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auroracloudI've just got to break my accidental posting silence to say I seem to have managed to watch the absolutely worst New Who episode, now that my Series 9 watching reached 'Sleep No More'. At least I'm not managing to come up with another as terrible. 'Kill the Moon' made equally little sense and its 'science' was also basically nothing but holes, but at least it had a few character moments worth seeing.
I mean, seriously - sentient evolving sleep eye mucus? Let me just state that nobody's allowed to complain about the Slitheen being stupid monsters anymore. They're fine art in comparison, even without considering Margaret in Boom Town who actually is great. Back to 'Sleep No More', the twist ending is very underwhelming when it makes no freaking sense. How would a visual signal cause your eye mucus to evolve? Sorry, but... no. Just no. Doctor Who is rarely strong on the science front, but still, there needs to be some alignment with how the physical world works. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief pretty far for the sake of an otherwise intriguing story in this show, but a) my disbelief suspension has its limits and they have been reached, and b) there was nothing at all worth watching in this story except Peter Capaldi's acting. I wonder how he convinced himself to take the script seriously enough to act it...
And there could have been something about this, you know. It could be worthwhile to explore the consequences of profit-driven humans trying to invent a way to do away with sleep, but to take that starting point and end up with "... and then your eye mucus will become sentient, grow into a huge monster and try to kill everyone and take over the universe" is... well. I'll let that stand for itself. You couldn't possibly have tried to explore, say, humans going bonkers because we actually do need more than five minutes of sleep, and have that cause problems? Now that could have been worthwhile. (Though I do feel a need to point out that I think unless we get over that extreme profit-driven mindset where people would even try to do away with sleep altogether just to make more money, we're unlikely to exist as a major species by the 38th century, or at least a technologically advanced one. But that's hardly the most unlikely thing about this story, so whatever.)
When I think about it, the only Mark Gatiss episode I've really liked is The Unquiet Dead. Cold War and the Empress of Mars were okay, but seriously... how about he's not allowed to write Doctor Who episodes anymore now? Just stick to playing Mycroft and keep away from writing Doctor Who, Mr Gatiss.
Well, at least I had heard enough not to expect a masterpiece, going into this story. And now I'm only a few episodes away from having watched all of New Who.
So on the positive side of Doctor Who things: Twitch is going to show a marathon of all of the classic series, from 1st Doctor to 7th Doctor, free everywhere in the world (so it says), between May 29th and July 23rd! Just when I'd planned to start finding ways to watch some of the classic series! And bemoaning how expensive it would be to buy all or even a sizable fraction of them on DVD!
They're running a few stories each day in blocks that they run three times a day, so that makes it easier to catch at least some stories in different timezones and with different schedules. The full schedule is here (that's for UK times; here are the US times). In the case you didn't all know this already!
What with only being on weekdays, it's not absolutely the easiest to manage with my time zone - a lot of the showings will be when I'm either sleeping or working - but I should manage many of the first stories before I have to go to bed, and I should catch most of the Friday stories on the second or third run which will actually be Saturday for me. Also sometimes I may be able to catch the last story or two after I get home from work. Not that I've been furiously browsing the timetables and comparing it to lists about how many 25-episodes each story is, converting it all to my timezone... I think I'm going to need to buy a calendar book. A good thing they're cheap at this point of the year.
Don't know how to combine this with the fact that I went and bought a supporting membership for this year's WorldCon just so I could vote for the Hugos, and probably ought to read the nominated novels at some point... And haven't read the previous volumes of any that are second or third in a series. I've read some of the novellas and the short stories, though, and fully intend to read the ones I haven't. I'm otherwise not too worried about managing the novels, but the Jemisin books are kind of big and don't seem to be the easiest writing (some of it's in 2nd person! I've never managed to wrap my brain around 2nd person POV!) and I haven't read the previous ones. I'm also a bit concerned about the Yoon-Ha Lee book because I've read many times that the series is rather brutal and violent, and I have a hard time reading any of that. But I especially want to read all the novellas that I haven't read yet - I hope the voter package gets here soon. I want that Binti #2 as soon as possible! (I could just buy it, yes, but I'm planning to wait for the pretty hardcover editions that will be released this summer before buying the Binti series.) I also want all those Seanan McGuire books. If I end up not being able to read the Best Novel nominations, I guess I could always see how many of the series I get through in two months?
But actually the biggest obstacle to my Hugo reading success, other than an impending Classic Who marathon, is that at the moment I apparently just want to read about soldiering AIs. I'm impatiently waiting for the second Murderbot novella to get here because I wasn't smart enough to preorder so it's still on its way; and last week I finally read Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice and now want to read the sequels, and basically I just want to keep reading about Breq. And about Murderbot. I'm not sure what it says about me that they're my most happy-making book characters at the moment, but yay them both, anyway. I probably am about as sociable as Murderbot these days, so yeah.
But look, I wrote an actual post! I only came here to complain about Sleep No More, but the post ran away with me. Success! So, hi, everyone who is still reading by this point, I hope you have been well.
I mean, seriously - sentient evolving sleep eye mucus? Let me just state that nobody's allowed to complain about the Slitheen being stupid monsters anymore. They're fine art in comparison, even without considering Margaret in Boom Town who actually is great. Back to 'Sleep No More', the twist ending is very underwhelming when it makes no freaking sense. How would a visual signal cause your eye mucus to evolve? Sorry, but... no. Just no. Doctor Who is rarely strong on the science front, but still, there needs to be some alignment with how the physical world works. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief pretty far for the sake of an otherwise intriguing story in this show, but a) my disbelief suspension has its limits and they have been reached, and b) there was nothing at all worth watching in this story except Peter Capaldi's acting. I wonder how he convinced himself to take the script seriously enough to act it...
And there could have been something about this, you know. It could be worthwhile to explore the consequences of profit-driven humans trying to invent a way to do away with sleep, but to take that starting point and end up with "... and then your eye mucus will become sentient, grow into a huge monster and try to kill everyone and take over the universe" is... well. I'll let that stand for itself. You couldn't possibly have tried to explore, say, humans going bonkers because we actually do need more than five minutes of sleep, and have that cause problems? Now that could have been worthwhile. (Though I do feel a need to point out that I think unless we get over that extreme profit-driven mindset where people would even try to do away with sleep altogether just to make more money, we're unlikely to exist as a major species by the 38th century, or at least a technologically advanced one. But that's hardly the most unlikely thing about this story, so whatever.)
When I think about it, the only Mark Gatiss episode I've really liked is The Unquiet Dead. Cold War and the Empress of Mars were okay, but seriously... how about he's not allowed to write Doctor Who episodes anymore now? Just stick to playing Mycroft and keep away from writing Doctor Who, Mr Gatiss.
Well, at least I had heard enough not to expect a masterpiece, going into this story. And now I'm only a few episodes away from having watched all of New Who.
So on the positive side of Doctor Who things: Twitch is going to show a marathon of all of the classic series, from 1st Doctor to 7th Doctor, free everywhere in the world (so it says), between May 29th and July 23rd! Just when I'd planned to start finding ways to watch some of the classic series! And bemoaning how expensive it would be to buy all or even a sizable fraction of them on DVD!
They're running a few stories each day in blocks that they run three times a day, so that makes it easier to catch at least some stories in different timezones and with different schedules. The full schedule is here (that's for UK times; here are the US times). In the case you didn't all know this already!
What with only being on weekdays, it's not absolutely the easiest to manage with my time zone - a lot of the showings will be when I'm either sleeping or working - but I should manage many of the first stories before I have to go to bed, and I should catch most of the Friday stories on the second or third run which will actually be Saturday for me. Also sometimes I may be able to catch the last story or two after I get home from work. Not that I've been furiously browsing the timetables and comparing it to lists about how many 25-episodes each story is, converting it all to my timezone... I think I'm going to need to buy a calendar book. A good thing they're cheap at this point of the year.
Don't know how to combine this with the fact that I went and bought a supporting membership for this year's WorldCon just so I could vote for the Hugos, and probably ought to read the nominated novels at some point... And haven't read the previous volumes of any that are second or third in a series. I've read some of the novellas and the short stories, though, and fully intend to read the ones I haven't. I'm otherwise not too worried about managing the novels, but the Jemisin books are kind of big and don't seem to be the easiest writing (some of it's in 2nd person! I've never managed to wrap my brain around 2nd person POV!) and I haven't read the previous ones. I'm also a bit concerned about the Yoon-Ha Lee book because I've read many times that the series is rather brutal and violent, and I have a hard time reading any of that. But I especially want to read all the novellas that I haven't read yet - I hope the voter package gets here soon. I want that Binti #2 as soon as possible! (I could just buy it, yes, but I'm planning to wait for the pretty hardcover editions that will be released this summer before buying the Binti series.) I also want all those Seanan McGuire books. If I end up not being able to read the Best Novel nominations, I guess I could always see how many of the series I get through in two months?
But actually the biggest obstacle to my Hugo reading success, other than an impending Classic Who marathon, is that at the moment I apparently just want to read about soldiering AIs. I'm impatiently waiting for the second Murderbot novella to get here because I wasn't smart enough to preorder so it's still on its way; and last week I finally read Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice and now want to read the sequels, and basically I just want to keep reading about Breq. And about Murderbot. I'm not sure what it says about me that they're my most happy-making book characters at the moment, but yay them both, anyway. I probably am about as sociable as Murderbot these days, so yeah.
But look, I wrote an actual post! I only came here to complain about Sleep No More, but the post ran away with me. Success! So, hi, everyone who is still reading by this point, I hope you have been well.
