Prodigal Son: The Recap

    It’s been quite a while since my last entry in this theoretically ongoing column.  Life and other Dork pursuits got in the way, and I just never got things as together as I wanted.  But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.  And I’m thinking I may start putting in the effort again.  The ultimate goal is still to pull together a small but solid roleplaying group for something focused and long term, but in the meantime, I’ll settle for a few game nights that might include some one-shot RPGs.

    So, here are the first ten entries in the series, if anyone is interested in giving it a read.  And perhaps in the days ahead, I’ll be posting more new material, too.


Part One: My Return to Gaming

Part Two: Early Ideas

Part Three: Regrouping

Part Four: Something for Everyone?

Part Five: The Art of the Rip-Off

Part Six: The Beginning

Part Seven: The Pen is Mightier

Part Eight: Homework

Part Nine: Fresh Meat (Guest Writer- Brad)


Part Ten: Tripping Over The Edge

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (8/11/13-8/18/13)

    A slow start finished big this week, with the ever amazing William Shatner.

Zardoz:  Certainly, Zardoz is not to everyone’s taste.  Possibly because it’s completely bonkers, features some surreally strange acting, wildly improbably turns of event, and Sean Connery running around in red swim-trunks bringing the gift of death to spaced-out psychic flower children while a bit of the ol’ Ludwig Van plays.  Zardoz is a 70s dystopian nightmare unlike any other.  The closest thing I could compare it to are a lot of those ultra-trippy sci-fi shows coming out in the UK at the time, of which Doctor Who was probably the most mainstream and easy to follow.

The Showoff: A borish oaf treats everyone like crap and can’t tell the truth.  Things go from bad to worse, and then they really get pathetic as he blusters his way through life, destroying everyone around him.  The film isn’t all that great, and the main character is bloody awful.  But Louise Brooks is pretty swell as one of the dames.

The Plastic Age:  It’s jocks versus nerds in this pre-sound college comedy that shows little has changed in a hundred years.  Everyone’s got dames and sports on the mind, and they’re all freaking out.  It’s all kinds of goofy, but an interesting look at a long standing subgenre of comedy.  Many of the archetypes are already in place before the first words were spoken.  And of course, it ends with The Big Game.

A Band Called Death:  The trailer for this documentary took hold of my brain.  But, to a degree, it also told the story of the film, so seeing the whole thing is a touch disappointing.  However, the film sizzles with the band’s musical energy.  It is an interesting family story, and of course, a revelation of an unknown band that played Punk before there was Punk.

Escape from New York:  In the crime ridden future of the 1990s, New York City has become the pit of hell everyone thought it was in the late 70s.  Into this comes an anti-hero for the ages, a bitter, gruff, one-eyed bastard who doesn’t much like The Man.  Great action, great score, cool setting, and a great cast of character actors playing colorful roles.  This is one of the coolest films to come out of the 80s.

    We started off ShatAttack with a couple episodes of Thriller (The Grim Reaper & The Hungry Glass.  Both are quite good, with Shatner getting to play both perp and victim.  Up next was an episode of The Fugitive (Strange in the Mirror), featuring more manic madness from the Shat (keep an eye out for Astronaut Dodge from Planet of the Apes!).  And then Alfred Hitchcock Presents (The Glass Eye & Mother May I Go Out to Swim?).  Then on to The Outer Limits with Cold Hands, Warm Heart.

    Day two of ShatAttack started with Escape from Planet Earth and William Shatner’s World Famous Cappuccino Muffins.  Mmm.  And we followed that up, obviously, by The Bastard, part of The Kent Chronicles.  And then it was on to ShatAttack favorite The Devil’s Rain.

Escape from Planet Earth:  No shock that this movie wasn’t very good.  It has a few funny gags, but is mostly about as obvious as it gets.  The jokes are pretty obvious and the ‘social commentary’ is ham fisted.  And I’m not sure, but I think the moral of the story was that being single is bad, being stupid is good, and being a housewife is all a woman should strive for.

The Bastard:  Part one of The Kent Chronicles, this details the life of a French murder-machine as he kills everyone who crosses him, often with their own weapons.  After being raped by a milk-maid, our hero goes on to get set upon by various roughians and thugs, who through either luck, or some grand and hidden methodology, he thwarts, mostly to their death.  Then he heads to America, where I don’t know, I guess he gets into freedom and stuff.  It’s a very forgettable made for TV film that’s entirely too long and very repetitive.  Also, many of the actors, especially Andrew Stevens, seem totally wrong for their parts.  Stevens’s accent comes and goes more than the tide.

The Devil’s Rain:  Over the years since I first saw this film, it has become something of a favorite of mine, at least when the William Shatner mood strikes.  It’s not good.  The ending doesn’t make much sense.  But it’s beautifully shot and has some good performances.  And I like all the weird family history it hints at but never does a very good job of explaining.  And then there’s the pudding poring finale capped with a nonsense ending to give it that final punch.

    Of course, then you’ve just got to throw in a Police Woman episode (Smack).  And then…we put in the amazing, the wondrous, the incomparable Impulse.  After that, we played Star Trek Scene It?  And then it was time for the main event.  Kingdom of the Spiders, the most amazingly…well, a movie.  Following that with Star Trek IV just seemed like the thing to do.  And the follow-up to that was the Star Trek episode A Piece of the Action.

Impulse:  “People like you ought to be ground up and made into dog food.”  I have come to the realization that Impulse is one of the greatest bad movies ever made.  From start to finish, it feels like a rollercoaster of awkward exchanges, poor choices, technical failings, and lack of continuity.  The ‘day for night’ shooting is among the worst outside of an Ed Wood movie.  The slow car murder, the Shatnerrific reactions, that awful little girl…Glorious.  No joke.  This is an absolute MUST see for any fan of cheese.

Kingdom of the Spiders:  Sadly not as genius as it should be, this does feature some great sleazy acting from Shatner and a fun, if poorly executed ending.  But the movie is slow, and the creatures ultimately not very scary (seriously, just get on a bike and you’re home free).  If you’re creeped out by spiders, this should be freaky.  If you’re not, it’s not quite campy enough, but it’s watchable with friends.

Star Trek IV:  One of the only Star Trek films to capture anything of the original series, this is also one of the most fun films of the whole franchise.  The first thing you’ll notices is that there’s no villain.  There’s nobody that needs to be punched or exploded at the end.  Like The Motion Picture, the film is more about identifying and figuring out a problem than it is about action.  If only the makers of the new films, or potential makers of a new TV series, would look at this movie and learn something.  No, that something isn’t ‘we should do time travel.

’

     After a raffle, those few who remained sat down to Big Bad Mama, the Roger Corman classic.  And we finished the evening off with a couple more original series episodes.

Big Bad Mama: This sleazy gangster film feels like a cheap attempt at capturing a taste of the Bonnie & Clyde pie.  It’s low budget and wonky, and it has dubious moral quality.  But it’s also got all kinds of 70s nudity (even Angie Dickinson).  Fun, but not especially good or memorable.

    Any week that involves a ShatAttack is a good week.  And this ended up being a really good week.

-Matt

BALTIMORE COMIC-CON 2013 part 1

- anticipation -

In the fall of 2004, a bunch of us drove to Atlanta for Dragon-Con.  Warren Ellis was crossing the Atlantic for the first time in a decade and Harlan Ellison was going to be there.  There were certainly many other noted guests in attendance, but these were the two I drove 26 hours to see.  While waiting in line for the early morning Ellis signing, we overheard a conversation that got, to my mind, rather foolish.  This woman, who was a published author, was going on about how different things are once you’re behind the curtain.  [emphasis mine]   As a published author – and, by extension, a professional – she did not read fiction for entertainment anymore; she couldn’t.  She continued to explain how she no longer got excited about meeting authors, in that “fan” sense.  Her rationale seemed to be that she was now part of this elite fellowship, and a fannish reaction would be unbecoming.  But, to my ear, it all sounded pretentious and stupid.  You couldn’t just excise that part of you enamored with stories and storytellers.  It was, and still is, an elitist attitude that was off-putting and felt disingenuous, as if this woman were putting on airs to impress those around her.  I wasn’t.

But what do I know?

It has now been eight years since Dan and I first tabled at a convention.  That experience was kind of devastating (WARNING: do not take your self-published, black-and-white, non-superhero comics to a big convention, just don’t, especially if they’re the first comics you’ve ever done).  But each successive convention has been better.  We’ve learned a lot from the experiences, had a few short stories published, and grown as writers through the only way possible, the grind of writing regularly, every day, no matter how inspired we feel.  Our names aren’t known and we haven’t landed that first big project, but we are writers (and Harlan Ellison, again, says that if you write, you’re a writer; you don’t need to be published or have an agent or whatever, you just need to do the work, and respect the work, and strive to improve – though, let’s be honest, being published is nice).  And, as we prepare for this year’s Baltimore Comic-Con – the first time Dan and I have returned to a big show as exhibitors since that initial debacle noted above – I find my inner fanboy revving up.

For the most part, since the devastation that was Wizard World Chicago: 2005, Dan and I have set up at small shows like SPX and the CGS Super Show.  Not only are those shows more intimate and less costly, but that is also where our audience is.  We write stories generally reproduced in black-and-white within genres that range along all points of the spectrum.  And I love those shows.  But Matt, who wrote a great fantasy story for Warrior27, our comics/prose anthology, kept telling us that Baltimore is a good show, that we could sell our books there, that it would be worth our while.  We always held off because Baltimore takes place within a week of SPX, and there’s no way Dan and I could take the time off to do both shows.  So we had to choose, and the Small Press Expo always won.  Until this year.

In 2003, before we started creating our own stories and exhibiting, Dan and I and a few others went to the Baltimore Comic-Con.  That was the year the hurricane had devastated Maryland, and the hotel where we reserved a room was without electricity (but that’s another story).  Despite this, the show went on, and even though we only spent one day there, I had a great time.  That day, ten years ago, I met Scott Kolins, José Villarrubia, Matt Wagner, and John K. Snyder III, and I had a great conversation with Chris Staros, among many other experiences.  It was a great show and a great time, and I’m looking forward to heading back in a few weeks.

This year I’m excited by the prospects of meeting the likes of Jim Starlin and Dave Gibbons and Greg Larocque and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, as well as finally meeting my collaborator on the first story I placed with a publisher – Jason Copland whose work on Kill All Monsters! with Michael May is fabulous and whose art graced my UFO story, “Life is Funny,” for Ape Entertainment.  And the guest list keeps getting bigger, with the likes of Michael Golden, Mark Waid, Art & Franco, Paris Cullins, Joe Hill, and the like.  Yeah, I may be a “professional,” but I’m looking forward to getting a chance to talk with some of the writers and artists who’ve created some of my most fondly remembered, and most-read, comics.  That will be a blast.

But I’ll also have my “pro” hat on.  I’m anxious to see who’s in artist’s alley and talk shop with them, and maybe make contacts that will pan out in a collaboration down the line.  Valiant and Boom! (and, apparently, IDW, though they haven’t been added to the official list yet) will be exhibiting, and I’ll have copies of my work on hand to share with them.  So, I won’t fully shuck off the “professional” moniker. 

Which means I need to start preparing.  I’ll talk about that in part 2 of this series.

- chris

Check out more from Chris at Warrior 27

Matt’s Week in Dork! (8/4/13-8/10/13)

    I was on vacation this week, and I didn’t get much of anything accomplished.  Didn’t even get much reading done.  All things considered, I didn’t watch many movies, either.  Still, got into DC once, and hung with friends a bunch, so not too bad.  Still, I kind of need another week to get to all the projects and tasks I took this week off to do.  Alas.

Europa Report:  As I said when I saw Oblivion earlier this year, there should be movies like this coming out all the time.  If that were the case, this would be a solid, average semi-realistic science fiction film.  However, due to the rareness of films like this, it’s one of the better to come along in a while.  The story is fairly simple.  A bunch of astronauts are on a long journey to Europa, the moon of Jupiter, to investigate the potential for life.  As happens in these movies, things don’t go especially well.  However, unlike movies like Sunshine, the cast of characters doesn’t seem like a collection of maladjusted sociopaths and mental incompetents thrown into a slap-dash bargain basement ship.  These folk are mostly competent, sane, and even under extreme pressure don’t break down.  They may crack a bit, but they don’t break.  Also, the ship technology doesn’t break down constantly or at every key moment (like in Sunshine).  Though the movie is about the dangers we may face in Humanity’s ventures into space, it is also about the glory and wonder of facing those dangers.

Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla: “Relax.  We’re with the government.”  The newer Godzilla movies are missing something, an essential charm.  They feel too rooted in modern Japanese science fiction, which is by and large total garbage, and less in the traditional Godzilla spirit.  This is no exception.  While the story of the disgraced soldier on a path to becoming a Mechagodzilla pilot is interesting, overall, the film is not.  And the monster fight effects are not good.  Everything looks cheaper, more made for TV.

2 Guns:  First, the good.  1) I’m glad this movie did well, so that Boom! Studios gets a cash influx, and maybe a bit of prestige.  Hopefully, that will turn into more of their comics getting adaptations, and in general, an improvement of titles they produce.  I  like Boom!  They tend to do the sorts of things I like to read (less superhero, more weird/science fiction stuff).  2) The Paula Patton nude scene is totally integral to the plot, and absolutely not gratuitous…Oh, wait, I mean had no reason for being there and was absolutely gratuitous.  Excellent.  After that, it’s all down hill.  Right from the start the dialog was awful.  The action scenes were boring.  And the whole plot was drab.  It felt like a second string 80s movie.  Like something Lou Diamond Philips would headline and Walter Hill would produce, but not direct.  Very bland.  Very typical.  No surprises.  No point.

King Kong Escapes:  Doctor Who (seriously, look it up) and a sinister governmental agent have finally figured out the best way to mine ultra-powerful radioactive elements from beneath the arctic ice.  Obviously, with a giant ape.  But where to find one?  Well, remember King Kong?  Yeah.  Right.  Well, we can’t get him.  So, uh, build a giant robot ape!  Duh.  But giant robot apes don’t do well with radiation.  And it turns out King Kong is around, and fighting dinosaurs on his island.  And boy is he horny.  Yup.  King Kong Escapes.  A whole bucket full of ‘what the hell’s wrong with Japan?’  But it’s also a lot of weird, silly fun.

The Host:  Holy balls, this movie is amazingly terrible.  It’s like the sad fantasies of a lonely high school girl.  Every line of dialog, every character decision, every plot turn feels like it was written on the back of a Trapper Keeper while listening to Debbie Gibson cassettes.  Many of these actors are better than this material, as is the director.  Frankly, the whole thing made me sad.  Not because the script was sad, but because it felt like watching a smart, beautiful woman descend into drugs and prostitution.  That’s what this movie felt like to me.  Sad and depressing.

It's so symbolic!

Yongary, Monster from the Deep:  “I’m going to see that monster.” Slow paced, low production value, and little of interest.  It’s not even up to the level of Gamera films.  Don’t bother.

Logan’s Run:  What can I say about this that I haven’t already?  One of my all time favorites.  It’s got all the stuff I love.  Dystopia, trippy music, Jenny Agutter in the buff, ruins of civilization, all that kind of thing.  A fun and twisting adventure of a style rarely done these days.  It scratches below the surface of a pretty paradise, digs into the underbelly, than rises up into the sun.  Awesome.

Elysium:  Overpopulation and climate change have turned large parts of the world into desolate urban sprawls.  The wealthy elite have fled, with their technology and know-how to a space station, where they’ve done a fine job of closing their eyes to life on Earth.  The look and feel of the movie is great.  The story is pretty basic sci-fi that’s been told scores and scores of times before.  A young man must rise from his humble place to free all the people from the oppressive regime.  Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Neo, Maria, the list goes on.  There aren’t very many twists.  It plays out in the expected ways.  But it’s well enough done to be enjoyable.  There is an over reliance on the dreaded ‘shaky-cam’ which is the bane of modern action film.  While not as poorly used as say Man of Steel or The Wolverine, it is still a black mark on the film’s record.  When will this nightmare of directors/producers/studios thinking that extreme close-ups and shaking cameras makes for good ‘tension’ end?  It just makes me sea-sick and angry.  But the thing I take away from this movie is that we’ve finally been given a really good vision of William Gibson’s cyberpunk world of Burning Chrome and Count Zero.  This movie is to Gibson and cyberpunk what In the Mouth of Madness was to Lovecraft and cosmic horror.  It isn’t based on any one work, but steeped in the genre, reaching for its essential center.  Is this going on my list of ‘best science fiction films’?  No.  But it’s a good one and worth checking out.  A good companion to The Running Man and Soylent Green.

Gantz II: Perfect Answer:  There are some extremely cool ideas at the heart of Gantz, but it fails in all the ways Japanese films tend to fail.  A sphere of ill-defined origin, with ill-defined motives, uses ill-defined powers to manipulate undefined characters on some ill-defined missions to terminate ill-defined aliens.  The Gantz anime had some good ideas too, but was stretched out over far too many episodes and never came together in any kind of satisfying way.  This two part adaptation condenses the series pretty well, and gives a better resolution.  Also, though not better defined, the characters are far less annoying and useless in this live-action version.  That said, Gantz II (and Gantz) is still a deeply flawed film with far too many problems and nothing especially amazing to make me recommend viewing.

    Wow.  Yeah, that’s pretty much my week.  Well, I did watch one other thing.  I powered through the first four seasons of Peep Show (It’s UK, so that’s not as impressive as it sounds. The seasons are only like 6 episodes long.).  The show is a touch painful, as David Mitchell’s character reminds me a lot of myself (actually, David Mitchell reminds me a lot of myself), and not always in a good way.  Funny.  But painful funny.

-Matt

Matt’s Week in Dork! (7/28/13-8/3/13)

    Sunday started the week off right, with a morning movie, a trip to a comic shop, and an early evening movie.  Brad, Ben, and I made a day of it, finally checking out the Angelica theater that has recently been built in a newly developing town center ten or fifteen minutes from my place.  The area has a Reston Town Center kind of vibe.  Nice, lots of shops, lots of open spaces, and lots of families.  The weirdest Target I’ve ever been to (it rests on top of a parking garage…?). 

The Wolverine:  Is it great?  No.  Is it better than most of the X-Men movies?  Yeah.  This movie did what Wolverine Origins should have done, focusing less on mutant battles, and more on character and story.  Unfortunately, the action it did feature was kinda awful.  Except for the train-top fight, which I enjoyed, I found all the battles and action sequences in the film extremely dull.  Not as dull as the battles in Man of Steel, but that film kind of set the gold standard for fights that WILL NOT STOP. 

Only God Forgives:  If you thought Drive was a bit slow, a bit too quiet, a bit too violent, then you should probably stay way away from this film.  Much more in tone like Valhalla Rising, with long sequences of not talking punctuated with sudden bursts of ultra-violence.  Although, when you look at it, there isn’t actually much onscreen violence, considering how oppressive it feels.  Most viewers are just not going to respond to this movie.  But if you enjoy stuff like Lost Highway, Valhalla Rising, Beyond the Black Rainbow, etc. you might want to give it a go.

Doctor Who: Battlefield:  The Doctor runs into Arthurian myth in this not entirely bad late story.  I’m finding it hard to push through these Sylvester McCoy tales, and I completely understand why the show was on its last legs.

Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack:  “It’s like a monster convention!”  This movie is weird.  It pretty much ignores 50 years of Godzilla films, with only the first one actually having happened.  And it re-writes the monsters.  Here, Ghidorah is a guardian monster, not the ultimate alien foe.  The story, as is so often the case, revolves around a plucky reporter trying to follow the action.  And of course, the military is helpless.  The mix of CGI and new filming techniques make the film look cheaper and more TV-like.  I liked a lot of the stuff about the people on the ground, but the actual monster action was less impressive.  I did find Chiharu Niiyama particularly charming as the reporter.  I might have been a little happier if they’d cut back on the military stuff and play up her role a bit more.

    And my vacation started on Friday evening.  I have a lot to do in the next week, including a good deal of serious time wasting.

Brotherhood of the Wolf:  This movie is total kitchen sink entertainment.  What genre is it?  What genre isn’t it?  It’s not a ‘teen sex-comedy.’  Otherwise, I think it fits into nearly anything you can think of.  Historic mystery, martial-arts fantasy, buddy cop, religious/political conspiracy, costume drama, western, horror, etc.  The set-up is simple.  A creature is killing people in the French countryside during the mid 18th century.  A war hero and his Acadian blood-brother ride in to town to investigate.  Things get crazy.  Is it a wolf?  Is it a monster?  Is it something else entirely?  Secrets and lies, politics and religion, lust and honor.  Crazy stylized action scenes, beautiful Hammer-style production design, and a crazy plot progression make for some entertaining viewing.

Space: Above and Beyond:  This show had big problems.  The main cast of characters are uninteresting clichés (though they get better as time goes on), the effects suck, the production looks cheap most of the time, and the A.I. rebel subplot is handled surprisingly poorly.  But, the WWII vibe and character growth do help.  The building storyline and sometimes heart breaking moments, along with the authentic feeling military jargon and behavior make it stand out.  A lot of sci-fi shows have action/war themes.  Few make it feel ‘real.’  Though on a totally different quality ballpark, this reminded me a great deal of Band of Brothers, or even The Big Red One.  I would love to see someone re-launch the show today.  Better technology and technique, as well as less devotion to the episodic nature of TV that was still fairly firm in the 90s could make up for a lot.  Drop or substantially alter the A.I. business (they’re cartoonishly stupid villains with little or no rhyme or reason, and inconstancies that are unforgivable).  In the post-Battlestar reboot landscape, with our generation’s own long term military conflicts hanging over our heads, a show like Space: Above and Beyond, handled with more care and more (or better used) money could be an effective vehicle for storytelling.  Sci-fi fans should probably watch this show, but know it’s uneven and gets off to a very, very shaky start.  The second half is a marked improvement, and it is sad that the show did not come back for another season, as I think there was a good deal of potential.  Who knows, maybe someone will Ronald D. Moore it one of these days.

    More reading.  More music.  Worked on a script.  Not much accomplished.  You know, another week in the life.  Dork life!

-Matt

The New Doctor is In

    I guess it wouldn’t make much sense for me to not have some comment on the choice of actor for the newest incarnation (regeneration) of Doctor Who.  I am a long time (1981?) fan of the series, and have talked about it extensively on this blog in the past.  Here’s the thing.  The new series has kind of lost me.  No, I’m not one of those ‘you can’t do anything new; why can’t it be like it was?’ kind of fans.  I like that they really shook things up in style and tone with the relaunch of the series in 2005.  And overall, I’ve liked this new run.  Christopher Eccleston was wonderfully eccentric with a nice balance of child-like wonder and sadness.  David Tennant overstayed things a bit, but was quite good for his first two seasons.  I warmed to Matt Smith shockingly fast.  But the writing.  The writing.  There have been problems from the beginning, with deus ex machinas flying around like skivvies at a college party.  But in the last two seasons, those problems have become far more acute.  The writing has become…well, just lazy.  Very, very lazy.  It’s become a series of impossibly huge problems with absolutely no way to get out of it and the fate of every Human on Earth resting in the balance…only to have the Doctor say a couple of pithy lines, maybe a speech about the wonder of the universe or how much he likes Humans and how special they are, then the sonic screwdriver comes out and he miraculously saves the day.  Forgetting of course, that along the way he’s let lots of other people die or be horribly ruined, even his friends.  When things are only mildly bad, or deadly for one or two people (or more accurately, easy for the writer to use in creating false emotional resonance) the screwdriver only works as a simple tool, but when there’s absolutely no hope, suddenly the screwdriver can do whatever is needed to solve the problem (remember that episode at the beginning of this past season where a third of the people on Earth just died…then he waved his magic wand-I mean sonic screwdriver and everyone just got better?).  It’s become the weekly equivalent of Superman flying around the world so fast he turned back time, one of the all time unforgivable cheats in cinematic history, up there with ‘it was all a dream.’

Expecto Patronum!

    So as far as the casting goes, Peter Capaldi is a great choice.  I was leaning toward Sean Pertwee or Colin Salmon personally, but Peter Capaldi is a fantastic actor.  Going back to his young semi-hippie performance in Lair of the White Worm, through more recent roles on Torchwood (and Doctor Who) and In the Loop.  I’m very happy that they went for someone a bit more mature this go-round.  Having two very young Doctors in a row was weird.  I will chime in on a topic of much contention within internet fan circles, too.  Look, I know gender is a touchy subject these days.  And I think anyone who really knows me knows that I am 100% pro-women when it comes to heroic roles, action leads, etc.  In fact, I’ve frequently complained that the Doctor’s female companions have been too often relegated to the role of love-sick puppies.  Martha is probably my favorite of the new companions, but she spent much of her time pining after the heartbroken Doctor.  Donna was the most independent, but I can’t stand the actress in the role.  Where are companions like Leela, Ace, or Romana (I&2)?  The sad thing is that Rory became one of the most compelling companions in this new run, and he was a monumental sap (Jack was pretty good, but once he moved to Torchwood, he pretty much sucked).  And as far as making the Doctor a woman this time round, that just seems like pandering.  There has never been an indication that Time Lords switch gender, and every indication that they don’t.  And the only reason to do it now would be to appeal to some sort of ill conceived sense of woman empowerment, but which would in fact be nothing but condescension.  It’s like adding the black character for no other reason than producers feel there needs to be a black character (not because the actor who was best for the part happened to be black).  The Doctor has always been a very male figure, and there’s nothing wrong with a male figure.  What there is something wrong with is the lack of compelling and strong female figures to accompany him on his journey.  Or for that matter, strong and compelling characters of any sort.  He needs a Leela or an Ace, an independent, self-motivated woman who doesn’t give a toss about him romantically, but loves the opportunity for adventure and knowledge.  And if romance is in the cards, he needs a Romana, an equally powerful and wise counterpart, not a wide-eyed child wowed by his expensive gifts and aloofness.  And maybe we could finally have a return to weird companions.  No more 20 something girls from today’s London.  Let’s shake it up with an alien, or someone from the future or the past.  A cyborg, a supergenius, or Hun.  What about that Silurian who showed up in the Victorian era?  Something other than another cute little girl.  On that topic, for crying out loud, let’s have a woman, not a girl.

    So, here’s to a new actor and maybe some new life breathed into the show.  But more importantly, here’s to an immediate and massive shift in writing.  Let’s get away from operatic melodrama, and get back into ideas and adventure.  Enough impossible astronauts and bad wolves.  Enough with everything having hidden meaning, but nothing meaning much of anything.  Enough with the human race being on the brink of extinction every other week.  Let’s have some good old fashioned interesting settings, interesting stories, and interesting characters.  Let’s have some fun again.  Take us places.  Show us things.  Make us think and wonder.  Come on Doctor Who.  Be as cool as we all think you are.

-Matt