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.)

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…”

FEBRUARY:

February is traditionally a light month for blockbusters, but the same can’t be said for mockbusters; the Asylum is releasing “Spectral Riders: Vengeful Spirit” early next month. The film focuses on a horse ranch in California that’s haunted by demonic spirits that possess their horses, turning them into “spectral riders” that hunt down the ranch hands one by one. The same month features the release of horror film “The Lady In Black”, about a wizarding school whose ghosts turn against them, and “The Chronicles”, about a secret book that can bestow superpowers and the teenage boys who go searching for it. But perhaps the most exciting news is the Asylum’s 3-D re-release of their “lost classic”, “The Phantasmal Menace”, about a secret order of alien samurai that do battle with evil kung-fu ghosts that possess corpses.

MARCH:

The month of March sees the long-anticipated sequel to their film “Princess of Mars”. “Prince of Mars” shows how John Carter (Antonio Sabato Jr) returns to the world of Barsoom and rises to the position of Warlord alongside his love, Dejah Thoris (played once again by Traci Lords.) This one is rumored to have a serious budget to compete with Disney’s rip-off project, “John Carter”, possibly even as much as two million dollars! (That’s a lot of dollars.) March also sees the release of “The Starvation Games”, a gruesome horror flick about a fasting competition started by a group of anorexics, and “Fury of the Titans”, a movie about the ancient Greek gods re-emerging in modern-day Los Angeles.

APRIL:

The Asylum takes a bit of a respite in April, only coming out with one film, but it’s a doozy. “Titanic: Adventures in the Third Dimension” is the true saga of what happened to the legendary lost vessel, as it passes through a vortex contained in the heart of an iceberg (known as “The Heart of the Sea”) and two of its passengers, Jackson and Rosie, must battle the ferocious natives of the lost planet of Pandorra. But will the robotic Terminatrix be their ally…or their assassin?

MAY:

May sees an exciting twist on the “found footage” genre with “The Avenged”, about a group of everyday people trapped in Los Angeles in the middle of a vast superhero/supervillain battle. Those who’ve seen the advanced screenings have described it as “like “Cloverfield”, but with supervillains”, and some consider it the Asylum’s most ‘avant-garde’ release. Fans of military action might prefer “American Battleship”, an exciting drama about a battleship lost in the Bermuda Triangle and fighting aliens, while fans of horror will no doubt get excited about “Darkest Shadows”, the tale of an immortal vampire who has an irrational fear of darkness, but cannot survive in sunlight. Meanwhile, fans of the “weird west” genre will get their fill with “Three Men In Black”, a tale of three outlaws who ride into a town beseiged by zombies.

JUNE:

In June, the Asylum finally releases their long-anticipated “Grimm’s Snow White”, an ultra-faithful retelling of the Snow White story that returns it to its gory roots, along with “American G.I.: Retribution”, an action thriller about three soldiers trapped behind enemy lines who have to take down a secret research lab that creates vampire cyborg lizard zombie ninja pirahnas. (The zombie theme continues with “George Washington, Zombie Hunter”, which purports to tell ‘the true history of the Revolutionary War’.)

JULY:

The Asylum is officially declaring July “superhero month”, as they come out with twin action blockbusters that focus on capes and cowls. “Amazing: Rise of the Spider-King” takes the super-hero saga and inverts it, telling the tale from the point of view of a two-bit punk as he attempts to become the hero ‘Spider-King’, only to find that his past won’t let him go. At the same time, “Fall of the Darkest Knight” is a tragic tale of the last battle of New York’s legendary superhero, as he tries one last time to battle evil with a body that is finally beginning to betray him. (Rumor has it that the two films were shot simultaneously, with the Darkest Knight battling it out with Spider-King in the finale, but The Asylum will neither confirm nor deny this exciting tidbit of info!)

AUGUST-OCTOBER:

After the breakneck pace of the summer, August finally sees a slowdown to the release schedule between the end of the summer movie season and the start of the Christmas season. (After the blockbuster action we’ve already discussed, we might need to take a breath!) Only “Totally Recalled” is on the Asylum slate, scheduled for August. According to the press release, this is an experimental sci-fi film about a man who develops a memory enhancer so perfect that it actually can summon past memories into tangible existence…which becomes all too dangerous when taken by an FBI profiler trying to catch a killer.

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER:

And as we finally enter the holidays, it becomes clear that the Asylum has saved the best for last. “Broken Dawn” is the terrifying tale of a pack of vampires stalked by a relentless, obsessive romantic named Dawn; this girl’s creepy, emotionally manipulative vampire fetish even freaks out the undead! Elsewhere, “Zombie World War” is an alternate history saga of a World War II fought by Germans with access to voodoo sorcery, while “Fallen Sky” is the story of a superspy’s attempts to stop a madman from hacking into the guidance systems of the world’s satellites and turning them into orbital-strike missiles. But the film everyone’s talking about is “The Unexpected Journey of the Habit”, an urban-fantasy saga about a nun recruited by a modern-day pagan shaman to rescue a circus (the Asylum used just about every actor under four feet tall in Hollywood!) from a demonic entity in the form of a gaseous cloud. The spectacular battle between the nun and Smog supposedly took upwards of a week to render digitally!

So for those of you who want to see movies, but can’t afford to see actual movies, the Asylum has your 2012 set!

(Note: Two of the titles in this are real. Try to guess which two without looking it up.)

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…

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.

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.

That’s a statement that seems pretty absurd on the face of it, to be honest. There have been times when the Doctor has said that “history cannot be rewritten, not even one line!” and times when he’s said that history changes constantly, every single time he steps out of the TARDIS. There have been times when people meeting themselves has caused vast discharges of temporal energy, and times when the Doctor has rubbed shoulders with himself. Anyone saying that there’s a consistent underlying principle has their work cut out for them.

And yet, if you sort of squint, it all does hang together. (This is the traditional approach to Doctor Who continuity in general, actually.) The first thing to do is to assume that when the Doctor talks about the Laws of Time and the things you “can’t” do when time traveling, he’s not speaking literally. The Laws of Time are not like the Laws of Physics, they’re more like the Laws of Traffic. Someone might tell you that you “can’t” drive your car at 120 miles per hour the wrong way down a one-way street, but that doesn’t mean your car won’t actually perform the action. It just means you’re going to die very quickly unless you’re an unbelievable sodding genius.

With this in mind, a lot of the rules of time travel make more sense. The Doctor is aware that very little is actually impossible, but much of what people are doing (or trying to do) is incredibly dangerous. The Time Lords, for much of the series, used their time travel knowledge and abilities to make sure that the technology didn’t get into the hands of the careless or the unskilled, but frequently they didn’t need to because most unskilled or careless time travelers broke the only real law of time travel in Doctor Who. They messed around with their own past history.

This is the common, underlying principle of time travel in Doctor Who: The people who have been exposed to time travel (perhaps those who have been imbued with artron energy, like Rose in ‘Dalek’ or Melody Pond during her gestation) become immune to the gross processes of cause and effect, and become “time-active.” These people can move through history without necessarily being subject to it (the Doctor describes himself and Romana in ‘City of Death’ as having “a special relationship to time…perpetual outsiders.”) But on the other hand, they seem to be subject to a sort of ‘higher time’ that moves in synch with other time-active entities, what you might call “uber-time”. This explains why Rose is 400,000 years or so earlier than the Ninth Doctor, and yet events seem to be proceeding at the same rate for her as for the Doctor. (Another example, for those who have read the books, occurs with the New Adventures ‘Birthright’ and ‘Iceberg’. These are claimed to be taking place “simultaneously”, but that has no meaning in terms of regular, four-dimensional time. Only among time-active powers can you discuss things happening “at the same time” in different eras.)

The implication, then, is that we are watching the series from the progression of “uber-time”. The show might jump around in time and space plenty, but it (more or less) follows the Doctor’s lifespan in a straight line. And more importantly, messing with one’s own personal past is always a one-way ticket to disaster. Stories like ‘Festival of Death’, ‘The Shadow of Weng-Chiang’, ‘Father’s Day’, and ‘The Wedding of River Song’ all show varied and complicated, but universally disastrous consequences for doing things that mess with your own past. (The novel ‘Head Games’ suggests that this extends to “known history”; once the Doctor learns of the sinking of the Titanic, he can’t avert it because his awareness of it is part of his past and thus inexorable. Which is why the Doctor never carries a history book, to answer Rory’s recently-asked question. The less he knows about history, the more he can do with it.)

“Fixed” points in time, presumably, are ones that major time-active powers have as part of their history; once the Doctor witnesses his own death, it becomes temporally fixed and for him to mess with it has disastrous consequences. Interacting with one’s own past in general is extremely dangerous (as apparently a person named “Blinovitch” theorized at some point), and generally to be avoided even by time-actives because of the inherent risks of paradox and ensuing disaster…

…and yet the Doctor does it on at least a half-dozen occasions. Why? What makes him so special? The key is, I think, that he is a Time Lord. It has been suggested that there is something special in their genetic makeup, something encoded by Rassilon back at the point where they stopped being mere Gallifreyans (or possibly a legacy he refined; some of the stories that focus on ancient Gallifrey suggest that they’ve always had an inherent sensitivity to time, like the Tharils of ‘Warrior’s Gate’) that gives them resistance to paradox effects above and beyond even other time-travelers. It’s this biological element that sets them above the Sontarans, above the Daleks (for a long while, at least…perhaps Davros instigated the Time Wars by giving the Daleks the final biological key that put them on a par with the Time Lords and allowed them to fight on their level?) This resistance to paradox is why the Doctor can meet himself without explosion, why he can leave notes for himself and perform clever tricks with predestination, and why, in the height of unbridled recklessness, he believes that he can alter a fixed point in time…albeit one that doesn’t seem to involve his personal past.

So, to sum up: Those who travel in time and actually gain exposure to the Time Vortex become linked not to the regular four-dimensional time we experience, but to uber-time. This carries attendant gifts, but means that the risks of paradox are greater and the consequences worse. Time Lords, being more resistant to paradox and more skilled in time travel, use their abilities to police time travel to prevent people from doing terrible and dangerous things, but resistance does not equal immunity and they were finally “time-locked” by a foe as time-sensitive as themselves.

If you actually made it through all this, feel free to add examples and counter-examples in the comments!

On the other hand, we did get an excellently creepy ‘God Complex’, a fun and breezy ‘Closing Time’ (as someone who’s been following Gareth Roberts ever since the early 90s, when he was writing Doctor Who novels, I will tell you that “fun and breezy” is his specialty) and the aforementioned drop-dead awesome ‘Doctor’s Wife’. And we got the Moffat episodes, all five of them. There is no such thing as a genuinely bad Moffat episode, only a Moffat episode that is less good than other Moffat episodes.

This season, we did get one or two of the less-good Moffat episodes; let’s face it, ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ faced the unenviable task of creating a terrifying, implacable, worthy-of-the-Doctor foe pretty much out of thin air, then having the Doctor come up with a way to stop them easily so we can see how impressive he is, then having them come up with a way to trump him that doesn’t make the Doctor look stupid. It…um, succeeded about as well as it could have. But that still wasn’t all that well. And as for ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’…did the “River sacrifices all her regenerations to save the Doctor from the poison with no antidote” ending really work very well for anyone? I ask mostly out of curiosity.

On the other hand, the opening two-parter was terrifyingly ambitious, the season arc actually made a lot of sense and had a fantastic ending, and the mystery of River Song was not drawn out and over-teased (and for everyone who says that Moffat is doing some sort of unprecedented Mary-Sue-ing by focusing so much on a supporting character and their story arc and plotline and this is a betrayal of the whole spirit of the series…River Song is Turlough with a better-thought-out backstory and more sex appeal. Think about it.) And really, the whole season would have been worth it if all we got was “Pterodactyls Are Vermin–Do Not Feed.” On the whole, this wasn’t quite as good as Season Five for me, but it easily trumped Seasons Three and Four and makes me look forward to Seven quite a bit. Bring on the fiftieth anniversary, I say!

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!)

Okay, so we get the idea that Harvey Dent died a raving madman, and there’s no way that this can ever get out because Gotham City needs him as an inspirational figure and not just one more politician chewed up and spit out by the brutality all around him. Batman heroically volunteers to take the fall for this, letting Commissioner Gordon paint him as the murderer who pushed Dent to his death (which is, um, more or less the truth, because Christian Bale’s Batman really isn’t that good at the whole “not killing his enemies accidentally-on-purpose” thing.)

But this is a Really Bad Idea. For one thing, it gives the Joker the victory he was craving just as surely as if they’d let the truth slip out. The Joker’s endgame was to break Gotham’s spirits by proving that its inspirational figures could become vicious murderers under the right circumstances, and Batman was (in his own way) just as inspirational as Harvey Dent. (Maybe moreso…I don’t think Harvey Dent inspired people to run around the city dressed in suits prosecuting people.)

If Batman is seen to be a cold-blooded, irrational killer, it works to serve the Joker’s ends just as surely as if Dent was. It also has the additional problem of being difficult to believe; despite the fact that Bale’s Batman actually has a pretty good bodycount, Maroni is fully confident that he doesn’t have the guts to kill him when push comes to shove. (Actually, push did come to shove. It was after that when Maroni decided Batman didn’t have the guts to kill him.)

And finally, it’s just plain stupid. If you’re going to lie about what really happened, why sit there arguing about who’s going to take the blame when there’s a ready-made homicidal maniac who killed someone in that very building just a couple of days ago? One who already made an attempt or two on the life of Harvey Dent, to boot.

Just blame the Joker. Tell everyone that the Joker had one more plan, that his goons kidnapped Gordon’s family, and that Harvey Dent heroically trailed them from the hospital despite his horrific injuries. While Batman was across town capturing the Joker and bringing him to justice, Dent saved Gordon’s family, but at the cost of his own life. The Joker’s thugs fled when Batman arrived, sneaking past a police cordon and escaping into Gotham, but they’re now leaderless with the Joker behind bars.

Honestly, why wouldn’t this work? The story’s entirely believable, and nobody involved is really going to be interested in exposing Dent’s mania anyway. The Joker might insist it isn’t true, but it’s not like he’s really got a whole lot of credibility here. “Well, yes, I did kidnap thirty or forty people, plant bombs all over Gotham, murder a bunch of cops by slicing Glasgow smiles into their faces, blow up a hospital, and disfigure Harvey Dent…but this kind of thing is really beneath me!”

I suppose that what happened on the screen is what I’ve got to accept for now, since it’s clearly setting up the grand finale to Nolan’s vision. (And I love that Bane is the villain. Bane is a much better villain than he gets credit for, a much better villain than he was frequently written post-Knightfall, and I am really looking forward to seeing what a hellishly talented writer/director does with the character.) And I suppose that you could claim that both Batman and Gordon were traumatized and not thinking clearly, and that Batman has displayed just enough of a martyr complex in the first two movies that it’s plausible he’d come up with a solution that screws himself over. But I still have to squint pretty hard to buy it.

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?

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.

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.

For those of you who do think it’s worth making fun of Harry Knowles, but have sworn a solemn oath never to click on any link that leads back to his website, allow me to sum up: This review is Harry Knowles explaining that while he loved the vast majority of the film, the ending left him so absolutely furious that he is demanding a Toy Story 4 solely to retcon away the final moments that he detests so much. He explains at great, frothing length, of course (Harry Knowles’ writing style reminds me of nothing so much as a quote from Transmetropolitan: “Use shorter sentences. Or just whittle everything down to ‘I’m all fucked up on big red pills.’”) But the short version is that he can’t stand the thought that the movie ends with Andy giving away Woody to some little kid. This is ANDY, after all!!! This is the special toy of his childhood, his closest and dearest friend, and he’s just GIVING HIM AWAY!!! He didn’t even check to find out how much Woody was worth on eBay!!!

Needless to say, Harry would never have given up his favorite toy like that.

For those of you who have unaccountably missed Toy Story 3, the end of the movie is all about Andy realizing that his beloved childhood toys are, in the end, just that. They are toys. They are meant to make a child happy, to bring the light of joy and wonder to their eyes. To be played with. Andy has a moment where he looks down at Woody, his beloved childhood toy, and realizes that although there will always be a special place in his heart for Woody, the most important thing in the world is making a little kid happy with that toy. That to keep it is essentially selfish and petty. His giving the toy to Bonnie, the little girl whose mom works at the local daycare, is an act of the purest altruism.

And Harry Knowles responds to that like a vampire being confronted with a crucifix. He can’t even conceive of the idea that giving Woody to Bonnie is the right thing to do. The notion that people are more important than pieces of inanimate plastic, and that it’s not worth it to hang onto those items just because they may have some sort of totemic significance? It’s not just incomprehensible, it’s anathema and incomprehensible. He acts like he just saw someone having sex with farm animals: He doesn’t understand why they could possibly do it, but he knows it’s wrong and disgusting.

The parallels to Al, the overweight emotionally-stunted manchild who sees toys as “collectibles” and accumulates them without ever really caring about them, are so obvious that they’re almost not worth pointing out…which doesn’t stop nearly a hundred people from doing so in the comments section. (The best part is when he compares his reaction to the end of Citizen Kane. That’s right, the message of Citizen Kane isn’t “don’t let the quest for material things change you and destroy your childlike innocence,” it’s “keep the damn sled!”) But those parallels are lost on Knowles. This movie and the themes that drive it, the idea that toys are to be played with and loved, not just hoarded…he doesn’t even understand why it’s so sad that he doesn’t understand.

Toy Story 3 and the unselfish love it displayed infuriated Harry Knowles to no end. That alone is enough of a reason for me to love it.

“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.

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.

In the end of “Day of the Moon”, for those of you who a) haven’t seen it and b) don’t care about spoilers, the Doctor plants an image of a Silent into the iconic footage of the moon landing, right in the little gap between “One small step for a man” and “one giant leap for mankind”. The Silent is saying, “You should kill us all on sight,” which is a bit of a problem for the Silence as a species because anything said when a Silent is in view gets forgotten by the conscious mind once they leave your field of vision, but is remembered by the subconscious mind as an irresistible command. Hence, people are saying, the Doctor has crossed a moral line by programming the entire human race into unthinking, genocidal killers.

Now first off, let’s get one thing out of the way: The Doctor has always been uncompromising, ruthless and quite brutal towards threats to the human race. He steered a fleet of Ice Warriors into the sun in “The Seeds of Death”, he sentenced Sutekh to death by eternal time corridor in “Pyramids of Mars”, he poisoned people in “Vengeance on Varos”, he boiled the Krillitanes in their own oil in “School Reunion”, and while he hasn’t wiped the Cybermen or the Daleks off the face of the universe, it hasn’t been for lack of trying. (Pretty much every incarnation has wiped out a Dalek army or three.) The Doctor is about as merciful as he needs to be, and the Silence weren’t exactly begging for mercy before he unveiled his big plan.

In fact, they were kind of doing the exact opposite, which is why I don’t consider the Doctor’s actions to be particularly immoral at all. The Silent that said, “You should kill us all on sight” wasn’t tricked into uttering those words by some clever plan of the Doctor’s; it was offering the honest, candid opinion of its species on the wisest, safest and best course of action for the human race to take. The Doctor had a hologram of a Silent that he could bring up on command, and knew that anything anyone said to someone watching a Silent would be taken as a post-hypnotic suggestion. That was the point of the bow-tie straightening scene. (And not, as Jacob of Television Without Pity suggests, to demonstrate that Canton was gay. Honestly, given that the man has passionately hated everything that’s happened on the series for the last four seasons and has willfully misinterpreted everything he’s seen on-screen since Moffat took over, I have no idea why he’s still recapping the show. Maybe it pays better than I think it does.)

But the Doctor doesn’t tell humanity, “You should kill all of these guys on sight.” He shows us the Silent’s unvarnished, honest opinion of us. “You should kill us all on sight.” If we were smart, we wouldn’t try to get along with the Silence. We wouldn’t show them mercy or compassion or even attempt to negotiate with them. We would just kill every single one of the bastards before they could get away. That’s not the Doctor’s opinion, it’s theirs. The Doctor is simply telling humanity something they need to know: There is an enemy in your midst and you can’t let it get away because it’s too dangerous to let out of your sight for even a second. Yes, the nature of the Silence means that became a post-hypnotic command, but even if it didn’t, the Doctor still would have told us and it still would have been just as important. That’s why it worked so well, because it was the absolute truth, straight from the creepy-cross-between-a-Grey-and-Edvard-Munch’s-”The-Scream”‘s mouth. The Doctor didn’t program humanity to be killers, he just let everyone know that it was kill or be killed.