Archetypical Blogger?
Monday, April 30th, 2007I took Friday off so I could spend some quality time with Girl Thursday night, and still sleep in on Friday. Oh, and so we could play some D&D. Grandma had the Goddessdaughter, so we could do some serious gaming for a while. And we had quite a doozy of a dungeon to go. I spent the better part of my week thinking about it and designing it, which is why there’s no Girl #6 done yet. I plan to post #5 today, once I get out from under the real work I’ve been avoiding.
The one long break I took from gaming was to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still. I saw it the first (and only time) when I was about 10, and the local library ( a tiny town library in the 2K+ pop town I grew up in) had a series of summer movies on Saturdays. They actually showed it as a film, flicking projector and all. I’m not sure many people even had VCRs back then. I think they were around, but I’m not sure.
In the movie, in case you haven’t seen it, Klaatu — an alien — and a robot named Gort come to Earth to deliver a message. Our first reaction to him is fear and aggression (he’s waving around a gun-like object which is not a weapon). He won’t deliver the message to just anyone, it has to be everyone at the same time. He gets predictably stonewalled and wrapped up in cold war politics, so he escapes the hospital where he was being treated. He steals an outfit, going by the name of the person whose clothes he stole (”Lt. Carpenter”), and takes up in a boarding house, where he befriends a woman and boy who show him what it means to be a human being.
Thus ultimately leads to him doing an end-run around governments, and — to show he’s serious — stopping the electricity everywhere on earth (except hospitals and planes, it’s noted), and thus the title of the piece. He almost makes it to his meeting with the scientists, but is killed in the process. Gort retrieves his body and revives him, and he warns us that we can fight ourselves as much as we want, but if we want to venture into space, we have to stop, or they’ll come here and destroy the whole planet. And then he leaves.
This was the first time I’d seen it as an adult, and the Christ imagery was pretty obvious, with the alien taking the name “Carpenter”, his death and resurrection, his message of warning and peace, and his final ascension into heaven. According to wikipedia, the movie represents the first real appearance of the flying saucer, the dome-headed robot, and the man in a silver space suit, as well as the oft-referenced line “Klaatu Barada Nikto”. It was interesting in a nostalgic way, and it is kind of amazing how naive Klaatu is. Today’s aliens, even when they aren’t here to destroy us, study and understand us much better before trying to meet us.
But then, The Day the Earth Stood Still is that kind of science fiction which introduces an archetypical alien culture in order to contrast it with us, and, thus, define what it means to be human. Or to make a large statement about something we do that is bad. The message of tDtESS is that war and aggression are bad traits, and we better stop or they will kill us. It’s an aggressive message, and I know just what the humans in that movie would have done: researched the aliens and built our own alien robot space force to take out their cops. Humans don’t take well to bullies, even when we are often bullies ourselves. And that layer is there, too.
And this trope of using aliens as archetypes or two-dimensional characters to reflect our humanity is still being used today, it’s a powerful part of the science fiction landscape. It’s been used to talk about racism, gender politics, marriage politics, and to explore the human condition. Doctor Who used this technique over and over again. The favorite Doctor Who alien is one who has denied their emotions to become more logical and powerful.
The Daleks are the supreme example of that, and they are back in this weeks Doctor Who, the second of a two-part episode. This time the last four Daleks are faced with a choice: they are too weak to take over Depression era New York (much less the world), so they have to adapt. That’s one of the themes of the Daleks: forced and chosen evolution. This time, though, the leader of the Daleks decided that they are missing something, and it’s quite logical. If they were really supreme, then they would have won and survived. Instead they didn’t, but humans did, over and over again. Therefore, the humans must have some trait which will make them more able to survive.
They blend with a human, and a Dalek with human emotions is born. He is very smart and ambitious, but recognizes that continuing in the path they followed was wrong. He convinces the Doctor to aid them, and make a new, better, Dalek which would have emotions and be better galactic citizens. And the Doctor helps. Of course, the other three remaining Daleks turn on him, and pervert their plans.
The Doctor is able to stop them, of course, and all but one of the Daleks dies. Then we get that same face-off we keep seeing, over and over in the new series: the Doctor as the last of his race faces off against the last of one of his enemies. When Eccleston’s Doctor first sees the Daleks, he rails against them, furious for their part in the Time War, and for the first time we really see a vengeful Doctor who is out to kill. Tennant’s Doctor has the same choice, but tries to reason with the Dalek (which never works) and it escapes for later. Because, as they say, “The Daleks always Survive”.
This season is shaping up really well, and I like the relationship between Martha and the Doctor which is both less romantic and more so. We get to see the loss of a companion’s affect on the Doctor for more than a few minutes. (I still recall the sadness of Tom Baker’s Doctor when he ejected Romana’s parts of the TARDIS.) According to IMDB, John Barrowman will reprise his role of Capt. Jack Harkness later on the show, and there is already an implication that there’s another time lord out there. And since the Doctor has been conveniently wrong about the survival of such baddies as the Daleks (and to some extent the Cybermen), I (and countless other whovians) patiently await the arrival of another time lord.
All the while knowing, of course, that if there is only one time lord other than the Doctor, it has to be his enemy, The Master. (It’d be nice, even logical with Canon if it were Romana, but it won’t be.)
There are two other bits of TV-related goodness, which is odd from me, I know. I got a copy of the pilot for Blood Ties, a Lifetime drama based oround Holly Lisle’s series of the same name. It’s modern detective/vampires stuff. They did a better job of the pilot than Dresden Files did, following the book a bit more closely, but then the main character Vicky Nelson (played by the same woman who played the hottie arty lesbian in Better Than Chocolate) isn’t as hip to the supernatural as Harry.
Harry is my other news, where I listened to their most recent podcast. The guy who does it is an old friend of Jim Butcher’s (used to play in his D&D campaign, to bring things full circle), and is writing the Dresden Files RPG (which I hope to own and play). I’ve yet to hear him say one bad thing about the show, or really, any of his guests. And there are bad things to say. The most recent podcast covers the show “Storm Front” which is loosely based on the novel, and was the original pilot. It’s pretty horrible, Girl and I call it “The episode which shall not be named” aka “The Bob-less episode”. I’ve written about it before.
Yet they do not mention its horribleness at all, merely discussing it in terms of the uncut version which the guest had seen (and not many else have), and not really going for it’s badness — which in my mind hints at what makes the other episodes, especially the final 3 really good. The good news is that it’s beating out Battlestar Galactica for ratings, and we’re pretty certain that BG will be renewed. Doctor Who has been renewed for 2 more seasons (or Tennant has been signed for that many), and Heroes was renewed months ago. For once, shows I like are doing well. How odd is that?