OK, kid - this is where it gets complicated

[alexsarll]

After a week which at times saw the first three TV channels all simultaneously screening oafs in shorts bothering grass with their balls, thank heavens for Channel 4 which, while it may be airing the undignified death throes of Big Brother, an experiment superseded before it even began (on which more in a moment), brought back The IT Crowd. Still far from revolutionary or life-changing, still a good, direct, paradoxically old-fashioned sit-com. Not that the other three channels had entirely lost it, because right on time (and thank heavens, I couldn't have waited a minute longer) along came 'The Big Bang'. Which resolved almost nothing in the way that I'd expected but, unlike most of the RTD finales, provided alternatives that were equally acceptable, as opposed to cobbling together some nonsense and then covering for it with lots of soap opera emotionality (and that's not to say I didn't cry at most of them. But I cried at this too, without feeling afterwards that I'd been manipulated). It was neither heartless nor brainless, it got perfect performances from all the leads (including Rory, who I liked so much more as a Roman Auton; including Amelia, and I wonder if she'll be back again). Images like the stone Dalek, and the emptying museum, and the burning, whispering TARDIS. And the idea of a multi-season arc...that's new. And welcome. This is the first time the new series has held on to a Doctor/companion team past season's end, and I'm so glad about that, but we've got even more of a through line to make sure nobody drops the show next year. Who was piloting the TARDIS? Who's River? And why silence?
Conjuring the Doctor out of a dream was very Lance Parkin (the best Who writer not yet involved with the TV series), but most of all I got Grant Morrison echoes, and that's rarely a bad thing. The little girl who still believes in stars? A dream-reversal of the Star Conqueror story from his JLA, and the one boy who knows there's something missing from the world. The sense of having forgotten something terribly important? The fate of the hypnotised White Martians. Most of all, the Doctor surviving the destruction of everything by becoming fictional until the danger is passed is exactly the way the superheroes infiltrate our universe in Flex Mentallo, my favourite comic ever. Consider also that, after a while as a messiah figure, by kicking off the entire universe (again) the Doctor has now stopped being Jesus and moved on to being his old man. Though, semantically it's wrong to say that the Doctor is a Jesus figure. Jesus was a Doctor figure, or equally a Superman figure - the best a pallid, nasty, ersatz religion-substitute could come up with in the dark centuries between the fall of the old gods, and the creation (or discovery) of superheroes and Doctor Who. And just as christianity stole the festivals from the old religions, so Doctor Who is stealing them back. The prime significance of Easter? NEW SEASON! The prime significance of Christmas? SPECIAL!

That Big Brother comment above? Don't worry, I'm not watching the new series (and if anyone else is, they've not mentioned it, which is in some ways a shame as following it through my friends' posts was far more edifying than watching the real thing). Rather, I watched We Live In Public by Ondi Timoner, the maker of Dig!, and if you follow that link any time over the next 17 days then so can you. As in Dig!, she follows someone generally regarded by those around him as a genius/messiah, but who would in fact appear to be a loon. Internet pioneer Josh Harris is essentially Nathan Barley as played by Eugene Mirman. He starts off with Pseudo.com, an internet TV network, but is edged out after attending business meetings dressed as a scary clown. Instead he sets up Quiet, which is something between a Berlin squat and a cult bunker (and this in the run-up to the Millennium), but is also the Big Brother house, except less boring (there's loads of shagging, unlimited booze, and guns in the basement - what could go wrong?) and less humane (CIA-trained interrogators, cameras in the loos). And after that's run its course, he sets up home with his (first) girlfriend in full public view - there's even a camera in the bowl of the loo, pointing up, though mercifully the only footage we see from it is the cat having a drink. There's a bit of a rubbish coda, but the film is otherwise a fascinating look at a very damaged man - and proof that the Big Brother 'experiment' was outmoded from the off.

What else? Well, I went to the N19 two nights in a row, and the Camden Head two nights in a row, but my life is in no way in a rut, honest. Oh, and then N19 again, but only after heading up Parkland Walk for a picnic and some art (a bunch of installations up the Highgate end, returning this evening from 6 if anyone needs the excuse for a summer's evening walk). Oh, and I read Evelyn Waugh's final novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. An autobiographical account of an ageing Catholic writer who mixes his medicines and starts hallucinating, it may only be 150 pages but that's still too long - like the genuinely insane, Waugh was clearly unaware of the need to edit, of how little illumination one sheds by repetition with minor variation. It has also that nasty Ricky Gervais quality, where the supposedly satirised autobiographical pratagonist is still sneakily presented as indefinably nobler than most of the other characters. And it comes in a book with two horrid, pinched little stories, 'Tactical Exercise' and 'Love Among The Ruins', which remind one of nothing so much as the weaker, more tiresomely reactionary writing of Evelyn's son Auberon - and if you don't know Auberon's work then put it this way - at his worst, he was Richard Littlejohn with the occasional good turn of phrase.

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I'm still watching Big Brother! It's quite good this year.

Morrison and the Doctor

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The entropic collapsed-universe scenes in the museum were very reminiscent of the time-has-broken-down stuff in Final Crisis #7 too. IIRC you hated Final Crisis so maybe you never got that far!

[ultraruby.livejournal.com]

Hooray hooray, I'm so glad someone else has watched We Live In Public! I haven't seen Dig! all the way through and I didn't realise the films had the same Director til afterwards, though some of the Dandy Warhols do turn up in the underground house I think. Have you seen Join Us? That's Timoner too, and the film seems to be about some of her family, which makes me sort of goggle at her life - coming from where she has, and then joining in and living in the underground big brother project and stuff. What surprised me about We Live In Public was that it contained so much stuff (in fact everything) that I hadn't heard about before; I'd have thought that Harris would've gotten more of a mention in all the stories of internet people that've been written and mythologised over the years, or mentioned in articles about Big Brother and/or Microserfs/Gen X etc etc, but no. Or not that I'd seen anyway. All that time he spent trying to make himself famous, trying to make himself public, and yet somehow it made him more invisible than others who didn't even shoot for fame. It really did feel as if his own efforts had made him somehow more ficional than other people, less likely to be noticed. He seemed very much like a bit-part character in a hybrid Bret Easton Ellis/Douglas Rushkoff novel or something, the uncool guy that buys the drugs off the main character, that tries that little bit too hard.

(also, I'm watching Big Brother this year. Not obsessively, but if it's on I'll watch it. I think it's right that it's ending now, but I reckon it's been an important and interesting part of culture for the last 10 years. In general I find watching real people (for whatever value of real, though actually that's part of the enjoyment of it, the head-mess of knowing something's supposed to be true or real but knowing it can't be, because it's on telly) more enjoyable than watching fiction, which is why I'm been having such a phase for documentaries lately.....though in the past when I've been stressed/lost/glum/etc someone's prescribed me 'a good big dose of imaginary worlds', so I'll be going back and watching Doctor Who on the iplayer at some point too)

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

the one boy who knows there's something missing from the world

Good call, that's exactly what it reminded me of.

I wasn't entirely sure of the nuts and bolts of how he came back, but it made enough poetic sense that I was happy just to go along for the ride.

Dr Who

[willjsm.livejournal.com]

...but but but... as the re-creation of the universe goes backwards, Amy's exposure to the universe decreases over time. And then when the crack in her wall seals, she shurely loses those powers entirely. Thus meaning that her remembering the Doctor too late is, well, too late.