Mad Larry

Ich möchte diesen Threat nutzen, um den User dieses Forums die Internet-Veröffentlichungen von Lawrence Miles ans Herz zu legen und einige Zitate daraus zu bringen. Lawrence Miles war einer der Autoren der NAs und EDAs und hat unter Anderem die Bücher Interference I+II und Alien Bodies verfasst.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/clas…nce_miles.shtml

Im Jahr 2000 erklärte er öffentlich seinen Austritt aus dem Doctor-Who-Fandom auch, weil er sich hoffnungslos mit anderen Autoren der Reihe wie Paul (von ihm genannt "Shagger" ) Cornell , Gary Russell und Mark Gatiss zerstritten hatte, da er es gewagt hatte die ungeschriebene Regel zu brechen, keines der Werke der anderen Autoren öffentlich zu kritisieren und zum anderen weil er - wie er selbst sagt - ein Dickhead ist.

http://web.archive.org/web/2005030109…ia/lastever.php

Sein Konzept Faction Paradox aus den EDAs hat er mittlerweile zu einem Spin-Off mit Büchern, Comics und Audios ausgebaut.

Von sich reden gemacht hat er in letzter Zeit auch weil er in seinem Blog http://beasthouse-lm.blogspot.com/, das sich mit Popkultur , Science Fiction, Politik und ( teilweise allzu ) persönlichen Themen beschäftigt nur vorübergehend online gestellte "Rezensionen" zu neuen DW-Folgen veröffentlicht. Diese sind in der Regel äußerst kontrovers bis polemisch und teilweise auch völlig am Thema vorbei, jedoch immer intelligent, witzig und unterhaltsam. ( Sebst wenn man mit ihm in der Bewertung überhaupt nicht übereinstimmt, so muss man doch sagen, dass seine Argument immer einen gewissen Sinn ergeben ). Berüchtigt ist sein Beitrag zu The Unquiet Dead, dem er latenten Rassismus vorwirft ( was er mittlerweile zumindest teilweise zurückgenommen hat ). Es gibt allerdings auch positive Wertungen unter anderem zu Love & Monster und Fear Her ( sic! ).

Den Spitznamen Mad Larry trägt er aufgrund seiner selbst zugegebenen "personality problems".

Aktuelle Beträge sind zu finden unter http://beasthouse-lm.blogspot.com/

Einige ältere finden sich auf :http://beasthouse-lm2.blogspot.com/

Der aktuelle Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Wiedereinführung von Donna und ich kann nicht anders als ihm - wie so oft - absolut zuzustimmen:

Zitat

In last week's review of "The Sound of Drums", the author of this
journal commented: 'I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare
than a rational response, that "The Last of the Time Lords" will
feature a shock ending in which David Tennant regenerates into Matt
Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow typical of the
kind of mistake this series is starting to make.' The suggestion in
this article was that if Doctor Who were to hire a
media-friendly yet grotesquely overrated comedy performer, whose
talents only extend as far as Doing Silly Voices and whose attempts at
drama tend to distort the rest of the production so badly that the
"real" actors look as if they're in a completely different programme,
then casting Matt Lucas as the Doctor would be as bad as it could
possibly get. In light of today's announcement by the BBC, we now
accept that this is not the case.

The review of "The Sound of
Drums" also criticised Russell T. Davies' belief that the audience can
only "accept" regular characters from a contemporary suburban
background, describing it as "insulting" and pointing out that the
programme's obsession with all things present-day is becoming both
repetitive and embarrassing. This paragraph should, of course, have
ended with the words: 'The result is that the ideal companion is now a
one-dimensional caricature of Someone Typically 2007 who wouldn't even
be acceptable in an episode of Footballers' Wives, an
individual whom the programme-makers believe to be "modern" despite the
fact that there isn't a single section of the audience which is capable
of relating to her, even if she weren't played by a comedian
whose idea of "acting" is to put on a generic surprised-looking face
and start shouting when she thinks it might get a laugh.'

The review went on to suggest that Mr Davies is now so well-insulated in the Doctor Who
bunker that he's no longer capable of seeing things from the audience's
point of view. This was clearly written before we learned that the new
regular on board the TARDIS will be a forty-year-old woman with
relationship issues and a job in an HR department, a character who will
simply be bewildering to any children watching, and whose presence will
inevitably cause life with the Doctor to become a BBC3 sitcom about
bickering grown-ups who occasionally get interrupted by annoying things
like "having adventures" while they're trying to agonise about their
biological clocks. We therefore freely acknowledge that we
underestimated the scale of the problem, and that "we couldn't possibly
have expected them to do anything this rubbish" is not an adequate
excuse.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused. As, indeed, should BBC Wales.

We'd also like to ask whether we can have Bonnie Langford back.

Quelle:http://beasthouse-lm.blogspot.com/

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Zitat von Kaoru

Und die besondere Gruseligkeit an der Sache ist, dass die immer recht schnell nachdem die Folge gelaufen ist online gehen...

Teilweise auch schon davor. Er rezensiert dann einfach die Folge wie sie seiner Meinung nach sein wird oder schreibt über etwas völlig Anderes.

EDIT: Ottografy berichtigt

Noch ein Bit von Lawrence über den zu Recht ( neue Rechtschreibung, oder? ) gelobten Steven Mofffat:

Zitat

52. Dominance. Oh yes… what I said before, about liking episodes of Doctor Who
even if they’re written by people I resent? I refer mainly to Steven
Moffat, whom I find objectionable not because of any great crime
against human culture, but simply because he used to insist on giving
me the “power-pat” every time I saw him. The power-pat, for those who
haven’t seen the President of the United States use it on virtually
everyone he meets, is a primitive form of body-language used by
dominant pack-males to establish that all the other pack-males are
beneath them in the hierarchy. If, for example, those other pack-males
haven’t won a Bafta or anything. (If this sounds like over-analysis,
then believe me when I say that the impact of the power-pat is quite
astonishing, so much so that political advisors now routinely train
world leaders to do it to visiting diplomats. Viewers automatically
pick up on it, even if they don’t consciously notice it.) Moffat’s use
of the technique was so unsubtle that it was almost funny to watch, so
I eventually had to counter it by telling everyone I knew that he had a
gay crush on me, and that if they watched him carefully then they’d
notice the way he always tried to cop a friendly feel when he was in my
presence. I have no idea whether Moffat ever noticed that whenever he
found me standing with a group of friends, the whole crowd of them
would start giggling as soon as he let go of my shoulder and walked
away. I also discovered that if I raised myself up on the balls of my
feet, invaded his personal space, and started asking him loud questions
about his private life, then he’d literally cower before me
and start treating me as if I were the dominant one, but I honestly
couldn’t be bothered keeping it up. Being an alpha-male is altogether
too much like hard work.
Quelle:http://beasthouse-lm.blogspot.com/

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Erinnert mich sehr an den Fernsehausschnitt, wo dem Bush das Merkel die Schultern knetet, oder?

Die Reviews erscheinen zuerst auf der allgemeinen Seite http://beasthouse-lm.blogspot.com/ , sind dort aber nur wenige Tage zu lesen.

Eine ( unvollständige ) Auswahl daraus gibt noch auf http://beasthouse-lm2.blogspot.com/ zu sehen, wobei nochmal anzumerken ist, dass es Reviews im weitesten Sinne sind.

Auf der wiki-Seite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Miles habe ich noch folgende Links gefunden:http://www.beasthouse.fsnet.co.uk/who01.htm,
http://www.beasthouse.fsnet.co.uk/who03.htm, http://www.beasthouse.fsnet.co.uk/who05.htm . ( und noch ein paar andere ).

Ansonsten kannst du noch nach Lawrence Miles googeln und wirst eventuell noch einige Seiten und Foren finden, die ähnlich wie hier bestimmte Beiträge vollständig oder auszugsweise zitieren. ( bei Outpst Gallifrey gab es wohl mal eine recht angeregte Diskussion vor allem über den The Unquiet Dead Review

Der review zu Last of the Timelords war recht kurz, so dass ich ihn aus dem Gedächtnis wiedergeben kann:

"The first rule of Science Fiction is You do not rewind time.
The second rule of Science Fiction is You do not rewind time."

Die Reviews erscheinen zuerst auf der allgemeinen Seite http://beasthouse-lm.blogspot.com/ , sind dort aber nur wenige Tage zu lesen.

Eine ( unvollständige ) Auswahl daraus gibt noch auf http://beasthouse-lm2.blogspot.com/ zu sehen, wobei nochmal anzumerken ist, dass es Reviews im weitesten Sinne sind.

Auf der wiki-Seite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Miles habe ich noch folgende Links gefunden:http://www.beasthouse.fsnet.co.uk/who01.htm,
http://www.beasthouse.fsnet.co.uk/who03.htm, http://www.beasthouse.fsnet.co.uk/who05.htm . ( und noch ein paar andere ).

Ansonsten kannst du noch nach Lawrence Miles googeln und wirst eventuell noch einige Seiten und Foren finden, die ähnlich wie hier bestimmte Beiträge vollständig oder auszugsweise zitieren. ( bei Outpst Gallifrey gab es wohl mal eine recht angeregte Diskussion vor allem über den The Unquiet Dead Review ).

Der review zu Last of the Timelords war recht kurz, so dass ich ihn aus dem Gedächtnis wiedergeben kann:

"The first rule of Science Fiction is You do not rewind time.
The second rule of Science Fiction is You do not rewind time."

Weil es nun auch nicht mehr auf der Seite von Lawrence Miles zu finden war, hier noch eine Kopie dieses hervorragenden Beitrages:

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Which is Worse: Langford or Tate?

What we've learned from history is this: there can come a point in the career of any Doctor Who producer when the years spent hanging around with minor celebrities and Cybermen begin to take their toll, and he finds himself either lost in space or lost in showbiz. In 1986, John Nathan-Turner went berserk simply because nobody really liked Doctor Who any more, hence his decision to retreat from the world by pretending to be famous and hanging around with as many People From Telly as possible. In the case of Russell T. Davies, renowned scriptwriter turned championship-level shark-jumper, the problem is that everybody likes Doctor Who and nobody's capable of slamming on the brakes. But the end result is the same: the tendency to pick a well-known ginger personality from the world of Light Entertainment to play the Lead Human, rather than a proper actor. And it's easy to make a connection between the two, because the casting of Catherine Tate in 2007 has provoked a very similar response to the casting of Bonnie Langford in 1986… which is to say, a very similar response amongst actual viewers, not amongst coke-happy BBC3-addled media types who still believe Catherine Tate to be the Hip New Thing in Television and probably think The Friday Night Project is funny. (This morning, a relative of mine greeted me with the words: 'Shame about Doctor Who, isn't it?' This is interesting, not because he thought that Tate was a cripplingly bad choice - everybody outside the BBC thinks that - but because he automatically assumed I'd agree with him, suggesting that everybody knows everybody outside the BBC thinks that. The official announcement was much like a news report about an earthquake in India, something to unite the nation in a response of 'tt'.)

Clearly, the key difference between Langford and Tate is that hardly anyone saw the episodes featuring Langford, whereas these days Doctor Who actually has an audience. The end result of this situation is, of course, international terrorism. There's a logic here. Britain is currently reeling from a wave of deeply rubbish terrorist attacks, apparently organised by Islamic extremists who don't really have any ideas about using terrorism to elicit political change, but who - faced with the nation's failure to pray five times a day and cover up Katie Price - feel so impotent that their only release is to drive cars into airports. Ineffectually. Doctor Who fans will already be familiar with this feeling of helplessness: consider the notorious postings on Outpost Gallifrey after Christopher Eccleston's early retirement, by emotionally-retarded monomaniacs who wanted to launch an organised campaign of harassment against him for the heinous crime of "being knackered". Leaving aside the obvious ethical problems with wanting to give a punishment beating to an actor… what, precisely, did they want to achieve? As with the Rubbish Bombers in London and Glasgow, their purpose wasn't really to change anything but to provide an outlet for frustrated rage. At around the time that Bonnie Langford became the new companion, one Doctor Who fanzine ran the headline "John Nathan-Turner Must Die". And since Langford only handicapped the programme rather than making it a completely unworkable proposition, the offices of BBC Wales must surely be a greater area of risk than Heathrow. We should also beware of people dressing up in Tetrap costumes and setting themselves on fire.

So which is really worse, Langford or Tate? In order to draw a line under this whole hideous issue, the evidence has been broken down scientifically, and we'll be comparing their performances - and their potential for damage - in five key areas…

1. Ability to Be Unpopular. This is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as it may seem. In 1986, Bonnie Langford was universally loathed amongst the general population, known throughout the land as a B-list game-show filler who'd once been a shrieky child star and who apparently hadn't changed much. Comedy shows of the day treated her as an all-purpose object of hatred, much like Jade Goody or Ann Widdecombe today. On the other hand, Catherine Tate is supposedly popular, supposedly because it's hard to find anyone outside the media who actually likes her. Her sketch show gets reasonable-but-not-great viewing figures, yet this seems to be a result of the BBC's drive to push every new "catchphrase comedy" series as the Next Big Thing rather than a result of audience enthusiasm. More crucially, though, there's the problem that catchphrase comedy - let's not call it "character comedy", we don't want to overstate things - irritates a lot more people than it attracts. Hire an actor from a sitcom, and most people will be ambivalent. Hire someone who makes a living by shouting the same joke over and over again, only with increasingly unlikely co-stars (up to and including jovial war criminal Tony Blair), and… well, for every viewer who likes it, there'll be nine who say "Christ, I can't stand her". It is, if you will, like installing Crazy Frog on the TARDIS computer. Nonetheless, we're forced to conclude that some real people actually like Tate, which certainly wasn't true of Langford in the mid-'80s. Langford 9/10, Tate 7/10.

2. Ability to Completely Distort the Nature of the Series. Bonnie Langford is, beyond the surface layer of mewling '80s showbizness, not actually a bad actor. Mediocre, possibly, but not bad. Whereas Catherine Tate is… not an actor at all. Like Peter Sellers before her, she specialises in a kind of performance which is more interested in getting the audience's attention than in making any part seem credible. She gets one single, straightforward scene in Bleak House, and she utterly destroys it, responding to every line of dialogue as if she's doing a "comic reaction" and therefore warping everything around her. Her comedy-drama vehicle for ITV was much the same, although thankfully, nobody can even remember what it was called. The point is that this isn't acting, it's what old-school comedians used to call schtick. In "The Runaway Bride", there are moments when she looks as if she's desperately trying not to look straight into the camera while she's doing her "surprised face" mugging; she gets away with it, almost, because this is the one-off Christmas Special and we know we're not going to have to put up with it for long. The idea of living with this for thirteen weeks, however, is much like the idea of watching Ali Bongo do the same water-in-the-newspaper trick for nine hours on end. The problem worsens when you realise that a lot of writers on Doctor Who just don't like the companions very much. In the gap between "Smith and Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code", Martha Jones goes from being acute, intelligent and inquisitive to being an ignorant she-parrot who makes cock-obvious statements and then says either 'yeah?' or 'you are kidding me' at the end of the sentence, basically a grotesque 2-D parody of a Modern Woman Circa 2007. Given a character like Donna Noble, who already is a grotesque 2-D parody of a Modern Woman Circa 2007, what are the odds of Tate even trying to play the part properly? Langford 4/10, Tate 9/10.

3. Ability to Play a Character Who Makes No Sense in This Context. We thankfully never get to see the moment when Melanie Bush joins the TARDIS, despite the attempts of various fan-fic writers to provide us with an Origin Story. As all good fanboys will know, she turns up in chronologically-confusing circumstances between the story that's probably called "Mindwarp" and the story that's not really called "Terror of the Vervoids", and perhaps this was a deliberate damage-limitation strategy on the part of the script editor: in much the same way that George Lucas couldn't possibly kill Jar Jar Binks at the end of Revenge of the Sith (because the audience would just cheer), the programme couldn't possibly show us the moment when the Doctor turns to Mel and says 'would you like to come with me…?' (because the audience would throw things at the screen). Mel is the woman with no personality, no background, no reason for being there and - ultimately - no reason for leaving, apart from the obvious "universal hatred" one. But while she is there, her presence on the TARDIS at least makes a form of sense. Mel is an all-purpose roll-on roll-off companion, who does all the things companions are supposed to do and squeals like a child when she gets overexcited. And it's Bonnie Langford, so being overexcited covers most of her existence. By contrast, Donna Noble is a petty, self-obsessed reject from Footballer's Wives who believes the fate of the cosmos to be Somebody Else's Problem. Not a single thing about her in "The Runaway Bride" is remotely likeable - or feasible, but that didn't seem so bad, when we thought she was just meant to be a joke - yet at the end of it all, the Doctor asks her to stay with him. This puzzled many viewers, although it makes sense when you realise that Russell T. Davies has actually come to like his creation, and can't understand that nobody else does. The comparison with Jar Jar Binks is a good one, because even he served a specific function, i.e. to make small children laugh. Donna can't even do that. Langford 6/10, Tate 7/10. Which brings us to…

4. Ability to Alienate a Large Portion of the Audience. If Doctor Who chased the ratings then it wouldn't be worth watching, but there's a sizeable gulf between "trying something controversial" and "just pissing everyone off". A lot of people hated Peter Kay as a big green bogeyman, and others couldn't understand why "Gridlock" was full of people talking when the whole thing could have been about giant CGI space-crabs, but no individual episode can wreck the set-up of the whole series. Nor could Mel, who may have been a non-person but who still performed her companionly duties to the best of her ability. When she has to say things like 'how utterly evil!' and (most astonishing of all) 'a megabyte modem!!!', we can at least tell ourselves that we might get something completely different next week. But Donna as TARDIS-fodder destroys the programme's entire dynamic. We need a point-of-view character, however exotic or annoying, in order to make sense of both the Doctor and his universe. Even if we could feel any sense of compassion for Donna at all, she'd still seem less believable than any of the monsters, and she'd still change the shape of the series from "young explorer and lonely god" to "a couple of grown-ups bickering". For once, you really have to feel sorry for the people at BBC Books, who are actually going to have to provide novels for ten-year-olds which use her as the central character. Given Bonnie Langford's perpetual childishness, an opening line like "Melanie Bush stood in the TARDIS console room, on the way to another exciting adventure in time and space" would at least be conceivable, whereas the words "Donna Noble stood in the TARDIS console room" can only really be followed by something like "wondering whether a promotion to head of the HR department would require shoes with bigger heels". For this reason alone, the casting of a 39-year-old should have raised questions in the BBC hierarchy - a companion who's older than the actor playing the Doctor could work, but only if the non-middle-aged parts of the audience were given something else to hold on to - yet if she's playing the same character who got on our tits so much in "The Runaway Bride", then it's hard to understand why even Big Russell was allowed to get away it without someone slapping him round the chops and telling him to wake up. Langford 5/10, Tate 8/10.

5. Ability to Generally Irritate. A tough one, this, although… with hindsight, it's difficult to say exactly how Bonnie Langford's debut looked to us in 1986. Yes, the whole world seemed to hate her, and those who still bothered tuning into Doctor Who had difficulty believing it was really happening. But watching it back on video, you realise how little difference there was between Langford's "character" and her public image at the time. Was this supposed to be ironic? Is there an element of self-referential angst in the fact that when we see the Doctor and Mel in the TARDIS console room for the first time, she's going out of her way to irritate him, her never-ending sparkiness making him feel the same way we feel? Were we supposed to laugh along with the programme-makers, and if so, then did we? Much of the irritation she caused while on-screen has to be put down to the writers rather than Langford herself, who might have been able to make a proper go of it if (say) she'd been told to play a murderous Victorian prostitute who turns out to be the daughter of Jack the Ripper. Or anything, in fact, other than TV's Bonnie Langford. This "potential irony" issue returns to haunt us in 2007, since Catherine Tate's character is also supposed to be annoying, to an extent. She's not playing TV's Catherine Tate, though, she's playing… the kind of character who might typically be played by TV's Catherine Tate. We don't see Donna as a person, we see her as a comedy persona with a known celebrity behind it, and that's definitely the sort of thing John Nathan-Turner would have gone for. The upshot is that as with Langford, Tate's ability to irritate might possibly be kept in check by the scripts, as long as they don't give her any opportunity to do her "surprised" schtick or her "shouting at the end of sentences" schtick. The chances are slim, but we'll give the programme-makers the benefit of the doubt, because otherwise her horrible miscasting would be too depressing to even think about. Langford 7/10, Tate 7/10.

posted by Lawrence @ 1:02 AM

stand mal auf: http://beasthouse-lm2.blogspot.com/

Und noch ein weiterer mittlerweile verlorener Schatz, ein Review der ersten Folgen der zweiten Torchwood-Staffel:

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Shag, Marry, Kill, Resurrect

If I've learned one thing from the angst-festival of Torchwood Season Two, then it's that gay men are happy to use the word "shagging" to describe fleshy man-love. Logically, this shouldn't be a surprise, and I've spent so much time amongst gay men over the last ten years that I'm sure one of them must have used the word at some point. But to me, "shagging" indicates a kind of sex that doesn't work without a uterus. It suggests a male woodland creature pinning down a female, and moving his pelvis backwards and forwards very, very fast; it suggests "rutting" rather than "making love", with all the associated mess and fuss of childbirth; it suggests a little internal alarm that says BABY-MAKING BABY-MAKING BABY-MAKING and won't stop until eggs have been fertilised. The idea that "shagging" might describe butch anal antics - or, in the case of Captain Jack and Jones the Hardware, probably a lot of tender licking and sucking with perhaps just the occasional bout of Resurrection Glove abuse - seems aesthetically wrong, to me. Rabbits shag, but it's not a term I'd apply to "out" animals like bonobos, antelope, or giant squid (the great gay leviathans of the deep).

That aside, the only remotely surprising thing about the second series of Torchwood is its pig-headed refusal to do anything remotely surprising. Everybody had problems with the first series, and even those sci-fi geek-scum who'll watch anything with killer robots in it were left feeling vaguely dissatisfied, Mark sodding Braxton included. Which begs the question… why has nothing changed? Did the overall sense of gloom and disappointment really not make an impression on BBC Wales? A standard-issue TV critic would probably describe the programme as "slicker" these days, and it's certainly more confident in its ability to make the same mistakes over and over again, but none of its problems have actually been fixed. Even the worst episode of Doctor Who is worthy of in-depth analysis and point-by-point dissection (indeed, bad episodes are often more deserving of inspection than good ones, given that "Time and the Rani" tells you more about what happened to television in the 1980s than "Doomsday" tells you about life in 2006), yet Torchwood remains resolutely… filler.

Full-scale reviews of Torchwood episodes are therefore unnecessary, since most of them can be boiled down to a single sentence, quite often "what's the point of this?". But in the interests of rational debate, here's a round-up of the season so far, with a whole honest-to-goodness paragraph per story…

1. "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang". Of the many, many design flaws in Torchwood, the greatest is this: whereas it's now de rigeuer for any modern SF series to be under the control of a single godlike chief-writer-cum-producer, whose own hand-written episodes are either measurably better than everyone else's or at least define the direction of the programme, Torchwood has a chief-writer-cum-producer who has no clear vision of where the series is meant to be going; who has no ideas other than things he's seen in other SF shows; and, worst of all, who has little or no understanding of how stories work (at least two of Chris Chibnall's scripts have no visible plot, while the rest have all the structural integrity of Muller Rice). In itself, it's telling that a Doctor Who spin-off should be under the creative influence of the man who wrote the least creative Doctor Who episode ever broadcast. However much the recent work of Steven Moffat may have been overrated ("Blink"… I could piss that in my sleep), surely a gadget-heavy sci-fi show about spunk-filled twentysomethings should rightfully be his gig? "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" is the inevitable "lead character meets his evil equivalent" story, and the inclusion of James Marsters just makes it look as if Chibnall's having a competition with himself to see how far he can get Torchwood to look exactly like every other "cult" programme on television.

2. "Sleeper". Of course, if we're making lazy Doctor Who comparisons, then the most obvious problem with the set-up of Torchwood is that it's stuck in modern-day Cardiff every week… or at least, it seems obvious, but look closer. The real trouble isn't that it's tied to Britain circa 2008, but that its attempts to integrate SF ideas into a contemporary setting can alienate us far more than any number of gonzo adventures in time and space. Here, we're supposed to get terribly emotional about a woman who discovers that she's going to cease to exist because she's an alien sleeper agent with an auto-destructing false personality. It's fair to say that very few people in the audience will be able to empathise with this situation, let alone cry in the right places.

3. "To the Last Man". An episode which breaks all the rules of British sci-fi drama by involving a paradoxical timewarp that leads back to World War One instead of World War Two. Although I find it hard to be too critical of Helen Raynor, because frankly, I so would.

4. "Meat". When Buffy the Vampire Slayer pioneered the fantasy / soap-opera hybrid, it was wise enough to understand that all the fantasy elements have to resonate with the "real" elements: the monsters are hormone-driven manifestations of the characters' own teenage angst, so the fantasy and the soap-opera are ultimately the same thing. Every fantasy-soap since Buffy has completely missed this (fairly essential) point, and given us stories about giant scorpions with "relationship" scenes thrown randomly into the mix, as if giant scorpions aren't interesting enough without the occasional detour into Sex and the City. Here we have a story about an enormously bloated whale-beast that sits around having chunks of fat cut off its body, but which is also about… Gwen having issues with her boyfriend. If I were the actor playing Rhys, then I'd feel offended by the subtext. Naturally, we care more about a six-hundred-ton slab of manatee than about any of the characters' whining, tedious love-lives.

5. "Adam". SF screenwriting is a specific skill, which is why it's not necessarily a good idea to hire a writer who cut her teeth on EastEnders and let her talk about aliens. If you don't know precisely how to pitch a slightly-off-the-wall story involving an interdimensional memory-parasite, then you end up with hideously overwrought dialogue like 'you crave flesh!' or 'it was so beautiful, after the darkness and the stench of fear!', and that's before we even start to process the unintentionally hilarious "Flashback Jack" segments (which are, let's face it, like clips from the worst war movie ever made). But the fundamental problem with "Adam" is that there's no point doing a story about the characters' personal demons when the characters aren't complex enough to have demons, or when the Male Lead is so far-removed from us that it's impossible to take any of his problems seriously, let alone his unresolved issues with his dad. Imagine an episode of Primeval in which the girl from S Club 7 suddenly has memories of childhood sexual abuse while running away from sabre-tooth tigers… that's what Torchwood is like.

6. "Reset". Leaving aside the fact that it begins the most counter-productive story-arc in television history (Owen dies, thus allowing him to mope more), "Reset" actually verges on competence at times, yet it's still hampered by the question of what this episode is actually about. The Mad Doctors aren't making a point about the state of medical research in a twenty-first-century world, they're just… Mad Doctors. So mad, in fact, that they're prepared to go berserk and shoot people dead even though it makes no rational sense for them to do so. In much the same way that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies, you can judge an episode of TV sci-fi fodder by the quality of the villains, and here they're just evil for the sake of convenience.

7. "Dead Man Walking". Oh, Christ, it's a resurrection: that's almost as bad as reversing time. Worse, it leads to a script full of portentous, overbaked conversations about the nature of mortality and the trauma of human existence (you'd be forgiven for thinking that 'we fight monsters, but what do we do when we turn out to be the monsters?' is as bad as dialogue can possibly get, yet it's very nearly topped by Martha's histrionic 'it must be death… because it's stolen my life!'), padded out with every terminal cliché of modern fantasy. A black-eyed demonic possession (again?); one of the regulars turning into a geriatric for absolutely no good dramatic reason (again?); a desperate attempt to give some depth to a bog-standard Malevolent Alien Power by wrapping it up in a Medieval legend; an even more desperate attempt to introduce some sort of tension by putting a sick child in jeopardy… all this, plus a conclusion that makes the ending of "The Daemons" look convincing, and might as well have Owen defeating the monster with the Power of Love. Ultimately, though, the real problem with "Dead Man Walking" is that it's got even less to say about death than "The Satan Pit" had to say about religion. Only the vomit remains memorable.

8. "A Day in the Death". What baffles me is that anyone might consider "forty-five minutes of a corpse complaining about being dead" to be a workable basis for a drama programme. Although the fact that the script editor here is Gary Russell - a man who has no background in television scriptwork, whose own attempts at writing have been unfailingly risible, and whose sole qualification for the job is that he's spent the last two decades making everyone else in Doctor Who fandom as miserable as possible - says a lot about this programme's general level of care, attention and competency.

Actually, now I think about it... 'the darkness and the stench of fear' is how the memory-parasite describes the experience of travelling through an interdimensional void. Can you have a stench, in a void? If there's no air, then how do you smell? (Like a dog with no nose, possibly.)

posted by Lawrence @ 11:31 PM

stand mal auf: http://beasthouse-lm2.blogspot.com/

Zu Neil Gaiman gibt es derzeit folgendes auf Lawrence Miles' Seite ( http://beasthouse-lm2.blogspot.com/ ) zu lesen:

"An Apology:
When I wrote last week's column, I honestly had no idea that Neil Gaiman had (ostensibly) been approached to write for the series. If I'd known, then I wouldn't have been so polite."

Ich selbst denke, dass "vielgepriesen" noch lange nicht auch gleichbedeutend mit "gut" sein muss. Jedenfalls habe ich bisher noch kein fiktionales Buch von Neil Gaiman gefunden, dessen Plotzusammenfassung für mich eine Lektüre des Buches gerechtfertigt hätte.

Und wenn die von Lawrence Miles gemachten Beschuldigungen ( "will sink to any depths in his quest to make goth-girls cop off with him" ) zutreffen sollten und auch nur annähernd wörtlich gemeint sein sollten, dann ist "stinking parasite" eine Bezeichnung zu der man ruhig greifen dürfen sollte.