#Each episode was a monster of the week and the plot was a character or 2 being in a Situation™

[simcardiac-arrested]

astute viewers might have noticed that i;ve been scpmaxxing lately. and so yesterday i rewatched confinement after like, 6-7 years? and the most bizarre thing about that show is that it was actually good. it was actually good.

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

I am gonna be real with yall, vld feels more like Powwr Rangers than mecha

[exitwound]

do you know what’s so insane about supernatural and it took me four years to realize this. Narratively. Monsterhunting show about two guys and each episode there’s a monster or the week and also an overarching plot for each season. Very simple very classic. Hold on. there’s a third guy. Ummmmm he’s not an antagonist though. Ummmm well they try to kill him but also he tries to kill them but also they’re like all really good friends especially one of the guys is realllllly good friends with him. He’s an angel not a monster also but in this world angels are narratively like monsters except for this one he’s different. We will tell you he’s different but we won’t tell you why. Here’s eleven seasons of this angel repeatedly featuring prominently in the narrative, becoming basically a third protagonist, but never quite having a spot in the car. Sometimes he sits in the backseat. Sometimes he sits next to dean. Sometimes dean adjusts his collar. tips his cowboy hat. Winks at him. Then he disappears. Sometimes he’s not even an angel. And what keeps him in this show? every other character but sam and dean eventually leaves, dies, disappears, or is forgotten, what’s cas’ place? He doesn’t have one. He is in love with dean winchester. Dean winchester dies. Okay show over 😁

[godzillabreath]

unfortunately I do have more to say about wwdits.

I think one of the most egregious things about the development of the show over the seasons is the tonal shift. I was watching it from the beginning to convince myself I wasn’t crazy for feeling the first three seasons were better, and I felt vindicated.

It was always a dark comedy, but it wasn’t always a zany dark comedy. It had been grounded in real, everyday life. The vampires prey on a LARP group, the vampires ride a late night bus to go to a city council meeting, Nandor tries for citizenship, etc. I think once they started introducing a slew of supernatural creatures like a monster-of-the-week a la carte, the show became increasingly less focused and outlandish. There are episode I don’t like even in seasons 2 and 3 that are emblematic of this shift. The siren, the gargoyles, the troll—they just feel out of place in a story that is supposed to focus on out-of-time vampires and how they engage with the modern world. They aren’t really adding anything to the characters or the plot when they appear either. They just make a flashy CGI appearance and give some quippy line, which ultimately eats up time where our main cast that we actually care about could otherwise be on screen, doing things. And then there was a point in time where this show just did not allow itself any more sentimental moments between characters. These moments, for me, made for refreshing moments between comedic situations. It balanced the humanity in all of the main cast. But the show opted out of those moments, and it just became a back-to-back comedic situation with less and less interesting character moments to look forward to. Anyway, I just find it kind of sad that the writers completely detonated all of the characters’ inner emotional lives by the series finale. I liked to see Nadja bored in her marriage and pursuing this lustful encounter with Gregor through reincarnated generations. I liked to see Colin challenged by another energy vampire undermining his territory. I liked to see Guillermo struggling with his fractured relationship with his family, his discomfort in his own sexual identity, and his need to cling on to this group of vampires that disrespect him if only to find family and personal liberation in their company. I liked Nandor being so disconnected from modernity that he became listless and depressed and lonely and clung on to the idea that he might make himself human again. I liked the romance that the writers were building literally textually and in all of their marketing material from season 3: that Guillermo (at least) had these unrequited and very frustrating feelings for Nandor and how that affected their relationship with each other. I liked the idea of Laszlo forming these personal connections with both Sean and Colin, even if I found their conclusive arcs to be lackluster, strange, or unpalatable (baby Colin to weird co-parent Colin was a bizarre arc.) I liked the idea of Nadja wanting power and community because of the impoverished, desolate conditions she grew up under (especially the class dynamic of marrying Laszlo and how that could be at times a schism in their relationship), even if the writers did not care to expand upon this. The potential just drives me crazy. I can’t believe they opted out of tying up any of these emotional hooks. I think it might drive me crazy forever.

[asexualandalwaysshipping]

I think what makes the Dead Boy Detectives so refreshing is it really feels like an homage to the classic "Monster of the Week" format. Sure, the first season is only eight episodes that are each barely an hour long, but we aren't just following along with some heavy plot that gets hard to keep up with; we also just get to see this zany crew and their adventures and watch their journey as individual characters. Each episode doesn't feel like it's just following up on the last; it actually has its own mini-plot and subplots that allow it to stand on its own, and I appreciate that.

(Also, I have definitely not been assigning each of the main characters to a member of the Mystery Incorporated gang because who would do that? Not me, psh.)

[absolutebl]

This Week in BL - It's odd rn but VERY PRETTY

Organized, in each category, with ones I'm enjoying most at the top.

Oct 2024 Week 1

Ongoing Series - Thai

Jack & Joker (Thai Mon IQIYI) ep 4 of 12 - I love Joke so much! And I love War in this role so much. It’s great. This is a great show it’s such fun. The comedy is somewhat leaving me flat. But that’s normal for me in this kind of Thai BL. I also like Hope. I shouldn’t, but I do. I love the little girl character as well, and I do believe that Joke has found his scion in her.

(As per usual the grandma of this BL speaks for all of us.)

Kidnap (Fri YT) ep 5 of 12 - Coils be coiling. Mummy dearest is v hot. I do like the twist on the henchmen. It would’ve been really gut-wrenching if Q had put the rope around his own wrist the night that he slept by himself (or tried to). And they have now made "the promise that is destined to be broken" waves at trope. Meanwhile, great flirting. Next week being episode six we should be getting our kiss.

(Was GMMTV gently poking at Jack & Joker with that play-within-a-play reference to Jack as Min's stunt part?)

Fourever You (Thai Thurs YT) ep 1 of 16 - Sampler pack university BL from Wabi Sabi that's trying to be a gay Boys Over Flowers (4 older med student hot boys + frosh) and it’s exactly what I want right now. Is it good? No, not really. Do I care? Not at all. It is, in fact, boys over flowers... only boys no flowers. I really couldn’t want anything more than that. What can I say? I’m easy. I love a pining seme. I guess what I am saying is, I am trash for trash. Inject this shit directly into my eyeballs.

Love Sick 2024 (Thai Sun iQIYI) ep 3 of 15 - At least in this version they talk bit more with each other about what’s going on. (Then again in the original we didn't need it, the acting was so good.) Still it’s a lot more modern to see representation of communication, but but the previous version felt more honest to teen behavior. This open communication entirely changes the push pull dynamic of Phun & Noh's whole relationship. I actually LIKE that change because it makes it very different from the original. I’ve been hoping that this one would veer in a different direction. I'm enjoying that they've made it Phun with the long term crush, and that he’s sort of testing himself with heterosexuality. It is selfish, but it is also a very rich kid thing to do. I love the shouted confessions and the decision to not date. This is a really good twist on the original. I’m liking this a hell of a lot more now that it’s substantially changed in direction, if not in tone.

Monster Next Door (Thai Thurs Gaga ) ep 11 of 12 - It’s very sweet and wholesome. And everyone kisses pretty. And I do like the communication and green flag aspects of this show. But I'm also finding it a touch dull. 

Battle of the Writers (Sun YT) ep 9 of 12 - I don’t know. The pretending to be blind thing is weird. This whole show is weird. I’m kinda weirded out by it. I like the two side couples well enough, but we get barely any time with them at all.

I Saw You in My Dream (Weds Gaga) ep 12 fin - I like that they did come around to the dreaming thing as a major plot point in the end. Even though it felt like they forgot about it in the middle. And I liked that it was an inherited family trait. I didn’t expect that (should have, but I didn't). And I thought it suited this kind of drama, even if it was a little pat. The whole family helping at the very end was very sweet and a nice full circle for the narrative. (Like the Ae's family sort of adopting the next-door kids originally. 

Summation

A cute friends to lovers romance, that’s a little bit like the stepbrothers trope since these two grow up next-door to each other and in and out of each other’s lives. The paranormal element is about prophetic dreams, and it is threaded through the narrative even if it gets somewhat lost in the muddy middle. All in all, a sweet fun little series with decent chemistry. 8/10

Addicted Heroin (Thai Tues WeTV) ep 8 of 10 - I've totally forgotten what’s going on. There was another kidnapping. Maybe they’re actually dating now? I don’t know. Honestly, it won’t really matter cause everything will change by the end of this episode... again. That said, I did love the parental confrontation sequence. It’s not as good as in the original because it’s a lot more direct and modernized, but it was pleasingly aggressive. Which I weirdly appreciated for the military angle. The cross-dressing thing was odd. The dolls advertising thing is even odder. Jealous baby on sports day was good though.

Bad Guy My Boss (Thai Sun Gaga) ep 3 of 10 - Why did I feel like I’ve seen this entire episode already. It’s just different characters saying the same thing to the main characters or flirting the same way or whatever. 

Live in Love (Sun Gaga) ep 5 fin - I did not like this ep at all. Fully half of it was evil backstabbing and some bullying and some sort of trying to engender sympathy for a friendship betrayal. And I was not on board. (Wouldn’t mind seen Hali and that cute kid in something together tho.) 

Conclusion

Basically this was a story about online relationships and how they interface with the real world, and in personal friendships, plus bullying of all types and some backstabbing and shipping. The acting was weak, the sound was terrible, and generally it was an old style pulp offering. It tried to deal with some interesting issues, but was awfully clumsy about it. 5/10 

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

Sugar Dog Life (Japan Sun grey) ep 9 fin - Such a great confession, so truthful and earnest and honest. And he’s also like that with his friends. And such a nice answer. I love that during the cool off they both realize how very much they both act like are boyfriends to each other all the time. Ooo running of the gays! And we even got a cute little smile kiss!!!! and an adorable boyfriend montage at the end. How unexpectedly satisfying of you, Japan!

Summation 

This is a phenomenally charming and adorable little romance about a forlorn university kid and the police officer who adopts him. They are relentlessly kind to each other, in fact it’s an extremely kindly show over all (everyone in it is so nice to everyone else including us) so there’s very little tension. But what it lacks in drive and complexity it makes up for in earnest acts of service and simple affection. These two are basically boyfriends from the get-go, it’s just one of them acts like it and doesn’t realize it and the other one realizes it and has to figure out how to make it a reality. It’s incredibly sweet and incredibly wholesome, nourishing but delicious. Everybody who can should watch this show. It will make you feel better about life. 

Easy 9/10 on this one from me.  

GO WATCH IT  

Teenager Judge (Vietnam Sat YT) ep 2 of ? - We have some semblance of a plot! Yay! Our BV tsundere character is secretly an online judge who whistleblows and exposes corruption in the school system. How very Pump Up the Volume. I am not mad about it. Also 2 of the prettiest seme bullies EVER. The epic pout-off with these bad boys. Be still my heart.

Our Golden Times (Hong Knong ??? YT) 1-4 of ? - Billed as a BL from Hong Kong I’m not sure we can trust this one to a get finished or be cohesive or have an HEA. But the optics are good. Everybody’s very pretty. It’s chaotic and clumsy and a little odd. But most of the stuff on my dash is these days, so what the hell? And ya know what, I kinda like it.

Love is Like a Poison AKA Doku Koi: Doku mo Sugireba Koi to Naru (Japan Tues Netflix?) 4 of 10 eps - It remains entertaining but off kilter in that way that indicates 50% chance of ultimate dissatisfaction in the JBL pantheon. 

First Note Of Love (Taiwan Mon Gaga) ep 9 of 12 - I wish we knew a little bit more about Sea's background/family. Neil should just tell him what the hell is going on. Why wouldn’t he? Instead they artificially wedged the main couple apart for most of this episode and Orca wasn’t there at all? = Not a good episode IMHO.

It's airing but...

My Damn Business (Korea Sat ????) 7 eps - supposedly airing on Saturdays starting 10/5 have no roleand I found the trailer but nothing else.

The Hidden Moon (Sat WeTV) ep 1 of 10 - This is a supernatural romance (my ghost boyfriend trope) by Violet Rain (I Feel You Linger). A man is hired to write an article about an old mansion in Chiang Mai being converted into a café. He sees the ghosts of people who died at the mansion, falls in love with one of them. Was substantially recast. I loved IFYLITA except the ending so I think I'll let this one run it's course you can tell me if it's work tracking down... if they managed to land it. I have my doubts.

Next Week Looks Like This:

Upcoming BLs for 2024 are listed here. This list is not kept updated, so please leave a comment if you know something new or RP with additions.

Coming Oct 2024:

10/7 Every You Every Me (Thai Mon Gaga) 10 eps - Jade and Chin have lived over a thousand lifetimes. In each one they somehow manage to fall in love with each other. (This pair, TopMick was piloted in a My Universe ep, that was one of the only ones I liked.)

10/10 Eccentric Romance (Korea Thurs Viki & Gaga) 12 eps - Silkwood’s 2nd Thai/Korean colab, that has been in production since 2022 which is a LONG time in the BL world. I'm worried but I like the concept: friends of 10 years who’ve been hiding feelings for each other enter the same university. Plus MURDER.

10/10 Gangster and His Boyfriend (Korea Thurs ????) 8 eps? - Kim Dong Bin (famous trainee & idol reality competitor, yeah that happens) stars as a fallen idol who unexpectedly becomes entangled in a gangster family. Discovers that his friend’s father is responsible for the murder of his entire family years ago. I don't know much about this one, neither does anyone else and I'm not sure where I got that release date so……

10/21 Love in the Big City (Korea ????) 8 eps - Okay both a movie (already out) and a series. Neither one is likely BL and I can't imagine it will end happily. I'm giving both a pass but here's your synopsis.

Cynical fun loving student Young pinballs from home, to class, to on night stands. He and Jaehee, his female besie and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their worries about life, love, and money with soju and hookups.

10/23 See Your Love (Taiwan Gaga Viki) 10 eps? - Zi Xiong, a third-generation heir, attempting to flee from taking over their family business, meets and falls in love with Shao Peng, who works as a hearing-impaired nurse. From the same production house as Kiseki Dear To Me in partnership with Shinehouse Theatre, funded by Taiwan’s BIGART + Japan's Rakuten (Viki). Show includes Lin Chia Yo (Be Loved in House: I Do). Director Chiang Ping Chen’s childhood experiences with his deaf uncle have inspired the drama.

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

I kinda love it when someone else does the prophetic claiming. Our Golden Times

Crumbs in Summer Nights but they very cute crumbs. We didn't even really get to see them get together but I'm glad that they are.

(Last week)

Streaming services are listed by how I (usually) watch, which is with a USA based IP, and often offset by a day because time zones are a pain.

The tag BLigade: @doorajar @solitaryandwandering @my-rose-tinted-glasses @babymbbatinygirl @babymbbatinygirl @isisanna-blog @mmastertheone @pickletrip @aliceisathome @urikawa-miyuki @tokillamonger @sunflower-positiiivity @rocketturtle4 @blglplus @anythinggoesintheshire @everlightly @renafire @mestizashinrin @bl-bam-beyond @small-dark-and-delicious @saezurumurmurs

Sigh, Tumblr in its infinite wisdom doesn't like too many at-ings.

[startrekprodigyfan]

Incoming Rant.

I feel weird as a Star Trek fan because right now there’s more Star Trek than even when I was growing up… and yet… so much of it doesn’t feel like Star Trek to me.

Picard was awful all the way through. It’s bleak, it’s depressing, it’s inconsistent tonally, and it’s just flat out boring. It doesn’t add anything new to the universe and instead just mercilessly kills off many beloved characters for no reason. From Icheb, to Hue, to Q, and even to Bruce Maddox.

Section 31 is an interesting idea. A rogue mission impossible style agency within the federation doing covert missions? That’s fun… but this whole mirror universe Terran empire stuff has no appeal to me and the show looks nothing like Star Trek.

Discovery keeps doing the universe is in danger and spent so much time with the main character that we never got to know anyone else in the show. Then it just randomly jumps forward several hundreds of centuries. It’s so far removed from the Star Trek content I like, in both directions.

I’ve been wanting a Starfleet Academy show since I was a kid. Having a series follow cadets as they learn each week about different starship dynamics and regulations and protocols? That’s fun. I like that. But I do not want it set in the Discovery universe so far into the future. I always felt Starfleet Academy should be around the Wrath of Kahn era in between the old and the new Trek series.

Strange New Worlds is the closest we have to monster-of-the-week style classic Trek storytelling.. but due to streaming’s limited number of episodes we’ve barely surpassed Season 2 of TNG in terms of episode numbers after 3 years and a lot of the times the writing feels to just fall short of being good.

Both Prodigy and Lower Decks which both feel the most like Star Trek and focus the most on the ideals of classic Trek were cancelled and brought to an end far too soon. There’s so much more we can do with either series but the big-wigs don’t seem to care.

I’m convinced more than ever now that Star Trek flourishes when it’s animated and aimed at kids. I think the media landscape for adult oriented TV shows has moved so far into darkness and shocking content that doing Trek now doesn’t feel the same. The sense of joy and wonder at exploring space and sci-fi concepts is gone.

Everything has to be a universe ending storyline.

Everything has to be grim dark and depressing.

There’s no time to spend with any of the characters because we’ve gotta keep moving the plot forward because we only have 10 episodes to tell everything in.

Bigger budgets allow different looking tech and scenery, but they still want to be nostalgic for the past while not giving us the stuff we want.

I feel like getting Star Trek isn’t hard. Yet it’s weird how many of the people in charge don’t seem to get it at all.

[genericpuff]

Y'all brought a lot of energy to that Covenant post, how about some love for Time & Time Again? 😘🤙💓

I've been reading this webtoon since it began, the creator is super cool and absolutely deserves more attention on their work. They're an extremely prolific comic creator with loads of work under their belt already, but Time & Time Again is their first Originals series on the platform. It unfortunately doesn't get advertised much by the platform but lemme tell you, it's one of the best out there if you're looking for a good series to binge and keep up with. It's literally a time-travelling vampire x werewolf duo going on wacky adventures through time, it's structured like those monster-of-the-week shows where every story arc is a new adventure and mystery to solve (but there's also an overarching plot that threads them together, much of it involving the main characters' angsty backstory >:3).

Also they're gay and their names are literally Adam and Steve (and iirc Steve is transmasc and Adam is non-binary !!). I don't think I have to even explain its appeal further than that , go read it LMAO And if you like it, please consider adding it to your list of books to order for your shelf!!! Deo has done a great job adapting it to print, and every book contains each story arc so rather than its seasons on WT being haphazardly divided into a limited amount of chapters, each book is cleanly organized into each adventure!

Time & Time Again is currently on hiatus, so fortunately the creator hasn't run into any issues like explodikid where they haven't been allowed to promote the books in their episodes... but that's simply because it hasn't been posting new episodes, so it remains to be seen if Deo will also face similar roadblocks. Hopefully Webtoons will have learned their lesson by that point, but until then, it's better safe than sorry to spread the word around now; and if you haven't heard of the series before, then now's your time to read it so you can catch up to it before it makes its return! (•̀ᴗ•́)و

Read the webtoon here:

Pre-order the books here:

[writingquestionsanswered]

ant tips on writing episodoc story but still having an overarching plot?

Overarching Plot for Episodic Story

It really depends on how you want to structure your overall story. With an episodic story, you can either take a big story and break it into smaller pieces--at which point the overarching plot is just the regular plot--or you can follow a TV show model and tell more encapsulated stories that are united beneath an overarching plot.

In the case of breaking a story into smaller pieces, you're going to flesh out your plot and structure the way you would if you were writing a novella or novel. Then, you'll look for natural "episodes" within to break up the story. Most of the episodes will likely center around a story beat, such as the introduction, the inciting incident, the dark night of the soul, etc. In this scenario, the story is the story. The story you're telling is the one that resolves the main conflict.

In the case of a TV show model, you're sort of telling stories within a bigger story. I like to use The X-Files as an example here... the overarching story (aka the "myth arc") of TXF was aliens and the government conspiracy to hide their existence. But the everyday story was two FBI agents tasked with investigating unsolved paranormal cases. Many of the episodes were stand alone stories known in TV as "monster of the week episodes," because they center around a different conflict or "monster" each week rather than being progressive segments of a primary conflict. However, the "myth arc" would be explored and furthered with periodic "myth arc episodes" where the central conflict was specific to the myth arc. And, sometimes monster of the week episodes would tie back to the myth arc or would have a myth arc subplot. So, in this type of story, you still want to look at the premise and flesh out the main plot as you would for any other story, figuring out the "myth arc" conflict, the "big bad," and what the protagonist must do to resolve the myth arc conflict and defeat the big bad. However, rather than break that story up into smaller pieces, you'll figure out a "monster of the week" framework that works with the premise and allows you to develop the characters, explore the world, and tie in bits of the "myth arc."

Happy writing!

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

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[bluebugjay]

just saw a post saying they miss the monster/guy/problem of the week format with tv shows, and Dead Boy Detectives has that! pretty much every episode has a new case to solve and therefore new characters, a new part of the town is explored and each case is linked to the issues and journeys the main cast are dealing with so give us a deeper yet natural look into the characters. they have a few overarching plot lines too like them being stuck in port townsend in the first place, plus each characters individual emotional arcs.

I just keep finding more and more things I love about this show!!!

[randomfoggytiger]

The X-Files: A Day-in-the-Life On-Set

An extract from this (very long) 1995 Chris Carter post.

CRUSHING TIMELINES AND ULTIMATE FREEDOM

…The Los Angeles office, housed in its own bungalow, is nicely appointed but relatively spare. 

The [Los Angeles] office itself is bustling this particularly morning, as writers move in and out--- occasionally invading the space of researcher/officer manager Mary Astadourian, where various drawers full of research material are kept. In there, the scribes will find literature on the paranormal, diseases, viruses, and various monsters, with folders that carry labels like “Roswell” or “Loch Ness.” 

…Part of the morning is devoted to the regularly scheduled writers’ meeting, with the entire staff… assembling to go over that week’s script, blocking out the teaser and all four acts….

The other writers question each nuance, throwing out suggestions to refine the story and make sure it’s clear…. Despite the need for exposition, Carter also stresses not letting the pace drag, wanting to spread action within the hour (or more precisely, 44 minutes or so minus commercials) allotted them. “Make sure you keep it hoppin’,” he says. 

…Eventually, it’s suggested they shift some action from the second act into the first in order to achieve the proper sense of pacing. The move requires some reconfiguration of other plot elements, but once those are blocked out the producer and other writers seem content. “That works for me,” says Carter, sending the show’s writer off to do another rewrite. 

Carter’s daily schedule, however, is just beginning. The writers’ session is followed by what’s known as a concept meeting-- a teleconference with the staff in Vancouver to grapple with various production issues before the begin filming a new episode…. 

Other issues involve the number of extras they can use….

Because money is always an issue, and time a luxury the crew usually doesn’t have, compromise and ingenuity remain key….

The producers also pride themselves on finding means of scavenging resources, then developing different ways to capitalize upon them. A prime case involves the crew getting access to a Canadian Navy destroyer that was then used in three different episodes, including “Dod Kalm”... and “End Game”.... “It’s fun,” Carter says, “to make something out of nothing.” 

Episodes must be plotted down to the most minute details-- in part because Carter is a perfectionist, and in part because the show is under a microscope now, with fans picking and nitpicking every conceivable aspect. Issues raised include what sort of garb Native Americans depicted should wear, with an emphasis on being as faithful as possible to tribal customs. (A Navajo group has complained because a character wore his hair down, something the elders in that tribe wouldn’t normally do, in the episode entitled “Anasazi.” Carter subsequently visited a Navajo reservation and attended one of their ceremonies.) 

From a more practical standpoint, the Vancouver team wants to know whether they can wardrobe the actors in blue jeans because some postproduction special effects shots use blue-screen, which essentially eliminates that color. 

The L.A. staffers are also assured that a shoot-out sequence will be top-notch, with bullet hits and ricochets plus a movie-style car explosion. Can it be done? “The answer’s yes… with disclaimers,” quips Beck good-naturedly adding, “One big disclaimer: How much money you got?” 

…The crew clearly takes enormous pride in the series, which presents them with such challenges on almost a daily basis and allows them to put their skills to the fullest possible use. Some freely admit, in fact, that they’ve been spoiled by their involvement with "The X-Files" and would have a hard time working elsewhere. “They’d have to drag me kicking and screaming off this show,” Gauthier says. 

The same goes for makeup special effects supervisor Toby Lindala…. Still, Lindala has proven up to most any task, with the Flukeman-- a costume his crew created in 10 days that had to weather water and other shooting ordeals-- still his proudest accomplishment. “That was probably the most insane undertaking for a time period,” says Lindala, who worked a 28-and 28-hour day during that stretch to get the suit ready in time. Even so, Lindala grew up watching monster movies and isn’t complaining, relishing the opportunities the show has provided to fool around with such projects. “I love making ‘em,” he says. 

Goodwin, a veteran producer who has worked on such series as "Life Goes On" and "Mancuso FBI", now tries to provide more lead time to prepare such major undertakings, but in most instances Lindala and his team (four people, including Lindala, work full time in that area) have just seven days’ notice to put a makeup effect together, and his services are needed in virtually every episode. 

…Careful planning remains the main hedge against both cost and time crunches, with Goodwin pointing out that in television time essentially translates directly into money. “The quicker you have to do it, the more it costs,” he says, adding that while some in the industry are tempted to cut corners, “My motto is, ‘Quality, whether they want it or not.’” 

…Kim Manners, also one of the show’s pool of directors, lauds Carter for treating each installment like a mini-movie. The process gives the individual directors-- who in episodic television, which is dominated by executive producers, are often viewed as transient guns for hire-- the opportunity to truly ply their trade. “He insists that you go out and be a filmmaker,” Manners says. “He doesn’t want you just go out and be a traffic cop.” Because of that freedom, he adds, the show is “the zenith of my career.” 

…Unlike most television shows that shoot on location, on "The X-Files" whoever scripted that particular episode goes to Vancouver to scout out locations and do other preparatory work. “To make sure,” as story editor Frank Spotnitz puts it, “everything is in sync with what the writer had in mind,” from casting to production design. In the cryptic vernacular of the show, the process stems from commitment to “purity control.” 

…For the episode in question, that means co-executive producer Howard Gordon, the only member of the writing staff other than creator Chris Carter who has been with the show virtually since the beginning, has made the sojourn to Vancouver. “As a writer, you don’t get that experience on any other show,” says Gordon. 

…Other matters have also arisen, some remarkable in their degree of minutia. Gordon’s script for the episode being prepared, for example, contains a seemingly innocuous reference to being “in the mood for some Quarter Pounders,” and Fox’s legal department wants them to clear the wording with McDonald’s…. “That’s a great line,” says an only slightly exasperated Manners…. Hours later, it’s decided to change to a more generic term rather than hassle the legal issue. 

…A later shot involves disposing of the [dead] cow, and Gordon-- a city kid from New York-- has actually researched the matter…. …But in light of McDonald’s headache, Carter has another suggestion. “How ‘bout if we just have a truck with golden arches on the side?” he jokes, spurring laughs from everyone in the room. 

…The attention to detail, again, proves remarkable, driven by Carter’s commitment to perfection. 

The entire process involved in shooting an episode of "The X-Files", from the first day of preparation to the last day of postproduction, usually takes six to eight weeks, with the seven days of preparation key to ensuring that the eight days of production that follow go smoothly-- though even the enormous effort that goes into planning can never account for every detail that can delay filming and raise blood pressure rates all around. In the middle of the season, as time grows shorter, there’s occasionally been as little as five weeks from prep to air. 

Just two days before shooting is to begin, Manners, Gordon, Carter, and co-executive producer R.W. Goodwin cram into a small audition room, where they’re scheduled to see more than 20 actors in just over an hour….

Manners, Gordon, and about 15 crew members, including special effects ace Dave Gauthier, production designer Graeme Murray, and others from various departments, later embark on a technical survey. They pile into an air-conditioned bus to scout out all the locations that will be involved in the upcoming shoot, usually a six-to-eight hour pilgrimage. “And this is the easy part,” laughs set decorator Shirley Inget. 

Carter follows the group to the door but has too much work at the office to come along. “I’m gonna miss this one, you guys,” he tells them, which is met with a collective “Aw” from the bus. 

…The bunch straggles back to the studio around 7:30 P.M., almost eight hours after their departure. On a near-by soundstage, meanwhile, Bowman is directing stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, trying to keep the level of enthusiasm up with another long night of work to do. Shooting is frequently a tedious process, with long lapses between the action as shots are set up. The two stars carry out an emotional scene in front of an elevator that isn’t really an elevator, with a crew member behind the soundstage wall sliding a wooden door closed to approximate the effect. “I love it!” Bowman proclaims as the scene ends, watching the shot through a monitor and lauding his star as “One-take Duchovny.” 

Outside, Anderson’s baby, Piper… plays with various staff members as well as her father, assistant art director Clyde Klotz, who’s just returned from the technical survey. Piper shows off her mother’s piercing eyes and frolics later with Duchovny’s dog, Blue (his constant companion on the set), both seemingly fascinated with and a bit perplexed by the other. "The X-Files" is, indeed, a family affair, underscored when Goodwin brings his 10-year-old son and a friend into the production office the next morning, the latter collecting autographs from everyone on that week’s script. 

A short time later Duchovny and Anderson arrive, enjoying a few quiet moments while Piper plays nearby in a small red tub, watched carefully by her nanny. …Though he isn’t shooting that day, actor Mitch Pileggi (who seems to create quite a stir among the female office staff) also pops by to look over dailies, or raw footage, of a fight sequence featuring him shot earlier in the week.  

…Bowman has to deal with five actors (Anderson, Duchovny, and Gunmen Dean Haglund, Bruce Harwood, and Braidwood) in a relatively confined space, so the staging will be critical. After Bowman aligns them one way, Duchovny suggests an alternative in handling the shot, and various configurations are tried. As they begin rehearsing, everyone still seems a bit punchy, and the mood is light. Haglund keeps wanting to call a Nazi scientist “Kempler” instead of “Klemper”, and Duchovny has a hard time not laughing each time Braidwood (who comes up roughly to the actor’s chin) approaches him, with Frohike supposed to act relieved to see Mulder alive after the events that closed the second season. “Did you ever see the Star Trek where Spock thought that Kirk died?” Duchovny tells him with his trademark deadpan delivery. ‘That’s what you want to be doing.” 

Production ultimately won’t conclude until near 2 A.M. that morning…. 

[utilitycaster]

Part of why it’s tough to talk about the most recent episodes is that I feel a lot of people treat party dynamics, culpability vs. victimhood, and overall character focus on the show, based on an idea of a zero sum game, and I find that fallacious.

It’s really valid for everyone to be furious at Ashton, and I don’t think anyone has behaved wildly inappropriately towards them. I don’t think Bells Hells behaved in a therapy-approved manner either, but as is frequently discussed this is fiction and not real life and therapy-approved discussions are so boring and unnatural in, to be honest, either fiction or real life, that this is not a metric anyone whose opinion I respect would use.

It’s also extremely understandable how Ashton got here. As Taliesin said on 4SD, and now in-game and in-character, the fact that nothing good had ever really happened to Ashton means that they jumped at the first sign that they might be special and ran with it. The Ashton and FCG parallels continue; the past week has been a bunch of important people telling him how unique and cool he is. Jumping into the lava even worked out well for them! And so, riding high on that hubris, and with the knowledge that the rest of the party would probably stop them, they deliberately deceived everyone but Fearne. He even admits that the fact that “very smart people” (Evontra’vir, Allura, arguably Percy) advised against it was part of why he made the decision he did. It was perfectly in character, it did come from their trauma, and it still was a choice that was harmful to them, to the rest of the party, and to a vitally important mission. Ashton covers the situation well: they wanted someone else to blame, but in the end it was their fault.

Ashton is both deeply traumatized and also responsible for a number of their own problems. To be honest, I think this can be said to an extent about everyone in the party, but that’s beside the point. Within the fandom, swinging entirely to one side (They are a horrible selfish monster who ruined everything and are lucky the party is still talking to them) or the other (He has had a very hard life and exploding hurt a lot and everyone should be nice to him as a result) is an incomplete picture at best and a realization of the post author’s unexamined bias at worst.

It’s much easier to cover the other kind of zero sum: that of the show’s, and the fandom’s focus. The show is telling a story. In a good story, everyone will get their time in the sun, but if you’re counting how many minutes each person talks you have quite literally lost the plot. If your favorite isn’t getting the time you wish they did, it’s worth considering what sort of actions they take. Rarely do I find a main PC to actually be sidelined; more frequently, they just have a more subtle plot and the actor playing them realizes this. And in the case of the fandom’s focus; I’d be a hypocrite if I said complaining wasn’t valid, but you’ll achieve far more by making good posts about an underrated character than whining that other characters exist. People can enjoy multiple things at once, and frequently do.

[weepingchoir]

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 14: A FULL SEASON REVIEW

Another decade, another frantic Doctor Who resuscitation. (Not that there were news of potential cancellation, but things must’ve been dire for the BBC to sell one of their most storied shows to the Mouse.) Chibnall is out, Moffat on retainer, Russell “Thee” Davies is in. The theme song is the best since Matt Smith, which, through weird and inexplicable coincidence, was also the last time I watched Who with any serious interest. Good start.

The Star Beast

While not technically part of the season, the specials preceding series 14 signal the beginning of a shift in tone and rules for Doctor Who, including the introduction of the new Doctor. Not yet, though. First we get an OLD DOCTOR FUCK YES DAVID TENNANT IS BACK.

I already know Tennant won’t stick around, and I’m glad. That would’ve stunk of Disney nostalgia-raking. Nevertheless, as a returning viewer, I’m grateful for the breakfall. “The Star Beast” doesn’t yet carry the magic that’ll characterize Gatwa’s series. It’s a standard scifi monster of the week serial, and the monster rules. Looking for returning companion Donna Noble, the Doctor runs into the Meep, a no-pronouns gremlin-Yoda puppet living in Donna’s shed, under the care of her daughter, Rose.

UNIT comes under attack by Kamen Riders. The Meep tears off the blorbo mask to reveal a genocidal dictator on the lam from the Intergalactic Criminal Court. It’s a hilarious turn in an episode whose emotional core relies on Rose’s transgenderedness. Pronouns are a real-time strategy game and evil space aliens are better at it than humans.

Quick dustup on weird plot shit: if Donna remembers the Doctor she dies. She has to remember anyway, in order to stop the Meep’s ship from taking off. Turns out that she’s since become immune to Time Lord neuron overload by offloading it on her daughter. Donna and Rose expel the toxic memories by harnessing their feminine emotional intelligence.

I don’t want it to land. Facing the Doctor, who was a woman one episode ago, Rose says that a man could never understand how she just harnessed the divine feminine. Nevertheless it passes, maybe because any representation of a transgender woman as through-and-through female is a gasp of fresh air. For better or worse, this also cues the season’s cardinal rule: what you feel is true is more important than what makes sense.

Wild Blue Yonder

The TARDIS crashlands at the edge of the universe and disappears when it senses danger, one of those things that it’s never done before and will only do again if it’s funny or cool.

The “edge of the universe” is a spaceship floating in ink-black, with Marvin the Paranoid Timebomb making its way down the hall, one step at a time. This is a great opportunity to ease us into the budgetful new Doctor Who, with sleek but understated shots of the spaceship’s exterior. When the Doctor and Donna split up to fix the ship, they converse with each other’s doppelgangers: “not-things” from beyond reality, looking to assimilate physics. Communication with the not-things goes awry as an eerie set of medium close-ups pull back to reveal their overlong limbs.

Backed with half a decade of set chemistry, Tennant and Catherine Tate ace all four characters in this bottle episode. Much of the runtime consists of the Doctor and Donna’s mind games against each other. It’s less a restatement and more a self-justifying exploration of why bother with a last hurrah for two fan favorites. Well-earned, too, as the Doctor nearly leaves the real Donna to die in the ship’s explosion. It’s impossible to be done exploring the fullness of a relationship. But one day, and soon, we will have to move on.

The Giggle

 Two crucial stopgaps against the not-things. One, a line of salt on the floor, which the Doctor tricks them into thinking they can’t cross, since they’re sorta vampires. Two, cognitive dissonance. It’s hard enough for the uncreatures to assimilate beliefs, let alone simultaneous contradictory ideas.

The Doctor fears that, by invoking fiddly rules at the edge of reality, he’s opened a door for fell mythos. This episode stars the Toymaker, a villain from a partially restored First Doctor serial. Originally a Fu Manchu caricature, the new Toymaker is Neil Patrick Harris putting on a German accent, which he can always do, it’s never racist.

The Toymaker has snuck a mind-warping signal into every screen, starting with the 1925 Stookie Bill experiment. Now mankind is mad , reacting with explosive hostility at any confrontation. Over the last decade, as writers have moved from mocking subsets of people for being on phone to everyone being on phone, we’ve uncovered more cohesive portrayals of what 24/7 connection is doing to us. Writ large, more and more of us are looking to win arguments. Even losing is a thrill.

It’s a contrived plan for a villain whose power transcends mere limitless control over physical matter. The only thing that binds the Toymaker is the rules of the game. We can trace the evolution of TV drama by comparing his first appearance to his last, William Hartnell’s almost congenial gotchas to Tennant’s panic at genuine omnipotence. The Toymaker traps the Doctor and Donna in a theater for a puppet play about the many deaths of the former’s companions. The Doctor, ever the hero, denies them three times.

Well, are they dead? These specials have proven that, even in the megacorp mines, fan favorite returns don’t have to be Rise of Skywalker gruel. Donna, and the Fourth Doctor’s returning Mel Bush, bring necessary continuity to the transition into new-new Who.

Not everything, at least, has to end in tragedy. When the Toymaker commandeers the giant laser gun the government is cool with UNIT keeping in uptown London, the Doctor bigenerates, splitting into straight Tennant (presumably) and gay Ncuti Gatwa. Together they beat the Toymaker at catch, which banishes him for good.

From here on, we follow Gatwa’s Doctor. Tennant stays with Donna. There is movement in rest, organic, within. Their relationship may continue to develop, just where we can’t see it. Not everything is for screen consumption.

The Church On Ruby Road

Every time I see this episode’s title I get Hüsker Dü’s “Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill” stuck in my head, except the Inter Arma cover because that’s the first time I heard that. The Doctor is fortunate enough to run into one of the few actresses that can match his energy, Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday: songwriter, orphan and ingenue. Ruby lives a zoomer kitsch apartment with string lights on the walls, alongside her adoptive mother and grandmother. She suffers from a curse of bad luck, bewitched by an airshipful of baby-eating goblins.

The Doctor and Ruby stop the goblins from eating a baby, to the tune of an R&B paean to Jabba-the-Hut, the only logical step from the Toymaker’s Spice Girls lipsync sequence. The goblins retaliate by traveling in time to eat baby Ruby, abandoned by her mother on Christmas day on the porch of The Church That Lives On Ruby Road. Watching Ruby’s mother go, Gatwa cries his series-first tear of silent grief. He’s very good at that.

The Doctor’s rule of no self-interaction has fucked his opportunity to let Ruby meet her biological mother. Pay attention, this’ll be on the test. Other than that, “The Church” is an easy, fun, low-stakes introduction to the Doctor’s companion and many of the season’s dominos, only some of which will receive a proper knockdown.

Space Babies

The first real ostentatious show of Disney budget is a quick but lush visit to James Cameron's Mesozoic. A CGI diplodocus doesn’t have to be bad. CGI baby mouths, on the other hand.

Budget cuts strand a colony spaceship, replete with babies in a bizarre state of semi-suspended animation: they’ve been toddlers for six years. Only accountant Jocelyn remains. The babies are terrorized by the Boogeyman, a snot monster generated by glitched-out educational software. Jocelyn almost airlocks the Boogeyman until the Doctor reminds her that it’s kind of her baby also.

The Doctor’s memory of Ruby Road changes to feature Ruby’s mother pointing at him. It starts snowing indoors, another magic plot puzzle piece. Cue tear of silent grief. There’s not much else to say about “Space Babies”. It’s a lot of terrible ideas, executed with functional neatness: quoting a friend, the platonic ideal of a Russell T 6/10.

The Devil’s Chord

1925 again! There’s a whole pantheon of Toymaker-type evil gods. This one’s Maestro, the god of music, played by a spectacular Jinkx Monsoon. Over the course of four decades, Maestro ruins music so thoroughly that even Abbey Road sounds like dogwater.

The Doctor and Ruby negotiate with the Beatles, who make dodgy gestures towards the whole of music being an embarrassing business. It’s never made clear how Maestro has convinced the world of this, or, like the Toymaker’s giggle, why they bothered when they have the power to eat music itself. We’ve crossed into the realm of magic. It’s not about the method, but the goal: within a hundred years, musicless mankind will self-exterminate to vent its anger, leaving Maestro to enjoy pure aeolian tones.

It’s hard to agree that music is the salve keeping mankind from abject violence when contending with the history of, Burzum, Chris Brown or Meni Mamtera. Nor does the idea that Maestro can be defeated by a seven-note scale available to basic Western music theory hold much water. “The Devil’s Chord” is an altogether less cohesive “The Giggle”, and only three episodes after its predecessor, too. On the other hand, as a piece of musical cinema, it’s a brilliant watch for Monsoon’s performance, the playful metanarrative gestures, and the closing number, ‘There’s Always A Twist At The End’.

Boom

On the ravaged planet of Kastarion-3, there is only war. A landmine vaporizes a guy, attracting an 'ambulance' automaton to euthanize his friend Vater by reducing him into an awesomely gross flesh tube.

Gatwa leaves the TARDIS in a super-sexy leather jacket and steps on a mine. What follows is ten agonizing minutes of the Doctor and Ruby figuring out the logistics of the situation. The Doctor can’t move off the smart mine or exhibit high emotion. On finding Vater’s tube, Ruby convinces the Doctor to let her hand it to him to use as a counterweight, in a move that almost kills them both. The pressure is immense, achieved with nothing but close-ups to tears of silent grief and a silly prop of a landmine with LEDs.

Vater’s daughter finds the duo, triggering the flesh tube to generate a grief counselor hologram of her father. Ruby gets shot while managing a haywire ambulance. The only way to get the ambulance to treat her is to admit that the Kastarians never existed. With a full third of characters dead, Cyber-Vater betrays its parent corporation to end the war. This is the most stressful Doctor Who gets, in all the best ways. For a second, and against all logic, I was even convinced it might be the end of Ruby Sunday.

“Boom” is the closest Gatwa’s Doctor has to a companion capsule episode. This focus on their relationship might’ve gone over even better if it’d been earlier in the run, especially given “The Devil’s Chord” has the opposite problem. I suspect the prime reason why it’s placed in an awkward middle slot is to not give away the game: “Boom” front-and-centers Susan Twist, who’s played minor roles in almost every episode since “Wild Blue Yonder”, as the face of the combat ambulance AI. There’s always a twist at the end, remember?

73 Yards

The Doctor’s always stepping on some bullshit. After intruding on a ritual circle, he disappears, leaving Ruby alone with a mysterious woman that’s always standing 73 yards away. Everyone who talks to the woman flies goes no-contact with Ruby: a hiker, a bar-goer, UNIT, even, in a harrowing turn, Ruby’s adoptive mother. So Ruby spends the next twenty years alone. Without her family, and also alone in this ethereal way where she’s meant to be on startlit adventures, not half-there on a wine bar date.

Gibson carries this mammoth episode on her shoulders, evolving from panicked 20 year old to middle-aged, purpose-driven mercenary. The closest thing to a co-star is the cinematography, following her eyes towards the woman-shaped hole in the near horizon. This is one of the subtler metanarrative moments of the season: the woman is impossible to photograph, blurry in pictures just as she’s never in focus for the camera.

Ruby makes up a mission: save the world from ‘Mad Jack’ Roger ap Gwilliam, a presidential candidate whom the Doctor off-hand warned would lead the world to nuclear ruin. Infiltrating, Jack’s presidential campaign, she maneuvers the woman into manifesting next to him, which makes him run screaming from office. The world is saved. Ruby isn’t. As she lays dying of old age, alone, the mystery woman is revealed to be herself, traveling back in time to warn the Doctor off the circle.

This is the furthest Doctor Who can stray from its own standards before becoming a different show altogether. The theme song doesn’t even play (shame). Not a coincidence, it’s also the episode to most demand that we trust emotion over logic, and it pays back that trust with dividends. It doesn’t matter that we never find out why there was a shrine to Mad Jack atop a cliff in Wales twenty years before his time, or the mechanism by which Ruby created a closed time loop. The important bit is the emotional resonance, the click of catharsis when we discover just enough details to let it rest.

Dot and Bubble

I feared, as “Dot” opened on a woman so dependent on social media that she can’t navigate her immediate surroundings without GPS, that this would be the Phone Bad episode “The Giggle” had managed to surpass. The truth is more complex: Finetime’s residents can afford to spend all day Whatsapping because they’re the offspring of another planet’s leisure class, here on permanent vacation.

Giant man-eating slugs have invaded Finetime, and the Dot-Bubble navigation system is walking people straight into their maws. Our lead is neither Gatwa nor Gibson, but Callie Cooke as Lindy Pepper-Bean in yet another of the acting masterclasses that characterize this season. An ongoing tension point is whether Lindy can keep her Bubble down long enough to string together two tasks. This means the season’s highest ratio of close-ups to other shots. Cooke carries this focus with recidivist disdain, processing the situation in arbitrary bursts only to default to anger at the Doctor for intruding on her groupchat, or elation at meeting a celebrity singer.

The slugs are an invention of the Dot, which, after years of servicing Finetime, has learned hate. Huddled outside the habitat dome, the all-white survivors reject the Doctor’s 'dirty' safe passage, and strike out to colonize the wilderness, ‘like their ancestors’.

Laterally to Phone Bad, an ongoing trend in wronghead fiction is Rich Bad. Movies like Bodies Bodies Bodies portray the bourgeoise as a self-obsessed bunch who will fall snarling on themselves at the first provocation. This is not what makes the bourgeoise dangerous, but in fact the exact opposite: because the rich have everything to lose, they will close ranks against you, no matter how much good you’ve done for them, no matter what you could yet do.

Rogue

Before the season ends, anybody want to defend England one last time? Playing nobility at a Regency London ball, the Doctor runs into Rogue, a bounty hunter who mistakes him (at gunpoint) for a shapeshifting, murderous Chuldur.

The Chuldur are fans of Bridgerton, on Earth to cosplay it to death. In order to lure them out, The Doctor and Rogue publicize their whirlwind romance. If “Dot and Bubble” was a response to the idea that Gatwa might run into racism if he travels to the past, “Rogue” is its inversion: the plan works because the modern Chuldur can’t resist the titillation of wearing a black gay man. They run after the hypervisible Doctor, while the white Rogue becomes “the other one”. He’s less problematized, less interesting, the one you get stuck with if you don’t call intersectional shotgun.

After the trap is sprung by accident, Rogue's banished alongside the Chuldur to a random dimension of nobody’s knowing. The Doctor declares it’s impossible to find him. We’ll see about that.

For all its nods towards fandom, “Rogue” isn’t a po-faced condemnation of fan culture. Ultimately, the Chuldur too are defeated through cosplay. Plus, it’s a straight beat-by-beat of the strongest points in Who structure: strong side characters, scifi logistics, a villain as goofy as it’s horrific. Whether its back-to-back placement with its thematic mirror, or as a segue to the season finale, is ideal, is anyone’s guess. 

The Legend of Ruby Sunday

The Doctor asks for UNIT’s help in figuring out why Susan Twist follows him everywhere. On 2024 Earth, she’s Susan Triad, tech CEO on the verge of releasing some kind of Alexa thing. But before we get to that, the Doctor decides now’s the time to meet Ruby’s biomom.

Using a ‘Time Window’, Ruby visualizes The Church That Lives On Ruby Road. Ruby cries: the Window refuses to show her mother’s face. The machine goes all creepypasta on some UNIT boot. Panicked, the Doctor chases down Triad, who reveals she can remember her past lives in dreams.

Triad pulls away to her conference. Though she’s live worldwide, her soundstage is empty, the crowd canned. Where much of this season has dealt with the phenomenons of mass media and TV, “The Legend” digs into a grief specific to Doctor Who, an ill-kempt archive of decades forever on the verge of cancellation.

Little else happens, for two good reasons. First, this episode is a two-parter. Second, much of its runtime is dedicated to extracting maximum stress out of the situation. Ruby is too compromised to act, while the Doctor and UNIT are late from the start, only just figuring out the situation in time to witness it unfold. The big reveal paying off all this anxiety, crossed purposes, fear and despair is, unfortunately, a CGI dog with a hat.

Empire of Death

Sutekh is a Fourth Doctor villain who’s been locked in the Time Vortex for thousands of years or a dozen seasons, whichever’s longest. He has spawned harbingers like Triad in every planet that the Doctor’s visited, and his “dust of death” has the power to kill nost just everyone, but everyone at every point in time. In the era of streaming television (and stream-only television), the C-suite can overnight erase all evidence that a show ever existed.

Through a bit of absurd circular logic, the Doctor declares that the Time Window’s memory of a TARDIS is in fact a functioning TARDIS. The crew escapes to roam a deserted universe. The memory TARDIS begs to tie long-dangling plot strands into knots of neat logic. Instead, a bunch of nonsense dialogue happens. When Ruby asks the Doctor why Sutekh has a The Mummy thing going on, the Doctor answers “cultural appropriation”, and fails to elaborate. Laterally, when Ruby casually lists the chameleon circuit’s AOE as 73 yards, the Doctor asks how she knew that. She’s not sure. Nothing comes of this.

Because Sutekh is incapable of seeing Ruby’s mother, the Doctor decides it’s all tied together and heads to a government office in Mad Jack Britain, containing the UK’s forcibly harvested genetic data. Much more cohesive commentary on racism than reminding us cultural appropration is a thing Doctor Who has done. Armed with knowledge, the Doctor baits Sutekh into the Time Vortex, where he forces him to, like, kill death and then die in turn.

It’s a fantastic turn of character for the Doctor, who oft makes a spurious point of not killing in order to condemn villains to fates worse than death, or adopts a ‘War Doctor’ persona which kills a bunch of people anyway. It’s a matter of framing, but also a genuine point of no return. As for less satisfying character beats: Ruby gets to meet her mother, who’s just some middle-aged Instagrammer with a bad haircut and a passion for rocky beaches.

So why was this character immune to everyone from the Time Window to Sutekh, and the unwitting carrier of Ruby’s inherited power to make it snow? Because, the Doctor explains, we cared about her.

Which begs the question: who is we?

The easiest answer is: the last people left alive in the universe. But Ruby’s been making it snow since “Space Babies”. Not proximity to the Doctor either, else the Doctor himself would have magic powers: on the contrary, he’s spent the whole season grappling with his limited ratfic ability to deal with the supernatural. And there’s millions of orphans out there. Ruby is, in this regard as in most else, not special.

Taken all together along with the season’s metanarrative overtures, which keep going right up to the last second of “Empire”, the only answer is that we are the audience. Or the audience and the crew, anyhow: the camera, the screen, Ruby’s protagonism and the people that accept it. We have imbued Ruby Sunday with transcendental power, because we would like her to transcend.

This doesn’t work unless I am more emotionally than narratively invested in Ruby Sunday.

Not that I didn’t get torn up when Ruby met her mother. But that’s just cinema trickery. A season’s worth of promises, a bit of music, very good acting: of course I was going to care. Not more than I care about finding out what the fuck was going on, though. As an explanation, this all rounds out to: what was going on is what was going on. Ruby’s mom was important because she mattered to us, and it mattered to us because she was important. Me, I refuse to be complicit.

There is an unpleasant extreme to the logical lens, the CinemaSinners combing through scripts, sacrificing the greater story to the tendentious idol of Plot Holes. Doctor Who has long been plagued by these types, pitfalls of being an easy-watching BBC show with a large audience. Series 14 scans like a concerted effort to not give these guys an inch. In overcorrecting, it created a maudlin mess of unfulfilled promise.

That is as far as the season's connected plotline goes. Fortunately, most of the episodes are gems, directed with a sense of fun almost unseen in the revival series’ longstanding gloom. The Doctor has turned into a killer, maybe for good. We are promised that his tale will end in tragedy. I hold out hope that, next time the story tries to hit me where it hurts, it’ll follow through.

7/10

[starryskiesahead]

So…

I may have just found a new anime to obsess over.

Yep. The Case Study of Vanitas is easily one of my new favorites.

My goodness, I don’t ever think I’ve fallen in love with a piece of media this fast. From the first episode, I adored every second, every minute of it. I fell in love with the animation/visuals, the music, the character dynamics, the worldbuilding and lore, the story…I’m just so invested in it and love it absolutely. Noé and Vanitas have an absolutely amazing dynamic and their relationship is one of my favorites that I’ve ever seen. They have easily earned their spot in my Top 5 fictional faves.

Parts of it actually kinda surprised me? For one thing, it's a lot more comedic than I expected. Like I mean. A lot of times it gets dark and fucked up bc all the characters are traumatized and have their own tragic backstories that are made of their trauma and suffering. But it's also not all serious and grim all the time like I initially thought it would be based on my initial assumption. There's a lot of cute, comedic chibi moments (iconic tbh), which I didn't expect from this anime. Also the OP, which I expected to be chock-full of darkness and blood and symbolism and motifs and action and angsty visuals, is essentially VaniNoe going on a date.

In that aspect it's completely different from what I expected but also not too far off from what I've expected, a guy and his soulma-er, partner going on dark fantasy adventures around 19th-century-steampunk France. I really like the concept of Vanitas being a doctor curing the curses that corrupt vampires' true names into malnomens, turning them into forms like monsters - when he pulls out The Book of Vanitas and activates the magic grimoire, it sends a flurry of beautiful, sparkling magical constellations to purify the afflicted like he's a magical girl in a mahou shoujo anime using her special attack to save the day from the monster of the week.

ALSO also... holy shit never before have I shipped ANY fictional pairing as hard as I’ve shipped Vanitas and Noe. I don’t even ship hard 99% of the time AT ALL, the closest was two of my OCs, who are my own original characters so they don't count.

BUT THESE TWO?

THEY’RE JUST SO PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL AND AMAZING AND AWESOME TOGETHER AND WHY THE HELL AREN’T THE TWO OF THEM KISSING YET?!

like.

I mean I get that Vanitas x Jeanne is canon (don’t care for the ship that much, but I can accept it I guess though I’ll never be super into it) and Noé could have a thing with Domi, but honestly? They’ll never hit the way Vanoé does for me. Even if they never become canon in the end, their relationship, while not necessarily romantic, is nonetheless a dynamic I treasure and the way their personalities play off of each other is my favorite part of the series.

(And even if you disagree with me and don’t see the romance you can’t argue that their relationship certainly did come off that way to a good deal of the fandom, judging by all the Vanoe content I’ve seen. Honestly with the dancing scene, the way they look at each other and are super pretty in each other’s POV, the fact Noé wants a taste of Vanitas’ blood so much when blood-drinking is usually framed as a sexual thing in this series, the first ending song being them reaching out to each other while lyrics like “you made me whole” play in the background….yeah I think someone has to definitely know what they’re doing at this point, right?)

This anime was a blast from start to finish. I was instantly entranced, enthralled, enchanted by it, and I simply can’t get enough, so I ended up binge-reading the entire manga in one day. And I loved and adored it as well! The cover art with all the watercolors is so *chefs kiss* stunning, lovely and beautiful and the mangaka did amazing with it. So talented, wtf?

Love it! 💙🩵💜💖

I do have some criticisms such as I feel the story (mostly in season 1, I feel like it got better around season 2) is kind of…jumping around between plots a bit? I was expecting the main conflict to just be. The problem of cursebearers that Vanitas and Noé mostly go around curing, with a few extra shenanigans here and there. Like the whole thing with Roland and the Chasseurs and the whole encounter at Dr. Moreau’s lab felt like it was a bit rushed or resolved kinda quickly for my tastes? and the ending of S1 with the encounter between Lord Ruthven and Noe right about as we’re about to begin the Gévaudan arc, and just an episode after Jeanne and Vanitas’ little date…And like I mentioned before, I don’t really care for this pairing - though I like both of them as individual characters, and I can accept that this is canon, but I don’t particularly have too much investment in the ship. No hate to anyone who likes it though. And well it’s important enough to the story to not be really ignored, it’s also kinda just. Okay. They like each other. At least it’s a subplot and there’s other things going on, so for me I don’t have to be too into VaniJeanne as a pairing to enjoy the story. Also I’m personally really not fond of the fact both of the times they kiss were forced on each other. But that’s just my two cents. (Toss in Noé and Dominique into the equation and the shipping/romance love square does get more messy/complex, though like I said, I’m glad it’s not a constant will-they-won’t-they love drama thing all the time (no hate to ppl who like it, but not personally fond of those). Relationships are definitely a very important part of this series, and that includes the romance stuff but at least to me it doesn't feel like constant dragged out melodrama all the time.) Also I lowkey do wish Jeanne and Domi got more chance to shine in the first season outside of their connection with the guys. They do get good character development in season 2, and though a good amount of said development does seem to be pretty linked with their relationships with Vanitas and Noé respectively, I can forgive it as after all, the relationships and dynamics are an important part of this series and at least they have entertaining, fun, and likable personalities and their own backstories and lore outside of just being "the girls who are there to be the guys' love interests".

Honestly the pacing to me feels much better in the manga than in the anime - idk if it’s the different format and the fact that I can read it at my own pace, but it just feels less fast and easier to understand. I know for the anime some people found it a bit confusing, and while I partially agree/can see it on some parts it’s not THAT confusing for me and I can still understand the plot okay. But that being said, I think the manga is a bit better at this and in some ways, easier to follow than the anime.

Also, while I love the chibi comedy moments, I feel like sometimes they can be a bit overused from time to time? Especially when it's shortly after a mostly serious moment, it kinda throws me off. The truly serious, dark moments, focusing more on the characters' backstories and trauma, at least don't get interrupted randomly by the chibis, but still it does feel a little jarring when the style randomly switches.

That being said, the problems or flaws this series has/my criticisms don't really take away my enjoyment at all, and I still loved and enjoyed the experience as a whole even when there were somethings I wasn't too keen on , so I can honestly still say that it was such a wonderful, magnificent experience for me. I do hope there'll be Season 3, but I think there's not enough manga chapters to adapt into the anime and the author is on hiatus I believe. Either was, this series has sunk its fangs into me and won't let go, and I look forward to seeing it the whole way through and being there for this journey, beginning to end, I am TOTALLY hooked.

I'm totally along for the ride, and until then, will be looking at all the fabulous Vanitas and Noé art by all the amazingly talented artists out there (keep up your good work, love you!)

(Also Noé might now be my #2 favorite character of all time, up there with Arlo from Number Days. Yes, he's simply that powerful.)

[cornfieldsrambles]

I saw your explanation about lords in black and I have a question: tgwdlm the main lord in black is pokey, in black friday it is wiggly, and in npmd, who would it be?

oh god that post is going to haunt me forever (joke)

well, NPMD isn't really that simple I don't think. It's all of them. All five Lords in Black. And I think that makes sense.

Let me back up and explain. So NPMD happened after both Nightmare Times had been released. Obviously NPMD had been "in the works" before then, but for the actual finished show, I think Starkid assumed that a substantial amount of the people watching would've seen Nightmare Time. So I reckon they wanted to give something new to those people, while also not excluding people who hadn't watched it. That's just my assumption, though.

Not every Nightmare Time story is directly related to the Lords in Black.* About half the episodes have a bit more of a 'monster of the week' vibe. Hatchetfield Ape-Man, Forever and Always, Perky’s Buds and Killer Track are some examples. Generally, the pattern goes: a monster of the week, then a Lord in Black, then a monster of the week, then a Lord in Black.**

So when NPMD rolled around and (again, this is kind of me speculating) Starkid wanted to give something new/rewarding to those who watched Nightmare Time, while accommodating those who didn't, so they decided to do both. A particularly memorable and exciting monster-of-the-week is the main event, and we also get to see the Lords. Hatchetfield lore is referenced but you don't need to know much about it, and the stuff you do need to know is communicated through what the characters learn. The Waylons were in a cult and had their weird book which they used to worship Wiggly and co., and now they're dead and their house is cursed or something. Got it.

The other thing about Nightmare Time is... we've already seen each Lord in action. Heck, including TGWDLM we've seen Pokey twice. So what's better than one Lord in Black? FIVE LORDS IN BLACK!!!!!

So having not just Wiggly, but ALL of the Lords - with brand new Tumblr sexyman forms to boot - and showing them in a new and interesting role of pretty much the Deus Ex Machina of the show (this is hands-down the most helpful they've ever been) is something that feels very new and very rewarding to NMT watchers. Like "Oh my god! I know those guys! But it's all of them! This rules!"***

But also, showing Wiggly again gives the non-NMT watchers something to latch onto. Showing his brothers is in itself the new exciting thing, like "Oh my god, it's Wiggly! Wait - there's more of him? What the hell?!" At its core, their purpose in the plot is simple and comprehensible. It's deal-with-the-devil plotline, it's not rocket science. That, and showing all the Lords and dropping crumbs of lore could also get non-NMT watchers excited and interested, and would hopefully entice them to watch Nightmare Time. (Which I am once again encouraging you to do! There's so much you're missing out on!)

So TL;DR - My guess is that Starkid wanted the show to be rewarding to Nightmare Time watchers, and accessible to non-NMT watchers. They did this by combining the two main Nightmare Time episode formats (monster of the week and Lords in Black) in a way that felt new and exciting, wasn't too lore heavy to confuse non-NMTs, but was just lore-y enough to get them interested and feeling rewarding for NMT watchers who already knew about this stuff. So that's why they used all five Lords.

Wow I did not mean for this to turn out so long, I am sorry lol

*If you want to be pedantic, you could say everything/most things in Hatchetfield lead back to things like the Witchwood or the Starry Children or whatever, which arguably lead back to the Lords, but what I mean is not every Nightmare Time is about one or more Lord in Black directly making a mess. The 'monster of the week' things I mentioned are all related to stuff that happened years and years ago, so they don't count as much.

**Okay, NMT2 doesn't really stick to this formula as cleanly, but that doesn't really matter for my point.

***This was pretty much my reaction, after a lot of incoherent excited yelling lmao

[absolutebl]

This Week in BL - Screw everything else inject On1y into my damn veins

Organized, in each category, with ones I'm enjoying most at the top.

Aug 2024 Week 4

Ongoing Series - Thai

Monster Next Door (Thai Thurs Gaga ) eps 5-6 of 12 - Extreme introvert dealing with a very hot, very drunk, very affectionate extrovert was an excellent experience all around. “I was drunk and talking out of my ass, but I wasn’t lying” maybe one of the world’s greatest confessions. How meta that he’s checking out the book of the story that he’s in. Carry on boys, very enjoyable, very Thai BL.

My Love Mix-Up Th (Fri YT) ep 12 fin - It’s cute. They are all very cute. I do like it when high school BL gives us a coming out sequence. I know it’s old-fashioned, but it’s a trope that goes with this particular setting really well, and I just like it when it’s done nicely. I’m not sure I needed it to totally dominate the final episode of the series. But it was fine.

I gotta say, Fourth is an absolutely outstanding actor. He really did knocked it out of the park in this last episode especially. 

In conclusion:

It was fine and it was charming, but it was also a little lackluster. Thailand managed to take one of Japan's softest cutest most bonkers BLs in recent memory and make it softer and cuter and... dull. They did this by watering it down. JBLs almost always have an edge to them, even the rom-coms, by dulling the edge, MLMU lost a great deal of the sparkle and tension as well. What an office setting managed to mostly maintain in the consummate hands of TayNew felt somewhat lackluster when handed off to the next generation and a high school setting. Cherry Magic was a lovely reinterpretation, Mix Up was an amateur's watercolor rendition of a colorful oil painting. Am I being harsh? G4 tried their best, and Fourth turned in some outrageously good acting in the latter half. But the show? It was fine. If you like water colors and you haven't seen (and loved) Kieta Hatsukoi. 8/10

This Love Doesn't Have Long Beans (Fri iQIYI) ep 8 fin - This was the first hint we got that the lead's relationship was anything more than sexual. And it was utilized for a breakup?! JJ and Wan's friendship is the best thing about this show. PWan selling JJ out to Methas was great. I was modestly delighted by the big fuck off ownership engagement ring. I admire a boy who likes to mark his territory with bling. I actually thought this was a decent final episode. If very rushed. I know, in general this ending was objectively weak, but I grinned the entire time, so I can’t really complain that much.

Final thoughts?

A story about a kid who infiltrates a cooking competition under false pretenses and then has to deal with the consequences when he falls in love with the head chef. The side couple is a poor little rich boy meets physical therapist (morality chain). The core friendships are excellent and the chemistry cannot be faulted across the (charcuterie) board. What this show lacks in substance it makes up for in health code violations. It was all chili all the time. Considering that the plot centered on betrayal but the romantic relationship never sweetened enough to balance that bitterness; one could be forgiven for throwing this one in the compost. But I got over all its weaknesses in flavor balancing for an ultimately satisfying meal, with a great dessert course. I've always loved spicy food. Plus the blooper reels were fantastic. 8/10

Addicted Heroin (Thai Tues WeTV) ep 2 of 10 - I like the side couple a lot. It’s nice to see that dynamic developed (as it wasn't in the CBL version). Of course, Thailand leans into a secondary couple, but I also like the super popular jock + geeky boy who couldn’t care less. You know what? I’m actually really enjoying this. And yes, I AM biased because it's August. (Wait, that could be taken several different ways this month. But you know what I mean.) Anygay, this is a lot softer than the original, and so Hero is much more of a pining character and less harsh. But I'm still enjoying it. I like the stepbrothers trope (we don’t get it very much from Thailand), and I enjoy the beats and pulses of this particular story. We will see if it derails into inconsequence and lack of conflict the way My Love Mixup did.  

Sunset X Vibes (Sat iQIYI) ep 11 of 12 - I’m enjoying this show but it should’ve been just 10 eps. It’s feeling bloated at this juncture. That said, I loved our little GL kiss. Very pretty. I also really like the bit with Sam and Yo flirting with each other. Sam trying to get Yo to call him P'Sam was fucking brilliant. And then slipping in all of those nongs. Delightful. Linguistic negotiation, it's what's for dinner... along with Sam's d**k apparently. I frankly did not think they would take this couple that far. So, thank you very much everybody involved.

Battle of the Writers (Sun YT) ep 4 of 12 - I do enjoy watching Yim freak out and fall in love all over again. The reality is still better for me than the fantasy parts, but it’s all fun enough. The magic mushrooms bit was odd. In fact, there is definitely a core tenor of ODD going on with the show. Which I’m accustomed to from Japan but I’m not really sure about from Thailand. Thus I remain engaged but suspicious of this BL. 

I Saw You in My Dream (Weds Gaga) ep 6 of 12 - Yu wants to take his baby on a trip, gets thwarted by his younger brother. Ouch. I really do think it’s time for Ai to tell Yu what’s going on with his dreams! Drunken boyfriend bolster pillow is a fav trope of mine. As usual, I’m catching second lead syndrome. What? I liked the rich boy badminton player. And then he picked up a guitar. Oh well.

The Trainee (Sun YouTube) ep 8 of 12 - No one cares about the hets. He was jelly? Cute. Also kinda an arse, by hey this is BL. 

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

The On1y One (Taiwan Thurs Gaga) eps 1-2 of 12 - announced in 2023, high school, stepbrothers, and is reputed to be high heat. Based on a novel Mou Mou + the Your Name Engraved Herein team.

ARE YOU READY? I'M GOING TO NOT SO QUIETLY LOSE MY DAMN MIND

This is old-school BL and it’s bloody fantastic. Tsundere seme to beat all tsundere (smartest + tallest + bestest at everything but people) meets socially-ept cutie smart-ass protag.

They living together by end of ep 1 and start kissing by end of ep 2.

There is an Unknown quality to this, and that I love. Also, and ironic to say this while Addicted Heroin Th is airing, but this REALLY reminds me of Addicted. It’s so fucking good. I am all in on this show. Shut up while this eats my life.

Cosmetic Playlover (Japan Tues Gaga) eps 5-6 of 8 - Of course! The POV shift to the seme character at ep 5! How could I forget? Japan loves this beat! AND.... The running of the gays. And a use of a first name! So darling. Also some crazy great communication and conversation that is NOT a hallmark of Japan. Sahashi is so very possessive. I loved the switch that went on in his brain and the mania in his eyes when he thought someone else was interested in Natsume. I continue to love this.

I Hear the Sunspot AKA Hidamari ga Kikoeru (Japan Weds Gaga) ep 10 of 12 - I’m never going to like Maya. Sorry. And the leads were separated for most of this episodes so it was largely disappointing. I did like the insight into the way T sees the world, and sees the alienation of a disability and what it's dong to his friend. It’s very empathic. He’s such an appealing character in his obtuse bull-headed way.

Seoul Blues (Korea Fri? YouTube) ep 2 of 8 - It’s intriguing, and I'm happy to have anything from Korea on my dash. But, like Blue Boys, I’m not entirely sure if I like it or not.

First Note Of Love (Taiwan Mon Gaga) eps 3-4 of 12 - This may be Taiwan but I’m still in the "no singing" camp. I’m getting a slightly better chemistry feel off the leads in this episode. I’m not sure if they’re keeping it stiff because the younger character is under age or if it’s just that the actors aren’t there yet? (In other words is this a directing choice or a performance issue?)

Takara's Treasure AKA Takara No Vidro (Japan Mon Gaga) ep 8 of 10 - I've finally come down firmly on the fact that it’s the uneven power distribution (in terms of interest and enthusiasm for the relationship) that I dislike about this show. Generally, I like a power dynamic differential, kinky and all that. But this particular dynamic, when it’s the weaker personality that’s so much more into the stronger one? I never like it, unless it engages a serious pivot at some point. (See My Personal Weatherman or Takara & Amagi.)

It's airing but...

Sugar Dog Life (Japan Sun grey) ep 3 of 10 - I was really loving this one but I can't find ep 3 anywhere so I guess I gotta wait it out. I hope I get to see it eventually.

4 Minutes (Sat Gaga) eps 1-6 of 8 - Gaga picked this one up so we can watch it there. If I have time, I'll get caught up and put it into rotation.

In case you missed it

Meet You at the Blossom (China) - I'm eating crow, binging the fucker, and live blogging.

The Time of Fever AKA Unintentional Love Story 2 (Korea movie) trailer IS COMING IN SEPTEMBER!!!! (Yeah this is gonna sit here until then).

Next Week Looks Like This:

Upcoming BLs for 2024 are listed here. This list is not kept updated, so please leave a comment if you know something new or RP with additions.

Coming Next Month:

The Time of Fever (Korea)

9/1 Live in Love (Thai)

9/3 Happy of the End (Japan)

9/6 Kidnap (Thai)

9/7 The Hidden Moon (Thai)

9/9 Jack & Joker (Thai)

9/14 Love Sick 2024 (Thai)

9/17 Love is Like a Poison AKA Doku Koi: Doku mo Sugireba Koi to Naru (Japan)

More deets next week. It's late and I'm tired.

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

It was pretty. I am very shallow.

Even more pretty. Petition to have Tenon with his shirt off and hair back in every subsequent Thai BL? Just because.

(SunsetXVibes)

(Last week)

Streaming services are listed by how I (usually) watch, which is with a USA based IP, and often offset by a day because time zones are a pain.

The tag BLigade: @doorajar @solitaryandwandering @my-rose-tinted-glasses @babymbbatinygirl @babymbbatinygirl @isisanna-blog @mmastertheone @pickletrip @aliceisathome @urikawa-miyuki @tokillamonger @sunflower-positiiivity @rocketturtle4 @blglplus @anythinggoesintheshire @everlightly @renafire @mestizashinrin @bl-bam-beyond @small-dark-and-delicious @saezurumurmurs

Sigh, Tumblr in its infinite wisdom doesn't like too many tags.