Greatest Hits

So I hate the new theme song. Let's just get that out of the way, first. The negativity. Because I am a geek and therefore on some level cannot be happy unless I have something to grouse about. I hate the new theme song. Beyond that, when "Silence in the Library" came out back in 08, and Steven Moffat was announced to be Dr Who's new show-runner, some fans worried that he'd rather run out of ideas. The squareness gun, the 51st-century setting, the "Everybody Lives" moment. (So far no one has died in a Moffat story save from old age, still, unless you count River and company, which the message of "Forest of the Dead" seems to philosophically contradict. Ie: Everybody Lives, Even When They Don't.) And "The Eleventh Hour" certainly keeps up this tradition of running through previous Greatest Hits of The Doctor, especially those from Moffat's stories. Amy's story is much like poor Reinette's in "The Girl in the Fireplace;" the aliens-talking-through-anything-with-speakers is the same as "The Doctor Dances;" and the central conflict of the episode--an alien prisoner loose on Earth being pursued by some pretty draconian aliens--is pretty much the exact storyline of Russel Davies' season-3 opener, "Smith and Jones."

But who the hell cares about plot? This is Doctor Who! There are monsters every week; that's not important. What's important is how our hero and his companion react to those monsters. Much more importantly, this is a new Doctor story, and there's only one question: How'd he do?



I'll admit I was put off by his youth. When the announcement was made, when the first publicity photos hit the air, I was a bit miffed. He's younger than I am, for God's sake. I am older than the Doctor, now. That's just not right. Not right at all.

However, I'm pleased to inform that my petty first impressions were entirely unfounded. Smith knocks it out of the park. And the script gives him ample opportunity to do so. There are a few lines which sound as though they could have been written for Tennant, but Smith does the one thing, the most crucial thing in this role: he makes it his own.

Favorite line: "Do you know when adults tell you everything's going to be fine and you're pretty sure they're lying?"
"Yeah."
"Everything's going to be fine."

Just the reading of that line is fantastic. Smith takes to the role with energy and authority and absolute commitment. And he moves, the way he moves, all awkward and gangly, in direct contrast to Tennant's bounding about the place and Eccleston's stalking swagger. (Which was awesome, don't get me wrong. Awesome.)

Bit of trivia: This is the third time the Doctor has stolen his clothes from a hospital.

I quite like the new companion, Amy. With "Rose" in 2005 we got reintroduced to the Doctor through his companion's eyes, and it happens the same here, only with a slightly different, fractured-fairy-tale spin. He becomes an imaginary friend, a story she tells herself then forgets was ever real, until he comes back. This is the kind of thing Steven Moffat has been doing extremely well in his Doctor Who stories these past five years. I'm entirely confident that the next five years will be utterly brilliant. I can't wait.

Gay Panic

Rumors persist that Torchwood, the BBC's "for adults" Doctor Who spinoff starring the omnisexually fabulous Captain Jack Harkness may be making the trip across the pond, like so many successful British shows, to a series in the United States. And like so many UK/US remixes, including the DOA travesty that was 1996's FOX 'Doctor Who' TV movie, this fact is troubling. Take a look at this comparison between Steven Moffat's wonderful early-aught's sitcom 'Coupling' and its US version.



It's called acting. Google it. And while you're there, check out the televisual abortion that was the US version of 'Red Dwarf.' Worst. Adaptation. Ever.

It's not that Torchwood is a phenomenal show, either, and occasionally the sun shines and the wind is in the right direction and we get something like 'The Office' (hell, 'All in the Family' is a remake of a British show). What concerns me more is Captain Jack.



Captain Jack Harkness sauntered on to the scene in 2005, and by the time he got his own show a year later, had emerged as really the gayest action hero ever. Tell me, America, because I'm dying to learn. Is there anyone else? With the exception of Ianto Jones, Jack's lover in the second and abbreviated third seasons of Torchwood, alternative sexualities don't fare very well in actioners. Sure, you can be a butch lesbian Vasquez-esque action hero if you're a gal, but if you're a guy and you enjoy anything other than the love of a good woman (not that there's anything wrong with that) you're reduced to mincing ineffectuality. The only exception I can possibly think of is from 2008's 'Death Race,' in which it's slyly hinted that Tyrese Gibson's Machine Gun Joe is, possibly, gay as hell.

Would a US version of the show smooth Jack out for NASCAR Dads? Is America ready for a bisexual male action character? Adam Lambert, openly gay American Idol contestant raised the collective hackles of America when he smooched his dancing partner in the finale for 'So You Think You Can Dance.' Angry letters were written. Call-in shows were called in to. "My kids watch this crap," they say, though we've been getting girl-on-girl love at prime time hours for at least a decade. It's totally fine if Olivia Wilde makes out with some lady (or ladies) in a given episode of 'House,' but if Omar Epps were to do it? (Admittedly, it might finally make Foreman interesting.)

My money is on "you betcha." Should Torchwood emerge in the United States with the same male lead it had in Britain, my presumption is that Harnkess' proclivities won't, to say nothing of a relationship between two men that doesn't paint itself in a super-broad, 'Will & Grace' sized brush.

If you ask me (and you haven't) at root of all this is the fact that female sexuality is not taken seriously by the media at large. Perhaps not by the culture. Olivia Wilde's makeout scene in House is harmless because lady-to-lady sexuality is harmless, unthreatening, and, let's face it, kind of awesome. But male sexuality, now that is serious business; and male homosexuality, if it's used in an action-TV show context at all is likely to be employed as threatening, prison-set Soap of Damocles. This is a shame.

Here's hoping they prove me wrong.

In Praise of Nancy Botwin

Of course I came to the party late. 'Weeds' ended its five-season run on Showtime on August 31. I'm about halfway through season 4 at the moment, so, again, late. But let me just say this: though my research has been unscientific at best, I feel comfortable making the following pronouncement: Nancy Botwin is (or was) the best-written lady-character on TV.

It goes back to the Bechdel Rule. The rule that states it might be a good idea for women on TV to be well-rounded, well-written characters who aren't either simply ciphers for the men in the story or otherwise defined (or choosing to define themselves--I'm looking at you, Sex and the City) by the men in their lives. Too many female characters on TV spend a predominant amount of their time preoccupied with the men in their lives. They don't have agency. Things happen to them to which they are expected to react, but they're seldom pro-active and it's always about the boys (I'm looking at you now, Grey's Anatomy and Desparate Housewives--it's right there in your title!)

Which isn't to say it's a total wasteland out there. Think Peggy Olson in Mad Men. But she's not the anchor of that show, not its heart by far. No, I can think of no other show which is entirely anchored by the presence of a strong female character, who grows and develops, who is flawed and interesting, who gets the bulk of the screen time. (Though I have heard good things about Nurse Jackie)

TV occasionally tries to float us one, but the lady in question ends up either written deliberately as Queen Superbitch (see Canterbury's Law, a short-lived House knockoff where House is a girl and a lawyer instead of a doctor) or some kind of living saint (see HawthoRNe). Through five seasons of Weeds we got to follow Nancy Botwin as she triumphed, fucked up, escaped with her life, fucked up again, loved and lost and dealt a copious amount of pot.

I hope we see more of her.

State Your Predestination

Oh, Miles. Will you ever stop being awesome? This past Wednesday, Lost aired its season-5 finale. I am blogging about it. There are spoilers. You have been warned.

Of course every yahoo with an Internet connection and one of these here web-logs has probably already prognosticated about the various ins and outs of Season 5's "The Incident" two-parter, from the (disappointing, at least for now) reveal of Jacob and his ideological opposite to my being totally wrong about Ilana and her boys being DHARMA bums. (Oh, well. I was right about Fringe and I can safely stay smug about that for another day or two.)

I don't really care about that. Most of the episode, up to and including the surprise deaths (one of which was unfortunately unintentionally HILARIOUS) that usually attend these things, was about moving pieces into place for season 6. What interests me though is that line from Miles, snarky as always, positing that Jack with all his faith in Faraday's science, is going to come around and actually cause the incident he's trying to prevent.

What interests me is this show's apparent take on time travel vs. free will. I'm a big fan of science fiction, as anybody can tell you, and sci fi, at least when it tries to market itself to the masses, has to take this cushy notion that our free will overrides the law of the universe. Think Back to the Future. Marty McFly goes back in time and because he has free will, because he has agency, he fucks up the universe by accidentally making out with his Mom, then fixes the universe by helping his Dad stop being a complete milquetoast.

Sorry if I just also spoiled Back to the Future for you.

The point is I can name at least a dozen other movie and TV time-travel escapades which all follow this pattern. Hell, it happens again in Back to the Future II for God's sake, with Doc Brown on hand to give us a tidy lecture on the creation of alternate realities. This is easy. It fits our instincts. I've had one reputable physicist explain to me that I can't actually hit a cue ball back through a wormhole and hit the eight ball in the past. That I would be physically prevented from actually altering the past, even if I could travel there, which, okay, is probably impossible anyway.

Sorry. That sentence got away from me a bit there. Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey. Jack, I think, and by extension Faraday, is wildly delusional when he thinks his purpose in being thrown back in time is to stop the event that got him started on the path that eventually put him back in time. It's like the Terminator, right? The Terminator travels back in time to kill Sarah Connor so she can't give birth to the future Anti-Robot Jesus. Only Anti-Robot Jesus of the future sends a soldier back to stop the Terminator. The soldier impregnates Sarah Connor, because apparently you have time to do that sort of thing when you're on the run from an evil Austrian robot. So the Terminator's caught in a loop. He gets sent back to change something and ends up causing it.

But what if he succeeded? And what if Jack succeeded? It's the headache of time travel, it's why we invent whole parallel universes around the outcomes of our decisions. If Jack's bomb cancels out the EM effect that caused his plane to crash, then Jack isn't around to, five seasons later, get whisked back to 1977 to detonate the bomb to cancel out the EM effect...you get the idea.

Of course the problem with this time travel logic is that it has the effect of robbing your time travel story of any urgency. If your Killer Austrian Robot is always stopped, if Biff never becomes super-rich, if the plane never crashes, then all we're doing is going through the motions.

I think this whole thing can be viewed through the prism of an earlier episode, "Whatever Happened, Happened." Sayid shoots kid-Ben, reasoning that if kid-Ben snuffs it in 1977, he can never do all the terrible things that adult-Ben will do that put Sayid on his path, the path that tells him shooting a thirteen-year old is a good idea. Same with Jack. Jack's not gonna stitch him up, so Kate and Saywer take kid-Ben to Richard, and pretty much guarantee the little boy's going to grow up a Class A Creepy Fuck.

This has nothing to do with physics. Jack and Sayid and Kate and Sawyer still have their free will intact. It has to do with determinism. Everything that happened to Sayid up to the point that he pulls the trigger made him what he is, made him the man to pull that trigger. Same with the others. The chains we wear are of our own making. That's a heck of a statement for a TV show to make, I think. To say that the fate of the world rests on the fact that we simply cannot change our stripes. And that's what destiny is, then. The inexorable march of history, political and personal, toward the end. And there is, as Jacob says, only one end. Everything up 'till then is progress.

I guess we'll see in January.

Police Cops

I was watching Lost the other night. There was a cop show following, a not-entirely-unenjoyable cop show at that, but it got me and my friend thinking: just how many cop shows are on the air? After perusing imdb's TV listings, I've come up with the following list:

Forensic Science Shows:
CSI: Original Recipe
CSI: Miami
CSI: New York
NCIS

Cop Shows:
Castle
Life
The Unusuals
Flashpoint
Southland
Cold Case

Shows about the FBI:
Fringe
The Mentalist
Bones
Criminal Minds
Numb3rs
Without a Trace

Law and Order variations:

L&O: Original Recipe
L&O: SVU
L&O: CI

For convenience's sake I'm sticking to broadcast networks (sorry, The Closer and Sue Thomas, F.B.Eye). Nineteen shows, spread out over the course of a week. That's almost three a day, for those of you playing Basic Arithmetic, the Home Game. So I had a thought. A once-in-a-lifetime Primetime TV event: Every cop show, every night, every network. Different teams, different approaches, but they all must solve the exact same murder.

Not a crossover. Rather, here's how it works: With only minor geographic changes, the story of, let's say, a prominent investment banker who was beaten to death with a name-brand shoe outside The West 43rd Savings and Loan. His money is in his pocket, this was no robbery. Now, each show's crack detective team, from CSI Miami's Horatio Caine and his sunglasses and crappy one-liners to Fringe's Walter Bishop and his mind control swimming pool, must each interview the suspects, uncover the evidence, make with the snarky, and solve the murder. Every cop show, every night.

You could have big-name guest stars, real method guys who'd have no problem putting the exact same spin on the exact same murder case, night after night, for what amounts to the better part of three weeks. We'd become familiar with their ins and outs. CSI's crew obsesses over tiny shards of glass while Bones Feds deal with the impact of Nike tread on someone's skull and The Mentalist himself gets all wiggy with potential suspects.

Each suspect is asked the same questions, slightly differently. The jokes are new, the banter and the b-plots of course there to keep us interested, since by Monday night we all know the score. But it's fun to watch them, dancing over and around the same evidence, coming to the same conclusions at just the last second, sparing the innocent man and damning the guilty. Upholding justice. Saving the day, every day.

It'd be awesome.