Obligatory Retospective

So... 2013.

Not a great year. Lots of drama. Some personal, some professional, some just omnipresent and lingering like smog.

There were good points, certainly. It was quite the roller-coaster ride. Looks like 2014 will hold much of the same. Impossible to say if any of that will be a good thing or a bad thing.

However it all goes, I feel obligated to say farewell to car payments (yay!), adieu to so many friends who were part of my life for such a long time, and good-bye to a sibling with whom I had a complicated relationship.

I'm not going to go through the pantomime of resolutions. I'll adapt to 2014 somehow and hopefully better than I adapted to 2013.

Adios 2013 and bring on the new year! I've got a pint in my hand and a dapper hat to face the elements. I'm ready.

EDIT: Oh, and to any who read this, I wish you a very happy new year. May 2014 bring you joy and good fortune while leaving all the bad crap behind.

Review: The Time of the Doctor

So I saw it.

The final Matt Smith episode, "The Time of the Doctor" has aired and I have personal reactions. Spoilers follow, so be warned. I'll hide it under a deprecated font tag, which will do exactly jack for handheld devices, but I lack technical skill to hide spoilers properly and am too lazy to research so... here we go.



























































Still there? Seriously? Okay...












"The Time of the Doctor" starts with Smith's Doctor in orbit around a planet. He has a damaged Cyberman's head that he's talking to in the TARDIS while a fleet of every alien ever is answering a strange, untranslatable message from the forcefield-encased planet below.

Meanwhile, Clara is having Christmas dinner and has the Doctor drop by as her faux-boyfriend in an entirely immaterial side-plot. That gets Clara on-board the TARDIS when the Doctor learns the message is transmitting that the mysterious planet below claims to be Gallifrey. It isn't.

The story then spins off into the normal navel-gazing incoherent nonsense that Moffatt usually pens. The planet is protected by the once-noted Papal Mainframe under the control of some woman the Doctor knew from before. The Doctor tricks the Papal whatsits to letting him go down to the planet where he finds another crack in time from Series Five that leads to Gallifrey beyond time-and-space. There's a "truth field" in place to make people speak the truth. The Doctor is being asked "Doctor Who" under the arbitrary logic that the answer will call back the Time Lords. Nobody in orbit wants that 'cause they think it will start another time war (huh?) so the Papal whosit woman starts the Silence movement to stop the Doctor. The Doctor lingers on the planet in a town called Christmas where... um... you know, don't dwell on the town. It's just meaningless and random. The planet is named Trenzalore and this is where the final battle is going down.

The Doctor sends the TARDIS to take Clara home, but Clara hangs on the TARDIS and somehow comes back to Trenzalore only centuries have passed and the Doctor has started to age. Everyone and their cousins up in orbit is fighting and some of the Papal people have gone back in time to do the whole Silence mystery thing that was the plot of series five. Turns out those Silence wonks? Gene-engineered confessors. Yeah... okay.

The plot takes weirder turns and the Doctor with the Papal people are fighting everyone to stop them from... um... I dunno. Killing the Doctor so he can't call back the Time Lords? That's only one of many plot points that wind up making no sense at all.

In the end, the Doctor is dying of old age. Through very creative math, it turns out the Doctor is on his last incarnation, having had his twelve regenerations. Clara talks the Time Lords from beyond into helping somehow and they manage to send him a new life-cycle while opening and closing the time crack at will. So the Doctor's new regeneration blows up the Daleks (the only enemies standing) and turns him into the... um... next Doctor? The 14th incarnation or 13th regeneration or whatever.

Plot points that make absolutely no sense at all:
- How was the Papal Mainframe able to stop the TARDIS from doing anything? Isn't Gallifreyan technology more advanced than everyone else?
- How did the Silence movement blow up the TARDIS in series five? That was never, ever addressed.
- Really? That regeneration-into-the-hand thing is going to count? Seriously? Fuck you guys.
- So if the Time Lords are now not-bad (still an open question) why would letting them return be a bad thing? I mean, everyone seems okay with the Daleks hanging around and they're homicidal to the extreme. What the hell?
- Why the hell do the Time Lords need the Doctor's "real name" to return? Why not just have the Doctor use the TARDIS to respond?
- If the Time Lords can get through the crack, why not send an expedition from their side using their substantial technology? I mean... seriously?
- If Clara was able to get them to help the Doctor, it seems the Time Lords got their reply that all was well. If they could move the time crack (and they clearly could) why not just pop into reality at a different point? Why fuck around at Trenzalore?

So, yeah. It was an entertaining episode, I suppose, but it was incoherent nonsense. Moffatt should hand off the reins to someone with a better sense of details and focus on "Sherlock". My two cents.

Tis the Season

Happy Rod Serling's birthday!

We get the Doctor Who holiday, too! Happiness abounds!

I know the answer

Shoggoth.

Wherein I ramble on a Thursday morning

I can't believe how crazed this week has been and it's only Thursday. It's not just hyperbole that I cannot wait for the end of my workday on Friday.

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Still flummoxed by the alterations that resulted in The Desolation of Smaug. I'm trying to parse out why Jackson opted for some of his more bizarre elements (vague spoilerish statements follow): Did Beorn really have to look like Wolverine's even-more-freakish taller brother? Did Bard really have to become a Han Solo-esque character? Was that painful-to-watch romantic subplot really have to happen? Did the Dol Guldur scene really have to be a rehash of something we've already seen in one of the LotR films?

I'm also wondering what happened to Jackson's sense of pacing and style. In the various Lord of the Rings movies, the fight scenes were complex and hectic without feeling frenzied and crowded. In the two Hobbit films thus far, all the fight scenes feel like badly-paced video game scenes.

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Xmas shopping. I hates it. I hates it a lot.

Smauggy day

Saw The Desolation of Smaug. I finally understand what Peter Jackson is doing. He's done a filming of a video game of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign he did based loosely on Tolkien's books.

This second installment of "The Hobbit" has nothing to do with the book with the same name save that there's a few characters that share names. Oh, and tiny people are called Hobbits when they're not Dwarves. Otherwise, there's no resemblance at all to the book. Once you accept that, it's pretty easy to digest Tauriel the "She-Elf" and the appearance of Legolas all over the place.

I wonder what kinds of slashfic Jackson's got on Legolas? No, I don't want to know. Not really.

Smaug was pretty awesome, and it was an entertaining movie once I realized what it was. Worth admission, but purists will claw out their eyes.

Tarragoatmeal Explained!

So I have a (terrible) excuse for the "tarragoatmeal incident"! I was coming down with a cold!

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Two nights of Nyquil mixed with naps seems to have shaken the bug before it took hold too much. I was pretty much back to 85% on Saturday and fluctuating between 70% and 90% on Sunday.

I feel about 95% today, which is pretty amazing considering it's Monday.

Still haven't seen The Desolation of Smaug yet. I may try mid-week and give the crowds a chance to calm down a bit.