The God Complex - Doctor Who

I quite liked that episode - "The God Complex". More so than well everything else I watched this week. It has to be the most creative and unpredictable thing I've seen. It looks like a Monster of the Week, but is everything but that. Also, it quite nicely, brings to a closure the arc.

During it, I thought why is it that most, if not all, science fiction tv shows and movies, along with fantasy, tend to slant towards "horror" eventually, if they don't go there directly? It's why I couldn't watch Doctor Who as a small child. Now, it doesn't bother me. I think the role of horror - novels, movies, tv shows is to throw our fears up there, so we can see them and laugh at them or scream at them, and then let them go. Somehow, after seeing the exaggeration of our fears...the reality becomes easier to handle? Or maybe it serves the same purpose as urban horror legends, campfire stories, and fairy tales - cautionary tales - this is what happens if you do this, this is how you handle it, and this is how you avoid it?

Much like the previous two episodes...the monster wasn't scary once we got to know it, so much as misunderstood...not a real monster at all. Also, this episode resolved the whole Amy as damsel bit quite nicely.


( spoilers )

Fringe S1 Review - non-spoilery

Just finished watching Fringe S1 on DVD. Will state the last two episodes were fascinating and the back story/plot I found somewhat innovative far more innovative than the two series people have compared it to - X-Files and Alias.

( The X-Files ain't all that - you might want to skip if you are a fan of the X-files or Alias )

While Fringe does borrow heavily from other shows - I've never seen a tv series play with parallel universes in quite that way. Usually they play with the concept, a la Voyager or the Star Trek tv series, then back off. We don't go that deeply into the science of it, the consequences, and what it means. The parallel universe idea is something that has always fascinated me. Far more so than time-travel. In fact my problem with time-travel - is there is no way you can do it without creating a pocket reality or alternate verse. The quantum physics won't allow it. I'm no physcist, but even I know that. Say you go back and kill Hitler or save President Kennedy? Then you change all the choices made from the point forward. It's like unraveling a knitted scarf and fixing a pattern you did then trying to recreate the patterns you completed and liked after you fix it - impossible. You have a new scarf. Or a story that you've written - you go back in your revisions and delete a few sentences - you have changed your story. I know I do it all the time. In most time travel stories - they deal with this contradiction by either making it impossible to change events, or demonstrating that the change was pre-ordained, ie - so and so was always meant to travel backwards and change this. Back to the Future is amongst the few time travel stories that defied logic and actually did rewrite the future in subtle ways. While hardly realistic, which is why Back to the Future felt more like fantasy than sci-fi to me, it was a fun take, and had the philosophical message that we can change our fate and the fate of others - nothing is written.

Fringe however goes a whole new route - it's not a time travel story, it's a parallel universe tale, much like Buckaroo Banzai - which along with Angel the Series, Torchwood and Doctor Who, is the only thing I've seen that's played with the idea of travel across dimensions. All three, though, haven't gone into as much detail or into as much depth as Fringe.

I can't say Fringe's science is on target, feels a bit off at times, like all tv shows - these are written by people with BA's/MFA's in English Lit, History, and/or Film Studies not physics, after all, assuming they have a degree at all. But they clearly did do some research.

If you want to try Fringe? The first season is spotty. ( lengthy non-spoilery review of Fringe )

The TV Slut watches the Emmys, and the frustrated writer/book slut flirts with indie Book Festival

1)( The TV slut Watches the Emmy's and up until the Dramas and Mini-Series is somewhat bored by the Emmy's )

2)Today flirted with The Brooklyn Book Festival - but just reading through the events gave me a headache. Too much information. It was crowded. And huge. I remember when it was just five or six booths, and about ten panels and speakers. This year, there's about 100 speakers, and 1000 booths. I was overwhelmed. Every book or type of book imaginable. Comic books, young adult, graphic novels, non-fiction, poetry, literary journals, and Housing Works as well as the NY League Against Censorship had booths. The latter was doing taped readings of banned books and had a waiting list. Speakers? Larry McMurtry and Susan Ossana were discussing Brokeback Mountain and adapting books for film and television, Wallace Shaw discussed anxiety in 21st Century, and Walter Mosely was talking about something. Jumpathri Lumpar - was the featured author of the festival. But the line to hear these folks was about a block long. [I admittedly felt guilty for not partaking of it and going home to watch Fringe instead (bad me), but it was a migraine headache - which increased when I tried to focus...so really not the day for it. Combo of things - barometric pressure shift, low blood sugar, allergies, and tension from neck and shoulder. So took aleve, a little chocolat, and something to eat...felt much better.)

I stopped by a booth offering "writer's getaways" - the lady behind the booth asked if I was a writer...I didn't answer (because I am a frustrated writer - which means have written prolifically but outside of business writing and a short story, never been paid for it), and she said - "Oh we have great getaways for people who do not have time to write or can't find the mental space for it - our campus is now in Atlantic City, we also have a week or two week summer retreat in Wales." I honestly don't know why I flirt with these things - I don't have the vacation time to take part - all my vacation time right now is devoted to seeing family.

But if you were worried about "print" being dead? It's not. ( The Brooklyn and NYC Publishing Industry )

Considering getting another massage this week to take care of the neck pain that keeps radiating down my right arm. Except they are bloody expensive and do not always work. If done wrong - they can make the situation worse instead of better.

I blame the lap-top. May take a sabbatical from lj and writing on the lap for a bit...and see if neck gets better. So if I'm not posting in lj this week or next - that's why. Chronic neck pain - it's this tight muscle pinching a nerve on the right side of the back of my neck.

On the tummy front? It's better. Definitely food poisoning from glutens - in this case, generic ibuprofin (which can contain "starch" from wheat as a binder).