The other day, I was reading a book called “A Galaxy Not So Far Away”, a book of essays about ‘Star Wars’. The essays varied wildly in quality from “kind of mediocre” to “crimes against the English language”, but one of the things that stuck out about them was the way that they all talked about the meanings that the author projected onto what they ‘knew’ to be ‘escapist fiction’. Normally, I’d chalk this up to a failing of the author, much in the same way I’d ding them for not realizing that a Boba Fett vs. Predator website might not be entirely serious, but this view isn’t unique to this book. Critics as diverse as Roger Ebert, Nathan Rabin, Tom Shone and Peter Biskind have all called ‘Star Wars’ a piece of pure escapism, with varying degrees of respect and appreciation. It has come to be the fundamental received wisdom about the original film. No allegory, no message, just a classic Boy Becomes Man story set so far away from anything we know that everyone can enjoy it.

Which is totally wrong. ‘Star Wars’ is actually an intensely political story, with a scathing and vicious statement to make about modern American politics cloaked in an allegorical “space opera”. The reasons that nobody appreciates this are twofold: One, the political landscape changed so much during the film’s lengthy journey from script to screen that much of its impact was neutered, and two, Americans have an amazing ability to assume that they’re the “good guys” in any allegorical story. This, combined with Reagan’s later appropriation of the imagery and terminology of the film, made it seem like an all-purpose battle of good and evil, but it wasn’t always intended this way.

It’s important, when looking at the political elements of ‘Star Wars’, to look at the era in which it was written. When Lucas first envisioned his follow-up to ‘American Graffiti’, Nixon had just been re-elected in an astonishing landslide. The Vietnam War had outlasted both the President who started it and the President who championed it, and was now continuing into the second term of a President who had promised to end it…and had instead escalated both its intensity and its scope. Watergate, the scandal that would eventually grow to consume the Nixon presidency, was at this point merely seen as a couple of muck-rakers trying to stir up trouble for a man as unpopular with liberals as he was popular with conservatives. And George Lucas? He was hanging out with radical, political film-makers like Francis Ford Coppola and his then-wife, Marcia Lou Griffin. He was potentially tapped as the director of ‘Apocalypse Now’, before ‘Star Wars’ came along to occupy his attention at the time. He was consumed with the idea of a political film about what he saw as the end of American democracy as we knew it.

This is actually worth repeating, because we’re at this point so far removed from the era that many people have forgotten the most troubling aspect of Watergate. It wasn’t that the President had bugged, burglarized, and “ratfucked” his opponents on the way to his victory. It wasn’t even that he’d paid hush money to his co-conspirators to make it all go away. It wasn’t even that he’d discouraged the FBI from pursuing the case. It was what people saw as the very real possibility that Nixon might simply tell the United States Congress to shove their investigation up their collective ass sideways, and to tell the Supreme Court exactly what they could do with their 8-0 ruling that he turn over the tapes. It was the idea that we had a President who genuinely saw himself as not subject to the rule of law. “Imperialist Presidency” gets bandied around a lot by both sides of the political spectrum, but everyone was worried that Nixon was setting one up.

And what did Lucas write against this backdrop? He wrote a story about a democracy that had become an Empire, with a ruler who (all together now) “dissolved the council permanently”. The Empire is now constantly on a war footing, using technology they perfected in the wars against its enemies on its own citizens to stifle dissent. Only a group of anti-establishment rebels who remember The Way Things Used To Be can possibly restore the Republic. In case the symbolism isn’t blatant enough, should I mention that the ending of ‘Jedi’ (in which a bunch of foreigners/aliens with primitive weapons overwhelm a technologically and numerically superior force through use of cunning, ambushes and a superior knowledge of the local area) was originally planned to be the ending of ‘Star Wars’ before budgetary constraints forced him to move it? Even the costume design for the Rebel pilots evokes early Russian cosmonauts. (If you don’t believe me, just drop by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum sometime.)

In ‘Star Wars’, the Empire is America. The Emperor is Nixon. The oppressor is us, and the call in the air everywhere is “Revolution!” George Lucas, the supposedly escapist film-maker who wanted nothing more than to entertain, was advocating for the armed overthrow of the United States government. By the time his film hit theaters, of course, it was already dated; nobody could look at “the sanctimonious impotence of Carter” (to borrow a phrase from James Lileks) and see a menace that had to be toppled from his iron throne. But by couching his work in the language of allegory, Lucas created a story that survived its political origins in a way that many other political films could not. Which is a good thing for us, but I suspect the idealist that Lucas used to be is a little bit sad about it.

(Post-script: I hate to have to mention this, because it seems like it should be self-evident, but…yes. I am serious. This is actually sourced in J.W. Rinzler’s “The Making of Star Wars”, which took contemporary interviews with Lucas and his friends and co-workers, along with drafts of the script, to show how the atmosphere of political idealism and frustrated radicalism that Lucas lived in during the 70s informed the work. Lucas has explained all this, but he’s offered so many contradictory explanations of the genesis of his work that most people ignore it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.)

I suspect that very few of you know what ‘The Shining’ is really about. You might think you know; you might talk about themes of isolation, claustrophobia, and the darkness in the human spirit made manifest as a “haunted” hotel. But you’d be wrong. You probably aren’t aware of the hidden messages about the dangers of going off the gold standard. You didn’t even know that it was a hidden confession from Stanley Kubrick explaining that he faked the moon landing footage. You hadn’t the slightest clue of its hidden warnings about the Mayan apocalypse in 2012. And you…okay, you probably knew about the secret subtext relating to America’s treatment of Native Americans. That one’s so well-known that even Cracked.com covered it. But you probably didn’t know about all of the hidden meanings, because you simply can’t. There’s so many hidden meanings that there’s a whole other movie coming out just about all the meanings in the first movie.

In all seriousness, what does make ‘The Shining’ such a popular subject for such a diverse range of “cryptic meaning” essays? Surely if Kubrick really had a message he was trying to convey, no matter how cleverly he concealed it, you’d expect to get some kind of consensus as to what it might be. But (for those of you who really don’t feel like sitting through a 40-minute YouTube video, or spend an hour or so looking at screenshots) Kubrick’s film almost seems to become a sort of Rorshach test, continually revealing cryptic messages that just happen to exactly coincide with the researcher’s personal perspective. Why? What is it about ‘The Shining’ that makes it more confusing than ‘The Prisoner’? What makes this film the one that people fixate on, while ‘Donnie Darko’ (to name another cult film that plays its cards close to the vest) seems to avoid these kinds of questions? I don’t know that we can ever know for sure, but here are my suggestions.

1) Kubrick isn’t talking. Well, I mean…of course he’s not talking now, but even when he was alive, he wasn’t talking about his movies. Kubrick had a reputation as a notorious recluse, but it would be more accurate to describe him as someone who just didn’t give interviews. He was perfectly content to be social, but he also hated the way that filmmakers who loved to talk about their work had reduced watching a movie to a sterile exercise in spotting the things the director had talked about in a magazine. He didn’t want you to be thinking about the technical reasons that the hedge maze had replaced the hedge animals (budget constraints, for the record–moving hedge animals weren’t technically feasible in 1980.) He wanted you to be watching the movie, and to let you come to your own conclusions about it. Seen from a certain point of view though, a reclusive movie-maker who doesn’t want to talk about his movies because he wants you to “work it out for yourself” can sound like someone who’s embedded a secret meaning. The more mystery invested in the process, the more people expect from the ultimate solution. “Some people are just crazy” is not going to satisfy them.

2) Kubrick had a reputation as a perfectionist. Time and time again, as you read these analyses, you’ll come across a phrase that’s almost word-for-word identical every single time: “A legendary perfectionist like Kubrick certainly wouldn’t allow such an obvious continuity error.” It is a prima facie assumption made in all of these analyses that any apparent mistake in the film must be placed there deliberately, as Kubrick was known for being a perfectionist. These must be hidden messages, because Kubrick doesn’t make mistakes.

This is, of course, an assumption so wrong that it almost has to be unpicked word-for-word. Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, true, but “perfectionist” in this case doesn’t mean “meticulous about set continuity.” Kubrick’s reputation came from his habit of shooting far more film than was necessary, sometimes doing 80-100 takes of a single scene, in order to get the widest possible ranges of performance from his actors and to force them to genuinely inhabit their characters. ‘The Shining’ was no exception; Kubrick spent 200 days in principal photography for a 144-minute film. (This means that on average, Kubrick shot about 45 seconds of usable footage per day. Almost certainly, there must have been whole months worth of days where he shot nothing at all that he used in the final film.) Kubrick was a perfectionist in that he wanted the perfect take, and was willing to shoot as long as was needed until he got it; and once he was armed with all those perfect takes, he would go into the editing room and spend months assembling them into a finished film.

But there’s a big difference between that and being precise about continuity. In fact, Kubrick’s approach works against tight set continuity; when you’re shooting 30, 40, 50 takes of one shot, even going back the next day for more, then of course tiny details aren’t going to be the same from shot to shot. Kubrick wanted the perfect emotional resonance, not the perfect amount of sandwich eaten from moment to moment. Even if he did notice the continuity problems (and he almost certainly did) what was he going to do once he was in the editing booth? Throw out the best performance because the scrapbook was on the wrong page? Kubrick had to be aware that only obsessive viewers notice continuity mistakes to begin with, and he almost certainly had more important things to concern himself. But to the ‘Shining’ enthusiast, each of these tiny mistakes has to be a deliberate message, because they assume Kubrick is a genius who doesn’t do anything by accident.

3) The movie is different from the book. This is true of just about all adaptations, of course, but there’s a little more to it here. One, Kubrick didn’t discuss why he made the changes he made when adapting the novel. (See above.) Two, it’s assumed that a legendary perfectionist like Kubrick wouldn’t make arbitrary changes unless he had a grand vision to them. (See above.) And three, King and Kubrick were legendarily at odds over the adaptation, with King going so far as to write and direct his own adaptation that was more to his liking. With the theme of “changes from the book” highlighted, everyone’s attention is drawn to them. And again, we’re back to the “hidden messages” territory, with every tiny alteration assumed to have cryptic meaning, from the hotel’s origin to its final fate and everything in between.

Again, though, this assumes that Kubrick was able to work in the realm of pure art, with no concessions needing to be made to practicality. Subplots like the simmering conflict between Ullman the hotel manager and Jack, or backstory like his assault on a student at Stovington Prep? Dropped for time, perhaps, because the movie is already over two hours long and there’s not even a mention of them. Wendy and Danny seem different because the characters wound up being interpreted by actors, and because certain elements had to be emphasized and dropped to get the film down to a manageable running time. Logistically difficult effects, such as the destruction of the Overlook Hotel or the moving hedge animals, had to be dropped completely. Nobody ever gets to do everything the way they want to entirely…except maybe George Lucas, which may explain why it’s not such a good thing…and Kubrick is certainly no exception. But if you’re not willing to believe that, then each change takes on a special significance.

4) The ending is ambiguous. Sure, we know that Jack died. But then we get that last cryptic scene, of the photograph in the empty hotel filled with mysterious people and Jack at the center. The caption, “July 4th Ball, 1921.” It has to mean something. It’s the final shot of the film, the one that Kubrick wants us to leave on, the one he wants to resonate in our heads as we’re leaving the theater. He actually went so far as to cut an epilogue out of the film after it reached theaters, so that all we see is the cut from Jack’s body to the mysterious photo. A cryptic ending like that is one that demands endless analysis, deeper investigation, because we want things to make sense. And that ending really, really doesn’t, at least not in a logical and linear sense. (It says a lot that even after “notorious recluse” Kubrick came out and blatantly explained the ending to everyone, people still don’t believe it.) Whatever conclusions you come to about the final shot, you bring something of your own ideas and experiences to it…which leads us to…

5) People really, really like to create patterns. It’s human nature, and the final element that brings the first four together. Once you’ve decided that there is a hidden meaning to ‘The Shining’, once you’ve started looking at it not as a film but as a series of cryptic messages encoded into tiny details, then there’s a sufficiently large mass of data present that you can draw any number of connections between data points based on your own personal viewpoint as a lens. Think that Kubrick was a numerologist? Examine the time codes, you’re bound to find a pattern of significant shots at significant times. (Because Kubrick didn’t really put in any scenes that he didn’t think were important.) Want to find messages about your own personal political, mystical, or historical views? They’re bound to be there if you think symbolically enough and are willing to put in some work massaging the data. (Remember, numbers are infinitely transformable. Add, subtract, multiply and divide and 7/4/1921 can become any set of numbers you care to name.) And ultimately, you will come away convinced that Kubrick’s message was about exactly what you want it to be about. It’s a comforting thought, really. Kubrick must be a genius for hiding such an intricate message in the film, and you must be a genius for being able to find it. The two of you no doubt think alike, and wouldn’t we all want to think of ourselves as being in the company of geniuses?

For myself, I don’t think there is a hidden message in ‘The Shining’. I think that Kubrick, like all great artists, loved ambiguity, and loved to insert it in the work instead of forcing his own conclusions onto you. You are required, by design, to think about what’s going on in front of you because the answers are not provided, and Kubrick isn’t telling because your answer is probably better than his anyway. I think he’d probably be impressed at some of the creativity people have brought to finding meanings in his film…even if I can easily picture Wendy looking at Jack’s manuscript and reading, “It can be ruled out that Stanley Kubrick didn’t notice this obvious mistake as he precisely edited the shot that way for a reason and we all saw it happen…”

Everyone’s talking about MGM, Paramount, and Universal this summer, but for some reason, nobody but me has the inside scoop on this summer’s films from indie horror/sci-fi titan The Asylum! Well, I know you all wanted that rectified, so here’s the inside scoop on their upcoming releases!

When you think about it, ‘Doctor Who’ should really have ended in 1966. After all, the star of the series was involved in protracted and angry disputes with the show’s producer, and was also suffering from the first visible symptoms of the arteriosclerosis that would take his life less than a decade later. Sure, the show was doing well in the ratings, but it’s pretty rare that success like that survives replacing the star of the show. Admittedly, ‘Doctor Who’ had already replaced its entire supporting cast at least twice by the time Hartnell finally left, with no apparent loss of support (primarily due to strong viewing support for the Doctor’s recurring antagonists, the Daleks–it’s no coincidence that Troughton’s first outing was against the iconic pepperpots)…but really, there was no reason to ever believe that recasting the Doctor was going to work.

Especially because it was written into the series. The show has been around for almost fifty years now, and is on its eleventh actor to “officially” play the part; as a result, we’ve become so accustomed to regeneration as a concept that we’ve almost forgotten what an extraordinary handwave it is. “Oh, yes, I just changed my entire physical appearance and personality. We aliens do that every so often. Weird, huh?” (Speaking of things that are no coincidence, it’s only after regeneration is introduced that the Doctor’s alien physiology becomes a serious plot point. Hartnell’s “alien-ness” was primarily a matter of attitude, a cultural identity; with Troughton and afterwards, he becomes an alien with unusual racial abilities.)

What’s striking about this is that when you look at most of the American cult series who’ve taken a run at the Doctor’s longevity (…well, “taken a run” is putting it generously. The only shows to really come close would be ‘Stargate’ and ‘Star Trek’, and that’s if you decided to treat every single one of their spin-offs and relaunches as a single show. But we’ll consider anything that ran more than three seasons, the point at which ‘Doctor Who’ was forced to retool to account for Hartnell’s absence…) It’s amazing how many of them are set up better than ‘Doctor Who’ was to continue without their stars. All of the ‘Trek’ series are ensemble shows built around the crew of a Starfleet vessel; they even tease us, in the Season 3 finale of ‘Next Generation’, with the idea that Picard might be pensioned out/killed off as a result of the Borg crisis and Riker might become the captain. Such a thing would have been audacious, but would it really have been any more daring than replacing a 58-year old grandfatherly inventor with a 46-year old cosmic tramp?

‘The X-Files’ actually did make use of its series format to replace one actor with another, but only late in the series run and only out of necessity. It’s worth asking if they could have extended the show by making the switch sooner and getting the audience used to the idea that nobody was safe from the sinister conspiracy, or whether it would have gotten the series canceled that much quicker as fans who were really watching for the emotional dynamic between Mulder and Scully gave up on the show.

And ‘Buffy’ actually introduced first one, then a second, then a whole friggin’ raft of potential replacements, only to have them all serve as foils for the lead character and demonstrate, in one fashion or another, that Buffy Summers is special even among special people. Certainly, you could argue that the show was about Buffy in specific and not about Slayers in general, and that the creators weren’t interested in extending the show just for the sake of extending it…then again, you could also argue that the show was about transitioning from teenager to adult through making the metaphorical high school experiences into literal confrontations with the forces of evil, and the creators certainly seemed to be interested in extending that show just for the sake of extending it.

Even a series like ‘Heroes’, which was explicitly designed to have a sprawling, ever-changing cast, had problems adding people to it in later seasons…then again, it seems like the later seasons had a lot of problems beyond just “adding new characters that caught the audience’s interest.” But ‘Heroes’ does provide a particularly illuminating example of the problem that cult shows have when they try to outlast their actors, and the reason that ‘Who’ is not in much company as it heads to the 32-odd season mark.

Namely, that series don’t like changing their core dynamic, and do so only a) grudgingly, b) out of necessity, and as a result c) through desperation and not design. The concept of Agent Doggett was, at its heart, “Oh shit David Duchovny just served us walking papers what are we gonna do now?” The dynamic of Season Six of ‘Buffy’ was less, “Let’s do a meaningful and sensitive arc about how Buffy will cope without adult mentor-figures,” and more, “Um…Tony Head wants to go back to England. How do we work with that?” The actors who came in for the later seasons of ‘Heroes’ were working with a plot arc that was already flailing around for relevance, and were cast by producers who were trying to cast new roles while managing the day-to-day production of a complex series. These changes were reluctant, and frequently rushed.

Whereas ‘Doctor Who’, by this point, had already (as previously mentioned) changed its entire cast twice. The producers were very comfortable creating new characters to travel in the TARDIS, and the show’s format had shown that it could adapt to such changes. Recasting the Doctor was just the final step in a process that had begun with ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, a process that showed that the concept, not the ensemble, was the star of the show. In that light, it’s not too surprising that the show made it through the transition with barely a bump.

Which makes the transition to the UNIT era, with ‘Spearhead From Space’, even more surprising. But that’s a discussion for later…

Recently, Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke embarked on a marathon project, the kind of thing that is only really ambitious for Doctor Who fans: They agreed to watch the entire series. It’s amazing to think about, really; what would be the baseline for fans of most other science-fiction/fantasy show, “Have you seen every episode?”, is considered to be the mark of utter devotion to Doctor Who fans. They’re actually writing a three-book series about their epic re-watch, “Running Through Corridors” (full disclosure: I’ve hung out at cons with Lars Pearson and Christa Dickson, and they’re really nice people and I enjoy plugging their stuff.)

But it’s more complicated even than that. Because if you read “Running Through Corridors”, you’ll notice that they don’t actually watch every episode. They can’t. They listen to audio recordings, they look at still photographs that another devoted fan has formed into a sort of slideshow, and occasionally they’ll view short clips, but for 108 of the episodes they write about in Volume 1, no recordings exist. Think about this for a moment. If you were to define a “true Doctor Who fan” as someone who has actually seen every single episode, they would have to be fifty years old at a minimum (and older, if you want them to have coherent memories of the missing episodes.)

It’s hard, I suspect, for fans of other shows to really wrap their heads around this. Sure, ‘Firefly’ or ‘Star Trek’ gets canceled (frequently, in the case of the latter…) but they can console themselves by watching and rewatching the old stories, creating a shared experience based on the show throughout their fandom. While Doctor Who fans…Doctor Who fandom is generational. Older fans share fond memories of stories younger fans cannot, by definition, experience, and must discuss solely based on received wisdom. (It was even worse in the pre-video days. ‘Star Trek’ might have been endlessly re-run, but there were many Doctor Who stories that were not seen for decades due to a lack of rebroadcasting. Even the stories that the BBC saved, they didn’t decide to show again until home video made it a lucrative moneyspinner for them.)

Which is why Doctor Who fans experience an unprecedented excitement when, as was the case today, new episodes get discovered. It’s not just that there’s more Doctor Who for us to watch; as mentioned, it would take a solid year of two-a-day watching to get through the whole series, and probably several thousand dollars of financial outlay to buy them all. (To say nothing of the books, the audios, the films…I’m not sure how long it would take you to watch “all of Doctor Who”, but suffice it to say we’ve never been short of it.) It’s not even the sense of joy that something we consider to be part of the world’s cultural heritage has been restored. I don’t hold any illusions that Doctor Who is high art, even though I do consider it to be significant and worthy of preservation.

It’s the sense of discovery. For decades, all we’ve ever experienced of ‘Galaxy Four’, visually, is what other people have told us; fans who’ve described it, writers who’ve novelized it, reviews that have discussed it. Most of us don’t even know what the Rills or Chumblies look like; only a couple of still photos exist of either of this episode’s principal “monsters”. (Although, not to spoil, the real monster is prejudice!)

It is exciting, to finally get a chance to see for yourself what you’ve only heard about from others your whole life. Of course, it probably won’t live up to those excited, fannish descriptions; what does? (Certainly not ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’.) But it’s the joy of reclaiming some of the series for ourselves, away from the “fan consensus”, that is unique to Doctor Who and one of the reasons why days like today are such an event. An event that seems unlikely to be repeated; the number of attics and cellars containing lost episodes has to be growing smaller by the day, and these discoveries are rarer and rarer each time. This may be the last…but we thought that last time, too.

Yes, I have been off in the desert. I have been contemplating the universal truths, eating nothing but locusts and honey, letting the poisonous snakes nibble on my tender bits and hallucinating from their venom, letting my beard grow out as I became sunburned and progressively insane. And now, having become wise in the ways of the universe, I return to you to speak…of Muppets.

Let’s get the least-important part out of the way first. No, the voices aren’t as good. Kermit and Miss Piggy are a reasonable approximation of their old selves, mainly because it’s difficult to tell whether Kermit is reedy and hesitant on purpose or by accident, but Fozzie’s voice has lost that braying quality that was so distinctive, and Rowlf sounds so off and has so little dialogue that they’d have been smarter to write him out entirely. But that’s miniscule stuff. The voices were always going to change someday, because that’s what happens with puppets and cartoons. Someday they will bring back Homer Simpson and he will not be voiced by Dan Castellaneta. It’s the way of the world. The question is, how’s the movie?

The answer: It takes a while to get going, but it has fun when it gets there. The first act is really flat; the screenwriter knows that he’s remaking ‘The Blues Brothers’ with Muppets, and he knows that the audience knows it. The deranged, inexplicable response to this problem is to treat the material with perfunctory disdain; the scene that sets up the dilemma (the Muppets need to come up with ten million dollars or an evil oilman will demolish their old theater!) is played with such utter disinterest that it would have been more exciting if they’d just filmed the story conference. The writer obviously loses interest in the “getting the band back together” material about halfway through, and has the characters openly admit how boring it’s becoming (“let’s do the rest of this as a montage!”) It’s a movie that is fully aware of what a lazy, slapdash premise it has, and just openly asks, “Could you do us both a favor and not care?”

Which is a shame, because I think there’s a lot of depth to the central premise that I think they ignored in an effort to keep things light and frothy. Because let’s face it, the Muppets didn’t stop becoming relevant as a cultural phenomenon because the world got harsh and cynical and the Muppets were too sweet for that kind of a world, as the film asserts. (For one thing, a TV show that put Alice Cooper on, singing “School’s Out” in an era when a lot of radio stations wouldn’t play it, is not a series that should be considered “too sweet”. The Muppets have always had a fairly twisted core to their comedy, something that this film thankfully captures in a lot of its best moments.) The Muppets “broke up” because Jim Henson died. The film makes a conscious decision to ignore this because it’s kind of a downer to talk about, but really, a film that doesn’t acknowledge that on at least a metatextual level is a movie without an emotional center, and that shows in all of the scenes that actually deal with the plot.

Luckily, there are a lot of scenes that don’t bother. The movie is at its best in the third act, where it stops trying to have a plot and starts becoming a really wonderful updating of the old Muppet Show with Jack Black as their Very Special Guest Star and slightly-more-recent pop culture references. The Muppet Telethon is like a demo reel for what the series would be like if it were brought back tomorrow, saying, “Look, all the weirdness, all the monsters, all the corny gags and the celebrity comedians and the charming self-deprecation and the throwing bowling balls through the air…yes, this still works. It is still funny. Chickens clucking out the melody of popular songs is never going to stop being funny. Here, have some more.” And that’s when I really loved the movie.

And the ending (not the actual “ending” ending, but the climax of the film) is letter-perfect, an acknowledgment of what Henson had in mind all along: Laughter and hope and family and love are not possessions. They cannot be taken away from you by anyone unless you let them. That’s a message Henson would have been proud of.

So, in short: Worth watching? Yeah, but after the first viewing you’ll probably find yourself fast forwarding to the halfway point. The important thing is that we need a new Muppet Show, dammit.

Okay, my apologies to anyone who’s a) not seriously into Doctor Who, and b) not absolutely mega-geeky. But this is an idea I’ve had for a long time now, and I wanted to get it out on metaphorical paper. So for those of you not into hardcore fan theorizing…sorry, but shit just got real.

And so with a bit of sorrow, tempered by immense joy and constant anticipation, we bid a fond adieu to another season of Doctor Who. The plots have been duly twisted, the revelations duly revealed, the jokes laughed at and the scares screamed at. (Well, not literally. Unless you’re my five-year-old daughter, who has gotten very good at burying her face in my shoulder and asking me to tell her when this bit is over.) So, now that we know everything we know…what do we think about what we know? Let’s talk more after the cut!

When ‘The Dark Knight’ came out, I confess that I did not have tremendously high hopes. Not because of Heath Ledger as the Joker or anything I’d heard about the production, but simply because I had yet to see a live-action Batman movie I actually liked after six tries (I liked the ’89 Batman when it came out, but it hasn’t aged well for me.) Even ‘Batman Begins’ holds the distinction of being the one Christopher Nolan movie I haven’t been able to really get behind (its messages about violence strike me as extremely confused. “I won’t kill this man because Killing Is Wrong! And to save him, I’m going to blow up the building with the entire League of Shadows still inside it!”)

But ‘The Dark Knight’ worked. It was, finally, the Batman movie I had been looking for. A brilliant Joker story that made the character convincing, terrifying, and absolutely riveting to watch. A deep, heartfelt exploration of human morality as the Joker works on Gotham City in an effort to prove that given the right circumstances, with the proper motivation, anyone and everyone will become a killer…and fails. Or does he? Seeing Harvey Dent finally snap and prove that at least for him, the Joker was right is a cruel, twisted, but ultimately honest exploration of both characters. It’s a great movie from beginning to almost-end.

Because that’s the one problem with ‘The Dark Knight’. The ending makes no goddamn sense. (I’ll explain why after the cut. Spoilers, sweetie!)

For those of you who don’t read my own personal blog (and you’re certainly not obligated to), I recently posted an angry, possibly coherent rant about some people’s belief that Leia appears as a more empowered, feminist character in ‘Empire Strikes Back’ than she does in ‘Star Wars’, despite large amounts of extremely blatant textual evidence to the contrary. (Suffice to say when your reaction to being in a strange, unfamiliar, possibly dangerous situation is, “I’m going to go find a pretty dress and get my hair done, then sit in my room and wait for the menfolk to come back and tell me what’s going on!” …you fail at empowerment.)

And I was discussing the idea with my wife, who is a very smart woman and a feminist, and we were bouncing around the idea of what ‘Empire’ might look like if Leia was actually treated like the strong, fearless, intelligent woman she was in the original ‘Star Wars’, rather than the Ice Princess Who Just Needs A Big Strong Man To Tell Her What To Do in ‘Empire’. And she suggested I blog about it. The rules: Change the actual plot as little as possible, while having Leia do things that an actual well-written, well-developed female character would do as opposed to a whiny damsel in distress.

First off, the sexual banter between Han and Leia would change. Less of the Slap Slap Kiss bullshit that fans have been conditioned to believe is an actual romantic relationship by decades of seeing women suddenly go gooey in films over guys who have been total assholes to them, and more actual, um…banter. Instead of telling Han she doesn’t like him because A Woman Doesn’t Know Her Own Mind and Needs a Man To Show Her Who She’s Interested In By Forcibly Sexing Her Up…(the classic “AWDKHOMANAMTSHWSIIBFSHU” trope…) Leia knows perfectly well that she’s attracted to Han, but she’s also a little annoyed that he knows that she knows and that he’s acting more than a little smug about it. So she flirts with him in a way that puts him just a little off-balance, because Han’s the kind of cocky guy who needs to be put off-balance in at least one area of his life because it tempers his exuberant confidence. Han, for his part, is playing along because he knows Leia is worth it and he’s pretty sure it’s just an act. (Pretty sure.)

From there, we cruise through to the first major “Leia gets to hold the Idiot Ball because she’s a woman” moment, the escape from Hoth. In the film, Han realizes that Leia has stayed too long and is in danger, he informs the Rebel command that he’ll be taking her off planet, and he practically carries her off over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Leia is portrayed as passive, whiny, and naive, while Han gets to demonstrate his superior judgment and discusses with a MAN what to do about this whole “woman” situation while Leia gets no input at all.

In the revised version, Leia stays longer deliberately. She risks her own life to make sure that the Ion Cannon stays operational until the last transport has left, then heads for the Falcon’s hangar. Han is shocked to find her still on-planet, but she explains that she had a plan all along: hitch a ride on the Falcon. “But I told you I was leaving five hours ago!” he said. “You also said you had one last minor repair to the Falcon,” she responds. “I figured you’d still be here when it was time for me to leave.”

At that point, things go roughly the way they do in the film for a while, with one key difference: Leia operates the gun turrets while Han and Chewie fly/fix the ship. Because as we saw in the first movie, there is a turret that can be operated independently of the cockpit, and Leia isn’t the kind of person to sit passively by and watch other people do the rescuing when she can pick up a gun and start shooting. She might not be as good of a shot as Han or Luke, but she can at least make the Imperial pilots nervous. (Oh, and that also means Leia’s primary role during this section of the movie isn’t to sit there whining about each decision Han makes, only to be proved wrong by his manly manliness that manfully mans up at every turn.)

Jump ahead past the kiss (which would still happen, although again, without the “Oh, I don’t like scoundrels like you,” “Sure you do, you just don’t know it yet. Once I commit sexual assault against you, you’ll realize you love me!” “Oh, hey! I guess I do!” bullshit) to Bespin and Lando. Here, instead of spending all her time changing outfits and getting her hair done, Leia decides to ingratiate herself to Lando using her diplomatic skills, and see if she can’t get a few strings pulled to get a message out to the Rebel Alliance (an actual sensible, active thing for a major character to do in that situation.) Instead, she comes back to Han and tells him that Lando is being evasive. There are areas of the city he won’t show them, he avoids letting them use the communications systems, and he won’t give a straight answer as to what’s wrong with the Falcon. She suggests that Han and Chewie keep an eye on the repairs at all times, while she goes looking for Threepio. (Again, note the active decision making, instead of just letting other people do things while she whines.)

Of course, they get captured anyway, they get tortured (and the suggestion Timothy Zahn made would be more explicit here, which is that Leia is actually tougher under torture than Han…after all, she wouldn’t give up the location of the Yavin base despite torture and drugs)…and Han gets frozen in carbonite. From there, things would progress pretty much as normal, because Leia becomes a more active character once Han is out of the picture. (Still not fond of the “Leia gets a flash of woman’s intuition Jedi insight” sequence, but that’s something that could be handled better if it was foreshadowing for Leia actually using Jedi powers in ‘Return of the Jedi’.)

The point of all this? Only that it is possible to handle Leia as an active, decisive, intelligent, emotionally-mature female character without losing the essential plot of ‘Empire’. The fact that they didn’t do this isn’t a reflection of some insoluble plot conundrum, it’s a reflection of laziness and a reliance on stereotypes of female behavior on the part of the writers. And this is the “best” Star Wars flick?

I just got back from watching the first episode of Torchwood (a local British-pub style bar and restaurant hosts a monthly Doctor Who showing, and this month was ‘A Good Man Goes to War’ and ‘Miracle Day’), and I have to admit, as someone who was never really grabbed by Torchwood the way I was by Doctor Who, this one was pretty good. Russell T Davies really seems to have hit on something with the idea of making the entire season one long multi-part story, centered on a single big worldwide phenomenon that the Torchwood team investigates. (Of course, by this time it’s the Torchwood duo…one of the other things I admire about the series is that they don’t pretend Torchwood is actually all that special at their job. They are not the best of the best of the best, they are bloody-minded and too curious for their own good.)

This time, for those who haven’t heard, the big phenomenon is that people have stopped dying. All over the world, the morgues are emptying out as they stop getting new customers. It’s not that people are magically healing or anything; one of the new characters, a CIA agent played by Mekhi Phifer, has a hole in his chest that was briefly filled by a piece of rebar. But they’re staying alive, a fact which is taken as evidence of a miracle…until people start realizing that we don’t have the resources to take care of a population that gets old and sick and wounded and hungry but never ever dies.

At which point, Jack and Gwen, formerly of the Torchwood Institute, begin to get involved. It’s an interesting hook, and while we’ll have to see where it goes, the first episode is sharp and clever and has lots of interesting bits. (It also has one transcendently silly bit where a child murderer is set free because he claims that he was executed and hence has served his sentence, which I will chalk up to RTD being a British TV writer and not an American lawyer.)

On the whole, I’m interested enough to keep an eye out for Part Two; for one thing, I’m curious to see whether my crazy theory about why everyone’s immortal is correct. (Crazy theory: Jack’s immortality has been siphoned out, as part of a murder plot against him, and has wound up being distributed among the rest of the world’s population.) For those of you who liked previous seasons of Torchwood, this one’s good too. For those of you who, like me, tuned out after the first three episodes and never went back, this is better than those were. For those of you who’ve never seen Torchwood, this is a pretty cool mini-series so far.

Is it still entertaining to mock Harry Knowles, or have we moved on to the point where we view him as just sort of faintly sad? I mean, at this point we all know exactly what Knowles’ flaws are as a film journalist, but is he still relevant enough that we can take deep pleasure in seeing him suffer?

I ask because I found his review of Toy Story 3 while wandering through the site a few weeks back, and it has to be one of the sweetest pieces of schadenfreude I’ve seen in a long time. If you really feel like it’s not worth it to make fun of him, though, just let me know and I’ll give you written permission to skip the rest of the entry. (Please allow 4-6 weeks for processing of your request.) Oh, this would also be where those of you who don’t want spoilers for Toy Story 3 should skip out.

Sorry about the lateness of this post; I just got done with a weekend at CONvergence, a Twin Cities sci-fi con that fits nicely into that category of “not so tiny that it’s just a dealers’ room and a movie room, but not so huge that you have to stand in line for two hours for everything.” I got to see a clever little indie movie called ‘My Sucky Teen Romance’ that people should keep their eyes out for, got to chat canon with Lars Pearson of Mad Norwegian Press, and generally had fun. But now, it’s back to work!

“Work”, in this case, elegantly describes the task of thinking about the ‘Matrix’ sequels. Because while I do recall bumping into a few defenders that hectic summer, I think that with the benefit of almost a decade of hindsight, nobody really wants to say that ‘The Matrix Reloaded’ and ‘The Matrix Revolutions’ were any good at all. But I’m not here to discuss the bad things about them. I think we were all aware pretty quickly of the mistakes they made…the fight scenes that were there simply because they thought they had to top the first movie’s fight scenes, the dull speechifying, the inexplicable downgrade in power that Neo got offscreen, the “what the fuck happened” final conclusion…today, though, I’m more interested in discussing the good ideas that were buried in under all the dreck, the stuff that could have been the bones of a good sequel before they began slapping the bloated, corpulent flesh onto it. So let’s talk about the good in the ‘Matrix’ sequels, shall we?

1) The Oracle is a liar. That would actually have been really brilliant, if they’d only followed through on it properly. The whole first movie, we’re set up to believe that the Oracle is a wise, mysterious, shamanic figure who is guiding Neo to his ultimate destiny. The second movie, we find out that all that’s true…but his destiny is to cull the “free humans” down to a manageable number, and she’s actually a computer program whose job is to convince him to betray mankind. Hell of a second act twist, sets up a brilliant third act…shame that they found the least interesting way possible of executing it. (I had one friend who explained to me that he didn’t even realize that’s what the twist was, because “after about the Architect’s third sentence, it all just started to sound like the grown-ups from Peanuts talking.”)

2) The Merovingian. Not anything about his actual execution, mind you: He’s dull, smug, pretentious, snotty, and his endless blather kills every scene he’s in. Oh, and his plot function is terrible too. But the idea of the villain of the second movie being a powerful renegade computer program who prefers the Matrix to his “natural habitat”, who is the opposite of Smith in the first film because he adores the pleasures of experiencing life through sensory input, and who is running a secret “underground railroad” for programs who want to live in the Matrix…that’s quite clever. And it makes sense that such a person would be against the One, because he’s enjoying things the way they are and doesn’t want the boat rocked by the One, v6.0. It needed a lot more drafts, but it’s a solid idea.

3) Smith returning as a computer virus. The idea that Neo somehow accidentally made him is stupid, and the less said about it the better, but again, there’s the germ of a good idea under this. At the end of the first movie, Neo is all-powerful. If you want to get at him, you need to get at him outside of the Matrix. For the artificial intellegnces, recreating Smith as a living computer virus, one who can infect human brains and wear human beings like suits, would be the way to go. (Although it’d have to be for the third movie, once Neo has realized his destiny and rejected it.) But one of the key elements that they almost utterly neglected is that Smith hated even being in a simulation of flesh…being in an actual flesh body should have been a source of major character conflict for him. Perhaps he becomes a nihilist, hoping to bring down the Matrix and bring about the extinction of both humans and computers rather than continue as he is.

Which would lead, in the end, to a roughly similar finale. The AIs realize that Smith, their creation, is a bigger threat than Neo, and form a truce with Zion to stop him. Neo dies saving everyone, the AIs make the Matrix voluntary (one of the things they should have played up is that the average human being is driven insane by Neo’s attempts to “snap them out of it”.) And eventually, they all live sort of kind of happily ever after until everyone realizes that the whole “using human beings as a power source now that solar power is inaccessible to us” thing actually violates the laws of thermodynamics in a big way and they’d all have perished in a frozen grave ages ago.

Okay, so the original had its problems too.

Ghostbusters: No matter how big and wild and crazy and wonderful a job sounds, it’s probably just a job to the people who do it.

Night of the Living Dead: The biggest threat in any crisis isn’t whatever’s going wrong, it’s the stupid ways people react to it.

Up: What’s important in life isn’t whether you achieve what you set out to do, it’s whether the things you did were worth doing.

Memento: Revenge is an ultimately hollow and meaningless pursuit that makes you into a monster.

The Limey: It still beats not getting revenge.

Star Wars: Adventure reveals people’s hidden talents.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie: If you’re stuck in a bad situation, it helps if you can keep your sense of humor.

Labyrinth: If you make a mistake, you have a responsibility to make it right no matter how hard it is.

Logan’s Run: It’s easy not to care about a problem until it becomes your problem too.

Blade Runner: Anyone who tries to divide the world into “us” and “them” is probably trying to justify the terrible things they do to people.

The Little Mermaid: You have to let your kids grow up, even if it means they make some really dumb mistakes.

The Wicker Man: The protections of civilization do not extend beyond civilization’s boundaries, and you forget that at your own peril.

The Ring: Just because bad things happened to someone does not automatically make them worthy of your sympathy.

The Princess Bride: Love is worth everything you have to go through for it.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: Obsession can be a very dangerous thing. (Actually, this could be the ultimate message of just about every story ever.)

Aliens: Imperialism has consequences.

Spider-Man: Being a hero requires sacrificing your own personal happiness.

Donnie Darko: Being a hero requires sacrificing your own personal happiness.

Pulp Fiction: The path of wickedness might be glamorous, but it’s ultimately poisonous and destructive.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Part of growing up is dealing with the crazy fucked-up world your parents left for you.

The Birds: Sometimes bad shit just happens and all you can do is deal with it.

The Wedding Banquet: Your parents are always going to be smarter than you are.

Doctor Strangelove: People in positions of authority are no less likely to be crazy and/or stupid than the rest of us; in fact, they’re probably moreso.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Greed and selfishness are ultimately the root cause of all of society’s problems, even the ones that seem minor and unconnected.

Transformers: As long as you cram enough giant fighting robots that turn into cars and planes into your movie, it doesn’t have to mean a goddamn thing.

There has come to be something of a debate over the last few days over the morality of the Doctor’s actions in the opening two-parter of Season Six. It’s something I really want to talk about, to the point that I’m posting a day early to weigh in on it (since I just posted a piece about The Incredibles in my own blog and I don’t want to push it down the page right away.) And since Season Six is so recent, I’m going to quarantine the whole thing behind the cut so that people who haven’t seen “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon” can remain unspoiled. Then I’m going to point out some things to those who feel that this is out-of-character cruelty from the Doctor.