I’ll probably end up going with a Motorola Milestone (the international equivalent of the Droid) through Telus.

I am just posting this so everybody can have a chance to tell me I am getting the wrong smartphone, or alternatively to self-importantly explain how they don’t have a cellphone and only communicate through smoke signals. Smoke signals are the new fixies!

I’m almost getting sick of writing about Rob Ford and his demented, dishonest mayoral campaign, but what the hell, really.

Even non-Torontonians should see that Youtube. It’s amazingly bad. Watch it, and then realize that Ford is the frontrunner in an election for one of the largest governments in Canada.

One of the things writers don’t talk about much is the loss of your babies. Not actual babies, mind you. That would be terrible.1 No, what I’m talking about is the experience of coming up with a really great idea, filing it away in your Idea Box to be used later, and then watching, haplessly, as somebody else uses it.

My favorite example of this happening to me is probably Demonic. Demonic was an idea that I had and then fleshed out, a serial narrative – could be television, could be comics, could be short stories or novels. It was always on the back end of my “to-do” list: a story about a demon who, for reasons of his own, had decided that Armageddon was kind of a bad bag and that wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t have one?

Not a new idea, of course. Good Omens did it first. But I figured I had enough of a spin on it that my take was fresh: Darius, my demon, was an antihero rather than a lovable misfit like Gaiman/Pratchett’s Crowley. He wasn’t saving the Earth because he loved it, he was averting Armageddon because it offended his sense of pride. He didn’t bring along humans for companionship; he brought them along because he needed them to do very specific things for his Plan (always, always the capital P).2 It was distinct enough that it was its own story, a sort of “what if the Doctor was really kind of a bad person but still the protagonist” idea. I rather liked it. Plus I got to have the end of the world happen in Indianapolis, because you can justify anything in a story like this and why not?

Of course, then Eric Kripke came along and created Supernatural, which has way more in common with Demonic than Good Omens did; more political intrigue among the ranks of Heaven and Hell, more brutal in tone than Omens was, and oh yes it’s another story about averting Biblical Armadeggon and maybe you can do two of them but you can’t do three, not with that many similarities. I watched with that odd combination of delight and nausea as ideas I had also occurred to the writing staff of the show: the crossroads demons, the Croatoan plague3 and hellhounds had all been on my list, among other things.

So now Demonic gets shoved into the “scavenge” box, which is my mental box of ideas other people have also had but might have something I can use later. One thing I think I’ll eventually use somewhere else is my idea for Uriel, the archangel of Death. See, of late the Death pendulum has swung back towards Death generally being an unpleasant sort of anthropomorphic concept, as Neil Gaiman’s Death has faded into the background and meaner, more sadistic Deaths have taken the forefront. Supernatural’s Death is really kind of a prick, killing off an entire restaurant of people just to have a meet-and-greet, and he just piles on with other Deaths who are kind of dicks.4 Pratchett’s Death in the Discworld books is really the only holdout on the “Death is probably a pleasant enough fellow” side of the equation.

So my idea was that Uriel would appear as a kindly old hippie – think Tommy Chong in his late sixties, shuffling around a hospital in a fringed brown jacket in sandals, escorting the ghosts of children on towards whatever came next. I rather liked that image; I think it’s got some oomph to it.5 The idea of Death as perhaps just a bit mournful, a dedicated and concientious professional doing a really, really terrible job, is one that I think works. (Pratchett’s Death comes close, but is, when you get down to it, a bit too alien to really get existentially sad about his work. He might have a bit of a depressive moment, but he always rebounds. What I’m talking about here instead is a general sense of melancholy.)

That’s how writers recycle their own unused chaff, trying to find a little wheat they can still use. Because the great secret of writing is that you are not a special flower and your ideas are not unique snowflakes; somebody else will have them if you don’t use them.

1. Also writers would talk about it all the time and write novels about it. And have. But I digress. [↩]
2. Of course, over the course of the series discovering friendship et cetera humanized by his drafted “companions” and so forth. [↩]
3. I was all NO SERIOUSLY I EVEN NAMED IT THE SAME GODDAMNED THING. That one physically hurt. [↩]
4. See also: Final Destination’s unseen Death, who really is a total asshole. [↩]
5. That is a very technical term. Oomph is quantifiable. For example, Tom Mota spraypainting the billboard in Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came To The End is a sequence with forty-one oomph. [↩]

My weekly TV series is up at Torontoist.

1.)

ME: Team Dating Couple #47 On The Left can’t find the flags for the airline.
FLAPJACKS: Well, at least they’re getting it out of the way early this season.
ME: What?
FLAPJACKS: The “one team decides that THIS moment is the time when the producers finally decide to not mark something Race-related with a flag.” They always mark everything with flags. You might miss the flags, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. If you see no flag ANYWHERE, odds are you are not where you are supposed to be and no, this is not your challenge or destination.
ME: Well, they don’t mark the entire route with flags. I mean, countries would get angry.
FLAPJACKS: This is true. We have enough problems that are flag-related as it is.
ME: Luckily, Team Dating And Shouts At Each Other recovers! Oh boy! I sure am glad they’ll stick around. Teams like this remind you of how awesome the rest of the Race is because they are so terrible.
FLAPJACKS: That’s like saying ice cream would be better if you put a blob of poop on it. Your theory is flawed.

2.)

ME: My word, is that an actual clue rather than a “go here and do that” statement?
FLAPJACKS: It is indeed!
ME: THIS IS THE TOUGHEST RACE EVER!
FLAPJACKS: Just like Phil said! Phil would not lie to us.

3.)

FLAPJACKS: You know, for the British leg of the trip, I was rather expecting something more Britishy. What do we get? Stonehenge, something to do with a castle, something vaguely to do with knights, and bad boats.
ME: Come on. These are tremendously British. First off, they gave the actors the chance to show off their terrible oral hygiene. Secondly, we got to re-enact Dark Ages-era British-style castle defense, which explains why everybody conquered them so many times before Norman the Conqueror decided that he might as well stay. It is actually true that early British people thought that hurling dirty water at your enemies would make them stop raiding the castle.
FLAPJACKS: Are you going to suggest next that the watermelon hurling has anything to do with anything?
ME: No, that was a production error. They were originally going to have the contestants swim in a giant vat of chicken tikka masala searching for clues, but the vat didn’t show up in time. So they had to cover, and they had all these knights around for flavour, and thus…

4.)

ME: Okay, so are the tattoo people the stupidest team ever?
FLAPJACKS: Well, on the one hand they got lost multiple times, didn’t understand the riddle, didn’t know what Stonehenge was, didn’t even know Stonehenge existed, thought a “battlement” was a person, and walked past the big pile of boats multiple times as they looked for boats. On the other hand, they did not try to eat their clue envelope. This is too close to call.
ME: I worry that they are lowering the bar too low for stupid teams. It’s only a matter of time before somebody tries to eat a clue envelope.
FLAPJACKS: And then get indignant when it turns out that was the wrong thing to do.
ME: “It made sense at the time!”
FLAPJACKS: …and now one of them thinks London is a country.
ME: I think the other one is eyeing that clue and thinking “man, I’m hungry.”

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.)

Hi, I’m Karen, your substitute SYTYCD blogger. You may remember me from one previous occasion when I did this in 2008. I don’t know what I was smoking back then, because I described Leah Miller as “quippy” and Jae Blaze’s choreography in the legendary Lisa and Vincent Raggedy Ann and Andy hip-hop number as “kind of balls”. Who was that person?

Amazingly, MGK has invited me back to blog the Top 14 episode of Season 3 of SYTYCDC while he’s off being a lawyer or liveblogging mayoral debates or whatever. To be perfectly honest with you, I also recently started a new job and am still getting used to the 9-5 workday (as opposed to waking up at 9:30, one benefit of grad school/unemployment) and I’m so tired that I’m mostly communicating in grunts and purrs. So bear with me.

Tonight is Top 14 night and your guest judges are Mia Michaels and Sean Cheeseman so you know there’s probably going to be some crying. Mia’s hairdo is fascinating; she looks like Iggy Koopa.

Tonight is also the night when the dancers switch partners, so they have to say something nice about the other person in the bio clip. You can really tell who is happy to be working with who. A few couples say stuff like, “I’m happy to be paired with so-and-so, because they seem like a hard worker and I like working hard!” which is a moot point because if you’re a good enough dancer to be on this show, you’re probably used to working your ass off.

Charlene and Mackenzie: Jive. That they managed to keep up with the jive’s speed was impressive, but their moves (esp. kicks) were sloppy and flailing. I thought their chemistry was awful; so much so that Mackenzie actually walked off stage into a pile of other girls at the end. Mia calls this dance “Near perfection,” but I call it, “Whatever.” But either way, I really like Charlene. I don’t think she has star quality but she’s a great dancer and very likable.

Amanda and Sebastian: Contemporary. OMG SO MANY LIMBS. I realize that Stacey Tookey was going for the Canadian equivalent of an Emmy with this “Grieving Parents Dance” but I totally hated it. Amanda and Sebastian did not hit a believable emotional tenor throughout this entire piece; it seemed way too happy! “Hooray, our child is dead! Join me in a ridiculous flailing of limbs!” But that aside, I like both of these dancers and their unique styles and can’t wait to see them in other dances together. And so do the judges, which is why they gave them absolutely no critique.

Claudia and Denys: Brazilian Samba, Capoeira Fusion. Gustavo Vargas, please continue to fuse Brazilian Samba and Capoiera! It was so kick ass. Denys’ performance in this number was one of the highlights of the season. He’s quickly becoming one of my favourites. Claudia was not remotely good in this, and all the sexyface in the world couldn’t save her. The judges tore her to shreds, except for Jean Marc who obviously has to represent for the Quebecois ballroom scene

Kloé and Shavar: Theatre. What can I say about this dance? I didn’t watch a second of it because I was so distracted by the bizarre costumes and sets that looked like they were right out of the movie From Hell. My boyfriend also pointed out the ridiculousness of a man wearing morning dress at night. Mia calls these two, “the weakest links in the competition”. I won’t be sad to see them go.

Janick and Jeff: Hip Hop. I was prepared for this to be really bad but Janick was convincing. No matter what Tre said, Jeff was not “swaggalicious” but he gave it a fine effort. Despite his “Wonderbread Face”, I really like Jeff. I fell in love with his legs during the audition episodes and they continue to keep me swooning. Clearly hip-hop is not his forte but I don’t really care yet.

Danielle and Edgar: Contemporary. Suicide-attempt dance! Was that supposed to be a NOOSE in the opening? This was terrible choreography, c/o Sabrina Matthews, but Danielle and Edgar danced the shit out of it anyway. I have high hopes for this partnership.

Natalie and Jonathan: Jazz. I was really reluctant to like this, but how could I resist? It was a bundle of joy! A delicious confection! Natalie and Jonathan’s chemistry and commitment to their characters in this cutesypoo routine totally sold it. Excellent choreo from Blake McGrath. Natalie was fantastic, Jonathan was good. Jean Marc gave Jonathan an ACTUAL critique and the audience booed him but I yayed him. Let’s have more of that.

FLAPJACKS: So how’s the new job?
ME: Fine.
FLAPJACKS: Just “fine”?
ME: It’s a good job.
FLAPJACKS: Are you defending the innocent with legal stuff?
ME: Sorta.
FLAPJACKS: Oh. Are you working for The Man?
ME: Not really.
FLAPJACKS: So you’re in that grey indeterminate haze of legal morality?
ME: Basically?
FLAPJACKS: Well, I guess that’s all right for the time being so long as you can loan me money.
ME: I can’t.
FLAPJACKS: Then it is a horrible injustice of a work environment and I demand you increase your standards.
ME: Shut up.
FLAPJACKS: But seriously, why is it “fine?”
ME: I’m working in a small law office. I like that. It’s hands-on. What’s not fine about that?
FLAPJACKS: Do you have to wear a tie?
ME: Yes.
FLAPJACKS: Then that’s not fine.
ME: Well, in law you don’t usually get to not wear a tie.
FLAPJACKS: You could work for some hippie law firm. I bet they don’t wear ties.
ME: If I want to go to court, I have to wear a tie. It’s kind of the rules. Even hippie lawyers wear ties to court. Maybe the ties are made of hemp, but they’re still ties.
FLAPJACKS: You know I’m only saying this because I know you absolutely hate wearing ties.
ME: Yes.
FLAPJACKS: Yes you hate wearing ties or yes you know that’s why I’m saying it?
ME: Both.
FLAPJACKS: Haven’t you always hated wearing ties? I mean, I remember one time you described them as “portable nooses.”
ME: That mangle your soul like Jeffrey Dahmer with a gay prostitute, yes.
FLAPJACKS: And now you’re in a job where you always have to wear ties.
ME: Pretty much.
FLAPJACKS: Boy, did you make good career choices. Did nobody tell you “hey, before you go to law school, you should probably know that lawyers wear ties” or did everybody just assume you already knew that?
ME: Shut up.
FLAPJACKS: Why do you hate ties, anyway?
ME: They get in the way of everything. You eat, you have to be careful of your tie. You go to the bathroom, you have to be careful of your tie. You do ANYTHING other than sit at a desk, you have to be careful of your tie.
FLAPJACKS: I see.
ME: Plus there’s wind.
FLAPJACKS: Wait, what?
ME: You know how in the movies when wind blows past somebody with a tie, the tie blows dramatically off to one side and looks badass?
FLAPJACKS: Yeah?
ME: In real life it just flies straight up into your face and you look like a schmuck. I wouldn’t mind ties quite so much if they didn’t do that.
FLAPJACKS: Yes you would.
ME: Well, okay, yeah.
FLAPJACKS: So what you’re saying is that there is a market for ties that look awesome in the wind and blow the right way. The Will Smith Coming Out Of An Explosion Tie.
ME: Not really.
FLAPJACKS: I bet I could rig something up with a system of weights. Or maybe strings.
ME: I should just stop you right now before you proceed to the bank with a business plan where you have liberally sprinkled the word “awesome.”
FLAPJACKS: Why don’t banks like things that are awesome?
ME: They just don’t.
FLAPJACKS: Besides, I was going to ask you for the startup capital.
ME: I thought we covered that I don’t have it.
FLAPJACKS: Damn.

So Toronto’s mayoral candidates had their seven billionth debate last night and, as always, I was watching.

The Event debuted last night, and did respectable numbers, but like just most sci-fi/mystery/whatever TV shows since… well, Lost, it was a terrible bit of television. Every season it seems there’s one or two “we’re the next Lost” shows in some network’s can; every season most of them fail. FlashForward is the most recent, but also consider Persons Unknown, Kings, Journeyman – nobody will ever learn all the mysteries involved in these shows because nobody cares. At best, you get something like Heroes, Dollhouse or Sarah Connor Chronicles that starts out strong, then limps to a relatively early cancellation.1

The genre successes of the past few years other than Lost have been less continuity-heavy fare.2 This isn’t to say that shows like Supernatural or Chuck don’t have continuity, because they obviously do – but they can also do “monster/spy of the week” episodes to lighten the burden of the ever-present overall metaplot. They don’t require quite the level of commitment to enjoy; there’s a good chance, with any given episode, that you can jump in and watch and be entertained regardless of not knowing all the rules about how Sam and Dean can capture demons, or what the Intersect is exactly. They’re not as entry-level as, say, Law and Order or most other cop procedurals – but they’re certainly more accessible than a show like Lost, where in order to understand what’s going on you basically have to watch from the beginning.

Does this mean you can’t make a successful mythology-heavy show? Of course not: Lost proves that you can – as does Battlestar Galactica, for that matter. But Lost and BSG offer up a set of guidelines for the prospective TV producer that often go ignored.

1.) Have a clearly defined story and viewpoint for your premiere episode. Lost‘s first episode is the crash of Oceanic 817 and the immediate fallout from it. Battlestar‘s first episode is the Cylons eradicating most of humanity and the escape of the last human fleet. These are simple, relatively straightforward ideas designed to introduce the larger, vastly more complex narrative in an engaging way. Compare this to The Event, which bounces around an entire year of its storyline willy-nilly throughout the first episode in a way that’s almost schizophrenic: you never feel grounded in the story because it feels like you’re browsing a Wikipedia entry rather than watching a TV show.

They’re made more palatable by reducing the number of perspectives from which we view the opening story. Lost‘s premiere episode is largely about Jack and Kate; most of the cast gets introduced, of course, but Jack and Kate’s viewpoints are what shape the story. Battlestar works primarily from three perspectives – Adama, Roslin and Baltar – again introducing other characters, but relying on those three perspectives to drive the story. Heroes (which had a good pilot, as much as I disliked the show generally) was primarily about Hiro, Peter and Mohinder.

Simple, right? Well, compare to Flashforward, where the entire show’s cast gets about three minutes apiece to do their thing. You don’t care about anybody because you don’t have enough time to get to know anybody. The Event is nearly as bad in this respect.

2.) Make sure your hook is a good one. The Event fails in this regard, too. “There are these guys? And they are vaguely mysterious? And there is a conspiracy? And a plane disappears, I guess?” The question marks are not simply there for effect; after watching the episode, you’re still not sure what it was about. Flashforward doesn’t work either, because “people prepare for a future that is forthcoming with vague sense of dread” might work for a book (and did!) but as a teevee show it is not thrilling. Lost has a great one (“after a disaster, survivors must rally together in a strange new environment”) which Persons Unknown unsuccessfully tried to copy. Journeyman stole its premise from Quantum Leap, so it was solid, but… eh.

Kings, while ambitious, never really had a good hook. “It’s the life of David… but with lasers and tanks and stuff” is simply not an enthralling idea and despite the fact that Kings was actually executed really well, the general pointlessness of its concept (retelling a story everybody knows the ending to) was one of the reasons cited to me frequently as to why people weren’t watching it: it was the Gus Van Sant shot-by-shot remake of Psycho of TV series. Okay, that’s a little unfair, but it’s one of the reasons the show flopped.3

3.) Don’t try to do too much in your pilot. People tend to forget that Lost was originally designed to have a two-hour pilot (and for all practical intents and purposes did, since in any market where they didn’t air the pilot as a two-hour feature, they aired the first hour back-to-back against the second the next week). Battlestar was a four-hour miniseries before it was a show. And again: these were two shows that had pretty straightforward opening premises (a plane crash and a very, very fast Cylon blitzkrieg). FlashForward tried to show pretty much all of its initiating event (a two-minute coma for the entire human race) in a single hour. The Event… don’t get me started.4

In two hours, Lost introduces its main characters (and I mean main characters – Jack, Kate and Charlie are the only ones who get any serious grounding) and establishes that there is a monster on the island and it is weird there. In one hour, The Event doesn’t really introduce any character other than Goatee Kid and President Man, and then time-jumps him so much you have no idea what’s happening. That’s not the key to a good, story-dense series that keeps people coming back. The first episode of a TV series is like the first chapter of a novel: even if you’re going to use storytelling tricks, you need to give people an idea of what your story is about, and that means not going all over the place.

1. Well, Dollhouse didn’t start out strong and in fact always mostly sucked, but you get my point. [↩]
2. Or they are vampire shows with vampires being vampirey. Also, porny. [↩]
3. Also it was on NBC on Sundays. [↩]
4. Incidentally, I would like to applaud the producers of that show for trying to build tenseness into an action sequence after letting the audience know what would happen beforehand. No. Really. That was absolutely brilliant of you guys. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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!