The Fractal Hall Journal

Hello, readers, and a happy new year to all. A proper one this time, rather than the perfunctory one from the other day.

Plenty of ups and downs over the past few months all over the place, which is a bit of an understatement. I certainly can’t remember a New Year starting so, you know, unpredictably. Where the Journal’s concerned, I think I’ve just about got ahead of the problems that kicked off in November. Unsurprisingly, blogging’s a habit like any other, and you get out of it after a few weeks of not doing it.

Part of the problem is trying to find somewhere to start. It’s not like plenty of things haven’t kicked off in the realms of the nerdish, from whatever the heck is going on in comics to the inauguration of perhaps the most important public figure on the planet: the 11th Doctor.

I’m really looking forward to Matt Smith on Who while dreading Tennant’s departure, and for whatever reason Smith’s arrival is causing a lot of- discomfort, I suppose is the word. Which is a good thing. The Doctor should never be a completely comfortable character, and Tennant’s made it very easy for the audience to be comfortable with him.

On a slightly related point, do you know the number one thing I fucking detest about the internet? When the very first thing any commentator feels the need to add onto any post, be it blog, twitter or fucking Facebook status, is a dismissive comment about the content.

For example:

Jimmy Fanboy is excited about matt smith as who!!!

John McFucknuts says: Eh, I don’t like him. Won’t be watching.

You know what I mean. A terse, pointless and uncorroborated one liner that adds nothing to the conversation. A little dig that says more about someone’s need to be noticed than to actually contribute. The Doctor thing was just the most obvious recent example.

I don’t mind disagreement. Not at all. By all means, should anyone disagree with me on anything, well, that’s why Comments are On. But at least try and make it look like a conversation. Facebook and its ilk are the worst perpetrators, because if you post a blog you’re asking for interaction. If you’re just telling the world what you’re happy about, it seems really mean that the first thing so many of your Fake Internet Friends want to do is kill your mood.

I know, I know. Mean? The internet? Heavens forefend.

I’m reminded of two parallel examples, one recent and one from a while ago that annoyed me so much it’s stayed with me. MightyGodKing notes that a drum and base track- Propane Nightmares by Pendulum- would be good to use in a trailer for a Flash movie. My first thought on listening to the track was to disagree. Not to jump into comments and let the world know that with a one sentence dismissal, mind, just to disagree. I don’t like drum and base, and I don’t really like the track.

But after listening to a while, I found myself agreeing with him. He’s right, it would do the job perfectly. And I found the song growing on me a bit. That kind of thing isn’t my cup of tea, but I can appreciate the merit of a piece of work that’s had some skill applied to it.

John Scalzi once posted a YouTube clip of Travis Barker overlaying drums onto the somewhat duff Soulja Boy track Crank That (incidentally, Trigg, if you’re reading this I meant to send you this link ages ago.) I like R’n'B even less than drum and base, and I’ve never been that big a fan of Blink-182, but even so the Barker video is brilliant. It’s a fantastic example of a different spin the application of specific talent can put on something.

Needless to say, the comments on the posts are a list of banal denials and disagreements. I don’t know how Scalzi does it, incidentally. It must be like having Statler and fucking Waldorf appended to everything you write.

I didn’t really want the first post back to be so negative, but it’s got on my nerves recently and I needed to get it off my chest. Expect tomorrow’s post to be a little bit brighter.

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Well that was a close one, readers. Turns out I didn’t have Ebola Gulf-A after all, but whatever I did have has burned out my blogging mojo, because I’ve started writing this post four times now, and haven’t managed to get further than the first hundred words. Let’s see how I do this time.

I mean, it’s not like there’s a shortage of things to talk about. Like Russell T. Davies’ new book (well, collection of emails), “The Writer’s Tale”. I’ve read the first couple of chapters of this particularly heavy tome, and so far it’s been fascinating. As well as having some candid information about the nuts and bolts of getting Doctor Who made, because it’s made up of the typed back-and-forth between him and Benjamin Cook it’s almost like going through someone else’s inbox. It’s particularly interesting how similar his writing here is to his demeanour in television and print interviews. If nothing else, the man is exceptionally enthusiastic about damn near everything. If you’re a Whovian of any stripe, you really need to read this.

I was going to do a bit on violence in comics, and in popular culture generally, but to be honest people’s reactions to the subject (sometimes valid, sometimes not) have convinced me to shelve it until I can think a bit more clearly about it.

I will say this, though: the phrase “torture porn” has been thrown around a bit in recent years. In some ways, depending on what exactly we’re talking about, I think it’s a misnomer. I mean, I know I’ve used the phrase as a criticism in the past, and to be honest in retrospect I think I was wrong. What it comes down to is that the creators of either the Hostel films or the Saw series didn’t write them to get people off. They just didn’t. Yet that’s what the “porn” tag suggests.

Horror fiction has a very specific function. I am absolutely certain we get attracted to darker types of fiction, be it Silence of the Lambs, Dexter, or even Lovecraft, not because we want to actually eat human flesh/slice people up/summon slimy tentacled nethergods to consume our very Reality, but because it’s a relatively safe way of facing our worst fears, and our own inevitable death. It’s no different to the way comedy makes us face our own pomposity, absurdity or prejudice, and for that reason it doesn’t really surprise me that comedic films and shows get criticised almost as much as slasher flicks do.

Let me put it this way: the Saw franchise is hugely profitable. They are relatively consistant in quality (regardless of what initial value anyone may place on that quality, and besides, compare Saw IV to, say, Halloween IV, and tell me the series doesn’t buck the usual nosedive trend of endless horror sequels), cheap to make, and every film so far has made over $100 million dollars world wide. Leaving the DVD sales to the side for a moment, that means at least 10 million people on the planet have seen at least one of the films. Does anyone honestly want to tell me that these 10 million people wanted to see it because they get off on the violence? Of course not. They went because they wanted to be scared, and that isn’t the function of pornography.

When it comes down to it, people like to be scared. And that kind of catharsis isn’t necessarily damaging.

Wow, this week’s Google hits are going to be interesting.

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Secret Invasion: Fuck me, is it still going on? Haven’t they invaded by now? Isn’t this better characterised as Secret Occupation? Secret War Of Attrition?

Doctor Who at the Hugo Awards: Meant to write about this at the time, but forgot to, and now I can’t recall if I had anything interesting or longish to say about it, so I’ll keep it brief. Firstly, after watching all the Battlestar episodes to date, Moffat’s Who episodes beating Ron Moore’s show for three years running is a spectacular achievement, because Battlestar is some of the best television writing full stop, never mind in SF. The Pegasus episodes in particular, because that stuff is very, very good. And very, very harrowing. However, the Razor TV movie didn’t hold together quite as well as other episodes in Series 3 (regardless of apparent fan reaction to that series), so wasn’t that much of a challenge to Blink.

Secondly, the real challenge to Moffat’s episode was actually Paul Cornell’s Human Nature/Family Of Blood two-parter, and it really should’ve won. I mean, Blink was funny and brilliant, but Cornell’s just pips it, thanks in no small part to David Tennant and Jessica Hynes (Daisy in Spaced, of course), who were extraordinary.

And speaking of the Hugos, it must have been a poor year for film if Stardust was really the best long-form genre flick from ‘07. It was good, but Sunday afternoon family film good, not award-winning good. Other recent winners include Pan’s Labyrinth, Serenity and The Lord of the Rings (all of them), and it’s nowhere near as good as them. Hell, it isn’t even in the same league as recent nominees, like The Prestige and Spirited Away.

And to think Transformers wasn’t even nominated. Scandalous.

Knight Rider: And you can bet this show is never getting nominated either. I love that Mustang, but to be brutally honest the pilot was shit and the series looks worse. The thing is, this:

A big part of season one is going to be why Kitt is here with this group, why is he learning, and why is an artificial intelligence in this car. There is a bigger mythology to it and what I wanted to do was bring some from the original and update it. It’s been 25 years since Knight Industries was seen so what’s happened to them and where have they gone? [from an io9 spoiler post]

Sounds like a good idea in the right hands. But oh dear Lord are these hands the wrongest hands imaginable.

An observation of possible interest to the kind of nerd that even other nerds like to pick on: I’ve finally finished the big chunk of work I mentioned the other day, and it’s the first completed thing written entirely on my Linux-infused laptop.

Those who’ve been hanging round the Hall for a while may recall a few months ago I attempted to salvage my utterly out-of-date yet faithful and broadly functional old warhorse, a Thinkpad that got me through University. I didn’t really want to get rid of it and have to shovel out money for a new one, because it was only really going to be used as a word processor, and I wanted to see if Linux really was getting more user friendly.

The main problem with the plan was that the hardware’s a little too old to run Ubuntu, which I’ve been told is the dead simple Linux. Fluxbuntu and Xubuntu both ran on it, but the former wouldn’t recognise a USB memory stick and I didn’t really want to have to fudge around that much to get it working. Xubuntu ran really slowly at first, but I managed to set up some swap space on the hard disk that largely took care of the problem. It doesn’t really load any faster than XP did (old system, though, so not surprising) but it certainly hibernates and shuts down quickly, and there’s no sudden slow-downs or apparently random accessing of the hard drive, which is practically worth the bother on its own.

The USB stick works fine, which is the most important thing because printing duties will have to be done by transferring the files over to the Windows PC. I can’t be bothered faffing around with getting an internet or network connection on the laptop, and I think I’m better off without the distraction. Besides, I think the AbiWord writing package is just about all the creaky old system can handle.

To be honest, I wouldn’t call the Linux packages that will run on this relatively old system user friendly at all. I’ve just about got enough knowledge to do the minimum of what I need to do, but that’s it. Unless the more modern Linux packages are more user-friendly by a good distance (like, light-years distance) then I can’t see Linux ever being a realistic choice for most. But you never know, they might be.

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Congratulations to Chum Rob on a new addition to his family. Not a child, oh no. No miniature monkeys. He’s also managed the elegant trick of naming his cat something that’s inordinately, fabulously geeky yet unlikely to confuse the unenlightened masses. Seriously, you wouldn’t believe the amount of conversations I’ve had that go along the lines of “No, Galactus, as in- well, have you seen the second Fantastic Four…? Look. We just call him Gali.”

I double-dare him to get another furball and name it Tegan. Or even better, a chihuahua called Adric.

OMFG, I hear you all say, pronouncing the acronym perfectly. He’s talking about the damned cats again. Yup, another slow day I’m afraid. Have another picture:

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Today’s Arthurian Snark, from Wikipedia (I know, I know):

“…[H]e was a peerless warrior who functioned as the monster-hunting protector of Britain from all internal and external threats. Some of these are human threats, such as the Saxons he fights in the Historia Brittonum, but the majority are supernatural, including giant cat-monsters, destructive divine boars, dragons, dogheads, giants and witches.”

So, would you like a film about this Arthur, or the guy from the castle once again going off hunting for a carpenter’s drinking recepticle while his cock of a best mate knobs his wife? I bring this up because BBC Wales are currently filming a new series which is essentially the Adventures of Teen Arthur and Teen Merlin, i.e. SmallCamelotVille. The Welsh: We Do It To Ourselves, We Really Do.

Speaking of superhero films (and in doing so now, this post becomes the 100th entry into the Journal’s “Comics” category. Huzzah!), as we have been doing a lot recently, one I’ve not mentioned here is next year’s Billy Batson and the Legend of Shazam, in danger of not featuring on anyone’s radar. Captain Marvel is a bit of a difficult one to translate to the screen, I would imagine. On the other hand, I actually thing that the title sounds kind of right, has the correct weight of playfulness and bluster. I think it might absolutely work as an 80s kid’s adventure type film, like a mix of The Goonies and Big. What absolutely isn’t going to work is a Hollywood horror remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds. Just when you think the film industry can’t possibly get any stupider.

Battlestar spoilers ahead.

Just watched the third series episode with the strike on the fuel refinery ship. I was skeptical at first, because, you know, Americans talking about labour relations doesn’t usually bode well. Baltar, the closest the series has at the moment to Amoral Irredeemable Baddie, gets cast as the Marx figure, writing influential revolutionary pamphlets from jail, which struck me as a little less than even-handed.

However, the episode really did win me over, stressing the appalling conditions the workers had to operate in, and how intrenched the class system is becoming in the exiled fleet. I was expecting a full-on condemnation of industrial action, which was somewhat prejudicial of me, because the writers did a brilliant job of balancing up the different sides of the debate.

The heart of dilemma, of course, is the strike eventually being led by Chief Tyrol. He had to act, but he’s military personnel. More than that, he’s military personnel during events that could lead to the total annihilation of the human race. The fuel workers have to work in terrible conditions, but it isn’t for the benefit of, for example, the bank accounts of the upper class, but the survival of humanity. Yet, as the show makes clear, it’s only the working class who get the shitty jobs.

For a while, I thought they were going to do something to really screw up Admiral Adama, but the resolution was just perfect. Adama had to make it clear to the Chief that he couldn’t tolerate orders being construed as optional, while at the same time agreeing to meet the worker’s demands. Sure, he comes across as an overbearing authoritarian, but that’s in keeping with his history and his current role, and besides, the best thing about the series is how every single character has deeply disturbing flaws as well as virtues.

I notice some online chatter about how the latter half of the third season wasn’t taken very well by the fans, because in an attempt to draw in more viewers they slowed down on the overarching stories in favour of done-in-one standalones. Now, I don’t get the problem. I’ve really enjoyed the standalones, and I think they’ve been necessary for a number of reasons.

The series has been a non-stop rollercoaster since the original mini-series. There’s so much going on I think it benefitted from a little breathing room. It certainly hasn’t been any less intense, dealing with themes of religious persecution, racism, social class, murder, betrayal, and a fuck-ton more. Also, because of the unrelenting pace up until now, it’s been essential to understand who the characters are through a series of episodes that have dealt with cast members who’s characters aren’t always explored, or who’s screen time gets split up into the odd scene here and there between the action sequences. Helo, Starbuck, Apollo and Tyrol in particular have all been served well by this.

Also, actor James Callis putting on what sounded like a stereotypical Yorkshire farmer accent to represent Baltar’s unsophisticated origins was a bit of a surprise. They should shove the cast of Heartbeat on one of the ships to represent diversity, as if one of the Twelve Colonies were Planet The North. Of course, as the Ninth Doctor once said, lots of planets have a North.

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It turns out that Britain really is in the grip of a UFO invasion. At least, it is according to the Torygraph (via Warren Ellis). Now, I’m pretty sure the (ahem) “quality” daily isn’t owned by Murdock. Or, for that matter, Marvel. And they’re usually pretty hostile towards the BBC. So we can rule out advertising stunts for the X-Files, Secret Invasion and Doctor Who, respectively. Strange shit is indeed afoot (or aflight), although I haven’t heard of much in the way of abductions, implantations or probings. At least, no more than usual for Cardiff on a Saturday night.

The rest of the papers are getting in on the action, too. The Guardian recently featured a ghost-busting weekend in Ludlow (Ludlow?) as a recommended activity holiday. The Indie’s ran an article on ten scary tales from folklore, and if we hop back to the Telegraph for a sec, we’ve got Civil War ghosts showing up on camera.

Man, I could eat this stuff up with a spoon. I should turn the Journal into a Paranormablog.

The Independent article is particularly interesting to me because it’s written by Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson, who authored the absolutely indispensable book The Lore of the Land, one of the most comprehensive volumes of English folklore I’ve ever seen. It was recommended by Neil Gaiman on his site a couple of years ago, and it’s one of the best suggestions I’ve ever got from the internet. Yes, even better than instructions on how to use Mentos to blow up Diet Coke. The article includes extracts from The Penguin Book Of Ghosts, so you can bet that just jumped to the top of the buy list. Sorry, hardback collection of The Rise And Fall Of The Shi’Ar Empire.

One of my major ambitions has been to contribute to a great work of reference (stop giggling at the back, I’m being serious. You all know this site is an official nerd-haven). I’d love to tackle a book like the one above that dealt with Welsh folklore. Even though the whole lack of focus and short attention span thing may well get in the way.

The Haunting Breaks mentioned in the Guardian sound pretty cool too. Long term readers may recall a trip to Edinburgh I mentioned here last year. We actually went on one of the Edinburgh ghost tours, into one of the vaults beneath the streets. It was pretty effing scary, even for people not as easily terrified as I am.

The only problem with the tour was the vague worry that an actor would jump out on the tour group for a cheap scare. It didn’t happen, which I was glad for, because you don’t pay your money for a ghost train, you want to get creeped out by spooky stories, stone circles and dark rooms. The whole point of going is for the chance of maybe seeing a real ghost, and cheap tricks would have really soured the experience. Then I found out not long ago from a mate who lives in Edinburgh that some of the tours do have “jumpers” on them, which is seriously disappointing.

Returning to the Telegraph one more time, Archaeologists are planning on opening a long-sealed chamber beneath a Mexican pyramid. I don’t know about anyone else, but with all the weird shit above, is this a fantastic idea? I mean, I’m jumpy enough about the Large Hadron Collider as it is, but after watching The Mist, I’m somewhat concerned about the consequences of anything that may lead to tentacled insectile monstrocities roaming over the planet.

In other, lighter news, and as a palate cleanser to the end of the world as we know it, I caught Kung Fu Panda the other day. Damn, it’s a great film, way better than any of the Shreks or the Cars or the Monster Houses we’ve been plagued with recently. It may well be my favouritest CGI cartoon ever, although that may change as soon as this Friday, what with Wall-E’s arrival on these shores. And impressive CGI aside, I’d actually have rather seen the entire film done in the stylised animation form that the initial dream sequence was made with. The best thing about the movie, and I know it’s been said by many people before but it bears repeating, is that it’s a genuinely great action film, as well as being hilarious. Seriously, the bad guy’s escape from prison was absolutely riveting. Speaking of which- Lovejoy as the voice of an evil snow leopard? Who saw that one coming?

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A bit of pluggin’, first. Brothers Paul and Mike have the premier edition of Pipe Dream up for download, or available on dried squished tree-pulp (for those within a flying saucer flight’s distance of Cardiff) from the Comic Guru, South Wales’ finest comic shop. Also, internet-chum Mick Trimble has a new website for he and Andy Winter’s Septic Isle. Head on over to both and share the Internet Love.

No, not that kind of Internet Love. Stop- stop doing that. Please.

Some things of note:

Fellow Travellers

Thanks to Blackout10 (so named, I assume, because his/her mother is just that big a fan of the Transformers movie, and who can blame her?) for letting me know about Mulder’s Big Adventure, a site that goes where the Fractal Hall fears to, by writing a post on every single individual X-Files episode. Stay strong, folks. Stay strong.

Halting State by Charles Stross.

Read and enjoyed very much, highly recommended to everyone. Even though if you’re nerdy enough to read a blog about nerdy stuff and enclined to like Stross’ work, you probably know about this already.

The hook here is that it’s written entirely in second person present tense, like the old text-based adventure computer games (”You walk into a large room. An Orc runs towards you with an unfeasably large axe…”). Even though you’d think it would be a little jarring, it’s very easy to get into the flow. It’s particularly nostalgic for those of us who spent way too much time with a Commodore 64 back in the olden days, but I don’t think it’s a requirement. That said, I’d be interested to see whether the novel’s appeal is a little too narrow, or if it’s broad enough to spread beyond the tech crowd.

The only thing that was a little disjointed about the book, and this really is completely subjective, was fitting into the mindset of the Edinburgh police detective who’s one of the three main protagonists. I’ve just started reading through all Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels again (four down, eleventy-million to go), and switching to a very different take on Scottish law enforcement did set off a bit of mental dischord. Rebus vs. Virtual Reality doesn’t bear thinking about.

They Impregnate Horses With Acid-Blooded Chestburster Embryos, Don’t They?

There’s an expensive “figurine” coming out, one of those prestige pieces of tat that, when given pride of place on your coffee table, convince your family that you’re completely off your rocker. And that’s before they see the price tag.

A Predator riding an Alien horse.

Seriously, that’s just laughable. I mean, who on Earth is going to buy that?

I mean honestly, I-

I really, really want one.

sob.

Doctor Who, OMFG

By now, I’ll have seen the finale to the most recent series of Who. Am I disappointed? Is my mind blown? Have the Beeb really kept a hee-uge twist from being spoiled by ravenous internet speculation? Well, I don’t know because I’m writing this on the Thursday before. I will say the wait from the end of last Saturday’s episode has been excrutiating.

The most recent series has confirmed that I’m never, ever reading about Doc on the internet ever again. While I don’t think the series has had any episodes that are as good as the standouts from previous years, I think it’s been a lot more consistant as a whole. Which seems to be completely different to the view of damn near anyone else. Of course, Who fandom is jam-packed with crazies so I shouldn’t really be surprised, but still, people just seem hell-bent on despising something that, overall, is really, really good.

Well, that was eloquent. Best move on.

The Internet: What’s it all about, eh?

I was reading an article somewhere (I forget where, but probably offline) discussing the lack of effect the internet actually has out in meatspace. It struck me that the problem with undestanding why internet phenomena appears to have little effect is its distributed nature. We try and Z it according to values we’ve grown familiar with in the pre-internet era. Something’s only a hit out in monkeyspace if it’s bigger than the Beatles. Online, on the other hand, doesn’t really help the kind of thing that’s going to go global in the old sense. But it does allow for the distribution of niche products and interests that wouldn’t otherwise get any kind of exposure.

Sure, Snakes on a Plane wasn’t a Star Wars level hit (then again, Snakes on a Plane wasn’t actually any good, which may have been the controlling factor), but if you think the internet isn’t changing anything, then you should go and ask the Penny Arcade guys about that. Or Jonathan Coulton. Both are the definition of niche interests, and yet are able to make a living in a system that didn’t exist even ten years ago, and is still largely a mystery to most of the planet.

I had a point here, but I forget what it was. This thinking is hardly anything new, and others express the point far better than I could. I suppose what got me thinking about this is the idea that what the internet isn’t particularly good at is directing a huge number of fleshlings towards a single product they can all agree on as being brilliant, not in the same way that, I don’t know, television was able to do back when there were only a handful of channels. Instead, you get a far smaller amount of people finding something they love that they would never have known to have existed under any previous system.

You know, like Predators riding Alien horses.

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The Unicorn and the Wasp

The weakest episode of the current Who so far, but that isn’t to say that there wasn’t anything to enjoy in it. The Doctor’s detox scene should have been naff, but I thought Tennant overplayed it just right to make it pretty funny. Well, I laughed, anyway. The good news is that the next two episodes are written by the brilliant Steven Moffat. The bad news is we’re going to have to wait two weeks for it because of the bloody Eurovision Song Contest.

And as we’re talking about BBC Wales’ finest, I’ve been thinking about the end of the last series, and some of the criticism levelled at it. And the more I think about it, the more I like it. Thing is, I like all of the mythic, mysterious, alien qualities they give the Doctor sometimes, in particular the events that highlight not only how inhuman he is, but also suggest that he’s a power in the universe even beyond his status as a Time Lord, renegade, Last-Of or otherwise.

The Sylvester McCoy years were jammed full of this (take Curse of Fenric: a chess game with an ancient evil, with pieces carved from dried desert bone), but that kind of spin isn’t difficult to see in earlier incarnations. The Master’s speech, for example, fits this perfectly. And there’s something epic about the concept of Martha Jones travelling a conquered Earth, giving people hope by telling them tales of the Doctor, and then ensuring their faith is amplified through the Master’s psychic network and you know what, writing it out like that does make it sound kind of silly. But no more or less absurd than the pseudoscience of the rest of the series, or most of SF for that matter.

Gravity/Bloodstream by Tess Gerritsen

Gerritsen was a hugely popular crime writer while I was at Waterstones, although I never got round to reading her stuff at the time. But I’m willing to give her books a try at the bargain price of three quid for a two-book omnibus in Tesco.

Gravity is more of a Michael Crichton-type thriller, about the release of a deadly (aren’t they always?) infection on the International Space Station. And it is actually pretty thrilling. And foul, in a squishy-fleshy-autopsy kind of way. And like Crichton’s work, it’s very much science fiction, but it wouldn’t sell as many copies if that’s what it was marketed as. So it isn’t. Most gruesome bit: after a moving scene between an infected woman who knows she’s going to die and her lover, she starts to have a fit, chomping down on his hand and forcing him to, essentially, cave her face in to get his hand loose. And hello there those of you joining us from questionable Google searches. Like I said, squishy-fleshy-autopsy.

The most interesting parts involve the medical science. Gerritsen has a medical background which adds to the authenticity of those scenes, but also highlights the lack of technical detail of spaceflight. Then again, it’s not exactly her home ground. And besides, too much detail would slow the book’s brisk pace, and believe me it’s a very brisk, easy read.

I’m about halfway through Bloodstream, the second book in the omnibus. This one’s a more straightforward crime/medical drama, and is a little more pedestrian because of it. The characters seem more wooden and a lot less interesting, and some of the events that paint a few of the antagonists as pompous arrogant evildoers strain belief a little, which has to be clumsy considering I was just saying how easily I bought the whole Doctor Who psychic satellite thing.

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The Doctor drops a sprog, and the internet shits itself.

Spoilers, by the way. Not directed at the shitting oneself comment.

This episode really showed up one of the problems that internet-users experience as opposed to people who just follow shows week to week. The whole online-interaction thing changes the nature of entertainment, after all.

Knowing that Who fans can be particularly, what’s the right phrase? Prone to shitting themselves, makes it even more hilarious that the show’s been resurrected by Russell T. Davies, a man with very little regard for screaming internet nutjobs. While the BBC have been quite switched-on with regard to using internet tools as part of New Who (fake websites, games, you know the drill), they’ve been very careful to ensure that the series can be followed by damn near anyone and that you don’t need the extra bits to enjoy the show. In fact, I’m starting to think that just following it week to week is the best way to go about it.

The identity of the Doctor’s daughter has, apparently, been the subject of a lot of discussion amongst fans, many of whom see the ‘cloning’ explanation for her existence, revealed even before the credits of the episode ran, was a bit of a cheat. The problem is, by now there isn’t going to be an explanation that doesn’t disappoint. If you’ve been kicking around all the different possibilities for months, all the possible angles will have been covered and you’re just not going to enjoy it. Take Lost. Even if the final explanation is a pure gobbet of God-exuded genius, you can bet hordes of people will descend on the message boards to bitch about it.

I liked the episode, myself. I liked the science-fictioneyness of the setting, and the twist about how long the conflict had been taking place. I thought the fish-faced aliens were awesome. And Jenny Who wasn’t so annoying that I wanted to jab glass into my face. This makes the episode a hit for me. Even though I wouldn’t point to any of the new series’ episodes as being better than the best of previous years, I’m certain they’ve been the most consistantly good. There isn’t one that I’d consider to be a New Earth level duffer, and I’ve found at least one thing in every episode to raise it above the mediocre.

I’d heard about the Doctor’s daughter thing ages ago, but didn’t give much thought to it beyond, I don’t know, wondering if she’d turn out to be Susan’s mother. But I kind of guessed not. Of course, if you ignored all internet chatter and just watched the programme, you’d have only learned about it in the teaser at the end of the previous episode, and it would have been just intriguing enough for you to tune in the following week. Which is kind of the point, really.

Short review: Just enjoy the ride.

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A lot of fragmentary thought round these parts this week.

Popping back to the Doctor again, how random was it that Mike from the Young Ones is playing the Sontaran commander? Weird. I wonder who they’ll get to play Davros.

It shouldn’t really be a surprise that it appears to be the Dalek’s creator who’s the major bad guy in Series 4. He’s really the only major one left to show up again, after the Master. I’m not too sure how I feel about it, outside the fact that it’s Russell T., so it’s bound to be awesome. Rose showing up seems a bit of a shame, as her character arc finished so perfectly, and her return’s a bit of a gimmicky.

I think the problem with Davros is something that’s been mentioned a number of times in Who fandom: before him, the Daleks were a threat all on their own, but after he turned up they just sort of ended up being Evil Henchmen. The new series has put so much into making the Daleks deadly once again it’s a damned pity they’re going to get relegated. I’d rather have had the Cult of Skaro developed a bit more as Dalek leaders, but then the last Dalek two-parter turned Sec into a tentacle-headed American and it all fell a bit flat. Maybe they do need the old guy back again, although I have to say I’d rather have seen a modern spin on the Sea Devils.

I’m in a bit of a quandry about continuing to get Morrison’s Batman monthly, too. I recently picked up Brubaker’s X-Men: Deadly Genesis in hardback (more on that soon), and it’s  a really great format to read the story in. With the Batman delays, plus the fact that the story so far reads so much better in one go rather than month by month (or longer, lets face it), I’m enclined to switch to the trades for Batman RIP. The same kind of goes for Final Crisis, or its tie-ins. I suppose the question is whether month-to-month delays and a fragmented story line will be better or worse than having all the good bits spoiled in advance.

And finally, I picked up this month’s Empire with the coverage of the Summer superhero films, and I have to say the more I see of The Incredible Hulk the more I like the look of it. Sure, it’s going to suck, but if I could make room in my heart for Ghost Rider then this one shouldn’t be too much of a leap. Despite enjoying the first Hulk, I do think they fumbled the ball a bit by largely ignoring the TV series.

The thing is, that’s the touchstone for most people and the character, and stuff like the pre-transformation green contact lenses generate the kind of pleasant memory the film-makers should be taking advantage of. Plus, part of the “hero’s journey” this time is Banner’s acceptance that, by the end of the film, the world needs a monster like the Hulk to save it (or, at least, New York), and isn’t that the kind of thing we read comics for?

Oh, and just so no one thinks I’ve forgotten, I’ll do a round-up at some point of all the Changaround posts, if not next week then the week after. Cheers to everyone who’s taken part so far.

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