The Fractal Hall Journal

I mentioned yesterday that I prefer Cyclops to Wolverine in the X-Men, although most people can’t seem to stick him. I guess I just think he’s got a cool power. His personality is a little dull, sure, but that really is the fault of the writers. Because you need that kind of dullish leader-character, the person who keeps everything together; the Nico in Runaways, the Jack in Lost. You remove that character from the team dynamic and, like a plot-vacuum, someone else steps in to the breach, and all you end up doing is watering down that character, whether it’s a neutered Logan in X-Men 3 or an edgeless Sawyer in the latter part of That Weird Island Show.

Grant Morrison, as always, handles the character best, by realising that an uncompromising idealist in the Marvel U, one that believes completely in Xavier’s dream, that believes he will trumph in any situation regardless of the odds, must have one personality characteristic above all others. He’d have to be completely fucking barmy. The “ice-cold lunacy” Wolverine refers to in the very first Morrison issue. It’s a great spin, a way of making the character compelling while retaining the idealism, and also goes someway to explaining the whole leaving the mother of his child for the woman she was cloned from plot point of the 80s, a character twist meant to make the boring character more interesting but ultimately kind of broke him.

Morrison’s take also allowed for an interesting comparison between Scott Summers and the Hairy Short Guy, examining the way their relationship could oscillate between friendship and antagonism. It led to the Assault on Weapon Plus storyline that had him and Logan team up for a mismatched buddies on a mission vibe, like a mutant Lethal Weapon. And for future reference, I would absolutely pay cold, hard cash to watch a Wolverine/Cyclops road trip flick.

Right, what else has tweaked the radar recently? Looking forward to Hellboy 2, finally landing this side of the Pond on Thursday. I know I had a bit of a go at the original film a couple of weeks ago, but this one looks like Del Toro has more of a grip on what he wants to do. I think I’m a little more used to the idea that it is Del Toro’s world rather than Mignola’s, and with that in mind I’m interested to see what kind of original take he has on it. I watched the first one last week, and while I don’t disagree with the negative things I’ve written about it (it really doesn’t quite hold together), what it gets right, it gets very right, and ultimately it’s a fun, engaging, good natured film, which bodes well. Ron Perlman was born to play the role, and John Hurt was brilliant too. And the sequence set in 1944 is absolutely brilliant, really spot on, and I hope the second film takes its cue from that.

And speaking of live action, BBC 4’s been showing a lot of the old 60s Batman series. I keep forgetting they’re on, so I haven’t managed to catch a whole one, but I caught the end of the one with the Green Hornet and Kato in it. It is beyond strange to watch Bruce Lee turn up in Batman. I’ve also watched a few YouTube clips of Kevin Smith doing his lecture series, ones where he mentioned his abortive attempts at writing screenplays for The Six Million Dollar Man and Green Hornet. The idea of Smith doing Green Hornet is really laughable, and it’s not really surprising the pitch was based in the 90s. The infamous First Wave of John Peters-driven superhero movies led to so many crazy properties being thrown round on the grounds that any of that shit would make money, regardless of whether the world really wanted a film version of the Lone Ranger’s grand-nephew.

Of course, what’s even crazier is that now were in the Second Wave, shit is still being flung just to see what sticks, and now Seth Rogen’s on writing duties. This is how insane Hollywood is. Kevin Smith writes about Superman’s sex life, so obviously he’s the man who should do Green Hornet, regardless of suitability. And when he can’t do it, they employ another funny fat guy on the grounds that, I don’t know, he also writes films with lots of naughty words in them.

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I don’t think I’ve ever written about Doc on the Journal, certainly not at any length. You don’t need me to tell you the character’s importance to British SF, at the very least in terms of how the show brought SF stories and scenarios to generations of children and adults. Almost everyone from my parents to the present day is familiar with the character and his conceits, even with an unfortunate 15-year gap during the 90s. You know the worst thing about that? Even beyond the premature ending of the Seventh Doctor’s underappreciated run, meaning we never got any closure to a fascinating new take on the programme? There’s a generation of kids who never got a Doctor that belonged to them.

My mother will tell you that William Hartnell was the best Doctor. Loads and loads of people swear blind that Tom Baker was the best, while scriptwriter Stephen Moffat made it clear in the last Children In Need special that his favourite (and, indeed, the Tenth Doctor himself’s favourite) incarnation was the Fifth. For me, it’s the McCoy years. And it doesn’t really matter what we all use as evidence to back up the argument (like I said, the Seventh Doctor is incredibly underappreciated, and cruelly dismissed as something of a joke although the plots of Doctor Who have never been so intricate, interesting or dense, not even the current series), ultimately we hold these views because our Doctor was the Doctor we grew up with.

A recent poll from, er, somewhere, had the current David Tennant Doctor listed as the Best Doctor Ever. I can imagine (in Who fandom in particular) the kind of tooth-grinding this may have provoked, the choice of the current flavour of the month as the best with no regard for history. But this is absolutely appropriate. Because it’s the current generation who power the new series, an audience of children usually dismissed by the BBC and the other channels who find it easier to boot them over to the Cartoon Network and other kid-specific venues where they don’t have to worry about them. Of course David Tennant’s their favourite. He’s their Doctor, and now the show belongs to them, not us grumpy old bastards who want to hear quotes from the old serials, or a mention of Fenric or Omega or the Black Guardian or whoever, or see the Brigadier return (although please, please, please let’s see the Brig one more time. Pretty please).

And Russell T. and crew have done them proud, giving a new generation the best possible Doctor they could have had. It’s just about the best programme the BBC have ever managed to come up with, and without a doubt the best thign BBC Wales have ever created. It’s unbelievable how well the writing stands up to and surpasses many of the shows that make their way across the Pond; I’m afraid that while most American shows (and British shows, for that matter) are utter trash, when they’re good they’re almost always better than anything we can manage. But not the Doc. We’ve got that shit down cold.

The first half of the first series of Doctor Who’s revival was a little wonky. It was good, excellent even, but it still needed to find its feet. And when it did, Christ. From the Dalek episode, they didn’t set a foot wrong. Since then, in the following three series, only a few have ever set a foot wrong. Probably the biggest of these was this Christmas’s Voyage of the Damned. Load of old bollocks, gurning villain, didn’t make sense, looked like utter arse and could easily have been saved by being set on the actual Titanic, with new model Sea Devils as the big bad as was widely rumoured right up until the first trailers.

With that last misstep spoiling Christmas forever for everyone, omens weren’t great for the new series. Luckily, the opener was good, a lightweight reintroduction for a new series and new companion. And last Saturday’s Fires of Pompeii was genuinely amazing. It was a bit funny, a lot dark, with some impressive CGI (flew in one of the gents who work with Weta in New Zealand, apparently. It showed) and characters I recognised from old Latin textbooks we had in school (perhaps the least likely injoke/crossover I’d ever have expected to see). This series promises resolution to stuff that’s been hinted at since the first series, missing planets, Shadow Proclamations and Medusa Cascades, delineating one of the show’s strengths: there’s a lot of mystery here, a lot that’s hidden, and these things are fun to work out and speculate about, not frustrating and unresolved as in Lost, or indeed The X-Files. It rewards engagement with revelation, lending the series a scale and epic feel beyond its budget and appropriate to the meaning of those words.

I think Russell T. sums it up in a quote from an interview he did where he was asked why people love the show so much:

“Because it’s the best idea ever invented in the history of the world.”

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The post-Easter malaise has been shaken off, and we’re back in the room.

A lot of X-Files episodes have been watched recently (with a Series 2 overview coming soon), and it’s made me think that it’s about time we had a new “unexplained” show. You know what I mean: UFOs, Bigfoot, Ghosts and Ghoulies. Because while Chris Carter’s creation set the benchmark for that kind of thing, it didn’t really follow through on everything. The UFO plots became more about colonisation than flying lights, and of all the “famous” phenomena they dealt with they never managed to pull off ghosts. There’s a hell of a lot of potential in cryptozoological stuff, inevitably squandered in substandard episodes about a swamp monster, the chupacabra and the Jersey Devil.

With this in mind, I’m certain a programme could be made that covers the same subject area while managing to be more than an X-Files rip-off. I’ve heard that JJ Abrams may be involved with something like that, hopefully more like Lost Series One than Lost Any Other Series.

It’s difficult to pin down this kind of thing in genre terms. Horror’s the most obvious tag for the monster type things, while anything alieny is going to be SF. I think I prefer tagging it as Weird Fiction (WeiFi?). While a lot of X-Files episodes are explicitly horrific (there’s some seriously vile stuff towards the end of the second series), the “unexplained phenomena” vibe strikes me as different to zombie/monster flicks, or anything that’s all about the gore and body parts. In fact, I can’t think of anything off hand that has the right feel; The Mothman Prophecies, perhaps.

Thinking about it, the atmosphere of the latter is exactly what I’m talking about. Unexplained supernatural events that aren’t quite ghost stories but aren’t quite monster stories either. And the original book’s damned creepy too.

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