Doctor Who Series 11:- Predictions

Well, with something of a trailer coming this weekend. Either a proper trailer, something shot special for it, or just footage from the first couple of episodes string together, we’re going to finally see something more than a brief snippet at the end of Twice upon a Time. So before we get to that I want to make a couple predictions

Now I know about the leaked footage and the behind the scenes photos and the rumours but I’ve kept clear of them. I’m trying not to have the show spoiled for me. At the same time I have so many ideas of what I want to see and what I think we’re going to see. So I’m putting this out there. This way I can crow if I’m right, or be surprised when I’m wrong and have some evidence one way or the other.

Prediction number One. At the beginning of the season the Doctor will have already been in the “present” (as it were) for a while. She will already have established herself and will be more or less stable (at least as stable as the Doctor gets…)

Prediction Two. She’s already going to have established her team, it will be through them that we are introduced to this version of the Doctor rather than the now traditional introduction to the characters through following the Doctor.

Now we get into specifics; Prediction Three. The Doctor will be practically homeless when we meet her. Without the TARDIS she will be living in the streets, or as close to it, as she is working on a way to summon her vessel. The difficulty being that she has not got access to any sort of technology to do it.

Prediction Four. It will be a failed attempt to bring the TARDIS to her that sparks off the adventure, with the Doctor being the only one that can stop whatever’s coming and the friends she has made during her time there helping out.

Prediction Five. The Doctor will have been seen as this relatively harmless mad woman… right up until whatever happens to kick start the plot. At which point the friends she has made will be in awe of just what she is capable of.

Prediction Six. The TARDIS will arrive in the last act, giving the Doctor everything she needs to defeat the enemy of the week.

Dredd (AKA DREDD 3D)

Trying to write a review of Dredd is sort of difficult. In some ways even more so than Batman or Superman. Just about everyone knows the two DC characters so what about ol' Stony Face?

Well rather than pick a random point in it's history I'm going back to the beginning of the comic that spawned him, 2000AD, and going through a much condensed summery of his background both as a fictional character and how he came about. I'm fairly sure if the almighty Tharg finds out about this he's going to give me an enema with a Rigellan Hotshot for my impudence, but I'll have to learn to do with out sitting.

2000AD kicked off in 1977 when a bunch of writers for the British comic book industry were disillusioned at the lack of any serious story telling in the countries comic industry. The US had a recent boom in underground horror comics that rebelled against the stifling Comics Code Authority (Long story short, an independent group in the US that kept anything more graphic than a bruise locked away where innocent children couldn't learn about them) and we in the UK were still stuck with things like Korky the Cat. Well the boys were, for some bizarre reason comics aimed at girls were far more adult.

Bully the Movie

Bullying

Here's something interesting, at least to me. Bully the Movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1682181/

Basically somebody has realised that bullying is an issue that needs highlighting once again and has made a rather shocking (if of course you lived on the moon or were teachers) documentary showing a small sample of the abuse many alienated young people suffer.

Now I'm not going to go on into a long background about the movie, but there are a few points I want to make. First of all the MPAA, the gang over in America responsible for their rating system, gave it too high a rating for it's target audience (around 18, or their equivalent over there). Apparently it "contained scenes that may be shocking to younger people". I am forced to ask; what like? Teenage boys and girls being attacked by gangs, insulted and emotionally abused to the point were some go as far as to take their own life? Yes, that is something young children should be protected from… but hiding it away encourages it you feckless fools! That the MPAA did not know this tells me that they are among the hundreds of thousands out there that think just because they don't see it happening it doesn't.

Fortunately this rating has been effectively repealed and the film is now able to be seen by those that most need to see it. The problem is I don't think it can do much good and I have the experience to tell you why.

Now I'm not going to suddenly announce that I was one of the many victims, the fact is don't see myself as that. I can however emphasise. I was regularly bullied in school one way or another. At least twice, without warning, I was attacked and several times chased by groups. Once I was even knocked out, briefly. I regularly had gangs of all ages (even younger than I was) hound me, throwing out insulting nick names. Mostly plays on my last name Fishwick; these included Dick-wick, Fishy-dick and other obvious penis related jabs.

I am not saying I've had the worst of it, or that other people should just grow up and accept it but wasn't pleasant.

Other, more creative insults came about with rumours of me being sexually attracted to my own, then as now deceased, grandmother and Bea Arthur for some reason. People I did not know in the slightest would hound me after school with these taunts and others. When I responded (usually physically to their great amusement) it would be me that got in trouble with teachers for being violent. Again becoming some great cosmic joke.

Often leading to me losing my lunch times and being forced to remain in detention for an hour or more after school. On on occasion I was even held back a class because I lashed out during a lesson (a lesson I could not hear because I had four other pupils openly talking about my so called sexual habits). There were other problems, but I'm sure you get the idea.

This of course continued until I got to college. At which point I became the focus of a whole new level of amusement. My work with Scouts made me a pedophile, other people began asking obviously inane questions until distraction. Imagine being forced to tell the same moron that despite coming from a small town you do not in fact have six toes (all on one foot) and that you're not married to a sister you do not have.

None of this made me suicidal, but I can understand how people could fall into despair. Especially without support. I also know I am not alone out there in the big wide world. The problem is there is no easy fix, one movie no matter how powerful can change it and there is one simple reason why.

Social structure.

We are naturally a social animal. We gravitate towards those we feel connected to, either through shared opinion or occurrences. We make friends who we feel comfortable around because we can talk to them and we avoid people we can't. As a people we humans need that structure, that society and that bond. Without it we all feel that most painful and obscure hurt. Loneliness.

This is where bulling comes from, people seeking to establish their own friends the only way they can think, by alienating someone else. Bullies are so afraid of the loneliness they see in others that they go out of their way to stop it. Causing it wherever they go because if they stop they are terrified they will become the bullied. Literally shouting at the top of their voice everyone else's problems, so no one will look to closely at their own.

Highlighting this alone isn't going to help anything. It's primal, rooted so far down that we can't pull it out. Our only hope is to acknowledge it, face fear and ignorance head on and battle with it. This is why people ignore it, because they don't want to see it in themselves. This is why they do it, because they are the one's that are too afraid to accept who they are. I have seen people change their whole personalities to fit in

This is why I pity them, not myself. I'm glad to be unique, not one of the crowd. I'm not afraid of who I am. A short, irritating know it all with bad teeth, short temper and an attitude to match. I am me in defiance to all those people and I actually think them for that.

Before I sign this off thI do want to say two things. I don't know if we're going to get this film over here (UK) but if you're in the US support it as best you can. Despite my reservations. I might not sound wholly positive about the out come but I have been wrong often and very rarely have I wanted that to be proven more than I am here.

Second is to repeat the thing I said when my mother and I had a meeting with my teachers about the whole thing. My tutor said:- "Thomas has difficulty communication with his peers." I responded by looking at the moron and saying "You're not calling those people my peers are you?"


Thomas

The great debate.

Oh boy

Thank you William Shatner, you have waded into the oldest and most impossibly stale argument in geekdom and you've kicked off a new phase in the war. For those of you that don't know Shatner did an interview on his youtube page saying Star Trek was better than Star Wars.

Of course he was going to say Star Trek. There are two reasons for this, both are that it's William god-damn Shatner. The only thing more legendary than his acting is his planet sized ego. Anyway Carrie Fisher decided to open a Youtube page herself and challenge that.

Meta, an investigation.

Meta, an investigation.

Oh dear, this is something percolating in the background of geek culture and has been for sometime. Meta-fiction, literally meaning "beyond fiction". So far beyond that it's almost abstract.

But just what the hell does that all mean? Well not much is the short of it, but the long is a real twisted story. There are about three different levels to Meta-fiction, each one coming about through different means. So lets start in the shallow end:-

The first level is an in-joke. Something that the writer, or director, puts in for a gag. Like Alfred Hitchcock's cameo's, or Bruce Campbell's cameo's in the Spiderman films. They can often just be one liners, a character quipping that something like that would only happen in a bad TV show. Or even the cylon in the title sequence of The A-Team. In someways a gag like this pulls you out of the fiction, taking you out of the story. In others it flags up the point that it only a story after all, and because we're in on the joke it puts us at ease.
Meta in-jokes are fun and if pulled off just right add to the over all experience. We're put on the same level as the creator, we're interacting with whats happening and feel like we're being let in to the Writer / Directors confidence. Of course if they're pulled off wrong it's just a cheap sting.

The second level is what I like to think of as The Great Game. Bringing the fiction into reality. This sort of started with Sherlock Holmes, but it's also found in stuff like Bernard Cromwell's Sharp series. This "level" deliberately blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Taking historical events and weaving them into the story, bringing up something like September 11th is a good example. Not in metaphor, but directly and having it as a motivation for a characters actions as was done in Farscape at one point.
Blurring the lines like this really adds a sense of realism to a story. The Scream films used this sort of meta-fiction perfectly. By acknowledging the codes and conventions of horror films, making classic horror films fiction in story, we felt like we were on the same level as the characters. That they were real people and not the bland ignorant cyphers of the previous twenty years.
That's the point of this level, blur the lines and you make fiction more real. Throw in a few twists and you make the characters people we can relate to. This doesn't always work but it can be very interesting to see pulled off.

The third though, well let's jut say it's mindfu*k time! The third level is what happens when the fiction acknowledges that it is fiction. It's literally having a character going on a quest to find god and meeting his Writer / Creator. In this you all sorts of questions, with the Character asking fundamental questions about their own existence and why. This was done to great effect in Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man, which I highly rate. Another point with this level is it often pulls the other two in with it. Littering the story with real world references and history. Stargate's two hundredth episode featured a writer coming to the team looking for ideas for scripts! The episode was littered with so meny in jokes and stings that it was all one big gag.
Take look at another of the corner stones of this level, Yes Virginia, There Is A Hercules, from Hercules:- The Legendary Journeys. In fact, for god's sake do. It's one of the three episodes that makes that show worth while. While on the surface it's just a clip show the framing device is so meta (ironically a Greek word…) that it makes your head spin. We see the production team, played by the main cast in exaggerated roles, fighting amongst themselves and we have the Greek gods appear to them, in character and with all their powers. The sting of this episode is even more barmy. Kevin Sorbo arrives to defeat the Gods, saying that he really is the greek demi-god and Kevin Sorbo is a cover.
This level of meta-fiction doesn't just blur the lines between one fiction and another, but flat out crushes them all, even those between fiction and reality, completely. It's like taking a bulldozer to the actor's forth wall and then detonating it with a truck full of C4. Almost anything can happen when you wheel this out, from George Lucas meeting Darth Vader to the TARDIS landing in the middle of the Doctor Who set!
With this level you can either have fun, or ask some of the most difficult philosophical questions you'll ever see. Either way the audience will be equally confused and enthralled.

So, in summation, Meta-fiction is a way to blur the lines between fiction and reality, in storytelling, to enhance the experience for the audience. That was the short version if anyone asks!