Saturday, March 3, 2012

FFS Spara!

See, Moff! You SEE what these delays in production do? They give the Emperor time to congeale like algae and get high off his own fungal fumes!

Both Amy and Rory should be killed off asap. They are dull everyman characters designed to appeal to Joe Normal. At least by giving them a dramatic exit some interest might be squeezed out of their boring existance.

At last count, Ben Chatham's seventh year of canon began with him lying on the couch, getting drunk and feeling ashamed of being gay while Kyle defeated alien invasions...

The new companion, whether male or female, needs to get away from being a bland, normal everyman or everywoman. We need someone who is real ie has flaws and vices but still saves the day.

That's Ben Chatham out, then isn't it? HAH! No, don't worry, Benji is still in the closet as his latest adventure - the imaginatively-entitled Wedding of Ben Chatham - has him desperate to appear straight, propose to the first non-regular-castmember woman he sees and immediately cheats on her in a gay bay. Immediately as in "a few minutes after she agrees to marry him" immediately.

Recent companions have been overly 'normal' in order to appeal to a mass audience. Martha and Amy in particular are one dimensional generic feisty girls. If one of them was an ex-prostitude on drugs I might be interested.

What IS a prostitude? Is it some kind of slutty outlook on life?

Not necessarily, I was making a rhetorical point.

Oh, thanks for clearing that up.

Recent Doctor Who companions have been bland, with the exception of Donna Noble.


And you treated her character with SO much respect as a result...

We need a different kind of companion, someone who is difficult and outside of the box.

No, INSIDE the box otherwise they can't travel in time and space and will be forced to hang around Cambridge getting drunk in wine bars and... oooooh, VERY clever, spara.

I presume that this is just a florid rumour the new companion will be the Doctor's boyfriend. However it should be true. As I have shown many times, the Doctor is bisexual.

Ah, you can do a whole year about the Doctor getting married to a woman he repeatedly has sex with - and his fetish for a female TARDIS - with a whole episode devoted to him having no clue his actions could possibly be interpreted as homosexual. But does that register with the absinthe-addict community? Shame on you, Moff.

Hawkeye Pierce, meanwhile, sums this up: "You cannot award yourself with smug self congratulatory praise because you have outed a fictional man on your television screen."

Adric, Turlough, kissing Captain Jack.......

Actually, Captain Jack kissed HIM and there was a complete lack of snogging or TARDIS-rape in the Davison era - I know, I've checked!

Meanwhile, sparacus abandons any pretence at having an original idea as he outlines his story arc for the fiftieth anniversary year of Doctor Who:

The giant maggots should return in a sequel to 'The Green Death'.

But what's this? For Jabba the Moff had promised "Fourteen Big, Blockbuster-Movie Episodes"

14 episodes of uber-populist American style TV which has little in common with the Doctor Who that fans love.

Yes, precisely the sort of thing Moff has provided for the last seven years...

Agreed. One of the biggest problems with current Doctor Who is how the venal Doctor Who industry line up to praise every single episode to the roof because they are making money out of it. I'm not suggesting that DWM should consist of purely negative or critical material. However there should be some balance of opinion. For example the letters page.


The one they refuse to let you on any more?

Occasionaly there is one negative letter selected however usually its just a string of letters praising the latest episode with no attempt whatsoever to represent a spectrum of views. SFX and other sci fi mags do the same.

Been reading different SFXes to me, then. There was more viscious hatred and unreasoning slagging off in the last SFX Doctor Who special then Michael Grade's autobiography... Could it be they get letters from people liking Doctor Who because it's actually popular?

I can accept the idea that a majority of the letters are positive for a majority of the episodes. But not that all the letters are for every episode. If you read the episode review threads on here you tend to get very mixed opinions expressed. Not in DWM, because they won't print the negative ones.
Again, this is clearly from someone who can't read...

You are clearly trying to entice me into calling Mr Spilsbury a liar, which I am certainly not going to do. My point is that there are hardly ever letters printed on the DWM letters page that are critical of Moffat era Doctor Who episodes. It is inconcievable to anyone with common sense that this is fairly reflective of fandom opinion.

Shall I just let you rant from now on?

You are misrepresenting what I am saying. 9-10 million casual viewers are not fandom. These 9-10 million casual viewers do not all buy DWM or feel enough motivation to write to it. They are mostly casual viewers who watch Doctor Who because it is preferable to the rubbish on ITV
.

He's a true fan, isn't he?

You are simply trying to muddy the waters here. This is a well known occurance. I have no horse in this race. Doing so would, frankly, reek of an insecurity and lack of confidence in my own opinions.


Um...

I am not asserting 'baseless accusations'. I am using common sense to reach conclusions which are pretty obvious.

OK...

Fair point but a rather tangental one. It is still unlikely.

Just nod if you can still hear me.

Anyway, moving on, original my point still stands.


Isn't that moving back?

We should not be celebrating that Moffat is promising 14 'Blockbuster-Movie' episodes. The essence of Doctor Who is that it is not like this. Its a quaint, varied, eccentric British show and its BBC tv style gives it a sense of being accessible. It isn't Star Wars.

You really should have mentioned this way back, Emperor...

No it is not. Doctor Who has always been 'the childrens' programme that adults also appreciate'. In the words of Philip Hnchcliffe, if you pitch it at the intelligent 14 year old then both kids and adults may enjoy it. To be fair on Moffat, some of his series 6 stories were clearly pitched this way eg the Impossible Astronaut. However too many, such as his awful Christmas specials, seemed pitched at 5 year olds! No wonder he is losing older vewers.

He's not losing viewers. If anything, he's getting more. The whole "tape it and watch it later" factor counts nowadays.

Hardcore Doctor Who fans won't want to wait to watch it later. They'll be desperate to watch it asap ie at the time of broadcast.

So the people that watch it later aren't fans?!

They don't make the effort to record it. Most of them watch it on I Player - the younger ones. They watch it on their I Phones to kill time when bored at school.

And who's fault is that, Mr. Teacher?

A tangental point I know but I'm honestly exasperated that people watch Doctor Who before allowing their children to see it. Its over protective and wrapping kids in cotton wool. It reminds me of parents who won't let their kids walk to next doors without driving them in the car. awful.

Stops them getting slaughtered in alleyways by cat-murdering eco-terrorists, though.

It would never have occured to my parents to vet something like Doctor Who in this way.


That does explain a lot of why your writing gets moderated for sexual content...

My alternate series 6 is neither awful or abandoned.

That'll be the one you haven't gone near for over eighteen months that even LBC thought was rubbish?

They are cutting edge and exciting story proposals.

Not according to everyone who read them.

Back to the point: Moffat's hype reminds me of RTD's hype about each season ending being 'bigger, better and brilliant'. Both praise their own scripts with no sense of embarassment.


Good thing you never do that.

Where was I?

Christ knows.

Oh yes. Everything has to be BIGGER and on a MASSIVE scale. Doctor Who is not a big international BLOCKBUSTER like the James Bond franchise; its a quaint little English show. Although varied in style, Doctor Who operates within a series of paremeters. It is a quaint bbc tv show with a sense of eccentric Englishness about it. Or at least the classic series prior to that awful 1996 Paul McGann US thing was.

"Thing"? It was a TV movie! Not a "paremeter"!

An unconvincing attempt to disguise the fact that the stats largely support my case.


What stats?

An attempt to blind with statistics.

Oh. It's not working.

Not the case at all. It is human nature for most people to seek to conform. People who lack a strong ego are often easily influenced and carried along by what they perceive to be the accepted orthodoxy.


Not me, fuckwit.

Assertive point which is not explained. I made a valid and reasoned point about human behavior. I have studied Psychology.

(See his review on The Girl Who Waited.)

I suggest that we both accept that we have made some valid points and less valid ones and regard our exchange as a draw.

And that was when the mods locked the thread, deleted half the posts and banned sparacus for the next day. Truly a golden age we live in. Makes me glad I broke back into Gallifrey Base. Send all cards and gesture of support here or here if it's really urgent.

2 comments:

Jared "No Nickname" Hansen said...

Ahhh, those mods. See, this all happened when the guy who thought it was genius to adapt the quote to be "No second chances. We're those kind of mods" ends up running the forum. You know, when you need a George Orwell kind of ambience to your Doctor Who fanfic discussions...

Youth of Australia said...

Indeed.

Pity no one misquoted Gridlock.

"Someone's got to ask, because you might not talk about it, but it's there in your eyes. What if the Chatham threads never stop? What if there's no punchline coming, not ever? What if there's nothing? Just the Rickett drool, with the trolls going round and round and round and round, never stopping? Forever?"

Maybe they did, and then they just disappeared...

Instead they quoted perfectly:
"That's a no. And that's final. We're not discussing it. The conversation is closed."