Re: No Body in the Library : Spoilers

On Thu, 5 Jun 2008 00:43:32 -0700 (PDT), "pbowles@xxxxxxx"
<pbowles@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On 4 Jun, 18:58, Ignis Fatuus <Ig...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 06:33:47 -0700 (PDT), "pbow...@xxxxxxx"





<pbow...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On 4 Jun, 13:41, Ignis Fatuus <Ig...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 05:13:40 -0700 (PDT), "pbow...@xxxxxxx"

<pbow...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On 4 Jun, 11:08, Ignis Fatuus <Ig...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 4 Jun 2008 01:04:18 -0700 (PDT), "pbow...@xxxxxxx"

<pbow...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On 4 Jun, 07:36, Ignis Fatuus <Ig...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Even your own synopsis fails to suggest a complex and
multi-dimensional plot.

Oh, for goodness sake, not this again. This is *Doctor Who*. The plots
are no more "complex and multidimensional" than they ever were - as I
pointed out in a recent thread, historically Who plots were kept
sufficiently simple that people coming in halfway through a serial
could pick them up, and deliberately so. As I also said in that
thread, rose-tinted specs are one thing but trying to laud old Who as
something it never was or criticise new Who for being something Who
never was just seems pretentious.

You really should consider the notion that the mere fact of having
pointed something out in a previous thread doesn't give your
observation the weight of holy writ.

You really should consider the notion that making a facetious comment
and ignoring the point being made won't impress anybody.

Funny I thought I was getting right to the heart of the matter - in
your own write :

 "as I pointed out in a recent thread, historically Who plots were"...
" As I also said in that thread, rose-tinted specs are"...
So to recap, I was merely suggesting that citing yourself as an
authority does not produce a valid proof of argument. As you were
citing yourself as an authority... Where exactly did I deviate from
your argument or ignore the point that you were making?

Assuming for the sake of being charitable that you aren't being
deliberately dense, allow me to refresh your memory about the way
citations are used. Traditionally one uses citations in support of a
point, and so avoid unnecessarily repeating all the arguments in the
source at length - the citation is not in itself the point; in this
case the point would be the section you substituted with ellipses in
the above and, hence, once more failed to address. The identity of a
source is a complete irrelevance - all that matters is whether the
argument in that source withstands scrutiny; self-citation is
established and accepted practice in presenting, say, scientific
arguments, so long as the citation happens to be to a pertinent paper
rather than just an exercise in increasing the number of one's
citations. After all, what's important is the calibre of the argument
contained therein - plainly it would be illogical to disregard a sound
argument because it happens to be by the same author in favour of
something wholly incoherent that happens to have the "advantage" of
being produced by someone else. Either you're guilty of a pretty basic
error in logic or you decided to attack what for some reason you took
as an easy target in lieu of addressing the argument at hand.

You seem to be suggesting that the more you repeat yourself the more
you validate your point of view. Wasn't there something like that in
The End Of The World? Anyhow, you rather undermine these repeated
arguments by admitting that you've never watched any of the stories in
question.

You significantly fail to engage  with my assertion that recent
stories - most notably from Mr. Moffat himself - have delivered more
satisfying and complex plot development than Silence.

That would be the commentary I made in response to your note about the
Empty Child, I take it - the response you didn't "engage with". And
you can't seriously be telling me that the conclusion to The Doctor
Dances was "satisfying plot development".

I didn't mention Dances - I merely cited Child as an exemplary first
of a two part serial from Mr. Moffatt.

My mistake - "The Empty Child" is usually used for the name of the
story as a whole, as well as the first episode.

And as for the point, I addressed it in commentary which, as I noted,
you ignored - at least insofar as your points can be addressed when
you insist on presenting value judgments as evidence without
supporting them with examples about just where these elements featured
in the episode (what specifically, for instance, does "satisfying and
complex plot development" in Empty Child refer to?)

Movement between different groups of characters with independent
concerns developing the story from a number of different perspectives.
Empty Child develops more material in the first fifteen minutes than
Library in 45.

Doctor and Rose head for Earth in pursuit of a mystery space canister
(mauve for danger).
Doctor winds up in a night club while Rose tries to help a lost child
in a gas-mask and ends up clinging to a barrage balloon in the middle
of an air raid.
The call to the tardis phone,and the mystery girl scrounging food for
a group of street urchins draw the Doctor into one puzzle, whilst an
Air Force officer with high-tech binoculars rescues Rose in a
spaceship. (and we're still only twelve minutes into the story).

The Library occupies an entire planet but the action takes place in
one room and consists of a group of stock characters standing around
waiting to be eaten by an invisible predator. River Song and the
mystery girl drop hints of future developments - but that just about
sums up the whole episode.


and the stories I've seen most recently are
the first two of those. So I can say for sure that the secondary
characters in Dalek Invasion serve no function beyond getting killed
and making Barbara look clever with their stupidity (it took them how
many

Silly me; and here I was thinking that there was a complex and highly
developed resistance organisation

Yes, that does seem silly in retrospect, doesn't it? "We're a complex
and highly developed resistance organisation - this means we've got
one old guy with a bomb who stands around ready to get shot, and a
bunch of amateurs who infiltrate Dalek headquarters and get shot
because they hadn't thought to field-test their equipment. And we need
some teacher with no military or resistance experience to give us any
idea what we're doing in the first place".

I should have added the point that the first two episodes of Invasion
- in spite of the slow build-up - cover a hell of a lot more ground in
terms of plot and character development, intrigue and suspense, than
the 45 minutes of Library.

Again, examples? Invasion, character development? For a start, in the
first two episodes there weren't any characters save the main cast -
or did that fellow whatsisname, David, show up then? You know, the one
who spent most of the serial with them and was still so anyonymous I
had difficulty telling his character from the rest of the resistance
extras. And suspense? You've got to be kidding; every episode in the
serial had a bland cliched cliffhanger with a hamfisted resolution
(afraid I can't be more specific in the context of the first two
episodes specifically, since I watched the serial as a whole and can't
recall precisely where each one tailed off). And it's no more than a
value judgment that you find the Doctor landing on a deserted planet
and gradually picking up clues to what's going on more intriguing
than ... the Doctor landing on a deserted planet and gradually picking
up clues to what's going on.

With the difference that a name like "Silence in the Library" is less
of a giveaway than "Dalek Invasion of Earth", of course...

Sorry, but I don't recall an episode called 'Dalek Invasion of Earth'.
You must be thinking of the dreadful movie version.

But again this comes down to wanting a particular type of formula -
intrigue and suspense are optional elements in storytelling, not a
gold standard that every story needs to incorporate. I worked out what
was going on fairly readily in Silence, but that doesn't mean I can't
appreciate the clever construction of the story and the way ideas from
a variety of sources are put together - and in fact I found it did
intrigue an awful lot better than any other Who story that comes to
mind. Dalek Invasion throws us straight into a story where something
has plainly wiped out much of London's population, and the intrigue so
far as it goes is about nothing more than finding out what did it.
Silence in the Library has exactly the same aspect with the shadows,
but also has the additional questions arising from the girl and River
Song and their connection to events - granted it's revealed pretty
much immediately that the girl's part of the library system (straight
away we're shown the security camera), but there's still the question
of how she relates to what's happening, which only gets resolved as
the episode progresses.

Plainly you don't see any intrigue, because you've decided the
different plot elements are only "loosely connected" without seeing
how they tie in to one another and the main story (as most of them
look set to do - in fact the only one that seems out of place at the
moment is River Song), but the fact that you aren't asking the right
questions at the end of the story doesn't mean they aren't there to be
asked.

I think you're
reading far more into the script than it managed to deliver.

I think everything I've drawn from that sequence is identified by
references earlier in the episode and its progression itself (for
instance, it's stated at the start that the computer is an index, and
it's equally plain what 'saved' entails. We also know the girl is the
computer

Please help me here, because I can find nothing in the broadcast
episode to suggest that this is indeed the case. The Girl's Doctor
implies that this is so but there is no discovery of the fact.

You were watching from the beginning, right? I appreciate that you
want to be spoonfed everything with literalistic descriptions of
what's happening at every point, but honestly I'm struggling to see
what could be said that's any more explicit than the Doctor telling us
from the off that the security camera is alive, or than the Doctor
making contact with the girl by hacking into the computer system (or
the rather blatant implication that the girl is the mysterious CAL,
reinforced by the fact that she is deliberately never spoken of by
name and not credited with a name). Of course, goodness knows how the
computer is able to send books flying off the shelves (what, do the
bookshelves have automated spring mechanisms that allow the machine to
physically hurl objects off them? Why?), but I think even that bit of
sloppiness is there simply to let us in on the fact that the girl is
what controls the library - and we'd already been told that what
controls the library is the central index computer. We also know she's
responsible for "saving" Donna, which means she exerts some sort of
control over the library teleport.

lots of nice ideas floating around then; but where's the drama?
where's the tension? where's the conflict? I'd like to see something
more than just a group standing around whilst the Doctor works out
what's happening and puts it to rights - and preferably something that
adds new layers of intrigue to the mystery. This is normal procedure
in all kinds of drama; and if you're going to ditch it then you need
something pretty damned interesting to replace it.

The 'let's just drop hints instead of developing the theme' approach
isn't cleaver - it's just dull.

Maybe you still aren't picking up anything more than an "implication",
but you can't plausibly suggest that the psychiatrist is the only hint
in the episode that the girl is the computer consciousness.

No, I think the bit with the screwdriver and the camera was a bit of a
giveaway - but not conclusive; so you'll look a bit silly if it turns
out that this is not the case after all.

, and that Dr Moon is the one character who uses 'saved' to
mean 'protect from danger'). There's reading too much into something,
and then at the other end of the spectrum there's expecting to be
spoonfed - which from your analogies with stories like Bad Wolf with
its lengthy exposition on what's being done and for what overall goal,
is apparently the sort you'd prefer. Which is fair enough, but doesn't
justify equating a more abstract approach with having less to say.

I expect to be spoon fed with sufficient variety of Character,

We're given four distinct characters (the usual plus River and the
girl) and a few peripheral ones with hints of an identity (the tycoon,
the psychiatrist, the PA) - that's as many as Empty Child gave us.

Incident,

Again, "variety of incident", capitalised or otherwise, is only one
way to tell a story - if you want to see the Doctor running from one
danger to the next and one location to the next, by all means watch
Dalek Invasion and thrill to the alligators and random mine monsters
that are clumsily slotted into the episodes at every turn to provide
"suspense" at the expense of credible plot progression.

.... or you can go for the minimalist version and watch them racing
through isles of books, jumping over shadows, crawling under tables,
and being consumed by ravenous flesh-eating dust that's only allowed
to come out of the shadows when it's latched onto a suitable victim
(or something like that).

But at least
try to appreciate that there is also value to a story in which not
much happens but a lot of time is devoted to setting up and exploring
one scenario.

Phil

= IF
.

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