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Zack Seckler of The F-Stop just posted the first in an ongoing series about marketing yourself as a photographer. Though the topic is fairly specific, it’s interesting and relevant stuff for any kind of freelancer.
(I aided with the transcription, as I will do for future interviews. )
I’d missed this the first time around; it’s a contemplative exploration-based game where the avatar is a mere three pixels high, and the rather gorgeous levels are built pixel by pixel, with every dot significant from a design standpoint — and then when the map pulls out, you appreciate the beauty of the big picture formed from all these individually important dots. Combined with a lovely “lonely game” score, which brings to mind that old Timeless demo/screensaver from the early 1990s, or maybe some old Future Crew demos, it’s a pretty rewarding ten or fifteen minutes. No real challenge; just wandering and pondering.
My friend Shepard has coded a rather tidy sorting table for Doctor Who actors. As I commented a moment ago, the curious thing is, within the show’s narrative Troughton didn’t naturally regenerate into Pertwee; the Time Lords arbitrarily gave the Doctor his third body.
Furthermore, Pertwee is less than a year older than Troughton — so the increase is only minimal, as far as things go on the surface. And then you get this business. The implication is, before finally regenerating into Pertwee, Troughton’s Doctor was put into service by the Time Lords — and kept kicking around in some form until the Doctor had aged the Time Lord equivalent of about 15 human years.
It’s semi-canonical; Terrance Dicks, who wrote Troughton’s final story, subscribes to the theory, and wrote a couple of tie-in novels set in that span. And frankly, it’s the only way Troughton’s later appearances make a lick of sense.
Thus: either Pertwee was in fact fourteen years younger than Troughton, maintaining the trend, or it’s probably irrelevant anyway because it wasn’t a natural regeneration.
So yeah. The Davison/Colin Baker regeneration is the only real blip in the data. The only comment I have there is that one of Davison’s final lines was that “it feels different this time”.
Having gained some renown, or perhaps infamy, with his dadaist La La Land series, Matt Aldridge (aka biggt) has unleashed a significantly more ambitious follow-up.
Compared to the La La Land series, Uin is rather more conventionally structured, if no less evocative. There is an inventory, and exploration, and in place of the sheer dream dump of La La Land, play involves a certain amount of skill or problem solving. There are even a couple of forced-scrolling shooter stages. Yet Aldridge still wraps it up in his typically baffling logic and atmosphere.
I love how the Angels are extrapolated here. I had actually wondered before about what happened if an Angel were, say, under video surveillance. And what happened if the Angels got weathered or broken while in stone form. And I had wondered about the logistics of the Angel who puts out the light in the basement.
Now we know that they just absorb all kinds of energy — electricity, radiation, potential energy of life forms. We know about the image business — including, apparently, a mental image. Which is amazingly freaky. Just for the kids, the concept that the Angel can now come out of the TV and get them — yeah. And then this clarifies that cheesy tag to “Blink”, where we saw all these statues that clearly weren’t Weeping Angels. Turns out, hey… any statue could actually be one of them.
And I just love the weathered, decayed Angels — all the creepier. This is basically Tomb of the Cybermen for the Angels — solidifying them as an ongoing threat, illustrating their background and a bit more of how they work and what their actual threat is. It makes them feel well-rounded in a way I didn’t imagine they could be from their earlier appearance. Before, yeah, they were clever. Now they feel rather brilliant and dangerous. More than just a gimmick, as it were.
I hadn’t quite hit on it, or hadn’t thought of it in ages, but the perfectly sculpted design was always a problem for me. Everything about the Angels, the first time around, was a little too cleanly designed, from their appearance to their abilities. This story roughens things up a bit, gets under the surface, without undermining them at the height of their presentation. There’s something more unnerving about an organic, imperfect thing — especially if its imperfections make it all the more desperate.
It’s the imperfect, organic element to the Cybermen that makes them fascinating. Not necessarily seeing a rotting chin, but the knowledge of what they are and what their motivation is. Nothing is creepier than the rather pathetic mantra “We muzzzzst surviiiiiiive…” and then knowing what that entails. There’s almost a certain sympathy for them, which is all the scarier because you know that won’t be reciprocated. You’re being played on several levels.
Likewise, what makes the Daleks fascinating is their intense, blinding emotion and the way it manifests itself — in their schemes, in their voices, in their mannerisms. It’s an imperfection that they refuse to admit, as it defines their being. Again, you can kind of understand their way of thinking. What makes it scary is that, like an angry parent, there’s no arguing with it.
For a monster to get under the skin, I feel like one needs to be able to get under theirs — just enough to understand what you’re up against, and why. It’s the futility of reason that leaves us stranded.
And I think that’s why, after this episode, the Weeping Angels feel to me like the first proper, classic Who monster to come around since the early ’70s.
After Pertwee’s era, we got a few interesting one-offs and a few so-so recurring characters or monsters. In the new series we got some decent stuff like the Ood and Judoon. But no really powerful recurring monsters or villains, with their own mythology. The kind of thing where you watch just because they’re going to be in this episode. Never mind Dalek/Cyberman/Master level; I’m talking about the second tier — the Sontarans, Ice Warriors, Yeti, Silurians, Autons.
Right now, I think the Angels may hover just a little below that first tier. They’re not Daleks or Cybermen, but they’re more memorable, more fleshed-out, and have more draw than Sontarans or the Yeti. If they appear again over Matt Smith’s era, I think they may be permanently associated as his antagonists, the way that we associate the Cybermen with Troughton or the Master with Pertwee.
That’s how well Moffat has extrapolated them. And likewise, many of Moffat’s other monsters remind me of all the attempts in the 1960s to find a follow-up to or replacement for the Daleks — the War Machines, the Quarks, the Krotons; the Vashta Nerada, Prisoner Zero, the Smilers. Two of them call on the same everyday edge-of-perception quality that makes the Angels so interesting; the other just stands there and stares at you, apparently inanimate but creepy.
