Television – The Implausi.blog

Dr Implausible’s Book Club

“Read a book!” This is more than just the catchphrase for Handy, the supervillian puppet and partner of the Human Ton in The Tick animated series (1994) (pictured to the right). Its also one of the more effective ways to spread knowledge. And while there may be an anxious pressure in the first month of 2025, that reading is a distraction or ineffective, there’s no time like the present.

While TikTok is seeing a nice resurgence in learning with the #HillmanUniversity and #TikTokUniversity programs, here we’ll just focus on going through some critical books, one at a time. This is a expanding and evergreen project so we’ve created a page for this project over in the pages section: Dr Implausible’s Book Club and we’re also mirroring the content over on the indie version of the blog here.

This one is focused on academic content, but there are a couple concurrent and overlapping genre-specific themes that we’ll dip in and out of too. We’ve introduced both of those on the podcast, in the early days, with the Cyberpunk 101 episode, and the Introduction to Appendix W (which we mentioned here way back in… 2021? Whoa). We sorta-kinda did the Appendix W as it’s own thing, and that may still continue, but we’ll try and keep everything contained here as well, in case you don’t feel like following three separate things. For those that only interested in a specific element, the companions will help narrow that focus.

We’ll start with Technology Matters: questions to live with by David E. Nye (2006). This was a text that was used as a supplementary reading for one of the classes I taught in the past, a “sociology and ethics for engineers” type of class in the STS vein. It’s approachable, and written for a non-technical audience, which makes it especially worthwhile. As Nye mentions in the preface, these are big questions, and such big questions defy simple answers (or at least ones that are easily testable), and as such we have to come at them with some empathy. Or at least, that’s my take.

We’ll start with the basics, and check back in over the next week or so, and then publish a full post (on at least one of the platforms). Trying hard not to overcommit at the outset though. Let’s see how it goes…

The Nostalgia Curve

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 35 on August 31st, 2024)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/15669349-e0035-the-nostalgia-curve

The box office for the summer of 2024 has been driven by titles relying heavily on the audiences nostalgia, with titles like Deadpool and Wolverine and Alien: Romulus leading the charge. But nostalgia as a driver for the movies isn’t new, and we’re seeing nostalgia across all areas of our society as well. So what’s going on? What are the factors that places something along The Nostalgia Curve?

In the summer of 2024, some of the biggest movies released were throwbacks to the past, sequels, or new entries in long standing franchises. But that’s no surprise, that’s been the way Hollywood operates for decades now. What was unique was the extent that these titles, like Deadpool and Wolverine and Alien Romulus, explicitly called out their past.

Part of their value proposition, the Pitch that allowed them to get made was that they were operating on the Nostalgia Curve. And what exactly is that? Well, stay tuned, we’re going to find out about it in this episode of The ImplausiPod.

Welcome to The ImplausiPod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And despite what you might hear in certain places, Hollywood is actually a fairly conservative town. And by conservative, we mean that it’s risk averse. When you’re playing around with big money, you want to make sure you get a return on your investment, and Hollywood is a very much a big money town.

This risk aversion lends them to trade in established properties, which is why you’ll see a hundred sequels or adaptations or remakes in a given year before you see something truly original. That isn’t to say that there isn’t anything creative taking place, it’s just that it’s constrained, it’s operating within certain limits, and these limits can often be defined by the nostalgia that a title evokes.

The characters, the scenes, the lines, the callbacks, all the expectations that an audience has for a long run property. In a YouTube video by the channel ScreenPrism discussing Twin Peaks: The Return, the authors note that nostalgia can act as a bridge. Balm, that’s B-A-L-M. Soothing the audience by giving them what they want, but to effectively use it.

There always has to be a tension there, and the audience might not know that they’re going to get what it is that they hope for. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Liking what you like and asking for, and maybe even getting more of it when it is available. And this is most noticeable in some of the more longer running, and let’s call them “eternal” fandoms.

Things like Star Trek, and pro wrestling, and comic books. And I know those cross the boundaries between different types of media, and different art forms, really. But, those fandoms have endured for decades, through ups and downs, through periods of cultural relevance, to cultural obscurity, and back again.

And I think that makes them interesting to look at to illustrate the nostalgia curve, to see how these fandoms relate to and engage with new material produced for them. Now, these fandoms aren’t exactly equivalent, but they’re more alike beneath the surface than is usually acknowledged. All three of them cater to niche fandoms and have persisted long enough that most of the population has had the opportunity to engage with them at some point in their lives.

The slipping in the In and out of the zeitgeist that comes with the success of waves of popularity is a critical part of that. As nostalgic parents introduce their children to the media and by extension, the fandoms that they enjoyed when they were younger. Both comic books and pro wrestling live in this weird kind of eternal now that can acknowledge and play off their history.

And often they use this as a means of generating credibility or cachet, but continually inexorably, they have to put out new product. Weekly or monthly, and sometimes they’ll reintroduce old characters in a new way to play off that, either through legacy characters, or children, or relatives of past performers, but the trends are largely the same.

Star Trek is different, for the most part, as it continually has to create new stuff that is kinda like the old stuff, but still new and distinct enough that the fans will enjoy it. Witness the titles that have been put out under the Star Trek brand banner during the streaming era. With the dichotomy between Discovery, Picard, the Lower Decks, Prodigy, and the Strange New Worlds all coming out during roughly the same time period, and all engendering different reactions as they touch down on different points along the Nostalgia Curve.

Now, obviously other properties play with the nostalgia curve at times too, especially long running ones like Star Wars and Doctor Who come to mind, and gaming titles like Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, Pokemon and Warhammer 40, 000 are all getting old enough to test the waters as well. So let’s maybe get to the point.

What is the nostalgia curve? Maybe it’s best to think of the amount of nostalgia a given property can evoke as existing along a gradient or a continuum or something like that.

When something appears in a long running piece of media, one with an inherent fandom, it can be a challenge to separate something from appearing for nostalgia purposes, i. e. marketing or whatever, and something existing just because it’s part of the setting. Like how do you differentiate between a trope, something that makes Star Wars, “Star Wars”, like a Wookiee or a lightsaber or whatever, and something that’s showing up just to evoke that nostalgia.

It’s not like Wookiees are going to disappear until a new shows shows up 20 years from now. Wookiees aren’t going anywhere. I mean, they’re. Like Top 5 Furry Beasts, easily. But, back on topic, is that the commodification of nostalgia, where whether or not a given movie or project even gets made, depends on how much the perceived nostalgia factor is worth.

And this is what’s really the issue. If the perceived value is enough, if you’re far along the nostalgia curve, then the movie can get made and the Hollywood being a place where money talks as we mentioned earlier It may be worth trying to create nostalgia for something that never existed in the first place if you can create or Incept I guess a fake thing which evokes real nostalgia or I guess let’s call it uncanny nostalgia from here on out We might have to work a focus group or something to actually get the name going, but then if you have this incepted nostalgia, this uncanny nostalgia, you can commodify that in the same way that the recent Deadpool movie did with Wolverine showing up and the quote unquote “comic book accurate” costume that still isn’t 100 percent there.

Basically. All these elements of nostalgia are memes, or what we think of as memes. () Have we done the meme episode yet? If not, we’ll put that into the near future.) But, nostalgia is representational, in a memetic way. Like, earlier in the flick, where Deadpool explicitly calls out the montage during a fourth wall break, and each scene in the montage is iconic within the comic books, and instantly recognizable to a longtime fan of those books, Even though they never have occurred on screen at any point prior.

Every point of nostalgia is an assemblage, or container, or docker, or however you like to term these things, for all the associations that accompany it. And these are all shorthand for everything else that is associated with those books. And this everything can include the year of publication, the era that they were published in, the creators, writers, writers, artists, editors, the events that they occurred in, whether it was like age of apocalypse or secret wars or fall of the mutants or something, all of these elements are compacted and drawn within these images and scenes that we see.

You can’t evoke a scene from the Age of Apocalypse comic book series and put it in a movie without drawing in all those other associations with it. Thus, each and every nostalgic element that’s put in the movie packs in more and more until a metatextual movie like Deadpool and Wolverine can’t help but burst at the seams.

But at least in the case of Deadpool and Wolverine, it feels deserved. A recent IGN review of Deadpool and Wolverine lumped the movie in with the adaptation of Ready Player One, a film that was similarly stuffed to the brim with hey I recognize that moments and criticized it as being one of Steven Spielberg’s Now, Spielberg has probably forgotten more about making fantastic movies than most any human will ever know.

So, were the failures of Ready Player One Spielberg’s fault, or was he simply being faithful to the source material? I’m asking because, honestly, I couldn’t stand the book, and punted it, and decided not to watch the movie when it came out. Seeing the trailers made it feel gimmicked and trying too hard, and I Noped out of it well in advance, whereas, as I said, with Deadpool and Wolverine, it seemed earned.

What I’m getting at here is that nostalgia is a hot commodity. It isn’t going away anytime soon, and even though we all yearn for something fresh and new and endlessly scrolling on our apps of choice to find it, we end up finding community and joy in our shared nostalgia for things we’re pretty sure we never saw.

Or at least not the way we imagine them to be. And I think that in and of itself is worthy of exploring.

In order to explore the nostalgia curve, we need to lay out some basics, set down our foundation. We’ve been describing how nostalgia functions as a factor in the calculus of content production, how it feeds into the algorithm of whether something gets made. So that leads us to question, how do we determine the value of nostalgia?

So, we’re not particularly privy to the internal calculations of Hollywood Finance and its Byzantine algorithms, but it might be worth plotting those out, plotting what we can see. Comparing release titles in a franchise versus the real or subjective value they held for the franchise owner. We mentioned a couple different types of franchises earlier, but for illustrative purposes, we’ll use the Star Trek series released during the streaming era.

Those include The following, Star Trek Discovery from 2017 to 2024, which was a prequel series with a new cast and the first Star Trek series in 10 years. It premiered on regular television before the rest of the episodes were released via streaming, and while there was some contention over earlier episodes, it did receive high praise and was noted as a driver of subscriptions for the network it appeared on.

Star Trek Picard was released in from 2020 to 2023, which followed the Captain of the Enterprise from Star Trek The Next Generation, and several of the films, with eventual appearances of other cast members from that series. It received critical acclaim, with reviews generally around the 80 percent mark, and it was the driver of subscriptions to the Paramount Plus online channel as well.

Star Trek The Lower Decks, which was an adult animated series that started in 2020, is still ongoing, and it was based on a premise from a Star Trek The Next Generation episode from 1994. It follows the misadventures of lower ranked characters within Starfleet, and it’s again gained critical praise and generally positive views.

It doesn’t appear to be the driver of the ongoing Star Trek stories in the way the other series are, but again, it’s a fan favorite.

Star Trek Prodigy was a computer animated Star Trek show aimed at children, and I said was, it still is, but there’s something special there. It appeared on Nickelodeon as a collaboration, and it was cancelled after one season despite the critical praise, and winning an Emmy, and it was picked up by Netflix for a second season and possibly more, so more to come on that one.

And Star Trek Strange New Worlds, which started in 2022 and is still ongoing, with up to a fourth season ordered. It follows the Enterprise before Kirk became the captain in events depicted in Star Trek The Original Series from 66 69. It feels in some ways like a direct homage of the original show, even though it’s set slightly before it, and it’s received accolades with a third season in production and a fourth order.

For all these series, we can see a number of commonalities. There’s varying degrees of diversity. Nostalgia, with some series tying more directly to past properties in the extended universe. There’s difficulty judging the impact, as the streaming services are reticent to provide their viewership data, and tailoring each show to appeal to different segments of the larger Star Trek fandom.

And I think that’s interesting that we have this segmentation going on. If we plot these series out, and I know if you’re listening to the podcast, this might not be the most visually engaging thing, but if we put these series or media titles or, you know, elements of a franchise in general, along a continuum based on the degree of nostalgia that they have, they can see that they all plot out at different spots, right?

We can say that something is more or less nostalgic, but Relative to other titles in the brand with the Star Trek streaming titles. I’ve been looking at the continuum might look something like Star Trek discovery at one end, Star Trek prodigy on, you know, next to that lower decks in the middle and something like Star Trek Picard or strange new worlds at the far end of our spectrum and Star Trek is not unique as a franchise among long running media titles.

They all trade in nostalgia to a degree, but here we can see titles like Picard and Strange New Worlds that lean heavily on other characters, settings, and aesthetics to bring the audience on board where Discovery and Prodigy are further removed from that. This is a useful metric. We can start to see how nostalgia plots out.

But a more complete look at nostalgia involves that contrast that we talked about. If we plot nostalgia on one axis and value on the other, we can see shows that have a very low nostalgia factor, shows like Star Trek Prodigy, where there’s almost none of the characters that appear in previous episodes and it’s almost wholly new, are very low on nostalgia and they’re not as much of a driver as well.

Whereas a show like Star Trek Picard, which is very high on the nostalgia factor, drawing on a loved character from a past show. is very high on that, but also high on value, so we can see where this line can be drawn basically directly between them. There are several takeaways. Value is subjective, so absent any real data on viewership, it can be tough to place the titles on the curve or to judge their impact.

Value is also relative. So, for a show like Prodigy, it wasn’t worth it for Nickelodeon to air the show, based on the budget. But for Netflix, the calculus made up for it, and it was, they were more than happy to pick up and release the show. And finally, nostalgia is also subjective. But the more closely tied to property as to what has gone before, like the trappings and tropes of the extended universe, the more constrained the creators can be in what they can make.

But we’re not limited to judging nostalgia by value. It isn’t the only way we can read it. This isn’t some Fisherian capitalist realist thing where that’s the only way we can picture things. There are other approaches we can take. Perhaps the fact that nostalgia is subjective can give us a clue. We could compare the nostalgia to show folks versus the novelty that approaches the subject with, and remap the curve with those elements on the axis.

So what does the nostalgia curve look like if it’s compared to different? For the sake of our example, we’ll continue to use the Star Trek series released during the streaming area that we’ve been mentioning so far. And these will form the data points along our curve. The shape of the curve will depend on some of the choices we make.

So, let’s see what our options look like. Our first comparison will be to swap out value. For novelty. Novelty’s long been a proxy for things like innovation. So there’s a track record, at least, of using it in academic contexts. When novelty occurs with respect to these franchises, something new is introduced to the setting or the larger universe and the traditional tropes and aesthetics of the universe are muted.

We can see that nostalgia isn’t absent with the more novel titles, but their focus on novelty moves them further along the curve. And again, in our description of the visual, this puts shows like Star Trek Discovery and Prodigy, high in novelty, lower in nostalgia, up on the top left, and shows like Picard and Strange New Worlds.

High on Nostalgia, lower on Novelty, down in the bottom right and we have that large sweeping downslope. And titles appear at various places along the curve. There’s no implicit value here, we’re not saying something is better or worse, we’re just saying things plot out differently along the curve.

Another way we can think about nostalgia is the extent which is real or imagined, on the part of the audience. Now, I guess that creatives and other content producers can be part of this audience as well, as it’s not uncommon for the producers on long running series to be fans or marks for the product, but that’s an aside that we can explore at a later date.

Real nostalgia, and you know, there’s quotes there, but real nostalgia would be the fans longing for something that was actually produced and published in the past. It can be sighted, looked at, enjoyed. Imagined nostalgia would be something that the audience thinks they have seen but never actually happened.

For a recent example, we could look at some elements in the Deadpool and Wolverine film, like the yellow costume, or Gambit’s appearance in the film, as That version of Gambit had never shown up in any cinematic version before. Neither of them have ever actually happened. They’re adaptations of elements that have shown up previously in other media, and granted the nature of transmedia storytelling necessarily means that there’s going to be a lot of adaptations going around, but the audience is doing a lot of the lifting here, getting something close to what they think they wanted.

If we map real versus imagined nostalgia with respect to our Star Trek streaming title curve, the ST:ST curve, it would look like almost a straight downward slope, with Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks being high on the imagination and lower on the real, and Star Trek Picard again being very heavy on real elements of nostalgia being evoked during the series.

Now, there’s at least one more way we can look at this. We mentioned the incepted nostalgia, that uncanny nostalgia that was created by the content producers to evoke nostalgia within a given title, the organic versus manufactured. If you have organic nostalgia, that which is experienced by the audience on their own, it is somewhat inherent in the titles that we’re looking at. This can occur due to that elements, aesthetics, tropes of the shared universe. But it is on the audience.

Organic nostalgia is related to our second curve, that of real versus imagined, as both real and imagined could be counting as organic having been experienced by the audience. But I guess that’s just depending on how we frame it. Manufactured nostalgia is that incepted form, something brought in for the express purpose of pleasure.

Pushing the audience’s nostalgia button, and Star Trek as a franchise pushes this button hard, don’t get me wrong. Each series relies on it to some degree. So much so that series might not even be the right analytic unit for this, it might be worthwhile to go intro series for the analysis, comparing the series on an episodic basis or comparing series versus other series for other franchises.

With respect to organic versus manufactured nostalgia, we can see that the organic ones again are tied heavily to our real nostalgia, things like Star Trek, Strange New Worlds and Picard echoing previous series. rely heavily on the audience’s nostalgia for the elements there. Whereas something like Prodigy, with its computer generated characters, it feels wholly manufactured in some ways.

That doesn’t mean it’s inauthentic. When Wesley Crusher shows up in the series In the second half of season one, any nostalgia that fans of the show have would be authentic, but his appearance there is manufactured, right? What I’m getting at is that there’s a lot of different ways that nostalgia applies to the media titles that we love and enjoy.

The value proposition plays a large part in driving the appearance of nostalgic elements in a show. In 2024, the summer box office seems to be thriving on it. I was originally inspired to start looking at this by the release of Deadpool and Wolverine, as I noted, and as I’m writing this, Alien Romulus has recently been out drawing heavily on James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens film, so much so that people are pointing out shot for shot scene comparisons, where Alien Romulus directly compares to James Cameron’s work.

This happened in Deadpool and Wolverine as well, with flight choreography coming directly from Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider Man film, any, many other elements that showed up in the shows and these movies are doing well with positive word of mouth circulating about each film, so Something is in the air pushing us along the nostalgia curve

And whatever’s blowing the winds of nostalgia is pushing it into all areas of our life Because we can see it happening in many more places than just with our media properties that we liked when we were young. By dint of nostalgia being present in so many of these areas, it seems obvious that the nostalgia curve may be more generalizable to other properties than just those that shape and deliver the content that is brought to our doorsteps.

We hinted at how the nostalgia curve gets adopted by one type of social activity. Gaming. And a keen observer will recognize that appeals to nostalgia in culture, politics, and technology, too. Let’s deal with those in turn. When it comes to nostalgia in gaming, I’m talking mostly about tabletop role playing games.

I’ve long held that interesting things arise out of the periphery, and gaming, especially tabletop gaming, has existed on the fringes in some fashion or another for most of my adult life. The recent surge in popularity due to stranger things and role notwithstanding. Gaming culture has been both an area of entertainment and an academic interest for me for a long time, and nostalgia has been fueling gaming since at least the 1980s.

It was pretty much baked in from the beginning, with the appendix and of the original Dungeon Master’s Guide for D& D detailing the titles that the game’s creators were nostalgic for. It’s also present in every new title and media tie in RPG released, whether it’s westerns and spy thrillers or Conan, Capes, Cthulhu, inspiring the current cop of adventures.

This nostalgia might have kept the lights on, but with the dawn of the new millennium, a new wave of titles kicked the nostalgia into overdrive. Following the release of the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons by Wizards of the Coast in 2000 and the creation of the Open Gaming License, or OGL, along with it, the portal was opened and a number of retro clones spilled forth.

This led to the rise of the OSR, or Old School Renaissance, or Old School Revival, but Terms are a little bit interchangeable. It’s a series of games that looked to the hobbies roots for inspiration. Sometimes in terms of game design, often in look and feel, and sometimes both like in titles like dungeon crawl classics, these retro clones evoke a simpler time in gaming where they each tried to emulate that earlier era, either to bring in old or new.

lapsed fans, or to court new players with simpler mechanics, and often cheaper entry points too. But while the OSR began with small publishers putting out material they wanted to use and finding a like minded community, Wizards of the Coast has also reissued classic books in new formats or adventures Connect with the rich history of the classic early tabletop RPGs, revisiting characters like Strahd and Vecna and other iconic entities from time to time.

D& D isn’t alone in this either, as Wizards of the Coast regularly places products along the nostalgia curve in order to move the product for their other major property, Magic the Gathering. MTG is no stranger to nostalgia, either internal or external. It finds itself locked into a game design from the early 90s, with a card back which, by necessity of competition, it needs to maintain for every set they produce, but it also digs deep into the wells of its own past for artwork, creatures, game mechanics, characters, planes, themes, all of these resurface from time to time to renew or maintain interest in the property.

Sets like Ravnica, Mirrodin, Urza, and others evoke a host of associations for the long time gamer. Now, extrinsically, Magic is Gathering reaches outwards to other properties with its secret lair series, bringing in fans of other media properties like Warhammer, Doctor Who, Walking Dead, Lord of the Rings, even Transformers, for specially themed cards and decks.

Seeking out these fans or lapsed fans, if they were to lay out a typology, to come back to Magic by engaging with the other things that they love. Wizards of the Coast isn’t the only gaming company that does this either, as Games Workshop, another giant in the industry, will engage heavily in the rich lore and history of their various game worlds, putting games on hiatus for years and bringing them back in a new edition.

Or a reimagining to fans who will leap at the opportunity to grab them lest they disappear once more. FOMO counts as a factor in the corporate quarterly reports of these massive, multi million dollar companies. Now, all of these elements that we’ve been talking about so far, Film, television, gaming, they could all be typified as part of the cultural industries, but cultural nostalgia exists too, socio-cultural nostalgia, and this extends far beyond media properties.

It’s not quite lifestyle, though there is an element of that too, but more a combination of time and place and often historical, though again, this can be real or imagined to various degrees, as we pointed out previously. Historical recreation societies are Large part of this they can celebrate a time long past or a location with arts, dance, music, and more that may seem anachronistic.

It can be part of the Western Era or Medieval Europe, Imperial Rome, Shogun Era Japan, or other periods, though I will note that there’s a connection here. If you can imagine a world for it in Westworld, it probably exists as a real form of recreation as well. At certain inflection points, historical recreation can tip over into experimental anthropology, of which I’ve spoken about elsewhere, but a large part of historical recreation is done via Military re-enactors, whether it’s the Civil War in America, World War II, Napoleonics, or the like.

Live action roleplay, or LARP after fashion, and the deep ties it has between gaming and LARP need to be examined. The Society for Creative Anachronism, the SCA, was formed in 1966. Preceding the invention of Dungeons Dragons by a few years, but rising roughly to with the development of tabletop wargaming hobby more broadly.

Within the SCA, we see the development and creation of an imagined nostalgia for a place and time that didn’t quite exist, but was co created as a mutual social imaginary. But within the socio cultural sphere, the most glaring example of the nostalgia curve is those that are taking place within the political arena.

There are examples of plenty of movements that evoke the good old days that want to go back to an imagined past. And this isn’t a political podcast, really, and it isn’t seeking to be. This political nostalgia is being mentioned for completeness, lest we be remiss in their omission. But they do have a connection to the nostalgia curve.

And lest we think that all nostalgia is backward looking, Science fiction isn’t immune to nostalgia either. For what is ostensibly a forward looking genre, there’s a lot of looking to the past that takes place within the fiction presented to the audience. Not just with time travel jaunts of the past, like in the Star Trek episode from the original series, The City on the Edge of Forever, and Constantly throughout that series, and pretty much any early Doctor Who episode, and both of these just involved that hop to the next soundstage in the prop closets as much as anything else, where production constraints shape the creative direction of the shows.

But also in the endless tales of plot twists, Past historical battles like Marathon, Thermopylae, Hastings, that were being waged anew with serial numbers closely filed off. It wasn’t just the props, the battles and the ideology. And here I’m looking at you Starship Troopers that can be retrograde. Science fiction often gives us nostalgia for a future that will not come to be.

This is retro-futurism, science fiction with the aesthetic appeal of an earlier age. This was seen best in the recent Fallout video games and TV series, and the short story The Gernsback Continuum by author William Gibson. Longing for past visions of the future, which brings us to the technological nostalgia we talked about last episode.

The Dial up pastoral. Nostalgia for technology isn’t limited to older non electric technologies, though there is tons of that that goes on, as seen with our LARPer example earlier. Technological nostalgia can be for anything from classic cars to phones that go ring, the tools that we have used and grown up with that are deeply connected to us, and all of these can evoke those lost feelings as soon as they are seen or held.

Now, Often after we use them for a little bit of time, we can remember why we moved on from them, but the feelings we have for them remain. So in all these fields and categories, the nostalgia curve is present. And in many more fields than besides, as we intentionally avoided whole realms where it could be seen like sports, food, fashion, language, music.

All of these and more, nostalgia occupies a place. There’s a through lines in the ones that we did choose, and I hope that’s apparent from gaming, to LARPing, to historical cosplay, to historical politics, to shared imagination of the future, for a longing for how technology was in our youth, but There’s only so much room.

I’ve been intentionally avoiding a lot of topics during this episode, and we’re already over half an hour, but this intentional avoidance, something called nescience, has been happening in another area too, and that of academia. The preceding episode is a summary of my thoughts on the topic of nostalgia, and I’m aware that other authors have written extensively on the topic.

I’ve kept those titles on the bookshelf while getting down my thoughts on the subject of nostalgia. And in our next episode, I’d like to explore what some of the academic literature on nostalgia has been saying. So join us next episode when we examine the works of Fredric Jameson, John Ralston Saul, and others, and we go deeper into the nostalgia curve in an episode titled Nescience and Accessions.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the Implausipod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4.

0 share alike license. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow from word of mouth of the community, so if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two, and pass it along. In addition, we’ve started a newsletter on the blog, feel free to check out the link in the show notes and sign up to that.

Please join us soon for our next episode, until then, take care, and have fun.

Implausipod E019 – The 14th Doctor

What does a sci-fi fan who’s never seen Doctor Who think of their first exposure to a full episode of the series? Can you even be a sci-fi fan if you haven’t? Well, we’re about to find out. Welcome our guest, an academic and Dr Who fan Dr Aiden Buckland who helps guide yours truly Dr Implausible through some of the details of “The Star Beast”.

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/14072417-implausipod-e0019-the-14th-doctor

Transcript:

DRI: Actors have a bit of a challenge in that they can become deeply linked with iconic roles that they play so that the audience always associates them with whatever they first saw them in. And so too it is for me with David Tennant and the Purple Man. Killgrave. From the Netflix MCU series Jessica Jones.

See, that’s where I first saw him. And he was absolutely stunning in that role. Super creepy. And it’s hard to imagine him as anything else. But apparently he has a long and storied history as an actor in various other cinematic universes. And one of those is returning to screen shortly. Something called Doctor Who.

And apparently it’s widely popular, but it’s a bit of a gap in my knowledge. I mean, I was aware. of it, but I’d hardly seen any episodes. Maybe something with Christopher Ecclestone back in the early 2000s and something with a dude in a scarf back when I was around eight, but it was never largely accessible to me.

But with it returning to the screen, it seems now is a perfect opportunity to get on board with the Doctor.

And I’m not kidding, I’m being completely honest with you. I haven’t really watched much Dr. Who and Jessica Jones was the first time I saw David Tennant. So there’s a lot of stuff out there in the media sphere and you can’t watch everything. And for some reason, Dr. Who just never really caught into me, you know, didn’t get its hooks in.

So I’m aware of it. I’m aware of some of the larger themes, but what we’re going to do for this episode is it’ll be in two parts. The first part will be me going to watch the first episode of these 2023 specials, StarBeast. And then I’ll come back and I’ll give you like, some of my initial impressions.

And then the second half is going to be a discussion with a colleague of mine, who’s a big Doctor Who fan. And so once they join in, we’ll kind of go over some of what my impressions are and how that connects to the larger universe. And then we’ll have, If time allows, we’ll do this for the other specials in 2023.

So stay tuned. I’m going to go check out an episode and I’ll be right back to let you know what my first impressions of watching a full Doctor Who episode are.

And we’re back after having seen the Starbeast, and that was an interesting episode. So this isn’t really a recap, it’s just kind of a list of impressions, so it may go chronologically for a little bit.

So, going in with having no history of the characters or any of their connections, it was a little odd. We got the recap at the start with the once upon a time, and I thought that was an interesting way to do it. We have the introduction of A British housewife, Donna Noble, and felt very much like, say, a British housewife canonically, as opposed to one from America or Canada or anywhere else.

And we learn that she is married and has a lovely child, and the child has grown. So there’s been a lot of history, I guess, in the past, but that doesn’t really have a whole lot for me. There’s some lines that they drop there that also stood out with an interesting juxtaposition where Dr. Who goes, this face has come back. Why? And Donna goes, the story hasn’t ended yet. So we get this idea that there’s something going on. And at least a little bit of a mystery that might be hinted at later.

The whole introduction itself felt very like. Marvel comics from the seventies and eighties, where there’d be a recap in the first few pages after a splash page or something, and I’m wondering if that’s common. We get the introductory title by Russell T Davies from a story by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons. And that is very curious because I recognize both those names from sci fi, especially like 2000 AD and other comics, again, of the seventies and eighties. So I’m wondering what the source was, whether it was a comic or a novelization, an older episode or something like an issue of 2000 AD or something else, heavy metal back in the day.

So I’m keeping an eye out for that and maybe I’ll track down the references after, but for now, that just kind of jumped out like, Hey, I recognize that reference. And while they set up some tension in the recap that, you know, they couldn’t see each other again, they get like right to it with their interaction right away, and kind of release that tension, but also set it up for something later on. We get introduced to Rose, but I got no idea who she is. I, I understand she’s Donna’s daughter, but I got no reference or what those eyes are referring to. So I’m wondering if that’ll pop up later. And then the meteorite or whatever streaks across the sky.

There’s a comment that Donna makes, while her eyes are distracted, about never trust a man with a goatee, and something about being stuck in a drainpipe, and I was wondering if that was a hint to any prior episodes, but I don’t know. And then she makes the reference to the doctor telling him that he has to ditch the tie by the age of 35, that he can’t do that old 80s Duran Duran style anymore. I thought that was cute.

And then following that we have a ride with the taxi driver, Sean Temple. Ends up being a little bit more expository as well. When we get some of the backstory and I was grateful for that. It was kind of, came about a little bit naturally, but also a little bit, Oh, here’s all the main characters all, all at once altogether.

So I’ll get to this later, but it felt like everything was just like one after the other falling into place. Like we didn’t really have a whole lot of mystery. So it was just kind of straight into it. And. We arrive at the factory and this explosion looks like something right out of the nineties, like demolition man or Robocop, which is pretty good for TV, honestly.

I mean, full points. I remember what syndicated sci fi TV shows looked like in the nineties. It was a little rough. As he’s wandering around the factory, I think the only thing that would make it more 80s would be the lighting as we have that gold and teal kind of filter rather than the blue and red filter that was endemic in 80s sci fi.

And then we’re introduced to a few other characters or groups. The ship is being Surrounded by some soldiers or soldier type persons and there’s a woman in a wheelchair, but again, I don’t have a reference here I don’t know if they’re new or supposed to evoke something from past episodes And then we switch to a home scene with an older lady cooking and who says there’s no such thing as spaceships. Now Donna has a neat quote about the 930 mark or she says I will burn down the world for you darling And then she goes, I will dissent, or I will descend. I didn’t quite catch it, but it was kind of neat.

And Oh, okay. So the older lady is her mom, but her mom seems to remember more of the past than she does. So again, I, maybe they were in earlier stuff. There’s a lot of internal reference, even at this point, like, you know, 10, 12 minutes into the episode that it feels is starting to be there for people who watch it regularly. And I admit I’m not lost, but I’m kind of, I don’t have any association that the authors, the show runners might be trying to evoke with this.

So sometimes it’s coming across a little bit flat as again, I don’t know who the people are. I don’t recognize them, and there’s just a lot of assumptions made. About the audience, about who and what they see. So then, we switched to the kids and Rose outside and there’s an escape pod in the middle of a field. And it feels like right now they are speed running through ET and they meet this little critter called a meep.

And while it’s cute enough, I’m not sure what they’re going for here. There’s also some dudes with like bug eyes in the dark and they remind me of like bug from Micronauts, which is weird given that, you know, we had Mills and Gibbons doing this. So maybe they were kind of tying into like the seventies comics.

I’m wondering if there’s that earlier comic book reference there. So, but apparently they’re hunting something. So we’ll see what’s up with that. The doctor is in the warehouse or sorry, in the factory steel factory. So very eighties heavy metal video here with his whole display that he’s able to conjure up on the out of thin air and actually works as an interface.

And that’s super cool. I don’t know if he’s ever done that before. And then. We meet the redhead in the wheelchair again, who knows the doctor is familiar with him. She’s Shelly science advisor, number 56, and she knows his history. At least he was science advisor. Number one, don’t, I’m probably saying that too much, but that comment, I guess about Donna, where the universe is turning around her again.

And the, he does has, I don’t want to be the one who kills her. So there’s definitely linking to that back history again, and so we get more of the officers from the unit. It had unit in the badge. I didn’t quite see what it was from, but you know, they’re like the men in black or something or the paramilitary organization associated with the men in black, maybe like shield or sword or some other group.

So they’re not necessarily regular police officers, but they are something else. And then. They open up the capsule and that is, that stood out. If you remember from like the earlier podcast, I talk about dragon’s domain and how there was like a creature that came out and started possessing the crew members from space 1999.

And we almost have that exact same thing here. This strikes out with. The light and the light changes in the soldier’s eyes, and then it takes them over and is able to possess them and move them around. And that is, it’s kind of wild. So we have these linkages to earlier, like 1970s sci fi, that’s been going on within this episode.

And that’s super cool. I’m wondering how much more that is. I’m just going off what I know, but maybe this is something previously within the show as well. Now the Meep and Rose run back at the show. And then the mother who, I guess now the grandmother, sorry, Cynthia, she seems to know what’s up. She goes, the Meep isn’t real.

So I’m wondering if it’s illusory. With the family all home, they’re trying to keep each other away from it. And I think Cynthia recognizes the past history between the doctor and Donna and doesn’t want anything to happen, but, yeah, that’s a bit of an issue. So they meet the meep and then we have the little bit with the fur harvesting is kind of a bad thing and a discussion about the pronouns for the meep and that struck me as interesting, but it also just struck me as matter of fact that the doctor was able to just accept that and correct and ask and just went with it for the rest of the episode. So that was really interesting.

There’s a comment, I guess the doctor has twin hearts. And that’s cool. The space Marines in the Warhammer 40, 000 universe all have twin hearts too. And so does like, um, Longshot from the X Men and that whole Mojoverse series. So that’s a common thing, I think, with a lot of sci fi series as a way of kind of evoking a subject’s transhumanism that, you know, Oh, they’ve got multiple hearts or whatever. And, and that was kind of fascinating. So I’m wondering if the 40 K guys kind of cribbed that when they were making their trans war, transhuman warriors and the space Marines, or that, if that’s just so common that it’s not from a particular thing, but it’s just a trope in general.

So from there, we’ve get into the firefight, and I’m wondering how many factions are going on here. We obviously. We have the meep plus the family at this point are with them. We have the possessed soldiers. We have the bugs who are fighting the possessed soldiers. We have the regular military, the ones who haven’t possessed. And I don’t know if the doctor is his own faction or what, but you know, we’ve got four or five different groups here.

And again, while they’re doing some cool tricks with the shields and using the. tool, the sonic screwdriver and their defensive capability, and just being clever about getting away from it and trying to escape and save lives. And I thought that was really interesting. There were some airborne troops in there and I was wondering if those were the bugs.

They’re kind of in the black and I didn’t quite see if those were more drop troops coming in to support the paramilitary organization or not, but I guess we’ll learn more as this goes on. And then we get to this parking garage and it says either we’ve escaped or we’ve got things very wrong. And he says, we’re in a court, court is in session.

It’s a shadow court and he puts on a teleport intercept. And then the bug soldiers appear and it turns out that yes, we indeed do have everything wrong. There’s something about a psychedelic sun here that powered the meep’s homeworld as they ate the galactic council and this is the last one left. And we get the whole reveal that yes, curse your inevitable betrayal here as the Meep turns out to be the one that is possessing the soldiers and there’s a whole lot more going on.

The star beast is indeed the furry little creature that finally shows its fangs. And so from there, things move along rather rapidly. The doctor and the family are taken prisoner and moved back to the steel factory. The little critter is being worshiped and brought about on a plank when made out of metal by the possessed soldiers.

And while they’re trapped, there’s a rescue from Shelly, the science advisor, who’s in the wheelchair, who has weapons apparently embedded within it. Because of course, James Bond also probably echoes into the influences here as well. So We switch to the ship and the doctor tries to prevent the launch as the dagger drive is engaged.

And we start seeing this whole scale destruction of London with the tendrils of flame and like earthquakes going out. It feels a lot like Guardians of the Galaxy 3 where we know this is like a populated area with people involved. And like, how are there not casualties and catastrophic destruction from this?

Now, Donna Noble is assisting him as they’re trying to get this right. But it’s a whole lot and there’s a lot of like internal reference going on here. I can see the action that’s going on. And then finally Rose undoes the psychedelic lightness that shining in the eyes of all the possessed and everything kind of goes back to normal.

We’ve learned that the toys in the shed are tied to Rose’s memories of all the beasts that have been encountered in the past and We finally kind of get some resolution here, but as a viewer I was kind of starting honestly, from about the 30 minute point on, I was kind of tuning out a little bit.

There was a lot of internal references and I wasn’t necessarily getting. All of them. It was the thing with like the Phoenix force that was going through Donna and Rose. I don’t know what’s going on there. Some shared memories or something was embedded within Rose that allowed her to be saved and then finally they walk inside the Tardis and we get that tiny little ship or the family’s talking about just taking one tiny trip and it feels like every Rick and Morty episode ever. And honestly, I’m wondering how much Rick and Morty is kind of tying into the doctor at this point. It’s weird that I’ve seen almost all of Rick and Morty, but almost none of Doctor Who.

So is it just a case of picking one and not the other? I don’t know. Or can you enjoy both? To my friend who’ll be joining me later, perhaps that’s the question. We get into a what looks like a redesigned TARDIS interior. It looks almost like Cerebro from some of the X Men films with all the sphere and the railings and stuff.

And it has a coffee maker, but apparently it hasn’t been protected against coffee. It’s fragile enough that one spilled coffee is enough to almost destroy the place. And that’s kind of where we end. So as the credits roll, it It, it feels a little odd, earlier note I made about it feeling like a speed run through ET.

I mean, it feels like the whole story was a speed run as they were racing through the required story beats to try and link everything together with previous seasons and previous episodes. And there was a lot of history there and so much of it was being elided. It was kind of being relying on our cultural memory of other sci fi.

Movies and TV shows and episodes, and we got equal parts of like a very special episode and a lot of fan service going on there. So I’m not sure as a new viewer, it was a representative story of the franchise. I was able to make some external connections to some stuff. Like the authors and some other references to sci fi and even by the midpoint, but by the last 15 minutes or so, it was all very internally referential.

And the titular Starbeast was like a very thin foil for the rest of the narrative that was assumed, like we assumed things would work out. And. They were just used there for the show runner to hang all the connections together. So as a new viewer, I’m not entirely convinced. I do want to discuss this with my colleague though.

So I’m going to step away from a brief second for a brief second, and we’ll be right back.

And we’re back and we’re going to talk about the impressions of the show. I’m here joined by Dr. Aidan Buckland, who’s a professor of digital and social media. You can let him introduce his bona fides. I’ve known him for quite some time. And we’ll get into it. So, thank you for joining us today, Dr. Aiden.

Dr Aiden: Well, Well Dr. Implausible, thank you very much for having me. Yeah, so, Ph. D., Communication, I’m usually somewhere in that pop culture landscape, and Dr. Who is something, you know, I’ve been a fan of for a while, but also had a bit of a Professional interest in: done some presentations over the years at Calgary and Edmonton Expo, and have watched a number at places like the Popular Cultural Association.

DRI: Okay, so you have like an academic interest in that, then. Awesome. Okay. I’ll just let you know I think, I sent you the copy of the of the first half of the episode here. I’m coming in with this, like knowing that exists, I have almost no exposure. And for a franchise that’s like older than me, which is rare, it’s like, okay, Star Trek, Dr. Who, and like, I’m older than Star Wars, right, so it’s a rare thing. And like, how have you not watched any of this? So here we are. Yeah, I, found it really interesting, but I’m kind of like, what’s your kind of take on it as somebody who’s like well versed in this, cause I’ll admit there’s some parts of it that didn’t necessarily land with me, but maybe we’ll walk through the episode a little bit and you can tell me what I missed without going too much into spoilers.

Maybe we can just chat about that for a little bit.

Dr Aiden: For sure. Yeah, and I was thinking that while I was watching it. So, you know, myself as a fan, I jumped on during the new who era. So I have dabbled a little bit and kind of watching and rewatching. I think at this point, all of the doctors for at least a few hours of their runs each just to get a flavor for it before going out and speaking about it. But yeah, this was a daunting episode. I think in some ways for new fans to be jumping on board. It was relying on a lot of stuff that kind of happened during Russell Davis’ 1st run at the show. But at the same time, I also felt it was very emblematic of of his vision of doctor who like, it felt very much like it would fit very easily into, you know, what we sometimes refer to as the season of specials.

DRI: Okay. The season of specials is like the Christmas season where they just have these one offs. I guess there’s two more episodes coming up and if you’re, if you’re down for it, I’ll watch those and we can maybe chat about each of those in the coming weeks too.

Dr Aiden: For sure. I’ll definitely be watching them. So I would love to chat.

DRI: Okay, cool. So yeah, like for me, the first, it kind of had like a, it felt like a Stan Lee Marvel recap at the start of it. And then, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it; while you do pop culture stuff, so you’re probably sure of who Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons were in that jumped out at me.

Cause I’ve been looking at both their works, Pat Mills, especially in his work on 2000 AD ties into something I’m working on called Appendix W, which are like the prehistory of the Warhammer 40, 000 universe. And so he’s really influential as like a creator from back in like the 70s and 80s, and that was just like, okay, so what am I watching here?

And I don’t know if you had any foreknowledge of that kind of era or influence on Doctor Who.

Dr Aiden: Yeah, I’d be interested. And I think, you know, in some cases with Dr Who, in particular, there is kind of a media kind of explanation for, you know, the influence that runs through here. You have to remember, of course, when Dr Who was.

In its prime, say, late 60s in through the 70s, you know, this is at a point in time where there are actually very few channels to watch in the UK. So whenever we’re talking about sci fi creators, writers, directors, who are living in the UK, you know, you can almost guarantee to a person that they would have been exposed to this show at least in its first run from, from 63 to 89 at some point.

DRI: Yeah. I’m getting a feeling, like we’ve covered Space:1999 a bit, and we’re going to be covering, as I said, 2000 AD and Blake’s Seven at one point, I’m sure. It feels like everybody knew everybody in this community. I mean, Britain is, is relatively small size wise, I guess, especially if you’re from the Canadian prairies, it’s like, well, we can just drive across Britain pretty quick here.

But yeah, so there’s that whole idea of scope and size, but as a community in the seventies, yeah, I’m assuming it was very connected. I can’t say for sure, but it has that feel to it.

Dr Aiden: And a hub of sci fi too, right? Like, there’s so much happening in television, in movies, so, yeah, it would be interesting to sit down and map all of that sort of stuff, like, who’s influencing who, where are we seeing, kind of things pop up, especially as it relates to the Doctor and his travels.

DRI: Yeah, that’s, well we’ll I think that’s kind of like the side project or maybe that’s something assumed with the Appendix W. I mean, we’re tracking everything up to the launch of Warhammer 40, 000, which is in 87. So yeah, it’s going to be coming. So, so how have I never watched the doctor before?

I got no idea, but what stood out to you from the episode? Like what was really kind of like a big thing, or just maybe walk through it chronologically, like how did you feel watching it?

Dr Aiden: I think the first thing that really struck me with the episode was the mixing and matching of the aesthetic of Doctor Who.

So, as, you know, you probably know production wise, there’s been a deal. Disney plus is distributing it now internationally. So there’s a lot more money in the budget, and this has been the case for a while. Chibnall, the previous show runner, also had a pretty big budget, for Doctor Who standards at least.

So, you know, we saw a lot of that, like that really lovely shot in (the) neighborhood. I’m jumping ahead chronologically in terms of the episode. Where we see the soldiers fighting the other soldiers and that nice over the action shot of that, like, that’s, that’s a really expensive thing that, you know, we sometimes got in new Who but we definitely didn’t get in the original run of the show, which was that kind of them flexing their muscles production wise.

I think the Meep in particular, in terms of the creature design, looked a lot more polished than a lot of Doctor Who aliens and and creatures look, but then we also had the Rolf, the, the grasshopper looking gentleman, who talked very nicely once they actually got to speak.

You know, they actually look more emblematic of that old aesthetic of Doctor Who. So I thought that that was, it was one of the things that stood out to me is this really does feel like A kind of crossover for Dr. Who: of Russell T. Davis going from kind of what he was working with in the early 2000s with the relaunch of the show to now having a bit more money, but wanting to stay true to that aesthetic that a lot of Who fans would be comfortable with.

DRI: Okay, so there’s he’s playing to some audience expectations there. Okay, that’s interesting because I mean, I noticed that with like, The set with in the steel factory with the spaceship in there that looked fairly impressive, like production wise. I don’t know how much of that was digital and how much of that was like a practical, but they at least had put that into place.

I mean, there was some obvious places where there’s like the digital layover of the city and the like, but even as you said, like that overhead drone shot that we’re seeing, it’s starting to become very common. We saw that in like The Peripheral and Westworld and a bunch of places where it kind of gives a top down third person perspective or not third person, but almost like an RTS perspective that we’re kind of used to.

Dr Aiden: I was going to say, it reminded me a lot of that series of games XCOM where you’re looking at the field from that and that’s an alien invasion game too. So it almost felt like they were trying to tap into that aesthetic with that shot, which It was neat, I think, for Doctor Who.

DRI: Yeah, for sure. So they’re expanding it now.

Like you said, these are the specials. So maybe it’s like the CFL on Grey Cup or the NFL on the Super Bowl where they’ll bust out multiple cameras and kind of go for broke and the regular episodes don’t quite have that same level of production. I don’t know, we’ll kind of see how that goes, but I’m always fascinated how the production culture elements influence the onscreen workings of it, or, you know, what we see as fans on screen and then how much the fans will, you know, develop the no prizes from Marvel or whatever to come up with explanations that kind of patch over some of those holes that might be simply explained by, well, we, we had no budget, so we had to put a plunger on the end of this, of the Dalek and, and kind of make it a thing.

Yeah, fascinating stuff, but we’ll keep an eye out for that in the future, for sure. So, what else kind of jumped out at you?

Dr Aiden: I mean, off the bat, I am a big fan of David Tennant, both as a doctor, but also as his other roles like Kilgrave, as you had mentioned earlier, having him do that kind of fourth wall break that once upon a time, once upon a time Lord was an interesting opening.

It reminded me of the last time Doctor Who as a franchise really started to, you know, put on a push to get American viewers, which I associate this Disney plus deal with, and they did something similar. They had the Companion at the time, Amy Pond do like a little voiceover kind of explaining her relationship to this being the doctor, and it got a bit of pushback actually, from some older doctor who fans.

It’s that gatekeeping element in fanculture that essentially. You know, Dr. Who’s been around for decades. Most people have grown up with it in the UK and in some of the Commonwealth countries like ours. And, you know, the idea that you would need to put this in here and, you know, clearly it is for newer fans. But how did you find that? Did that help you? or orient you for what was coming up. Did you find that useful?

DRI: I found it super useful, I think between the introductory bit before the credits, as well as some of the exposition that happened with the cab driver, I felt, you know, they kind of put a lot of pieces in place. So maybe they were, I think I commented earlier as a bit of a speed run, but I felt there was enough exposition that I wasn’t necessarily confused about who was what, like I didn’t, I didn’t have any deep connection with any of the characters, but I could generally tell the relationships and the social map of who was who there. Sometimes characters would show up and I wasn’t sure as, Oh, is this an old person or a new person or something?

So maybe, maybe that’s the thing, like what was new in that? What was, what was novel in the episode that I have no reference of. So like, was there anybody, what was new?

Dr Aiden: Yeah, well, production wise, I think that’s actually kind of one of the fun parts with Star Beast is that actually this is, you know, an adaptation.

So we’re, we’re dealing with a Who story that has existed since I believe sometime in 1980, there was a weekly comic strip and that’s where this story first shows up. So in the opening credits, I believe you see along with Russell T. Davis, the original writers for this panel in particular, but in terms of new stuff, I think there’s still lots in there.

I would say, you know, for a lot of older Who fans the Sonic was doing a lot more in this episode than we’ve ever seen it do, which, you know, is some fans have bristled on it. The ones that I’ve been watching reactions from online, but at the same time, it is always like a lot of the elements of Doctor Who, you know, the sonic does what the writers needed to do in a particular context.

So it’s kind of always had that, but generally, as a tool, it’s really done underwhelming things, like it just, it unlocks a door, or it sets off an alarm, or it, you know, turns on a sprinkler, it’s, you know, very underwhelming, so when he starts to look at it as a visual display, very MCU like, which is a comparison that Ellie Littlechild made over there at WhoCulture, or later on where he’s, he’s building light shields out of it, that almost seemed, in a lot of ways, to use a kind of gamer culture term, a little overpowered for the sonic screwdriver, which is interesting.

But again, this is a Doctor who is coming back, which again is something we haven’t seen, so.

DRI: Okay, I just yeah for reference. I didn’t know that any of those abilities like the the shields and like even just the interface I didn’t know that was new. It seemed I felt they were seamless I really liked the like basically passive or non combative use of the screwdriver because it gave a like a different way of solving problems and even though it wasn’t… I guess maybe firefights aren’t that common in Doctor Who, I don’t know.

It did seem like they put a lot of budget in it, you know, blowing up a wall and having the whole chase through the house. But having those ways of reacting that isn’t necessarily offensive, I thought that was really neat. And the interface, I mean, we’ve seen that see-through interface in everything since like Minority Report with Spielberg, Spielberg put a lot of money and effort into the development of that interface for that movie.

And then we’ve seen it from Avatar and Matrix and that whole idea of a see-through interface, which really isn’t that useful, like from a user perspective, this is amazing visually. Yeah, we’ve seen that. So I didn’t realize that was new, but it seemed like an awesome way to like engage with it. What about like characters or anything?

Was there any new peeps that showed up?

Dr Aiden: Yeah, we do have some new people in there, but I, I just wanted to respond to something you had just mentioned there. It is actually, this is the, the classic Doctor Who thing is he almost never is overtly offensive in the way he interacts with other species.

So, you know, he will do things to stop a villain from, you know, achieving their plan. He’ll do things like he shoots the Meep up in the escape pod by the end of it, but like his, his initial reaction is almost always to run, you know, so it’s, it’s something that you’ll see him saying a lot and generally, that’s because he’s trying to observe what’s going on and figure it out, which is usually what you get revealed in the end.

So it’s his non combativeness is actually by design and it was, yeah. At various points in the run in the original run, I think it was the 5th doctor who put his hands on a gun and that became kind of controversial. And then even in this new who run Matt Smith, it was in a trailer at 1 point for an episode, it was the 3rd episode in the season and, you know, it just has him holding a handgun and firing it, which, you know, got a bit of a negative reaction, and then when you saw what was happening in context, you see that it’s not the Doctor using a handgun against a person. It was him shooting a piece of technology with reversed gravity at the time.

So, it’s the kind of thing that he doesn’t like, it’s, it’s rare to see him actually holding offensive weapons, which was interesting.

DRI: Okay. Yeah. That idea that it ties into some of our other more iconic heroes, like, you know, a Captain America or Spider Man or Batman, you know, or there’s generally that idea that they didn’t have offensive weapons.

So Batman’s probably an edge case in that one. And I know they’ve made some changes to cap as well, but for a long time, the silver age view of those heroes was like no guns. Now, some of that was from, you know, especially in America from the comics code, but you know, there was some other reasons for it as well.

That, okay. That’s fascinating. Interesting stuff. What about Peeps? Was there, because again, I kind of got that the family all knew each other, that there was relationships there, but was there any other new characters that were introduced?

Dr Aiden: New character, old organization. So, in the episode, of course, we’re introduced or reintroduced, I guess, to Unit.

This is the, basically the task force that deals with alien kind of stuff on planet earth. They are often associated with working with or working against, depending on the episode needs, the Doctor. And of course, in this one, we get the introduction of an actress who essentially, Ruth Madely, as Shirley Anne Bingham, the newest science advisor.

So, you know, as you saw in the episode through dialogue, the Doctor is the first science advisor for Unit. This is during the period in the original run when he was basically banished to earth for a little while, but Madely, had a role on Years and Years, which is a Russell T. Davis show for the BBC, and I guess that’s seeing her crossover from that now into Who was interesting, and her role was, was fantastic, like, I loved the positioning of her. It was the scene where, you know, “don’t make me the problem”, sending the soldiers on up to the mind control.

And then, later on, having, you know, weapons in a wheelchair, and when the doctor remarks on it, you know, her response is, yeah, we all have as if, you know, this is just, it’s standard operating procedure. All unit members who may or may not be wheelchair bound will have weapons in their devices, which was fun.

DRI: Yeah. There was, there was a lot of that stuff was just and maybe this leads to some of my confusion because they, they dealt with a lot of stuff just matter of factly. Right. Like it did not happen. I noticed there was… okay. so unit, I saw the badge on the lapel, but I didn’t, I thought maybe I was missing something that there was another word for it, but it’s just, it’s called the unit. Okay.

Like they had a Sikh member and there was a few others. associated with it. So there’s a broad spectrum of representation within the show. And like I said, I’m going into this as spoiler free as I can, but I guess there’s some issue. Is there some controversy around the whole woke moment there in the middle?

Dr Aiden: I’m sure there will be just given the, the internet these days and, you know, Doctor Who has run into various.,let’s say communities who perceive themselves as aggrieved, for representation issues in the past. The previous Doctor in particular was the first doctor to be female presenting during her run.

We see another variant, or in Doctor Who terms of regeneration, who is also female presenting and also, African Britain. So it is something that they have run into before. But this is one of the things that I think is again, emblematic of Russell Davis as a creator. He’s not afraid to touch those, those controversial rails or those 3rd rails and really, again, the matter-of-fact nature in which they deal with a lot of the more, I think, sticky issues like the conversation that Donna and her mother have in the kitchen about whether or not she should be, you know, complimenting her daughter Rose for being attractive when she didn’t before the transition, was a lovely kind of way of, again, not, you know, scolding or preaching like, you know, Donna could have, you know, yelled at her mother in that scene.

Like, you know, better stop doing this stuff, you know, whatever, but really just kind of lovingly interacting with her and, you know, modeling that. Hey, it doesn’t have to be uncomfortable for very long. We can actually just have a nice. Little matter of fact discussion, you know, she’s beautiful. She’s gorgeous.

And then, of course, you get the Catherine Tate humor about, you know, “you could be saying that about me”, the generational bit there. But I think that that was quite lovely. And I think the pronoun bit in the middle was also again, another way of making it matter of fact. This, you know, pronouns have been an issue now for a little while.

They tend to cause some people to get very upset about having to use them or not, and you know, turns out, if you’re a Doctor Who fan, you’ve been using alternative pronouns for a long time, because he’s the definite article. He is The Doctor, and Meep is The Meep. So, he idea that it’s Rose that kind of puts that as a question, I think was, it was nice to kind of nudge that conversation in there, and then, you know, to make it so that, you know, actually, the Doctor has an alternative pronoun of the definite article, and always has.

So, You know, pronouns are really not that big of a deal, right?

DRI: Yeah, I liked how they approached it, that it was, it was, a long time ago I talked about, like, I guess it would be framed as agenda-setting in media, like how we learn how to deal with things and everything from commercials to just, you know, how shows present things, especially things like sitcoms, like the Slice of Life stuff, how you might see how the video game or internet is incorporated into family life and then that kind of sets how we talk about it in, in the broader culture.

And so, yeah, just seeing that kind of embedded within it, treated matter of factly and the show moved on, I think was a really effective way of showing to its viewers. a good way of dealing with this. So I know we’re kind of getting a little bit tight on time here. So just in interest of not really spoiling things for any future episodes, but like, what are you looking forward to in the next couple?

Dr Aiden: Oh, for sure. So this is actually an interesting production thing as well. We’ve 60th leading up to this latest episode and it turns out, that most of the footage in those trailers comes from this 1st episode. So, Russell T. Davis himself, in an interview I was reading recently, has mentioned that, you know, they haven’t cut any footage into a trailer from this 2nd episode coming up.

So, we literally know nothing about what’s going to happen in this next episode. We know, of course, how the episode ended. The TARDIS is doing its TARDIS thing. Things look like it’s a crisis and it’s going to take us anywhere it wants in time and space, which is actually something they’ve done quite frequently in Doctor Who, the TARDIS is always enduring and fragile at the same time.

It seems to always be breaking down and going the wrong place and not doing what he wants it to do, but then also always doing what he needs it to do, which is actually a line from the Steven Moffitt episode, called the Doctor’s Wife, I think, and pardon me if I got that wrong, but it’s essentially where he gets to speak to the tardis, ’cause it gets embodied in a human- ish body, for a little while. So you get this idea that, you know, it’s always kind of had that, so that I’m, you know, eagerly anticipating, you know, what kind of surprise are we gonna get next for this next episode?

DRI: All right. And for me, I think it was that toy box at the end with a bunch of little critters.

Some of those I recognize from various… I think there’s a lot of cross pollination between media in, you know, in various, not necessarily transmedia ways, but just the influence from one cultural element showing up in other ways. I’ve seen some of those creatures in other forms and other formats before, whether it’s dungeon and dragons or Warhammer.

So seeing which of those actually show up as dudes in costumes or, as special effects, I’m kind of curious as well. So we will see what happens. So, with that in mind, I think we’re pretty close to our time. So I’m going to, let’s touch base in a week here or maybe less. I think, we’ll get this out probably around the release of the second of the specials, give or take.

And hopefully we can touch base before the third one as well and talk a little bit further. So again, Dr. Aiden Buckland, thank you for joining me. I appreciate the insight, as always. And, from someone with no…, who knows nothing, I appreciate again you taking the time to share with everybody here on the ImplausiPod.

Dr Aiden: Sure. Thanks very much for having me, Doctor, and look forward to talking again.

DRI: Okay. Thank you. And once again, thanks to our guest, Dr. Aiden Buckland. You can contact him at doctoraidenwho at gmail. com. And again, I’ve been your host, Dr. Implausible. Join us again in a week or so for the second of the Dr. Who Christmas specials. We’re going to try and recap that one as well, or give you my impressions as I become a little bit more familiar with the. Dr. Who cinematic universe here. And again, you can contact us at Dr. Implausible at implausipod. com. We have a few other episodes going up shortly, so we’ll keep on with the regular production, but we hope to talk to you again soon until then have fun.

“Wild Blue Yonder” quick take

Had the time to sit down for a watch of the second Dr. Who special episode for 2023, with David Tennant as the 14th Doctor. Found this one much more enjoyable than the first one, as the episode was focused on just the two characters (The Doctor and the Companion), in a spaceship at the edge of the universe.

So there was a lot less of the additional references and information that went into the first episode. Or at least I think there was; as the old Rumsfeld Matrix went, the episode could have been filled with unknown knowns. As a novice viewer, how could I know.

There was some fun stuff there with the idea of “slowness” that I want to get into; there’s at least a couple places where it’s been mentioned in sci-fi that I can recall, and the overall themes of knowning, not knowing, and unthinking thought carried through as well.

I’ll bring up the connections in the next recap episode, which should be out later this week. Until then.

The Star Beast

Finally watched a Dr Who episode. Seriously, hadn’t seen more than a clip or three before. Full thoughts will come in episode 19 of the Implausipod.

An odd episode: it felt like a speedrun through the required story beats to link everything together, and a lot of the rest was elided. So I’m not sure it was a representative story of the franchise; we got equal parts “very special episode” and “fanservice”, and while I was able to make some external connections early (and by the midpoint too), by the end it was all internally referential, and the titular Star Beast was a very thin foil for the rest of the internal narrative that the showrunner wanted to hang over the episode.

As a new viewer, I’m not entirely convinced to stick around. Let’s see how the next one goes…