Who, what, where?

Picture this. 8 years of age and my first introduction to British SF is Jon Pertwee as Doctor Who. I was an avid watcher, never missed an episode. Then Tom Baker came along and within two or three multi-part episodes I'd given up. Dipped in again when Peter Davidson took over, dipped out with Colin Baker and didn't really bother with Sylvester McCoy (although I have heard some of the stories were considerably darker than the show's appearance would lead you to believe). I still struggle to like the Dr Who film with Paul McGann, although I do agree he might have made an interesting doctor given a longer run.

So when Dr Who relaunched in 2008, I didn't really consider myself a fan, but I was prepared to give it a go and subsequently, like a bad habit, I have been unable to give it up, even if I am just a one-watch and done kind of 'fan'. However, that said, before Christmas, on a whim, I watched the relaunched first series with Chris Ecclestone and was surprised at how dark it was for a family TV program - because that is what it has always been - and how surprisingly good some of the episodes were, even if some of them were maybe a little... naively executed. There's a reason for telling you this, because I'm now watching David Tennant's first full season as the doctor and Rose Tyler's last and it is also a strange mix of excellent and naff. I also think we forget just how vengeful the Doctor could be back in those days. He wasn't averse to killing a few aliens in the name of peace. 

Russell T Davies had a lot of detractors, but compared to what was to follow, a lot of what he did in those first two seasons hasn't been bettered. So the news that he's returning to run the show again is actually a positive thing in my mind, because the good Doctor needs some major surgery and quickly because there's a strange parallel with the original run; it becomes less important, more insignificant and ends up poorly executed, or in this case, jumping the shark.

From Matt Smith, through Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whitaker, the Doctor has become sanitised, homogenised and not at all the scourge of evil throughout the universe that shudders at his name if they're thinking of invading a planet and hear he's about. Whereas Ecclestone and Tennant had no problem chucking dynamite at a threat, more and more we've seen dependency on the sonic screwdriver and the Doctor's cod diplomacy. The edges are so rounded now, the program is a rolling ball and it's heading towards a black hole.

I've heard plausible rumours that Tennant might reprise his role, but as another incarnation and as a transition for the next in a couple of years; the clever thing about DW PR is it manages to keep a lot under its hat and this could just be a red herring to move journos away from the story. Then I got thinking, what if I was Russell T Davies, what would I do? Not who I'd replace Whitaker with, I really don't care who the Doctor is as long as he/she's good, but where do you take the story? Especially now there's this massive elephant in the room called ... is it the Lost Child? Whatever the Doctor is from whatever other galaxy he/she originally came from it has opened up a can of worms that is going to be difficult to ignore. It renders the rules fans thought there was around the Doctor obsolete and opens the door to massive abuse from the wrong people. I don't want to sound melodramatic, but it's broke and needs fixing and if it isn't fixed it'll probably disappear from our screens for another ten years or so. I enjoy it, even if I do fall asleep a lot.

So, what would I do? Thinking about this logically, the Dallas option would be the most likely, with The Master having manipulated events in a massive sting type operation to finally vanquish his foe, but how fucking lame is that? Too many bits of the box is open to try and stuff that back inside. So how do you deal with that and all the subsequent stuff that has given the Doctor an almost eternal existence? Perhaps you don't. Perhaps you meet it head on. Here's my take:

Finish Chibnall's run with Jodie Whitaker by not regenerating, but disappearing completely. Just zoning out - gone. Just Jaz is left, in the Tardis. End.

First of the 'specials' - Jaz is searching for other former assistants, looking for clues, but is coming up blank at almost every turn. Kate Stewart and her team are doing what they can and even Jack Harkness has been brought in. The Doctor is gone and now there's a new threat looming in the form of aliens the human race are unable to communicate with, are immune to any force and are enslaving the planet...
Glimpses of three different people, lost on unknown planets are scattered throughout the episode.

Second of the 'specials' - Earth and its inhabitants are enslaved by the unknown alien race, but they offer no specific threat; everyone is confined to their dwellings. Jaz, who is using the Tardis as her home, wakes to the sound of the ship moving. The Tardis is flying itself. When it stops, she goes outside and there is a fantastic paradise, sitting alone is a woman. Back on Earth, a breakthrough is made in trying to communicate with the aliens. They are not interested in conquest, they have come for one purpose, to find the one humans call the Doctor. Back wherever Jaz is, she is sitting with the woman who seems to be shifting between young, middle-aged and old. The woman says to Jaz that she must take an amulet she hands her and find the Doctor and once she'd succeeded they must end this forever...

Third of the 'specials' - As UNIT struggles to tell the aliens that they have no idea where the Doctor is, Jaz is back inside the Tardis staring at a glowing console. There is pocket where the Doctor placed all of her memories and Jaz deduces that she has to put the amulet inside it as it's glowing at her furiously. As soon as she does this, the Tardis starts up again and dematerialises. The Tardis makes three stops and each time a different individual comes inside claiming to be the Doctor, but unable to gain control of the Tardis which appears to be running the show. Jaz is recognised by each of the three claiming to be the Doctor and all three say things that only the Doctor knew. [At this point I should point out, I don't care if one Doctor is a man, a woman and a dog] The Tardis then transports them back to Earth. The planet is in a bad way because the people have now been trapped inside their homes for over a month. Illness and hunger is rampant across the planet, the aliens refuse to even communicate with the people unless the give them the Doctor.

The Doctors arrive just as the they start to merge with each other. They work out what happened; the regeneration was interrupted by the arrival of the aliens, splitting him into three entities, as they approach the reason for this original split the Doctor is now regenerating properly. The head alien - encased perhaps in massive armour - is revealed to be a human and she has come to this universe not to cause death but to ask that the Doctor returns home to help them prevent its destruction. Jaz opts not to go, but she tells him/her that the old woman that gave her the means to find him/her said she was The Last Doctor. They say their goodbyes and the Doctor and the Tardis disappear inside the alien spaceship and head to his 'home' universe...

So what happens now?

Episode 1 - The Origin of the Doctor

The new Doctor - an amalgam of the three [by the way, there's no real reason for a split doctor apart from it allows lots of time wasting before you got to the denouement] is transported into the next universe. Inside the Tardis, the lead 'alien' woman retrieves the vessel containing all of the Doctor's lost memories and crushes it in her hand, before the Doctor can protest, she explains that much of it was fake, slanted in a way to allow the woman who found the original version of the Doctor to be used for her own purposes. Yes, there had been regenerations he/she could not remember, but all of those would be revealed when the Doctor learned of his/her true origins...

Cut to a quintessential English cottage in the summer of 1962, We meet a handsome young husband and his pretty wife; we see they have a toddler. There is a bright light, the child vanishes. Cut to a bothy in the Scottish Highlands during the 1800s, a wee bairn is sitting on a blanket while his mother is doing chores. There is a bright light and the child is gone. Cut to and speed up; different scenes - inside an apartment, in the past, in the future, in India, China, the USA - children disappearing throughout history; an unknown number.

Cut to the inside of a giant space ship sitting in between the spaces inhabited by the two universes. This is a mercy mission of sorts; this universe is actually much older than the one Earth sits in and it is also strangely like our universe, because all it really is was a parallel universe. The plan is to take all of the children to this universe's version of our Earth to help repopulate it in the future - so we can take it they took hundreds of children from all eras of mankind. One thing is clear, this alien race - like the ones who came for the Doctor in the present - is in decline and decay and as the ship hurtles back into its universe something happens and all of the children on the ship are merged into one glowing baby. The ship explodes and the baby disappears, reappearing on Gallifrey to that Tektouine [sp] woman.

Cut back to the Tardis and the alien woman says to the Doctor, "That is you. You are the hundreds of children stolen from Earth to repopulate a different galaxy. You return to the place that made you who you are. Now can you see why you have such a soft spot for Earth and its people, because you are essentially a human even if you do share most of the Gallifreyan physiology. Your memories will return now because you know the truth. You are also now aware that you have hundreds of possible regenerations; each time you change you become the adult version of one of those children lost and each of those lost children gets to live his or her life as you. It is why each regeneration is you with a different personality."

"OK. So why are we here now?" Says the Doctor.

"Because we need your help to save our universe." Cut to images of the threat to this universe - nightmare versions of Daleks, Cybermen and any other Who villain you can think...

From that point on the rest of this mini-series focuses on how the Doctor helps the parallel universe defeat their versions of his greatest foes without the help of either the Tardis or his sonic screwdriver as neither work there. They save the day and allows the dying universe to plod on for a bit longer and returns to our universe and back to Earth, where the final scene of this series is the Doctor visiting a quintessential English cottage.

That sorts out the mess and allows you to pretty much continue with a clean palette. The Doctor is a lot of humans, reborn in the only place that might possibly understand how hundreds of children lost through time can understand its position in the universe with proper guidance, the kind provided by Time Lords.  Introduce new companions, revamp the Tardis, return to a Doctor who isn't afraid to kick some arse and maybe explore some of the original Doctors adventures by the current one encountering threats we've never seen before but he/she has or maybe bumping into a previous self on an adventure more often. I would be keen to put back the sense of dread and doom that many of those early rebooted episodes had; proper kids behind the sofa stuff that has been lost over the last five years or so. RTD obviously won't do any of the above, but it would be nice to see a different approach; maybe try and resolve the mire the continuity has gotten itself into. Maybe in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter, DW exists as a form of entertainment the same way Teletubbies does and we don't expect that to have a continuing subplot, although I'd be keen to see what it might be. Yet it also attracts new fans all the time, much to my surprise and they all seem to care. 

Now I wish there was some way that they could link the Doctor Who universe to Mr Benn's...

Revisiting the Older Marvel Films (part 1)

It dawned on me the other day that X-Men is 22-years-old. I remember the excitement at the time about a live action Marvel film after some forgettable rubbish that had gone previously, most notably the Blade films, which were all right, the Punisher films which weren't and the odd thing like Daredevil etc. Yet with X-Men there was this sense that the 21st Century could be the time of the superhero live action film and to a not so aging geek like myself, not yet 40, this was a good thing.

It also dawned on me that I haven't seen X-Men for about 20 years, nor had I watched any of the five previous Spider-Man films more than once, with a good chance I've never actually got around to watching Andrew Garfield's second outing. I've that to experience, but for someone so involved in comics for so much of my life, not watching these superhero films more than once seems odd. I've now seen all of the recognised MCU films and I'm expecting to see the new Spider-Man film in the next few months, so I thought I'd give the 'originals' and the first three X films another look, to see if I could understand why I've only seen some of them once.

Spider-Man is odd. It's a clever updating of the origin but Parker (Tobey Maguire) and his peers are all basically too old and too much like their original 1960s comics counterparts. In fact it's dripping in nostalgia and homage to Steve Ditko and John Romita, the artists who draw Spidey for their first ten years. Aunt May almost looks like she'd walked from the pages of Ditko's early issues and everything was suitably slightly pantomime - lots of melodrama and facial acting. It does, in so many ways, capture the original comic better than any other comic adaptation since. The Spidey special effects are really good to a point and while there was an excessive use of webbing, it illustrated the uniqueness of the character.

However, when we wander into the world of Norman Osborne things get a little dodgier and with hindsight as there had been the hint there were other superheroes out there in a throw away line, having Ozcorp go against Stark Industries in a bid for a government contract might have been an interesting little nugget. The thing is there shouldn't be anything wrong with a science company trying to come up with a) a super soldier serum and b) a battle suit; I just couldn't imagine the US Military being interested in a battle suit that makes you look like a goblin and a flying hoverboard. 

Considering this was about Peter Parker the student now with enhanced abilities, there didn't seem to be much building on character or continuity or even an attempt to make the actors more than just the characters they were on the comics page, in a way they were even less. The preamble to the ending should have been a little more sophisticated in its set-up, but it all feels a little 1920 silent film peril and when the Green Goblin finally fights Spidey the overriding feeling you get is you're watching a slightly more expensive version of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. The movement of the Goblin from fight scenes to extrapolating about how brilliant he is all look a bit Toho Godzilla.

Plus the ending stinks and was so unlike anything a Spider-Man of my early life would have done. It did, however, feel like a BIG film and important film and one that allowed Marvel characters the same gravitas afforded to Batman (and Superman).

X-Men - [let's come back to the ol' webslinger in a bit] Things I noticed quite clearly: 1) It's a remarkably short film for such a grand idea. 2) It's glaringly obvious, even with advances in CGI, that the X-Men are not as visually spectacular as many of the other MCU heroes and only Wolverine has the feel of a character with longevity. 3) It's a load of shit. It simply doesn't really make a lot of sense and when it tries to make sense it simply muddies the water. From the initial Wolverine and Rogue meeting where she's a runaway who introduces herself as 'Rogue' - WHY? He's a cage fighter called the Wolverine, that's almost plausible, but why a codename - she isn't a superhero? To the amount of testosterone on display throughout the film from Cyclops; James Marsden just growled like a spoiled teenager and the relationship between him and Jean Grey just seemed like it was there; the two characters interaction didn't suggest they were making the beast with two backs all the time. The woeful dialogue that sounds more like a PowerPoint explainer than a feature film. The fact they're just a bit crap and send a man with a metal skeleton against a bloke who controls magnetism? You could literally go on and on and on picking holes in this film, it's that bad. 

Turning people into mutants? For fuck's sake! As a holder of Biggest X-Fan in the UK for many years, I can honestly say I must have liked the film first time around because I've got the DVD, unless someone bought it for me, then I have an excuse. It has a bunch of fine actors hamming it up in a film so pantomime that it makes Spider-Man seem like a David Lynch film. These actors must have been paid a lot of money. X-Men might have benefitted if it had been made by David Lynch, because otherwise what you have is just a bunch of scenes sewn together with bullshit. I don't even really want to talk about it; it felt like an episode of McMillan & Wife with a budget.

Before I leave this alone, hopefully for the last time ever, I want to return to that point #2 and how the X-Men might not work on the big screen. Not only is the Marvel mutant universe fat, bloated and unwieldy to try and find a way of shoehorning it into the existing MCU - unless it's done when we have a reunification of the multiverse in a few years time - but Marvel has attempted to introduce various incarnations of 'mutant type' characters before and they've all failed. If Agents of Shield is cannon then there's The Inhumans in that series and the failed solo-series and, now, in many respects The Eternals represent a sort of higher level of mutantness - because the similarities between what the Eternals can do and what the X-Men do is a bit similar. 

All of the later X films, with the dreadful acting and SFX did nothing to convince anyone that X-Men work on camera - yeah some of them do, but if you're going to be selective about who you use and how you use them then the key reason The X-Men became so popular is lost.

It's my belief that mutants would work better as a Marvel/Disney TV series, the problem with that is it would need ramping and speeding up if you didn't want to spend the first half a dozen series plodding around with scene setting, because 1960s X-Men wasn't really a good comic until it was being cancelled. Nothing in the MCU rule book says the X-Men and mutants have to have a similar 'origin' to their comic roots like the other heroes in the universe have, but part of the reason the MCU works is its willingness to stick to the structure that made the comics successful in the first place.

Spider-Man 2 - Here's the thing; I know many people think this is the complete superhero film or at least the best Spider-Man film of the live action ones, but it's remarkably boring. The amount of time it takes Peter to persuade Otto to do the right thing I could have died and not given a shit. If Sam Raimi's first film was an exploration of and homage to 1960s Spider-Man comics, then the sequel is his attempt at doing a serious superhero film with the comicbook backdrop. This is all about struggle; all of the main characters are struggling with something - Peter with his life, Aunt May with the bills, Harry with the death of his father, MJ because of her love life, Otto Octavius because his work is not happening the way he wants it and it's already cost him his wife. If people aren't struggling they're crossing people who are trying to make them struggle.

With 2 we've ditched the Flash Thompsons, streamlined the core cast down, and devoted the time the first film should have spent on character development and failed dismally. I simply didn't care about any of the characters any more, not that I had that much emotional attachment after the first film. It is a good superhero film; the fight scenes are considerably better, with Raimi's stop motion blending in well, but the film needed another villain or an action distraction. Peripheral characters were so shallow they were literally plot devices. Don't get me wrong, it is a good film to a point, I just don't think that point is higher than about average.

The penultimate scene of the film would, most definitely, be a mid-credit scene now and the ending was about as perfect an ending you could have for a Spider-Man film.

A slight digression...

In 2005, Marvel had its name tagged onto a US/Australian film called Man-Thing. Everything about the film until it starts is Marvel. The flashing comic images, music, etc., it's obviously linked to the Multiverse in some way or shape especially if it can make Disney money. Let's just say that I have indeed sat through this film and I can honestly say that apart from the names of the characters and the ones named after Man-Thing creators there is nothing remotely similar to the comic apart from possible exposition. It makes the DC Swamp Thing films of the 1980s (with Adrienne Barbeau getting her baps out) look like true classics. If I were Kevin Feige I'd buy all copies and burn them.

And if you're waiting for X-2, The Amazing Spider-Man 1 & 2 and X-Men: Last Stand, that's going to be next time because I have some decent stuff to watch before I have to dive into that anachronistic bunch again.