Doctor Who: S6 Ep1, The Impossible Astronaut

I would have had this up sooner, but notes were lost and I don't really have much time for extra rewatches these days. Hopefully, over the next few weeks these posts will happen within the day of the US airing.

Considering the amount of hype that has been generated over this season of Doctor Who (that I am partially responsible for) I was ready to feel let down. Fortunately, I didn't quite feel that way.

Before I start, I should mention that this is the first season of Doctor Who that I have ever watched live. I came to the new series only after David Tennant had left and spent the time during Matt Smith's first season watching the Russell T. Davies era. I have finally caught up though, and have been ready for this season to get started for a long time. Partially because this is one of the few fantasy series that keeps me coming back, and because I think that Steven Moffat's idea of who the Doctor is, is closer to what I want him to be. That is, I want him to be a silly person who is really smart, but still playing with forces he doesn't quite have full control over. The key word there is playing.

Anyway, on to the season opener which has had most of its details hidden under wraps for a while. The things we did know going in were few: the whole Moffat gang is back together, the Silence are the bad guys, and stetsons are cool. So the opening which features the Doctor getting caught under the dress of an English woman whom he was modeling for then escaping from the Tower of London seems a bit random at first, but knowing Moffat it will be important latter. Then Amy and Rory get a letter at their flat inviting them to a picnic, and centuries later River gets a letter too. Quickly after that though we find the Doctor and his current set of companions picnicking in the Southwest US when an astronaut comes out of a lake and kills him. After a sad funeral pyre on the lake (to which the astronaut returned to) the companions quickly see that their invites were numbered and one person is missing. Walking into a 50s themed dinner they quickly discover the last invite belongs to the Doctor, but a Doctor much younger than the one that just got killed. This whole need to keep secrets thing seems at odds with what they want to achieve, but I guess keeping a person's impending/past death from him means that it doesn't become a self-fulfilling kind of thing.

Going back to the TARDIS they convince the Doctor to trust them and go back to 1969 which was a year mentioned by the dead Doctor. This basically amounts to the Doctor acting cross at not being let in on what they know until Amy swears on fish sticks and custard just how important this jump is. So they end up in Nixon's office and find that he has been getting strange phone calls from a girl who can only respond with the cross-streets of where she is (as the Doctor figures out, even without a fez). As this is happening, Amy sees a creepy figure who looks like what Buffy's Gentlemen would look like if they had eaten a bunch of lemons, but quickly forgets him the moment she stops seeing him. Of course, she saw this same thing in the desert right before the Doctor got killed, but forgot then too. She ends us going to the bathroom with a stomach ache and finds the figure there again. After a crazy scene in which Amy snaps a photo of the creature on her phone and watches a woman basically perform a kind of amnesiac slapstick before getting blown up she runs out of the bathroom forgetting the whole thing.

So the Doctor, his companions, and a CIA agent who in the future brings the gas to the picnic to light the pyre hop in the TARDIS and go to Florida where they find a place full of creepy and sticky alien technology. They all then split up because that's exactly what you do in situations like this. River goes down a manhole and finds a bunch of Silence but comes back up saying nothing was there. She then goes back down with Rory sent down with her at the Doctor's suggestion. They end up finding a bunch of ancient caves that seem to basically be all over Earth, yet no one seems to notice them. Eventually, they find a room with one of those control rooms that was on the second floor in "The Lodger." River touches something and makes an alarm go off. Rory sees the Silence but when he turns around to tell River he forgets. Very quickly after we hear noises that sound like the Silence might have gotten to River and Rory.

Meanwhile, our CIA agent, Canton Delaware, has wonder off and yelps out. Luckily, Amy is trying to give the Doctor some big news as this happens. Standing over Delaware's unconscious body, Amy tells the Doctor she is pregnant. Suddenly the astronaut appears again and lifts her mask to show that she is a child in the large suit. Amy's maternal instincts kick in and she shoots at the girl thinking this might save the Doctor in the future.

One of my favorite Moffat themes is at the heart of the Silence, the use of our objectifying gaze and the gaze act's production of memory. Last season was filled with this theme, both in Amy who was made overtly sexy and in the baddies. Prisoner Zero made it difficult to actually look at it, and when you did it would take another form preventing direct gaze. The Angels had to be constantly looked at, and very literally objectified, in order to keep them from attacking. Even the Daleks last season needed to be named in order to survive. Now though, we have something even scarier in the Silence. A thing that which can not only slip out of our gaze, but also out of our memory, even without a crack. I want to leave off this thought here until after next week's episode so I can hopefully talk about the Silence in more detail.

As a bit of a side note though, this fear makes the Silence make sense thematically with the American Southwest where the show's overhyped first act took place. The most complex monsters to come from that area are the Greys. These creatures, like the Silence watch us quietly, and if we ever see them the experience usually comes with the sensation of lost time. They Greys are also the ones that supposedly crashed at Roswell in 1949, an event that has become more about the need for the surfacing of institutional memories within the government over any sort of public memory to legitimize it. All of these notions tie very closely to the Doctor as a friendly alien who also controls time. In other words, I would be willing to bet that the Southwest will be coming back as a meaningful setting later this season.

Photography, Death, and Memory

A friend of mine made this video for a class we are in. It is a good summation of a lot of ideas from the class. I cannot recommend it more highly.

Expanding on iTunes

iTunes started life as one of those little programs that was made to let you rip your CDs and listen to your music via your computer. As an app it was pretty quant back in the day. However, with its purchase by Apple and its pairing with the iPod the app suddenly became useful and with great meaning. Then the iTunes Store opened and that made sense. Why bother buying physical if you are just going to rip anyway?

However soon the iTunes Store began offering movies, TV shows, and apps for iPods and iPhones! Of course, if you are going to buy something in the iTunes Store it is only logical that the iTunes app be where you access them. Right?

Well, with the newest section of the library, Books (which has a whole separate app, iBooks, on the iOS) I am pretty fed up with iTunes being such a catch-all. So I propose some kind of closely knit set of apps in OS X that might best be called the iLibrary.

(It is either this or overhaul iTunes into some kind of iMedia program that melts in iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. That would be a bad idea for many reasons, including the before mentioned bloat of the app. Of course, they don't want to alienate Windows users.)

The iLibrary Apps:

iTunes - Has your music, podcasts, audio books, ringtones, (better than now) streaming radio stations, and maybe even music videos.

iVideos - Has your movies, TV shows, music videos, and has a robust Internet video viewer that can let easily watch and download videos from YouTube and other sites.

iPhoto - Like it is now, but with a less odd library system and a more full integration into my life. Yeah, I use it now, but only because it is there. Most of the time it seems like Finder's abandoned child/frame.

iBooks - Can store any form of text document from .doc to .PDF to any of those other crazy ones AND it can read most of them so that you could theoretically search for specific passages within documents. It would also be able to provide you with bookmarks, highlighting, personal side notes, and other meta-editing. I would also hope that Apple might be able to introduce a new ebook open standard that puts these sorts meta-edits into a common file type.

iApps - Where you iOS apps are. I would hope that pretty soon we can run iOS apps across platforms from the iPhone to the iPad to OS X. This is an off the wall prediction, but I don't feel like it is too crazy.

iKnow - This is only kind of silly. Redo the Address Book app and turn it into something more socially connected. Connect Twitter, Facebook, etc to make my contacts more dynamic and useful.


Each of these would have a permanent app in iOS. Because we would be used to the apps being separate on our computers it would stop being so jarring to find that I have to close my iPod app and find my iBooks app to read a book then go back to my iPod app to watch a movie. Considering that all of this media is in one central library app right now does anyone else find this annoying?

From here the "iLibrary Apps" would include a number of editing and creation apps that should do more than the quick adjustments that might be around in the storage and meta-data management apps.

They would also be able to easily interact with the media libraries that our computers seem to be becoming more and more these days, at least if you are a Mac user. They would also be easily integrated into both iOS and OS X as apps both places.

iBand - Keeps the usefulness of GarageBand, but also can provide a simpler interface for people just wanting to make ringtones or to edit down any other .mp3. This will give GarageBand the respect it deserves while at the same time eliminating the need to hunt for Lifehacker articles on how to make a ringtone every time T.I. drops another single.

iMovie - It exists now in both desktop and iOS form and is actually pretty good for what it does. If Apple just keeps these apps up to snuff they will stay useful to people like me who just need to edit simple raw video.

iProgram - Apple should buy out GameSalad and turn it into a native app. I think we have reached the point where Apple can loosen its stranglehold on its apps and the AppStore. This would also encourage Apple and larger programers to keep their own products fresh.


We also need something that deals directly with the settings on our Apple gear:

iDevice - Directly reads and deals with any iDevice connected to the computer. Looks like iTunes is sort of doing this right now with AirPlay, but this is more. Here you will edit your iDevice's settings (be it pod, pad, or phone), manage what is stored on it, etc. No more having to go to iPhoto if I want to put any photos from the device onto my main library. It can just do it. Also, I should be able to use it as a kind of flash drive, gotdangit.


While I am expecting some major iOS integration into 10.7 (Lion?) I would like to see these things added in as well. We are still several years away from OS 11 which I can only see merging together OS X and iOS much more fully, but until then these updates to the core functions of the Apple software could make the entire product line into some much more functional.

The Age of Deep Mystery

Today we feel so smart. We know how brain chemistry effects our desire for things like gambling or why companies give us choice in our pick of spaghetti sauces even if it makes us all crazy. We are always on the lookout for that Nash equilibrium. Min/Maxing is not just limited to RPG players any more. We are cracking the secrets of ourselves. We are finding out just how we all tick and how to tweak ourselves to get what we want out of life.

This is all mostly a process of demystifying our lives. By figuring out all these little things so we can profit from them, or at least be aware of them, we are working toward a kind of understanding of the world, but this is not just some kind of modern age enlightenment.

With every look at just what might sum us up we always admit there is a wall. This wall comes in many forms. We can't see that far out. We do not know how to directly observe that. There is no pattern in the noise. We can't observe its spin and position at the same time. In every case it is the same. There is a point where the universe becomes unknowable.

Most of the time this unknowableness is acceptable. We have already found the practical answers to things like sickness or marketing. Because of this, these are the things we romanticize now. Just think, we have cracked how evolution works, but we still have no idea how cells are able to make the proteins they need to survive. It's a random process. Not something we flick a switch on. This is not just beautiful to us, it is the way we find beauty in the world.

This mode of thinking is drastically different than any other way of thinking before. The thinking that there is a wall to what we know and no matter if we break through that wall in our knowledge there will only be another wall is unique. The Enlightenment could not predict no end to these walls. The Romantics were busy building walls. Einstein hated that this was suggested by his ideas. The only people who could have seen this were those who just assumed it was turtles all the way down.

The fundamental problem of our times is coping with this. How do we accept that there is no base to the world? If there is always going to be something we don't have the ability to figure out, then does that mean we have to have some kind of spirituality? Organized religion has yet to provide any kind of way of thinking that doesn't blatantly ignore this. Does this mean that not even God is immune to this fear?

Scott Pilgrim vs. Video Game Logic

If there is one thing that should be in more movies, it is 8-bit sound effects. While likely less realistic, they are strangely effective at communicating abstract sounds. That said, here is my review of the movie.

Scott Pilgrim is not a movie about a guy trying to win over a girl. It is about a relationship between the guy and a girl, as told from his perspective. In Scott's case that perspective is something of a guy that that recent NYT article was talking about. He is self-centered, disconnected from any relationship that does not seem to contribute to making himself better, and generally a sweet but asshole-ish dude. Also, he clearly was a child of the late 80s with constant thinking in terms of Video Game Logic. This VGL is actually very important to the movie so lets talk about that.

As a disclaimer, I have not read past the second book in the series of comics. I know this makes me a bad nerd. Oh well, I got distracted watching Doctor Who or something…

VGL was first named for me as a bunch of my friends and I were playing the XBOX game Ninja Gaiden. A remake of a beloved NES game, Ninja Gaiden was pretty awesome but used a seemingly strange way of telling us if a door could be opened or not. It had a red or green light. These sort of thing might have worked if the level was some sort of industrial site, but we were on a kind of passenger ship. And the lights were HUGE. In real life these lights would never exist, but here they were. From there on my friends and I began to notice all sorts of things that made perfect sense in video games, but not in real life. These include but are not limited to total easy changes in jump momentum, wondering into people's homes in strange small villages, and one use keys. All of these things would be questionable in many ways if the game space was the real world, but in the Mushroom Kingdom you just accept it and move on.

Scott has a bunch of what might be considered non-diegetic (to anyone but him at least) concepts like character stats, hit counters, "vs" displays, points, and even scene title cards. In VGL these are simply a part of playing the game. Mario does not see the timer that we do that forces him to finish a level quickly. That is just something we know about, thus non-diegetic or outside of Mario's world, but still a part of the game as a whole. These are unfortunately the only things that most people seem to be focusing on when it comes to the gamic influences on the movie as a whole.

Instead, I want to focus on why anyone would join together to create a League of Evil Exes to prevent Ramona (and Scott) from being free from the past's grasp. To this, I propose, that the League is nothing more than another projection of Scott's as he dates and gets to know Ramona. VGL then can become what is truly is, an easy oversimplification of the world in order to better make sense of it. After all, we have to simplify the world in video games because of things like graphics and simply user mechanics. It is for our sake that we don't have to manage every key we find or have a fight staged with health meters. Scott just takes it one step further. Each time a bump comes in his relationship with Ramona, Scott sees it as tied to a past trauma of an (evil) ex who he must defeat in order to get closer to Ramona and produce a sort of fairy-tale romance. The fights with her exes, like the applause in one scene are all in Scott's head.

This introduces a concept played up this summer by the last scene Christopher Nolan's Inception, but seems rarely brought up if not made explicit: the unreliable narrator. While there at first seems to be a omnipotent third-person narrator, maybe The Voice as played by Bill Hader, visual cues of everything revolving around Scott, the applause scene, and the lack of any subject of conversation but Scott all suggest that this whole thing is from Scott's view only. This is not that bold to suggest. However, we cannot trust Scott to not inflate his own story. Especially when even the version of himself he is presenting is so untrustworthy! The movie can then only be seen as what this shallow and kind of selfish dude understood his relationship to be.

This is kind of disturbing because this actually paints the very crowd it is meant to appeal to as a bunch of people who see relationship baggage as bosses on some quest to get laid or fall in love or something. Seriously, is coming to accept that a new partner was a school bully, a bit too ready to dump someone, bi-curious, or still kind of mad for a former lover so hard that we have to think about these things as personified forms that we can beat until they explode into bus fare?

Even the last "fight" between Scott and "Nega Scott" was nothing more than Scott putting off a confrontation with a part of himself that he simply doesn't see as something he needs to deal with. Going to brunch with a dark part of yourself is nothing more than saying that you are going to wake up hung over some time soon.

This Scott-sided view limits our ability to have any absolute understanding of the relationships or girls in them. Ramona and Knives overlap for Scott much longer than I think Scott, our narrator, lets on. Considering the way that time seems to skip forward throughout the movie, this should not be a shock. This would definitely explain and even validate the extreme reactions of the women when the find this out. This is important to consider because it would also serve to explain why Knives felt so totally wronged and why Scott ended up feeling that he had cheated on both of them.

Individually, both girls are clearly not ever remotely understood by Scott. Knives is constantly seen as only a silly love-struck teenage girl with a crush and a single minded desire to have Scott back. While it seems likely that Knives did hold a grudge against Ramona, it is never totally easy to assume that any of her other actions are simply to get Scott back. After all, she is still dense enough to talk nothing but good things about Scott's big ex in front of him. That seems like something that a girl out to win back a boy would try to avoid. While it might make him sad enough to return to you, it could also just piss him off. By the end of the movie it is clear that Knives might still like Scott, but has moved on to the wider social life he introduced her to.

Ramona is THE girl with a past. Being with Scott is in many ways totally escapist for her, just like moving to Canada and getting a job as a delivery girl.* It is clear that by the movie's end she is not over her exes. They may be coins to Scott, but to her they still exist as memories of times that have a version of her that she does not like any more. Her hope was that by going someplace new she could simply bottle those memories, but of course they had to come out for Scott to deal with. Besides feeling naive for thinking she could run away from the past, at the end of the movie she is nothing but embarrassed for having shown just who she once was to Scott. Her fights were only just beginning.

*The delivery profession is clearly seen as the lowest non-blue collar job out there. This is why Fry and the rest of the cast on Futurama are so easily depicted as sad and lonely people. They are just working for a delivery service. Yeah, it is to other planets, but still all they do is take packages across the galaxy, return to Earth, and watch TV. Likewise Ramona makes her job seem cool because she rollerblades while wearing goggles, but that is just a superficial look to make the job seem less like something that requires no skill.

The video game logic Scott applies to these girls prevents him from ever seeing these romantic interests as dynamic characters who have more complexity to them than just their color pallet changes (hair dyes). Accepting all this, we are able to see that the movie is not anti-feminist at a core level, but simply depicts them all as Scott's pixilated versions of themselves.

These are not totally naturalistic assumptions to make about a movie. This is why the movie was a box office flop. However, I expect that in the very near future as video game logic becomes more common Scott Pilgrim will become a classic.

Essays by Wallace Shawn

I got this as a Christmas present from my lovely girlfriend so I felt like I should write a review, just to show how much the gift has gotten in my head.

Wallace Shawn is a name whose face and nasally voice is likely very familiar to us to the point that whenever he shows up in some movie or TV show we all say, "Hey, its that guy, you know, [insert role and movie he was in]!" Before reading this I didn't realize that his most interesting reasons for being known were in his own writings as a playwright and essayist. This role as a New York creative type is given voice in his book Essays.

A compilation of fifteen previously published works including two interviews, dating from 1985 but mostly writing in the early part of the 2000s, the book is broken into two parts. In part one, Reality, Shawn is trying to come to terms with the end of the American century and his feelings on his own affluence. Both thoughts mingle together to the point of eventually becoming one as in the book's third essay "Morality." The second part, Dream-World, questions just how and why we access art in this day and age. While less seemingly focused compared to the first part these last few essays provide the breadcrumbs of thoughts that if reflected on will lead us into a deep thicket of the mind that Shawn seems content to frolic in.

The book is kind of a downer, overall. It would be hard for me to like Shawn if I did not already relate to him in some way. He is not afraid to bring up (albeit in a tame way) the suffering in Africa or the Middle East. It is a quick read, however, that I will likely pick up again from time to time knowing that I will likely find something new.

Mailbag

Due to the recent comeback of the blog I have received many questions that I will try to answer now.

Dear FJohn,

I love singing karaoke. I could probably even tell you which bars have karaoke night all over NYC every day of the week. My only problem is that the list of songs I enjoy singing is getting a bit tired. I love to sing Michael Jackson and other pop. Would you mind suggesting a few songs for me.
Someone Interesting Needs Guidance

SING,

I would recommend looking to expand outside of your basic genre. Try some Elvis Presley or Roy Orbison. Even better just jump to country for a night or two. Most country songs are about drinking so pick one that really captures how you feel you are drinking that night. If you are singing in bars that only do karaoke every so often this is a surefire way to get people to dig you getting up on stage.

I would also avoid any kind of ballad. This seems like a good idea because they are often songs that most people know, but if your songs hit the 3 minute mark no one wants to know you.

Dear FJohn,

My roommates and I are in a heated debate. Which is better for you cake batter or brownie batter? I say cake but they tell me brownie. Which is it?
Batter Eating Teenager

BET,

It is unwise to eat batter of any kind in large quantities, even if you don't add eggs. Batter is made up of a lot of baking chemicals that are made to create the sort of sponginess of both cake and brownies. During the baking process these chemicals are reacted and become good to eat without causing gastrointestinal problems.

That said, brownies do have a slightly lesser amount of most of these chemicals so I guess they are "better" for you. But you really should just cook them both (preferably before you get baked yourself).

FJohn,

I love your blog. I just have a quick question.

I am in a relationship with my boss's daughter right now. He was my boss before I was dating her so it isn't like he got me a job through some kind of nepotism. I have been a pretty good boyfriend and a great employee, however I am pretty sure my girlfriend has been cheating on me for the last few weeks, and is planing on dumping me.

Her dad, my boss, is a nice enough guy, but it is unlikely that he would be willing to give me the time of day if it went south with his daughter.

I really need this job. It is a stable stepping stone toward my dream job and would hate to have to start over again somewhere else. What can I do?
Dipped In Company Ink

DICI,

You don't say if you have confronted your girlfriend with these heavy allegations yet. This should be the first thing you do. Try not to get too defensive or mean about it. Just tell her that it seems like she wants out of your relationship, and you are willing let it end peacefully if she makes it clear to her dad that you and her ended on good terms.

Parents more than anyone know how difficult it is to be a major part of their children's lives. This is sort of the way that most parents in this day and age bond with their children's significant others. "Yeah, when Soandso was growing up she wasn't a morning person ether." So long as you haven't hurt his daughter he will be understanding of what happen.



There you have it. If you have any questions please send them to fjohnrickert [at] gmail [dot] com.