Re: Is Doctor Who "realistic" sci-fi?

pbowles@xxxxxxx wrote:
On 28 May, 12:01, Elvis Gump <elvisgump...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
pbow...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On 27 May, 23:21, Elvis Gump <elvisgump...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
pbow...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On 27 May, 19:44, Elvis Gump <elvisgump...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
pbow...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On 27 May, 01:28, Elvis Gump <elvisgump...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
pbow...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On 26 May, 20:25, Elvis Gump <elvisgump...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Master wrote:
On Fri, 23 May 2008, Elvis Gump wrote:

I'm curious about the part he supposedly has in this season's DW which
seems largely forgotten of late.

Me too - unless he plays a parallel universe Dawkins in the Rose story
he can only be in the finale, since he's playing himself and so is
presumably confined to Earth.

I'm anxious that it's going to be silly and poorly done.

Yes, but they still referred to the thing as the Devil, even this season
rather than a lifeform masquarading as a demon.

The point was that it was the devil - not in the sense of being
anything supernatural, but being a real entity that inspired the myth
to begin with; in other words, removing the supernatural element from
the idea (well, insofar as any Who monster can be regarded as anything
but supernatural).

But the thing was still supernatural in that it's consciousness could
move at will from organism to organism.

Yes, but most Who monsters are supernatural to some extent. I'm sure
someone like imipak would be all too happy to proffer a 'science
fiction' explanation for mind transference.

Well I might do so pointing out that it doesn't strike me as completely unlikely that if we ever figure out how memories are stored we should be able to create an interface that would allow manipulating, cross-transcoding and storage in other media the data that constitute human memory.

The thing is once we can get at the very data in someone's head, privacy is gone forever, the very idea of having no way to have secrets would probably lead to horrific totalitarian states.

The idea of access to human thoughts or the 'mind' is almost always done so laughably though in movies as to make the idea seem like pure fantasy. Like the Matrix where brains can be loaded in their 'loading program' that Morpheus shows Neo, presumably a mini-Matrix that's part of their ships computer, so if that's possible, why not make a backup copy that 'lives' in there before they load their 'minds' into the machine Matrix where it might be trapped, unable to escape? In those movies it seems like their minds are simultaneously still linked to their bodies as seen in the dreamlike jerking of their bodies, yet they seem genuinely trapped in the machine computer if they can't find an 'exit'. It was all laughable, but appealing to people that don't think very much.

And they took the silliness farther in "Shakespeare Code" making
magic=science which shows how dumb they can get in their writers
meetings.
I thought the idea was quite good; very silly, to be sure, but it was
a change from "they're witches, so they do magic".
How was all that incantation stuff any different from Magic? Speaking
words that cause physics to go out the window is still magic in my book.

Of course it is, but the difference is that they called it (in the
Doctor's words) "a different kind of science". And isn't calling magic
"science" what the whole enterprise of Dr Who, and much TV "sci-fi",
is all about? There's nothing scientific in any real sense about
police boxes that are bigger on the inside than out, either.

Postulating that one could create a dimensional portal or encapsulate a different dimension inside a finite space while outrageously unlikely, still is postulating that it's done by the application of the scientific method and with engineering.

On the other hand saying magic is another kind of science as though I can wish things into existence with the power of my mind is something else altogether. Religion and magic are pretty much the same thing, not science and magic.


There's no reason to think the Final Five or Six don't have other copies
someplace separate from the main Cylon fleet, in fact the one thing that
they didn't copy from the original series as I remember it, and I'm
pretty fuzzy on it I'll admit because I hated it so much, was a central
command for the Cylons.

Yep, you'd have hated it for sure - the Cylon supreme leader turned
out to be the devil. :-)

Really? Well all 'great' political leaders seem to fancy emulating the 'devil'.


What is missing is any real command and control
ship, who planned and is running the war for the Cylons, and to me a
bigger plot hole is how they never seem interested in using something
like another stealth ship to do some reconn looking for the infrequently
mentioned Cylon homeworld where presumably such a central command would be..

It seems pretty plain they have no central command by all the
bickering they do... Nor is it terribly clear that they need one,
since "planning the war" from their perspective seems to amount to
"chase Galactica, except when we want to be the good guys when we'll
leave them alone for a bit before having a sudden change of heart and
chase them again". As for a new recon ship, didn't they only have the
spares to make the one? Of course that was before Pegasus started
turning out new Vipers for them - and yet another lost story arc; it
would have been unthinkable a year earlier that the show would lose a
battlestar and never so much as mention it again, say by focusing on
the need to relocate survivors on the remaining ships, or lamenting
the materiel that had been lost.

Fans complain about the big gaps between seasons, but it's clear they never really mapped out as well as they should have things you mention which are all things that got my attention too. They've written themselves into several corners over time, not the least of which was the addition of the invincible Pegasus which quickly became a liability to the rag-tag stories they wanted to tell.


If anything given their dire circumstances I'd also expect the humans to
be investigating some form of biowarefare or at least computer viruses
to infect the Cylons with to kill them.

Yep, that virus that was a plot point towards the end of last year is
yet another of those conveniently forgotten story arcs. Goodness, it's
almost as though they don't plan this thing in advance and make it up
as they go along. Oh, wait, that IS what they do...

Moore admits as much in his commentary tracks talking about how they would do particular stories or include characters that would take them off into sidetracks.

I'd love them to do a better job bullet-proofing their premises and arcs, but if you wrote out a synopsis of each episode they did, found yourself a big wall, pinned them all up and poured over them culling out those dead-end plot points and such it would still be a tremendous job to edit it all again knowing what we know to plug up all the holes.


They are in a footing of total
war and yet they more often than not don't behave as though they are.

Well, supposedly they're in a footing of total retreat; they decided
in the pilot that going to war with the Cylons would only be a
disaster.

That's true, but but knowing what they know now, that the Cylons seem determined to never give up pursuing them looking for ways to deal the Cylons a death blow shouldn't be completely off their tactical table.


They've done many bits dramatizing how in war people are tempted to
break all the rules for the 'greater good', like Roslyn trying to fix
the election to prevent Baltar becoming President. Why they didn't just
assassinate him is beyond me, or at least portray an attempt would have
been interesting.

There was an attempt on New Caprica - Baltar didn't show. Before then
it wouldn't have served much purpose. Why Roslin kept quiet for half
the season about knowing Baltar had worked with the Cylons until it
was too late is anyone's guess.

A lot of it was the political hopelessness of steering the frightened and weary civilian population. That wasn't an entirely unrealistic development to me, though given what Cain did to be so iron-handed was something that was amusing seeing Adama and Roslyn bristle about when they themselves had done many things just as bad.

Well one of the things they showed in the third season on the Basestars
were these panels in troughs, which looked like colored glycerin water
over segments (the prop of the sort of plastic defuser panels you would
see in drop-ceiling florescent lights). The Cylons would place a hand in
this colored goo and appear to link up to others so connected or the
'hybrid' which was a humanoid female each Basestar seems to have a copy
of that's kept in a goo tank and connected to the machinery with a
Matrix movie like cable to the back of the skull.

But more than that, if they can 'download' their consciousness it would
imply the ability to also 'receive' via whatever mechanism aids in the
downloading for resurrection.

That presumes the mechanism is under the Cylons' control, which
doesn't appear to be the case. It seems to be a feature of their
'biology' that they automatically download when they die - they can't
choose to download or receive signals (hence Deanna having to get
herself killed all the time). One of the key points in the series
seems to be that the current batch of Cylons aren't engineers, they
aren't responsible for their design, so the way they work is pretty
much down to their designer. Just because they're synthetic that
doesn't mean they have working knowledge of how to alter their
programming or refit their bodies, any more than being biological
implies humans are necessarily expert biologists or doctors.

Which makes them rather odd in a way, puppets of a yet unseen puppet-master element of the Cylons. Appealing to the bio-Cylons on the grounds that they aren't as free as they think they are could have provided a big storytelling opportunity.

Why can't they manipulate Cylon physiology so their spies and
sleeper agents don't look like one of 12 possible models? Clearly
they realized their 'oops' early on and then have been ignoring it
ever since.

I hear this a lot, but there's no particular reason to believe that
the twelve were designed to act as sleeper agents. After all, the
human Cylon project was going on while there was an armistice, and
most of the human Cylons haven't made much effort to keep their
identity secret - Leoben and "Shelley Godfrey" both deliberately gave
themselves away, and we know of only one sleeper who was activated to
carry out sabotage and assassination - if there had been others they'd
have been used by now. They seem to have acted as sleepers as the
opportunity presented itself; probably their original objective was
just to infiltrate the Colonies when no one would recognise them
anyway, and any Cylons who survived in the fleet afterwards where just
used opportunistically.

Which is rather telling that the Cylon attack was rather impetious
because had they bided their time and come up with thousands of genetic
variations of bio-Cylons or at least surgically altered the 'models'
they had they could have done far more damage. Either that or total
distruction of humans was never their plan. It seems like they wanted
some humans to survive so they could drive them like a herd toward doing
the work of finding the lost Earth colony for them. Then it's debatable
as whether or not they would destroy humans entirely, or forceably
interbreed with them to create a new hybrid race of Cylon-humans.

The much-vaunted "Cylon Plan" is entirely inconsistent - it was plain
from the end of the pilot that they didn't know where Galactica was
(they said it could take decades to find them) and only wanted to hunt
them down to prevent future reprisals. There is simply no way to
reconcile this with the fact that in the first episode they'd put a
tracking device on one of the ships and had been following it from day
one. Plus their plan changes from moment to moment; this season, the
rebels just wanted to get back in the fight against Cavill. Then their
raison d'etre suddenly became to find the Final Five and get to Earth,
to the extent that they didn't even care about destroying the
resurrection hub, just used it as a bargaining tool to get Galactica
onboard.

Well it's all over the place. I just finished watching RAZOR and it's interesting the things the old man hybrid is muttering before Kendra Shaw finally finds him about how the 7 are screwing things up, apparently referring to the Cylon humanoids running things and how the enemies will all be one and so on. I didn't rewind it and listen to it but I think that's pretty much a road map for the how the show ends with the humans and Cylons merging in the end on Earth and they is us, our ancestors as it were because they will find ancient Earth, not the modern one we live on.

I suppose the way to reconcile Dylan songs and Shakespeare quotes remains in the enigmatic "This has all happened before and this will all happen again."

The best reason is that it is religiously motivated

They seem to have dropped that angle ever since the War on Terror went
out of fashion.

Also, the Cylons seemed to need living human models, rather than
making new human Cylons from scratch - we saw Leoben and Six among the
prisoners Adama ran into in Razor; presumably all but twelve of them
died or became experiments like the Hybrids in Razor and the main
series (which make a total of 14 human Cylon types including the
missing one).

I'm supposed to get Razor in my Netflix tomorrow so I'll watch for that
detail. I didn't get to watch it closely the first time it was on tv
because my mom was very ill a the time.

I think we got too close a view of Leoben - they really didn't need to
give that detail away. Plus he's talking to Adama for a while, which
is a mistake when you consider that this sequence is set years before
Adama supposedly met Leoben for the first time, and gave no hint of
recognising him. We just see Six's hair, though.

Wait, the guy young Adama couldn't free was Leoben? I totally missed that. But then heck I see people I met for a minute years ago that remember me and I don't remember them so I could believe that. A lot of people remember me because of my name. I tend to forget names but remember faces, sometimes faces I can't quite place. I saw a guy in a store the other day I remembered as one my mother's doctors, but it's nagged me for days I can't remember his name or where I saw him like in an ER or was he on a ward or where. I can only remember him in a white coat with surgical gloves on, but no context for the where. Memory is funny like that.


Dramatically it would have been more interesting that everything they
said could be a lie and not trustworthy. Many times the things that the
Six in Baltar's head tells him don't seem to quite pan out, but she
tries to play it off when Baltar catches on. She doesn't seem as
connected to the big picture as she implies. The switcharoo of Caprica
Six having a version of Baltar haunting her seems to have been a thing
they didn't carry through on for very long and was quite unexplained.

He was fun, though. I think the main point of him was to point out
that the Six in Baltar's head isn't any product of Cylon engineering
(Baltar wouldn't be able to engineer Six to have an inner Baltar), but
is just a delusion of some variety.

Well maybe one is the byproduct of the other. If there was time unaccounted for say they took Baltar off to a baseship, tinkered with his head to copy in a Six consciousness along side his own, gave him memories to camouflage the time it took to do all this and as part of it conditioned him to betray the Colonies - well given transferring minds and all, that seems plausible in the parameters as set up.

The thing is to link a Six in Baltar's brain might have caused leakage in the other direction. Could you if you had their technology create an artificial split/multiple personality? One set of memories and ethics and all that make up a 'mind' loaded into a host brain (Baltar) and condition the host to accept it as real?

I
still haven't gotten through the episodes again where they had Baltar on
a Basestar for a while but my recollection was they were kinda
gas-lighting him into wondering if he'd also been a Cylon all along.

He decided he wasn't when the President gave him a truth serum, and
that was the end of that mini-arc.

Well I have season three to get through in the next week so I guess I'll catch up to that. I sort of remember it but I need a refresher.


Except that the batch on New Caprica didn't know who the Final Five
were, so how could they capture and condition them? Also, there's no
reason to suppose any but Tigh ever were captured.

That supposes that the Cylons who acted in control are telling the truth
about the Final Cylon models. For all one can be sure, they may be
making that stuff up as they go along.

They talk to one another about them, without knowing who they are.
Athena doesn't recognise the Cylons aboard Galactica as being the
Final Five. Deanna had an entire story arc trying to find out who they
are. The Six who was killed a couple of episodes ago was right next to
Colonel Tigh and showed no sign of recognising a final Cylon; nor, for
all her claims that she feels they're close, is Caprica apparently
able to recognise Tigh. Cylons on New Caprica were happy to kill
Anders (including the Deanna who was their apparent leader), come to
that. So I think we can take it as read that they really don't know.

I think it would be interesting if they were being run by something like that fucked up hybrid old man in RAZOR where they will be dismayed to discover that their unseen leader is something mad and erratic and doubt themselves for once.


It seems likely that Anders was specifically put out there to
find Helo and Starbuck and become 'friends'.

Then again, in their first encounter he tried shooting them. Not very
friendly...

True, but then a lot of the seeds the Cylons lay didn't pan out. The priest played by Stockwell had his cover last a long time until another version of himself showed up with a message for the humans. They planted a lot of seeds and only some of them paid off. There was really never a lot of reason for them to ever trust Boomer again and yet they make compromises which is something one would suppose the Cylons never expected.

Except that to make it fly they've had to make them 'good' Cylons, so
again - just where's the drama? Anders said it to Starbuck: if she was
a Cylon, she's still the character she always was. Same with the rest
- they aren't going to do the Boomer thing again.
But even a human might get conditioned a la Manchurian Candidate
brainwashing to be a sleeper agent. It's possible that the orignal
Boomer was no more than that to begin with, that on a certain time, or
maybe when she was sure she was a Cylon she'd be post-hypnotically
activated to kill the most senior human officer she encountered.

She said no one activated her - I think of her action as her coming to
terms with being a Cylon after visiting the basestar and then
reasoning "If I'm a Cylon, then Adama is the enemy and I should kill
him" - in other words she wasn't conditioned, but was just doing what
she thought a Cylon ought to do (which also seems to be what Tory is
doing with going down the One God route).

I dunno, it seemed like it was a surprise to Boomer that she'd done it even after what she'd seen. There was a bit where Tigh saw himself doing the same thing, shooting Adama on the bridge which one could argue is either a symptom of his wracking guilt at the possibility of being a Cylon or similar post-hypmotic conditioning that he is able to resist. He and Tyrol are to me the most interesting characters of the series despite how much Tigh is set up to be a guy you are supposed to hate for all his flaws.


One of the other things that's been interesting are female characters
that aren't superhumanly tough, but aren't the shrinking violet damsels
in distress that we usually get, especially in Doctor Who.

Except for what they did to Starbuck in season 2, and to some extent
season 3 - could the woman go an episode without bursting into tears?

Well I'm a dude and I've been pretty much ready to burst into tears for her and I know it's just a frakking tv show. Despite all the laughable plot holes at times it's very moving.

To steer things back to Doctor Who, at times I've found Eccleston and Tennant's performance in silly plots just as moving.

I know and acknowledge all the laughable problems with say "Father's Day" from Eccleston's season, but my own father was dying of cancer that summer it aired and I just can't watch it without crying because it really hits me every time I've watched it.

Roslyn's cancer and the death of the minor on-off bit with Nana Visitor as the cancer patient got me a few weeks ago. It didn't really fit in the overall arc of the season very well, but it's the sort of thing that anyone that's lost friends and family can relate to and just got me even though I could see them ticking off plot points with it, manipulating it in a cheap way at times.

The bit where Starbuck relived her mom's death really got to me because my mom was dying last year when that one aired.

If Anders or Helo had found that farm, do you think they'd have been
crying their eyes out over it? When they had Starbuck break down in
the episode where she confessed to Adama about getting Zak killed, it
was effective because it wasn't expected from a strong character. But
she's been made progressively weaker, more stereotyped, and less of a
central character as the story's progressed.

Well that happens to people the more death they encounter I think. I wouldn't expect Anders or Helo to cry about much of anything because they are still pretty much the same insensitive dicks they started out as. I would have probably blown Helo's brains out along with Boomer's back on Caprica if I were in Starbuck's place. Helo is an idiot supreme knuckle dragging moron.

I trust Starbuck more because she does cry and care more and I think she's pretty damned believably smart as written. I couldn't imagine shouldering some of the responsibility that's landed on her. Can you imagine trying to whip civies into being pilots? Or being a pilot much less a CAG in those furball fighter attacks? I think most people would come back and curl up in a fetal ball and chant FRAKFRAKFRAK for a hour before the adrenal level returned to something approaching normal.


But in sci-fi that's par for the course. I just saw the reimagining of
"The Andromeda Strain" last night which was a mess of adding on
terrorism, wormholes, messages from the future and so on to what had
been a far more elegant and straightforward plot in the original book
and movie. The new miniseries was a ponderous, laughable piece of crap.

Hadn't heard of that one, but wormholes and messages from the future
in a story about an exotic virus? Don't think I'll bother with it.

Phil

Read the book, see the original movie which are both more believable.

I think I'm gonna dredge out "3 Days of the Condor" and rewatch it in honor of the late Sydney Pollack tonight. I need a break from sci-fi!
--
Higgins: It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?
Joe Turner: Ask them?
Higgins: Not now - then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!
-- "3 Days of the Condor" (1975)
.

Loading