The 10th Doctor and June 18th, 2014

The Tenth Doctor

(same post at my Media blog)

When the 9th Doctor came to an end, I was almost ready to call it quits on Doctor Who.  Its the American in me that does not like when "title" characters change on me.  After so many years of cult movies I liked getting different leads to play the same actor and being "shit", I did not like "my" Doctor changing.  Christopher Eccleston was the 9th Doctor and the first Doctor to keep me interested in Dr. Who.  He had a toiled past about him, and no matter how cheery he got, he was a little tortured inside over guilt about something.  Then, when we were finally getting answers, he left the show after only one season.  For those that do not know about Dr. Who, he is sort of like a Phoenix or a Trill(from Star Trek).  The Doctor gets reborn at the time of death into a new personality but with keeping the memories of the previous.  The 9th Doctor was taken far too early for my sense of story sensibilities.

The 10th Doctor came out cheery, silly, and only randomly did bad things.  The companion, Rose, seemed to abandon the thought of 9th Doctor very readily because this 10th Doctor was "dreamy".  I watched that season and I took a good long break.  The loss of Rose was the last link to 9th Doctor and the new companion from the Christmas Episode that year seemed like a real "pill".  If I had known how great the 10th Doctor's 2nd and 3rd year were going to be, I'd have watched them a lot sooner.

The 2nd and 3rd year of David Tennant as the Doctor are some of the best seasons of television I've ever seen.  They rank easily up there with Star Trek Next Gen's best.  The writing started taking into account Tennant as an actor, and Rose was replaced with a caring Martha.  Where as Rose was flighty and ditzy and played  alot of "stupid" and "school girl crush" jokes, Martha was intelligent and not quite so susceptible to closed doors(you Whovians know what I mean).  We got kickbacks to the original Who series with guest actors that played the parts they played in the 70's and 80's.  We got the wonderful Sarah Jane, arguably the most beloved woman on British TV, coming back so triumphantly she got her own spin off show.  And we had David Tennant.

David Tennant was perfect at showing a child-like wonder with Dr. Who.  Everything fascinated him.  In the 2nd and 3rd years, we met the other side as well.  David Tennant could make Dr. Who heartfelt.  This is why 10th Doctor has won me over.  Unlike Eccleston, things that happened with Tennant made me tear up.  Whenever he knew someone was going to die, he would say "I'm sorry, I'm so very sorry" and after you believed that he was sorry, you realized someone in the room was going to die and it would bring up tensions.  They are not shy to have people you care about die in the Tennant era of Doctor Who.  When things are revealed we are only as surprised as the Doctor, and Tennat did this very well.  He was right mix of serious, funny, and just enough Scottish to remind us of a Time Traveling James Bond.  He had the best portrayal of a mischievious person, but just like the Dumbledore you read in the books, or Gandalf being silly in the Shire, there's a hint of "everything is under control, I know what I'm doing".  In this post alone, I've compared Tennant to Gandalf, Dumbledore, and his story to the very best of Jean Luc Picard's Enterprise.  These are lofty places in nerdom, and I think he belongs there.

Oh and that companion we thought we dodged a bullet on after the Christmas Episode?  She was Donna Noble and Tennant made us care about her.  I was determined not to like the woman, and their work together was easily the most emotional of any in the series so far.  Do not even ask me how it happened, but I ended up liking Donna Noble even more than Rose Tyler.

The Tennant Era is one big huge story.  Almost every thing that happens actually is building to something and oh did it end in a wonderfully huge finale.  You might think that each season is self contained for the most part, as each season gets it own resolution and completion, but you're lulled into a false sense of "finish".  Tennant's era finishes with "The End of Time" and this two parter takes every major story line of Tennants era and gives it a send off the likes of which are usually only matched by series finales.  And that's a big difference to what we got with the 9th Doctor.  David Tennant got a send off, he got to say goodbye to everyone, and the show treated his leaving as the passing of a crown, as should befit the passing of a benevolent king.  The lasting quote of the 10th Doctor, "we must look like ants to you"  "oh no, to me you look like giants" is a great summation of the 10th Doctor.

So the 11th Doctor has shown up and like the 10th, he hasn't given me a very good impression.  We don't know what we're getting for a companion and we can't imagine Doctor Who without Tennant.  As I said before in an earlier daily post... that's core for Dr. Who and an experience you have to get used to if you're a fan.  I'm looking forward to finding out if I"m a David Tennant fan, or a "Whovian" in the real sense.


June 18th, 2014

I've already listened and did a write up about ACDC's "Ballbreaker" album when I realized that I forgot to add a bit of personal history that pertains to this era.  This is a blog from me after all, so I need to talk about ACDC live.  When it comes to getting a "Greatest Hits" album when I had money to spend, ACDC Live was about as close as you could get.  In time I came to love every single song on that album, and since ACDC are the masters of sounding like ACDC at all times, the live tracks were as good, if not better, than the album versions.  This lead to a new blind spot for me though; my knowledge of ACDC stopped at 1992.  So even though that ACDC live was a great album, it left a lot of Bon Scott and post 90's stuff out of my view, and is one of the reasons I've gone back to listen to all their albums.  So if you only buy one ACDC album, then ACDC live is a good one to get, but you are missing some Bon Scott stuff like Ride On, and Rock and Roll Damnation.  A few Brian Johnson era hits like "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" slips through the crack as well.

Turning to some video game news.  Some asshole that I'm not going to dignify with naming has popped his head back up in an industry he swears he no longer wants to be a part of.  The issue is about Youtubers and the rights of the game creators to get a piece of the money they make off videos of them playing.  This man called Youtubers "pirates" and "thieves".  Which is funny, because like all hipsters, this developer co-opted other people's hard work and rode a trend specifically because it was the "it" trend to ride, and the easiest to plunder at the time he left his overschooling.  Anyway, I call it bullshit.  He got his cut of the "action" when they bought the goddamn game.  The people who make footballs do not go after broadcasters for profit, the football maker got its profit when the team bought the damn ball.  Its called "Fair use" and its protected in our country.  The fact that this guy, and Nintendo does it too, can't see that Let's Plays fuel their industry with cheap advertisement and purchase encouragement is a real shame, and real "corporate" thinking.  That's right, this Indie darling is acting like EA, so never put your trust in this "poser" as much as I hate the term, it aptly describes him.

I finished book 1 of the Riddle-master of Hed trilogy.  Its a short book, as they all are, but there is a lot that happens in these books.  In the series, the "School" uses Riddles as a teaching device.  I did not catch on to this early, but they are sort of like parables.  For example "who is Sol, and why did he die?" is a "riddle".  When you answer who he was, you tell the circumstances of his death, and then you tell the lesson.  In this example the lesson is "better to tread the unknown than to turn your back to certain death".  I should have been writing these things down instead of the names of all the farmers at the beginning, because ALL the people mentioned in legend are important... and in some cases they show up face to face(its not a spoiler, you'll understand if you read the book).  The negatives of the book... for the first 100 pages you might just be bored.  The reason is, all these things are happening and you don't yet see how it fits.  It seems like whenever a story is getting started, it gets derailed, but after 100 pages of all these derailments you see that maybe this was the correct path all along, and that these derailments have large meanings.  I devoured the last 60 pages in a "quicker than usual" reading fashion since I type WAY faster than I read when I'm reading casual.  So it ended with enough gusto to make me want to read the next book right away.