Doctor Who?

BECAUSE "WHO" IS HIS NAME, NERDS! Here's a bunch of TARDISes.

As some of you may have guessed, I’m not a fan of culture. I like “cultures,” especially the kind made of bacteria, and of course, moldy cheese, sour beer, and tea someone left on the countertop for too long (the only good sweet tea) - but as far as culture goes, no sir, I do not like it.

 

So, the staff of PRF strapped me down and made me review various aspects of this shit-show. I hope you enjoy it.

Doctor Who

The original adventures of white techno-Jesus! Protip: When an Englishman arrives, wanting to help, and says he’s “Just passing through, lending a hand” don’t accept his help. This always turns out poorly, especially if you’re India.

If you’re looking for a way to hear a wide variety of methods for making people ask the question “Doctor Who?” then I can recommend this show. I wasn’t going to include it in my rundown, because it’s British, but I feel like enough Americans watch the show, which is on the BBC America, to make it worth my while.

One thing I do like about Doctor Who is that, until the most recent iterations, the people on Doctor Who look realistic. I’m not talking about the special effects, which are sometimes great (people in rubber suits!) and sometimes execrable (CGI aliens) . I’m talking about the actual human beings on the show. They look like actual people you might meet in Real Life.

See, the human beings on most TV shows are more unrealistic than a regenerating thousand year old Time Lord in a magic box. They look more plastic than the replicants from the Nestene consciousness, and have more enhancements than a Cyberman. The zombie fighting beauty pageant contestants of The Walking Dead, the stunning statuesque politicians of Scandal, the CSI techs that just walked in off the beach where they spend 8 hours a day doing tanning pilates, these dubious special effects only serve to distract the viewer and hammer at the suspension of disbelief.

It really takes a show about a time traveling alien to haul across one of the more interesting facets of alien, I mean British, TV - there are people who look normal on there. People you might see in real life, who don’t always look impeccably airbrushed and artificial. I do feel that they’re getting away from that in more recent seasons, but that’s because I watch too much of the show.

There are several running themes, and none of them are particularly interesting. “Is the Doctor equal to a Dalek?” Is one. “No” is the answer.

Daleks are basically a combination of a genocidal lego set and murderous salt shaker, they kill everything around them on purpose, and have a whisk and plunger attached. They are uncharismatic, nasty, and have limited dialogue. The Doctor, no matter what form he is regenerated into, is a goofy, affable, aloof, intelligent white guy, who talks a lot, likes most people, and only sometimes gets some people killed, usually not on purpose! He does have a tool, rather more of a magic wand, so I guess, in one way, they are a bit alike.

Another running question is “Am I a good person,” asked by the titular Doctor himself. The answer always seems to be “sort of,” which is really the only answer anyone can have to that question, ever. This, at least, is a touching bit of honesty from a ridiculous show about a man in a magic box that has abducted a long stream of women and taken them to space.

The show features quite a few conflicts that always seem to be, in the end, resolved with time-travel gotchas, the power of Love, and swelling orchestral music that ensures any event takes far too long to occur.

    The actual show is set in the entirety of time and space (except parts that you can’t get to for Plot Reasons) - but really, the TARDIS only seems to go into the far, alien future, the always-advancing modern day, and Victorian England.

   There are some good bits. It’s interesting to see the various enemies change over time in how they look and act, and it's always a treat to watch something darkly whimsical that Neil Gaiman had a hand in.

- please note that we do not care one whit about the numerous inaccuracies contained within. Do not contact us regarding "what we got wrong," as we know we got it wrong, and did so only to inflame our reader's nerd-rage glands.

SCANDALOUS!

They drained the lake looking for all the corpses created during this show. There was nothing left.

As some of you may have guessed, I’m not a fan of culture. I like “cultures,” especially the kind made of bacteria, and of course, moldy cheese, sour beer, and tea someone left on the countertop for too long (the only good sweet tea) - but as far as culture goes, no sir, I do not like it.

So, the staff of PRF strapped me down and made me review various aspects of this shit-show. I hope you enjoy it.


NOTE: I didn’t actually watch this show. It was on behind my head while I was playing video games.

SCANDAL

This show begs an important question: Do you think enough bad things about the people in Washington, D.C.?

    You probably don’t, unless you’re one of my visitors from the David Icke forums, here to tell me that they’re all a bunch of blood-drinking human-sacrificing pedophile shapeshifting lizardmen, come here to enslave and consume the human race as chattel and cattle. In which case, welcome! Please don’t comment.

    But for the rest of us - do you think that everyone in Washington D.C. is a murderous, lecherous, bribing, philandering, cover-up artist, torturing everyone in their path, doing a dozen nefarious deeds before breakfast? Do you think that they’re a bunch of own-team murdering morons, incapable of even the simplest of moral actions without an overwhelming personal benefit?

    If not, then maybe you should give this show a watch for an episode or two. But, to prepare you, here’s what happens:

    Act I: Someone we are lead to believe is a Good Person will do Something Bad. In some episodes the Good Person is a Good But Flawed Person. Sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re a Bad Person Who is Doing Good Things. Sometimes they’re the person who grabs things that you really need, even if they didn’t need them.

    Act II: Technobabble will then be followed by it’s legal equivalent, Lawblahblah. This will serve to show us how screwed our poor sap really is. The stakes will be made.

Act III: Faced with Bad Choice that changes Things and Worse Choice that changes Things, our heroine, Olivia Pope, will inspire her minions, because she’s fashionable and smart and has made Sacrifices.

Act IV: The minions and our heroine will figure out a third choice and the all-important Status Quo will be upheld, no matter the cost to democracy, freedom, or the intelligence of the viewer.

But - assigning good morals to bad behavior and painting sociopathic power-hungry monsters as normal isn’t the most appalling bit of social programming on the show. That honor would go to B-613, which is a secret government (non-drone) assassination program for American citizens. It’s like the worst parts of the CIA and NSA all lumped together. Unlike their real-world torture-murder counterparts, they never make mistakes, are always hyper-competent, and never screw up.

This is more dangerous of an idea than you might think, and it’s lazy storytelling (though incredibly handy to invoke when you want to just clean up your plot) - I can’t believe I’m having to type this, because it is something that I wish was not true, but people confuse TV with real life.

People confuse TV with reality. Let that sink in for a moment. The whole “those that would sacrifice liberty for a little security” thing is pretty true, and honestly, it wouldn’t be so bad of a deal - IF (and this is a HUGE IF) you got security by giving up liberty. IF, for instance, you were having Jack Bauer torture terrorists and B-613 assassinate the bad guys and James Bond thwart your supervillians.

But in the real world, which people confuse with entertainment (I am not kidding, look it up) - these are not hypercompetent organizations. The CIA isn’t abducting Terror Master Zero and torturing him, it’s grabbing random goat farmers and “guy who knows a guy who knows a terrorist.” They’re not pinpoint poisoning perfect suspects to prevent the next bomb, they’re drone-striking weddings. The reason that checks and balances exist (and the only check, the only balance, on this show is the miraculous Olivia Pope) isn’t for high-minded reasons of freedom and America. It’s for accountability. And people who assume that our real-life black ops assholes are secret superspy supersoliders, they operate under an assumption that these people are like the ones that they see on TV. They’re not.

The show goes out of hand all the time, with more murders and kidnappings and fake suicides and fake murders and superspy technology than a soap opera. Scandal has jumped more sharks than a surfer high on Mountain Dew and PCP. Instead of seasons, it has a series of shark-ramps, each higher and more sharktastic than the last, finally culminating in a mid-season sharkjet extravaganza that catapults us past wholesome, Katy Perry sharks, over the Jaws sharks on the backs of the super-sharks from Deep Blue Sea, and into a sort of politically-themed Sharknado, which is only slightly less impossible than an actual Sharknado.

The Walking Dead and The FEAR

IF this is your DVR you have the BEST possible TV experience.

I’m not a fan of culture. I like “cultures,” especially the kind made of bacteria. I enjoy moldy cheese, sour beer, and tea someone left on the countertop for too long (the only good sweet tea) - but as far as the stuff we're all supposed to do together, the kind of culture that involves you other filthy humans? No, I do not like it.

So of course the staff of PRF strapped me down and made me review the TELEVISED (aka, "worst") aspects of this shit-show. I hope you enjoy it.

The Walking Dead + Fear the Walking Dead

 

    The Walking Dead is a show where a mindless, moaning horde slowly shambles across the landscape, being easily dispatched by wandering zombies. It’s a modern take on the old “these dirty people are different, so heroic white men must kill them” genre. Our heroes stay clean, devilishly getting a cut across the nose, or bit of smudged makeup, or wrinkling their collars. That’s how you know they’re the good guys, and that violence is always a swell idea.

If you are on this show and you are black, I am sorry. You will be dead soon.

The most important aspect of the show is that it gives our protagonist archetypes a way to get the blood-and-guts visceral action of killing other human beings, without forcing the viewer to suffer any potential feelings of a conscience about it. When the show attempts to introduce human villains, they are always vaguely evil for no particular reason, and our heroic core of heroes will kill them, or, in a Shyamalan-worthy twist, let zombies kill them.

But it’s not all violence! In fact, much of most of the episodes revolve around people complaining about things that nobody would care about in a non-zombie-apocalypse situation, let alone when there’s something real to worry about.

What do they argue about? I don’t even remember. But if you want a show that’s 40 minutes of forgettable pointless argument, and 10 minutes of guilt-free violence, then may I suggest The Walking Dead?

Fear the Walking Dead is a show where emotionless robots are in charge of caring for a heroin addict and a real live teenage girl. The guy playing the heroin addict really gets across that inability to feel anything at all, or express any sort of emotion. Maybe he learned it from his robot caretakers? Anyway, it’s such a compelling performance that, by the end of the show, I too felt nothing, wanted nothing, and craved the sweet sensation of junk flooding my veins, robbing me of my pained senses.

While The Walking Dead was 40 minutes of argument and 10 minutes of zombies, this show is 30 minutes of argument, 10 minutes of talk about heroin, and 10 minutes of driving around LA, which was probably extremely easy to write for anyone living in LA.

UPDATE FOR EPISODE 2:

Fear the Walking Dead has now killed 100% of the black characters on the show, something that the original show could never manage.