Σάββατο 24 Νοεμβρίου 2012

What I think About Stuff-This Is Not A Nerd Rant




From left to right: Degenerate space horrors, Alien Policemen, Space Nazis (in Exterminating brown and Assimilating Silver), Rational Octopus People, Self-Replicating Miscalculation, the One Good Dalek and the man from Gallifrey himself, courtesy of SlightlyTwisted.


This is not a Nerd Rant Or Yes, it fucking Is!
UrbanDictionary.com defines nerd rage as:
          1) When a gamer becomes upset upon not getting his/her way or seeing a noob playing badly.

Oh thank God I suck at video games, then. I don’t play well with other people and when I do play on my own, I cheat up the ass

Because I didn’t pay 700 euros for a pc only so I could fucking lose to games I bought.


2) When someone who is especially well-versed in a certain area of academia sees someone who is not as well-versed exhibiting a rather large amount of
brain-farting and idiocy in regards to said area of academia.

Also excluded, since I am hardly versed in as much areas of academic knowledge as I’d wish I were and am therefore unable to make someone cry over virtue of my higher knowledge quotient

i.e. saying lots of stuff in rapid succession + yelling= intelligence (more on that in another article)

3) When a
nerd sees a popular science-fiction movie, comic book, or other media source improperly quoted, misrepresented, or otherwise flamed.
 
Well shit, Urban Dictionary, you fucking got me square in the balls. I’m guilty of this a thousand times over.

But first, a chance for rebuttal via confessing, blog-style!

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.Albert Camus, putting it like a boss.
I had never experienced this deep, emotionally troubling state of nerd fixation in my life, until recently. Sure I like Star Wars (and was saddened by how its own creator fucked it up the ass) and I’m a fan of a number of comic book and fantasy series that have caught my eye and set my imagination on fire, but for the most part I always had some control and could approach them with at least the minimum of objectivity.

Except for that one time when my brother trolled me by saying that Arya Stark had been killed and I almost punched him in the face.
Sure, some series like Game of Thrones did push me into the fringes of Nerd Rage, but I had never once felt honestly devastated or saddened by the turn a series might take both in terms of quality and in content.

And then, a friend of mine told me I should watch Doctor Who and I made the joyous mistake of heeding his advice for the very first time in my life.

And it…was…GLORIOUS!

Soulja  Boy can’t dance like me-Actual David Tennant quote.
Doctor Who is a BBC TV series that’s been running for 46 years and is television and fictional history in the making. It’s the tale of the Doctor, an alien from the planet Gallifrey, home of the Time Lords, who traverses time and space and saves the day every single day of his life.

Now, Doctor Who wasn’t exactly an unknown, nerd-specific character here in Greece, no sir. It might have taken us 10 years to pick up exactly what the heck were those Transformer thingamajigies those ‘Mericans kept talking ‘bout and we might have only have stumbled upon Spiderman in the 80’s, but we knew our Doctor, yes sir!

This face and that music made me shit my pants when I was a kid.
I remember watching my very first Doctor Who episode, The Genesis of the Daleks and hiding under the living room couch whenever I heard the Dalek’s screaming accusations against everything with a pulse and uncontained inside an armor that looked like a peperpot armed with a mixer and an all-purpose plunger.

You know, for 5 pounds and two shepherd’s pies between the entire production crew, the guys who came up with the Daleks did a marvelous job!
I watched Dr Who again this very year, after having sporadically watched a couple episodes now and then, always scoffing at the low production value of the new series and pitting the snazziness of a 46-year old scifi series that put the “FUCK YEAH” in time travel against the cool, sleek, CGI exterior of Star Wars.

Yes, I was an idiot.

When I saw Dr Who this time, I did it by taking two things into account:

          1) The series’ budget was shit and so were the effects:

BBC special effects being horrible or sub-par has always been a staple of every series it’s ever made. Don’t believe me? Well, here’s a video that the BBC might have blocked for a short while by the time of publication, because they’re kind silly that way:

                  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WBIajuSEq3Y

As a result of point Number one, though…

          2) The series compensates for its terrible effects by far superior writing, performances and stories
Because when you’re a cult-hit TV show that’s been out of it for nearly a decade and you know you don’t look as pretty as those sluts over at Lucas’ studios and you need to regain your lost audience and their grandchildren

Because if you knew Dr Who in 2005 before there was an Internet, you’re pretty old by now.
Would be to present well crafted and interesting stories.

          3) Remember what I said about performances? Well here’s two clips of the first two new Doctors in the series, kicking your ass with acting:

Here’s Richard Eccleston, soothing an old woman while breaking your heart:

 

And here’s David Tennant, in an acting battle with Patrick Stewart, dressed stupidly for the occassion:



BBC took a huge bet upon resetting Doctor Who and went through the procedure that made the original run of the series great. It had excellent leads, impossible stories and some fantastic direction that really set my brain on fire.

And then, Matt Smith came.

I name thee Antichrist.
Well, not Matt Smith. In and of himself, Matt Smith couldn’t have done so much damage to this show. But Matt Smith became the ‘Facebook Doctor’, the vanilla, handsome bastard that can’t act half as well as his predecessors (Shakespearean actors both), working with dumbed down storylines written by a man who neither gets nor wants to get Time Travelling and how awesome works.

The current Doctor, though no fault of his own, stars in a series that is a watered-down, dumbed-down version of the previous one that I fell in love with.

Where on one hand there were beings that only existed when you did not look at them, alien empires, the incarnation of evil, the abduction of Earth, an army of all-assimilating and all-encompassing man-machines and the best horror 10 pounds sterling can buy, the new Doctor Who has  this:



This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when you try to dumb down a series so you can draw ‘the youngsters’. You do stupid shit, in the name of becoming trendy or trippy or to make fun of the old tropes, but end up fucking everything up.

I was originally going to play the devil’s advocate and try to defend the Doctor Who series that has been built around Matt Smith, citing the influx of new people that now watch the series, but you know what? I won’t. Wanna know why?

BECAUSE I COULDN’T FUCKING WATCH MATT SMITH’S RUN FOR EVEN A SINGLE FUCKING SEASON.

When I realized that the one scifi series I had loved had been tonally ruined, I jumped the hate-wagon and I will not climb down until Matt Smith has either been replaced by David Tennant

Yes, it is stupid of me to even think that would happen or that would have even been rational.

Or that the series stops being so goddamn stupid and starts doing its best to respect its audience by giving them the excellently written and brilliantly presented stories it used to.

But until that happens, here’s me doing something about it: I recently read that David Tennant is rumored to return to Doctor Who on account of the series’ 50th anniversary. Now I know that if this is true then Russel T. Davies has already creamed his pants twice over

Being the man who single-handedly made Dr Who awesome again and all that

Which means that he’s way too tired to come up with a good segway to restore the previous Doctor back in his place, without seriously violating the continuity the series set up.

So, Mr Davies, this is my pitch on

MY AWESOME IDEA ABOUT THE SPECIAL THAT RESTORES THE TENTH DOCTOR IN THE BEST NON-PLOT HOLE-Y WAY POSSIBLE

(Or it’s not a fanfic, but goddamn you’re trying)

First, to explain the basic premise of returning to the 10th Doctor: it is a trope of the show that, while you can go back in Time through the use of the relative technology, you cannot go back in your personal timeline, which means that while you can, for example, visit the fall of Troy and punch Adolf Hitler in the ‘nads, you cannot tell yourself that investing in HD ready DVD players is going to be a terrible idea.

  Hey fuck you, man! It’s a cheaper, more viable alternative to full HD, which will not be affordable for at least a decade!
Another important trope of the Doctor Who series concerning time travel is that certain instances or events in time are ‘time-locked’ which means that if the circumstances that allow these events to come to pass are met, then these events are unavoidable and inalterable.

For example: ridin’ your sparkling new time machine, you go back to the Rattskeller, so you can kick Hitler in the balls halfway through his first speech, aiming to defame him so he will lose his chance to rise to power (yes, your plan kind of sucks).

But World War II is an event that is not only major, but has also served to change mankind’s history forever by giving us access to atomic power. Which means that any and all attempts on your behalf to kick Hitler in the balls will fail or even if they succeed, they turn out not to have made any difference whatsoever.

Lastly, back to the point of personal timelines, you can never even talk to yourself or even return to your former self, since that would constitute a paradox that would cause a titanic backlash that would envelop the entire Universe in an attempt for Time to compensate for your bullshit paradoxical behavior.

So, from the get-go, it is impossible for the series to return to a previous Doctor. Even if it could (say, if the Doctor decided to restore to a previous save state and keep playing the game with his current xp and items)

So he could unlock a sexier outfit for Rose, for example…

It would be an inconceivably selfish and terrible thing for him to do, completely contradicting his character. However, in the course of the series, the Doctor has been known to get swept up in Time Vortices, trapped in temporal anomalies

And in one case, teaming up with his past selves to save the Universe on his 20th anniversary.

Which means that backsies, though unusual, are canonical in the Doctor Who continuum. This is good, because it gives me that inch that I will use to stretch my credibility into the following scenario, but then there’s the very next point:

The Tenth Doctor’s death.



The Tenth Doctor’s death was built as this great, monumental thing that signified not only the wrapping up of every loose end set up by the Bad Wolf and the Master story arcs, but also ended the universe that the original series had set up.

In layman’s terms, the Tenth Doctor’s death was sad. If you want to bring him back, you risk ruining that wonderful sadness and also alienating the multitudes of new people into the current Doctor Who.

The scenario I will be describing deals with the merging of both Doctors’ timelines into one cohesive whole, brought about both by the Eleventh Doctor’s timeline abuse (like when the bastard talks to himself and creates a series of paradoxes as a result) in order to avoid alienating fans on both sides.

WARNING: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A SPOILER-HEAVY SECTOR. PLEASE COVER YOUR EARS MAKE ALARM NOISES WITH YOUR MOUTH UNTIL THE END OF THIS ARTICLE.

That said, I give you…THE CRUCIBLE

Bwooo-oooo weeee-ooo wididly wididly wididly woom!

The Crucible is a three-part special with a threefold purpose:

            1) Restore the tone of the series to its original form
  
            2) Allow both the Tenth and Eleventh Doctor to merge their timelines into one cohesive whole 

           3) Do away with the silly, trippy crap that was added mostly because the writers equate younger audiences with stupidity or something.

In order for it to work, the specials needs to reference the most important, iconic parts of each Doctor’s run. That means that we need the Eleventh Doctor’s Weeping Angels, Professor River Song and the Tenth Doctor’s Master and the Time War. Primarily, these need to be done to appease both sides of the fans, but also to allow for the epic disaster-cluster that will allow this special to come about in the first place. Also, Daleks.

In the interest of avoiding a gigantic article and a fanscript (which I have sworn myself to never do ever again)

Why yes, I have written a fanfic starring 30 different characters with a length of 100,000 words. No, you may never see it.
I will outline the setup instead: according to Dr Who cannon, the Time War (the war between Time Lord and Dalek that exists in its own time loop in constant repetition that is to end with the annihilation of Gallifrey) has already once broken into the current continuum, but stopped. Also, the Master (Doctor Who’s archenemy, also a Time Lord) has been trapped within it.

Now, the Eleventh Doctor’s Weeping Angels (a considerably powerful foe, creatures that feed off temporal energy) have already faced extinction once already at the hands of the Doctor but have escaped by the granite of their teeth. An event as monumental as the Time War spilling out into the universe would allow them to restore themselves to their original strength.

The event of the Time War spilling out in all its destructive glory is a temporal anomaly of such significance it should send out ripples across Time and Space. An epic foreshadowing is in order. The death-cry of planets, the swan song of quasars, history twisting and turning, becoming askew.

And a strange hour, set between 5pm and teatime, when nothing is quite the way it seems…

The Doctor keeps finding himself in strange situations, familiarly conversing with beings that he has not met yet, trapped inside the Odd Hour, where he receives warning of a coming disaster. Caught up as he is in the process of saving the Universe, he misses all the great clues until he receives a warning from River Song, who has been trapped inside the Time War herself by the end of this story arc.

This serves as a means to show that Time is not only breaking up, but as a harbinger of doom for the Eleventh Doctor, who seeks to avoid this event but finds himself drawn nearer to it every minute instead.

Meanwhile, the Weeping Angels (in reference to the episode Blink) have commenced the invasion of Earth since ancient times. By the time the disaster draws near, they have infiltrated human society by disguising themselves as statues


Counting down the days at the rate of a thousand sunsets a second…

By the time the Doctor catches wind of what is going on, the Weeping Angels are already on the move, picking off mankind. Amy Pond is one of the first victims of the invasion, sent to a future time by a fluke of the coming anomaly, where she meets professor River Song (now a survivor of the Time War disaster) and attempt to contact the Doctor.

But how will the Time War spill out, exactly? The series has told us that it exists in itself and cannot be unleashed. But what happens if one of them, fearing for his life, decides to take the entire Universe with him in a vain attempt to save his life?

Doom! Du-du-doom! Doom! Du-du-doom!

Last time we saw the Master, he had voluntarily fought the President of Gallifrey and flung himself inside the Time War. We also knew that he was not an actual veteran of the War and that he was unprepared for the horrors that the Daleks and Time Lords had unleashed upon each other during their centuries of conflict.

This scenario assumes that the Master failed to kill the President, but escaped capture. He has been stuck inside Hell, looking for a way to escape the timelock and avoid certain death. Thus, the Master decides to take drastic measures.

So the Master wants to escape because he’s scared shitless. He hopes that the anomaly will draw the Doctor’s attention and perhaps he can steal his ship so he can get away, no longer caring about the consequences. He’s seen terrible things in that place, nightmares looping on and on and on.

So at this point in the story, the Weeping Angels, having fed off their victims on Earth, are converging on the anomaly that, due to budget constraints, takes place over London.


Worst. Place. Ever.
Feeding off the coming disaster, the creatures grow in number and power, perpetuating the disaster that has been engineered by the Master. River song and Amy try to warn the Doctor, but by that time, it is already too late.

The first taste of the Time War begins to leak out into the Universe.

What this? This is just hor d’oeuvres.
The weapons of the Daleks leak out first. The Nightmare Child, a sentient black hole that screams with the voice of drowning infants. The Skarro Degradations, gigantic Dalek dreadnoughts that eat planets and babble blasphemous incantations, spitting nuclear fire from their mouths.

The Dalek fleet proper slips through, overtaking Earth in instants, locking themselves in battle with the Weeping Angels. The Solar System is set ablaze, then holds it breath as the Time Lords begin their exodus.

The Could-Have-Been King and the army of Neverwheres, a legion of beings comprised of moments in time that could have been. Continuum-vores, Time Lord weapons that eat history and excrete paradoxes, enter the fray.

The Doctor finds himself trapped in the war between the greatest forces of the Universe once again. Clashing with the Master (who attempts to steal his TARDIS), the Doctor decides to end this.

He directs River Song and Amy from their point in the future, leading them to devastated Gallifrey that is being evacuated by the Time Lords. The women try to warn him that the future is ending, but the Doctor will have none of it. They try to explain that this was the bold move that finally killed him, but the Doctor isn’t exactly known for his caution.

Now, if Doctor Who and Michio Kaku have taught me anything, if you want to fix a hole in space time, you need a really big explosion.

Arigato, Professor Kaku.

But this is an anomaly that threatens to annihilate Time. This means that it needs power and to be specific, power far greater than anything the Time Lords could have to offer. So how did the Master do it?

By tapping into the Nightmare Child. Using the power of a black hole without the Dalek’s knowledge, he allowed the time loop that kept the War trapped to be undone. So now, the Doctor needs to cross the fleet of the Dalek, avoid fire by his own kind and fly inside the ultimate Dalek Weapon so he can make thing right.

The Master overpowers the Doctor and is about to fly off with the TARDIS, when he hears the message by Amy Pond:

“The future is disappearing! Doctor, can you hear me? There’s nothing here! Doctor?”

The Master realizes that this action has been his greatest folly. He will not survive this. In fact, he will take the entire universe with him. It’s what leads him to help the Doctor and team up with him to save, well…everything.

Now imagine, if you will: a War that will end all Wars, spilling out across Time and Space. Lasers blasting the living crap out of everything in sight. Weapons that tear into reality herself and use her guts as makeshift weapons and among it all…

A tiny blue box, our last and only hope.

The TARDIS heads toward the nightmare Child, battered and bloodied, trailing fire. The warring factions, having realized exactly what is going on, turn their attention against it in an attempt to stop it.

The Master looks up at the Doctor, as Amy screams from her point in the future, reality unraveling around her:

“Doctor, what is going on? What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Amy. I’m so sorry.”

The Master goes pale as he realizes how close to death he is. In a moment of cowardice, he reaches out to wrest the controls from the Doctor, screaming:

“I don’t want to die! Not like this, not with you!”

The Doctor flies into the Nightmare Child and crashes into the Paradox matrix inside it, smashing it. Both he and the Master are thrown out into the Child’s event horizon and struggle to reach the interior of the TARDIS. The Doctor tries to save the Master, but his enemy swats his hand away, letting himself get dragged down into the gravity well instead.

Around them, the Time War anomaly collapses. The forces of Time Lord and Dalek cease to be. The timeline begins to unravel, history folding like origami and the Eleventh Doctor’s life passes before his eyes. His life becomes blurred, changing.

Amy Pond and River Song are restored to their original positions, since the future they had been sent to by the Angels no longer exists. The present becomes re arranged and the Doctor stares with horror as the TARDIS is trapped inside this flux, its own field the only thing keeping the change at bay.

This is a chance to show the Doctor truly and utterly scared. He does not know what will happen. He knows that he isn’t going to die, but how much of him is there going to be left? For better or worse, he likes his identity but to be lost, to be swept under the rug like this disaster is more than he can bear.

It’s only when Amy and River Song restore communications with him that the Doctor realizes that, even if he is lost, at least life will go on. He flings open the doors of the TARDIS and lets Time do its work.

“I’m ready. Do your worst.”

The Tenth and Eleventh Doctor’s timelines merge, change, flow back to the point of regeneration and at the very last moment, as the Tenth Doctor begins his transformation, the effect is turned back. He stands there, awash with light and sees his future self dissipating, as he falls to his knees and collapses on the floor, exhausted and very, very scared.

On the screen, we see a flicker of Amy and River Song. Outside, the Doctor has landed on Earth, in Antarctica. He looks at the world around him and knows that everything has changed. He can taste the historical distortions settling and he feels scared to step outside his ship.

It’s during that moment of silence and terror that the reborn Tenth Doctor hears the mad cackle of the Master coming from the screens. He barely has enough time to react, as this happens:

Roll credits

ATTENTION: YOU MAY NOW UNPLUG YOUR EARS AND CEASE MAKING ALARM NOISES WITH YOUR MOUTH. THANK YOU.

So, this is my pitch. If anyone reading this has any comments, suggestions or simply needs to point out my gigantic plot holes, feel free to point so out in the comments. I enjoyed this little ride and I am really looking forward to doing so again, to be honest.

Addendum:

To ask for a series to undo its work is irrational. I do not like the Matt Smith run of Doctor Who and this is an idea of mine intended to restore a great actor who made the Doctor awesome, but it would be against my personal responsibility as a writer to, say, undo three years’ worth of adventures for the sake of my raging fanboy butthurt.

It has been proven, time and time again, that series or franchises that cave in to popular demand and do their damnedest to soothe the cries of the zealot multitudes end up turning into a jumble of fanservice and incoherency.

So, from me to you, BBC people who might be reading this: please do not bring David Tennant back. It hurts me to thinkt hat the best Doctor won’t be returning to the show, but that would violate both your continuity as well as your credibility. Instead, focus on making the show as deep and inspired as before and I promise I’ll do my damnedest to stop being such a bitch.

A man who only recently saw the light but loved it just as much,
Konstantine Paradias

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