When I last blogged about this season of “The Amazing Race”, it had just premiered, and I gave some preliminary thoughts on the racers and the series. I got a few things very right (“Brook and Claire seem nice enough, but I think they’re this season’s token “Teams That OD on the Adrenalin Rush and Chest Bump After Every Small Accomplishment”) and a few things very wrong (“Nick and Vicki will be gone next week”)…but looking back, what do I think now that they’re down to the top four?

For starters, I stand by my assertion that the more the racers drive themselves around, the less interesting the race gets. Gary and Mallory’s elimination was almost entirely without suspense, despite the best efforts of the Race’s editing team, because when you spend nine hours driving around looking for the first clue, it’s a pretty good bet that everyone else gets a free pass to the next leg. Admittedly, taxi roulette isn’t much better, as Andie and Jenna found, but I think that maybe the challenges need to be a little more challenging in order to give late racers a chance to catch up. There have only been a few really tricky challenges this year; most have them have been time-consuming in a way that doesn’t allow the racers’ skills to give them a chance to shave off much time. A task that takes everyone an hour is a task that might as well not be there.

Still, there have been some good innovations. The Double U-Turn changed the U-Turn from a “fuck you, you’re eliminated” to a real race-leveling tool; since two teams got stuck with it, you were still racing against someone on the same terms as you. I still don’t feel any need to have the U-Turners need to put up their picture itself–I think it creates Drama in one of the few reality shows that’s a lot of fun even when it’s totally Drama-free–but if someone really feels like holding a grudge against the person who U-Turned them instead of going after the strongest competition, I can’t stop them.

As to the remaining racers…well, I’m thrilled beyond belief that Chad and Stephanie are gone. I was seriously starting to think of them as the cockroaches of the Amazing Race, thoroughly unpleasant and yet somehow surviving everything that was thrown at them. I was slightly saddened that Gary/Mallory and Michael/Kevin got eliminated, since they seemed to be having fun with the Race (and doing better than most parent/child teams do) but such is life. And now, I’d like to see Jill/Thomas and Nick/Vicki gone, or at the very least not winning the Race. Both guys are nasty and mean to their girlfriends (especially Nick, who really does behave like he’d like to hit Vicki if the cameras weren’t on them) and I don’t want to see them anymore. But with three episodes left (I’m guessing that this week will end with a split leg) I still can’t say I know who will win. Which is at least one thing they’re doing right.

Kurt Russell is one of those actors who will probably never win an Academy Award, not even one of those special “Lifetime Achievement” awards they hand out when the Academy suddenly looks up and realizes, “Oh, shit! So-and-so has never won an Oscar?” He doesn’t take the right parts to be an Oscar-winning actor. While other actors are playing tortured poets or tortured soldiers or tortured gunslingers, Kurt Russell is always refreshingly angst-free. He’s the kind of guy who is always having fun, whether playing a super-hero or a fugitive or a trucker caught up in a struggle between ancient Chinese sorcerers, and he’s not afraid to let everyone know it.

And that’s what makes him an Unsung Hero. The sense of fun that Kurt Russell brings to every role he plays is infectious. While he’s on screen, you frequently find yourself smiling almost before you realize it; it’s something about his delivery, perhaps, the way that he drawls out each line with just enough of an accent to make you wonder whether he’s parodying John Wayne or whether he really talks like that. Or maybe it’s his body language, the way he seems to have just enough self-knowledge to play the Stallone-esque tough guy while letting the audience know he thinks it’s pretty silly, too. Or maybe it’s just the eyes. Watch Kurt Russell’s eyes when he’s on screen, and you’ll see it. He knows that this is a hell of a fun way to make a living.

Whatever it is, Kurt Russell makes movies fun. There has never been a movie so bad that it hasn’t perked up while Russell is on screen (“3000 Miles to Graceland” comes to mind)…and there have been a lot of cult classics that he’s made even better. “Escape From New York”, “The Thing”, “Big Trouble In Little China”, “Overboard”, “Tombstone”, “Stargate”, “Executive Decision”, “Sky High”, “Death Proof”…none of them art films, all of them what would probably be sniffed at by critics as ‘crowd-pleasers’, but all of them quite successful at pleasing crowds. Why? Because Kurt Russell’s in them. And he’s just damn fun to watch.

So let’s join together as geeks and give a big round of applause for Kurt Russell, an actor who knows that movies should be fun to watch.

We can all agree that the movie version of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” failed, right? I mean, it was terrible. It wasted the talents of some very good actors like Martin Freeman and Sam Rockwell (I am literally traumatized to the point where I can’t watch “Moon”, because I can’t believe that the man who gave that performance as Zaphod Beeblebrox is actually capable of acting) and spent a lot of its time cutting away brilliant dialogue and clever narration to focus on action sequences and set-pieces that should never be the focus of a comedy to begin with. It made back its money, it didn’t get totally shredded by the critics, but I think it’s safe to say that history has not been kind to it.

And we can all agree that while it was better-acted and better-scripted, the original TV adaptation of “Hitch-Hiker’s” had some serious problems with its production values, right? I mean, trying to do a story on the scope of Douglas Adams’ novels, one that starts with the destruction of the entire planet and moves on to the building of a whole new one, taking in two-headed aliens and vast varieties of epic visuals along the way, on a BBC budget in the 80s…let’s just call it over-ambitious and leave it at that.

But there is a version of “Hitch-Hiker’s” that’s already very well-acted and perfectly-scripted. It’s the original audio play that aired on BBC Radio, the one that Adams adapted into his novel. And there is a medium where budget doesn’t matter and anything that the mind can conceive, the screen can portray. It’s animation. And with the advances in computer animation, it’s easier than ever for the average computer user to make professional-quality animation.

So this is what this leads me to: What if you took the BBC Radio play as the soundtrack for an animated adaptation? Sure, it’d be a copyright violation, and doing the whole thing would probably be out of the financial reach of most hobbyist animators…but if you broke it up into five minute chunks, say, and had each person just animate their five minutes, you’d wind up with a fascinating range of visual styles and a potentially high-quality adaptation of what has famously been seen as one of the great unadaptable sci-fi stories. And as long as nobody made money off it and nobody sued, who’d complain?

Call me crazy, but I actually think this is a good idea.

And I have gone from barely noticing the existence of the series to watching it religiously (it became a tradition over the course of my long-distance, long-term relationship to watch it while on the phone with each other. You may now awwww or ewwwww, according to preference.) The new season started tonight. So what did I think?

First, the teams. In the order they finished…Jill and Thomas managed to be this year’s “Team That Doesn’t Stick In Your Mind At All”. It’ll be several legs (assuming they survive) before I remember anything about them at all. I see them as a middle of the pack finisher, despite the fact that they won the big “Express Pass” prize this leg. I think they’re competent, which will let them survive while the terrible teams wash out, but I don’t think they’ll go hugely far. Then again, I thought the same thing about Brent and Caite last time. Then again, I also thought the top three of that Race would have finished middle of the pack any other season.

Nat and Kat, I think, are going to do very well. They’re used to the killer stress and killer fatigue that screw teams over hard in the later legs of the Race, and they seem to generally have their heads together overall. They impressed in every area on this leg, and while that’s not necessarily a predictor, it’s a good sign. It’d be nice to see them as the first all-female team to win the Race.

Connor and Jonathan got the nickname “The Ducklings” within about fifteen minutes in our house. Like ducklings, they are adorable and sweet. And like ducklings, you figure that they have a lifespan of about five minutes without someone looking after them. Seriously, forget coming in last, I expected them to wind up in a ditch somewhere outside of London, tied up with their own underwear. They surprised me by doing well in the actual challenges, but I get the feeling these guys are in way over their heads.

Brook and Claire seem nice enough, but I think they’re this season’s token “Teams That OD on the Adrenalin Rush and Chest Bump After Every Small Accomplishment”. (Think “Drive it like you stole it.”) I definitely admire their fortitude in the face of the now-infamous “Watermelon Money Shot”, and I think they’ll probably be in it pretty close to the end, but I see their personalities as grating on me by about Week Six.

I was not enamored by the way Katie and Rachel decided to come up with derogatory nicknames for all the other teams, and it definitely soured me on a duo that I think also has a pretty good chance to finish high in the standings. But we’ll see. Maybe that was just a bad first impression. (But come on, they were snarking at the Ducklings! How can you possibly be cruel to little babies like that!)

Gary and Mallory feel like that very nice parent/child team that gets into the Race to be heartwarming and bond across the generation gap, and then finds out about three weeks in that this shit be hard, man. I don’t think they’re doomed, necessarily, but I think they’re not top three material.

The same is true for Michael and Kevin, except they’re funnier to watch and they’ll probably get another couple million hits for their website.

Chad and Stephanie cannot get eliminated soon enough. CAN. NOT. Every Race seems to have one bickering asshole couple with a guy who really thinks that fuming, pouting, screaming and whining is the sure-fire communications technique to motivate their partner. (And they all seem to get into it to “help improve their relationship”. Yes, because putting the two of you into an intense stress situation that you can spend the rest of your lives blaming each other over the failure to win large sums of money is clearly much better than couples therapy.) Please, please, please please please let them not last more than two more weeks.

Andie and Jenna…hoo boy. This could either be a spectacular train wreck, or a really touching experience for them. Me, I’d have met my birth mom for coffee or something, but I have to admit that while they didn’t do well (and I think they’ll probably be middle of the pack overall) they seemed to get along, so it might be heading for some real happy moments for them. Which might be worth more than a million dollars, as far as they’re concerned.

Nick and Vicki will be gone next week. They didn’t know anything about other countries, they didn’t know how to find landmarks, they didn’t know how to figure out challenges, they couldn’t even figure out what a boat was on the first try. They are the token Stupid Couple, and it was only luck that let them survive the first leg. (And yes, I know. Jeff and Jordan were last season’s Stupid Couple, and they made it to seventh place. See above comment on last year’s crop of contestants being extraordinarily weak.)

And Ron and Tony…tough luck. I know I’m in the minority in my household, but I don’t really care much for the contestants having to drive themselves. Yes, part of the Race is finding your way around strange places, and yes, it cuts down on the “taxi roulette” problem (contestants getting incompetent or super-competent drivers and getting a huge detriment/boost to their finish in that leg)…but on the other hand, lots of scenes of people driving around asking for directions are boring, the episode loses tension if you know that one or two teams are so far behind because they’re lost that the others stand no chance of being eliminated, and it really kind of sucks that some teams don’t get the chance to show how well or poorly they could have done in the challenges because they took a wrong turn on the M25 and got eliminated.

As for the episode itself…definitely a harsh opening in terms of the above-mentioned driving challenges. Opening with “Find your way through Boston to Logan Airport” and closing with, “Now find your way from Heathrow Airport to various spots in the British countryside” is pretty much the Olympics of competitive driving, and it’s no surprise that even the top finishers spent a lot of time asking for directions. (Which, again, boring.) The challenges were great, though. Top-notch, with enough real challenge to them that teams could actually change position based on how well they did. (A challenge that fails, in my mind, is one where everyone walks out of it in the order they walked in. There should be enough difficulty to reward competence.) The coracles, in particular, were good stuff–something about the way a coracle sinks, straight down instead of tipping, perfectly exemplifies the concept of “epic fail”.

Overall, this seems like a pretty strong field of contenders, a pretty well-designed Race, and I’m looking forward to next week! (Note: Follow to my blog, Fraggmented, for a joke I thought was too geeky to put here.)

Nobody has arguments like Doctor Who fans have arguments. There, I’ve said it and I’m not going to take it back. Sure, “Trek” fans have their “Kirk vs. Picard” debates. Yes, “Buffy” fans constantly argue about whether Angel or Spike is Buffy’s One True Love. (Riley never gets a fair shake in those debates.) And sure, “Battlestar Galactica” fans constantly argue about whether the ending of their series was incoherent gibberish, or whether the entire series was just as awful. (I assume.) But Doctor Who fans? We have arguments older than a good percentage of the audience. We have arguments that actually get summed up in books. “Which Doctor is better, Four or Ten?” That barely even scratches the surface. Here’s a quick guide to the big Doctor Who arguments, the evidence for and against each side, and the episodes you can watch to start forming your own irrational opinions.

1) UNIT Dating. When Jon Pertwee took over as the Doctor from Patrick Troughton, it was accompanied by a radical shift in the series’ format. Instead of traveling to alien worlds with his companions to fight monsters, the Doctor was exiled to Earth sans TARDIS, and fought monsters right there in Britain alongside UNIT (a United Nations division tasked with investigating the strange and unusual.)

At the time, the publicity materials announced that this was to be the England of the near-future, and the technology is certainly more advanced than the era in which it was made. (Britain has a fully-fledged space program in “The Ambassadors of Death”, there’s a female Prime Minister in “Terror of the Zygons”, and similar bits of anachronistic tech and unusual fashion.) But clearly, making the series “futuristic” was not in the front of the mind of the production team, and they missed a lot of things that clearly dated the series to the era it was filmed in. (You can see pre-decimal currency signs in shops, they mention Mao Zedong in the present tense, and most of the fashions and all of the haircuts scream “70s”.) By the time the series revisited the era, in the mid-80s, they had totally forgotten about the “future” aspect and set a date for the Brigadier’s retirement in 1977. (Meaning all UNIT stories had to take place before then.) This clearly conflicts with companion Sarah Jane’s comment in “Pyramids of Mars” that she’s from 1980. Only one of these can be right. Pick a side and ignore all the evidence to the contrary, and you’re set!

2) Are the Spin-offs Canon? At the time it came out, the book “No Future” seemed to settle the “UNIT Dating” issue by showing the events that led to the Brigadier’s retirement and setting them in 1976. When the book was published, moreover, the TV series was on an indefinite hiatus and the books were the officially licensed continuation of the show. But then, in 1996, FOX came out with a TV movie that picked up the story with the Seventh Doctor’s regeneration. The books gamely rallied, filling the gap between the novels and the TV movie and continuing on with the new adventures of the Eighth Doctor, but then…

In 1999, Big Finish Productions obtained the rights to do audio plays for Doctor Who. They set up their own competing Eighth Doctor series that became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the books, and canon wars started over which was the “true” timeline. Then, to complicate things further, the TV series came back as well. The TV show has adapted some of the book and audio stories, seemingly rendering them “non-canonical”, but has explicitly contradicted very little of the information in either (about the same amount as it has of the old TV show. Doctor Who creative teams don’t tend to have the same priorities as the fans.) So at the moment, the books and audios are in limbo. There have been clever attempts to work around this (involving the Land of Fiction, or alternate realities) but none of them have been satisfying.

3) Is the Eighth Doctor Half-Human? (Much thanks to my girlfriend for reminding me about this one.) When the TV movie came out in 1996, it was…not entirely well-received, to put it mildly. There were a lot of people who tried to deny that it had ever happened at all, even as he went on to star in seventy-nine novels and sixty or so audio plays. They finally acknowledged the canonicity of the TV movie when the new series showed him in flashback as one of the “official” Doctors, but they continue to insist that the TV movie can’t be an accurate representation of the events of his regeneration. Why? Because the Eighth Doctor, in a moment of either unprecedented honesty or mad whimsy, mentions to a scientist that he’s half-human. (On his mother’s side.)

This is not something Doctor Who fans like. It contradicts a lot of the canon established in the books (but see above.) It establishes the Doctor as part of a biological family, which means that his parents–and quite possibly the Doctor himself–might have squishy bits that they enjoy using (but see below.) And it’s a staggeringly stupid sci-fi cliche which offers no storytelling possibilities at all. Everyone seemed to have agreed not to mention it…until Russell T Davies’ grand finale to his era as Doctor Who showrunner, where he introduced a mysterious Woman In White, who had an unspoken but deep connection to the Doctor and who he recognized as a Time Lord. And she also had a mysterious, unspoken connection to Bernard Cribbins’ character, who could see her and who the Doctor described as someone he’d be proud to have as a dad. Mutated version of the TV movie’s “half-human” idea? Or terrible plot cul-de-sac to be buried forever? You decide!

4) Does the Doctor Have Sex? There’s certainly no on-screen evidence. Sure, he’s surrounded by nubile young women, and sure, the new series seems to show him all lovey-dovey in a chaste fashion. And sure, he mentions that he was a father, and sure, back in the very first episode, he was traveling with his grand-daughter…but does that mean he has sex?

A lot of fans say “no”. They feel that sex is a distinctly human quality, and part of the Doctor’s essential “alien-ness” is that he doesn’t show much, if any, interest in sex. (The classic line, from Douglas Adams’ script for “City of Death”: “Well, you’re a beautiful woman, probably…”) For a big contingent of fans, the Doctor even functions as an iconic gay sci-fi hero. Sure, he doesn’t overtly snog guys, but at the same time, most of his female relationships have a certain “Will and Grace” quality to them. These fans have come up with some fairly elaborate rationales for the presence of biological relatives like Susan (see below) and ignore everything but the most blatant evidence of sex. (They ignore the most blatant evidence, too.)

5) Lives Before Hartnell. The same rationale that explains Susan’s existence in a fairly convoluted fashion (look up “Lungbarrow” if you want to know) also explains away one of the most tantalizing bits of fanservice in the series: The extra faces you see in “The Brain of Morbius”. See, the Doctor and Morbius (an evil Time Lord who tried to conquer the universe from exile, and was reduced to a brain in a jar) have a “brain-bending” duel, where they’re placed in direct telepathic contact and try to regress each other’s minds to infancy. The regressed lives are shown as faces on a handy screen, and it seems like Morbius handily pushes the Doctor back through his third, second, and first incarnation…and then eight more faces appear on the screen before Morbius’ brain explodes from the strain. The production team at the time claimed that these were intended to be pre-Hartnell incarnations, suggesting several lifetimes’ adventures before “An Unearthly Child”. Every subsequent production team has ignored this, setting clear limits on the number of Time Lord incarnations, specifying their order, and establishing Hartnell as the first.

And yet, like the “Paul Is Dead” myth, this one will not die. Believers of the pre-Hartnell theory come up with elaborate explanations as to how the Doctor could have lived more than thirteen lives, pointing to the Fifth/Thirteenth Doctor’s cryptic dialogue (“I might regenerate…feels different, this time…”) and the erratic post-regenerative personality of the Sixth Doctor as hints that the regeneration was a truly unique event that has yet to be explained. (These people are insane. Argue with them at your peril.)

Those are the top five, but there are undoubtedly a ton I missed. Forty-seven years of continuity will generate that sort of thing. Feel free to mention yours in the comments!

Frankly, I don’t blame you. It’s the longest running science-fiction series in the history of television, having gone on longer than every single Star Trek series put together. It’s featured the writing of Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman, and television luminary Steven Moffat (who looked like he was going to corner the market on Hugo awards for a few years there.) It’s smart, witty, fun, inventive, fearlessly silly and gobsmackingly terrifying all at the same time, and generally the best thing since sliced bread. But with a TV show that’s coming close to celebrating its 50th anniversary, where do you start?

Really, the wonderful thing about the series is that there are any number of jumping-on points. The show is not a “Lost”-type experience where you have to pay deep attention to the mythos and every story builds on the story before it. (In fact, it’s almost the opposite; with so many changes to the show’s creative personnel, it was pretty frequent for series writers to have to rely on second- or third-hand descriptions of older stories when they brought back recurring enemies. This is why compiling timelines of Doctor Who is a fan cottage industry.)

But probably the best jumping-on point, right now, is Season One of the new series. The first episode, “Rose”, shows the Doctor from the perspective of someone meeting him for the first time, and gives you a nice initiation into the basic concept of the series (although the best description of the basic concept comes later, in Steven Moffat’s introductory episode “The Eleventh Hour”: “Amy Pond, there’s something you’d better understand about me, because it’s important, and one day your life may depend upon it. I am definitely a madman with a box.”) From there, it’s pretty easy to find yourself moving on to Seasons 2, 3, 4, the 2009 specials, and 5…although honestly, I think that big chunks of 3 and 4 are skippable if you don’t feel like watching everything. (Make sure to watch “Blink”, though. Everyone should watch “Blink”, if for nothing else than to see Carey Mulligan in one of her early TV appearances. She’s gonna be huge.)

But the thing is, as much as I like it, the new series is only the tip of the Doctor Who iceberg. There’s twenty-six seasons and a whopping 286 novels out there, not to mention the comics, audio plays and movies. (The movies are just adaptations of two early TV stories. You can skip them if you want, although it’s neat to see Peter Cushing playing the Doctor.) While you certainly don’t have to see it all…and in fact, you can’t, thanks to the BBC’s short-sighted decision to erase several early stories from their archives…there are a few good places to start in. I’ll list eleven, in honor of the eleven Doctors (although not necessarily featuring them all.) One thing, though. It’s worth noting that the classic series was filmed a long time ago, and usually on a shoestring budget. If you have a low tolerance for terrible special effects, run don’t walk in the other direction.

1. Genesis of the Daleks. The origin of the Daleks (although not their first appearance) and the first appearance of Davros, their mad creator. Also features the most popular (and arguably the best) Doctor, Tom Baker, whose floppy hat and long scarf provide some of the iconic images of the series.

2. An Unearthly Child. The very first episode; it actually holds up pretty well as a piece of drama, although you’ll find yourself wondering exactly who Susan’s grandmother was and why we never hear about the Doctor’s family ever again. This is normal, and part of your initiation into the world of Doctor Who fandom.

3. Spearhead From Space. This story doesn’t actually introduce UNIT, the military organization that helps the Doctor frequently over the course of his travels, but it does introduce the era of the series where they were most prominent (and the era where the Doctor was trapped on Earth.) It also introduces the Autons, occasional recurring enemies of the Doctor.

4. The Deadly Assassin. Likewise, this story doesn’t actually introduce the Master, the Doctor’s arch-nemesis and fellow renegade Time Lord, but it’s easily the best story with the character and introduces his rationale for most of the later era of the series (he’s used up all his regenerations and is trying to find a way to prolong his existence.)

5. The War Games. Basically, it’s the origin story for the Doctor, but it’s also a clever story in its own right. The Doctor seems to materialize in World War One, but at every twist, the story grows in scope until he has no choice but to reveal his past and go to his own people, the Time Lords, for help in restoring order. (Pack a lunch…it’s a ten-parter.)

6. The Chimes of Midnight. This is one of the better stories in the audio spin-off line from Big Finish, and also one of the stories that’s emblematic of the Eighth Doctor’s run in the audios. His impulsive decision to rescue “Edwardian adventuress” Charley from certain death aboard the R-101 has catastrophic consequences to history, and this story is a perfect example. Plus, it’s chillingly clever and a mix of humor and horror that sticks with you for a long time after the story ends. “Edward Grove is alive.”

7. Human Nature. At last, a chance to use links! This classic Doctor Who novel is also available as a free ebook at the BBC’s website, and it’s one of the best things Paul Cornell (who you might have heard of from the Pete Wisdom or Captain Britain comics) has ever written. It was later adapted for TV, but the book is better. Also features one of the stronger appearances of Cornell-created companions Bernice Summerfield, who wound up with her own spin-off series of some thirty novels and a similar number of audio plays. (River Song, from the new series, is basically a slightly-less awesome version of Bernice.)

8. Spare Parts. Another audio play, this one featuring TV’s Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison. It’s also the origin of the Cybermen, who comprise, alongside the Daleks and the Master, the Doctor’s main Rogue’s Gallery. (In general, the Doctor’s Rogue’s Gallery consists of entire species, not individuals. Individual bad guys who fight the Doctor have a tendency to wind up dead.)

9. The Two Doctors. This is one of the more watchable adventures of the Sixth Doctor, but it gives you a pretty good idea of the kinds of excesses and problems that were afflicting the series around then. Colin Baker tries hard, but script editor Eric Saward undercuts everything with his vision of the series, and producer John Nathan-Turner viewed his job more as drumming up publicity for the series than actually making it watchable. Oh, and it’s got the Sontarans in it. See one Sontaran, you’ve seen ’em all (literally, they’re a race of clones.)

10. City of Death. The Doctor Who episode every Doctor Who fan shows to non-Doctor Who fans, this is the one written by Douglas Adams, with Julian Glover as the villain (you know Julian Glover, even if you don’t remember the name; he’s been a villain for James Bond, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Harry Potter) and the cameo by John Cleese. If you can only watch one of the stories on this list, this is probably the one.

11. Remembrance of the Daleks. The last Dalek appearance in the classic series, and probably the best; this features three of the all-time classic headfucks of Doctor Who. The first is the Dalek chasing the Doctor up the flight of stairs for the first time in series history, the second is the appearance of the “Special Weapons Dalek” (which must be seen to be believed), and the third…but that would be telling. 🙂

So there you go, a potted guide to Doctor Who! It’s by no means complete, but I hope I’ve given you a good place to start. That’s all for this week…but I did want to beg everyone’s indulgence for a moment, and mention that I’ve started my own T-shirt store on CafePress. Feel free to stop by and see if there’s anything you like!

No, you haven’t accidentally mis-clicked on an article for Cracked.com. This is still Mightygodking.com, even if I’m not him and I’m totally stealing a gimmick from Cracked’s lists (that are more like crack than Cracked, honestly. Once you start clicking on them, it’s five hours of timesink before you know it.) Because let’s face it: Lists, especially non-comprehensive lists that you can add onto yourself in the comments section, can be fun.

This time, it’s about film adaptations. We’ve entered a true golden age of film adaptations in some ways, especially when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy films; the improvements in effects technology, combined with the general viewing audience’s increasing familiarity with sci-fi tropes, has resulted in increasingly sophisticated and effective adaptations that bring the book (or comic book) to life. But sometimes, I find myself wondering if “faithful” should really be the defining quality of an adaptation. Sometimes, what works for a book doesn’t work for a movie, and vice versa. By way of counter-example, here are five films that changed a lot, but still made excellent movies.

5. Blade Runner. This one is low on my personal list because, despite it being a beloved cult film that influenced a generation of movie-makers, I really don’t care for it. I’ve watched the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, pretty much every cut they put out, and it always feels like a slow, shapeless mess that wastes Harrison Ford’s talents as an actor (or, arguably, where Harrison Ford wastes his own talents as an actor–Ford can be brilliant, but you can tell when he’s not emotionally invested in a project, and he clearly sleepwalks through this one.) But I’m aware that it is much adored by a great many people, and I can appreciate that even if I don’t share it.

And to the extent that it is good, it’s good specifically because it abandons Dick’s original novel; “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” never really looks at the moral ambiguity present in the Replicants, instead taking the claim that they lack empathy at face value. “Blade Runner” admits the flaw in this entire concept, questioning the morality of gunning down people who look human, act human, and may in fact be more human than human. In fact, I’d say that the less faithful an adaptation of this novel is, the better it could be. (Witness “The Wedding Banquet”, which abandons every single aspect of the novel and is absolutely charming. 🙂 )

4. The Collector. This is an interesting one, because in terms of plot, it’s totally faithful to the original novel…but the original novel was absolutely unadaptable in its existing form. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a story about a kidnapping told first from the perspective of the kidnapper, then from the perspective of the victim, then returning to the kidnapper’s point of view for the finale. The narration manages the almost impossible trick of making you understand the motives of the kidnapper and even sympathize with him at times (the victim’s POV scenes make her out to be every bit as snooty as the kidnapper’s persecution complex imagines her to be)…right before hitting you in the gut with the final sequences.

The film adaptation doesn’t have the ability to do any of that. But with nothing more than a tiny bit of voice-over narration, it still conveys that same sensibility, solely through the acting talents of Terrance Stamp. His body language and facial expressions convey everything that the film can’t show in other ways, and Samantha Eggar strikes just the right note of ambiguity as the victim (it helps that Eggar shot Stamp down for a date when they were at college. Nothing says awkward like actual awkwardness.)

3. Memento. I’m going to try not to gush here, but…the original short story was a very clever idea, expertly presented in an artfully precise short story. Christopher Nolan then took that idea and used it as the seed for a chillingly brilliant film that explores the nature of revenge in a way that almost no Hollywood movie ever does. Seeing that final/first scene, and realizing where Leonard’s quest for revenge has taken him, is a moment far more powerful than any of the various “Death Wish” clones out there ever deliver. Lots of films talk about how revenge is ultimately hollow, but they usually do that as an obligatory wrist-slap after the hero gets heaping helpings of juicy, delicious revenge that we can vicariously enjoy. “Memento” radically departs from that model (which is equally present in the original short story) and is all the better for it.

2. The Princess Bride. I actually read the book before I saw the movie, and I remember watching the whole thing in a state of constant, low-grade dread because I knew how the book ended. I know there will always be purists who feel that the original, unhappy ending is somehow “truer” (I hear the same thing a lot about “The Little Mermaid”, too) but I think that sometimes we need a little bit of fairy-tale in our life. We need happy endings in stories precisely because we don’t get them very often anywhere else, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting them. And “The Princess Bride” is just an unabashedly beautiful film with plenty of heartfelt moments (I defy anyone in the world not to shed a tear the first time they hear Inigo say, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” It’s not exactly a “Memento”-level commentary on the hollowness of revenge, but it gets the point across.) Most interestingly, this is a rare case where the writer and the adapter are one and the same person; William Goldman was undoubtedly proud of his novel, but he wasn’t afraid to kill his children if it resulted in a good movie, and “The Princess Bride” is one of the best.

1. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? If you’ve never read “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?”, the novel that formed the basis for the film, let me save you some time: Don’t. It’s downright inept, a muddled murder mystery full of red herrings and an ending that comes so far out of left field that you might legitimately suspect it to be from another ballpark. But somehow, Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman managed to throw away the gallons of bathwater and still keep the baby. Almost nothing remains of the original save the barest bones of the central concept–“Toons”, a private detective, and a murder–but those elements make the story what it is. Every change improves the story, and they’re all done with a keen, aggressive eye towards making it all click with audiences. If you ever want to run a clinic on how to rewrite a book into a movie, this would form a core part of the curriculum.

So that’s my five…or at least, five of my many. As always, feel free to add yours in the comments section!

It’s a deceptively simple question: When exactly did ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, the series, end? To some, of course, the answer is, “It didn’t.” Dark Horse Comics has already announced a Season Nine to come after the conclusion of the comics-only Season Eight, and the same people who wrote for the TV series are clearly enjoying the upsides of writing a Buffy series with an unlimited budget and no worries about actor availability. That’s ‘Buffy’ in some form, definitely.

But to others, ‘Buffy’ ended when the series left television. Seven seasons, two networks, 144 episodes, no writing Emmys. Certainly, the facts argue in favor of that interpretation; ‘Buffy’ Season Seven features the same core cast as Season One, the same basic setting, even the same theme music. But Season One was about a teenage girl who was trying to make it through the metaphorical hell of high school while simultaneously trying to stop demons from the literal mouth of Hell, while Season Seven was about…um, a twenty-two year old woman looking for a career, and a bad guy who couldn’t do anything but make vague menacing threats, and Andrew for some damned reason. They’re set in the same place, they feature the same people, but they don’t feel like the same series when set side by side. Only because we watched the transformation as it slowly occurred does it feel seamless to us.

So when did ‘Buffy’, the show that started in 1997 on the WB, end? Did it finish on the WB as well? It’d be hard to argue that, I think; Buffy as protective big sister/single parent to Dawn, working out of the Magic Box to battle demons alongside super-witch Willow and semi-redeemed vampire Spike, feels less like Season One than Season Seven did. (Not to mention Season Five marks the breaking point where the series ceases to be about people growing up and begins to be about people who have grown up and find their life really sucks and it’s not what they thought it’d be in high school and they’d really rather go back and be teenagers again…actually, Seasons Five through Seven really suck the joy out of re-watching Seasons One through Four. “Oh, aren’t Willow and Oz so cute together?” “Yeah, they go through a painful break-up later on, and then she becomes a lesbian and falls in love with this really sweet girl…who gets shot and killed.” One of the big problems with both ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’ was that neither series knew when to stop bumping off supporting characters.)

So it’s Season Four, then. Except…as much as I love Season Four (and I do; I think it’s the last good season, and it’s got some of the best comedy episodes) it’s actually a much bigger break from Season Three than Five is from Four or Six from Five. It’s a change of setting, a big change of supporting cast (gone are Angel, Cordelia, Principal Snyder, Joyce, Jonathan and Oz as regulars, and in comes Riley, Maggie Walsh, Forrest, Graham, Tara, Spike and Anya as regulars) and a change of mission, too. Buffy and her friends aren’t teenagers dealing with teenage problems anymore. They’re grown-ups, learning what it’s like to be out in the wider world.

No, I think that you can safely set aside Seasons One through Three of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ as a seamless whole, an epic story about how we become adults told through a prism of sorcery, horror, kung-fu, and witty quips. All of the themes introduced in the beginning of the series (“high school is hell”, “Buffy’s friends are assets to her Slaying and not liabilities”, “your first love might seem passionate and true and the deepest you’ll ever experience, but they’re not necessarily good for you and passion isn’t enough to sustain a relationship”, “growing up means making decisions for yourself instead of listening to authority figures”, “having true friends that stick with you through thick and thin is better than being powerful”) are wrapped up in dramatic and spectacular fashion in the season finale (the commencement speaker turns into a giant demon snake, Buffy rallies together the entire high school class to defeat it, Angel walks away afterward to let her find someone who can be happy with her, Buffy tells the Watchers to sod off because she doesn’t need a Watcher anymore, and the season ends with everyone together watching the flames and then walking away hand-in-hand.) Heck, the Season Three finale even ends with the suggestion that there’s no need to worry about the Hellmouth anymore: the last line of the episode is, “Why do demons even come here anymore?” What could be more series finale than that?

‘Buffy’, as we finally saw it, is a genuinely great piece of television. But the first three seasons are the true ‘Buffy’ because they’re the execution of the central concept, a great idea turned into a magnificent series that ended just like it needed to. After that, it’s just a matter of following the character around while she lives her life, and frankly that’s not the same thing as telling a story. Buffy might keep fighting evil forever, but ‘Buffy’ ended the day she got her diploma.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of Inception (including the one here) and a lot of thoughts on Inception (including the one here just a little bit ago, which is quite a nice theory. Me, I tend to go for the straightforward ambiguity of “either the ending is entirely real, or else everything up to the ending is real and it’s only the last few minutes that are a dream”. But I do like the idea that Matthew Johnson put forward…and I like that the movie is more ambiguous than the heist flick it seems to be on the surface.)

But the most common negative I hear about the movie is summed up by one of the comments in Matthew Johnson’s post (thank you, Snap Wilson, for inspiring this post, by the way): “Yes, I suppose it’s thoroughly reasonable that a drab, uninteresting person would dream about other drab, uninteresting people taking place in drab, uninteresting environments (or risible Modern Warfare 2 levels, apparently). That doesn’t make it good storytelling. Dreams certainly are capable of being alternately exciting, wondrous, imaginative or terrifying things. Inception was too serious for that, and thus we’re stuck with sterile concrete, glass and steel cityscapes where everyone wears a suit. The dreams of an accountant.”

This is the big complaint most of the people who disliked Inception had, that the dreams didn’t feel like dreams. (In fairness to Wilson, he said he liked the film despite that.) But I think those people are…not missing the point, because I think that’s kind of mean. Perhaps they’re approaching it from the wrong angle, or approaching it without key knowledge. Nolan isn’t making a film about dreams. Nolan is making a film about lucid dreams.

Lucid dreaming is the phenomenon of experiencing a dream with the knowledge that you are experiencing a dream, and using that knowledge to “steer” the dream and control its contents. The result is something like an astonishingly vivid narrative, like living out a movie. (Yes, the parallels are obvious. Nolan is clearly fascinated with the subject; after all, he apparently worked on the screenplay to Inception for something like a decade. You don’t do that with something you’re not obsessed with.)

Lucid dreams feel very different from normal dreams; there’s less of the disconnected dream-logic, the bizarre and senseless structure that comes from synapses firing randomly. You feel like you’re in a real place, talking to real people. There’s a narrative to it…and it’s one you can control. Does this begin to sound familiar? Lucid dreamers even develop strategies to determine whether or not they’re dreaming, although not the same ones as in the movie. (They do things like look at a digital clock, look away, then quickly look back again. In a dream, the numbers don’t stay the same.)

That was where Nolan’s idea for Inception began. The film takes that initial, real-world idea of lucid dreaming, and asks, “What might happen if lucid dreamers could share their dreams?” And then takes it to the next step, “If a lucid dreamer controlled the dreams of a normal dreamer, how would they know it wasn’t their idea?” And then inserts gangsters, corporate espionage, and guys with machine guns and grenade launchers, which is never a bad direction to take a film. The people who point out that Inception doesn’t replicate a normal dream are right…but then again, it’s not trying to.

The format war officially ended two years ago. Blu-Ray is the new standard of the land, every Wal-Mart and Best Buy has a dedicated Blu-Ray section, and prices are down to the point where the average person can afford them. So the question then becomes…do we actually need to care?

No, I’m serious. Set aside the automatic “but it’s an upgrade!” reaction that comes second nature to geeks. (I’m not saying I don’t have it too. I have a Blu-Ray player, and I don’t even have a hi-def TV to watch the discs on. Long story.) I’m asking whether we actually need a new format, now or ever. Sure, the picture quality is better. Put two TVs side by side, one playing a DVD and the other playing a Blu-Ray DVD, and people will be able to tell which one is which. But it’s not the same as the difference between VHS and DVD. It’s not between “okay” and “amazing”, it’s between “amazing” and “near-perfect”.

Do we need “near-perfect”, though? Already, some films are having problems being converted to Blu-Ray because the format is so perfect that you can see imperfections in the film used to shoot the original master edition. The differences are so small as to be almost subliminal. DVD is immersive enough; Blu-Ray improves, but can you put a dollar amount on the exact improvement…and more importantly, is that dollar amount equal to the difference in price between DVD and Blu-Ray?

Perhaps I have a slightly different perspective on this than some fans, because I’m a Doctor Who fan. We get our series one story at a time, eight stories a year, and there are twenty-six years of stories to go through. It took them almost literally the entire life of the format to release all the existing episodes of the classic series on VHS, and by the time they put out the last one (“Invasion of the Dinosaurs”, if memory serves me right) they’d already started putting out the DVDs. Which means I’m very familiar…perhaps uncomfortably familiar…with buying the same thing twice.

As a result, I can’t help but think that Blu-Ray is mostly–not entirely, but mostly–a way to get you to buy the same thing three times. Let’s face it; at a certain point, even the best movie stops making money for the studio, because the market’s saturated. Everyone already has it. The only solution is to find a new way to repackage it, so you’ll buy it twice. And improvements in technology are a remarkably convenient way to do that. And, to get back to the question at the beginning, the question in the title…at what point does the improvement become incremental enough, insignificant enough, that it’s not worth buying into the new format? Is Blu-Ray that point?

Oh, I should have mentioned at the beginning, this is one of those columns where I don’t actually have an answer. (Except for myself, of course. I have one Blu-Ray disc, and I got it as a gift. The player was on sale for cheap. I won’t buy any DVD over ten bucks anymore…after all, I’ve got plenty to watch, and the prices always come down eventually. For me, market saturation’s a big saver!)

On the one hand, I’m not crazy enough to say that the “Star Wars” prequels are good. There’s some rough sailing there, for a variety of reasons: Lucas hadn’t directed a film in a long time, his scripts were less polished due to a lack of a strong editor…and the less said about Jar-Jar, the better. But there’s a very strong theme that tends to get lost or misinterpreted, and it’s actually pretty impressively clever–but it requires letting go of one of the big assumptions the classic trilogy gave us. You have to be willing to understand that while the Sith are the villains of the series, the Jedi are the other villains of the series.

Lots of people complained when the prequels came out that Lucas’ vision of the Jedi philosophy was sterile, emotionless, inconsistent and creepy. But this is not a bug; it’s a feature. Lucas didn’t accidentally make a Jedi code that made his heroes seem unpleasant, he deliberately made the Jedi just as absolutist and unsympathetic as the Sith, only from the other direction. The Jedi’s commitment to detachment and an impersonal “greater good” is as dangerous in its own way as the Sith’s unrestrained and unbridled passion.

Look at “The Phantom Menace”. Everyone jokes about Yoda’s decision that a nine-year-old Anakin is “too old” to begin the Jedi training. First Luke was too old, now Anakin…how young do you have to be to train as a Jedi, anyway? But the throw-away line has a terrifying implication. Anakin’s too old because he’s already had time to live life as a non-Jedi, to form attachments to other human beings. His love of his mother is seen by Yoda as a major strike against him, because if you love someone, you might be afraid to lose them, and fear is a Bad Thing under the Jedi code. One can imagine a maternity ward where the Jedi test newborns for their strength in the Force, taking away the potentially powerful forever to be raised in the Jedi temple (and possibly wiping the minds of the parents with their Jedi powers. After all, they’re “compassionate”, aren’t they?)

In Yoda’s world, love is bad. Hate is bad. Fear is bad. Anger is bad. The only emotions allowed are a sort of vague compassion and commitment to the “greater good”. The Jedi are basically raising an army of ruthless sociopaths, and calling it a positive thing–because supposedly, the only alternative is to be a violent psychopath. Even getting a little bit angry, even if it’s righteous anger against the Sith on behalf of someone you love, is the first step on the road to becoming pure evil. This is the equivalent of claiming that outrage over the Holocaust will make you a Nazi.

Anakin is torn apart–emotionally, ethically, and finally physically–by this false dichotomy. Yoda, his mentor, guru, teacher and spiritual leader, tells him that caring about the people he loves is evil and the only way to stop himself from falling to the Dark Side is to give up on Padme. On the other side, Palpatine tells him that the only way to save his wife is to give in completely to the Dark Side and become a child-slaughtering Sith Lord. There is no in-between, no give from either side, and Anakin is betrayed just as surely by the Jedi as by the Sith. Both sides insist he has to make a choice, when the correct choice is “none of the above.” When Obi-Wan says, “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes,” everyone pointed to the irony, but not many people spotted that it was intentional.

That’s what the prophecy of “bringing balance to the Force” is about, even if Lucas never bothers explicating it properly. (Hey, I did say it was a half-hearted defense. For that matter, he never explains very well who the Sith are and what they’re getting revenge for…) In the end, Luke is being shaped by the Jedi as a weapon against the Sith, not trained as a heroic warrior. Yoda and Ben don’t tell Luke that he’s about to go kill his own father because they think it might make it harder for him to do what has to be done for the greater good, and because he’s “too old” to properly learn that it shouldn’t really matter if he’s gutting his dad like a fish. When he finds out, they view it more as an inconvenience than anything else. If that doesn’t strike you as insanely fucking creepy, why not?

When Luke announces that he thinks Vader can be redeemed, Yoda’s basic reaction is, “Well, we’re fucked.” In twenty-plus years, he never once thought of trying to reach out to Anakin with even the tiniest shred of human kindness, both because it’s antithetical to the Jedi philosophy to care about your friends (and oh, the symbolism of “you have to let your friends die in Vader’s trap” in light of the prequels) and because he just never saw the point, really. There’s no redemption in Yoda’s Manichean philosophy, so why bother trying?

Luke’s final battle against Vader and the Emperor is the culmination of all six movies. When we only saw it in the light of the classic trilogy, it seemed as though Luke was on the verge of falling to the Dark Side and only barely managed to redeem himself by remembering Yoda’s teachings; seen as part of the complete picture, it’s a total repudiation of Yoda’s philosophy. Luke gets angry at his enemy, uses his attachments to his friends as a source of determination, and uses the Force for attack–everything Yoda says will drive him permanently and irrevocably to the Dark Side. (And “once you start down the path of the Dark Side, forever will it dominate your destiny.” There are no in-betweens, remember?)

The Emperor, who’s bought into this black-and-white bullshit just as much as Yoda, says, “Now, strike him down and take his place at my side.” And Luke…doesn’t. He’s a Jedi. More importantly, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” The line is striking, in light of the full picture we see. Luke isn’t just saying that he’s not a Sith, he’s saying his father wasn’t either. Before Anakin Skywalker failed the Jedi, the Jedi failed Anakin Skywalker. It couldn’t be any clearer if he’d said, “Oh, and fuck you, you dried-up green bastard.”

Seen like that, the prequels actually have a lot of meat on them for Star Wars fans. They’re still not perfect, or even necessarily all that good, but they can be seen as “interesting failures”, perhaps even “flawed successes,” instead of the incoherent examples of excess that they seemed to be on first viewing.

Of course, there’s still no excuse for Jar Jar.

One of the things that I genuinely adore about writing for mightygodking.com instead of my own blog is that I get a lot of comments. People love to give feedback on what I’ve written (and ultimately, that’s what every writer really wants, to know that people are listening. Money is just a measurement of that, albeit one that can be used to pay your rent.)

But after a while writing for a high-traffic blog on the Internet, you do start to notice that no matter what you say, someone disagrees with it. I’m not complaining about it; you don’t get into writing, especially writing opinion pieces, if you don’t have enough confidence in your opinions to avoid taking disagreement personally. But I am curious. Is there really any opinion out there that everyone, absolutely everyone can agree on? Is there something we all like?

So, here’s the experiment. I’m going to name ten movies that I consider to be awesome. Not the ten best movies of all time, or the ten all-time classics; just ten movies that I love, and that I could sit down and watch at any time and enjoy them. And in the comments, you can either add movies to that list, or veto movies that someone has added. You don’t need to defend your choices, either to add or to subtract. In fact, I don’t want you to; I’d prefer that the comments not get bogged down in a big argument about whether or not “Buckaroo Banzai” sucks. I’ll try to go back and edit the list occasionally, so people can see at a glance what the current content is, and we’ll see if anything survives as something everyone on the Internet could sit down and watch together.

UPDATE: I went through the first sixty-two comments and updated the list based on everyone’s new picks and vetoes. A few points I want to clarify for future commenters: You do not, I repeat not need to take something off the list in order to put something on. The list can be as long as it needs to be. Comments that said “replace X with Y” were treated as “Veto X, Add Y”. Also, there is no need to re-nominate or re-veto a movie. I won’t take anything off unless it’s vetoed, and once it’s vetoed, it can’t go back on even if someone nominates it again. The whole point is finding films everyone wants to watch! (If you want to make my life easier, you can just make your comments: “Veto: A, B, C, D” and “Add: E, F, G, H” so that it’s easy to figure out what you want me to add and remove. Also, it’d help if you mentioned whether you meant the original or the remake. I assumed the original unless otherwise specified.) Oh, and sorry, but if you nominated a film specifically to watch the Rifftrax version of it, that doesn’t count.

The current list:

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Alien, Aliens, Animal House, Apocalypse Now, Army of Darkness, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Better Off Dead, The Big Lebowski, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, The Blues Brothers, Das Boot, Bringing Up Baby, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Chinatown, City Lights, A Clockwork Orange, Dawn of the Dead, Death to Smoochy, Doctor Strangelove, Donnie Darko, Empire Records, The Empire Strikes Back, Enter the Dragon, Fargo, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fight Club, Forbidden Planet, The Full Monty, Ghostbusters, The Godfather, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, High Society, Highlander, The Hudsucker Proxy, Hunt for Red October, In Bruges, It’s a Wonderful Life, It’s My Party, Jaws, Juno, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, LA Confidential, Last Night, Last of the Mohicans, Latter Days, Little Miss Sunshine, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Lone Star, Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings, Memento, Metropolis, Miller’s Crossing, MirrorMask, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Moon, Muppet Christmas Carol, The Muppet Movie, Murder by Death, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, Night of the Living Dead, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Perseopolis, The Princess Bride, The Producers, The Professional, Pulp Fiction, The Quiet Earth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ransom, Rebecca, The Right Stuff, Ronin, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Rushmore, Ruthless People, The Shining, Silver Streak, Snatch, Sneakers, The Specials, Spider-Man 2, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Sting, The Terminator, Thank You For Smoking, The Thing, The Third Man, Throne of Blood, Time Bandits, Unforgiven, The Untouchables, Watership Down, Willow, The Wizard of Oz, Used Cars, The Valet, X-Men 2, Yellowbeard, Young Frankenstein

The Vetoed List (remember, once it goes on this list, it can’t come off):

Airplane, Amelie, Avatar, Back to the Future, Big Trouble in Little China, Blade Runner, Blazing Saddles, Brazil, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Bug’s Life, Caddyshack, Chasing Amy, Children of Men, Clue, Contact, Cowboy Bebop, Dangerous Liasons, The Dark Crystal, Dogma, Drunken Master 2, Evil Dead II, The Fifth Element, Finding Nemo, (500) Days of Summer, The Goonies, Groundhog Day, Happy Gilmore, Hot Fuzz, Hudson Hawk, The Incredibles, Iron Man, Jacob’s Ladder, The Jerk, Jurassic Park, Labyrinth, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Love Actually, The Matrix, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Monsters, Inc., Pan’s Labyrinth, The Patriot, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, The Philadelphia Story, Police Story 3, Ratatouille, Repo Man, Schindler’s List, Serenity, Sexy Beast, Shaun of the Dead, The Shawshank Redemption, Shrek, Silverado, Sin City, Star Wars, Stargate, Starsky and Hutch, Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny, The 13th Warrior, 30 Days of Night, This Is Spinal Tap, Tombstone, Tommy Boy, Toy Story, Toy Story 2, 12 Monkeys, 28 Days Later, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Unbreakable, Up, The Usual Suspects, WALL-E, When Harry Met Sally, Zombieland, Zoolander

There we go; let the consensus-building continue!

Oh, dear. They’re at it again, aren’t they?

Sorry, that probably requires a bit of explanation. Um, and I’m going to deliver that explanation in a nice, long paragraph, so that those of you who don’t want spoilers for the new Doctor Who episode, “Flesh and Stone”, which has aired in Britain but not in America, can skip this entry if you like.

Basically, for those of you not familiar with the series (or at least, not over-familiar with the series) the Doctor, an enigmatic wanderer in time and space, tends to have a traveling companion with him on his journeys. (Primarily as a way of solving a lot of writing problems–the Doctor tends to already know a lot of things the audience needs to know, so having an inexperienced traveling companion is an easy way of delivering expository dialogue that doesn’t sound forced.) These companions tend, very frequently, to be pretty young women. (Again, this is done for rather mundane reasons; the series wants to appeal to a very broad audience, and there are certain elements of the viewing public that respond strongly to pretty young women…for one reason or another.) Thus, it’s become something of a running gag among viewers that we never actually do see what the Doctor does in the TARDIS with those pretty young women between adventures.

And in the relaunched series (we are now trending towards the spoilery bits, here) that element has become more explicit. Rose, the Doctor’s companion, has a very obvious crush on the Doctor, and while the Doctor can’t ever bring himself to actually say the words, “I love you,” at any point, David Tennant is clearly playing the part as a man in love. Martha, the next companion, has her own crush on the Doctor, but since he’s still mooning over the departed Rose, she’s got no chance (an element that’s rather overplayed in Season Three, but that’s another story.) The romance angle goes into full retreat for Season Four and the 2009 specials (excepting for the season finale to Season Four, where Rose comes back and we practically get swooping strings when the two of them see each other)…but now it’s rearing its head again. Current companion Amy Pond just about jumps the Doctor’s bones at the end of “Flesh and Stone”. But the Doctor doesn’t reciprocate…despite Karen Gillan being just about the prettiest of the pretty young women ever to join the Doctor in his travels. Why?

The question is actually pretty contentious, in Doctor Who circles. (It says something about Doctor Who that it is actually less contentious than the question of what year the Third Doctor stories took place in.) There are a lot of people who believe that sex is off-limits in Doctor Who, at least in regards to the Doctor himself. They feel the Doctor should be above that sort of thing, even if they can’t necessarily articulate why. (Or if they can’t agree on a reason why. Doctor Who has possibly the strongest gay fan following of any science-fiction series, precisely because he’s a male sci-fi hero who doesn’t lust after women. To a lot of fans, the reason he doesn’t hit on his female companions is the same reason Will doesn’t hit on Grace.)

There are a lot of people who make the counter-argument that the Doctor most certainly does have a sexual relationship with many, if not most of his companions over the years. They insist that the people who insist “sex shouldn’t be allowed in Doctor Who” are prudes at best, Puritans at worst, who never noticed the sexual subtext of the older stories and now get angry when they spot it in the newer ones. (A sub-set of these people feel that there’s a sexual subtext to some, but not all stories, and that the Doctor has a “true love”, who is {INSERT COMPANION HERE} and that this is the perfect pairing and the series hasn’t been any good since that true love left and he’s been forced to make do with pale substitutes. All of these people are twelve-year-old girls. Even the ones who aren’t.)

Me? I fall at least a little into the former camp. I feel that there’s a reason why Russell T Davies and Stephen Moffat, the people who’ve been in charge of the relaunched series, haven’t pushed the boundaries of the Doctor’s sexuality too far. (And they really, really haven’t. For all that the Tenth Doctor is much more lovey-dovey than his predecessor, he still won’t even say the words, “I love you.” Not even once. My standing joke is that all the times he says, “Rose…I need to tell you…” and trails off, he’s trying to find a way to explain that traveling in the TARDIS makes you sterile.) It really isn’t in the Doctor’s character to have a sexual relationship with his companions, and Amy Pond provides the key to why. (Well, half the key.)

When Amy makes her rather blatant come-on to the Doctor, his response (played magnificently by Matt Smith) is absolute horror. He can’t imagine sleeping with Amelia Pond, because Amelia Pond is the seven-year-old girl he was just talking to a few days ago. Sure, she had a rather inconvenient case of growing up, but as the Doctor said to her, “Don’t worry; we’ll soon sort that out.” He’s not looking for a lover. He’s looking for a daughter. Or, if we’re to provide the other half of the key to the Doctor’s character, a grand-daughter.

Because the first pretty young woman the Doctor traveled with, back when he was an old man played by William Hartnell, was his grand-daughter Susan. (Also more contentious than sex: Whether William Hartnell was the actual first incarnation of the Doctor, or just the first we’ve seen.) The two were inseparable, each one the only reminder the other had of their home, and the original stories tended to focus on the differences between them and the humans that shared the TARDIS with the Doctor. (When Carole Ann Ford, the actress who played Susan, left the series, some speculated it wouldn’t survive her departure.) Susan’s departure was a watershed moment, a coming of age as the Doctor finally realized that staying with him was preventing her from living her own life. He forced her to stay behind with the man she’d come to love in one of the most bittersweet moments of the show’s history.

And the subsequent episode makes explicit what all the subsequent stories would leave as subtext. Ian and Barbara, the Doctor’s human friends, convince him to adopt a young orphan woman they’ve rescued from a crashed starship as their new traveling companion. Vicki becomes a surrogate grand-daughter to the Doctor, someone who makes him feel young and alive as they share the wonders of exploring the universe together…until she also falls in love with a boy and leaves. And the Doctor found another surrogate for Susan, and another, and another…at heart, Doctor Who is a series about a lonely old man who’s lost his family, and who finds it again with an orphaned girl. (This is the one really big mistake the new series makes with Rose, I think; not that she loves the Doctor, but that she only travels with the Doctor by choice. All the best companions of the old series were running away from something.)

Not every companion is living in Susan’s shadow, of course; Romana, for instance, seems to be pretty blatantly shagging the Doctor off-screen. (Mainly because Lalla Ward and Tom Baker pretty much were blatantly shagging each other off-screen. But now is not the time to delve into the vast store of gossip about who was having sex with who on the set.) But that’s the model of Doctor Who. That’s the reason why all the jokes about “What is the Doctor doing with those pretty young girls between adventures?” miss the point. The Doctor has a father’s love for his companions, not a romantic passion. There is most definitely a difference.

It is said that they’re making a fourth Mission: Impossible movie, and that Brad Bird is in talks to direct it. I think this is a fantastic idea.

A big reason for my enthusiasm is, of course, the involvement Brad Bird himself, a talented filmmaker who made one of the best superhero movies there is with The Incredibles, and who topped it by making a movie about a rat with a keen interest in French cuisine just as engaging.

But the fact of the matter is, I love the Mission: Impossible movies. “But Justin,” you might well say, “the Mission: Impossible franchise … well, it’s hardly even a franchise at all, is it? It’s just generic spy action – those could be any movies. Why, you don’t even have a memorable lead character! Ethan Hunt has no distinguishing characteristics; he’s just Tom Cruise with a gun, which means all he really does is alternate between his intense face and that cocky smile he does, depending on the situation.”

Well, the first thing I would say is that Cruise may only have two expressions, but he does them both so very well. I usually like watching Tom Cruise in things, and I can think of no reason for this other than he just radiates charm; certainly it’s not a mystery why this guy is a movie star, right?

But onto the larger issues … look, the thing is, not a whole lot of people today – especially not in that youthful demographic the films are aiming for – have ever seen the original TV show or know what it was like (for the record: I’ve never seen it either). But you know what everyone in America does know, even if they’ve never seen that show?

Bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da deedillooo…deedillooo…deedillooo…da na. BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…NA NA!

Um, and so on. They are not making the movie version of the show, they are making the movie version of that song, because that is one of the most stirring television themes ever written.  The producers felt pretty safe that as long as you had that theme, a couple of catchphrases from the show (“Your mission, should you choose/decide to accept it” and “This message will self destruct in five seconds,” which everybody also knows despite never having seen that show) a bankable leading man, and a lot of explosions, you could put pretty much anything in there and it would sell.

Instead of being a weakness, however, it turns out to be the franchise’s greatest strength.

See, James Bond movies are very clearly defined stylistically. There is a relatively narrow range of things you can do with Bond, and when you start moving out of that range, moviegoers go, “Hmm, I don’t know…it doesn’t feel like James Bond.” You could never put, say, Quentin Tarantino, or Edgar Wright, or John Carpenter on a Bond movie. It wouldn’t work, because their styles are all so distinctive and so not-Bond. What you need are extremely talented, but not flashy, directors to do 007. The direction must serve the franchise.

But the Mission: Impossible franchise, as it exists, has no unity of theme or character or style, so it doesn’t matter if they don’t match up. There is no recognizable franchise to serve, so you can get very talented directors and just let them go nuts. So the first movie is very much a Brian DePalma movie, very stylish and glossy. The second movie is John Woo doing his ultracool gun stuff, right down to the doves. And the third one lets J.J. Abrams revisit his Alias political-intrigue-and-personal-stakes bag of tricks. Three different directors with three different styles produce three movies that have absolutely nothing to do with one another. So the sort of metatextual brilliance in all this – which I’m sure was not planned, but it’s there anyway – it’s not just Ethan Hunt being given his assignment, it’s also the directors…

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make an action movie using the following elements:

1. Tom Cruise, and a box for him to stand on when interacting with taller actresses.

2. Ving Rhames as a guy who constantly points out how dangerous/impossible/crazy the mission they’re on is as a way to pump up the tension a bit.

3. A pre-existing suspension of disbelief that you can make masks so lifelike that they’re indistinguishable from the original person (despite differences in height, weight, etc.), yet peel off painlessly with one good tug.

…and of course…

4. Bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da, bum, bum, ba-da deedillooo…deedillooo…deedillooo…da na. BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…BA-NA-NAAA…NA NA!”

The wonderful thing about the DVD revolution is the way that it makes it possible for just about anyone to become a film student. Videotapes began the process, of course, but their limitations meant that the really nice versions of a lot of movies were only available to someone who was willing to shell out the big bucks for a laserdisc player (and the expensive discs it played.) Once DVDs really caught on, though, science-fiction fans like myself could take an informative, exhaustive, and above all cheap trip through the history of the genre.

All of which is by way of introduction to my decision, some years back, to sit down and watch The Omega Man, Logan’s Run, and Soylent Green. I figured I might learn something about my sci-fi geek ancestors by watching what I thought of as an informal, accidental trilogy. All three of them had come out on DVD, and all three of them had come out in very reasonably-priced versions. And most importantly, all three of them had become, in their own way, pop-cultural touchstones. I didn’t know exactly why I grouped them together in my head beyond that, but I figured it would come to me as I watched them.

It actually didn’t. Perhaps it was because the project took a little longer than planned; I watched Logan’s Run in 2002, but I didn’t get around to watching The Omega Man and Soylent Green until about four years later. (In my defense, in the intervening time I bought a house, wrote a couple of books and some short stories, and watched lots of other movies. Oh, and I started a blog.) Even after I’d finally watched all three, though, the connection never gelled in my mind. I knew it was there; I was sure I was right to see them as somehow linked. But it still didn’t click as to why.

Until recently, when I read about another movie that came out not long afterwards. It’s a little cult film from a director that only did a handful of movies, a sort of avant-garde sci-fi flick that tried to graft the techniques of cinema verité into a new genre. You might have heard of it, though. It’s called Star Wars.

(pause for laughter)

(pause some more for laughter)

No? Not even a little? OK, I’ll move on. The point is, Star Wars came out only a couple of years after Logan’s Run, but the two of them look like they’re from different decades. Logan’s Run is a very technically polished science fiction film, with effects that no doubt dazzled contemporary audiences, but it’s still one of the last pre-Star Wars films, whereas Star Wars is the first post-Star Wars film. (Yes, Star Wars is a post-Star Wars film. I’ll explain.)

All three of the films in my informal trilogy share that same elusive element, that quality that changed in the watershed moment when Star Wars transformed science-fiction cinema for better and/or worse. They’re better, simply in terms of production quality, than 50s sci-fi movies like The Thing, It Conquered the World, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers…but you can see a continuum of evolution between those movies and Soylent Green, whereas something like Transformers doesn’t even look like it came from the same breeding stock. It looks more like a descendant of Star Wars…OK, a brain-damaged, atrophied descendant, but a descendant nonetheless.

I think the key is Lucas’ decision, with Star Wars, to create an immersive environment. People talk about the special effects of Star Wars as though that was the film’s great breakthrough, but it really didn’t make that many advances beyond what was already possible. (Which is not to denigrate the advances it did make–motion control cameras allowed for fluid, realistic shots of space battles that were essential to the director’s vision.) But the real change was the extra care that was taken in crafting the models, the costumes, the sets and the locations. Lucas wanted you to feel like he was shooting a documentary, not a science-fiction movie.

Previous science-fiction effects artists weren’t lazy when they didn’t take that same amount of care–they were just thinking about the effects in a different way. To them, the science-fiction genre was the genre of ideas; everything was an allegory, a representation of existing concepts. Logan’s Run was about the generation gap. Soylent Green was about overpopulation and pollution. The Omega Man was about nuclear war. Likewise, the effects were representational instead of realistic. Prior to Lucas, science-fiction was the cinema of ideas.

Actually, Star Wars is an allegory too. It’s a movie made by a cynical veteran of the 60s, with the Empire as a stand-in for a pre-Watergate Nixon administration that seemed (at the time) to be about one bad week away from dissolving Congress and declaring martial law. The only solution, according to Lucas’ actually pretty radical and highly politically-charged script, is for armed rebellion against the tyrannical government, aided by all the other races that the Powers That Be ruthlessly oppress. (Early drafts of the script contained sequences that later trickled into Return of the Jedi. The highly trained, professional soldiers with all the cool technology getting their asses kicked by natives with pointy sticks and stolen guns? Gee, what war was going on right around then?)

The problem is, Lucas made the film so immersive that nobody noticed the allegory, and the effects so beautiful that everyone judged all subsequent films by the standards he set. From now on, an important aspect of all science-fiction movies would be, “Are the effects realistic?” The cinema of ideas was replaced, in that instant, by the cinema of visceral experience. Sci-fi became all about making you feel as if you were there, recreating the documentary feel of Star Wars instead of the philosophy of it. A post-Star Wars movie was one you lived, not thought about. (Which is why, despite having intended to make a pre-Star Wars movie, Lucas made a post-Star Wars movie in the eyes of everyone who saw it. See? Makes sense now, right?)

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that every science-fiction movie made before Star Wars was a deep, insightful allegory, any more than it means that every post-Star Wars film was a brain-dead piece of eye-candy. Writers and directors still have things to say in their art, and that’s a constant in any time and any genre. But the emphasis shifted with Star Wars…and by watching Logan’s Run, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green, you can see some of the most advanced examples of films made before that watershed moment, the apex of the cinema of ideas.

And, um…if you haven’t seen them, please don’t read the comments section. Because someone’s going to spoil the ending of Soylent Green, I guarantee it.