Philip Sandifer's Blog, page 47

Sonic Superplay: Aquarium Park with Blaze the Cat (Modded Sonic Generations)

 

Cheating a little bit this week as I teased and released this video two weeks back, but because of E3, the Elder Kings livestream and Zelda (not to mention the effort it took to record this video), plus some personal stuff, I couldn't get a second video out in time for today. I wanted to do a video on Titanic: Honor and Glory's new demo, which just came out, but given that thing is 6 gigabytes and I have joke Internet, downloading, installing and learning it in time to record, edit and upload a video on it wasn't going to happen in a week. Did get some stuff on the Steam Summer Sale, and hopefully some of that will show up on the channel someday soon.

But hey, this should still be new to many of you.

A "superplay" is what we used to call a tool-assisted speedrun without the tool assits. It's what we did to hone our focus back before people could add hacking tools to video games. It is a finely tuned runthrough of a video game level based on personal familiarity with and mastery of a game's mechanics and layout. I take it to mean a run with no mistakes, taking no damage and moving in a stream of unbroken movements and actions.

This is a video of what I'm calling a "superplay" of Aquarium Park, a mod stage for Sonic Generations based on a level from the 2010 Wii game Sonic Colors. I'm going to talk more about this in a future video, but to me this level perfectly encapsulates everything I love about Sonic the Hedgehog games, so I thought making a video about it would be the perfect way to celebrate Sonic's anniversary. It's in many ways the definitive example of everything I want from one type of video game, and it's the kind of game SEGA does better than anyone else.

Blaze the Cat, for those understandably unaware of the Sonic series' Byzantine lore, is basically the female version of Sonic from an alternate universe. She has all his powers and abilities, just in slightly different forms. I really wanted to play as her for this for a lot of different reasons, so thankfully there's a mod that lets me do that!

I'm going to try and record that follow-up video sometime this week, so be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and set the alert if you want to see that as soon as it goes up. In the meantime, you can get Sonic Generations on Steam, Aquarium Park here and the "Blazy Mix" mod on ModDB. You're also going to want the SonicGMI mod manager, as well as the Unleashed FX Pipeline shaders if you want to really make this game look its best (This is a 2011 game running on 2008 tech, so it should run fine on any relatively modern rig).

 

A Consistently Inaccurately Named Trilogy Part I: Brick

I first encountered the work of Rian Johnson while reading about Terry Gilliam’s My Neighbor Totoro remake Tideland on Wikipedia, where I stumbled across the factoid that Johnson had declared it and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain to be the two best films of 2006. This claim was notable for being A) self-evidently correct and B) a completely insane statement that nobody but me would actually make. And so I was immediately fascinated by this previously unheard of filmmaker and decided that, on the basis of his taste alone, I’d check out his existent film, a high school noir called Brick. (Also, it was only like $5 on Amazon.) Since then I’ve followed his career on the general logic that he was going to get really big some day. Which, sure enough, he did, so let’s put that knowledge to populist use. (And I’ll just spoil it up front, my favorite Johnson film is The Brothers Bloom, my least favorite is Looper.)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Brick is that it isn’t funny. Sure, there are moments that are humorous - the recurring urgent discussions about who people eat lunch with, for instance, or any scene whatsoever with the Pin’s mother. But although these things are funny, Johnson makes no effort whatsoever to actually get the viewer to laugh. The scenes are not played with comic timing, the humorous aspects are not pushed to the foreground, and none of the actors deliver their lines as if looking for the laugh.

What’s unusual about this is not that it’s an incongruous genre mashup played straight. What’s unusual is that one of the genres is high school. When you take the other great incongruous high school genre mashup to launch its creator to directing a major Disney franchise film, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it took place not only in a high school, but in an overtly funny high school of the sort familiar from Saved by the Bell or Ferris Bueler’s Day Off or, if you prefer to go back further, Happy Days or Grease. It’s not that Brick is the only serious high school movie ever made, but the core texts of the genre are those comedies or ones like them. So to do a genre mashup that is an objectively funny idea when one of the genres is largely comedic and have it be deadly serious is, on the face of it, interesting.

A genre mashup, done well, is about liminal spaces. In Brick, the key one is the tunnel where Emily is murdered. It’s where the film opens, and it returns there constantly, with Johnson’s camera endlessly cycling back to open mouth and to characters sinking into and emerging out of its darkness. It also returns constantly to the image of Emily’s arm lying in the water, her murder being the key event to take place in this space. This image also features on most of the film’s posters, becoming, along with the line drawing that represents the tunnel, the film’s main visual icon.  

Obviously, this is a bit icky. And there’s not really a way around that ickiness. There’s no serious way to argue that this is secretly a feminist film or anything like that. It bombs the Bechdel test at the second hurdle, with none of its three female characters ever having a conversation. Nor are any of them particularly positive portrayals - there’s the drug addict with multiple sex partners who gets murdered, the femme fatale who sets her up, and the main character’s lying ex-girlfriend, who’s just a different sort of femme fatale. It’s noir, so nobody comes off well exactly, but this is a film that’s definitely more interested in exploring masculinity than it is in women.

Thankfully its take on masculinity is compelling. The main character, Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Brendan, is repeatedly defined in terms of his desire to protect Emily and keep her safe. This, however, is not treated as a positive thing. At its best, it is something that makes Brendan slightly pathetic. At its worst, it’s visibly suffocating and borderline abusive. It’s not that Emily doesn’t need help - she’s locked into a visible downward spiral. Rather, the problem is that Brendan needs to protect her and, even more importantly, protect his (fundamentally fictitious) image of her. Certainly his protection of her is not really done with particular attention to her best interests or indeed consent - their breakup was over his decision to get in with a small-time drug dealer she’d befriended just to rat him out to the principal (portrayed by Richard Roundtree, another hilarious decision played straight). This isn’t just masculinity played with realistic toxicity, it’s played with genuinely adolescent toxicity - unhealthy and destructive in the ways that well-intentioned teenage boys often are.

This makes it one of relatively few aspects of the film to really come from the high school side of the ledger instead of the noir one. In some ways this is unsurprising - given that it turns its back on the genre’s comedic underpinning. But this fact clarifies a key aspect of how Brick manages its genre mashup. For the most part, it’s not interested in using noir to illuminate truths about high school that other stories miss. Instead, it’s using the high school setting to refresh noir. As Johnson put it in an interview, “the second you do a modern movie that has men in hats and alleyways and venetian blinds shadows -- it’s not that it can’t be good, it can be terrific, but you know instantly where you are. You can categorize it in your head.” Putting it in a high school instead of the 1920s breaks that, allowing the genre to be unfamiliar again.

It’s a good trick, which is all you actually need for a first film. I mean, that and rock solid execution, which Johnson has in spades. Brick is a microbudget film, but it looks absolutely gorgeous. Johnson’s camera angles are striking without being distracting. He often picks low shots that let the characters loom in the frame, giving a sense of weight and grandeur to them even though they’re high school students. (This is the rare film where casting twenty-somethings as teenagers works for reasons beyond “they’re better actors.” Although certainly another one of Johnson’s strengths is his casting, grabbing an on the rise Joseph Gordon-Levitt along with Emile de Ravin, and the criminally underrated Nora Zehetner.) Alternatively, he picks close-ups, often shot with fairly wide angle lenses, and a huge number of POV shots that serve to focus the film on Brendan’s perspective. This latter move has the useful side effect of doing the work usually accomplished by hard-boiled narration, thus avoiding an aesthetic decision that would have been hard not to have be funny, and, worse yet, inadvertently funny. (c.f. “Sushi, that’s what my ex-wife called me.”) 

The result is not a film with the brash grandeur of Tideland or The Fountain. But those are, respectively, a late-career film and a director getting his first taste of a real budget. The films to compare it to are Time Bandits and Pi. If anything, Brick, by dint of the dissonance in scale between noir and high school, has more of a sense of grandeur than Gilliam and Aronofsky’s debuts, just because it’s a film that’s in part about its sense of scale. To make the Buffy comparison again, just as that show trades on “in high school everything feels like the end of the world,” Brick trades on the expansion of adolescent male alienation into the full-blown grime and glamour of noir.

And yet on the other hand, there is a sense of control and discipline to Brick that neither Pi nor Time Bandits has. Those films, like the later career works that entrance both Johnson and me, are fundamentally committed to a level of excess. Brick, on the other hand, in its studious lack of humor, has a fundamental instinct not to push things too far. It’s a much more inward looking film. There’s an analogy Eddie Campbell makes in The From Hell Companion where he talks about having loaded From Hell up with a certain amount of creative fuel generated by its formal concepts, and this fuel being exactly sufficient to get the project over the finish line. And the description applies to Brick as well - it’s a film about showing what its creative and aesthetic engine is capable of.

In that regard, perhaps a more accurate way to look at Brick’s comparative lack of bombast is to accept that the answer to that question is not interesting because of its scope. Rather, it is that such an improbable and rickety engine, bolted together from two radically different approaches in a fundamentally counterintuitive way, should run so smoothly and straightforwardly. Its trick is making it look easy.And I mean genuinely easy - not the ostentatious “aren’t we clever for pulling this off so well” polish of, say, Memento (and I reckon I’ll do the Nolan Batfilms to complete the trilogy trilogy, incidentally) but rather a film that seems good instead of impressive.

I think, to be honest, that it’s a better film than Time Bandits or Pi. That’s not, obviously, a claim that Johnson is better than Gilliam or Aronofsky. But it struck me as clear from his debut that he was someone who could get there. And as he had another film coming out in a few months that I’d already seen a trailer for and thought looked fine, I figured I’d check it out when it wandered by Gainesville on its infuriatingly meandering tour of small indie theaters (and, subsequently, real ones). Which brings us neatly to The Brothers Bloom.

The Doctor Falls Review

There’s probably a few people who wanted something more like Blink (or, more plausibly, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang) out of Moffat’s last finale, but it’s hard to imagine what more you could actually ask from it. It’s an episode that has at least one big moment catering to virtually every sensible aesthetic of Doctor Who and one or two of the dumb ones too - the rare thing that manages to solidly delight both GallifreyBase fandom and queer Tumblr fandom. (Although the Moffat Hate crowd is managing to treat Harold’s misogyny as the voice of the author because of course they are.) Entirely separate from any questions of ranking or comparison, it’s self-evidently successful as a finale, anchoring Series 10 as firmly in the “good” column.

Now for comparisons. The obvious point of comparison is The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, the equivalent “finale before the era-ending regeneration” story from the Davies era. It’s not that it’s quiet per se - it’s a multi-Master story, after all. But it’s quiet in comparison. Its defining decision, in many ways, is having the Doctor’s big speech be delivered to Missy and Harold, a quiet speech about kindness and decency in which the Doctor explains why this is the hill he’s going to die on. It’s not aiming to outdo Hell Bent or The Day of the Doctor. Like Extremis, it is visibly a work of late style. It’s aiming small and careful, relishing in its details.

Which isn’t quite everything. The Doctor’s reluctance to regenerate is unearned - there’s a line of dialogue with Bill that’s clearly there to set it up, but it’s a pro forma bit of foreshadowing as opposed to something that feels genuine. Heather probably should have come up somewhere, even if only in dialogue, since April 15th. And, perhaps most fundamentally, there’s not actually a reason for Missy and Harold to be here other than so they can listen to the Doctor’s speech - they’re not actually part of the same story as Bill’s salvation. But these are all small problems. It’s not like Missy and Harold clash with the Bill plot, after all. This is an episode that moves between two things, deft at both of them and, for that matter, at the transitions between them. The parts don’t quite add up, but that’s kind of how the whole being greater than the sum of its parts works.

More to the point, though, the whole is more than the sum of some absolutely astonishing parts. This is a story where the details are exquisitely crafted. The switches between the human and the Cyberman versions of Bill were done perfectly, maintaining the agonizing horror of it while not getting in the way of Mackie’s farewell performance. There’s a lot of coasting on the body horror of World Enough and Time, but the point of a forty-five minute windup is surely that you can coast on it after, wringing vast amounts of emotion out of a few seconds of carefully deployed Tenth Planet voice. The fate of Missy and Harold is brilliantly conceived and executed, although putting “I will never stand with the Doctor” in the trailer was probably a mistake.

There’s a case to be made that this is grading on the curve. It’s not as good as Hell Bent, although it’s considerably more invested in being palatable. It doesn’t reverse the general trend of Series 10 being Capaldi’s weakest season (though far from Moffat’s). It’s satisfying and none of its flaws are too damning, and after a rocky season that was already thoroughly out of contention for the title of “the best” a solid finale that tops the season rankings feels like a win regardless of how it stacks up in the larger sense.  But that’s unfair. There’s a fundamental sense in which this can’t be compared to Hell Bent or Death in Heaven. Simply put, it really is the finale, explicitly framed as this Doctor’s last stand and quietly, against his furious insistence, framed as Moffat’s. The decision to go small carries its own weight specific to that context, and it’s not a flaw to trade on it instead of trying to play the same game as all your other finales.  

What stands out, then, is the decision to end on a story about principles. For Capaldi’s Doctor, this is the speech about kindness - a matured and even wiser version of his “I’m an idiot” speech in Death in Heaven. He goes out by answering the question that so troubled him in Into the Dalek and declaring that he will be. For Moffat, this is the salvation of Bill - his steadfast refusal to give his female characters anything other than honorable, joyful endings that leave them on equal standing with the Doctor. And, more broadly, it’s notable that if we assume (no doubt correctly) that Missy in some fashion escapes being dead, unable to regenerate, and presumably having her body incinerated in a gigantic explosion this is a return to Moffat’s “everybody lives” approach - a story with no visible casualties in which the Doctor saves everybody.

I’ve observed before that the central tension of a lot of Moffat’s work is asking what kind of story this is going to be. World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls does not answer this question in the sense of a manifesto for the show going forward, or a demonstration of what it should be. Nor does it seek to be the final, definitive version of a particular answer to that question. Instead it looks back at what the show has been doing over the course of the Moffat era and seeks to take the core of that and give it a straightforward and effective platform on which to shine. The platform has Mondasian Cybermen and John Simm putting on eyeliner. The core is kindness and space lesbians. And the era is the single greatest one in the history of Doctor Who.

“Is the future all female” “We can only hope.” Moffat’s being rather pointed with Chibnall about casting, isn’t he? Still, it seems worth reiterating that, for all that Moffat has made it explicit that the Doctor could regenerate into a woman and hinted strongly on his views in this regard, his tenure as showrunner is going to come to an end without him taking the step of actually casting one.
One really interesting thematic resonance - the parallels between Bill’s cybernetic body and her black one, particularly around the discussion of having to learn to live with everybody being afraid of you and around her getting shot by a panicking white person with a gun.
I do have to circle back to complaining about the sudden appearance of Heather, however. It’s a great ending, but it makes comparison to Clara’s departure inevitable in a way that makes the lack of setup beyond a callback to the engine oil line (and the Cyberman/Dalek symmetry I remarked upon last episode and then waved away) and the general “Heather as barely explained being of apparently limitless power” concept feel more slapdash than it has to. Especially given that it’s the exact same resolution that was rejected in The Pilot with no real sense of what’s different other than “Bill’s a Cyberman now so it’s a less bad deal in comparison.” I like what it’s reaching for, and I’m generally willing to pretend it actually gets there, but I wish Bill had gotten an ending where all the pieces came together.
Assuming, of course, that she’s not in the Christmas special. (Though if we’re going to have a return for Christmas, I’d rather Clara drops by for a cameo, in much the same way that it was important Rose and Amy show up for a scene.)
The important takeaway, however, is that Steven Moffat is 100% on point in his realization that the correct aesthetic for Doctor Who is “space lesbians.”
As I’ve said on the podcasts, I’m all for David Bradley playing the First Doctor at Christmas, albeit with the caveat I’ve made before that the First Doctor is not a character that has ever been portrayed by William Hartnell. I’m happy to read Bradley as playing a piece of series lore as distinct from the guy who appeared in The Sensorites.
Although at this point Moffat has written for a staggering nine Doctors on television (1, 4, 5, 8, War, 9, 10, 11, and 12). I’m not sure if he’s got the record if one counts extended universe stuff (though he picks up McCoy), but that’s definitely a televised record, with second place being a tie between Dicks and Holmes, each at five. And no, let’s just all agree not count Curse of Fatal Death for this record.
A surprising twist in Moffat’s allegiances in the Last War in Albion as he responds to Alan Moore’s interview in Vworp Vworp #3 (still available and amazing) in which he weighs in in favor of Moffat over Davies by going and canonizing Grant Morrison’s “The World-Shapers.” Of course, he also completely screws up that story by then also including Planet 14 on the list of Cybermen planets when “The World Shapers” establishes that Marinus is Planet 14. But most of the fun of legitimizing EU material is causing twice as many problems as you solve, so hey.
Of course, if we’re scoring in terms of Last War in Albion the resemblance between the Masters’ final fates and The Killing Joke should probably be remarked upon. Not sure who that reading would end up favoring though.
I assume the number will go back up as the $12 in declined pledges sort themselves out, and I’m not cancelling the podcast either way cause the guest is awesome, but the Patreon is at $309, $11 short of me having to do Game of Thrones reviews. I should stress, I’m fine with that because omfg this season did terrible things for my progress on anything else whatsoever, but you know. Money and all that.
All right. Double-length podcast this week, which means you’ll get to hear the bridge of whatever mysterious transmission from the future has been serving as our theme song. Spoilers: it has the word “antler” in it. See you then. Well, and tomorrow for part one of A Consistently Inaccurately Named Trilogy, the second part of my Trilogy Trilogy. And Wednesday for Josh. And Friday for Jack. And regularly after that. BUT YOU GET THE POINT.

Ranking

World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls
Extremis
Oxygen
Thin Ice
The Eaters of Light
The Pyramid at the End of the World
The Pilot
Empress of Mars
Smile
Knock Knock
The Lie of the Land

Less Than Zero

I've got nothing today.  I was trying to get something written about Wonder Woman but it's not ready yet, and may not be good (or tactful) enough to publish anyway.  Meanwhile, a podcast I'm editing is presenting big audio-quality problems.  So, yeah, coupled with other stuff going on IRL... I ran out of time.  Sorry everybody.

So instead, here is a little round-up of stuff I've been reading lately.

...

Here's Andrew Hickey saying important stuff about Autism and Empathy.

Josh was kind enough to send me this interesting article in the New Yorker about 'the occult roots of modernism'.  Essential for modernism geeks.

Cameron L. Fantastic wrote a review of Zero Books' much-anticipated Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle... and it's not pretty.  I have to say, my hopes weren't high because I think Nagle is overrated.  Her Jacobin articles have been okay(ish) but shot through with frankly bizarre problems.  I can't say Mr Fantastic (?) is right about Nagle's new book, because I haven't read it, but if half of what he says about it is true then it's a major disappointment (though not, as I say, to me).

This demolition of Bill O'Reilly's rubbish history books was fun, from Harpers' Magazine.  Fish in a barrel, but hey... a very unpleasant fish that richly deserves to be shot (metaphorically).

Here's Richard Seymour being very astute (I think) on the prospects for Corbyn and Corbynism, and what needs to happen.

Relatedly, here's James Butler on similar issues.

Here's Jonathan Cook giving an account of Seymour Hersh's investigation of claims that Assad ordered a sarin gas attack in April (the basis of Trump's much-lauded bombings), and of how Hersh's investigation has been ignored by the media.

Here's Ali Abuminah putting the kerfuffle at Chicago Dyke Pride into context.

And finally, the first example of genuine, solid-gold comedy genius I've seen for a long time.  Kaleb Horton at MTV (whose podcast with our very own James Murphy, The Last Exit Show, has just returned from hiatus, and deserves to be heard) presenting selected highlights of the script of Sully.  Trust me.

...

Needless to say, my liking for all these things doesn't imply that any of them necessarily have any kinship with each other, or with anyone else.  Nor does my linking to these articles mean that I myself necessarily agree with everything in them.

Laters.

 

 

Eruditorum Presscast: World Enough and Time

I'm joined this week by Chris O'Leary, author of Rebel Rebel, to talk about World Enough and Time. You can get that here.

Hyrule Haeresis 7

Do you ever wonder why Celtic music always sounds so sad? Because it is always lamenting something it lost so long ago it can't even remember what it is longing for anymore.

The Celtic-infused sea shanty that scores the intro sequence to The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is the overture. Singing its own microcosm, The Wind Waker's opening gives way to a declaration of its rights and standings amongst the unfolding Legend. A tapestry of recap. No mere retelling, this Legend. This is the next part of an unbroken, continuous story. A serial. “Act 3, Scene 1” is written on the script of our experiential lives.

Sure, this is a Legend that has been passed down “from generation to generation”. All Legends must be. But this Legend is specifically The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Elevated to the status of myth itself, Ocarina of Time's version of The Legend of Zelda has become a story from a distant Golden Age. The new Ur-Zelda and its vaunted status etched into the fabric of the Legend itself. But of course, it would be. Why wouldn't it be? Ocarina of Time was the greatest and most successful of them all.

But, like all Golden Ages, this is an imagined one. And the Winds of Change blow for it, as they must blow for all things. Their story retold in the broadest of strokes from the coarsest of brushes, the Hero of Time is explicitly namechecked for the first time in a game that is not their own. And it is their absence, and the absence of the Hero archetype they created, that weighs heavy on Hyrule's people now. After the triumphant events of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time where the Hero travelled across the ages to seal away the Great Evil wielded by the thief of the desert, the stories tell us, Ganondorf Drogmire returned to dominate Hyrule once again. The people believed the Hero of Time would return to defeat the Great Evil just as they had before, but the Hero did not appear. And why would they? While Hyrule had made that child a hero, it was not their land. The Hero of Time did not come back to Hyrule because they had returned home to Termina. The stories do not tell us this, but it is the truth. Hyrule was no longer part of the Hero's story.

As with all stories of Golden Ages and exalted Heroes, the people of Hyrule clung to Old Myths because they did not yet have the strength to believe in the divine truths inside of themselves. And as with all such stories, the Universe Itself intervenes, enacting a change in the natural order of things to force its people to look inward for the future.

And so Hyrule at that time became a forgotten land. The Sea rose to reclaim that which was born from it. All things in time return to the sea. We are born from nature, and to nature we shall return in death. In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, artefacts of the old land remain to remind us of its presence, but this presence is never more than the haunting remnants of an age long since gone by. Goron merchants, the last of a race of mountain-folk who lived on Death Mountain during the Hero of Time's day, now reside in pocket enclaves on the remotest islands of the Great Sea, those highest peaks that alone survived total submersion during the Deluge. The Hero of Time lives on in pure aesthetic iconography only: On Outset Island there is a tradition to dress a chosen boy up in the green tunic and cap of the Hero as part of a festival to honour the memory of the Legend. Ritual emerges to fill the void left by the absence of lived Gnostic experience when younger, more material-minded generations declare that they are no longer interested in old traditions and old spiritualities. Religion and ritual are ghosts themselves.

This then is the true, secret legacy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The prophecy was wrong and the Hero of Time was in the wrong story. No prophesied Hero will appear, and now Link can't even be a Warrior Shaman anymore. This Link is no Hero (or at least, he isn't yet in this particular moment), he's just a lost child going through the motions because this is what he's been told to do. Link's sister Aryll is an invocation of Marin (and thus Malon and Princess Zelda) to the point even agents of Ganondorf are confused, but, like Link, she's only wearing her guise. It's a kind of mask, but the mask doesn't mean anything anymore. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask took a stand against the patriarchal rite of passage myth to strike out an identity of their own, and that was utterly catastrophic to the History of the Legend. Hyrule, and The Legend of Zelda, has been rejected and outmoded, and the tortured ghosts of its past now cling desperately to the last remaining shreds of its aesthetic power. There's no such thing as coming of age rites of passage anymore, just the hollow, vacuous aesthetic shell of their iconography. And without the rite of passage, Hyrule is nothing.

So we return to the sea, and start anew once more.

Captain Tetra is something new, and, as a true navigator, it is she who plots the course forward. Leader of a gang of pirates patrolling the Great Sea in search of treasure and salty as the sea itself, she's as sure an example of the Hero of Another Story as exists. Rumours, gossip and conjecture swirl about who she is and where she might have come from, but she never gives us anything concrete. The Helmaroc King captures her because he thinks she's Aryll, necessitating Link saving her in the opening level. Not an astonishingly encouraging introduction for someone who's supposed to be the game's action heroine lead then. But this is Zelda, what do you want?

Like any good pirate, Tetra hides her secrets well, only giving the faintest of clues to those seeking to draw a map and undertake the treasure hunt. Though young, she's evidently an experienced sailor and pirate captain already. Tetra takes Link to the Forsaken Fortress, where the Helmaroc King took Aryll. She says before it became decrepit and overrun by monsters it used to be home to a ruthless band of pirates she and her crew would cross swords with, and to a weathered eye the Fortress bears a striking resemblance to the one the Terminan Gerudo Pirates of the Great Bay inhabited in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. And perhaps it's your hazy vision, but doesn't Captain Tetra, with her tanned features clad in sandals and sarawali, look more than a little bit like a Gerudo herself?

Tetra and her crew are looking for sunken treasure hidden beneath the surface of the Great Sea. Link is just along for the ride, trying to rescue his kidnapped sister. Along the way, he picks up his own boat, a vessel called The King of Red Lions. Like all ships it has a soul, it's just that this one can talk. Meaning physically verbalize. He also picks up a magical baton, the titular Wind Waker, that allows him to channel and conduct the winds, changing their course and direction at will. Winds of Change, and in the hands of the next generation of adventurers tasked with plotting their own course to the future. But control over the wind is also an occult secret: Texts from the European middle ages outright described it as a form of witchcraft (a fact which was not lost on one Hayao Miyazaki during the development of a manga he was writing entitled Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind), so Link's mastery over it gives him the power of forbidden knowledge. But in the world of the Great Sea treasure and secrets are hidden for a reason. Secrets, by definition, are stories and truths that are not meant to be told. And some treasures are cursed.

The Great and Terrible Secret of the Great Sea is Hyrule, flooded and buried beneath the waves once its time was over. The world has been reborn since then, and its inhabitants now happily go about their lives blissfully unburdened by the sins of their past. And yet, the old world wishes to harass and haunt them still. Ganondorf has returned to plague this new world by looking once again for the Triforce, a forgotten relic of an abandoned age. No better than Ganondorf is The King of Red Lions, who is really King Daphnes Nohanson Hyrule, last king of the Hylians in disguise. The Red King has been manipulating Link and Tetra both, hoping to get them to restore the Triforce and defeat Ganondorf so that he may once more reign over a Hyrule he feels entitled to bring before the unblinking, all-seeing gaze of the eternal Sun. The final chapter of the game even has Link contacting the ghosts of the descendants of the Seven Sages from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (or coercing their own descendants to help him), literally disturbing the dead at rest to fulfill the King's ambition.

Link becomes a hero because he does kind and heroic things, not because a prophecy told him to do them, but the King would force him to accept the mantle and legacy (and baggage) of the Hero of Time out of pointless fealty to contextless and outdated tradition, just like the people on Outset Island. Tetra is a descendant of Princess Zelda, and the King likewise tries to leverage her ancestry to use her as a puppet by forcing her to change who she is to become his idea of “the current incarnation of Zelda”. This results in Tetra once again losing agency, being literally placed under house arrest in a sunken Hyrule Castle for her “safety” until Ganondorf is finally killed, using his final breaths to express genuine remorse for his actions, entrusting the future of the land to its rightful heirs, the children. Only in this moment does the Red King finally see the error in his ways. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is the final chapter in the Legend. A Legend of Zelda with no Link and no Zelda, it is a story about its own irrelevance in the face of time's ever-flowing tide.

Oral history has no ending, but The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker becomes the Missing Third to a trilogy it itself just invented. It is outmoded and is about being outmoded because it's a Legend of Zelda made for people who have already experienced The Legend of Zelda, namely, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In particular, those people who liked it, but not The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and thus missed the entire point of the story both games must be taken as two halves of. It is seemingly then a regression for the Zelda Myth, which has always reinvented itself for each successive generation. But times are not the same for Nintendo as they once were. The Nintendo GameCube is not doing as well against its competitors the XBOX and PlayStation 2 as the Nintendo 64 did against the SEGA Saturn and original PlayStation, or as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System did against the SEGA Mega Drive, and is coming nowhere near the levels of near-industry monopoly that the NES and Game Boy enjoyed in their respective mediums.

Nintendo is no longer playing as strongly to general audiences as it once did. There is a pivot point in the GameCube's lifespan corresponding to winter 2003 after which a marked dropoff in sales means the console stops seeing as many populist-oriented games of the sort that characterized its earlier catalog such as Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, as well as Nintendo's own Metroid Prime and Super Mario Sunshine (which, while franchise entries, were different enough from and coming long enough after previous games in their respective series that the GameCube's audience could comfortably be assumed to be unfamiliar with them, thus serving as soft reboots). While the GameCube did continue to see versions of multiplatform releases for the remainder of its lifespan, its tanking sales meant investing in it beyond the bare required minimum of effort was no longer a priority for third parties. This switch corresponds almost exactly with the release of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker in December 2002 and March 2003, as well as the rise in prominence of the “Hardcore Nintendo Fan” subculture, a concept that did not meaningfully exist before this point.

And so, it fell to The Wind Waker to channel the meaning of the times. Because only The Legend of Zelda can truly speak to the heart of the Hardcore Nintendo Fan, and Link can say things that Mario and Samus cannot.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker thus becomes not children's literature in the traditional sense, but children's literature for adults who are still reading children's literature. A gentle, yet firm, message to get on with their lives, make something new and leave childish perspectives (if not childish whimsy and wonder) behind. This was not, as you might expect, a lesson Hardcore Zelda Fans wanted to hear. For quite some time after the fact, The Wind Waker actually managed to supplant Majora's Mask as the least popular and least loved Legend of Zelda within fandom consensus, despite selling markedly better than Four Swords Adventures (which is technically speaking least-popular Zelda ever, judging only by sales figures). Excuses were made as to why this was the case, mostly revolving around the fact The Wind Waker's art direction adopted a stylized cel-shaded animation look radically different from the slightly more realistic Japanese anime style utilized by its two predecessors, which fans had grown accustomed to as the signature “Zelda Look”. This was done both explicitly to contrast The Wind Waker with Ocarina of Time to give the new title its own identity, as well as to compensate for perceived shortcomings in the GameCube's hardware. No-one remembered that the original Zelda no Densetsu used an art style for its manual that was even cartoonier than that of The Wind Waker, and thus no-one saw.

For the true answer was one they were not willing to comprehend.

Consensus eventually did turn around on The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, it becoming the critical and connoisseur's choice Zelda game just in time for the release of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD on the Nintendo WiiU in 2013. It's status as consensus-worst Zelda was granted instead to The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes (the “Kisekae”-era Zelda for Harajuku Girls), while its reputation amongst video game historians, those backwards-looking vanguards of obsolescence and irrelevance, remains assured. Fittingly then, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD is a version of the game that has been overhauled to better placate Hardcore Zelda Fans (who by 2013 were the only people buying Zelda games anymore, the WiiU selling so exponentially worse than even the GameCube due to a series of catastrophic marketing and branding blunders it became an outright financial failure) by giving them exactly what they wanted: A version of The Wind Waker that actively works to subvert The Wind Waker's unique identity.

The difficulty has been increased (because Hardcore Gamers only care about how punishingly unfair a game is), The King of Red Lions moves significantly faster (so gamers don't have to “waste time” sailing and just get on with the dungeon crawling and story progression) and an iconic part of the back half of the game in which Link would have to explore the ocean looking for and decrypting secret treasure maps coded in a mysterious cipher to look for sunken Triforce shards has been dramatically shortened such that it no longer carries the same weight or makes as much of an impact. Most notably Tingle, a character introduced in Majora's Mask who plays a more significant role in The Wind Waker, has had a key component of his part of the game entirely excised. In the original game, players would get a “Tingle Tuner” that facilitated communication between players' Nintendo GameCube and Game Boy Advance systems in order to gain access to certain buffs, this “connectivity” being a defining feature of the GameCube experience. In The Wind Waker HD, the Tingle Tuner has been replaced by a message bottle that allows players to upload status updates to the WiiU's Miiverse social media network.

Tingle's role was likely downplayed in The Wind Waker HD because he is a character who, while beloved by Japanese players, is resoundingly hated by US Zelda fans. And Zelda as a series has always been significantly more popular in the US than in Japan. Tingle was created to be a loving parody of grown men who still enjoy fairy tales and children's literature.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD is notable as being the first remake of a Zelda game that fails to improve the original in any significant or meaningful way, except as a technical proof-of-concept that The Wind Waker's art style was not an aesthetic mistake as the visuals look even more stunning in 1080p. But in many ways this was an inevitability. The Wind Waker was always destined to anger fans, and the reactionary backlash was equal parts swift, harsh and unavoidable. The Wind Waker HD was only the final nail, as the murder of Tetra's new world was being plotted even before her game's final curtain call. And when sequels attempted to continue the story of Tetra and Link's pirate adventures, there was only one thing they could do. In The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Tetra has zero agency from the beginning, a stock tsundere damsel who gets kidnapped by a ghost ship and taken to a Dark World, where she sits out the entire game as Link searches for a magical sword to reverse the effects of the titular hourglass.

Phantom Hourglass got a sequel in 2009 called The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. This game is set in the realm of “New Hyrule”. Spirit Tracks explicitly establishes that, following the events of The Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass, Tetra and Link reached the shores of a new land upon which they founded a new Hylian dynasty and a new kingdom of Hyrule. A stained glass window portrait of Tetra appears in Hyrule Castle's throne room in Spirit Tracks just as stained glass portraits of Zelda and the Sages of Ocarina of Time appear in the throne room of the sunken ruins of Hyrule Castle in The Wind Waker. Tetra's descendants are this game's Princess Zelda and an elderly woman named Anjean, who resembles an aged version of the pirate captain. This seems an odd stylistic choice for the Zelda games gracing the Nintendo DS which, in stark contrast to the GameCube and WiiU, is one of the highest and best selling video game console of all time, but The Legend of Zelda always moves to the tune of its own symphony.

This is the real truth of the Great Sea. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker brought upon its own demise. We become what we invoke, and that which we cast into textual form shapes our identity and destiny. Any story that positions itself as an ending will doom itself with Patriarchal Epic Time and its masculinist tales of torch-passing and dynastic succession; subsumed by the very eschaton it itself laments. The true tragedy that is the story of Captain Tetra is that she was never allowed to explore the ocean and discover the true depths of its mysteries. Here at the edge of the map there be Dragons; sea serpents guarding sunken treasure and the waters of enlightened ascension. There are squalls ahead that swell up and force us to face the elements one-on-one, and mermaids silently and cautiously observing our actions from afar. The birthright of any True Queen lies beyond the waves, and the greatest crime that can be committed against her is to deprive her of this.

Ironically, yet inevitably, the future lies within the past. The Fair Folk will have their say now.

An Unraveling Thread

I should probably link the book I wrote on Wonder Woman, A Golden Thread. Which I just cut the price of. Buy that here.

I saw Wonder Woman opening night, with a big group of friends. Standing outside the theater afterwards, everyone in the group - mostly female - expressed their love for the film, until eventually all eyes turned to me, and I confessed that I kinda hated it. Since then, I have largely opted to shut up about it. What I want out of a Wonder Woman film is, after all, by definition idiosyncratic, and in no small part incompatible with mass audiences. More importantly, however, despite having literally written the book on Wonder Woman (or at least a book), this was very clearly just not my conversation. I didn’t, and indeed still don’t want to be the guy who shits on the first superhero film to actually offer serious female representation largely untainted by the male gaze. There are widespread reports of women crying with joy at seeing a female superhero on screen, including ones who don’t even like superheroes that much. That matters more than a weirdo blogger who happens to have written a book.

Still, it’s been a few weeks now, and we’ve got a nice little lull between seasons of Hannibal, so let’s finally tackle this. First, I want to reiterate that nothing I say here is intended to take away from the basic importance of representation, both in front of and behind the camera. The elation female audiences have had for this film matters. It matters a lot more than tracking the particular movement of Wonder Woman as a signifier within the larger context of superheroes and specifically DC Comics. Nevertheless, tracking that movement is a thing I do, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least sketch my thoughts on the matter. Consider this a distant appendix rightfully buried at the end of the cultural report on Wonder Woman; an obscure dissent that’s gone at least three contrarian twists too far.

Let’s start with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Longtime readers of mine will know that I am a Zack Snyder apologist. And while Batman v. Superman is a hot mess of a movie that either needed to be an hour shorter or two hours longer and a TV series (preferably the latter, really), it remains in fundamental ways more interesting than the bulk of what has by this point definitely become an obscene glut of superhero movies. Much of this - indeed essentially all of it - is down to the bizarre cynicism of Snyder’s view of superheroes. Batman v. Superman spends its first half hour in outright fear of its title characters, treating them as objects of horror, an idea inherited from Man of Steel’s controversial resolution in which Superman kills Zod after a city-wrecking battle. And it never really backs away from this view. This is a film that views superheroes as at best morally dubious, embracing the Grant Morrison “superheroes as gods” take while viewing gods as awful intrusions into the world of mortals.

This was, needless to say, not an approach that won a lot of admirers among the left-leaning ends of superhero fandom, whose attachment to superheroes as idealizations of liberalism knows no bounds. But as someone who’s long been of the “superheroes are actually kinda fascist” school of thought, my contention has always been that grappling with this by doing superheroes from a position of religious terror is a way to explore this without going full Miracleman. And indeed, while Snyder’s cynicism led him to make a complete hash of Watchmen, applied to DC his take has been consistently invigorating in its strangeness, even if it’s easy to take the wrong lessons from it, as Suicide Squad grimly demonstrated.

But this approach was always going to find its limits with Wonder Woman. Part of why Snyder’s films work is that they were rooted in the Batman/Superman dyad. Man of Steel was explicitly Snyder executing Christopher Nolan’s vision of Superman, and its take was always in part “what if you cast the same sort of moral suspicion that’s routinely cast on Batman onto Superman?” In actually adding Batman into the mix for Batman v. Superman, Snyder simply took the argument a step further, creating a Batman that was correspondingly skewed to match his Superman, which maintained the basic logic. But it also shifted to the official DC party line that the narrative foundation of the DCU is not in fact the Batman/Superman dyad but the establishing mythos of the Trinity, with the third of their continually published characters, Wonder Woman, also added into the mix.

But Wonder Woman is a problem for the dyad as Snyder understands it. There are basically three ways in which Wonder Woman has been defined within the Trinity; one quite good, two deeply flawed. First, she is simply “the girl one” - the laziest option by far, although still capable of being interesting in the way that diverse representation inherently is. Second, she is defined by her association with war, a contrivance of Gail Simone’s that works to distinguish the character, but not actually on particularly interesting terms. And finally there is the one that actually works, which is to embrace the connection with radical politics offered by William Moulton Marston, which is, of course, also the approach that’s never actually done. But none of these options are great for the dyad as Snyder creates it. “The girl one” is at its most reductive when put in the mix with the excess testosterone of Snyder’s Batman and Superman, while “the warrior one” is scarcely a distinction. Which leaves the radical politics option. Played as a negative option in the same way that Batman and Superman are, this quickly makes Wonder Woman indistinguishable from a supervillain (as basically happens in Injustice); played positively against the quasi-fascist objects of horror and it’s so didactically on the nose as to be pointless.

For what it’s worth, it’s clear that Snyder is broadly sympathetic to Wonder Woman in a way that he’s not actually with Batman or Superman, which is actually about you’d expect from the director of Sucker Punch. I remember Jack, who I gather will be writing about Wonder Woman soon, pointing out with evident relish the way in which she’s portrayed as enjoying the climactic fight against Doomsday, a delighted smile playing across her face at the opportunity to charge in at impossible odds. Which is, obviously, the Simone approach (also what you’d expect from Snyder), but is still an interestingly privileged position for her. More broadly, Sucker Punch makes clear that Snyder views femininity as a potentially viable alternative to the bleakness he identifies in masculine heroism, a viewpoint that comes tantalizingly close to what Wonder Woman was originally created for. She’s even positioned as the chronological beginning of superheroes, with a century of experience under her belt before Batman ever hit the scene, a move that seems primed to take the third option and allow her to be the actual moral foundation of the DCEU.

But, of course, this is just an illusion. The actual franchise history - which is of course where Wonder Woman’s narrative claim to intrude on the Batman/Superman dyad comes from - remains firmly centered on Snyder’s more nihilistic vision. Wonder Woman may be the first hero, but she’s explicitly positioned as having hidden herself for the hundred years between the mysterious photograph of her standing around with Captain Kirk and the present day such that Superman’s “revelation” (as the film’s opening chyron puts it) remains the narrative anchor point.

And there’s a fundamental way in which this decision sets Wonder Woman up for failure. It has to be a story of Diana not becoming a hero - an explanation for how “A hundred years ago I walked away from mankind.” And indeed, its opening monologue promises to explain just that by having her declare “I used to want to save the world,” pointedly suggesting that she doesn’t anymore. Yes, the film eventually finesses this in the final monologue by having her say that “only love can truly save the world. So now I stay, I fight, and I give - for the world I know can be,” which is semantically indistinguishable from wanting to save the world. But the overall frame is still essentially just how Wonder Woman came to occupy her Batman v. Superman role of haunting the film with the possibility of the larger DCU. It’s an origin story for a ghost.

It is in this light that we must understand Wonder Woman’s period setting. The decision to revert back to something very close to Wonder Woman’s actual historical origins makes the film into an explicit near-miss of Marston’s original vision: a story of how the character he imagined doesn’t quite take hold and instead gets caught in an embryonic state, waiting a century for the men to come along that will enable her to finally take form. This is, of course, painfully on the nose; it may not be a literal century, but it’s been seventeen summer movie seasons since the first X-Men film kicked off the cinematic superhero boom, and we’re only just getting around to a major female-led film. Wonder Woman really did have to wait. But what’s important here, I would argue, isn’t just the structure of delaying Wonder Woman, but that this is accomplished by going back to her Golden Age origin in precisely the way Batman and Superman’s DCEU versions do not.

Well, sort of. Marston’s Wonder Woman was, of course, a World War II character, as was the entire golden age superhero era. And she was overtly political - the reason she’s sent from Paradise Island to Man’s World is because the “last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women” is in danger from the Nazi menace. This was mostly a trojan horse for Marston’s elaborately weird philosophies about how men need to submit to loving female authority, but this doesn’t change the underlying sense of activist utopianism in Wonder Woman. But the film changes the setting to World War I, consciously moving from the “good” war with clear-cut comic book villains to a war defined by its futile pointlessness.

The major reason for this is obvious, which is that it sets up Wonder Woman’s disillusionment regarding saving the world, taking the “war to end war” rhetoric and subsequent disillusionment surrounding it and making it a personal character arc. But this ends up being a half-formed transition; World War I is presented virtually indistinguishably from World War II, with all the jingoistic rhetoric of valorous Americans/Brits and evil and murderous Germans intact. And so the switch to World War I doesn’t end up changing anything about Wonder Woman’s origins except to strip them of moral content. The Germans are essentially indistinguishable from Nazis and providing all of the same narrative function as comic book Nazis; it’s just that no moral point follows from this and there’s not actually a point to opposing them.

It’s around here that a joke like “Executive Producer Steven Mnuchin must have been thrilled” feels appropriate, and while it’s easy to read too much substance into the politics of one of the film’s financiers, it’s still culturally significant that this is a Wonder Woman film executive produced by Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary. Not so much, again, because of how this influenced the film as because it’s just so perfectly depressing an image. Because this is Wonder Woman utterly defanged, made as utterly unsubversive as possible.

This loss is perhaps most keenly felt around the Amazons. The film goes out of its way to make them look middling - Hippolyta is a hypocritical coward who lacks the strength of her own convictions, and those convictions are reduced to nothing more than “wait for Ares’ return and then fight him.” The film never even looks back at them once Diana is off the island - a frankly bizarre bit of narrative structure. This is unsurprising - the underlying cynicism of the Snyder approach was never going to fit well with a utopian society of women. But it’s still remarkable just how much the film seems like it would prefer that Wonder Woman have some other origin.

Well, I say the film. But what I mean is the script. The film’s saving grace is, in many ways, the fact that Patty Jenkins is blissfully unaware that she’s been handed a pointlessly deconstructed take on Wonder Woman. She’s not directing a film about Wonder Woman’s failure to become a hero, but rather a straightforward superhero film about a woman. At times she even lets traces of the character’s radicalism through, most obviously in the largely improvised Diana/Steve boat scene. And she introduces her own quiet radicalism in her decision not to frame Wonder Woman in the male gaze, which is admittedly more than Marston ever managed or indeed tried. While the film she’s directing is less interesting than the untidy excess of the Snyder films it spins off from, it’s still a better fit for Wonder Woman than any option other than having Wonder Woman actually be the moral alternative to the Batman/Superman dyad, which was never actually going to happen because, again, we live in a world where the Wonder Woman movie is executive produced by Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary.

Which brings us back where we started - with the thing that’s good about Wonder Woman simply and straightforwardly being its female representation. And to be fair, that matters more in the face of “institutionalized misogyny” being taken to a whole new plane by the Trump administration. So yes. In the face of a President who’s admitted to serial sexual abuse, a Vice President who refuses to promote women to positions where they’d have to meet with him one on one, a seventeen year superhero boom that’s had no major films with female characters, a sustained assault on women’s health care and reproductive freedom, and the rise of the alt-right in geek culture that’s determined to push women out of cultural spaces the representation of Wonder Woman matters. It matters more than anything else on the table, and it renders most criticism of the film, from “the first and second acts are to different movies, neither of which are resolved in the third act” to “its politics aren’t radical enough” firmly irrelevant.

On the other hand, the fact that we’re so starved for female representation that we have to uncritically settle for this is the best argument for subjugating men to loving female authority since William Moulton Marston.

World Enough and Time Review

As an excuse to let Peter Capaldi exclaim “a Mondasian Cyberman!” it’s a solid one. This is not an inherently less worthwhile pursuit than getting Ysanne Churchman back to do the Alpha Centauri voice, so let’s roll with it. After all, the other Peladon-related angle to work here is “the Monster of Peladon to Dark Water’s Curse,” and we wouldn’t want to get snarkily contrarian in the first paragraph, now would we? 

After all, there’s a lot that’s good to outright brilliant. Stripping the Mondasian Cybermen back to the medical horror that inspired Kit Pedler the weekend after the US Senate unveiled its plan to fund a tax cut for the wealthy by murdering poor is probably the second most audaciously on the nose classic series deep cut that Doctor Who could have done this week. (Third is Brexit of Peladon; first, of course, would be a Paradise Towers sequel with a prominent scene about fire.) It’s beautifully executed - Rachel Talalay nails the horror as you’d expect, and Moffat’s eye for the macabre has never been finer than the volume knob. The Mondasian Cybermen are exquisitely creepy, and the extended buildup of their iconography before Bill’s eventual conversion is absolutely delicious. But past that, pretty much everything there is to say about it hinges entirely on The Doctor Falls.

That, notably, wasn’t true of Dark Water, which hinged on the shock twist of killing Danny in the cold open, delivering the astonishing volcano confrontation in its first half before moving on to its expertly inevitable assembly of the promotional pieces. Here, however, we have an episode that really is just forty-five minutes devoted to getting the audience caught up with Doctor Who Magazine. No, it’s not a problem that the show is made for the other 100% of the audience, but equally, that’s the hundred percent of the audience that doesn’t know who the Mondasian Cybermen are and may or may not remember John Simm’s last appearance eight years ago. It’s just that, well, that’s the episode - the efficient and moody delivery of a cliffhanger by assembling a bunch of pre-announced elements into what’s basically the only shape they could ever have fit into. The only potential surprise is John Simm getting his Leon Ny Taiy on with a comedy prosthetic, which is admittedly absolutely delightful. 

If this is a triumph, it’s going to be because of how The Doctor Falls plays with what it’s been given. Certainly the trailer makes it look as though it’s a more complex matter than “Missy is evil after all,” which you’d expect. I mean, Moffat has always been fond of mirroring past lines and structures, so the implicit inversion of Dark Water in which the Doctor is trying to get Missy to be his friend again instead of the other way around is intelligent. And it’s unlikely that the cowriter of Into the Dalek is going to declare Missy beyond redemption. This absolutely has the ability to turn into something extraordinary.

And yet one somehow suspects that the 51.33% of GallifeyBase that were prepared to declare this a 10/10 are going to turn on it the moment it does something that isn’t just horror-suspense and fanwank, which is probably only going to take five minutes or so of The Doctor Falls. Which isn’t to say I disagree with GallifreyBase on the episode. It’s an episode designed to delight Doctor Who fans, and I’m as susceptible to its charms as anyone. If anything, I’m reasonably optimistic: I think the odds are better that this is going to turn out to be extraordinary than not. But equally, it’s a Moffat story, and it’s going to turn completely on its head in some fashion, so what’s good here isn’t necessarily informative. For one thing, we apparently lose the cool Cybermen in favor of the shitty clanking robot ones. But who knows what treats might be waiting for us? Maybe Omega will be in the black hole. Also, the cold open is still a live thread, and we’ve got Christmas to feed into. So Omega and David Bradley.

In the end, we have a buildup to something or other that’s not quite as good as the fourth best episode of Capaldi’s second best season. Like I said, that’s not bad for a going away present for Peter Capaldi. Less a Monster of Peladon than a Planet of the Spiders to Dark Water’s The Green Death. But the overall comparison to Pertwee’s last season is still informative in key ways. Both are epilogues to runs whose natural endpoints came a year earlier, with new companions who are brilliant in their own right but doomed to be the secondary companions of their eras. They’re visibly getting long in the tooth, pulling from a second tier pool of ideas. The capacity for brilliance is still there, but where once it was scattered freely, now it’s summoned up in strategic flashes across large swaths of good enough. This could be brilliant. But The Final Problem could have been too.

One thing the trailer does make very clear is that The Doctor Falls is going to be about the Master. There’s a certain moderation to its ambition here that feels interesting - as a choice, it feels aware of how many loose ends from Moffat’s time he’s already tied up. Missy is one of the few remaining ones that’s substantial enough to justify a story like this, but it clearly is substantial enough. Perhaps more to the point, it’s going in a very different direction than The End of Time did, going out on a note that’s distinct from chasing the same flavor of “bigger and better” one step further.
My one worry is where all of this leaves Bill. Unless Chris Chibnall has unexpectedly decided to keep Pearl Mackie on - which would actually be delightful - she needs a satisfying departure woven into a story that’s already about an awful lot of things that aren’t that. After a first half of the season that was very focused on her, the back half, Rona Munroe excepted, has been more interested in other things, and there’s a real danger of her story arc just petering out. I assume not, but Moffat had better have a good idea in reserve here.
One interesting bit of symmetry that I doubt will be followed up on: Bill as a Mondasian Cyberman crying vs Heather as a dripping Dalek.
The best bit of John Simm’s extended prosthetics performance, of course, is the fact that the Master disguised himself so none of the Mondasians would recognize him as the Prime Minister.
Although this highlights something interesting about doing a multi-Master story, or at least about doing this multi-Master story. Countless writers have pointed out that the Doctor doesn’t actually change that much between incarnations. But Missy and Harold (clearly the correct way to distinguish them) are actually quite different, as the trailer emphasizing their different attitudes towards siding with the Doctor makes clear. The other revealing line is Harold’s bit about the Doctor never forgiving her for what she did to Bill, which, coming from him, feels almost aspirational - “finally, I’ve done something bad enough that you’ll hate me forever.” Missy’s motivations, on the other hand, have consistently been to repair her relationship with the Doctor. There’s a real conflict to be had there, in a way that makes this a significantly different idea than, say, a Delgado/Ainley pairing would ever be.
An odd consequence of the overstuffed banquet of an episode is that after her opening comedy bit, Missy doesn’t actually have very much to do in the story. I’m a little surprised the exposition scene about relativity didn’t work her in. Presumably a timing issue, but it’s a bit weird.
Also weird - and definitely a drag in a rewatch - is the flashback to the Doctor setting up Missy’s test cut in the middle of Bill’s death, which I’m sure does essential things for the pacing, but really doesn’t advance much of anything other than reestablishing bits of Extremis and The Lie of the Land.
I’d say that I’m uncertain how this can be reconciled with Spare Parts, but frankly I don’t see how you reconcile the Cybermen beginning on a space ship slowly accelerating away from a black hole with The Tenth Planet, when they’re flying a planet around. (Speaking of which, the Dalek/Cybermen planet flying meetup really needs to happen. Come on Big Finish.
The Omega suggestion, incidentally, is only half joking - if the Christmas special rumor that it tells the story of Capaldi’s involvement in The Day of the Doctor is true, we’re going to have to pivot to Gallifrey. Harold’s an obvious route for that given when we last saw him, at which point the black hole over the mantle starts looking rather Chekovian.
Peter Capaldi’s hair, on the other hand, is presumably that his character gets trapped at the bottom of the ship.
OK. Enough predictions. On to rankings, which are entirely based off of this episode and guaranteed to shift next week.

Ranking

Extremis
Oxygen
Thin Ice
The Eaters of Light
The Pyramid at the End of the World
World Enough and Time
The Pilot
Empress of Mars
Smile
Knock Knock
The Lie of the Land

Eruditorum Presscast: The Eaters of Light

At long last, we've got this week's podcast up, so you can kill an hour before "World Enough and Time" comes on. Our guest this week is Elliot Chapman, and you can listen to our discussion here.

Drunken Whocast 2

Yes, the Drunken Whocast returns.  It is now, undeniably, a regular thing.  Some guys - Jack, Kit, and Daniel this time - in varying and progressing stages of shitfacedness, talking far too much about Doctor Who. 

This time, your arseholed hosts talk Series 2 (2006).  And other things (this was recorded before the election). 

As before, you're getting this almost entirely unexpurgated.  We've removed only some dull pauses, some bathroom breaks, one or two jokes that were a tad too off-colour upon sobre reflection, and one instance of vicious slander.

Stick with it - I'm told hour 4 is the best. 

Download here.

As often happens, people who sponsor me on Patreon heard this ages ago.  (I don't thank my sponsors at the end of Drunken Whocasts as it seems wrong somehow, almost as if I were insulting them, but they all get namechecked at the end of regular shabcasts, as long as I have time to record that bit.)