[Not The Anon, But I'd Be Interested In Your Answer To These Objections.]

I think that’s a small part of the reason he’s so loved -- he’s awful, yes, but that’s underneath the shell of a sad, brave, deeply romantic old man. Where many of the monsters of ASOIAF seem beyond any sort of redemption, Jorah seems like if he would just indulge in some self-examination, he could be a genuinely great person.

At least, that’s probably why I like him. He’s a grand Byronic hero who keeps threatening to stumble into an actual hero, only to tragically fail to own up to any of his own faults. Even on the page, he has a lot of charm, although of course Glen gives the role such soul that it elevates the character’s attraction even further. (and, of course, makes it frustrating that the show tends to sidestep what a terrible human being he is underneath that)

Theory: People enjoy Jorah because Iain Glen is super charming (and the show hasn't dwelt on the whole selling people into slavery nearly as much as the show iirc).

The books don’t dwell on it at all. It’s still hideous, and his utter refusal to accept responsibility (including a laughable attempt to reframe it as a problem of Ned’s excessive honor) is what has always really repulsed me about Jorah. 

He thinks slavery is OK. Why does Dany keep him around after she decides otherwise?

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. 

my friend left her window open in her bedroom and came back to find this

look at his self-satisfied little face, the cheeky shit

motherfucking australia

I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

*electric guitar riff*

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

Of course, you call Biden the old guy who needs a nap, and there's Trump sleeping through his court trials and through the RNC and through his own son's speech

Me, too! And you can't convince me otherwise.

Which makes Kasich, what, Edmure Tully? Seems like a decent guy, so of course everyone kind of forgets he exists?

Tomb Raider [2018]

Say what you will about the previous Tomb Raider films, but they made a brilliant casting choice in Angelina Jolie. Already a great, Aca...

Alicia Vikander kicks ass in a Tomb Raider movie that fails to kick ass. Deja vu.

Everyone should know the international sign for Help Me. Let’s make this famous!!

I’ve always had a fascination with early Antarctic Exploration. But I’ve mostly sidestepped the related early Arctic exploration except where the two directly intersect; now I’m reading Furthest North, which goes through the early exploration (from the 1500s to 1926), and focuses on telling the stories through eyewitness accounts. It's a great book, but man, arctic exploration is so much more depressing than Antarctic exploration.

Like, the usual Antarctic exploration story will be something like, “The 26-man expedition lost 1 man when he was driven mad by the sunless winter and died for no clear medical reason, and 1 man to scurvy because he refused to eat seal meat, but the other 24 safely returned home, having mapped huge previously unknown areas and achieved immense scientific research. And also there were several delightful stories of penguin encounters, and here's a photo of the most badass member of the crew adorably snuggling some puppies.”

And the usual Arctic story will be, “25 men laboriously dragged their ship across the endless fields of ice to find the legendary Open Arctic Ocean. At first, they somehow managed to make 15 miles a day, but due to the southward flow of the ice, they only gained a net 17 yards per day. As they one-by-one got scurvy, they started losing ground. Things took a turn for the worse when the captain suddenly died of a mysterious illness; a century later, his body was found buried in the ice, and the mass levels of arsenic suggests he may have been right when, in his dying words, he accused the expedition’s doctor of poisoning him because they were writing love letters to the same girl back home. Without their navigator, they finally gave up and attempted to drag the ship back to the open sea so they could get back to land. But just as they were approaching open water, the ice trapped the ship and crushed it. They reverted to their lifeboats, one of which disappeared in a light fog, never to be seen again. The exhausted, undernourished, fatally sick final survivors made it to a desolate island. There they all slowly starved to death while the one healthy man among them was three days’ travel away, trying and failing to communicate to the confused Siberians he’d found that there were people who urgently needed rescue. He finally moved onto a second village, where one guy spoke German for some reason, and he was able to mount a rescue party. They arrived two days after the last journal entry of the expedition leader:

“ ‘October 28 - Hungry. Ate last of the boots yesterday. Feet cold. Spirits high.’ “

Isle of Dogs

Isle of Dogs is a stop-motion cartoon from Wes Anderson about how dogs are man's best friend. The film nearly reviews itself from th...

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.