Doctor Who: Paradise Towers

Am watching 'Paradise Towers'. It's... special. It looks like children's TV from my dim and distant youth ie a bunch of drama school people Acting Really Loud, some bad lighting and one set. I compare this to some modern DW and conclude the acting got a lot better. And the scripts. I quite like the component parts in this one, but it's slow and explainy. And clashes badly with the casting and acting and quite a lot of the costumes and the weird gestures. Everyone looks horrendously 80s and they're prancing around doing the Prince Charming dance as a greeting and calling each other Fire Escape and having their own language that might work a bit better if they could decide if they're supposed to sound like spoilt brat 12 year olds or rough tough gang kids and... you know, it's really rather awesome. I keep giggling. It's seriously on something.

I remembered the gangs and the cannibal old ladies and the cleaner robots that I think look like the war machines from twenty years earlier only wobblier but I've only seen a clip of those anyway. The cleaner robots are pretty cool when they're gliding past ominously with someone's boot sticking out. I remember that bit. They're somewhat less convincing though when the great big grab claw and the actors neck has to manuever to be in roughly the same place. Also it's difficult to explain why a cleaner robot has a great big drill. Also also it looks a bit dodgy from some angles.

It's like it has all the parts of a Doctor Who story but ...

well, I've only watched the first section and a half. I'll go watch the rest.

Mel is still not a very good character. And her hair is... are we sure it's not an independent symbiotic life form? Really?

Kangs hair looks, er, sort of familiar? Red and black... yes...

*watches the rest*

... Mel has brain of fluff. Her hair took all the energy. "Oh I'm sure this bit isn't dangerous even though every other bit was and everyone says it is! I shall take my clothes off and jump right in!" *facepalm*

I think the best bit of the story was the moral of the tale. Everyone must work together to win, and the coward must blow himself up. Yes. Good message there. Oh, and the bit where they're all "You eated us! ... but then you said sorries. Okays, BFF 4eva now y/y?" That was class.

*facepalm*

Okay, Paradise Towers is only to be rewatched as a drinking game.
... I don't actually consume alcohol.
... I wait until really sleep deprived and hallucinate better story?


The best thing about Paradise Towers is that, without a doubt, I can write better than that. I mean, really. It's not the production constraints or the 4 part format or even just the acting that lets it down, it's the thing where it's really, really, really bad. And I'm not. So that's encouraging then.

Actually I do like all the parts. Cannibal old ladies and building full of girls FTW. And old caretaker guys with a rulebook and no brains works fine. It's just how they all got mixed together to be boring and repetetive even with my brain cranked down that didn't quite work out.


Also I have this horribly persistent bunny where the next time traveller that turns up is Captain Jack Harkness. Because there's an entire building full of women who don't know what a boy is. There's several different ways that could turn out educational.


... mah handbasket, it is bigger on the inside...

Inviting us in

I've been thinking about beginnings. Teaser scenes, those shiny bits before the opening titles that are there to tell you why you should bother watching the rest. And first episodes, which have much the same function but for the whole series.

Torchwood has two contrasting openings thus far. And they're interesting in what they expect us to know and where they invite us to stand.

First season, dead guy in the rain. Torchwood are the mystery. We're with Gwen, knowing nothing about them, with just tantalising glimpses of Jack drawing us in.

Second season, blowfish in a sports car. Torchwood are the common knowledge of little old ladies. And we're still with Gwen, but also the rest of the team... still getting Jack walking in as an outsider, not revealed by the little fishy monologue.

"Bloody Torchwood" is in an odd way a really arrogant way to begin. Because we're expected to know. Here's the quick character tag lines, here's a situation, oh look they dealt with it, moving on... It's like they expect Torchwood to be as famous with the viewers as they are with Cardiff. Welcome back fans. But it's subtly deceptive too, because this is Team Torchwood version 2, new and improved with actual competence... kinda. Everyone is just a bit different than they were last we met them. And we find that through Jack being the ousider, failing to fit back in... so we're with Jack then, watching the team he doesn't quite know. Like we were with Jack the first season, introducing Gwen to the things we'd learned from Doctor Who. Gwen and Jack offering us different places to stand, both seasons.

Then there's the difference in approach to both presenting a problem and solving it, and consequently in what the first eps say the series is about.

Dead guy in the rain - there's darkness out there, mystery, and these few have seen just that little bit more of it. They think that makes them better able to handle it... if they don't fall in.

That's the series that hooked me. Darkness, mystery, human fragility in a big weird universe.

Blowfish in a sports car... that's actually a different series. Because yeah, Owen hanging out the window had that classic mix of *facepalm* and coooool that is Torchwood getting the job done by the skin of their teeth, but what else is it saying? This isn't mystery, this is action. We don't have to figure out the threat, there's no slow reveal on it. Here's a blowfish in a sports car... on drugs in your living room... oh look we shoot him dead. Different series, different hook. Bit more... pop. Threat comes from outside and can be fixed with a gun. Pretty much opposite of 1-01.

And then Captain Spike turns up and the new threat is Jack's relationships catching up with him now he's reconnected to the world. Which is interesting, way more interesting than blowfish, but it's still all running around shooting and nearly getting blown up, there's no mystery there. There is dark though, and damaged people, someone who fell in quite some time ago.

So now I'm interested to see where they're going next. Do they mean to keep changing things? Did they think they were writing the same show? Will we get more mystery/internal/darkness or more action/external/kaboom?


I was also thinking, a first episode for a TV series has pretty much the opposite job than a first for a fanfic series. TV wants to draw in new viewers. They want to present something fresh and exciting, something you can catch on to in the first few minutes, something that uses the toys already established, sure, but also makes sure people watching for the first time don't feel like they'd have to invest 13 hours before they could bother with this next bit.

This isn't an invarying rule. Stargate has a tendency to cliffhanger their seasons and be seriously arc heavy on their first episode back. And they managed 10 years on that model, so it can't actually be wrong. Stargate must therefore want a lot of returning fans and not worry so much about the newbies. Y/N?

Fanfic though... if there's any newbies out there, we be a bit surprised. Fanfic is for people who have not only watched but memorised the available canon. Only in xovers do we tend to give the infodump on background. Otherwise it comes up with references, quotes, maybe a line about spoilers or author's note about what episode it is set after. And part of the job of a good fanfic is to prove we've watched the show. Learning Criteria: Demonstrate you haven't find/replaced the names on a fic from elsewhere. So writing something that newbies can jump into without knowing the background would tend to be judged suspiciously, on account of it looking a teensy like a newbie jumped in without knowing the background. Therefore fanfic first episodes are not in fact firsts, they're somewhere after the last minute of what we've got. Even if they're set before. The hook isn't 'cool new show!' it's 'my take on what we've all seen'.


So my plot bunny needs an opening scene. I'm thinking of throwing together a few quotes to show what I'm pulling together into this fic, then zooming out to Cardiff from above... because I want to write script format and really visually, because I'm practicing.

This, too, is going to be a bit of a clash with fanfic standard. I haven't read anything script format. I've read more chat format than script format. So I'm considering tweaking it back to being just a very sight-and-sound oriented bit of prose. But then I consider how prose can refer to taste and smell and touch and get right into people's heads to watch them thinking, and the narrator voice has a different perspective than the descriptives in a script, and... I get tangled up in differences, pros and con, pro and fan fic.

I guess fan fic invites a different audience in. And seeing as y'all are the ones who might actually read it, I should do that.

But I kind of really want to play on TV too, and practice that, and we all watch TV so...

... complicated.

(no subject)

Had a dream where I defeated demons by chanting and glowing.
I think Buddhism is generally more complicated than that, but hey, if I can enlighten with your actual light, I might actually be able to do that.
Om mani padme hum... nope, still not glowing.
It was all golden and pretty. I could make it go in people and their eyes would glow and they'd have bright ideas of the enlightened kind. Or I could make it like a big pool so any demons going through would get splashed, and then they'd cry gold and the demony bits would dissolve. Some demons were only made of demony bits and then they'd just crumble away. Cool.
Lots of people thought I shouldn't ought to go around stirring things up. No golden glowy fixing of problems because then first they have to see problems and might get eated by them. Which, you know, understandable.
So I kept on getting it wrong by underestimating or by being too proud about it. If I forgot to get all mindful and enlightened myself, if I was thinking of it as 'smite demons!' rather than 'enlightened compassion to demons!', then it fizzled and went rather wrong, which was less fun. And if I was all 'hey, I enlighten you cause I know best!' at people then the glow went a bit green and odd things started to happen and I think I needed to stay humble and let people decide if they want to be glowy or not, because otherwise I've lost the shiny place myself and can't really spread it.

So, dream of buddhist cool. I mean, I'm pretty sure spreading enlightenment involves actually understanding stuff first, and also words, but if it was just chanting and glowing and passing it along then that would be pretty neat.

Wonder if you get karma points for dreaming you did mantras...