded in the far future, seemingly forever. That isn't the case, however.

During Doctor Who's second season, there are multiple references to the Torchwood Institute, a secret organization started by Queen Victoria as a means of protecting the Crown against alien threats, the Doctor among them. In that season' finale, Torchwood reveals that it takes and adapts alien technology for service to the the United Kingdom, but they are all but destroyed. Or, the LONDON part of Torchwood was destroyed. Torchwood 3 is working just fine over in Cardiff, Wales.


And that's where Torchwood season 1 picks up. In Cardiff, as is explained in a Doctor Who episode, there is a temporal rift allowing time and space matter to travel between dimensions, making it a hotspot for alien phenomenon. This follows the Buffy model of having all the action take place around a single area that happens to attract the paranormal. Makes it easy to keep the location shots cheap. Since both Doctor Who and Torchwood are BBC Wales productions, all they have to do is go outside. When series one begins, Captain Jack is the leader of a small team consisting of medic Owen Harper (Burn Gorman), tech-savvy Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori), and stuffy paper-pusher Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd). In the very first episode, they are more or less discovered by Police Constable Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) who helps solve the case and is inducted into the world. Blah blah blah, heard it all before.

It took me about five months to get passed the first four episodes. Torchwood was a "post-watershed" series, which in Britain, given the limited number of television station, is the designation of a show that airs later at night and can have much more adult content, including graphic violence, sexual content, and bad language. I am always up for heaping helpings of all of these, except when they aren't handled well. It felt to me that the writers didn't know how to make a show of this nature and as such put in huge amounts of sex unnecessarily, or just because they could. In many cases, the sex didn't have anything to do with the story and was really more just titillation for the sake of it. Sci-fi writers generally don't know how to deal with sex. Gwen, who is dating blue collar Rhys (Kai Owen) has an affair with Owen which is neither interesting nor very important to their characters. There was also, amongst the sex, a fair amount of homosexual activity. One episode finds Toshiko (a female, the name's not a giveaway to anyone outside of Japan) in a relationship with a mysterious blonde woman who ends up being an alien, wouldn't ya know it? Another ends with a sweeping, 360-degree camera sweep around Capt. Jack passionately kissing goodbye to a young military man of the same name. I definitely applaud the show for going there and that much doesn't distract, it's just used in such a sensationalized way.


One bit I did enjoy about the season is just how deeply damaged all the characters are. Gwen struggles with her personal life and her work life, Owen hates himself and wants to die, Tosh is crippled with insecurity about everything, and Ianto, a straight man, grapples with his growing romantic feelings toward Jack. We also learn little bits about what happened to Jack after he was stranded in the 24th century. Turns out the time energy that brought him back to life left him immortal, or more accurately, left him with the ability to come back to life after getting killed. He is shot, stabbed, strangled, smothered, and other means of dispatch not beginning with S only to eventually gasp back to life. We also learn that he somehow got sent back to the late 1800s and has to live through the whole 20th century waiting for the off-chance the Doctor will come find him.

Because of the not-so-great writing and sometimes way dramatic acting, I'd say I actually liked 2 and a half episodes of the 13. But I kept watching because I heard it got better. At the end of Torchwood season 1, Jack goes off to find the Doctor leaving his team without a leader. That storyline picks up in the last three episodes of Doctor Who season 3 where Jack does indeed find The Doctor and travels with him and his new companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman). A whole mess of stuff happens that I won't get in to if you ever want to watch it, but at the end of it, Jack decides he misses his team and working for and with Torchwood and leaves The Doctor to return to them.

But when he does, at the beginning of Torchwood season 2, he finds a team that is at once happy to have him back and resentful that he left in the first place. During this season, the writer's calmed down a bit and found their own rhythm. They introduced a few character's from Jack's past (which is our future... wibbly wobbly timey wimey) and strengthened the character relationships. Gwen is engaged to her boyfriend Rhys and eventually tells him about her job. Toshiko tries to confess her feelings to Owen, who just doesn't get it. Ianto embarks on a romantic relationship with Jack that is allowed to develop naturally. My favorite arc occurs in the middle of the season where Martha, now an agent of UNIT (Unified Intelligence Taskforce) comes to Torchwood to help. During this time, Owen is killed and Jack tries to bring him back to life. It half works. Owen is animated again, but he's still technically dead. None of his bodily functions are operating, his heart isn't beating, he doesn't get tired, he can't drink or have sex. If he's injured, it won't heal. So he has to deal with being the living dead, which doesn't go too well.


Season two had uniformly better writing and acting, but it was still far too "monster-of-the-week" and often those monsters were uninteresting. The season ends with Owen being disintegrated and Tosh is killed by the bad guy, leaving Torchwood severely diminished. The next time we see Jack, Gwen, and Ianto is during the finale of Doctor Who season 4, where every character who ever existed reappears. It's a pretty ridiculous finale. But after THAT, is the five-part miniseries "Children of Earth" which is pretty damn amazing, I must admit. It's basically a sci-fi version of 24, which I also loved. The writing is top notch as are the guest stars. I could try to describe what it's about, but I wouldn't want to spoil any part of it. If you like sci-fi at all and think I have good taste in anything, give "Children of Earth" a watch. It's on instant play on Netflix and it's only five episodes. What's stopping you!?!?!


For a whole calendar year, there's been no new Torchwood, but in the recent weeks it has been announced that BBC, BBC Worldwide, and Starz Entertainment are teaming up to produce a fourth season of Torchwood, starring the remaining cast, and adding new people. This version will also travel beyond Cardiff for an "international flavor." I won't say I'm excited, but I have tempered optimism. The show improved every time it came back, and if it ups the ante of CoE, then we're in for some excellent crap.

Man, I do go on.

You're welcome.
-Kanderson

Top 6: Ways Sci-Fi Movies Lied To Us

The 1961 film, "The Phantom Planet" begins with a narrator telling us that since the splitting of the atom, Mankind has triumphed in breaking through the atmosphere and is now exploring the vastness of space. It depicts rocket launches occurring from the moon and artificial gravity inside the oddly Hobbit-sized rocket ship. It's a vision of a future we know little about, but we should. The story is set in 1980. None of that shit happened. What a load of bollocks. (See for yourself. The whole movie, which is pretty hysterical, can be watched on Hulu) Ever since people started writing fiction with science in front of it, we've been given hypothetical potentialities for futures that, at the time, seemed so far away and yet, we've more or less passed all of them. It's to the point where thinking about it is laughable for having missed the mark so badly. Here are the 6 most egregious errors committed by science fiction.


VI - The Flying Car (BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II)
To say nothing of time travel, which is excluded because it's not depicted as a universal thing, Back to the Future part II shows us all the crazy, and really unnecessary, bits of technology we have to look forward to in five years (the movie takes place in 2015). For example, food hydrators preparing pizza in seconds, a weather service that can accurately predict a rainstorm to the second, and holographic movie adds that pretend to bite you in half. But the most glaring lie is the fact that cars can fly, or "hover" as they say in the movie. Now, hovercrafts we have; they're about two inches off the ground. These things fly, through the air, and have traffic lights and taxi cabs up there. Doc Brown mentions that he got the Delorean hover-converted in the early 21st Century, which would seem to allude to sometime within the first decade and unless we're gonna hover-convert the shit out of our cars this year, BTTF2's claim in just plain phony.


V - Manhattan Island is a maximum security prison (ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK)
The conceit of this 1981 movie is that the crime rate in the United States gets so bad in the future that there wasn't any more room in the prisons. The solutions was to move every criminal in the entire country to a fenced off and patrolled Manhattan where they could roam freely and do whatever they wanted to each other. The trouble is, this was all supposed to happen in 1997. I'm damn skippy that didn't happen. In 1997, Bill Clinton began his second term, arguably the most prosperous time in America for a long-ass while, the crime rate was the lowest it had been in 20 years, and the New York Yankees had just won the World Series. As much as I love this movie, it could not have been more wrong.


IV - Aliens live among us relatively peacefully (ALIEN NATION)
In one of the more audacious examples of counting your chickens before they hatch, the film Alien Nation was released in 1988 about a world three years after an alien invasion...in 1988. Yes, the filmmakers so wanted to date their film, they made the initial landing of alien Newcomers just a few months after its release. That's about as "near" as the "near-future" can possibly be. The bulk of the action takes place in 1991 where the Newcomers have become part of the society and are discriminated against in a thinly veiled nod to race relations. People watching this movie when it initially came out on video were already in a world where this couldn't possibly be real, since aliens did not indeed land and gentrify the nation in 1988. Couldn't they have even waited until 1990 for the landing? At least give people a little time to pretend. We all know it's fiction, but that seemed destined to fail from day one. That'd be like if I wrote a thing about giant rocket powered flamingos that took place the day after I wrote it. Anyone reading it would go, "Okay, well this didn't happen."


III - Nuclear Holocaust caused by sentient computer (TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY)
This is something I feared for a long time, and in many ways still continue to fear. Ever since I saw the 70s tv movie "The Day After," I have been scared to death of the end of the world via nuclear annihilation. So, when I first saw Terminator 2 when I was 14 and it actually gave a date to this horrible event, 29 August 1997, I was petrified. Until I remembered that it was six months earlier. Yes, James Cameron's best film is still considered among the top ten sci-fi and action movies ever made, and in 1991 when it was released, it could still be seen as visionary. Skynet, the insanely smart computer thing, is going to become self-aware in 1997, and it's up to the Connor clan and a re-programmed T-800 to see that it doesn't happen. Or, they could just not do anything, cuz it fucking didn't become self-aware at all. We were not vaporized by atomic explosions, nor have huge mechanoids started marching up and down the streets, destroying anyone they see. I never understood why it becoming self-aware was such a bad thing. I know a fair amount of people who could benefit from being a little more self-aware.


II - We have colonized Mars (BLADE RUNNER, TOTAL RECALL, et al)
According to these movies, and some others too, we took off from Earth, terraformed our nearest celestial neighbor, and began building a population. Blade Runner takes place in 2019, and although the action is entirely on Earth, there's much talk of replicants being used for labor on Mars. Total Recall takes place in 2084, but we've already had a colony on Mars for sometime in that film. Gonna get a little scientific on your asses now; here's why we can't do that. 1) GRAVITY: The surface gravity of Mars is just a little over 1/3 that of Earth's. 2) COLD-ASS: The average surface temperature of Mars is -63 degrees Celsius (-81.4 degrees Fahrenheit). The coldest it's ever been on Earth was in Antarctica where it bottomed out at -84 degrees C, whereas Mars routinely falls to -140 degrees C. 3) WATER: There's no fucking water on Mars. 4) PRESSURE: The atmospheric pressure on Mars is ~6 mbar, and in its current condition, is well below the Armstrong Limit, 61.8 mbar for people to survive without pressure suits. Since terraforming cannot be expected as a near-term solution, habitable structures on Mars would need to be constructed with pressure vessels similar to spacecraft, capable of containing a pressure between a third and a whole bar. 5) MONEY: No one on Earth is going to give money for colonization of Mars when they could easily spend it on the new Miley Cyrus album or the Shake Weight. In short, we're never going to Mars, apologies to Philip K. Dick.


I - Space Odyssey? (2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY)
I was really looking forward to this and here we are nearly a decade later and we've not had a single space odyssey. There is no regular transportation from the Earth to the moon, there is no artificial gravity, super computers have not reached sentience (see number III) and we've found no enormous slabs of black granite anywhere that inexplicably turn us into giant, glowing, omniscient babies. This is probably one of my top ten favorite movies of all time, and yet I still can't get passed how wrong it was. Granted, it was made in 1968, a full year before Man set foot on the moon, so it had very little to work with, but come on! In the aftermath of Kennedy's great "New Frontier" speech, the world seemed to be bursting at the seems to go live in space, but we just never got there. Too many worldly concerns got in our way, technology didn't advance as fast as films had promised, and the world lost interest. This might also be the first example of a film AND its sequel being proved wrong. Part two of this saga, 2010: The Year We Make Contact is happening right now. Again, we're not living in space, and we haven't made contact with any alien life forms.

So to sum up: Nothing cool will ever happen. People nowadays are far too jaded to actually believe in the hope of ever breaching the atmosphere, and with the economy in trouble, NASA has just taken a huge budget cut, effectively putting the kibosh on even the smallest celestial glimmer. It seems that we as a people are too self-centered and small-minded, myself included, to realistically go into space or even develop "space-age" gadgetry without an app being involved. Unfortunately, it seems, even our visions of the future are behind the times.

You're welcome
-Kanderson

Top 6: Romero-Free Zombie Movies

As a fan of horror, and specifically the zombie sub-genre, it's hard not to be a fan of George A. Romero. He not only breathed new life into an already-passed-its-prime monster, but gave it the lore and rules that are still being followed to this day. His first three entries into the cycle work not only as gorefests, but as sophisticated satires of a society bent on self-destruction long before the dead started rising. Unfortunately, since the first three, Romero has made three other films bearing "of the Dead" that few could deem sophisticated. With his latest, the totally nonsensically-titled "Survival of the Dead," getting panned across the board, I thought I'd mention some of the entries into the genre that don't bear Romero's name or myth at all. These are the Top 6 Romero-Free Zombie Movies.


VI - THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE (1974)
This Spanish/Italian film from the pre-Dawn era of undead flesh-eaters is an under-appreciated gem. It tells the story of long-haired hippie George (Italian heartthrob Ray Lovelock) accompanying pretty Londoner Edna (Spanish actress Cristina Galbo) through the countryside in her tiny little English car. Along the way they are attacked by people who just plain don't look right. It's probably because they're reanimated corpses. Obviously. Unfortunately, when the youngsters go to the police, they are immediately suspected of the grisly murders themselves by the youth-hating Inspector (Arthur Kennedy). The Manson murders had just recently been committed so this movie definitely sought to point out the backlash the counterculture felt shortly thereafter, and to offer some kind of revenge against the squares. This movie is noteworthy also for having a number of completely unrelated titles. The original Italian title is "Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti" or "Do Not Speak Ill of the Dead," which no one on screen really does, nor is that the reason they rise. Another title is "Let Sleeping Corpses Lie," which, again, is not something anyone is disagreeing with. I think George and Edna would have happily left the dead fuckers alone the whole time. The most absurd one is "Don't Open the Window," despite there not being a single instance in the film where someone befalls any harm after opening a window. Nor is there a scene where someone opens a window. Nor is there a scene where there's a window. The best title is the "Manchester Morgue" one, even though the main end fight takes place in the Manchester hospital and not its morgue.


V - CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS (1973)
This movie is, to put it mildly, one of the weirdest fucking movies I've ever seen. Long before he made "Porky's," and "Baby Geniuses," director Bob Clark used to make interesting horror movies. The year after this, he made both the slasher archetype "Black Christmas" and another zombie movie "Dead of Night" (aka "Deathdream) about a boy killed in Vietnam who returns home as an decaying bloodsucker. Both are interesting in their own right, but it's his first that is the most notable in my book. It follows an irritating theatre troupe as their leader tries to raise a dead body. They go to a cemetery and play pranks on each other and argue for most of the film as they dig up a body, named Orville, and say some phony magic words. A little over two-thirds of the way into the movie, something unprecedented happens: the other dead bodies in the graveyard begin to rise. The rest of the movie is a genuinely scary and bleak zombies-attacking-a-house story where the annoying people get their comeuppance and Orville has a "coming out party." A remake was in the works until Bob Clark's untimely death from a car accident in 2007.


IV - THE GRAPES OF DEATH (1978)
Director Jean Rollin was known for pornographic vampire films in his native France when he was approached by producer Claude Geudj to make what became this film. It began as a desire to cash in on the American disaster movies like "Earthquake" and "The Towering Inferno," but when finances proved prohibited, they decided to modify the format of a group of people hindered in travelling from point A to point B by various problems (every four minutes) into the horror oeuvre Rollin was used to. The premise is what makes this movie interesting. A certain vineyard is using a hazardous pesticide on its crops which gets made into wine. But instead of just making people sick, drinkers of the vino made from the Grapes of Death start to rot from the inside out, making them mindless and bloodthirsty ghouls who stalk the French countryside. Displaying a good amount of a gore, and even R-rated versions of Rollin's X-rated roots, Les Raisins de le mort is a worthy entry to the non-Romero group.


III - DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE aka CEMETERY MAN (1994)
It's rare to find an understated horror-comedy in any capacity, least of all one from the zombie ilk, but this Italian outing manages to be just that. It's a film full of romance and heartache as well as misunderstandings and silliness, but there's also a fair amount of head shooting and throat-tearing. It's the story of Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) who is the proprietor of the local mortuary/cemetery. This particular cemetery seems to bring people back to life, so on top of all his normal duties, Francesco also has to put the residents back down once they get up. He falls in love with a young widow and in a particularly ill-conceived instance, has sex with her on her husband's grave. Go figure, he gets up and is pretty pissed about this whole thing and bites his wife, forcing Francesco to shoot her before she becomes an undead creature herself. Of course, she didn't die from the bite and he shot her when she was alive. Francesco is wracked with guilt and starts killing the townsfolk BEFORE they die to save him the trouble of dealing with them later. The film ends with probably the bleakest and most existential of finales proving that there really isn't nothing out there but our own little worlds.


II - RE-ANIMATOR (1985)
Part "Frankenstein," part "Braindead," Stuart Gordon's 80s monster classic "Re-Animator" is the perfect mix of grossness and hilarity. One of the themes of these movies I've chosen (with the exception of the previous one) is that the zombification is explained as opposed to the Romero model of having zombies appear due to God knows what. In "Re-Animator," it's all there in the name. This guy, Dr. Herbert West, is TRYING to raise the dead, and breaks all kinds of ethics laws to do it, even resorting to murder. That's how you get the freshest specimens after all. Full of black humor and memorable lines, "Re-Animator" also has one of the most shocking images in all of horror, where a dead body holding its own decapitated head attempts to perform oral sex on a kidnapped co-ed. It's so insane that you wonder why no one thought of it sooner.


I - SHIVERS (1975)
David Cronenberg is often hailed as the king of body horror, which started early with this Canadian horror classic. In "Shivers," also known as "They Came From Within," a semi-mad scientist is experimenting with parasites in an attempt to aid in transplants (?) but really he thinks people have lost touch with their instincts and flesh, so the parasite is actually part aphrodisiac and part venereal disease. He infects his teenage mistress and sets her loose in an enormous ultra-modern apartment complex in Montreal. The effect of the parasite on the host is to create a sex-crazed maniac, hell-bent on spreading the disease to everyone in the vicinity. It's up to a physician and his assistant to stop it before the city is lost to mindless lust. Some of the images from this film were copied by Romero in "Dawn of the Dead," and even though the premise sounds like a porno version of a zombie movie, "Shivers" actually works as a pitch-perfect allegory to the AIDS epidemic, which was just in its infancy back in the 70s.

One of my goals with these lists is not only to entertain but to educate and I would definitely recommend all of these movies to anyone who hasn't yet seen them. You might also notice I didn't include "Return of the Living Dead," which is in many ways the anti-Romero film. The reason is simple. I fucking hate that movie. Don't watch it, it's awful. Happy viewing!

You're welcome.

-Kanderson

It's Over!: A Musing on TV Finales

So many shows are ending this year, by choice or otherwise, that I felt it necessary to address the nature of series finales and how often they are less than satisfying to the fan. Specifically, I'll be like everyone in the known universe and talk about "LOST" because I just watched it.

In this day and age, it's amazing that shows even get a "planned" ending. More often than not, the show gets axed by the network brass after the last episode gets filmed and there's never a proper (or even a rushed) sendoff. It just ends. Take "Firefly," which didn't even get to air all of the episodes it had filmed before getting the boot. Yes, the show was revived for a really good spinoff movie, but one wonders how much more the characters could have accomplished if the series was allowed to progress. Then there are those shows, the bulk of them, that barely get time to develop a fan base before shuffling off to Buffalo. So when a show gets the opportunity to end its own way, on its own terms, it's a pretty special thing.

But it's a double-edged sword. The longer a show goes on and remains popular, it becomes increasingly difficult to end things with the proper amount of gravitas and make all the fans happy AND end the narrative naturally. You also don't want to overstay your welcome. Look at "Heroes." "Heroes" had the opportunity to be one of the best tv-experiences ever. A fantastic 23 episodes and out, but instead it got to big for its own britches and went on for three more awful seasons. It's hard to sustain even the best of concepts. I won't go so far as to say it can be a burden to have a successful and popular show, but it's definitely a tricky place to be in.

Even shows that remain popular and have great finales, like "M*A*S*H" for instance, run the risk of overstaying their welcome. "M*A*S*H" actually lasted longer than the Korean war it was depicting. I almost have more respect for a show that chooses to end while the getting's good. The show might not have as big a cultural impact that way, but it sure as hell would have a bigger thematic impact. It's easier to craft a complete narrative over three seasons than it is over eight.

"LOST" decided its sixth season would be the last, giving it finality and time to craft a proper ending. Now, people will argue forever as to whether it was a "proper" ending, but it was an ending, a definite one. It was ambiguous, granted. But some of the best shows, especially genre shows, end in such a manor and they're talked about still. "St. Elsewhere" ended with the entire series existing within the mind of an autistic boy with a snow globe. "Battlestar Galactica" ended with some kind of parable about how present day Earth is what happened after thousands of years of humans and cylons mating and then we better watch out because we make robots too...or something like that. "Battlestar" is a lot more heavy-handed than it probably could or should have been, but essentially it was effective. Possibly the best, "The Prisoner" ends with our hero, the titular Prisoner, unmasking the fabled "No. 1" to reveal first an ape mask and then his own maniacally cackling face.

"LOST" ended with two storylines, one in the real world and one in the weird sideways universe (which we finally learn the nature of at the end). This satisfies both halves of Campbell's hero's journey. In the Island World, Jack travels the external path, encountering monsters, a cave, certain doom, and his own mortality. In the Sideways World, he's on the internal path, dealing with his father issues and his own faith and issues of failure. This is pretty textbook storytelling, albeit with some curve balls thrown in along the way.

Both journeys end triumphantly, which should satisfy everyone, right? Well, there are also about 900 mysteries the show brings up that don't get addressed, but to be honest, all of that stuff is window dressing when you get down to it. The characters are what mattered. We found out WHAT was happening, we don't really need to know the HOW or the WHY.

This is not to say it was perfect. The episode ended more or less without conflict. Once the ____ _____ was defeated and Jack put the ____ back in the ____, there was next to nothing left to worry about. It sort of felt like the end of summer camp. A lot of buildup to not much fanfare. We all go home and remember the fun we had, but it's basically all too fleeting. In the annals of television, I still think "LOST" will go down as a great sci-fi show with a pretty okay ending. And that's as good as you can hope for from a finale these days.

You're welcome.

Doctor Who: The Colin Baker Years

When we last left the Doctor, he was dying from spectrox toxemia in the end of "The Caves of Androzani." It was 1984 and Peter Davison had decided his third season in the role would be his last. The question again became who would play the eponymous time lord. Producer John Nathan-Turner decided to cast character actor Colin Baker, who had actually played a supporting role in an earlier Peter Davison story. The thinking behind the regeneration this time 'round was to give the fans an entire story at the end of season 21 to get to know Colin Baker before the season break. Thus began arguably the most turbulent time in the show's history.


The idea was to make the sixth incarnation of the character a sharp contrast to the amiable, fatherly, and all-around likable fifth; to make Baker's Doctor one that audiences, and other characters, weren't sure about and then eventually, over the years and years he'd play the part, peel away the outer layers until he becomes more or less what people were used to. The story, titled "The Twin Dilemma," introduced audiences to an arrogant, bi-polar, and ultimately unstable lead character, an attribute given within the narrative as a regenerative crisis. The instability of the character was expressed visually be a loud, clashing costume that is by all accounts the least attractive piece of clothing ever worn on a human.

The rest of the story follows this post-regeneration weirdness, and at one point The Doctor actually physically attacks his companion Peri, only to become aghast at himself when he sees his reflection in a mirror. He then decides to exile himself, and Peri as a result, to a distant rock planet to atone for his ways. The rest of the story is unimportant and frankly pretty bad, as it has something to do with twin boy geniuses who are brainwashed into helping a giant slug move the planet into the path of another planet... and it just goes downhill from there. It is the coupling of the sub-par script with the shocking new direction of the lead character that have caused many to deem this one of the worst episodes in the series' history. In fact, in the Doctor Who Magazine poll of the 200 stories broadcast to that point, "Caves of Androzani," as I mentioned last time, ranked as number 1, "The Twin Dilemma" which immediately follows is ranked 200.

The first full season with Baker 2 saw a change in format, going from four 25-minute episodes to two 45-minute episodes comprising each story. While this difference did offer a great deal more time to develop individual characters or ideas, it cut down the episode-ending cliffhangers which had been a staple of the series since its inception. Another change was that the level of violence was upped considerably. Blood was actually shown in a few scenes, which was very limited prior, and The Doctor himself actually causing the demise of some enemies. This fit the new characterization Baker was employing, with a much more passionate Doctor often leaping before he looked, but this did garner even more concern from censorship groups claiming that the show was too scary for children and should no longer be allowed to be so.


This season also saw a marked lowering in both production cost and quality of scripts. John Nathan-Turner continued his decree that established Who or sci-fi writers should not be commissioned and new, fresh writers be given a chance, much to the chagrin of script editor Eric Saward who had been with the show since Davison began. A show always known for its low-budget effects was now at its lowest which, even to fans of the show and the genre, makes it increasingly hard to stay committed to the premise. Saward tried everything to make the season worth watching, bringing back old favorite villains like the Cybermen and the Daleks, and even an appearance by second Doctor Patrick Troughton. Even so, the ratings started to slip slightly, and the network brass desired to make new programs. So, despite still being quite popular, the BBC decided to cancel Doctor Who at the end of season 22 in 1985.

That is until JNT and the fans started petitions to keep the show around, leading to the eventual agreement that the show be placed on an 18 month hiatus, after which time it would return to its 25-minute format and the number of episodes be cut from the usual 26 (or 13 longer episodes) to 14 episodes, making it the shortest season of Doctor Who ever. The shakeup more or less stopped for the moment, though, as neither Saward nor Nathan-Turner, nor any of the cast, were fired or replaced. This very much seemed like a short reprieve rather than a full pardon, and Saward and company decided to depict the show being on trial for its life with a season-long saga of the Doctor on trial himself.


"Trial of a Time Lord" ran the length of season 23 and consisted of a frame story wherein the Doctor is taken out of time by his people, the Time Lords, and put on trial as a menace. The story-proper was split into three with each normal adventure being played as evidence at the trial. The final two episodes would tie up the trial storyline and wrap up the season. Longtime Who writer and script editor during the best period in the show's history, Robert Holmes, was brought on to write the first four episodes and help Saward write the last two. Unfortunately, Holmes took ill before the script for the final episode could be written. John Nathan-Turner did not agree with Holmes' idea of ending the season with a cliff-hanger and forced Saward to change it. As he was very good friends with Robert Holmes, who actually passed away during the skirmish, Eric Saward refused to change anything and subsequently left the series in a huff of bad blood. Nathan-Turner asked husband-and-wife team of Pip and Jane Baker to write the last episode, having just written the third story of the season.

The ending wrapped up the season in a lovely little bow and ensured Doctor Who would remain on the tv schedule at least for another year. However, the BBC decreed that Colin Baker should not return to the role for a third season. It was believed that much of the backlash the series had received over the passed two years was due directly to Baker, which is unfair to my mind. While he isn't my favorite Doctor, he does grow on you and he is quite good at playing the arrogant yet honorable blow-hard the character became. I thought full-well before I started that Colin Baker would be my least favorite Doctor, and while he doesn't rate nearly as highly as Davison or Pertwee, he served the purpose necessary and did so admirably.

As stated, the Colin Baker years were pretty light on good stories, in fact only one was ranked in the top 100 in the DWM poll, but still I will recommend three with the caveat that they are not probably for people unfamiliar with the show. Watch some Davison first, then check these out.


First, "Vengeance on Varos," wherein the Doctor and Peri arrive in a cave-world on which the people vote for everything by watching television. They vote whether political prisoners should live or die, and indeed if the president proposes new legislation, he is himself executed via public electrocution if he is voted down. It hearkens back to Roman times with gladiators subject to the whim of the people, and public shows of violence were common entertainment. There's also a really great villain in the form of Sil, a small reptilian slug creature who has the real control of the city.


Second, "The Two Doctors," the only three-part story of the bunch. It features the return of Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor and his longtime companion Jamie McCrimmond, played again by Frazier Hines. While the actual story is a bit thin here, with genetic reassignment and alien conquerers, it's great to see Troughton again as the Doctor. He's a personal favorite of mine and I will discuss the Second Doctor at length in my next "Who-Review."


The third, and best of the bunch, is "Revelation of the Daleks," written by Eric Saward himself. It is a twisty story that sees two rival factions of Daleks, one ruled by the Dalek Emperor, the other by their mad-scientist creator Davros. The Doctor actually takes more of a secondary role in this story as there are many many side characters, including a pair of assassins, an all-seeing DJ, and the dastardly proprietor of a funeral home. The plot is pretty hard to describe without going on for awhile, but needless to say, it's good fun with the Daleks and probably the best writing of the entirety of C. Baker's run.

Poor Colin Baker was in the role for such a short time that all of his episodes have been released on dvd. "The Trial of a Time Lord" set includes some really great commentaries and documentaries that both enlighten and entertain.

Next up for me with Doctor Who... I don't know. The Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, has barely any stories released and I don't feel it prudent to write a review based on having not seen everything available. So, next we're going back to the Second Doctor, who also saw some unfortunate happenings with his output, though not in the same fashion as the Sixth. Until next time.

You're welcome.
-Kanderson

Teasers

Hi all, just writing to let everyone know that there are going to be some exciting new things here on the ol' Embrace Your Nerd blog. Still getting the details worked out, but the site will be expanding and bringing in new factors. Vague enough for you? Just a taste for now. Get psyched!

You're welcome.
-Kanderson

Top 6: Remakes That Don't Suck

Without question, I think remakes are awful. Not necessarily the quality of the film itself, but the sheer audacity, NAY!, the balls to deem it prudent to remake a movie that is already good. Especially nowadays, no movie made since the invention of cinema is safe from the money-hungry clutches of the uncreative. I am not looking forward to this weekend's "A Nightmare on Elm Street," despite enjoying the remakes of "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th." The reason is, most remakes just pale in comparison, I'm looking at you, Gus Van Sant's "Psycho." This all being said, there have been a few examples of the remake being as good (if not better) than the original. These are the top six remakes that are okay.


VI - 3:10 TO YUMA (2007)
Fifty years after Delmer Daves' minor classic, James Mangold did a slam-bang action-rich version of the story of a poor farmer charged with transporting a wanted criminal to a station to make sure he boards the eponymous train. Starring famous angry men, Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, the 2007 remake of 3:10 succeeds in making a western that speaks to modern audiences. Not since "Unforgiven" has there been such an enjoyable entry to the genre. It upholds the western film trope of honor among men, even enemies, while still having fairly raucous action sequences that the original didn't attempt. Mangold does pretty drastically change the ending, for good or bad, that makes the film an interesting counterpoint to its source material.


V - THE DEPARTED (2006)
Most people probably didn't know that the Oscar winner was a remake of a Hong Kong think-piece when it came out, but it is. I actually saw the original, "Infernal Affairs" long before "The Departed" came out, picking it up at Blockbuster when I was in the throes of my John Woo-inspired Asian action phase. I was slightly disappointed as it wasn't a double-pistoler, but it definitely had something about it, as the two lead characters, a cop posing as a criminal and a criminal posing as a cop, face their moral, professional, and personal dilemmas. Martin Scorsese's fantastic redo has the same amount of pathos, but what makes it better in my opinion is that it fleshes out all of the supporting characters into much more memorable and indelible figures, specifically Jack Nicholson's mob boss character who is present in the Chinese film, but is much less defined. I went to see "The Departed" three times in the theaters, so yeah, I like it.


IV - THE THING (1982)
John Carpenter's favorite filmmaker is Howard Hawkes and has actually remade two Hawkes films: "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976) is essentially a remake of "Rio Bravo" (1959) and this film which is a remake of Hawkes' production "The Thing From Another World" (1951). Carpenter dropped a reference to the first "Thing" in "Halloween" and a few years later was given the opportunity to mount a remake. As fun as the earlier film is, Carpenter's film eclipses it by heightening the sense of isolation, the paranoia, and of course the viscera. The special effects by Rob Bottin absolutely make the film what it is. The creature can look like anything and can assimilate anyone, evidenced at the end when it manifests as six people and pieces of a couple dogs. Compare that with James Arness in a head application from the original. Also, Kurt Russell is a badass. Nuff said.


III - THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)
The samurai genre from Japan is very closely tied to America's wild west. They both depict men of action displaying their own codes of moral conduct in a relatively lawless environment. I was tempted to put "A Fistful of Dollars" which remade "Yojimbo" on here, but I decided to go with the earliest example. "Seven Samurai" is one of the greatest movies ever made. It's an epic by every definition of the word. It's also 3hrs 27min long. John Sturges' western is not as fantastic a movie as its predecessor, but it's very accessible and it's a great deal of fun. It is also one of the first examples of a heroic team. Up to this point, the western hero was a loner and an outsider who has to save a town/woman/family/horse/whatever, but "Magnificent Seven" gives you seven such characters to choose from, each with their own backstory and personality. It starred Yul Brynner and started the careers of universal cool guys Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn.


II - DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004)
The idea of this seemed blasphemous. George A. Romero made a modern classic in 1978 with his adventurous satire against consumer culture and for some unknown music video director (Zack Snyder) to touch it went against everything I held dear. And then I saw it. While not as thoughtful or profound as the original, Snyder did a phenomenal job of taking Romero's original concept and making it about family and friendship, as well as making it a horrifying ride. For me, the film works best as an action movie that happens to be about zombies, rather than a "scary" horror film. It's full of gun fights, explosions, chases, and running around. It's a fun romp through a post-apocalyptic America. Plus, it turned me on to Richard Cheese's brand of lounge covers of metal and rap songs. So thanks.


I - THE MALTESE FALCON (1941)
You might think such an old film couldn't possibly be a remake, but you'd be wrong. John Huston's classic noir flick (arguably the first in the movement) that stars Humphrey Bogart as private eye Sam Spade was actually the third attempt at making Dashiell Hammett's novel to the screen, made once in 1931 and again in 1936. Both were disappointments, but the last one was an unqualified success. I haven't actually seen the first two so I can't compare all of them, but I will say that this is the instance where remaking something works best. Why should GOOD movies be remade? Why not remake ones that suck or fail for one reason or another? Maybe one day there'll be a remake of "Howard the Duck" or "Teen Wolf" that improves upon the underwhelming performances of the originals? I'd be all right with that. Let "Maltese Falcon" be the model; if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but if it is broke, fix the shit out of it until it's good.

You're welcome.
-Kanderson