This View That All Too Many Hold In The Church Is Infuriating. Jesus Absolutely Understood The Systemic

poll time because something my mother said pissed me off lmao

and in the tags tell me your gender and age?

On the other hand, Hayles' script for The Celestial Toymaker was completely rewritten by Donald Tosh (including using the Mandarin second meaning of the title), to the point where Hayles was supposed to just be credited for the idea. Which was then again completely rewritten by Gerry Davis to the point where Tosh refused to take credit, and Hayles was ultimately credited on a technicality.

Similarly, Letts and Dicks had Hayles completely revamp his Monster of Peladon script once, and then Dicks did was was apparently a pretty major rewrite of his own.

Which is to say, doesn't it almost seem like cheating to choose a guy whose bad scripts were basically written by other people?

On the other hand (or back on the original hand?), that's a lovely essay.

Which writers have written the Doctor Who episodes most varied in quality? Gaiman? Aaronovitch?

This is framed interestingly, and I like it.

The two proposed are, of course, writers of two episodes of decidedly different receptions. But both have an all-time classic and a lesser work. Neither Nightmare in Silver nor Battlefield are unwatchable lows of the series that curl your toes and make you wish you had never taken that DVD off the shelf, and Doctor Who has those.

But by picking writers who have done more than two stories, you can get ones who have written things that are the equal of The Doctor’s Wife and Remembrance of the Daleks and who have also written ungodly horrors. There is a perspective in which it is hilarious that the writer of Listen also wrote The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe. Robert Holmes presents himself as another good target here. The mighty writer of The Ark in Space and Carnival of Monsters, the genius behind The Ribos Operation and The Deadly Assassin, who also gave us The Krotons. Though I actually like that one, so let’s do The Mysterious Planet. Or The Power of Kroll. Ouch. I mean, have you sat down and watched The Power of Kroll lately, because I fucking won’t. I will not sit down with that voluntarily. There’s no reason to do that to a man more than once.

Of course, in that regard, the really tempting answer is Robert Holmes for The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Talons of Weng-Chiang, that being the single most pathological object in the history of Doctor Who. I mean, don’t get near a discussion of something so complex as rape culture with someone who doesn’t get that this is something you should be embarrassed to have on your DVD shelf because it is fucking called The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And yet, of course, it is full of witty dialogue and charming atmosphere, and is brilliant and beautiful and feels exactly like 1970s Doctor Who costume drama should feel, and on top of that it has that gorgeous giant rat, which you look at and your heart breaks and you just think, “oh, bless you for even trying, Philip Hinchcliffe, bless you for even trying.” 

But that is, perhaps, too esoteric a point. It is a clever answer, and would satisfy the question, but one suspects that The Power of Kroll was the more revealing option. 

In other words, I think you get the really interesting results when you look at stories that are among the absolute worst ever. Sure, some of them are by one-flop-wonders like Anthony “exploding typewriter” Steven, but others are things like The Dominators, written by the same people who brought us The Web of Fear. And while The Web of Fear is not the outstanding miracle that people think it is, and is self-evidently inferior to the story before it, it is a fuck of a lot better than the sodding Dominators. In this regard it is also tempting to say something like Planet of the Dead and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, if only to make a point about rewrites.

Similarly, a really strong case can be made for Terry Nation, who really does swing into the extremes. I mean, there’s no excuse for some of Nation’s not-in-any-meaningful-sense-scripts… but Genesis of the Daleks really is good. So are the first two, even if there’s no real reason to have tried the tentacle monsters in the first place. He embodies the ridiculous and the sublime of Doctor Who in the same way that The Talons of Weng-Chiang does, but he does it with astonishing gulfs in basic visual literacy. 

But another name jumps out, and I think it is particularly worthwhile. Brian Hayles, who is credited with both The Celestial Toymaker and The Monster of Peladon, is the rare writer to land two stories on the all-time worst list, and I’m willing to say that even if we apply the Talons of Weng-Chiang principle. To either of them. And yet between them he has The Ice Warriors, The Seeds of Death, and The Curse of Peladon, two of which are absolutely fantastic things that just thinking about makes me want to watch again, and the third of which I’ll admit is worth a revisit once every couple of years. 

Because, I mean, they weren’t stories I ranted and raved about like I did in my “holy shit how is this not one of the all-time classics of the Patrick Troughton era” of Enemy of the World, but that’s still just caught up in the gulf between people who think the point of the Troughton era was the monsters and the people who think the point of it was that it started with Power of the Daleks. But The Ice Warriors is the sort of thing that proves that the base under siege could work. You can do gripping tension with relative cheapness. The Ice Warriors is an incredibly smooth viewing experience, and was even before the animation. And The Curse of Peladon, man, that’s just a beautiful, mad thing that only Doctor Who would ever do. There’s a Doctor Who tradition that consists of that, The Ribos Operation, and Warrior’s Gate that you just constantly hope they’ll try again. (Period alien planets. Work every time. Well. Every time that it isn’t The Monster of Peladon.)

That’s a very, very strange gulf in quality there, purely because of the widely varied circumstances of all of them. And I really do think it’s the widest, simply because of how passionately I am personally led to love and hate the particular extremes. And the weirdness that there’s a Peladon story at each end too. 

Yeah. Brian Hayles. 

ARE computers flammable? I feel like they’re probably not?

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

AI art bros are big mad about it.

Who are the Anti-Stratfordians?

People who think Shakespeare wasn’t actually Shakespeare, but that ‘Shakespeare’ was a secret pseudonym for someone more important and better educated, like the Earl of Oxford. 

See also: imbeciles.

Yeah, a lot of what bothers me about fantasy settings (especially D&D) is that people try to run wizards like they're academics, but their only exposure to academics is authoritative professors telling them The Truth, so they don't realize that all academics are always 5 seconds away from trying to strangle each other over questions like 'does time really pass or does it just seem to pass'

Howard the Duck

Given the imminent release of Avengers: Infinity Wars , what could be more fun or appropriate than revisiting all the Marvel Cinematic U...

My review of Marvel’s first ever movie!

She haunts it, mostly.

Ian and Barbara are both unnerved by how casual the Doctor seems about it. Since their arcs, and especially Ian's, are about embracing their adventures and having fun rather than suffering through them, they sort of have the same transition the show has once she's gone.

During the one scene from the Doctor's POV, he wonders about what's going to happen to her; at the end, he decides his next adventure will be to go to her wedding. (or, more accurately, to get her a wedding gift)

Since there isn't a Susan subplot, Ian and Barbara go through the vast majority of what her story would presumably cover, and one of the POV Venusians is more or less a teenager, so that seems to take care of the rest.

Also, lacking Vicki, there isn't really a comedy subplot (or, at least, not a significant one), and the Doctor spends most of the story on his own, largely stalking the edges of the story until the last act. Because of that, Vicki's absence is also felt, in a subtle way.

Venusian Lullaby? I read it over Thanksgiving, and thought it was a fantastic take on the Hartnell era, particularly for its success in aiming at roughly the same target as The Web Planet and nailing it.

Not one I’ve read. Interesting TARDIS team though. How does it deal with Susan’s absence, given that placement?

Dude, you're *rocking* that frog costume

Oh no, was that too strong, oh no *hides in hole*

you look great in that frog costume

i feel like we don’t talk about things like this enough