#the torture of infection on its own may be worse yeah and then he dies and its not him anymore

[fencecollapsed]

genuinely very interesting that so far the Paul and Emma trauma polls seem to be a toss-up between a horrible way to die and a horrible trauma they then had to live with

[takerfoxx]

So…I recently finished up Shiki. And boy, do I have…opinions!

See, this anime has got me feeling more conflicted than I’ve felt about any show in a long time, and it was honestly kind of hard to watch at times. And I mean that in the best possible way.

See, on the surface, Shiki doesn’t seem to have much special about it. The plot is as follows: in a small, insignificant village in the Japanese mountains sometime in the 1980’s, a mysterious family moves into a grand, western-styled house. At first the locals are curious, but overall unbothered and welcoming. But then people start to die from a mysterious illness, in which the victims become sleepy and lethargic, isolating themselves from everyone before simply dying. What is more, soon there are rumors that those who have died of this illness have been sighted walking around after dark. As the deaths mount up, it is up to our protagonists to…yadda, yadda, yadda.

Look, the new family are vampires. They’re sneaking into people’s homes and turning them into vampires. This isn’t a spoiler, the show doesn’t bother to hide it, it’s made explicit in the freaking opening. It’s pretty much Salem’s Lot set in a Japanese village instead of an American town. Hell, the author has already confirmed that Shiki is meant to be a Salem’s Lot homage…with a few twists.

So yeah, on its surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything special. We’ve seen this kind of story before. Even if Salem’s Lot didn’t exist, it’s not like the whole vampire invasion story hasn’t been done before. In fact, given how slowly paced the first entire third of the show is, I can’t blame anyone who got frustrated and gave up. I mean, it still treats the whole vampire thing like it’s some sinister mystery that the characters have to figure out before it’s too late, despite letting the audience in on the secret pretty much from the get-go. I can really see many people pretty much tearing out their hair and screaming at the characters, “It’s vampires! You’re being attacked by vampires! It’s so obvious!”

But no, the show takes its time, slowly building tension, making us spend time with all the townspeople as they go about their lives while trying to make sense of these strange happenings. Hell, it’s several episodes before we even see any of the vampires. And of course, you have the small band of heroes who figure out that something’s up before anyone else, and they start poking around and try to warn people, only to get laughed at and ignored, and of course the vampires are secretly sabotaging them and destroying their credibility, so blah, blah, blah, we’ve seen this before!

But it is then that the show finally tips its hands, and it does so so subtly and elegantly that you might not even notice that something’s up before it’s too late.

See, we then start to see things from the vampires’ (who refer to themselves as the Shiki) point of view. We get to meet them and come to know them. And we learn what it is that really sets this story apart from Salem’s Lot.

And that is this: becoming a Shiki does not turn you into a demon. Oh, you’re still a vampire. You’re an undead being with the standard collection of advantages (immortality, super-healing, can hypnotize those you feed upon) and weaknesses (sleep during the day, sunlight is deadly, circulatory system is vulnerable, need an invitation, aversion to religious totems), that requires blood to live. But it doesn’t change who you are as a person. You’re still you, but with an unbearable thirst for blood, and it is how you deal with this thirst that can change you. Some are already nasty people who continue to be nasty people, some are otherwise decent but go along with things because what else can they do, some truly hate what they have become but reluctantly go along with it because the thirst is just that bad, and some outright refuse to hurt anyone no matter how badly it hurts. We come to know the Shiki just like we came to know the villagers, with some being pretty evil while others are completely sympathetic and others are sort of a mix of bad and good.

But what makes it kind of brilliant is that it doesn’t somehow change the complexion of the whole vampire invasion thing. It doesn’t make it some kind of misunderstanding and the vampires were the good guys all along. No, they really are invading and killing people to add to their ranks, though their motivations are more about loneliness and desire for some kind of sanctuary than to build an army or anything like that. But it still doesn’t make it right, especially since there is the new wrinkle of whether or not someone who has died rising up again as a Shiki being a chancy thing. Some do, but others simply rot, so some of the people they kill are just dead, which in a way makes things worse. They even start to kidnap people from the city as a food source. What they are doing is still monstrous, and the show makes no pretentions otherwise.

So you start to feel conflicted. It’s not that you start rooting for the Shiki to succeed (or maybe you do, but you’re not supposed to), but you do start to feel for many among their number, and want them to have some kind of happy ending.

But then the show tips its hand again, and all hell breaks loose…but to talk about that we have to go deep into spoiler territory, so if you’ve already seen the show or just don’t care about spoilers, check under the cut for the rest.

In their desperation to survive, the human resistance start to take more and more drastic measures to warn the others, with the one in the lead, the town’s doctor, who had already been outwitted by the Shiki on several occasions and had been personally warned by them, being forced to resort to horrific means in order to gain an advantage.

He uses his authority as doctor to isolate one of the infected and keeps them hidden until they die, deliberately fudging medical records so the Shiki would not be informed of their death. Then he keeps close watch on the corpse, waiting to see if it would be one of the ones to rise up.

It is, and now with one of the Shiki under his power, he closes the clinic and starts to subject his new prisoner to a variety of torturous tests, checking to see if it is indeed harmed by sunlight (she is, and graphically so), repulsed by religious iconography (she is), affected at all by drugs (she isn’t), if it can heal from any injury (she can), and so on, until he has learned all that he needs and kills the Shiki with a stake to the heart. He carefully documents the whole process, cataloguing irrefutable proof that vampires exist and now walk among them. Smart plan, but it should be noted that the Shiki herself has no idea what is going on, and is fully awake through the whole process, bound and gagged and feeling everything that he does to her. She struggles, she cries out, she begs him to stop until he gags her, because as far as she knows, she had gotten sick, passed out, and woken up to find the doctor torturing her for no good reason.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that the Shiki also so happens to be his wife?

It’s a truly horrifying scene, not only because of what he’s doing and who he’s doing it to, but how cold, clinical, and detached he is throughout the whole process. And given my rant from earlier, it should have made me lose all sympathy for him.

…and yet, it didn’t. Because I understood.

Honestly, that’s what makes Shiki work. That’s the whole point. It’s a lot of otherwise decent people who do terrible things that are wrong, that are evil, and yet they don’t lose their sympathetic points, because you kind of get it, because you can’t say that you wouldn’t do the same in their position. After all, considering the situation, what else could they have done? And even if you don’t agree with that, you can at least understand why they made the choices they make, as they always fall in line with understandable human nature.

But of course, that’s just the first two-thirds. You know that sooner or later, the rest of the village is going to wise up to what’s happening. And they do: the Shiki are finally exposed.

And then all hell breaks the fuck loose.

The script is flipped yet again, and the last six episodes or so are the humans fighting back and doing a damned good job of it too. Suddenly, the hunters become the hunted, and the Shiki are dragged out from their hiding places and exterminated. Graphically.

This ought to be gratifying to watch. This ought to exhilarating. Finally, the invading monsters are getting what’s coming to them! They brought it on themselves, after all.

But it’s not. Not at all.

Because we’ve already gotten to know several of the Shiki, some of them even before they were turned. We’ve come to empathize with them and the community they’ve built. And now, seeing them not as monsters fleeing a hunt that has gone all wrong but as victims who are terrified for their lives, who desperately seek any way of escape, who die screaming for mercy, often at the hands of their former friends, is heartbreaking. Even the Shiki leader that masterminded the whole thing breaks down crying, wondering if this is punishment for having killed so many people…but then she says that it can’t be her fault, because she didn’t ask to become a vampire, it was forced on her! So how can she be blamed for just wanting to have others like her around to keep her company? It’s a very poignant breakdown to watch, as this ancient monster grapples with her own guilt and inhumanity and the unfairness of it all.

But it goes beyond that. See, we all have a little bit of a monster inside us, and though they may have begun as innocent victims, it doesn’t take long for many of the villagers to succumb to theirs.

There are many that are just a little too gleeful about bashing the Shiki’s heads in, about dragging them to burn in the sunlight, about stabbing them and beating them with pipes, despite many of them formerly being their neighbors. Some admit to specifically targeting those that they had already disliked, while others are quicks to kill actual humans that they merely suspect of being Shiki collaborators. One innocent family that had nothing to do with anything is massacred just because one of their relatives had Shiki connections.

But even with all that violence and cruelty, it isn’t as if the roles are completely reversed. Many of the villagers outright refuse to have anything to do with the massacre because they can’t stand the thought of killing their loved ones. Others do take part in the killing, but it’s clear that they hate it, and one man, upon seeing how the Shiki are being tortured to death for no reason, proceeds to give each every one of them a merciful quick death to end their suffering before breaking down and crying. And all the while, we continue to see the damage that the Shiki’s wrought, from a meek housewife who has gradually gone insane as her family dies and rots one by one to a poor little girl who has watched her own family disappear and resorts to digging her own grave because she’s convinced that she’s next. Even the worst and most violent of the villagers gets the chance to verbally tear down each and every one of the lead Shiki’s justifications for her actions, brutally smashing all of her defenses. And though he has been portrayed as a pretty terrible person thus far, he’s actually right in everything he says.

I’m not going to give away the whole game, but suffice to say, things end pretty badly for both sides. A lot of people die, and the few survivors end up scattering to the winds to try to move on and rebuild their lives. So basically, neither side really wins. But then, it was never about sides. The plot is propelled by sides, yes, but the focus is always on individuals, about the good and bad in everyone and how extreme situations bring that out.

Of course, the next question would be how it holds up to Flip-Flappers, which I had watched immediately before. And as for that…apples and oranges, man. Flip-Flappers was a very throw everything at the wall and see what sticks kind of show, while Shiki had a concept that it stuck to from beginning to end. But I will say that Flip-Flappers didn’t always stick the landing and Shiki was more consistently good from beginning to end, but Flip-Flappers heights were higher than Shiki’s heights, and leave it at that.

Anyway, I am way behind on the Best of the Super Juniors tournament, so I’ll be taking a break for a bit. After that…I dunno, maybe I’ll put it up to another vote.

[the-desolated-quill]

Let’s Kill Hitler - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Oh Christ, do I have to talk about this piece of shit?

I’ve made it no secret how much I despise Steven Moffat’s writing. His convoluted series arcs, his painfully obvious plot twists, his smarmy ‘too kool for skool’ dialogue that’s often dripping in pretentious bullshit, his one dimensional ‘quirky’ characters and his casual sexism. Even the few good stories he’s written have at least some of these problems. Let’s Kill Hitler is definitely one of the worst stories he’s ever written. Every problem I listed, Let’s Kill Hitler contains in excess. I HATE this episode with a passion. I usually watch these episodes twice before writing a review in order to properly analyse every detail. and that can be excruciating when it comes to other bad episodes. With Let’s Kill Hitler, it felt like my own personal torture. Halfway through my second viewing, I was about ready to jump through the TV screen and start throttling the characters to death.

After some bullshit involving crop circles and establishing that, after all this time looking for Melody Pond, the Doctor has achieved fuck all, we’re introduced to Mels.

Yes. Mels.

Well gee. Could she be Melody Pond? Nah! That would be ridiculous! Mels has a darker skin tone than Melody. It’s not as if she’s a Time Lord that could regenerate or anything... OH WAIT!

Oh God. Where do I start with Mels? What a smug, grating, unlikeable piece of work this is (also she’s the first woman of colour to appear in Leadworth and she’s a criminal. Lovely). I was about to say I can’t see how Amy could possibly stand to be around someone like Mels, let alone name her child after her, but then I remembered this is Amy we’re talking about here. She’s just as big of a bitch as Mels is. Just look at the way she treats Rory as they grew up. At this point I’m convinced Rory isn’t so much in love with Amy as he is feeling the effects of Stockholm Syndrome. So no. I have no problem buying Amy and Mels would be friends. They’re both utter bitches. I’m sure they got on like a house on fire.

You know, considering what close friends Mels and Amy supposedly were and how incredibly influential she apparently was in Amy’s life, it’s strange that this is the first time we’ve ever heard of her, which suggests that Moffat just pulled Mels out of the darkest depths of his arse in order to facilitate his shit plot. And as shit plots go, this is very shit. Worthlessly, pathetically, incontinently shit. Moffat has written some bad stories before, but this one simply takes the cake. NOTHING makes any sense whatsoever.

The Doctor and co crash-land in Berlin 1938 where they encounter the Teselecta. A robot controlled by miniaturised people who travel in time punishing historical criminals. Like with the Headless Monks in A Good Man Goes To War, the Teselecta isn’t an inherently bad idea. It could be potentially interesting. The problem is it barely gets a look in due to Moffat’s bullshit series arc. The story is really about Mels/River. The Teselecta, Hitler and Berlin are really little more than just a backdrop. This could have been set on a space station or in a Nandos and it would have been the same.

So Mels regenerates into River Song, at which point she’s labelled by the people in the Teselecta as ‘the woman who kills the Doctor’ and ‘the worst war criminal in history.’ Yes. River, who killed one man, is a worse criminal than Hitler, who facilitated the deaths of millions of people. Fuck you Moffat.

Okay there’s a lot to unpack here. I apologise if this review is coming across as a bit sloppy and all over the shop, but there’s just so many problems with Let’s Kill Hitler that its hard to know where to start.

Let’s start with the whole Time Lord thing. River can regenerate because she was conceived in the TARDIS. Well that’s bollocks. It’s like The Big Bang all over again. If a TARDIS can destroy the space/time continuum if it were to explode and can infect foetuses, why on Earth would the Time Lords have ever let one off the assembly line? The most popular excuse Moffat fans like to use is that the TARDIS is faulty. Um... yeah, because of its chameleon circuit. Not because it’s a radioactive deathtrap.

Also why would the Silence need to create a Time Lord to kill the Doctor? Think back to The Impossible Astronaut. The Doctor died from two gunshots. The first to start the regeneration process and the second to finish him off. You don’t need a Time Lord for that. Any old fucker with a gun would do.

Which brings me to the Silence’s motivations. So they take Amy’s kid and brainwash her into becoming an assassin (not a psychopath Moffat. Would it kill you to use Wikipedia?) by telling her all the crimes and evils in the universe the Doctor didn’t solve, thus proving what a bad man he really is.

I’m sorry, but even the village idiot could spot the flaws in that logic. The Doctor isn’t a God. He can’t be everywhere at once. And if he reversed every bad thing that ever happened in history, the space/time continuum would probably have more holes in it than a colander. Also, why is the Doctor the only sole person responsible for this? What about the fucking Teselecta? What about the Time Agency? What about your DIY TARDISes? The Doctor doesn’t hold a monopoly on time travel. If you want to fix history, why not do it yourself?

And then we get another bullshit mystery in the form of the Question. The first question ever to be asked. Hidden in plain sight...

......

NAH! Come on! Even by Moffat’s standards, that’s just too stupid.

Before I dive deeper into this cesspool of convoluted nonsense surrounding River Song, I suppose I should point out I’ve got nothing against Alex Kingston. I think she’s a great actor and has done some good stuff over the years. It’s not her fault that she’s been lumbered with such a shit character.

River is at her most annoying here. The smarmy, post regeneration dialogue is utterly cringeworthy and there’s just a sprinkling of casual misogyny thrown in for good measure, such as Mels saying she’s concentrating on a dress size just when she’s about to regenerate and River exclaiming she needs to weigh herself. And that’s not the worst of it. Everything River says has a flirtatious or sexual undertone to it, to the point where it becomes nauseating, there’s yet another scene where the Doctor has to ask Rory’s permission to hug Amy as though she’s an object rather than a person, the Captain of the Teselecta at one point makes a comment about the size of a female colleague’s arse, and then there’s this unforgivable line from the Doctor when Amy asks about River’s flip-flopping goals and motivations:

“She's been brainwashed, it makes sense to her. Plus, she is a woman.”

Moffat, seriously, go and fuck yourself! This isn’t remotely charming or funny. It’s just sexist as shit.

Matt Smith gets lumbered with shit too sadly. The Doctor gets poisoned by River’s lipstick (again, why do the Silence need a Time Lord for that? This makes no sodding sense), at which point he spends the majority of the episode flailing about on the floor like a prat. Not only is this horrible to watch due to Matt Smith’s god awful panto acting, there’s also no tension because we know he doesn’t die here. The death at the lake is a fixed point in time. He HAS to die there. So all this poison stuff just feels like a massive waste of time. In fact not even the fixed point in time stuff makes sense. If the Doctor’s death is a fixed point, why are the Silence bothering to kill him now with poison lipstick? And how do you create a fixed point in the first place? Who determines what’s fixed and what isn’t? I’ve always found the concept of a fixed point in time to have a slight whiff of bullshit about it, but this is just a whole compost heap of bullshit.

And how does the Doctor get out of this one? River gives up her remaining regenerations to bring him back to life. Because apparently she’s fallen in love with him.

Yeah! This isn’t a slow, gradual thing. She just suddenly changes her mind. She’s just sporadically in love with him now. Moffat doesn’t do anything to properly justify this change of heart, unless he's suggesting that the Doctor still caring for his companions on his deathbed was enough to make River’s heart flutter, which it isn’t. Maybe Mels had a crush on the Doctor growing up, but that’s bullshit too. Imagine if Mels was brainwashed to kill Hitler. All her life she’s been fed all the reasons why Hitler is evil and deserves to die. Would it be likely that she would fall in love with Hitler? Of course not! It’s the same principle with the Doctor. if she’s been brainwashed to kill him, it’s unlikely she would have any positive feelings for him whatsoever. So I’m not buying any of this.

But the biggest problem of all is the lack of characterisation and empathy. River Song isn’t a character. She’s a plot device. We never fully explore how she feels about the Doctor and she’s never written consistently. Her thoughts and motivations change depending on what the plot requires. River needs to save the Doctor now, so she just does. And in Moffat’s rush to connect all the dots in his bullshit series arc, he forgets quite possibly the most important characters in this story:

YEAH! Amy and Rory! You know? RIVER SONG’S PARENTS!

Over the course of this two parter, Amy and Rory discover a secret pregnancy, have the baby, lose the baby, realise the baby is both River Song and their best friend Mels due to convoluted time travel stuff, learn that their daughter is the one that kills the Doctor and they ultimately lose out on parenting their own child. That’s some pretty heavy stuff. Pity none of this is ever explored. In fact the one time this is touched upon, Moffat actually plays it up for laughs. What the fuck is wrong with you, you incompetent prick?

And then, just to rub salt into the wound, there’s this really weird line where Mels says it all worked out in the end because Amy and Rory got to raise her during the course of their childhoods, which is just prime Moffat idiocy right there. There’s this huge emotional tragedy taking place here, but Moffat appears to be the only one who hasn’t noticed. His attention is in all the wrong places, focusing on the mechanics of his convoluted arc rather than exploring what the characters are thinking and feeling. I suppose you could argue that exploring these kinds of themes might be too heavy for a family show, but if that’s the case, why is Moffat introducing the topic in the first place?

Like I said at the beginning, I’ve never liked Steven Moffat’s writing very much, but Let’s Kill Hitler was the point where I went from not liking Moffat to hating Moffat. This is easily one of the worst episodes he’s ever written and indeed one of the worst episodes in all of Doctor Who. Whereas A Good Man Goes To War was annoyingly stupid, Let’s Kill Hitler was insultingly stupid. It’s ill conceived, poorly written, utterly misogynistic and completely tone deaf. Fuck this episode and fuck you Moffat.