19x5. Black Orchid
Writer: Terence Dudley
Director: Ron Jones
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Synopsis: The Doctor is mistaken for an expected guest at the
home of the 1920s upper-class Cranleigh family, where what seems like a
light-hearted cricket match and costume ball gives way to a murder
mystery with the Doctor as a suspect. The culprit turns out to be
George Cranleigh, a former explorer who had his tongue cut out and has
since gone insane, kept hidden in the family's home under the cover
story of having gone missing. Nyssa, whose appearance is near-identical
to that of Ann, George's former fiancee who is now engaged to his
brother Charles, finds herself in danger when George gets loose.
Review: "Black Orchid" is an odd little serial that has its
appealing elements but relies a little too much on
"because-the-writers-said-so" plotting for me to give it a full
recommendation. It's the first two-part serial since "The Sontaran
Experiment," and much of the first episode is spent in a light-hearted
"TARDIS crew on vacation" mode, but then it steps into more serious
territory and raises questions that it never completely answers.
Seeing
the main cast in a more relaxed setting is a welcome change of pace,
especially with a larger-than-average TARDIS crew. Tegan, who has
typically been the most easily intimidated by the dangers that they
encounter, has nevertheless decided that she'd like to continue
traveling with them for a while and clearly enjoys the party at the
Cranleighs' house. Meanwhile, Nyssa shows herself to have a playful
side when she agrees to wear the same costume as Ann and keep everyone
guessing as to who's who. The Fifth Doctor continues to emerge as a
more relatably human incarnation than his predecessor, proving himself
to be a skilled cricketeer and revealing that he had wanted to drive a
train car as a boy. (It's actually a little strange to hear the Doctor
refer to childhood - I don't recall seeing children in any of the
Gallifrey serials, and it doesn't seem like the Time Lord aging process
works the same way as that of humans.)
Underneath
all the mirth, however, is a story of an upper-class family that has
prioritized keeping up appearances, even to the point of keeping George
as a virtual prisoner in their own home. When the initial murder victim
is discovered, Lady Cranleigh asks that it be kept quiet until the
party is over, and later she allows the Doctor to be blamed for the
killings in the assumption that he'll eventually be cleared. What
exactly do the Doctor and his companions think about all this? It's not
entirely clear, because a considerable portion of the second episode is
occupied with the Doctor getting arrested and eventually winning over
the skeptical police by showing them the interior of the TARDIS. The
Doctor initially agrees to keep quiet about the first death until the
police arrive, but if he recognises the social customs that prompt Lady
Cranleigh to behave as she does, he never really says anything about it.
At a more basic level, the serial employs
two rather blatant contrivances to set these events in motion. One is
the near-perfect resemblance between Ann and Nyssa, which is apparently
meant to be nothing more than a coincidence. Maybe I'm barking up the
wrong tree given that Doctor Who has
so many humanoid aliens in the first place, but this feels like a
stretch given that Nyssa is not only unrelated to Ann but is not even
human -- it seems incredibly unlikely that this would "just happen,"
much less in a situation where people also "just happened" to be
expecting an unnamed "Doctor" right when the Doctor turns up. The other
is the nature of George's mental illness -- whatever it might be. I say
that because the serial tells us nothing other than that he's insane.
Okay, fine, but plenty of people suffer from mental illness, even
severe mental illness, but still don't just randomly murder somebody
the way George does. Does he have PTSD? Is he delusional? Psychotic?
All
this culminates in a somewhat ham-handed ending, where Charles
convinces George to let Nyssa go and moves to embrace his brother, but
George recoils or flinches and falls off the roof to his death. Perhaps
this could have been convincing if we understood more about George's
mental illness or what sort of relationship Charles has had with his
brother, but without that background, it feels like the script
forcing an abrupt tragic ending rather than letting the story and
characters develop naturally. There's a brief epilogue in which we see
that the TARDIS crew have stayed on to attend George's funeral - as has
Ann. Is she still planning to marry Charles? Again, the script is simply silent.
While
I wouldn't argue that "Black Orchid" should have been four episodes, I might say that three would have been more suitable - the
extra time might have allowed for more substantial development of the
guest characters and a clearer understanding of George's behavior. As
things stand, it has a promising setup but doesn't fully deliver on its
potential.
Rating: **1/2 (out of four)
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Review [Doctor Who]: "The Visitation"
19x4. The Visitation
Writer: Eric Saward
Director: Peter Grimwade
Script Editor: Antony Root
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Synopsis: The TARDIS materializes in England in 1666, where Terileptils have established themselves in a small village, using control bracelets and an android that resembles the Grim Reaper to manipulate the residents for their own purposes. As escaped criminals from a violent society, they plan to wipe out Earth's population and claim its resources as their own.
Review: "The Visitation" is perhaps most noteworthy for further exploring the contentiousness, inexperience, and occasional mistakes of this TARDIS crew. Davison's Doctor is proving to be a bit irritable at times and sometimes struggles to control the situation - he is forced to leave Adric and Tegan behind at one point when menaced by the Tereleptils' android, and the final fight with the Tereleptils results in the Great Fire of London breaking out. While the Tereleptils are certainly dangerous and had to be stopped, it's also clear that they come from a pretty brutal culture, and the Doctor and Nyssa both show noticeable regret at their rather gruesome demise (they are trapped in the fire). Meanwhile, Adric is noticeably frustrated when he feels as if he can't contribute much and gets himself captured. On the other hand, the Doctor's light-hearted reaction when someone points out that they're partly responsible for the fire seems inappropriate - not that I expected him to intervene, but a more sober "we can't change history" response would have been more appropriate. Still, this is a solid entry that makes good use of the setting, and Richard Mace - the thief who gets reluctantly drafted into helping the Doctor -proves to be an entertaining guest character.
Rating: *** (out of four)
Writer: Eric Saward
Director: Peter Grimwade
Script Editor: Antony Root
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Synopsis: The TARDIS materializes in England in 1666, where Terileptils have established themselves in a small village, using control bracelets and an android that resembles the Grim Reaper to manipulate the residents for their own purposes. As escaped criminals from a violent society, they plan to wipe out Earth's population and claim its resources as their own.
Review: "The Visitation" is perhaps most noteworthy for further exploring the contentiousness, inexperience, and occasional mistakes of this TARDIS crew. Davison's Doctor is proving to be a bit irritable at times and sometimes struggles to control the situation - he is forced to leave Adric and Tegan behind at one point when menaced by the Tereleptils' android, and the final fight with the Tereleptils results in the Great Fire of London breaking out. While the Tereleptils are certainly dangerous and had to be stopped, it's also clear that they come from a pretty brutal culture, and the Doctor and Nyssa both show noticeable regret at their rather gruesome demise (they are trapped in the fire). Meanwhile, Adric is noticeably frustrated when he feels as if he can't contribute much and gets himself captured. On the other hand, the Doctor's light-hearted reaction when someone points out that they're partly responsible for the fire seems inappropriate - not that I expected him to intervene, but a more sober "we can't change history" response would have been more appropriate. Still, this is a solid entry that makes good use of the setting, and Richard Mace - the thief who gets reluctantly drafted into helping the Doctor -proves to be an entertaining guest character.
Rating: *** (out of four)
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Dragon Age: Inquisition - Two Games in One (includes spoilers)
I finally finished Dragon Age: Inquisition, and I'm not sure
I've ever played a game before that is so wildly inconsistent in both
quality and style. At times, it almost feels like two separate games
somehow accidentally wound up in the same .exe file together.
One of those games, fortunately, delivers the sort of content that I look forward to when I play a Bioware game (disclaimer: I've only played the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series). While Corypheus himself is just a by-the-numbers villain, Bioware makes up for it with its portrayal of the people who have ended up serving his cause - a Tevinter magister trying to save his son, a previously loyal Templar who feels that he and his colleagues have been treated as pawns, Grey Wardens deceived by a false calling, rebel mages who turned in desperation to the one nation where they'd be allowed their freedom. The Mage/Templar war is a classic example of a conflict in which each faction has legitimate grievances, but events have spiraled out of control as extremists on both sides dig in their heels. Putting the player in the role of leading the Inquisition's efforts to contain the conflict and prevent ordinary citizens from getting caught in the crossfire is a good choice, allowing us to express viewpoints on the underlying issues through the dialogue scenes and creating a more "down-to-earth" context for our actions as opposed to simply "fight the bad guys" or "keep the world from being destroyed."
Characterization is generally strong, with most of the potential companions winning our sympathy despite very different backgrounds and points of view, and the return of characters of various prominence from the previous two games - Cassandra, Leliana, Cullen, Varric, Morrigan, and Hawke being the most significant - reinforces the sense of a coherent fictional universe with lots of moving parts and wide-ranging consequences. Perhaps even more importantly, Bioware has used the fantasy setting not just to give us non-human races and magical powers, but a world in which some of the basics of reality work differently than they do in ours. Characters are able to cross into a more spiritual plane of reality at times (i.e. the Fade), but definitive answers to the big metaphysical questions (such as the nature of a deity, or what happens after death) remain out of their reach. Characters like Cole, Mythal, and the apparition of Justinia demonstrate that even a question like "Who are you?" may not have a simple answer in Thedas. Morrigan, meanwhile, has continued to develop a strong intellectual curiosity, with her demonstration of the Eluvians to the Inquisitor and her reactions to the discoveries in the Temple of Mythal serving as further reminder us that Thedas is a very strange and mysterious place and not simply medieval Europe with elves, dwarves, and magicians.
Placing many of the key events within large open-world environments, where the player as is also drawn into smaller or tangential conflicts, seems like a good idea. Corypheus may be the existential threat here, but his allies' manipulations and the political chaos that could prevent a unified response to his plotting would logically be a major factor as well. The "power/influence" system ties the player's actions back to the Inquisition's overall standing, and side missions are the perfect opportunity to develop the complexity and detail of Thedosian society as well as allow the player to explore his or her character further through dialogue and choices. Theoretically, this should be effective.
But somehow, it just isn't. Instead, the environments and the events that take place in them too often feel like they're just hanging out there. The dialogue is frequently minimal, and once I got past the "wow!" factor of the visual detail, I couldn't help but notice that I was basically doing the same few things over and over again: (1) fighting off enemies to capture a certain area (whether to close Fade rifts, set up camps, or help out an NPC); (2) retrieving one or more objects for somebody; and (3) reading notes, books, and other scraps of information scattered around the landscape. If I'd just watched someone playing a few minutes of one of these levels, without being given any context, I'd have guessed that I was watching a generic open-world action game as opposed to a Bioware RPG. When fully exploring a single one of these environments can take well upwards of, say, 4-5 hours, it tends to diminish the narrative momentum that the game builds up in the main quest missions.
What's especially disappointing is how straightforward most of these side missions tend to be. Rarely is there any sort of unexpected consequence or opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue. For example, I was playing my Inquisitor as noticeably uncomfortable about being called "Herald of Andraste" and only reluctantly exercising his newfound power. Early on, I was informed that an Avvar cult had captured some Inquisition soldiers in an attempt to lure me into a fight, viewing the existence of the "Herald" as a threat to their own religious beliefs. "Now that sounds interesting," I thought to myself, anticipating that perhaps I'd have a chance to negotiate for the soldiers' safety, or try to convince the cultists that I wasn't presuming to invoke divine authority and that their religious practices would face no threat from the Inquisition, or learn from the hostages that something more complicated had been going on in the Avvar compound. But could I actually do any of that? Nope. Turns out the cultists all attack on sight, and there's nothing to do but fight them off and click on something to let the hostages out.
Part of the reason this is frustrating is that I know Bioware can do better and has done better - repeatedly so, in fact. Consider Jack's loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2. There's combat, sure, but the very fact that there's combat is itself a plot twist, because the mission is initially presented as destroying an abandoned facility. More importantly, along the way, Jack has to come to terms with the fact that she never even fully grasped what was going on during her horrific childhood experience, culminating in her confrontation with Aresh - a man who suffered even worse than she did and is now engaged in a twisted quest to give meaning to all the torture he and other children endured. It's not an especially long mission (probably 30-40 minutes), but it still manages to tell a compelling story and open the door to a change in Jack's attitude. Had this mission taken place in Inquisition, I'd half-expect it to take twice as long, only with Aresh dying in a boss fight and the squad finding a piece of paper explaining what he'd been doing instead of actually talking to him about it.
I'm aware that Dragon Age 2 apparently caught a lot of heat for recycling environments and limiting most of the action to Kirkwall, so I suppose if Bioware wanted to prove that they could make a mega-super-duper-huge game world with absolutely no recycling of environments ever, well, okay, mission accomplished. But a game doesn't have to take a hundred hours to finish to be "epic," and when you have a game that does, in its better moments, still offer some meaningful choices, I'd argue that it probably *shouldn't* take that long simply because it makes it harder to find time for multiple playthroughs. (And for what it's worth, I actually found DA2 somewhat underrated, with my main gripe being that it seemed to end because Cassandra told Varric he could stop telling the story rather than because everything was actually resolved.) I'm tempted to do another playthrough in which I simply skip most of the side content, focusing entirely on the "Inquisitor's Path" main quest and the companion quests, partly to see if the narrative feels a little more coherent that way. But the game does enough to steer you towards the side content (with various warnings of one crisis or another) that I suspect this might prove somewhat immersion-breaking as well.
I suppose it's to Bioware's credit that, despite all this, I'd still rate the game a solid 7 or 8 out of 10. But if there's one lesson that I hope they take away for the next Dragon Age game, it's that more and bigger do not always equal better.
One of those games, fortunately, delivers the sort of content that I look forward to when I play a Bioware game (disclaimer: I've only played the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series). While Corypheus himself is just a by-the-numbers villain, Bioware makes up for it with its portrayal of the people who have ended up serving his cause - a Tevinter magister trying to save his son, a previously loyal Templar who feels that he and his colleagues have been treated as pawns, Grey Wardens deceived by a false calling, rebel mages who turned in desperation to the one nation where they'd be allowed their freedom. The Mage/Templar war is a classic example of a conflict in which each faction has legitimate grievances, but events have spiraled out of control as extremists on both sides dig in their heels. Putting the player in the role of leading the Inquisition's efforts to contain the conflict and prevent ordinary citizens from getting caught in the crossfire is a good choice, allowing us to express viewpoints on the underlying issues through the dialogue scenes and creating a more "down-to-earth" context for our actions as opposed to simply "fight the bad guys" or "keep the world from being destroyed."
Characterization is generally strong, with most of the potential companions winning our sympathy despite very different backgrounds and points of view, and the return of characters of various prominence from the previous two games - Cassandra, Leliana, Cullen, Varric, Morrigan, and Hawke being the most significant - reinforces the sense of a coherent fictional universe with lots of moving parts and wide-ranging consequences. Perhaps even more importantly, Bioware has used the fantasy setting not just to give us non-human races and magical powers, but a world in which some of the basics of reality work differently than they do in ours. Characters are able to cross into a more spiritual plane of reality at times (i.e. the Fade), but definitive answers to the big metaphysical questions (such as the nature of a deity, or what happens after death) remain out of their reach. Characters like Cole, Mythal, and the apparition of Justinia demonstrate that even a question like "Who are you?" may not have a simple answer in Thedas. Morrigan, meanwhile, has continued to develop a strong intellectual curiosity, with her demonstration of the Eluvians to the Inquisitor and her reactions to the discoveries in the Temple of Mythal serving as further reminder us that Thedas is a very strange and mysterious place and not simply medieval Europe with elves, dwarves, and magicians.
Placing many of the key events within large open-world environments, where the player as is also drawn into smaller or tangential conflicts, seems like a good idea. Corypheus may be the existential threat here, but his allies' manipulations and the political chaos that could prevent a unified response to his plotting would logically be a major factor as well. The "power/influence" system ties the player's actions back to the Inquisition's overall standing, and side missions are the perfect opportunity to develop the complexity and detail of Thedosian society as well as allow the player to explore his or her character further through dialogue and choices. Theoretically, this should be effective.
But somehow, it just isn't. Instead, the environments and the events that take place in them too often feel like they're just hanging out there. The dialogue is frequently minimal, and once I got past the "wow!" factor of the visual detail, I couldn't help but notice that I was basically doing the same few things over and over again: (1) fighting off enemies to capture a certain area (whether to close Fade rifts, set up camps, or help out an NPC); (2) retrieving one or more objects for somebody; and (3) reading notes, books, and other scraps of information scattered around the landscape. If I'd just watched someone playing a few minutes of one of these levels, without being given any context, I'd have guessed that I was watching a generic open-world action game as opposed to a Bioware RPG. When fully exploring a single one of these environments can take well upwards of, say, 4-5 hours, it tends to diminish the narrative momentum that the game builds up in the main quest missions.
What's especially disappointing is how straightforward most of these side missions tend to be. Rarely is there any sort of unexpected consequence or opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue. For example, I was playing my Inquisitor as noticeably uncomfortable about being called "Herald of Andraste" and only reluctantly exercising his newfound power. Early on, I was informed that an Avvar cult had captured some Inquisition soldiers in an attempt to lure me into a fight, viewing the existence of the "Herald" as a threat to their own religious beliefs. "Now that sounds interesting," I thought to myself, anticipating that perhaps I'd have a chance to negotiate for the soldiers' safety, or try to convince the cultists that I wasn't presuming to invoke divine authority and that their religious practices would face no threat from the Inquisition, or learn from the hostages that something more complicated had been going on in the Avvar compound. But could I actually do any of that? Nope. Turns out the cultists all attack on sight, and there's nothing to do but fight them off and click on something to let the hostages out.
Part of the reason this is frustrating is that I know Bioware can do better and has done better - repeatedly so, in fact. Consider Jack's loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2. There's combat, sure, but the very fact that there's combat is itself a plot twist, because the mission is initially presented as destroying an abandoned facility. More importantly, along the way, Jack has to come to terms with the fact that she never even fully grasped what was going on during her horrific childhood experience, culminating in her confrontation with Aresh - a man who suffered even worse than she did and is now engaged in a twisted quest to give meaning to all the torture he and other children endured. It's not an especially long mission (probably 30-40 minutes), but it still manages to tell a compelling story and open the door to a change in Jack's attitude. Had this mission taken place in Inquisition, I'd half-expect it to take twice as long, only with Aresh dying in a boss fight and the squad finding a piece of paper explaining what he'd been doing instead of actually talking to him about it.
I'm aware that Dragon Age 2 apparently caught a lot of heat for recycling environments and limiting most of the action to Kirkwall, so I suppose if Bioware wanted to prove that they could make a mega-super-duper-huge game world with absolutely no recycling of environments ever, well, okay, mission accomplished. But a game doesn't have to take a hundred hours to finish to be "epic," and when you have a game that does, in its better moments, still offer some meaningful choices, I'd argue that it probably *shouldn't* take that long simply because it makes it harder to find time for multiple playthroughs. (And for what it's worth, I actually found DA2 somewhat underrated, with my main gripe being that it seemed to end because Cassandra told Varric he could stop telling the story rather than because everything was actually resolved.) I'm tempted to do another playthrough in which I simply skip most of the side content, focusing entirely on the "Inquisitor's Path" main quest and the companion quests, partly to see if the narrative feels a little more coherent that way. But the game does enough to steer you towards the side content (with various warnings of one crisis or another) that I suspect this might prove somewhat immersion-breaking as well.
I suppose it's to Bioware's credit that, despite all this, I'd still rate the game a solid 7 or 8 out of 10. But if there's one lesson that I hope they take away for the next Dragon Age game, it's that more and bigger do not always equal better.
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Review [Doctor Who]: "Kinda"
This is the first of my Doctor Who reviews that I'll be posting here; hopefully, this blog will give me an added incentive to keep up with my re-viewing, and reviewing, of the series a little more regularly. You can view my website where I archive all my reviews here.
19x3. Kinda
Writer: Christopher Bailey
Director: Peter Grimwade
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Synopsis: The TARDIS arrives on the planet Deva Loka, where a group of human explorers have an uneasy relationship with the native Kinda and some of their personnel have recently disappeared. The Doctor and Adric are drawn into the conflict between Sanders, who commands the mission, and Hindle, his increasingly unstable subordinate, while Tegan is contacted and briefly controlled by the Mara, a malevolent entity that manifests as a snake.
Review: The long era of John Nathan-Turner as Doctor Who's executive producer has sparked considerable debate among fans, but one positive development at this point was that the show was starting to experiment a little more in both style and content. "Kinda" stands alongside "Warrior's Gate" and perhaps "Logopolis" as one of the clearest examples of this: while we've certainly seen critiques of imperialism on the show before, I don't think we've seen one quite like this.
In a serial like "The Power of Kroll," for example, we see a conflict between an opportunistic human leader and some locals with strange religious practices, but there isn't any big mystery as to what's really happening and why. It's difficult to imagine any of the earlier eras of Doctor Who attempting something like Tegan's nightmare, in which she encounters a sinister young man who seems to represent the Mara and finds herself arguing with her own duplicate over which of them is real. Prior to "Warrior's Gate," I'd have to go all the way back to "The Mind Robber" for a serial that involves a similarly bizarre alternate reality sequence. The Kinda themselves are suitably alien, with most of the population communicating only through telepathy and actual speech as a mark of advanced wisdom. And while the giant rubber snake at the end is a little embarrassing, such things are perhaps inevitable on Doctor Who's budget, and the concept of the Mara - an entity that takes control of others by manipulating them through dreams - adds to the sense of Deva Loka as a very strange place.
"Kinda" earns points for taking a creative approach to what could have been a formulaic imperialists-vs.-indigenous-people conflict. Unfortunately, the characterizations are more of a mixed bag. Hindle is the most interesting guest character, in that he's gone insane due neither to egotistical hubris nor to the manipulations of the Mara, but because he's simply cracked under pressure. Unlike the one-note villains we've seen in weaker Doctor Who entries, he's genuinely unpredictable, going from bellowing at the Doctor and Adric to panicking at the notion that the trees and vegetation pose a threat to even calling out for his mother. Sanders and Todd, on the other hand, seem unfazed by the situation to a curious degree. Todd acknowledges that the mission is in trouble, but the tension and dread we'd expect from someone in her situation aren't there - instead, she mostly acts as a sort of substitute-companion for the Doctor when his actual companions are separated from him. Sanders, meanwhile, is so blithely unconcerned that he might as well have "imperialist doofus" written across his forehead, stating matter-of-factly that they've taken two Kinda hostage out of "standard procedure" and that he never thinks twice because it's a waste of time. I realize that the character is supposed to be arrogant and out of touch, but some of his behavior verges on a complete absence of rational thought or common sense (even before his mind is affected by the mysterious Box of Jhana).
Overall, I'm relatively content with this new incarnation of the Doctor. Peter Davison, at 29, was the youngest actor to take the role at the time, and the Fifth Doctor does display a sort of breezily personable and curious manner that I might well call "youthful," while still displaying a mix of wisdom, whimsy, and occasional irritability that reflect the character's vast experience and unique intelligence. When Adric accidentally activates a robotic survival suit that takes them both prisoner, for example, the Doctor observes that "[t]here is a difference between serious scientific investigation and meddling." However, there are a couple of instances where it's unclear whether what we're seeing is a deliberate quirk of characterization or the same sort of oddly laid-back attitude that seems so inappropriate from Sanders and Todd. Specifically, he seems to think both Tegan and Adric are okay on their own at one point, and he is quite clearly wrong on both counts. Tegan falls asleep in the woods and becomes prey to the Mara's psychic attacks, and Adric finds himself in the midst of another crisis at the colonization team's headquarters. Without any direct acknowledgment of this issue, we're left to guess as to whether the Doctor is actually meant to be seen as making a mistake.
"Kinda" gets a positive recommendation for its creative approach and underlying concepts. Still, it definitely could have been better when it comes to telling a coherent story. The effort to stop the Mara only develops at the end and feels like it's over rather quickly, and it's never explained what happened to the three missing personnel. I'm all for weird flights of imagination when it comes to Doctor Who and science fiction in general, but after "Four to Doomsday" and now this, I'm hoping to see a little more structure to the narrative next time around.
Other Notes:
- Nyssa's sudden fainting spell at the end of "Four to Doomsday" really amounted to absolutely nothing. She's out of the action recuperating for most of "Kinda," but it turns out to have nothing to do with Monarch, the Mara, or anything else that the TARDIS crew have encountered. (Reportedly, the script was developed before a firm decision had been made to make Nyssa a companion.)
- I couldn't help but snicker a little bit when the Doctor constructs a device to help Nyssa recover around the sonic screwdriver and casually dismisses Adric's concern that they might need it. Right, because none of the seemingly benign situations the Doctor encounters ever turn out to be the least bit dangerous.
Rating: *** (out of four)
19x3. Kinda
Writer: Christopher Bailey
Director: Peter Grimwade
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Synopsis: The TARDIS arrives on the planet Deva Loka, where a group of human explorers have an uneasy relationship with the native Kinda and some of their personnel have recently disappeared. The Doctor and Adric are drawn into the conflict between Sanders, who commands the mission, and Hindle, his increasingly unstable subordinate, while Tegan is contacted and briefly controlled by the Mara, a malevolent entity that manifests as a snake.
Review: The long era of John Nathan-Turner as Doctor Who's executive producer has sparked considerable debate among fans, but one positive development at this point was that the show was starting to experiment a little more in both style and content. "Kinda" stands alongside "Warrior's Gate" and perhaps "Logopolis" as one of the clearest examples of this: while we've certainly seen critiques of imperialism on the show before, I don't think we've seen one quite like this.
In a serial like "The Power of Kroll," for example, we see a conflict between an opportunistic human leader and some locals with strange religious practices, but there isn't any big mystery as to what's really happening and why. It's difficult to imagine any of the earlier eras of Doctor Who attempting something like Tegan's nightmare, in which she encounters a sinister young man who seems to represent the Mara and finds herself arguing with her own duplicate over which of them is real. Prior to "Warrior's Gate," I'd have to go all the way back to "The Mind Robber" for a serial that involves a similarly bizarre alternate reality sequence. The Kinda themselves are suitably alien, with most of the population communicating only through telepathy and actual speech as a mark of advanced wisdom. And while the giant rubber snake at the end is a little embarrassing, such things are perhaps inevitable on Doctor Who's budget, and the concept of the Mara - an entity that takes control of others by manipulating them through dreams - adds to the sense of Deva Loka as a very strange place.
"Kinda" earns points for taking a creative approach to what could have been a formulaic imperialists-vs.-indigenous-people conflict. Unfortunately, the characterizations are more of a mixed bag. Hindle is the most interesting guest character, in that he's gone insane due neither to egotistical hubris nor to the manipulations of the Mara, but because he's simply cracked under pressure. Unlike the one-note villains we've seen in weaker Doctor Who entries, he's genuinely unpredictable, going from bellowing at the Doctor and Adric to panicking at the notion that the trees and vegetation pose a threat to even calling out for his mother. Sanders and Todd, on the other hand, seem unfazed by the situation to a curious degree. Todd acknowledges that the mission is in trouble, but the tension and dread we'd expect from someone in her situation aren't there - instead, she mostly acts as a sort of substitute-companion for the Doctor when his actual companions are separated from him. Sanders, meanwhile, is so blithely unconcerned that he might as well have "imperialist doofus" written across his forehead, stating matter-of-factly that they've taken two Kinda hostage out of "standard procedure" and that he never thinks twice because it's a waste of time. I realize that the character is supposed to be arrogant and out of touch, but some of his behavior verges on a complete absence of rational thought or common sense (even before his mind is affected by the mysterious Box of Jhana).
Overall, I'm relatively content with this new incarnation of the Doctor. Peter Davison, at 29, was the youngest actor to take the role at the time, and the Fifth Doctor does display a sort of breezily personable and curious manner that I might well call "youthful," while still displaying a mix of wisdom, whimsy, and occasional irritability that reflect the character's vast experience and unique intelligence. When Adric accidentally activates a robotic survival suit that takes them both prisoner, for example, the Doctor observes that "[t]here is a difference between serious scientific investigation and meddling." However, there are a couple of instances where it's unclear whether what we're seeing is a deliberate quirk of characterization or the same sort of oddly laid-back attitude that seems so inappropriate from Sanders and Todd. Specifically, he seems to think both Tegan and Adric are okay on their own at one point, and he is quite clearly wrong on both counts. Tegan falls asleep in the woods and becomes prey to the Mara's psychic attacks, and Adric finds himself in the midst of another crisis at the colonization team's headquarters. Without any direct acknowledgment of this issue, we're left to guess as to whether the Doctor is actually meant to be seen as making a mistake.
"Kinda" gets a positive recommendation for its creative approach and underlying concepts. Still, it definitely could have been better when it comes to telling a coherent story. The effort to stop the Mara only develops at the end and feels like it's over rather quickly, and it's never explained what happened to the three missing personnel. I'm all for weird flights of imagination when it comes to Doctor Who and science fiction in general, but after "Four to Doomsday" and now this, I'm hoping to see a little more structure to the narrative next time around.
Other Notes:
- Nyssa's sudden fainting spell at the end of "Four to Doomsday" really amounted to absolutely nothing. She's out of the action recuperating for most of "Kinda," but it turns out to have nothing to do with Monarch, the Mara, or anything else that the TARDIS crew have encountered. (Reportedly, the script was developed before a firm decision had been made to make Nyssa a companion.)
- I couldn't help but snicker a little bit when the Doctor constructs a device to help Nyssa recover around the sonic screwdriver and casually dismisses Adric's concern that they might need it. Right, because none of the seemingly benign situations the Doctor encounters ever turn out to be the least bit dangerous.
Rating: *** (out of four)
Saturday, January 18, 2014
The Walking Dead Season 2 and Shaping a Character in Video Games
[Spoilers ahead for Telltale's The Walking Dead game series]
One reason I will defend video games as worthy of consideration alongside other more "serious" forms of storytelling is the extent to which their interactivity can allow players the chance to shape the characters we are playing. The Mass Effect trilogy, the Fallout games (though I can only speak for Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas), The Witcher and its sequel - all of these certainly have traditional narratives with goals that must be accomplished along the way, but they are also concerned with the personality of the main character and the values and ideas reflected in the choices that the character makes at the player's direction.
That's not to say that they've quite reached the level of interactivity that I'd like. I'd wager that almost any Mass Effect fan has "my Shepard wouldn't say/do that" or "but I don't agree with any of these choices" moments, for example. But there's enough variety available that a playthrough with one Shepard, or Lone Wanderer, or Courier, or Geralt of Rivia, doesn't necessarily feel exactly like another.
Which brings me to Telltale's much-praised The Walking Dead. Like most gamers, I was thoroughly impressed with Season 1, in no small part for how it required players to make difficult, spur-of-the-moment decisions and explored the consequences that followed. Because the narrative centers around a not-always-harmonious group of survivors, it's impossible to please everyone, and the consequences of the player's choices have less impact on the plot per se than on the relationships between the characters and which of them survive various turning points in the narrative. Shaping Lee Everett and his efforts to protect Clementine and teach her to survive ranked up there as one of the more compelling interactive experiences that I've had since getting back into gaming several years ago.
When I heard that we would be playing as Clementine in Season 2, however, I was less than enthused. Playing as an adult trying to help a child through the world (as in Season 1) was one thing, but actually trying to put myself in the mindset of a young girl? I was a little less sure that I could do that, and so far the game hasn't entirely assuaged my concerns. Early on, for example, Clementine is with Christa and Omid, the expecting couple who survived Season 1, and they are having a discussion over what to name their baby. When Clementine is prompted for input, I instinctively selected a choice along the lines of "You two should decide." That's likely how I would respond in real life, i.e. it's their relationship, their baby, and their decision, and I should stay out of it. But is that really how a 10-year-old would respond, or would she simply give her opinion? I ended up replaying that scene for other reasons and went with "What if it's a girl?" instead. But I didn't have to second-guess myself this much when playing Lee.
One other sticking point: at one point, there is a "sixteen months later" jump forward in which Christa's baby has apparently been born but is now absent for some unstated reason. What is the point of keeping us, the players, in the dark about what happened to the baby? The problem I have with this is that Clementine almost certainly *does* know what happened, and that would undoubtedly shape her perspective and attitude, and yet we're supposed to role-play her perspective and attitude without knowing this. (In fact, S1 kind of did this too - at the very beginning I'm supposed to role-play Lee responding to questions about whether he was really guilty of murder, and I thought to myself, "How the hell should I know whether he's guilty or not?" and chose a fairly neutral response to be safe. I later came to see him as wrongly convicted, but at the time I just didn't know.) If they're going to withhold this sort of crucial information from us, then we should be playing from the perspective of a character who also doesn't have the information.
I don't mean to sound down on The Walking Dead here - I'll be looking forward to Chapter 2 - but one thing that game developers do need to consider when giving us the option to shape our characters is whether or not the characters have a perspective we can understand. So far, it's unclear whether we'll quite get there with Clementine.
One reason I will defend video games as worthy of consideration alongside other more "serious" forms of storytelling is the extent to which their interactivity can allow players the chance to shape the characters we are playing. The Mass Effect trilogy, the Fallout games (though I can only speak for Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas), The Witcher and its sequel - all of these certainly have traditional narratives with goals that must be accomplished along the way, but they are also concerned with the personality of the main character and the values and ideas reflected in the choices that the character makes at the player's direction.
That's not to say that they've quite reached the level of interactivity that I'd like. I'd wager that almost any Mass Effect fan has "my Shepard wouldn't say/do that" or "but I don't agree with any of these choices" moments, for example. But there's enough variety available that a playthrough with one Shepard, or Lone Wanderer, or Courier, or Geralt of Rivia, doesn't necessarily feel exactly like another.
Which brings me to Telltale's much-praised The Walking Dead. Like most gamers, I was thoroughly impressed with Season 1, in no small part for how it required players to make difficult, spur-of-the-moment decisions and explored the consequences that followed. Because the narrative centers around a not-always-harmonious group of survivors, it's impossible to please everyone, and the consequences of the player's choices have less impact on the plot per se than on the relationships between the characters and which of them survive various turning points in the narrative. Shaping Lee Everett and his efforts to protect Clementine and teach her to survive ranked up there as one of the more compelling interactive experiences that I've had since getting back into gaming several years ago.
When I heard that we would be playing as Clementine in Season 2, however, I was less than enthused. Playing as an adult trying to help a child through the world (as in Season 1) was one thing, but actually trying to put myself in the mindset of a young girl? I was a little less sure that I could do that, and so far the game hasn't entirely assuaged my concerns. Early on, for example, Clementine is with Christa and Omid, the expecting couple who survived Season 1, and they are having a discussion over what to name their baby. When Clementine is prompted for input, I instinctively selected a choice along the lines of "You two should decide." That's likely how I would respond in real life, i.e. it's their relationship, their baby, and their decision, and I should stay out of it. But is that really how a 10-year-old would respond, or would she simply give her opinion? I ended up replaying that scene for other reasons and went with "What if it's a girl?" instead. But I didn't have to second-guess myself this much when playing Lee.
One other sticking point: at one point, there is a "sixteen months later" jump forward in which Christa's baby has apparently been born but is now absent for some unstated reason. What is the point of keeping us, the players, in the dark about what happened to the baby? The problem I have with this is that Clementine almost certainly *does* know what happened, and that would undoubtedly shape her perspective and attitude, and yet we're supposed to role-play her perspective and attitude without knowing this. (In fact, S1 kind of did this too - at the very beginning I'm supposed to role-play Lee responding to questions about whether he was really guilty of murder, and I thought to myself, "How the hell should I know whether he's guilty or not?" and chose a fairly neutral response to be safe. I later came to see him as wrongly convicted, but at the time I just didn't know.) If they're going to withhold this sort of crucial information from us, then we should be playing from the perspective of a character who also doesn't have the information.
I don't mean to sound down on The Walking Dead here - I'll be looking forward to Chapter 2 - but one thing that game developers do need to consider when giving us the option to shape our characters is whether or not the characters have a perspective we can understand. So far, it's unclear whether we'll quite get there with Clementine.
Saturday, October 5, 2013
TL:DR, or, why I started this blog
When I first thought about starting this blog, I considered naming it "TL;DR" - the popular internet short-hand for "too long; didn't read" in response to an overly long post on a message board. Or, as I've occasionally used it, for "too long; don't read" as a warning before one of my own posts. I quickly discovered that it was already taken as a title on Blogger, and I figured it wasn't all that catchy as a title anyway. However, I wanted to find a title that acknowledged that what I'll probably be writing for the most part - analysis of pop culture products like television shows and video games, as well as occasional Excel-fueled amateur data-nerd musings - is the sort of material that often prompts people to say, "Why are you thinking about this so much? Stop overanalyzing everything." So "Signal to Noise" seemed like a reasonable choice in place of "TL;DR." Needless to say, most of my posts should be assumed to have a TL;DR warning.
Anyway, the reason I started this blog was that I have often caught myself writing TL;DR posts on the Bioware Social Network forum (where I also post as FlyingSquirrel) and figured that perhaps these sorts of long-winded ramblings would be better-suited for a blog than a message board. And since I've always enjoyed writing, this seemed like a good outlet for it, plus I figure it might give me a reason to finally finish the classic Doctor Who reviewing project that I started an embarrassingly long time ago.
Anyway, the reason I started this blog was that I have often caught myself writing TL;DR posts on the Bioware Social Network forum (where I also post as FlyingSquirrel) and figured that perhaps these sorts of long-winded ramblings would be better-suited for a blog than a message board. And since I've always enjoyed writing, this seemed like a good outlet for it, plus I figure it might give me a reason to finally finish the classic Doctor Who reviewing project that I started an embarrassingly long time ago.
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