Torchwood, series 1

Torchwood is the Doctor Who spinoff featuring John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, set at some point after the first of the new Who series; the last episode of this series corresponds with the eleventh episode of the third series, apparently. Torchwood’s purpose is to investigate anything that may involve aliens or their technology and to keep the alien technology out of the public’s hands. I’m not sure if they are also supposed to be protecting the public from the aliens; if so, they’ve forgotten that part (and Gwen’s purpose is to remind them that there are people involved). I think there is more information about Torchwood’s history and mission in the second series, but I haven’t seen that yet. The group also includes Eve Myles as Gwen Cooper (ex-cop and new girl, replacing Suzie), Burn Gorman as Dr. Owen Harper (medic), Naoko Mori as Toshiko Sato (computer wizard), and Gareth David-Lloyd as Ianto Jones (general office staff), and briefly included Indira Varma as Suzie Costello.

I think I enjoyed this more now than I would have at the time that it aired; I heard enough about it that my expectations were very low. I treated it more as a mindless action sort of show than a drama with actual character development and consistency; I would have liked more action and less drama, though. It probably also helped that I watched the relevant Doctor Who episodes when Sci Fi first ran them a couple of years ago, and so didn’t really remember how Jack used to be. I tried to watch it when it first aired and only made it halfway through the second episode before giving up; I really don’t like the “watch the new girl screw up” sort of episode but couldn’t bring myself to skip it and continue. When I rented it, I watched most of that episode on fast forward (the subtitles were mostly readable) and continued on.

My biggest problem with the show is Gwen; I don’t like her and she’s too much of a major character to ignore. I kind of liked her in the episodes where she was more one of the group instead of the female lead, though. I did think that a few of the random episode characters would have been more interesting as a regular than Gwen; I would have liked to have seen more of Suzie, and either Diana (the pilot from “Out of Time”) or the cop from “They Keep Killing Suzie” could have filled her purpose better. I don’t like Owen either (and tended to fast forward through anything dealing with him alone), but as part of the group, he’s tolerable; Gwen was kind of whiny (not quite the right adjective, but I can’t think of a better one), while Owen was more snarky and sarcastic (and I liked Gwen best when she and Owen were being snarky at each other). I might have liked Owen better had he not been introduced as a rapist, and I’m kind of appalled by the number of people who don’t consider what he did to be rape (using a drug to get a woman who said NO into bed and using said drug on her boyfriend without giving him any sort of chance to say yes or no = rape. It doesn’t matter that he used it on himself (it was some sort of alien perfume/pheromone spray); there is no indication that the others had any sort of choice).

Looking back through the episodes, it looks like they used several generic plots that I really don’t like (first-day screwups due in part to lack of knowledge/training, fish out of water/adjusting to a new world, focus on outside characters instead of the main cast). I liked the more action-oriented episodes best; it was easier to turn off the brain and ignore plotholes and other problems when there was more action than character interaction. Several episodes showed the loneliness and alienation of working at a place like Torchwood and having to keep everything secret. There were also a whole lot of plots driven by the fact that the characters keep acting like they have no common sense and occasionally lapse into complete idiocy. I’m not sure how they managed to investigate anything before Gwen arrived; she spent a fair amount of time using basic police procedure with better results than the rest of the team had.

Brian Francis Slattery: Spaceman Blues: a love song

I ran across a mention of this somewhere; it sounded interesting, and the library had it. I picked it up and read a couple of random bits, thought “not for me” and put it back and wandered off, but wandered back and flipped through it again a couple more times before deciding that there was obviously something there that interested me and I should check it out. There’s a lot of description in the book, and I’m not a very visual reader, so long passages of description generally make my eyes glaze over, but something with his style made it interesting. I liked this much more than I expected and plan on buying it eventually.

The front cover blurb is from Harlan Ellison^® (“What a breathless, mad tornado of words!”; I’ve never actually read him); the back blurbs compare it to Thomas Pynchon twice (tried and failed a couple of times), Phil Dick for the plot (a plus; I’ve read most, though not in at least ten years), and to China Miéville (bounced off of due to style) and Cory Doctorow (meh) for style. These are mostly not endorsements that I find appealing, but there were also several instances of “surreal” and surreal is always worth trying.

Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González is missing after his apartment exploded; his lover Wendell Apogee wants to know why. Wendell starts by talking to Manuel’s other friends and then his enemies and follows leads farther and farther away from his acquaintances. Manuel is the sort of person who knows everyone; at one point there is someone who keeps track of relationships with strings on nails, and Manuel is at the center of everything; that person is afraid that without Manuel, everything will fall apart. Manuel also has many enemies; he traffics in everything, including immigrants, drugs, and arms. Wendell eventually finds the city under the city (Darktown); he eventually fakes his death and moves there accompanied by Masoud, a former fighter pilot from Lebanon. Wendell reminds Masoud of his younger brother who he failed to protect, and he wants another chance to do the right thing. It’s hard to say anything else about the plot without spoiling any twists.

The setting is a very immigrant-heavy portion of New York, and the cast is extremely diverse; there are several Latino characters, but most of the others are from different cultures (and even the Latino characters are from everywhere that that description contains). I think there is a scene somewhere (a party, maybe?) where there are over a hundred languages being spoken. Wendell himself is white, but I kept thinking of him as African-American; I think I can blame the band Arrested Development for that (though the song was “Mr. Wendal” and the video featured an old man). The book mostly follows Wendell and is in third-person present tense, with flashbacks and glimpses of the futures of various characters in their appropriate tenses. The present tense took some getting used to, but after a few sections, I stopped really noticing it. It has seven chapters in which something happens; each chapter has named sections that are a few pages long.

The only things that bothered me were very minor: the police officers were named Trout and Salmon, which I found a bit jarring; and the end of the book (it ended). Even though the book just kind of ended, there were glimpses of most of the major characters’ futures throughout the book, so even if their immediate fates were uncertain, their future was at least mentioned.

I really liked this book, but can’t really say why; it just worked for me. I liked the characters, was interested in the plot, and liked the style. It’s annoying that I can go on for ages about things I don’t like or even things I find vaguely annoying, but can’t really find anything to say about things I like. It might have been easier if I had written it up when I read it instead of a couple of weeks later, though. The blurbs on the book are all extremely positive, and all of the praise is merited. I would not have guessed that this was a first novel, and I hope this book is successful for the author and that he continues to write.

Doctor Who, Season 2, Disc 4

The continuing adventures of the tenth Doctor and his companion Rose; I have enjoyed this, but I think I liked Christopher Eccleston better as the Doctor, and know I liked Rose better in the last season. I’ve seen bits and pieces of the older Who (like many people, starting with Tom Baker) and may eventually work my way through them (at least enough to have an idea of the different Doctors). I generally try to avoid spoilers, but there are some in here (unavoidable).

The Impossible Planet

The Tardis lands in the middle of a station on a planet far enough away from everything that there is writing that it cannot translate. They discover that they are on a planet orbiting a black hole; there is a gravity field of some sort going outwards, keeping the planet in orbit. There is a group that are trying to find the power source that is located somewhere inside that is causing the gravity field, and they are close to it at the beginning of the episode. They are assisted by a race called the Ood, who apparently live to serve others; they are humanoid with tentacle faces (I immediately thought of Lovecraft, but others would probably be reminded of Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean; I haven’t seen the relevant movie yet). They are apparently low-level telepathic with each other and speak to the humans via occasionally wonky translators.

The Ood’s first appearance is a group of them advancing on the Doctor and Rose, saying “We must feed” in unison; they apologize and offer refreshments (“We must feed you”). There is an earthquake, and the sector where the Tardis landed is destroyed; the leader refuses to divert the drill to look for the Tardis, but offers them a lift back to civilization once they have found the power source and leave.

I didn’t realize this was part one of two until near the end, when I looked at the title of the next episode. This episode was nicely creepy, with disembodied voices whispering to people, and occasionally taking over the computer’s voice, the Ood’s translators, the Ood themselves, and once calling Rose’s phone. Toby, the archaeologist, is the main target of the voices; he is trying to translate the language on some pottery they have found. The drill eventually reaches the core, and The Doctor volunteers to accompany Ida (the Science Officer) down the shaft. They find a seal, it opens, the Ood are possessed and start speaking for the occupant of the pit, and the episode ends.

The Satan Pit

I like the major spoiler in the title, though it is a spoiler for the end of the last episode (and was fairly obvious earlier). The Doctor and Ida are down the shaft, debate investigating the pit, are ordered to return, and the cable snaps. Below, The Doctor and Ida have philosophical discussions while using the cable from the capsule to investigate the pit (The Doctor investigates), while above, Rose takes charge and gets the crew to come up with a plan to stop the Ood. The remnants of the crew above manage to escape; unfortunately, the possessed member is one of them. The Doctor finds the beast and faces a dilemma: destroying the beast will also destroy Rose (the gravity field is tied to its prison; destroying the field will cause the planet to fall into the black hole; the lack of the field will cause the rocket to fall into the hole as well. The existence of further episodes makes this less suspenseful than it might have otherwise been, though the remaining crew’s fate was uncertain until the end.

Rose actually is kick-ass in this episode; after the beast causes the crew to start panicking, she convinces them to concentrate and come up with a plan to stop the Ood (there are 50 possessed and armed Ood and five or six crew members by this point). She seems to be using “What would the Doctor do?” as her motivation, and it seems to be working. I liked her fine in the last season, but earlier in this season, she was getting on my nerves a little; she seemed a bit weepy and clingy, though I guess the regeneration was hard on her.

Love and Monsters

There’s a guy (Elton, with Ursula filming) telling his story of his encounters with the Doctor. He ends up meeting a group of people who were interested in and investigating the Doctor who become the London Investigation ‘N’ Detective Agency (LINDA), and they ended up becoming friends and becoming more of a social group than an investigatory one. A man named Victor Kennedy joins the group and takes it over, giving people files to analyze and getting them to look for information about Rose. Members of the group begin to vanish, there is an alien, and eventually the Doctor shows up to save the day.

For such an emotional episode, that was an extremely grotesque alien (fat and ugly). It was kind of interesting seeing the Doctor from an outsider’s point of view, but I would have rather had an episode with the Doctor in it.

wikipedia on Doctor Who

Jay Lake: Mainspring

Overall, I liked this and would recommend it, but was vaguely dissatisfied and am not sure why. I thought I first heard of it from a list of nominees for some award, but can’t find said list now. It sounded interesting (steampunk/airships/gears/everything is clockwork), and the library actually had it, so I checked it out.

The book starts off in New England, which is an English colony under the reign of Queen Victoria. The world itself is described as:

“God in His infinite wisdom had made the world so, hung Earth in the sky on the tracks of her orbit around the lamp of the sun, then left it alone, for man to find his way. After man’s fall into sin and error, God had sent His son to be the Brass Christ, redeeming man by showing the way to correct thought and deed.
…
Hethor knew there were heresies, folk who claimed that Christ had come to wind the Mainspring of the world again, and even that He was neither the first nor the last.

The angel Gabriel appears to the (sheltered/naïve teenage orphan) clockmaker’s apprentice Hethor and tells him that “The Key Perilous is lost.” and that “The Mainspring of the world runs down…only a man, created in the image of the Tetragrammaton, can set it right.” Hethor sets off from New Haven to Boston to see the court mystic William of Ghent, fails to be taken seriously, and ends up on Her Imperial Majesty’s Ship of the Air Bassett, which is on a mission to the Equatorial Wall to support troops who are attempting to make a base there. He manages to cross the Wall (where the gears of the Earth run on the tracks in the sky) and heads south. The front flap describes it as a journey “from innocence and ignorance to power and self-knowledge.”

The positive: I loved the world itself (though I wouldn’t want to live there); I am a sucker for steampunk-type settings and felt this one was well-constructed/described and internally consistent. I was interested in most of the characters, even Hethor himself (not teenage or male; generally read this sort of book for the settings and side characters and plot). I like Lake’s writing style (the right balance of description/exposition/action for me), though I’m not a particularly visual reader and did have problems a couple of times figuring out what was happening (I have a bad habit of skimming long descriptions).

Minor and personal issues: I was interested in some of the side characters, and wish there had been some way to find out their fates. The lack of female characters bothered me a little; I think there were three named in the book, and I don’t think there were really any in the background, either. I know some of that was due to the world itself (or at least the parts Hethor saw), and I would hate to see token female characters. I’m not sure if the ending was what I would have expected from the beginning (a bit of an anti-climax), though the plot unfolded in a consistent and logical manner.

The negative: One of Hethor’s actions near the end made me hate him a little, and I’m not sure I can accept his justification for that action.

I enjoyed this book, would recommend it, and look forward to reading more by the author.