Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: creator: steven moffat

Showing posts with label creator: steven moffat. Show all posts

21 December 2022

The Cruel Sea (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 30)

The Cruel Sea: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Robert Shearman, Mike Collins, Gareth Roberts, Steven Moffat, et al.

Collection published: 2014
Contents originally published: 2005-06
Acquired: December 2014
Read: September 2022

I've always been a bit salty that this book exists. Well, it would be more accurate to say that I am salty that the DWM Special Edition The Ninth Doctor Collected Comics exists. I dutifully bought that, expecting that no such graphic novel would ever come out—there just weren't enough strip adventures to justify such a collection! Eight years later, and the size of these collections had been halved, and so I bought those stories all over again, with just one addition—a prose story that I already had! Well, that and the as usual excellent extras.

So this was a reread again for me, but the added context of the extras was new. I appreciated in particular that were get to hear a lot from Mike Collins, who illustrated every DWM strip of the ninth Doctor; this is one of those eras where we have a consistent artist but not a consistent writer. I've opined before that you need one of those two, otherwise the strip doesn't feel cohesive because you don't have an actor's performance to unify the various voices as the tv programme does. And Mike Collins does good work; he's been with DWM since 1987 as a writer, and since 1991 as an artist, but I knew him first from his work on Star Trek comics for Marvel and Wildstorm and Babylon 5 comics for DC. He's good at likenesses, great at storytelling—exactly the artist you want, I reckon, when you're suddenly producing a tv tie-in strip to an actual tv programme for the first time in over fifteen years!

It's funny, in the extras to both this and the next volume, The Betrothal of Sontar, editor Clay Hickman talks about how they felt they had to a go a bit more kid-friendly now that the tv show was back... but I would hesitate to call any of the DWM strips here notably kid friendly, especially Rob Shearman's! But overall, I remembered this era as a bit of a shambles, and rereading it I didn't find that true at all. It's not perfect, but this is a solid slice of Doctor Who comics. Certainly it's much better than what DWM was putting out last time the tv programme was still on!

from Doctor Who Magazine #356

The Love Invasion, from Doctor Who Magazine #355-57 (Apr.-June 2005)
script by Gareth Roberts, story by Roberts/Hickman, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by Dylan Teague and James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

The ninth Doctor and Rose debut with a very solid piece of Russell T Davies pastiche. There's a lot of running back and forth in 1960s London as the Doctor and Rose must piece together what links some overly helpful young women, the death of several prominent scientists, and a woman who keeps killing aliens. There's solid humor, a decent alien motivation, and a strong sense of the voices of both Eccleston and Piper. The main thing I didn't like was that there's sort of a fake-out double ending, which felt tacked on.

Art Attack, from Doctor Who Magazine #358 (July 2005)
story & pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by Kris Justice, colours by Dylan Teague, lettering by Roger Langridge

This is a decent story with a good ending, about the Doctor and Rose coming to a futuristic art gallery, and getting caught up in an evil piece of performance art. That said, I felt like there's a better version of this story somewhere in the multiverse: a comics story about art written by an artist seems like it could have done more fun stuff than the story does, and there's surprisingly little made of the fact that both the Doctor and the alien are the last of their kinds—that would have been the emotional center of the story on tv, I think.

from Doctor Who Magazine #359

The Cruel Sea, from Doctor Who Magazine #359-62 (Aug.-Nov. 2005)
story by Robert Shearman, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I was pretty surprised when Mike Collins noted this as one of the best comic strips he's ever illustrated—because to me it was the weakest story in this volume. It has striking visuals—a cruise ship on the red oceans of Mars, Billie Piper in a skintight spacesuit, a woman whose face looks like a fractured mirror—and some neat uses of the medium—the conversation between the two Doctors—but even though I'm a big fan of Robert Shearman's audio work for Big Finish and his original prose fiction, I found something deeply unpleasant about reading this story. Some of the visuals struck me as inappropriate for the Doctor Who of 2005, and some I just didn't like. Well rendered, but genuinely unpleasant to think about. It's the kind of thing Shearman makes work in prose or audio, I guess (there's some gross stuff in Scherzo), but when you have to actually see it, it's very different. The characters generally are unpleasant, too—this story is very much the epitome of something that's well-crafted but just did not work for me.

When I posted the above on GallifreyBase, Rob himself popped up to opine, "I absolutely agree with you! I'm so grateful to Mike Collins for his amazing art and lovely support, but I don't think I got this story right at all. I've never been a big comics fan, and so misunderstood the particular demands of the medium - and yeah, I think I got the tone wrong completely." Phew!

from Doctor Who Annual 2006

Mr Nobody / What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow, from Doctor Who Annual 2006
stories by Scott Gray and Steven Moffat, art by John Ross and Martin Geraghty, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

These two stories, one comics, one prose, are both from Panini's only Doctor Who Annual, and are both more child-focused than the average DWM strip. But they're still both solid. You can of course count on Scott Gray for a well put-together done-in-one, and Steven Moffat's story is a fun time travel loop. We should meet this Sally Sparrow again!

from Doctor Who Magazine #364

A Groatsworth of Wit, from Doctor Who Magazine #363-64 (Dec. 2005–Jan. 2006)
story by Gareth Roberts, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

The ninth Doctor's DWM tenure comes to a quick end with this, a decently fun story with some good jokes and a nice last scene. Obviously this ended up a dry run for a David Tennant episode, like some many stories in this volume, but it's different enough to be worthwhile.

Other Notes:

The Love Invasion, despite being three issues long, spans the entirety of Christopher Eccleston's on-screen tenure.
The behind-the-scenes stuff about Mike Collins trying to get Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper's likenesses down was great. On the one hand, Eccleston kept shooting down images that were too heroic and good-looking and muscular, too American comics! On the other hand, Piper just said, "Ooh, he's given me hips and tits, I like it!"
After all the talk of likenesses, it thus becomes very noticeable when Rose has a dream in The Cruel Sea about marrying Mickey, but we never actually see his face, presumably so the story could avoid an extra set of approvals just for a one-page sequence.
Elements of The Love Invasion, The Cruel Sea, What I Did on My Christmas Holidays, and A Groatsworth of Wit arguably all ended up on screen. The latter two are obvious, but Clay Hickman makes the case that The Cruel Sea influenced "The Waters of Mars." Is this an offshoot of the Flood? A GallifreyBase commenter pointed out to me that the scene in Love Invasion where the Doctor counteracts being poisoned by eating random foods was lifted for "The Unicorn and the Wasp."
Rose is the first companion to spontaneously appear in the strip since Benny, and only the second to ever do so. Every other previous companion was introduced, even if (as in Peri and Ace) it was a reintroduction. Between this and the Doctor's regeneration, the illusion of the DWM strip as a standalone continuous narrative is shattered. We're in for a lot of that over the next couple years...
Rob Shearman is, I think, the first tv writer to work on the strip since Marc Platt. (Though one other strip writer here would go on to be a tv writer, as is the case with a couple past writers.)
It's pretty mind-boggling to learn about the ninth Doctor strips we didn't get from the extras: Russell T Davies and Bryan Hitch writing the ninth Doctor's debut! Russell T Davies and Dave Gibbons writing his final episode!! It's a shame we've still never gotten an RTD Doctor Who comic. I don't know if comics would play to his strength like tv, but I'd certainly be interested to see it.

This post is the thirtieth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Betrothal of Sontar. Previous installments are listed below:

07 December 2020

Review: Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown

Published: 2020
Acquired and read: November 2020

Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown

edited by Steve Cole

This slim anthology collects Doctor Who material created or published during 2020's coronavirus lockdown; some of it was for the Doctor Who web site, some of it was released as part of the series of tweetalongs organized by Emily Cook, some of it is original to this book. I always like a good Doctor Who anthology, and this is a great one. Steven Moffat explains what the terror of the Umpty Ums is as the Doctor faces down the DeathBorg known as Karpagnon; Russell T Davies gives us a glimpse into the way the Time War could have ended if Paul McGann had regenerated straight into Christopher Eccleston; Neil Gaiman reveals an incident in the life of the Corsair; Pete McTighe discovers that the Doctor also enjoys watching her past adventures; Paul Cornell revisits both Daughter-of-Mine from "Human Nature" and Bernice Summerfield; Mark Gatiss reunites the Doctor with her granddaughter. All this and some great illustrations, too; my favorites included Valentina Mozzo's of the Doctor fist-bumping a Judoon and Chris Riddell's of the Corsair.

It reads briskly but it reads well. Moffat shows that he can always craft an engaging Doctor Who story by mixing the fear of a child with the solace of the Doctor and yet always find something new and fun to do with it. Plus, of course, good jokes! Davies's closing pages of a faux Time War novelization are an utter delight, firing off more great Time War ideas in ten pages than Big Finish has in ten dozen box sets.

I really like Paul Cornell's "Shadow" trilogy: three linked stories of the Doctor coming to doubt that her punishment for Daughter-of-Mine in "The Family of Blood" was just, though the best one is probably the one that has the least to do with that premise; "The Shadow Passes" focuses on the thirteenth Doctor, Yaz, Graham, and Ryan spending time in a bunker on an alien planet. Cornell has a good grasp of the voices of these characters, especially the Doctor and Yaz, and make them likeable. I like the Doctor and her companions well enough on screen, but I feel that series 11-12 haven't done a great job using them. In fact, I think all of the authors here render a pretty great Doctor: Chris Chibnall, Moffat, Joy Wilkinson, and Gatiss also really shine. The promise of the thirteenth Doctor was, I think, a light of compassion burning in the darkness. The tv show struggles to make this work, often giving us a Doctor that seems ineffective and a "fam" that just stands there, but Adventures in Lockdown plays to her strengths, with Whittaker's compassion echoing off the page in a time where we need it most.

The only thing that didn't work for me is that seeing the script for "Rory's Story" is pretty pointless; that segment only worked for the novelty of getting to see Arthur Darvill play Rory once more. And though I did like "Shadow of a Doubt," it definitely loses something in not being read aloud by Lisa Bowerman.

28 July 2017

My Hugo Awards 2017 Votes: Dramatic Presentation Categories

This posts covers my votes in the two Hugo categories for "Dramatic Presentations." In each category, I'll start with the story I placed the lowest and move up to the highest.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)

6. Deadpool, screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick, directed by Tim Miller

Well, I never would have watched this film if it wasn't for the Hugos, and I can't say I enjoyed it per se, but I am pretty sure I laughed at the jokes more often than I did in Ghostbusters; I liked the meta gags the most. On the other hand, there sure were a lot of things I had absolutely no inclination to laugh at (lots and lots), and I think that on the whole I am more sympathetic to what Ghostbusters was trying to do than what Deadpool was, even if neither accomplished enough to make me very enthusiastic.

5. Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, screenplay by Katie Dippold and Paul Feig, directed by Paul Feig

This was all right. Kinda funny, but not very funny. Some good gags (the Chinese delivery one had a great pay-off, and I liked Chris Hemsworth's character), but at the end it kind of drown in tedious city-destroying spectacle like too many modern sf&f films. Like, I had a good time-- the interplay between the main characters is very likable-- but I suspect I will never want to see this again.

4. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, screenplay by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, directed by Gareth Edwards

I know a lot of people raved about this film, but I didn't find it near as good as The Force Awakens. A good take on a war film in the Star Wars world, and Gareth Edwards has a great way with striking visuals and giving the effects heft, and of course there are some wonderful callbacks to the original film, but I found this lacked the emotional weight I think this wanted to have. Jyn's story felt muddled. A lot to like, but little to love.

3. Hidden Figures, screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, directed by Theodore Melfi

I enjoyed this. It's not science fiction or fantasy, but I guess the official guidelines also allow "related subjects" and I'd rather see this get the award than two 1980s franchise revivals. Even outside of that, it's a pretty good film with some strong performances and a number of great scenes, casting light on a part of the Space Race I knew nothing about despite growing up watching PBS documentaries about NASA.

2. Stranger Things Season One, created by the Duffer Brothers

Coming after Ghostbusters and Rogue One, 1980s nostalgia clearly rules the Hugos this year-- but this is an original work, not another installment in a franchise. I thought this was marvelous, a slow-burn television show that actually works, with great characters solidly based in a series of excellent performances. I loved all the kids, and the last couple episodes were especially filled with really strong emotional moments.

1. Arrival, screenplay by Eric Heisserer, directed by Denis Villeneuve

I really enjoyed this. Gorgeous music, beautiful visuals, cool concepts, and a clever twist. But a twist that's not just clever: when you realize what's going on, your entire emotional world changes. Everything just came together for the final act, with a tribute to daring for peace and cooperation, as well as a moving depiction of how we have to keep going in a world where all the certainties feel like bad ones. I need to seek out the Ted Chiang story this is based on now.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

6. Game of Thrones 6x05: "The Door," screenplay by David Benioff & David Weiss, directed by Jack Bender

This is the second episode of Game of Thrones I've seen, the other one being the first episode back in 2011. There's not attempt at all to tell a discrete story within this episode, so to me it just comes across as a series of scenes I can faintly discern the relations between; there's a lot of politics and a lot of plotting and a lot of making armies and a lot of having cod-period drama conversations in front of dramatic landscapes. I did pick up enough to intuit why the closing revelation was probably exciting if you'd been watching the show all along, but for the most part my ignorance was alienating.

5. Game of Thrones 6x09: "Battle of the Bastards," screenplay by David Benioff & David Weiss, directed by Miguel Sapochnik

I enjoyed this more than "The Door," partly because it told more of a distinct story (though there's some side stuff about the dragon lady, most of the episode is about a battle involving at least one bastard), and partly because I had a better idea of who some of the players were thanks to "The Door." A lot of it is right out of the epic medieval movie playbook, down to the last-minute save by a second army, but I did find myself becoming involved. My feeling, having seen these two episodes, is that Sophie Turner is a better actress than this show deserves, and Jon Snow is kind of useless as a military commander. My favorite scene, though, was the one where Gemma Whelan started flirting with the dragon lady. I'm not sure, it might actually be better than "Doctor Mysterio," but I'm using show loyalty as a tiebreaker.

4. Doctor Who 10x00: "The Return of Doctor Mysterio," screenplay by Steven Moffat, directed by Ed Bazalgette

This was Moffat's best Christmas special thus far, I thought, a fun and funny tribute to the Richard Donner Superman films. Why exactly Moffat decided to write a tribute to those thirty years later, I don't know (though as I observed above, apparently 1980s nostalgia is the Hugo finalist ticket these days), but I enjoyed it, even if I suspect the only reason it was nominated for the Hugo was by virtue of being the only episode of Doctor Who to air in 2016; Moffat has done much better work before and since.

3. Splendor & Misery by Clipping.

Well, I would not have guessed than an Afrofuturist hip-hop concept album would be a Hugo finalist, but I ended up really enjoying this, the story of an escaped slave who commandeers a spaceship from his captors but then ends up isolated in the blackness of space and time with only the ship's AI (to which he is somewhat hostile) for company. The ending kind of fizzled for me-- I wanted more of a climax plot-wise, even though we got one musically-- but up until that I enjoyed it a lot, and I still enjoyed it even with those reservations. My favorite track was "All Black," which chronicles the protagonist's adjustment (such as it is) to life alone in space. I listened to it alongside these annotations by Eden Kupermintz, which explained both the story (I always struggle to follow the plots of concept albums; five years on and I still have only a vague notion of what The Hazards of Love is about) and the very dense references to sf (Delany, Le Guin, Butler, and Star Trek: The Next Generation all get mentions, among others, and Kupermintz points out a lot of Cordwainer Smith parallels, too) and to other music, including Clipping.'s own oeuvre. I then went back and watched the three music videos for the album; my favorite was "True Believer"-- like the best music videos, it elevates the music, in this case with a simple but arresting image.

2. The Expanse 1x10: "Leviathan Wakes," screenplay by Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby, directed by Terry McDonough

I really enjoy The Expanse, a space opera that manages to be character-driven and interestingly political at the same time, while putting some hard sf concepts up on the small screen. Though there have been some even better episodes in the second season, the first season's finale was its strongest story, taking what had been two separate plotlines and suddenly jamming together to explosive and emotional effect.

1. Black Mirror 3x04: "San Junipero," screenplay by Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris

This is the first episode I've ever seen of Black Mirror, but it's an anthology series, so that doesn't matter a whole lot. I loved this, an emotional (yes I teared up) tale of two women finding love in the 1980s in improbable circumstances, with some intriguing sfnal ideas. It actually kind of reminded me of Banana, but science fiction. Which is, well, a good thing.

Overall Thoughts

If you let me be grumpy for a moment, the long-form Dramatic Presentation category shows what's wrong with contemporary sf on the big screen: 50% 1980s nostalgia, overlapping with 50% franchise installments. The most original thing on offer is Arrival, an adaptation of a twenty-year-old short story. Though probably if I look back it's never been much better than this, and I did really enjoy what I ranked #1-3. My guess is that Arrival will smash this category.

As for short form, I again really enjoyed by #1-3, though I'm mildly annoyed that "Return of Doctor Mysterio" got nominated solely on the basis of being a Doctor Who episode; I mean, I love Doctor Who, but let's not be blindly partisan here. I have no sense of what will win this year, but a Game of Thrones episode did win short form in both 2013 and 2014. I'm curious to see how this category looks next year, with multiple excellent episodes of Doctor Who to nominate, plus The Expanse's even better second season, and the forthcoming first season of Star Trek: Discovery.

20 November 2015

Kate Stewart's Choice: Doctor Who and the Crisis of the Refugees

I'm sure others have commented on it already, but Doctor Who's recent story ("The Zygon Invasion"/"The Zygon Inversion") about terrorists hiding in a group of refugees has turned out to be eerily timely.

(If you don't watch much Doctor Who, the 50th anniversary special saw an invasion of Earth by the shape-shifting Zygons thwarted through peace negotiations; these stories reveal that the deal was that Zygons would take human form and be redistributed in secret to various locations around the globe, including Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, of crossword puzzle fame. Some of the Zygons, however, resent the deal their leadership struck, and demand to be able to live in their true forms.)

I was surpsised by how brazen an ISIS analogy it all was, even before the tragic Paris attacks. Televised Doctor Who occasionally does political commentary, but it rarely goes this relevant and this controversial; usually we get nothing more than "Paying taxes is a bit annoying," or "Dictatorships are evil." But "The Zygon Invasion" opens with a hostage video that ends in an on-screen execution, talks about young folk being "radicalized," and even engages with the ethics of drone strikes. At the beginning of it, I was a little skeptical, but once I realized that writers Peter Harness and Steven Moffat were just going for it all the way, I decided I liked it more than I didn't. And then I decided I loved it: it's big and brave and kind of mad and the analogy doesn't always make sense, but it has so much to say and gives the Doctor and Clara and the recurring characters so much to do.

A lot of the post-Paris attention to ISIS has been on whether or not we should continue to accept refugees. It's not a big part of the episode (more of the focus is on how do you convince someone to de-radicalize, and what are legitimate uses of violence in carrying out social change), but Doctor Who does engage with this question: near the end, Kate Stewart (head of UNIT and thus representative of humanity) has the option of pressing a button that will do one of two things: set off a nuclear bomb in the heart of London, or release a toxic gas that will kill every Zygon on Earth. The Doctor explains the meaning of the choice (in a tour de force performance from Peter Capaldi):

This is a scale model of war. Every war ever fought, right there in front of you. Because it's always the same. When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who's going to die! You don't know whose children are going to scream and burn! How many hearts will be broken! How many lives shattered! How much blood will spill until everybody does until what they were always going to have to do from the very beginning. Sit down and talk! Listen to me. Listen, I just, I just want you to think. Do you know what thinking is? It's just a fancy word for changing your mind.

The situation we've gotten in real life isn't exactly like this-- refusing refugees isn't going to start a war-- but as states weigh in on whether or not to allow the resettlement of Syrian refugees (my state is thankfully among those that have said "yes"), Kate Stewart's choice is our choice: we can get rid of all refugees out of a selfish and misguided desire to promote our own safety above all else. We won't be killing anyone in the sense of pressing a button that causes death... but how many lives that are already shattered will remain so if we don't help these people?

Truth...

Kate Stewart chooses not to press the button, but not out of principle: rather out of fear of the consequences for her own side (i.e., humanity, and especially Britain). She doesn't decide that violence is not the answer in general, but rather that this particular instance of violence is too risky.

...or consequences.

Those aren't quite the consequences of our choice. There's no chance that not admitting refugees will have a negative impact on our own safety. But, out of principle, we shouldn't press that button anyway. We should stop the children from screaming and burning, the hearts from being broken, the lives from being shattered, the blood from being spilled. Hopefully, unlike Kate Stewart, we can make the right choice out of principle and not fear.

28 August 2012

Review: Doctor Who Storybook 2007 edited by Clayton Hickman

Hardcover, 76 pages
Published 2006
Acquired August 2011
Read June 2012

Doctor Who Storybook 2007

edited by Clayton Hickman

I picked this book up because my wife and I had just listened to Patient Zero and Blue Forgotten Planet, two Big Finish appearances of the Viyrans, and she was curious about them; the story "No One Died" by Nicholas Briggs contains their only appearance in prose. It's an okay story-- there are some good ideas, but the resolution obnoxiously leaves a central mystery dangling!

The rest of the stories are fine: there are no particular standouts, positive or negative. Part of the problem stems, I think, from the fact that most of the writers try to tell a "typical" Doctor Who story in a few pages, not reworking the format to the shorter length as the Short Trips usually do. Still, some are fun, such as Gareth Roberts's "The Cat Came Back," about a strange civilization discovered by the Doctor and Rose. (Martin Geraghty's illustrations are great.) Robert Shearman's "Untitled" has some good ideas-- a picture coming to life-- but the best part of it are the Brian Williamson illustrations it engenders.

I did find Justin Richards's "Gravestone House" sacrificed logic for poorly done "scares," and Jonathan Morris's comic strip "Opera of Doom" is kinda disappointing as well.

On the other hand, Steven Moffat's "Corner of the Eye"-- told in the form of an implausibly detailed instant messenger conversation-- is hella creepy.

27 August 2012

Review: Doctor Who Annual 2006 edited by Clayton Hickman

Hardcover, 62 pages
Published 2005
Acquired August 2009
Read June 2012

Doctor Who Annual 2006

edited by Clayton Hickman

This set of stories are some of the scant few adventures to feature Christopher Eccleston's ninth Doctor: aside from this book, there's just six novels and a slim collection of Doctor Who Magazine comic strips. Despite being written by luminaries such as Paul Cornell and Rob Shearman, they're mostly just okay. Nothing terrible, but Gareth Roberts's "Doctor vs Doctor" just seemed too convoluted, and I never engaged with Cornell's perhaps-too-alien "The Masks of Makassar." Shearman's was a bit better, with "Pitter-patter" giving us some nice creepy moments, and Daryl Joyce turning in some excellent illustrations.

The best stories are definitely the fun little comic strip ("Mr Nobody") by DWM stalwart Scott Gray and illustrator John Ross and "What I Did On My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow" by Steven Moffat, which went on to become the television story "Blink," but is a fun Moffat adventure in its own right. (I actually bought this book to get this story, so that I could assign my students to write a short paper on that adaptation!)

There's also some puzzles and behind-the-scenes stuff which is utterly disposable, with the exception of the volume's highlight: "Meet the Doctor" and "Meet Rose," both written by Russell T Davies. There's nothing quite like seeing how the characters are viewed by their creator himself.