Thoughts on Doctor Who

In the past year or so, I’ve gotten into “First Time Watching” videos on YouTube.  Basically, some 20-something will film themselves watching The Terminator, or Iron Man, or whatever and post a half-hour long video of their biggest gasps or reactions.  What I find appealing about these, is they will be watching a favorite movie of mine, but one I haven’t seen for a decade, and it’s like I’m watching it again with … not a friend, but a person I vaguely know who has no idea I even exist.  Also, I forget how many people I’ve seen shocked at the “chest burster” scene.  That’s fun. 

There are twenty or so of these reactors I follow on YouTube.  And recently, four of them have either started watching Doctor Who or I just found them.  So I’ve been seeing the highlights of these … not old-old Doctor Who episodes, and since season … whatever just ended, I figured now was as good a time as any to write up some of my thoughts on the show.

First off, back during the time of the Tenth Doctor, if you had asked for my Top 10 TV shows, Doctor Who would have made the cut.  Now, I almost need to be reminded it exists.  For me, I’d say the Tenth Doctor was peak, and it’s been going down – sometimes faster, sometimes slower – since then.  If you asked why I thought that, I’d say I think the writing isn’t as good.  But if you then asked for concrete examples, I could only shrug.  Because it’s all subjective.  For example, there is an episode that started strong, I thought had an interesting premise and I was eager for the mystery to be solved.  And then the episode kind of petered out and ended.  So it’s an episode that I do not care for.  But, the one First Time Watcher who is far enough ahead to have seen it, loved it.  And I think when it first came out the “consensus” was that half the people loved it while half hated it.  And I was just in the hated half.  And that just seems to be where I always end up.

I understand that no book, song, TV show whatever will be loved by everyone.  That’s … life.  But the more I thought about it, I think what happened with Doctor Who is it’s not just they have more episodes I dislike than like, but they keep going back to the episodes I dislike.  There will be an episode I don’t care for, but instead of letting me move on and forget all about it, four episodes later, that villain comes back and is just as lame and uninteresting.  Or next season there’s a sequel episode, or two seasons later this character I’ve completely forgotten about comes back to play a super important role and I’m just confused trying to remember who they are.  And while there are some characters I’d like to see return, I would rather have more new stuff with less callbacks. 

If, somehow, the people at Doctor Who see this, all I ask is they do more new stuff.  New, good stuff.  Stories where the villain isn’t one dimensional, or the mystery is “solved” in a satisfactory way instead of just petering out in some artsy-fartsy way.  And if you do bring things back, maybe do them in a way where we don’t need to have watched fourteen episodes over the last fifty years to know what’s going on.  You have all of time and space to work with.  Do something new, that’s also good.

Free story idea – Four quick ideas for TV series

I have a lot of ideas for stories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’s worth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting through them all.  I will admit that some of the ideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could make something of them.  I’ll just never get a chance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of these, go right ahead.  And if these are the ideas I’m giving away, maybe check out the ones I keep.

These are just some quick ideas that could be turned into TV shows.

First Idea – Fantasy cop show

I believe I was watching a not so great movie when this cliché scene happened.  Basically, the bad guy killed the good cop’s wife, or kid, I can’t remember, and the good cop catches up to them and starts beating the crap out of them.  Then his partner shows up and stops them saying something along the lines of, “Killing them won’t bring her back.” But then I thought, what if it could?

The idea is that in a present day world with magic, if someone is murdered they don’t bury the body right away.  They put some special two-part bracelet, or something, on the body and then store it.  If they catch the murderer, they put one of the bracelet parts on them and then execute them with a special spell.  The murderer dies, but their lifeforce resurrects their victim.  And in a world with such magic, they also have truth serum, so they know for certain who all this person murdered and they can bring all their victims back.  If the murderer dies before they can be found, the bracelets disintegrate and they bury the body like normal.

The story begins with them executing someone – who confessed with truth serum – but instead of resurrecting the victim the victim’s body explodes because they executed the wrong person.  This causes concern.  In the original version, the magic world was secret and separate from the real world, and a magic detective gets the help of a regular detective to find out how to get around all the magic.  And along the way they discover some dark plot, and probably have a romance. 

But that seemed too … normal.  So the revised version is that the world is all magic, but the cop goes to a “fantasy” writer – which in this world would be someone who wrote stories about worlds where magic doesn’t exist – to help solve the case.

Second Idea – Superhero comedy

This started with a post on Facebook asking how you would explain to the insurance agency if the Hulk smashed your car.  After hammering some ideas out, I came up with this comedy.  In this world, there are two big cities each with their own batches of superheroes and supervillains.  They are a hundred or so miles apart, and practically in-between them is this small town of maybe a hundred people: Main Street is basically just one block.  On this block there is a small law office, an insurance agency, a hair salon, a pizza joint, and a couple other things.  The stories would be about these regular people living in such a strange world, like the roof of the hair salon was damaged by some villains battle drone, but the insurance company is being a pain about getting it fixed.

Every time one of the supervillains tries to expand their territory to the next city, they basically go through, over, or under this town.  And then all the superheroes follow.  Maybe the speedster in this world has an understanding with the pizza joint to keep a pizza on a certain shelf in the refrigerator for them.  When the speedster has to run to the other city – maybe once a week or so – they make a quick stop to grab the pizza and leave a $20.  They then use their “friction power” or whatever to reheat it.

I was thinking one of the storylines would be this “crazy” guy who blames everything on supervillains.  He gets a flat tire and goes into the insurance agency with some outlandish story to try to collect from the fund set up to pay for all the damage done by supervillains.  The twist would be that while 99% of his claims are just delusions, he’s actually right about some. 

Another possible storyline would be a very minor villain would be sent to work undercover at the pizza shop.  Meanwhile, a very minor hero would be sent to work undercover at the law office, or wherever.  The two start dating, not knowing they’re working against each other.  And maybe to do something different, the hero joins the dark side for love.

Third Idea – Fantasy show

The show would begin with a ten year old kid getting out of a city school with his friends.  They start walking along, but then he gets an odd feeling and looks across the street.  There he sees a woman who smiles at him, but then turns and leaves. 

Fifteen or so years later, he’s in a bar when the same woman walks up to him.  But this time he’s too drunk to get any odd feelings.  She asks if he wants to go outside, and he agrees.  They step into an alley and he starts to undo his belt, but she stabs him.  

He dies, but then gets back up, instantly sober.  He asks what the hell, and she starts to explain that he’s an immortal.  Immortals can sense one another, but they are very few.  In olden days, it was likely an immortal would “die” long before they met another.  But nowadays, it’s really easy for an immortal to go around standing before schools to see if any of the kids are immortals.  That’s the woman’s job.  She found him, and just waited until he was an adult to “kill” him.  This stops him from aging, as well as being a very effective way of showing that he is an immortal.

Immortals can really die, but it takes something like being drawn and quartered.  Which was actually a method used by immortals to execute some of their members in the past, but then normal humans found out about it and thought it really cool. 

With the current population, there’s maybe an immortal born every year.  This has led to some issues in the immortal community.  Most immortals are content to amass some wealth and then live comfortably in the shadows, which has worked for centuries.  But as there are more immortals in the world, and it’s becoming harder to live in the shadows, a second faction has emerged that think they should rule over normal humans.  That leader may have been someone who was repeatedly burned at the stake, so they have a dim view of normal humans.  The two groups are more like political parties than warring factions.  The idea would be that neither side is fully correct, but that each have their pros and cons.

The woman works for the first group, and the story would be her bringing the guy into their world.  Part of her job is finding new immortals, but she also works to try to bring immortals from the other side over.  So it’s a world full of spies and secret agents.   

Fourth Idea – A companion show to the third idea

Basically, this show would cover the same time period and many of the same events, but from the POV of the other group of immortals.  Each show would be self-contained, and show their side as the right ones, but you’d get a clearer picture if you watched both. 

The idea I had would be the main character of this show would be an agent who keeps tabs on the woman immortal in the other show.  Like, he was on the roof of the building across the street watching her stab the newbie in the alley.  Maybe they were a couple two hundred years ago, but it didn’t end well. 

Is scifi doing a disservice?

I love science fiction.  I love watching scifi TV shows and movies, I love reading it, I love writing it.  But to be perfectly honest, I’ve started to wonder if a lot of scifi is doing a disservice to those who enjoy it.  A very general description of scifi is that it portrays the world as it might be.  What if humans just become fat slobs who have robots do everything for us?  How would humanity react if there were an alien invasion?  Could we clone dinosaurs?  Some of these portrayals are just for pure entertainment, but others are meant to be more of a warning: if we continue down this one road we could end up in a dystopian future.  But not all is doom and gloom.  There are also more positive portrayals of the future, the “This is how things could be if we work towards it” type of stories. 

But what about stories of “we need to get used to how the future will likely be?”  I’m sure there are stories out there like that, but none readily come to mind.  For example, something that is often pointed out as a critique of scifi is that it is extremely unlikely that there would be humanoid aliens out there.  It’s understandable that for a weekly TV show with a set budget that they couldn’t go through the expense of designing unique aliens every week for the intrepid crew to come across.  Instead you just put some weird nose or ears on some actors and call it a day.  But that seems to lead to the idea that aliens will just be humanoid with weird noses or ears.  If you were to ask an average person to name some fictitious aliens, you’d probably hear Vulcans, the Asgard, or maybe the Marklar.  You’re less likely to hear Gomtuu, Replicators, or whatever species Najix is.  I worry that this subconscious expectation of humanoid aliens will make the momentous First Contact with aliens even more complicated as this … thing that comes off a ship won’t be what we expected.

Another issue that I have, which I’m sure other people have but it’s not big enough to be well known, is the idea that humans like us will be the ones out exploring the galaxy.  In reality, there won’t be a Star Trek future.  I’m not talking about the idea of warp drive or anything like that, but that it will be Mark I Humans out there.  Mark I Humans are what I call us, the flesh and blood Homo sapiens.  Star Trek showed Mark I Humans flying around the galaxy in the 23rd Century, yet given advances in medical science it’s likely that by 2100 a significant chunk of the population will be … other.  They’ll have implants that let them merge with computers.  They’ll replace some of their organs with 3D printed mechanical versions that do more things and can be easily repaired or swapped out.  Or they’ll genetically modify themselves to have gills so they can live underwater.  Not to mention things we can’t even imagine.  That’s a more accurate portrayal of the future, yet it’s a rare thing to see in science fiction, especially TV or movies. 

I’ve read that many of the soldiers in Vietnam grew up watching the war movies of the 40’s and 50’s which tended to glorify war and ignore the horrifying aspects.  So when they saw the reality of war, they felt that they had been lied to.  Will the journeys of Mark I Humans meeting humanoid aliens one day be seen as lies that didn’t prepare future generations for reality?  I almost say no, just because scifi doesn’t have as large an impact on the general society as I feel it deserves, but it’s hard to say.  Only time will tell.

World building telling

There are two current shows that are receiving a lot of … deserved criticism: Marvel’s Inhumans and Star Trek: Discovery.  Instead of trying to forge through all the problems they have, I’m just going to focus on one that, in my opinion, they both have, namely not following the “Show, don’t tell” mantra in regards to their world building.  And just so you know, there will be some minor spoilers ahead.

The basic story in Marvel’s Inhumans is that Maximus, brother of the Attilan King Black Bolt, has staged a coup.  The main reason, as the show goes on, is that he’s deranged and power hungry.  But something that has been mentioned a few times is that he has the support of the lower class.  Apparently, the Attilan upper class live in luxury while the lower class works in the mines.  But I think there have only been two scenes set in the lower class section, for a total of maybe two minutes.  We’re told the lower class is put upon, but we don’t see it.  Which makes it – unintentionally? – awkward since Black Bolt and the other royal “despots” are the ones we’re rooting for. 

And it wouldn’t take much to fix this.  In the first episode, there’s a scene where Black Bolt is walking through an upper class crowd, and if I remember right the people are cheering.  If instead the people had been more restrained and some of Black Bolt’s guards had thrown a few people out of the way, then we’d get that these people aren’t the nicest ones and they probably mistreat the lower class.  And there could have been a scene were Maximus gave water, or something, to exhausted mine workers showing why they like him.  Yes, it would have been cliché, but it would have been something.

As for Star Trek: Discovery, the first two episodes dealt with the beginning of the war with the Klingons.  And they talk about the war in every episode since.  But except for one small battle over a mining colony we don’t really see any of the war.  In the last episode we were told that – thanks to the Discovery – the Federation was starting to win the war.  Could we see that?  Could we have seen them starting to lose the war?  If the backdrop of the series is the war, then we should see it.  Instead it’s like a movie following some people at Woodstock where we never get to hear any of the music.  Then why set it at a music festival? 

The reason we don’t see more battles on the show is because it’s hard to shoehorn the main character into a significant role in a battle.  But there’s a bit of a way to work around it, and that’s Captain Lorca.  Lorca is portrayed as pretty gung ho wanting to do whatever is necessary to win the war.  This is the kind of captain who would probably have daily battle drills to make sure his crew is always ready to fight.  But we’ve only seen one battle drill, and that was a prelude to the battle at the mining colony.  Instead of the current almost whispered, “Oh yeah, there’s a war going on,” having a random battle drill in an episode would be more of a “THERE’S A WAR GOING ON.” Also, after a drill – perhaps where the Discovery lost – Lorca could tell them, “Those were the tactics the Klingons used to destroy the Voyager, find a way to defeat them.” This way we would see more of the war than what happens on Discovery, and make it more believable for the crew to follow Lorca’s gung ho attitude.  It’s not much, but it would be like hearing some music in the background.

So in summary, if you’re writing for … anything, really, don’t think that just an occasional line about this huge element of the world is enough.  Actually show us some of this huge element.  I’m not saying that this one simple step will make your work better than Marvel’s Inhumans and Star Trek: Discovery, but it can’t hurt.