The episode was written by Rona Munro, who also wrote the last serial prior to the program's decades long hiatus- "Survival" , featuring the seventh Doctor and Ace.
I mention it because this time out feels a lot like the professorial, mentoring seventh Doctor and his student companion.
The Doctor, here, is the quietly approving tutor, watching his best student hit all her marks. He's still the Doctor- irascible, head strong, and so forth. But Bill has come into her own, fully, as companion. She knows when to listen, when to strike out on her own, and when- as things become dire- to take matters into her own hands. Bill is no longer dependent on the Doctor- save in the obvious way, in that he controls the time machine. She is capable of diving into their little adventures and going off on her own. As he now trusts her to do.
She is the most adult companion- the most responsible and self motivated companion- that I think we have ever had, including late in the game Donna Noble.
Very good work from both actors, here. As has been showcased throughout the year.
The story, however... is by the numbers. There is a monster. The doctor figures out that not everyone fighting it is pure of thought or deed, and in the end, those fighting the thing overcome their differences and so forth and so on.
It's fairly well done- but nothing particularly memorable.
Until the end.
I haven't said this, I don't think, directly, but the last couple episodes have felt like we're being given something to do to fill our time before getting to Missy. Like that was their actual focus.
This one was no exception. Though it would seem to be, from the preview for next week, the last one to dick us around like that. The last two episodes seem to shift the focus directly onto her.
The whole adventure, this time, evaporated when, adventure over, the team got back to The Time Lady In The Box.
Not going to spoil. Desperate as I am to discuss it. Let's say that it takes the episode from a six of ten to a nine. To echo an earlier incarnation? Change has come. And it seems not a moment too soon.
Next week? A surfeit of Master.
Monday 19 June 2017
Friday 9 June 2017
So. About that Woman...
This is an expanded version of something I posted to Facebook. Turns out there is more to say.
Wonder Woman works because it's not about women or wymyn or feminist empowerment or gender equality or some other heavy handed message.
It's about people rising to face the challenge at hand. People; young and old, men and women, of different races and different belief systems and different countries.
Not because they were born heroes - even Diana- but because they took responsibility. Because they looked at a pending disaster and felt that they had to try and sort it. Because they were brave and fierce and godly?
Not at all. Diana is a naif, Steve Trevor is a sneak, and the merry band of gentlemen they collect as they go are, in general, pretty seriously damaged. They get involved because they are all inspired to rise above themselves, to look at the world outside of themselves and their problems, and as a consequence, realized that something needed doing and that they- against all probability, were in a good position to get it done. Inspired by Diana? Certainly. Not due to her prowess in battle or even her amazing optimism, but rather... Because of love. All kinds of love, in the end. The love between men and women, between family, between comrades at arms, between us and ourselves - the love that lets us look in the mirror without cringing. Empowerment, and all the messages people are getting from it? It all stems from this. From the bravery of standing up. Standing up for self, for family and for humanity.
The movie doesn't stop to highlight any of this, to objectify it, to hover over beautiful bodies or add gloss to the violence. Gal Gadot is beautiful. Connie Neilsen is beautiful. Robin Wright is beautiful. Chris Pine is beautiful. So are fireballs and gouts of blue fire and the spark of a bullet ricochet.
There could easily have been long scenes devoted to the adoration of all that.
There are not. We see plenty of skin, plenty of action, plenty of stuff asploding all over the screen. But we are seeing athleticism and verve and moxie in motion, and the terrible results of war. The beauty of the human body, and the horror of what happens to it in battle.
It is- for a big, tent-pole actioner? Charmingly forthright and free of leers.
There is even a discreet cut away from a love scene. Not quite a candle blowing out as draperies move in the breeze, but that same effect. Haven't seen that in a while. The movie also reminds us that we- whoever we are, whatever our abilities or lackings- can be heroic. We don't need to be living action figures, either. We just need to stand up. I'm not subtracting the importance of having a woman lead- a bisexual leading character at that. I'm applauding everyone involved for making her, and her actions, part of a larger story, and trusting that people would see the inherit empowerment within. You're a wonder, Wonder Woman.
Verisimilitude, or Believing Anyway.
Lets start with Iron Man.
You may not have known of the comic book character on which the movies are based- but I have no doubt that most of you have seen the movies. Or, at least, the commercials, clips, trailers, games and the rest of the promotional tie ins.
The endless, wearying tie ins.
Iron Man is Tony Stark. A rich jerk who- after a nasty incident in war torn Plotpointistan- becomes a rich jerk hero. Courtesy of a fabulous do anything suit of candy apple red and gold armour. The suit shoots missiles, knock em down beams, blow em up beams, is resistant to bullets, protects the wearer from any sort of impact- and flies at supersonic velocities.
All of which is so much bullshit. A close fitting suit of armour? How does it absorb impacts without transferring them to the wearer? How does it protect against the G forces imparted by all that frantic flying about?
Those of you who saw the movies? I would guess that you never really thought about this.
You didn't think about this because the writers and actors and directors worked their asses off to make this bullshit seem real. Everyone acted as if it were a real thing in the real world. They introduced it like a fact, and reacted to it like a fact. Iron Man has this amazing suit that functions like the ultimate army knife. It has attachments and blades and doohickeys that will allow the wearer to do almost any damned thing. At will. Instantly.
And... it worked, at least for most of us, when we were in the audience. We sat there, with this improbable to the point of impossibility splayed out in front of us. And our critical reasoning- the built in crap detector most of us have- did not trip. It worked because everyone on screen acted and reacted as if it worked.
Not real actions and reactions- no one having shown up as Iron Man, no one knows what those would be. But a realistic guess at them. Reactions that fit in with what the audience imagines. A mixture of amazement and disbelief and wonder.
And having gotten that mixture right- those carefully realistic, faked actions and reactions- the movie mowed right over our crap detectors. "Okay," Tony Stark says near the beginning, "I can fly". and our critical reasoning rolled on its back and purred.
The phrase for the whole process we went through- the Cahirs du Cinema approved movie snob term- is: Willing Suspension of Disbelief. The part that allowed you to suspend that disbelief- which is our topic here? Verisimilitude. Which is, rather more or less, acting as if the lie were truth.
For a writer- a fiction writer- verisimilitude is everything. When you have a sense of it, you can write a story where a thick mist rolls into town one fine afternoon- carrying with it the end of civilisation. Or tell us of a romance between brother and sister, or detail the epic love between an undead teen of hundreds of years and a modern girl. Or give us that man in the tin suit, playing around with Navy fighters- and rest content that your audience will put up with it. If you don't have it?
Odds are that your work won't go very far. Odds are that your work won't go anywhere. Even if you write contemporaneously, and base your story in a recognisably modern world- you have to make sure that everything is realistic for that setting. You have a man and woman lunching in Manhattan- talking about the current president and social issues- and then have them fly off on giant geese? Unless you've found someway to justify giant, people carrying waterfowl-yours is cooked. Someone's just thrown your manuscript into the trash.
I emphasise this because- again and again and again- I see this violated. I see what might well have been interesting work evaporate up its own ass.
An example from something of my own. More years ago than I care to remember, I was asked to co-write a fun, family oriented Christmas play for a local theatre. A friend of mine had some ideas and wanted to collaborate. He never quite found the time to work on the piece... and I ended up editing out his ideas almost completely and finishing the thing by myself. Not because they were bad, but because I couldn't write them.
His main idea- Santa was actually a job, and Santas were recruited out of mental institutions because of a need for the job holder to believe in impossible things.
Cute, and not without precedent. There was a Twilight Zone episode, "Night of The Meek", in which Art Carney played a possibly delusional department store Santa who became Santa out of sheer belief. And then there were the Santa Clause movies.
The thing is... I couldn't write it. If I made the institution believable, it got depressing. If I tried to make the institution a lighter environment- I imagined something like the detective squad room in Barney Miller, where everyone's attitude remained generally light despite fairly pressing circumstances- it felt like a cheat.
Like I was trying to re-write Harvey, with Elwood actually nuts, as opposed to simply... strange.
I knew that a mental institution- at best- was far from a cheery, happy place. And at Christmas? I couldn't imagine any situation where that would be... fun. A good starting place for what was supposed to be a nice evening of holiday theatre.
I changed it to an old folks home, which felt better, with two old coots and a minimal staff being stuck on site for Christmas because they had no where else to go.
I had a lot of fun writing that. Until, one late evening, I realised that I was writing the damned Sunshine Odd Couple Boys. Grumpy Old Men meet Santa. It was going and going and going. But it wasn't getting anywhere. It wasn't about Christmas so much as how well I could write Neil Simon dialogue.
I ended up telling the story of a drunken old Broadway star who- years later- has a sort of breakdown during a live Christmas Eve broadcast. His wandering- post breakdown- taught him the true meaning of the holiday.
I told it as an extended flashback. An older woman telling it as a heartening story to her son, who's a bit lost following the death of his wife. He lacks the Christmas spirit, so she tells him about someone who also lost it- and how he found it.
The thing is... it did not work. It felt like two plays, two very different plays, forced together in unholy bond. The problem was... The mother/son stuff was one reality, the radio show stuff another. Mom and son spoke realistically, their situation was told seriously. The people in the radio show section spoke like they came out of His Girl Friday.
Verisimilitude was broken when you shifted from one to the other. The rules didn't mesh.
The resolution came to me several years after I dropped the story deep into hard drive storage.
The whole thing could be tied together if I gave up on the idea of ANY of it being real. If I accepted that the whole thing was a story- ME telling a story to my audience. The realism was not mother and son or radio actors and crew. It was... sitting by the radio, listening to the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre. It was laying in bed, just about to fall asleep, listening to a comedic monologue. It was sitting by the fire, letting the village elder tell you the history of your people via story.
Magic. And extremely loosening. Parts flew into the thing- whereas in the original telling, I'd been constrained by the need to have a realism in each section, I was now free to add whatever I wanted- to write whatever I wanted- safe in knowing that... if this worked... the audience would buy what I did because they were in that "tell me a bedtime story" reality I'd created.
And the play- for good or ill- worked. The parts merged into a whole, and it felt nicely snug and Christmas-y.
Basically, I realised I was telling one lie, not two, and I hewed to the bigger lie. I found verisimilitude by throwing my adherence to general reality, our shared reality aside, and creating my own internal reality.
In writing, there's possibly no more important thing. It's why stories work, no matter what type, and regardless of anything else. They can be written so beautifully that your teeth ache. But if you don't believe, it just sits there.
So. How do you check this? How do you make sure that your story has faith in its own reality? A few ideas from the top of my head. There are undoubtedly more, and better.
Consistency. If you establish rules as to how something works, you cannot violate them. Whether it's an interplanetary drive or how two people express their affection. If your crusty detective eschews romantic attraction, you cannot have that worthy go swooning after a dewy young thing without explaining how this could happen within that crusty reality. Without making it plausible.
Character buy in. Once your detective is showing romantic interest, to continue the example, the best way to reinforce its believability for your audience is to have other characters in the story believe. And if it's going to be a hard sale, use those characters to make it for you. Have them refuse to believe it, and then be won over. They will function as audience surrogates,with their processing guiding the audience.
Anyone see "Arrival?" I haven't read Eric Heisserer's screenplay, but halfway through the movie, there's a knotty narrative issue to handle. Amy Adams' linguist, having clearly demonstrated how difficult it will be to translate a certain language, has to be shown as making progress in a fairly short period of time. Basically, having set a rule, the narrative has to make the audience buy that it's either been followed, but quick, or that it wasn't such a hard and fast rule.
The wrong choice will kick people out of the movie. Amy's been established as a non superwoman with a near impossible task. If she just waves her hand and does it, your story violates its own rules, and you've pissed on your audience's trust.
The movie handles this largely with character buy in. Amy suffers in her effort, other characters react to this, and one character redirects her efforts into something which seems comparatively easier. Rather than translate the whole language, she needs to understand enough to ask basic questions.
Preparing your audience. Don't drop, say, a supernatural character into gritty police procedural without setting something into your environment that allows for it. Set something into the background that lets them know that this spooky stuff exists, maybe unnoticed by most... Until now.
Keeping with "Arrival", the last act requires a pretty big conceptual leap. So it's prepared for from practically the first line. And little hints are consistently dropped. I'm not sure that it works as well as it might. But I am sure that the transition would fall flat without this stuff. Gone from a Twilight Zone zone moment to a "2001" what the hell was that?!? Moment.
Knowing Your Audience. This one goes out to comic books- I started off with a comic book character so it makes sense to finish with one.
The Batman.
There have been a great many variations of the character since Finger and Kane- though there are general constants. But. If you think about what Batman does for a few moments, critically, the character- and every story ever told using him- falls apart, certainly in modern times.
Think about how easily his movements could be tracked , how easily he could be killed. How a man in a bat costume might not frighten everyone out of their wits. Think about how a little planning could result in his capture and arrest- as he operates outside of the law.
The comics get around this two ways. First, The Batman is prevented as a fact. Whatever your objections, if you buy into the world created for him? Yeah, but there he is. Once you accept Gotham and the DC universe- where people can fly and blast rays out of their eyes, or be so toxic that their kiss kills, or what have you- you're already willing to accept The Batman's ability to evade death or capture.
Second, The Batman is presented as a pre-eminent generalist. Having inherited a vast fortune as a child, he's had the time to train to expert level ability on everything he might need. He knows every martial art. He's exercised himself into peak physical condition. He knows every weapons system. He knows the law, he knows the customs, he knows criminality. And he keeps current. He's a genius level monomaniac who focuses himself on a single area, and has managed to make himself incredibly effective.
The reader- when confronted with actions that violate general reality- doesn't even blink. Because in the comic book reality established, and from the character established within that reality, these actions make sense.
In reality, if you tried to swing between buildings on a thin line, no matter how strong, you would run afoul of telephone lines, errant winds, running out of line and stopping short, and, well, gravity.
In the DC reality- it's elegant and damned near like flying.
And if they had not so carefully created this environment and this character- none of it would work.
You may not have known of the comic book character on which the movies are based- but I have no doubt that most of you have seen the movies. Or, at least, the commercials, clips, trailers, games and the rest of the promotional tie ins.
The endless, wearying tie ins.
Iron Man is Tony Stark. A rich jerk who- after a nasty incident in war torn Plotpointistan- becomes a rich jerk hero. Courtesy of a fabulous do anything suit of candy apple red and gold armour. The suit shoots missiles, knock em down beams, blow em up beams, is resistant to bullets, protects the wearer from any sort of impact- and flies at supersonic velocities.
All of which is so much bullshit. A close fitting suit of armour? How does it absorb impacts without transferring them to the wearer? How does it protect against the G forces imparted by all that frantic flying about?
Those of you who saw the movies? I would guess that you never really thought about this.
You didn't think about this because the writers and actors and directors worked their asses off to make this bullshit seem real. Everyone acted as if it were a real thing in the real world. They introduced it like a fact, and reacted to it like a fact. Iron Man has this amazing suit that functions like the ultimate army knife. It has attachments and blades and doohickeys that will allow the wearer to do almost any damned thing. At will. Instantly.
And... it worked, at least for most of us, when we were in the audience. We sat there, with this improbable to the point of impossibility splayed out in front of us. And our critical reasoning- the built in crap detector most of us have- did not trip. It worked because everyone on screen acted and reacted as if it worked.
Not real actions and reactions- no one having shown up as Iron Man, no one knows what those would be. But a realistic guess at them. Reactions that fit in with what the audience imagines. A mixture of amazement and disbelief and wonder.
And having gotten that mixture right- those carefully realistic, faked actions and reactions- the movie mowed right over our crap detectors. "Okay," Tony Stark says near the beginning, "I can fly". and our critical reasoning rolled on its back and purred.
The phrase for the whole process we went through- the Cahirs du Cinema approved movie snob term- is: Willing Suspension of Disbelief. The part that allowed you to suspend that disbelief- which is our topic here? Verisimilitude. Which is, rather more or less, acting as if the lie were truth.
For a writer- a fiction writer- verisimilitude is everything. When you have a sense of it, you can write a story where a thick mist rolls into town one fine afternoon- carrying with it the end of civilisation. Or tell us of a romance between brother and sister, or detail the epic love between an undead teen of hundreds of years and a modern girl. Or give us that man in the tin suit, playing around with Navy fighters- and rest content that your audience will put up with it. If you don't have it?
Odds are that your work won't go very far. Odds are that your work won't go anywhere. Even if you write contemporaneously, and base your story in a recognisably modern world- you have to make sure that everything is realistic for that setting. You have a man and woman lunching in Manhattan- talking about the current president and social issues- and then have them fly off on giant geese? Unless you've found someway to justify giant, people carrying waterfowl-yours is cooked. Someone's just thrown your manuscript into the trash.
I emphasise this because- again and again and again- I see this violated. I see what might well have been interesting work evaporate up its own ass.
An example from something of my own. More years ago than I care to remember, I was asked to co-write a fun, family oriented Christmas play for a local theatre. A friend of mine had some ideas and wanted to collaborate. He never quite found the time to work on the piece... and I ended up editing out his ideas almost completely and finishing the thing by myself. Not because they were bad, but because I couldn't write them.
His main idea- Santa was actually a job, and Santas were recruited out of mental institutions because of a need for the job holder to believe in impossible things.
Cute, and not without precedent. There was a Twilight Zone episode, "Night of The Meek", in which Art Carney played a possibly delusional department store Santa who became Santa out of sheer belief. And then there were the Santa Clause movies.
The thing is... I couldn't write it. If I made the institution believable, it got depressing. If I tried to make the institution a lighter environment- I imagined something like the detective squad room in Barney Miller, where everyone's attitude remained generally light despite fairly pressing circumstances- it felt like a cheat.
Like I was trying to re-write Harvey, with Elwood actually nuts, as opposed to simply... strange.
I knew that a mental institution- at best- was far from a cheery, happy place. And at Christmas? I couldn't imagine any situation where that would be... fun. A good starting place for what was supposed to be a nice evening of holiday theatre.
I changed it to an old folks home, which felt better, with two old coots and a minimal staff being stuck on site for Christmas because they had no where else to go.
I had a lot of fun writing that. Until, one late evening, I realised that I was writing the damned Sunshine Odd Couple Boys. Grumpy Old Men meet Santa. It was going and going and going. But it wasn't getting anywhere. It wasn't about Christmas so much as how well I could write Neil Simon dialogue.
I ended up telling the story of a drunken old Broadway star who- years later- has a sort of breakdown during a live Christmas Eve broadcast. His wandering- post breakdown- taught him the true meaning of the holiday.
I told it as an extended flashback. An older woman telling it as a heartening story to her son, who's a bit lost following the death of his wife. He lacks the Christmas spirit, so she tells him about someone who also lost it- and how he found it.
The thing is... it did not work. It felt like two plays, two very different plays, forced together in unholy bond. The problem was... The mother/son stuff was one reality, the radio show stuff another. Mom and son spoke realistically, their situation was told seriously. The people in the radio show section spoke like they came out of His Girl Friday.
Verisimilitude was broken when you shifted from one to the other. The rules didn't mesh.
The resolution came to me several years after I dropped the story deep into hard drive storage.
The whole thing could be tied together if I gave up on the idea of ANY of it being real. If I accepted that the whole thing was a story- ME telling a story to my audience. The realism was not mother and son or radio actors and crew. It was... sitting by the radio, listening to the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre. It was laying in bed, just about to fall asleep, listening to a comedic monologue. It was sitting by the fire, letting the village elder tell you the history of your people via story.
Magic. And extremely loosening. Parts flew into the thing- whereas in the original telling, I'd been constrained by the need to have a realism in each section, I was now free to add whatever I wanted- to write whatever I wanted- safe in knowing that... if this worked... the audience would buy what I did because they were in that "tell me a bedtime story" reality I'd created.
And the play- for good or ill- worked. The parts merged into a whole, and it felt nicely snug and Christmas-y.
Basically, I realised I was telling one lie, not two, and I hewed to the bigger lie. I found verisimilitude by throwing my adherence to general reality, our shared reality aside, and creating my own internal reality.
In writing, there's possibly no more important thing. It's why stories work, no matter what type, and regardless of anything else. They can be written so beautifully that your teeth ache. But if you don't believe, it just sits there.
So. How do you check this? How do you make sure that your story has faith in its own reality? A few ideas from the top of my head. There are undoubtedly more, and better.
Consistency. If you establish rules as to how something works, you cannot violate them. Whether it's an interplanetary drive or how two people express their affection. If your crusty detective eschews romantic attraction, you cannot have that worthy go swooning after a dewy young thing without explaining how this could happen within that crusty reality. Without making it plausible.
Character buy in. Once your detective is showing romantic interest, to continue the example, the best way to reinforce its believability for your audience is to have other characters in the story believe. And if it's going to be a hard sale, use those characters to make it for you. Have them refuse to believe it, and then be won over. They will function as audience surrogates,with their processing guiding the audience.
Anyone see "Arrival?" I haven't read Eric Heisserer's screenplay, but halfway through the movie, there's a knotty narrative issue to handle. Amy Adams' linguist, having clearly demonstrated how difficult it will be to translate a certain language, has to be shown as making progress in a fairly short period of time. Basically, having set a rule, the narrative has to make the audience buy that it's either been followed, but quick, or that it wasn't such a hard and fast rule.
The wrong choice will kick people out of the movie. Amy's been established as a non superwoman with a near impossible task. If she just waves her hand and does it, your story violates its own rules, and you've pissed on your audience's trust.
The movie handles this largely with character buy in. Amy suffers in her effort, other characters react to this, and one character redirects her efforts into something which seems comparatively easier. Rather than translate the whole language, she needs to understand enough to ask basic questions.
Preparing your audience. Don't drop, say, a supernatural character into gritty police procedural without setting something into your environment that allows for it. Set something into the background that lets them know that this spooky stuff exists, maybe unnoticed by most... Until now.
Keeping with "Arrival", the last act requires a pretty big conceptual leap. So it's prepared for from practically the first line. And little hints are consistently dropped. I'm not sure that it works as well as it might. But I am sure that the transition would fall flat without this stuff. Gone from a Twilight Zone zone moment to a "2001" what the hell was that?!? Moment.
Knowing Your Audience. This one goes out to comic books- I started off with a comic book character so it makes sense to finish with one.
The Batman.
There have been a great many variations of the character since Finger and Kane- though there are general constants. But. If you think about what Batman does for a few moments, critically, the character- and every story ever told using him- falls apart, certainly in modern times.
Think about how easily his movements could be tracked , how easily he could be killed. How a man in a bat costume might not frighten everyone out of their wits. Think about how a little planning could result in his capture and arrest- as he operates outside of the law.
The comics get around this two ways. First, The Batman is prevented as a fact. Whatever your objections, if you buy into the world created for him? Yeah, but there he is. Once you accept Gotham and the DC universe- where people can fly and blast rays out of their eyes, or be so toxic that their kiss kills, or what have you- you're already willing to accept The Batman's ability to evade death or capture.
Second, The Batman is presented as a pre-eminent generalist. Having inherited a vast fortune as a child, he's had the time to train to expert level ability on everything he might need. He knows every martial art. He's exercised himself into peak physical condition. He knows every weapons system. He knows the law, he knows the customs, he knows criminality. And he keeps current. He's a genius level monomaniac who focuses himself on a single area, and has managed to make himself incredibly effective.
The reader- when confronted with actions that violate general reality- doesn't even blink. Because in the comic book reality established, and from the character established within that reality, these actions make sense.
In reality, if you tried to swing between buildings on a thin line, no matter how strong, you would run afoul of telephone lines, errant winds, running out of line and stopping short, and, well, gravity.
In the DC reality- it's elegant and damned near like flying.
And if they had not so carefully created this environment and this character- none of it would work.
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