An Update To My Doctor Who Blog. (Only 10 Months Behind Schedule This Time!)
An update to my Doctor Who blog. (Only 10 months behind schedule this time!)
More Posts from Jjgaut and Others
Man, Ophelia gets even more screwed in this version.
Hamlet, Scooby-Doo Style
[This is one of the funniest, most brilliant damn things I’ve ever read. It dates from very early Internet days and I thought it deserved resurrection to Le Tumble]
This recently discovered folio edition of “Hamlet” follows other known versions closely until Act V, Scene II, where it begins to diverge at line 232, as will be seen:
KING: …`Now the king drinks to Hamlet.’ Come, begin, And you the judges, bear a wary eye.
Trumpets sound. HAMLET and LAERTES take their stations
HAMLET: Come on, sir.
LAERTES: Come, my lord.
Enter FRED, DAPHNE, VELMA, SHAGGY, AND SCOOBY
DAPHNE: Wait!
SHAGGY: Stop the fight!
HAMLET and LAERTES put up their foils
KING: I like this not. Say wherefore you do speak?
FRED: Good lord, I pray thee, let thy anger wait. For we, in seeking clues, have found the truth Behind the strange events of latter days.
VELMA: The first clue came from Elsinore’s high walls, Where, so said Hamlet, Hamlet’s ghost did walk. Yet though the elder Hamlet met his death, And perforce hath been buried in the ground, ‘Tis yet true one would not expect a ghost To carry mud upon his spectral boots. Yet mud didst Shaggy and his faithful hound Espy, with footprints leading to a drop. This might, at first, indeed bespeak a ghost… Until, when I did seek for other answers, I found a great, wide cloth of deepest black Discarded in the moat of Elsinore. ‘Tis clear, the “ghost” used this to slow his fall While darkness rendered him invisible.
FRED: The second clue we found, my lord, was this.
KING: It seems to me a portrait of my brother In staine’d glass, that sunlight may shine through.
FRED: But see, my lord, when placed before a lantern–
KING: My brother’s ghost!
HAMLET: My father!
VELMA: Nay, his image.
FRED: In sooth, that image caught the Prince’s eye When he went to confront his lady mother. Nor did his sword pierce poor Polonius. For Hamlet’s blade did mark the castle wall Behind the rent made in the tapestry. Polonius was murdered by another. The knife which killed him entered from behind.
LAERTES: But who?
FRED: Indeed my lords, that you shall see.
HAMLET: And if this ghost was naught but light and air, Then what of that which I did touch and speak to?
The GHOST enters.
GHOST: Indeed, my son.
SHAGGY: Zoinks!
DAPHNE: Jenkies!
GHOST: Mark them not. Thou hast neglected duty far too long. Shall this, my murderer, live on unharmed? Must I remain forever unavenged?
SCOOBY and SHAGGY run away from the GHOST. SCOOBY, looking backward, runs into a tapestry, tearing it down. As a result, tapestries around the walls collapse, one surrounding the GHOST.
GHOST: What?
FRED: Good Osric, pray restrain that “ghost”, That we may reach the bottom of the matter. Now let us see who truly walked tonight.
FRED removes the helm and the disguise from the GHOST’S face.
ALL: Tis Fortinbras!
FRED: The valiant prince of Norway!
FORTINBRAS: Indeed it is, and curses on you all! This Hamlet’s father brought my own to death, And cost me all my rightful heritage. And so I killed this king, and hoped his son Would prove no obstacle to Norway’s crown. Then Claudius bethought himself the killer (As if one might be poisoned through the ear!) The brother, not the son, took Denmark’s throne, And held to Norway with a tighter grip. I swore an end to Denmark’s royal house. I spoke to Hamlet of his uncle’s crimes. Then killed Polonius to spark Laertes. This day, with poison’s aid, all might have died, And Denmark might have come to me as well As my beloved Norway and revenge. My scheme blinded them all, as if by fog But for these medd'ling kids and this their dog.
KING: The villain stands confessed. Now let us go. For much remains to us to be discussed. And suitable reward must needs be found For these, our young detectives and their hound.
EXEUNT OMNES. Copyright 1993 Michael S. Schiffer
My review of Kill the Moon, in which, to the surprise of a disturbing number of characters, there is gravity on the moon.
Wherein I review Wes Anderson’s ridiculously charming Isle of Dogs, and reluctantly examine the question of cultural appropriation I’m so not properly handled to discuss.
Please, reblog! IIt’s called self defense. Apart from having here, in the US, one of the highest cases of homicide and rape in the world and high rate of GBV, think about how this could help your mother or sister
Okay, it’s like this:
RT gives their percentage based on a simple yes or no -- good or not. But the “average rating” is based on averaging critics’ ratings of the film, which are a little more nuanced than “good” vs. “rotten”. Generally speaking, if a critic is rating on a 4-star scale, 3 is considered good, 2 is considered bad, and 2 1/2 is meh. 2 1/2 usually but not always ends up as a negative review on there. So a theoretical film that got 2 1/2 stars across the board verses one that got 1 star across the board are going to get the same RT score of 0%. But the 2 1/2 star one will have an average rating of 6.3/10 (2.5*2.5 rounded up) and the 1 star film will get an average rating of 2.5/10.
So, The Room got some “positive” reviews which give it 2 1/2 stars or 3 as an accidental camp classic ala Plan 9 From Outer Space, but anyone who reviewed it seriously gave it 1 star or 0 stars or something in that area.
Whereas Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice apparently has some undeniably strong elements (Affleck’s performance, many of the visuals, some of the action beats, some interesting themes buried in the rubble), so its negative reviews are almost all 2 or 2 1/2 star reviews. It’s too good to go to a bottom-of-the-barrel rating. So the same number of critics gave it a good review, but its average score is a lot higher than The Room, because its positive qualities drive up the ratings.
Congrats to Tommy Wiseau, who Warner Bros. has hired to direct Justice League.
🤔🤔🤔
I should probably point out that I’m someone who likes the TV show, even if I think the books are largely superior, so we obviously don’t entirely agree on a lot of these points. (I do love your metas, Gotgifsandmusings, regardless of my enjoyment of the show; they’re consistently insightful and witty.)
As far as the Emmys go, a lot of it has to do with the nature of awards shows. Deserving winners get missed all the time because there’s competition that can’t be ignored. This is how you end up with awards that feel like “lifetime achievement awards” or whatnot.
So Game of Thrones Season 4, which (whatever its adaptational or sexism issues) really was spectacular television, lost all its awards to the final season of Breaking Bad, except for directing, which it lost to True Detective. Same thing for GOT Season 3, which, again, was terrific television. But it lost all of its nominations to other shows (including, again, Breaking Bad).
The thing is, no matter how great Game of Thrones was those years (and, again, as TV, it’s pretty great, and I think it improves on the books in a few areas, albeit definitely not in all areas), it was never going to beat Breaking Bad. There was just no possible way to ignore it.
And so when Season 5 rolled around, for all its flaws, it still tends to be entertaining and technically superb television when it wasn’t in Dorne or Winterfell (both plotlines were heavily criticized even among those who still love the show, and at least in the latter case, it’s certainly exceptionally well-made in a technical sense). And this time, there wasn’t a strong frontrunner to beat it (its competition is strong, but it’s not terribly obvious what the best choice there actually is), so it got all the awards it’s been nominated for all these years but never managed to actually win, even if it was the weakest season.
That’s just how these things work. Sometimes something wins that really deserves it -- Robert Donat won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1939 for Goodbye Mr. Chips. But he beat someone else who also really deserved it - Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. So the next year, Stewart won Actor for The Philadelphia Story, and while he’s great in that, should he really have beaten Chaplin, Fonda, and Olivier?
So this year, Game of Thrones took a couple of massive misteps, and badly exposed all its underlying flaws in really ugly ways. It’s also, often, compelling, complex, fun, and dazzling. So even if it isn’t those things to any consistent degree, it still represents enough of what’s loved about the show that it’s able to pull off a sweep when it’s not up against anything that can’t be beat.
And Winterhell helped win the show an Emmy... What a great message to send to viewers and creators... "If you want to make good TV and win what is considered the most prestigious television award, rape someone! Have shocking things that make no sense happen! Cynicism and everything sucks! DARKNESS! Oh and viewers who don't like this stuff and are triggered by it? FUCK THEM AM I RIGHT?" Ugh...
Is Winterhell what helped them win their Emmys? I mean it was just so, so, so bad.
I’m pretty sure everyone and their mothers got distracted by HARDHOME, the BEST HOUR OF TELEVISION (if we turn our brains off and don’t bother thinking about context or like…why are arrows stopping wights, or anything).
But like…I have to hope that’s what one them the votes. Because I think it is actually physically impossible to enjoy Winterhell. Then again, the finale won “best writing,” and the first 20 minutes centered on Satannis’s farcical defeat.
@itsalwayslydia said to gotgifsandmusings:Hey, so I just finished reading your post on Winterhell, which was so good it made me angry. (Not at you but at what’s happened to these characters for the purpose of TV ratings.) Anyways, I was wondering if you’d seen the Huffington post article where it’s pointed out that Theon is wearing Robb Stark’s outfit from the Red Wedding? Sophie Turner confirmed that was true on her Comic Con panel: “Just to make that a little more brutal.” Seven hells.
I had seen that, yeah. And like…that’s you know. Nifty that they wanted to use costuming to “make it more brutal.” But it also makes no fucking sense? Like, why in Seven Hells is he wearing Robb’s outfit? He’s not disguising himself as a Stark. Why isn’t that outfit full of arrow-holes? How did they even get that outfit? Was it when Sansa had passed out from the Xanax Batfinger gave her so she failed to notice them passing through the Twins?
But like, at least it wasn’t as horribly out of place as the sith lord and the dude with the conquistador helmet:
Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings:What’s the proper way to compliment your Winterhell Retrospective? I enjoyed it? It made me angry about that whole plot line all over again? Anyway, it did make me angry again, but I also enjoyed it. I still fail to understand how professional writers of TV could put together such a stupid arc, they have huge books to help them!! Why do they think they are better at telling this story than GRRM? Why did they retcon the Others? Why can’t we call them the Others, instead of the white walkers? ???
Well one quick correction: they don’t think they are better at telling “this story,” because they have no interest in telling the same story. They think they are better storytellers.
That aside…
Okay I know that Nick Cage is the Internet’s favorite movie lunatic but we really need to talk about Sam Neill
Like, sure, he’s more simmery-crazy than explody-face crazy but this motherfucker kook it up with the best of them.
Like, if all you know him from is Jurassic Park, just take the SIX INCH RETRACTABLE CLAW scene, multiply it by a thousand, and you get the rest of his career.
Motherfucker was in a movie with Isabelle Adjani (The Queen of the movie lunatics) where she contorts herself into a miscarriage that makes her bleed from the ears and gives birth to a demon-fetus-doppelganger-monster and held his own.
He was scarier than any of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park…
Then there is this shit:
(Seriously, if you ever feel like watching the Omen series, you can skip Omen II and just go to Omen III because Sam motherfucking Neill. If you really have to know about Omen II — there is a bowl cut and some birds. That’s about it.)
The guy makes Malcolm McDowell look like Morgan Freeman.
(I just love how fucking pleased with himself he is)
In conclusion Sam Neill is an underrated mad genius thank you for coming to my TED talk.
On the other hand, Hayles' script for The Celestial Toymaker was completely rewritten by Donald Tosh (including using the Mandarin second meaning of the title), to the point where Hayles was supposed to just be credited for the idea. Which was then again completely rewritten by Gerry Davis to the point where Tosh refused to take credit, and Hayles was ultimately credited on a technicality.
Similarly, Letts and Dicks had Hayles completely revamp his Monster of Peladon script once, and then Dicks did was was apparently a pretty major rewrite of his own.
Which is to say, doesn't it almost seem like cheating to choose a guy whose bad scripts were basically written by other people?
On the other hand (or back on the original hand?), that's a lovely essay.
Which writers have written the Doctor Who episodes most varied in quality? Gaiman? Aaronovitch?
This is framed interestingly, and I like it.
The two proposed are, of course, writers of two episodes of decidedly different receptions. But both have an all-time classic and a lesser work. Neither Nightmare in Silver nor Battlefield are unwatchable lows of the series that curl your toes and make you wish you had never taken that DVD off the shelf, and Doctor Who has those.
But by picking writers who have done more than two stories, you can get ones who have written things that are the equal of The Doctor’s Wife and Remembrance of the Daleks and who have also written ungodly horrors. There is a perspective in which it is hilarious that the writer of Listen also wrote The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe. Robert Holmes presents himself as another good target here. The mighty writer of The Ark in Space and Carnival of Monsters, the genius behind The Ribos Operation and The Deadly Assassin, who also gave us The Krotons. Though I actually like that one, so let’s do The Mysterious Planet. Or The Power of Kroll. Ouch. I mean, have you sat down and watched The Power of Kroll lately, because I fucking won’t. I will not sit down with that voluntarily. There’s no reason to do that to a man more than once.
Of course, in that regard, the really tempting answer is Robert Holmes for The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Talons of Weng-Chiang, that being the single most pathological object in the history of Doctor Who. I mean, don’t get near a discussion of something so complex as rape culture with someone who doesn’t get that this is something you should be embarrassed to have on your DVD shelf because it is fucking called The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And yet, of course, it is full of witty dialogue and charming atmosphere, and is brilliant and beautiful and feels exactly like 1970s Doctor Who costume drama should feel, and on top of that it has that gorgeous giant rat, which you look at and your heart breaks and you just think, “oh, bless you for even trying, Philip Hinchcliffe, bless you for even trying.”
But that is, perhaps, too esoteric a point. It is a clever answer, and would satisfy the question, but one suspects that The Power of Kroll was the more revealing option.
In other words, I think you get the really interesting results when you look at stories that are among the absolute worst ever. Sure, some of them are by one-flop-wonders like Anthony “exploding typewriter” Steven, but others are things like The Dominators, written by the same people who brought us The Web of Fear. And while The Web of Fear is not the outstanding miracle that people think it is, and is self-evidently inferior to the story before it, it is a fuck of a lot better than the sodding Dominators. In this regard it is also tempting to say something like Planet of the Dead and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, if only to make a point about rewrites.
Similarly, a really strong case can be made for Terry Nation, who really does swing into the extremes. I mean, there’s no excuse for some of Nation’s not-in-any-meaningful-sense-scripts… but Genesis of the Daleks really is good. So are the first two, even if there’s no real reason to have tried the tentacle monsters in the first place. He embodies the ridiculous and the sublime of Doctor Who in the same way that The Talons of Weng-Chiang does, but he does it with astonishing gulfs in basic visual literacy.
But another name jumps out, and I think it is particularly worthwhile. Brian Hayles, who is credited with both The Celestial Toymaker and The Monster of Peladon, is the rare writer to land two stories on the all-time worst list, and I’m willing to say that even if we apply the Talons of Weng-Chiang principle. To either of them. And yet between them he has The Ice Warriors, The Seeds of Death, and The Curse of Peladon, two of which are absolutely fantastic things that just thinking about makes me want to watch again, and the third of which I’ll admit is worth a revisit once every couple of years.
Because, I mean, they weren’t stories I ranted and raved about like I did in my “holy shit how is this not one of the all-time classics of the Patrick Troughton era” of Enemy of the World, but that’s still just caught up in the gulf between people who think the point of the Troughton era was the monsters and the people who think the point of it was that it started with Power of the Daleks. But The Ice Warriors is the sort of thing that proves that the base under siege could work. You can do gripping tension with relative cheapness. The Ice Warriors is an incredibly smooth viewing experience, and was even before the animation. And The Curse of Peladon, man, that’s just a beautiful, mad thing that only Doctor Who would ever do. There’s a Doctor Who tradition that consists of that, The Ribos Operation, and Warrior’s Gate that you just constantly hope they’ll try again. (Period alien planets. Work every time. Well. Every time that it isn’t The Monster of Peladon.)
That’s a very, very strange gulf in quality there, purely because of the widely varied circumstances of all of them. And I really do think it’s the widest, simply because of how passionately I am personally led to love and hate the particular extremes. And the weirdness that there’s a Peladon story at each end too.
Yeah. Brian Hayles.
*releases pack of dads into home depot* go……be free
