Doctor Who: “The Eleventh Hour,” “The Beast Below”

In which I love Matt Smith, like Karen Gillan, yet have some serious reservations.

Lost, “Ab Aeterno”

¿Que te pasa, Ricardo?

815 Sentences About Lost

815 Sentences About Lost has posted something I wrote about my favorite ever Lost scene. Quite aside from that, 815SAL is an interesting look at what people think about the show… people should check it out.

Lost, “Dr. Linus”

Obligatory cut for les spoilers…

Thoughts on Caprica

For a long time I ignored Caprica, because everyone was talking about how horrible Caprica was. Then suddenly everyone was talking about how awesome Caprica was. By “everyone” I mean, of course,  the People Who Live In The Internet. So even though I, like the People Who Live In The Internet, had been stunned and appalled by the end of Battlestar Galactica, I decided to give Caprica a chance. And lo, it was not that bad (not even the pilot) but it was also afflicted by some Problems. Such as:

1.  One of the things I found most intriguing about Battlestar Galactica was its complex portrayal of religion. It got right to the heart of what makes religion attractive, dangerous, lasting, a comfort. You could both understand and question its characters’ religious faith. They lived in a universe very much palpably powered by mysticism. As a religious person, I found that compelling — but was also glad that the show didn’t let religion off the hook.

Caprica purports to be as interested in religion. After all, its primary act is one of religiously motivated terrorism. Yet its depiction of religion feels flat and mystifying rather than mystical. Why were Zoe and Lacey devout enough monotheists to plan on leaving their families? What exactly do they believe? Why does Sister Clarice believe strongly enough to devote her life to religious terrorism? The answer seems to believe that they believe in One God because they are characters who believe in One God. But that kind of tautology is dissatisfying. Real-life fundamentalists are fascinating, and far more comprehensible. They believe because they’ve had intense experiences of conversion, or because religion provides them with a profound and satisfying sense of purpose in their lives. Their beliefs are immediate, specific, and very real to them. They don’t just sort of vaguely decide that there’s one god instead of twelve, and they’re going to give up their lives for him. We saw this on Battlestar Galactica: the monotheist movement there, with its obvious parallels to early Christianity, drew its popularity from a sense that the complex rituals of the twelve gods had, in the atmosphere of crisis on board the Fleet, become empty and meaningless. The new message preached… “preached”… by Baltar was one of immediacy, intense mystical experience, and radical salvation. It was easy to understand the attraction of these ideas, especially in that context. By contrast, on Caprica we have no idea of why these fundamentalist monotheist ideas have such apparent power for people. As a result, the idea that someone as headstrong, savvy, and clever as Zoe Graystone would give her life to them is almost ludicrous.

2. Caprica, please stop torturing me with the Tauron “language.” I am all in favor of inventing and/or demuertifying languages for science fiction/fantasy worlds. In fact, I find ConLangs fascinating. And I have, at one time or another, however briefly, studied both Latin and Greek. However, I have also spent enough time seriously studying living languages to know what a living language sounds like. A living language does not sound like the Others on Lost speaking Latin*; it does not sound like two guys reciting syllables of more-or-less Ancient Greek. Living languages have their own rhythms: stressed syllables, vowel reductions, elision. They’re fast and fluid. They sound like people talking. It’s easy to tell when people are actually speaking a language and when they’re reciting syllables. The latter is torturous for anyone with a linguistic ear.

3. It seems to me that Caprica is in some ways ignoring its own centrally interesting issues. Really this ought to be a show about — on some level — a world searching for authenticity: a world in which people escape to virtual reality, or else to a religious fundamentalism that promises them meaning and purpose. It also ought to be a show about what makes us human: is a data reconstruction of Zoe Graystone still Zoe Graystone? If implanted into a body, so that this body possesses all Zoe Graystone’s memories and mental abilities, does that body “become” Zoe? What does it mean to be a human being in the technological world? These are huge and resonant themes, much more interesting than the simplistic wheel-spinning taking place with Sister Clarice (who is, btw, totally boring) or Caprican talk shows.

I don’t know. I’ll keep watching for now, because I’m mildly entertained. The show has so much promise — it would be a shame if it failed to make good…

*Except for Richard Alpert, because Nestor Carbonell speaks Latin like it’s Spanish — resulting in a natural feel to the language.

The problem with Kate

One mystery of Lost that I have always found especially mystifying is the mystery of why Kate is so unbearable. Normally I am quite contrarian in my opinions; I like to defend minority viewpoints, and often find myself a convincing devil’s advocate. However, I have to go with the masses here: Kate is awful. Her episodes are terrible, her stories unconvincing, her relationships flat and dull. From episode 1 till the present day, I’ve been singularly baffled as to why anyone on the show or off is interested in her.

But why is she so terrible? There are usually quite easy answers to this sort of question: the inability of television writers to craft rich and believable female characters, a tendency in television to favor broad, easy types over believable human beings, the fact that many so-called “actresses” are little more than leggy swimsuit models who can read lines. Yet on the latter count: from what little I’ve seen of Evangeline Lilly, she seems like a genuinely grounded, interesting, and complex person. This isn’t to say she’s a great actress, but she’s not terrible — certainly adequate, at least. And on the former counts…

I know that people can and do argue that Lost is as sexist as any other television show. However, as I’ve written before, I strongly disagree. It isn’t perfect. But many of the allegations levelled against it are confused, and disingenuous in the extreme. There’s a tendency to highlight certain statistics and ignore others — for instance, saying that Lost “kills women” while ignoring the many male characters who’ve also been killed (on the one hand Shannon, Ana Lucia, Libby, Charlotte, Rousseau; on the other hand Boone, Mr. Eko, Charlie, Michael, Faraday), or taking “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” positions such as condemning the death of Ana Lucia whilst simultaneously hating on her character. Haters gonna hate. I believe that Lost has some of the best female characters on television, and by “best” I mean not “most saintly” or even “most heroic,” but rather “most complex and interesting.” I love(d) Juliet (does it count as dead if she’s probably almost immediately going to live on in Mundo X?) because she was her constant coldness and calculating manner had an odd air of delicacy, because she was ruthless with a rifle and her intelligence constantly shone through. I also loved her because I felt that she was not an accessory to the male characters on the show: her character fought against that subordination, and her aloofness lent her the sense that she was always on her own mission. I love Eloise Hawking for the same reason: she’s a better adversary to Ben Linus than Widmore is, because in every era she has that sense of lone wolf-ness: a combination of monastic devotion to the Island and powerful self-interest. Note also that in neither case (Juliet or Eloise) did this independence preclude romance or, in Eloise’s case (though perhaps it ought to’ve) motherhood.

So given that I don’t feel Lost‘s writers are incapable of writing powerfully interesting female characters, what is so wrong with Kate that it’s proved unfixable over five years?

I suspect the answer lies in a point I’ve already raised. Juliet, I said, was not an accessory (or more than an accessory) to the male characters on the show. I think that Kate, fundamentally, is. If one were to craft a one-line description of Kate’s role on the show, it would read: Love Interest. That is the primal part of Kate’s character. It comes before all other things. Kate exists to be desired by Jack and Sawyer; the fact that this defines her very existence as a character explains what is, for me, the most irritating aspect of the Love Triangle ™: its inexplicability. You can’t explain why Kate loves either Jack or Sawyer — ontologically, she has no other choice. She exists to love and be loved by them. Everything else about her (her “tracking skills,” her ludicrous career as a fugitive, her baffling decision to raise Aaron) is tacked on secondarily, to lend color and/or some kind of foundation to her Love Interest role. They don’t arise from some intrinsic understanding of who Kate is*; in an important sense, Kate is no one. She is like those roles in scripts that say simply, “Police Officer,” “Checkout Girl,” or “Waitress #3.” For five years, the totality of her existence has been functional. No wonder she’s dull.

I will raise the flag of institutional sexism only in this place: that I feel Kate’s failure to evolve beyond her functional character is the result of a pervasive sense that it’s perfectly okay for the female Love Interest to not have a character beyond that function — the result of a lack of need for the female character to be more than that. At the start of the show, all the lead characters were types: the Man of Science, the Man of Faith, the Funny Con Man, and so on. These types can be equally flattening and limiting — if the Con Man cons because he’s a con man, the Man of Science refuses to believe because he’s a Man of Science, the Man of Faith believes in everything because he’s a Man of Faith. Characters can become tautologies. But there’s a sense (at least on intelligent shows — I’m not touching procedural dramas) that male characters have to be more than that. They have to have depth; they have to have agency. Female characters lag behind in this department. As long as they (a) are attractive, or (b) service the development of male characters, they escape attention.

This problem is so endemic that on most shows it goes almost unnoticed. However, I think Kate stands out on Lost because other characters, male and female, have so transcended the issue — while she remains imprisoned by her function, forever limited by it. Imagine if the Love Triangle had been got rid of back in season 2. How might Kate have evolved once she was no longer required to dutifully anchor one of the LT’s three tiresome, unintelligible points? Sawyer escaped it, and turned into someone stronger, darker, more compelling, and more mature. But because Kate is a woman — because it is somehow, for some reason, so much harder to envision the purpose of a woman not anchored to men — she doesn’t have the same chance.

*What Kate Does, in other words, and What Kate Did, are actions unconnected to any central sense of Kate.

Lost: Fear & Trembling

In honor of the new season of Lost, I’ve been engaged in a massive re-watch of seasons 4-5, because I am the sort of person who re-watches entire seasons of Lost. Re-watching “The Incident,” I was reminded of something that’s always bothered me: the revelation that when Ben and Locke visited Jacob’s cabin in season three, Ben didn’t see Jacob– that Ben was pretending to have  a conversation with an empty chair.

Previously, I thought: this destroys the mystery. The wonderful creepiness of that scene was in its ambivalence, the sense that there both was and wasn’t someone in the chair when Ben was speaking. There’s something cheap about the thought that he was faking.

But now I see a connection between this scene and the larger theme in Lost of fear & trembling (as explicitly evoked in the sixth season premiere by an actual copy of the book.) Fear and Trembling, the Kierkegaard text, concerns the nature of faith (more or less). It focusses on the story of Abraham and Isaac, and one of the observations it makes is that in order for the [averted] sacrifice of Isaac to be legitimate– a legitimate act of faith– Abraham had to be genuinely willing to kill Isaac. Yet he also had to have no real, concrete evidence that he would be rewarded for doing so. The legitimacy of his faith as faith was conditional upon a total lack of evidence as to the object or rewards of his faith. If faith were predicated upon evidence, it would not be faith– it would be something different.

Apply this to the question of Jacob and his absence from Ben Linus’ life. In order for Ben to have faith in Jacob, he necessarily could have no evidence of Jacob’s reality or power, yet was required to behave as though his belief were absolute. One could argue that the Island does provide concrete, tangible miracles– yet these, like all good miracles, are not of the cause-and-effect, scientific kind. They are somewhat arbitrary and do not strictly follow (as rewards) from faith.

Though I don’t buy Jacob as a sort of God stand-in, I do wonder if this is the point about faith that will eventually be made: that the faithful man has absolute faith, contingent upon neither proof nor reward. And that Ben Linus, in all his risible– as it seems now– blindness and naivete, was a faithful man until he confronted Jacob: the object of his faith.

LA X

Sometimes there’s a thing– a certain kind of food, or the experience of driving, or a landscape, or even a song– that you forget to love. You loved it a while back, but once it was gone you didn’t wake up every day missing it. You hardly thought about it at all. But the instant it’s reintroduced to your world, the totality of your love comes rushing back and you think: how did I live without this? Such is Lost, for me.

The End of Time, pt. 2

Obligatory spoiler cut as I’m writing before this airs in America.

The End of Time, pt. 1

“The End of Time, Part One” does not feel like a Doctor Who episode. Let’s just get that out of the way. I feel like a lot of the vitriol it appears to have attracted (et tu, io9?) can be traced back to this fact. “Love and Monsters,” another stylistically experimental episode, was similarly controversial. But I liked “Love and Monsters,” and I loved “The End of Time, Part One.”

Yes: it has problems. The Naismiths are appalling characters, sketchy and irritating, who never seem to be successfully integrated into the plot of the episode. The spiky people not only come from nowhere, but feel excessive: that little unwanted lagniappe that Russell T Davies often can’t resist slipping in. And the Master Race is so ludicrous that I actually covered my face while watching, half in horror and half in hilarity.

And yet my love persists. The first half of the episode is, I think, nearly perfect. I’m not completely sold on the whole mystic-ceremony-resurrection, but I give it a pass because this story is structured as a story: a fairy tale being told us by Time Lord Timothy Dalton. I may not like the ceremony, but it is consistent with this half-unreal, feverish, fairy-tale feel. Aside from that there’s not much about the first half hour that I don’t love. As a writer of more or less fairy tales, I can’t argue with a television drama that begins, “It is said that in the final days of planet Earth, everyone had bad dreams.” There is a melancholy and a beauty to this theme of dreaming, of fear and loss and destruction and longing, that I think runs throughout the episode. We see it in the lovely scene in the church with Wilf as he sees the stained glass TARDIS and tells the Mysterious Woman that he wants the Doctor to come back. We see it in the scene in the cafe where the Doctor more-or-less admits that he’s afraid of dying and that he misses Donna and that he’s made a mess of everything. And we see it most of all in the scene between the Doctor and the Master in the wasteland.

This is the scene that made me understand how “The End of Time” was working. I’m talking about the scene midway through when the Doctor sort of inexplicably appears, at night, in the wasteland and the Master knocks him down with electricity before launching into a peculiar, seething, melancholic little digression about Gallifrey. “I had estates,” the Master spits. It’s the last thing you expect him to say. And yet there’s a thematic sense to this conversation: these two people– once powerful and brilliant– now brought to ruin, dirty and exhausted in a bleak industrial desert. There’s something terribly apocalyptic about it. And it feels dream-like– we don’t really know how the Doctor got there or why he chose that particular moment; we don’t know what he thinks he will do with the Master. But none of these things matter very much. All that matters is what’s happening on an intuitive, mythic level between them. And that, I think, is how the episode as a whole operates. A scene in which the Doctor almost weeps in a London cafe is more important than a scene in which there’s a magic gate or whatever that will whatever the spiky people from the gate planet. The fact that people are having bad dreams is more important than the why and how of these dreams. The episode fails when it doesn’t surrender to this and instead tries to be something it’s not: traditional Doctor Who. But for the most part it does embrace this dreaminess, and I think is a great success. Then again: I’m a writer of fairy tales, so what do I know.

Also, I have to note for the record that over the whole span of winter holidays I watched (as part of the process of converting a civilian to Doctor Who) the fourth series of the show and realized that it was not as bad as I had initially thought. “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” are, I still maintain, technically failures. But as failures they are surprisingly filled with things to love. And “Midnight,” which I merely liked on transmission, is actually quite brilliant and quite surprising. Is the love and forgiveness in my heart related to the amount of love I have for Russell T Davies’ book about writing, which is shockingly clever, enjoyable, and sympathetic? It may well be. I do fear Russell T Davies: he may yet take “The End of Time” a tick too far tomorrow and send the edifice collapsing into a heap of dust. He is capable of it. But fundamentally I think he is an honest writer. It’s a quality I respect.