Father Brown and Lucifer

Last week I wrote about how I sometimes think about what I would do if I was somehow transported back in time.  It’s a fun way to pass the time.  A related time killer is to wonder what I would do if I somehow ended up in some series.  (It could also be a movie, but series usually cover more time and so give more opportunity to explore.)  For shows I’ve already watched, it’s fun to wonder if I could explain things to fix the problems that will come up, like uncovering the villain not revealed until a season finale cliffhanger.  And for shows that I haven’t seen, I wonder how I could explain things using my general series knowledge, like if it’s a police procedural than the character played by the famous – to me – actor is probably the murderer.

At some point in this bizarre train of thought, I wondered what series I would like to binge watch with a character from another series.  Yes, it’s weird, but what you do to pass the time makes perfect sense.  After some thought, I figured I would like to watch Lucifer with Father Brown.  Lucifer is a show about Lucifer getting bored of Hell, so he retires to Los Angeles.  There he meets a homicide detective and starts solving murders.  Father Brown is the title character from the 2013 series who lives in a quaint, small, 1950s English village where there is a murder every other week.  And half the time the local police arrest the wrong person and it takes Father Brown to piece together the truth.

The reason I would like to do this, is because I think Father Brown would be most interested in Lucifer, for both the crime solving and theological aspects.  I also feel that if the two could meet, Father Brown would become friends with Lucifer.  There have been several episodes of Father Brown where he’s met homosexuals and instead of preaching damnation at them, he’s treated them as people who are probably having a difficult time, and if there was anything he could do to help them he would.  In the case of Lucifer, I suspect he wouldn’t have the knee-jerk reaction of just taking God’s side and would actually listen to what Lucifer has to say.  One of the things that keeps coming up in Lucifer, is how he hates that so many people blame him for their actions: the devil made me do it.  And I’m sure Father Brown would understand that.  As for Lucifer, I think at first he would be amused with Father Brown’s willingness to bend the rules, but then he’d come to respect his judgment. 

Having written all that out, I’m now wondering if there is any Father Brown-Lucifer crossover fanfic.  It’s the internet, so there probably is.  That may, or may not, be horrifying.  Anyway, that’s just something weird I do to pass the time, and it fits in with the new season of Lucifer starting tomorrow.  In case you’re wondering, another show I might want to watch with Father Brown would be Warrior Nun, just because why not?

Some thoughts on Good Omens

Spoilers.

Good Omens – the book – is fantastic.  There are a ton of little jokes and references that you can’t always remember, so every time you reread it, you rediscover these gems.  Good Omens – the series – I found … a little meh.

Now I know that books and TV series are different media: what can be easily done in one can’t always be done in the other.  And adapting a book allows the screenwriter to show a different angle of the story, as well as maybe fixing a few inconsistencies, or things that didn’t work all that well.  (I didn’t miss the other Hell’s Angels not being in the series.)  I am perfectly fine with changes being made, as long as the end product works.

First off, I absolutely love the portrayal of Aziraphale and Crowley.  That episode with a half hour showing them throughout history was fantastic, and a great example of a screenwriter filling in some gaps from the original story.  I would watch a cut of the show that was just their scenes.  It’s just that, in my opinion, everything else kind of fell flat. 

For example, in the book the Apocalyptic Horsepersons were very important minor characters.  In the series, they seemed little more than glorified cameos.  This is a weird, personal thing, but whenever I think of the book, I think of this woman I used to know.  She might have been the one who introduced me to the book, now that I think of it.  Anyway, I remember her talking about how she loved this one scene involving War.  A scene that wasn’t in the series.  So in my mind, one of the key elements of the book isn’t in the series. 

While that is a personal issue the makers of the series should not worry about, there is one they should have worried about.  And that’s the Them.  There is a lot of Them cut from the book, and I think that hurt the show.  Instead of spending a lot of time getting to know these characters, we got the CliffsNotes, which cut some important details.  In the book, there’s another gang of kids, the Johnsonites who don’t show up in the series.  Well, Greasy Johnson shows up at the beginning, but I don’t think he’s mentioned or seen again.  In the book there’s a scene where Adam and the Them talk about what it would be like if they completely beat the Johnsonites.  They talk about how things wouldn’t be as interesting without them, and how some of the locals would prefer not having either gang.  And Adam comes to the conclusion that it would be better if neither gang “won.” This is the argument he uses later against the forces of Heaven and Hell.  He uses it in the series, but without the setup.  So one of the components used to stop Armageddon just … shows up basically out of thin air. 

Several of the reviews I’ve seen talk about how great Aziraphale and Crowley are, and I agree.  But I think they were made too important.  I always saw them as major characters, but as part of an ensemble cast.  That we saw more of them is great, but I think too much was cut from other characters.  If they had had an extra episode to include more from the book – especially for the Them – then it would probably be something I’d gladly rewatch whenever I reread the book.  But as is, I’d rather just watch an Aziraphale/Crowley cut.

Thoughts on Doctor Who Series 11

In late June of 2007, some friends of mine got married in Hawaii (she was from there, he grew up there), and a group of us went out for the wedding.  Besides being with friends, it was a chance to go to Hawaii, visit Pearl Harbor, and take notes for my novel Damocles – which I will probably never get around to writing – that is set in Hawaii.  For all the benefits, there was one major downside: I had to wait to see “The Last of the Time Lords.”

At the time there were two ways for me to watch Doctor Who.  I could watch it on – I think it was still – the Scifi Channel, but I think it aired a month or so after airing in the UK and there would be a few minutes sliced here and there to make room for the commercials.  Or I could wait six or eight hours after it aired in the UK and hunt down a bootleg version.  I opted for the uncut, bootleg version.  Like I was going to wait for doctored Doctor Who. 

But for that trip to Hawaii – where I tapped out a rhythm of four about … fifty times a day – I couldn’t pack my desktop.  I didn’t have a laptop back then, and I don’t even know if the hotel had internet for all the rooms.  There was an internet café a couple blocks away, but I think you had to buy your time.  So I had to wait until I got back home to watch the final episode of Series 3.  And I think it was one of the first five things I did when I got home.  Of course my experience wasn’t unspoiled.  There were a couple of steps between the airport and my apartment.  One stop was at a friend’s house where I checked my email and whatnot, and some post somewhere that I tried to skip over had the reveal of who the Face of Boe was.  Still, I was super excited to see how The Doctor, Martha, and Jack defeated The Master. 

Compare that to my actions for the latest series.  I now have BBC America, but Doctor Who aired at the same time as Supergirl, and I don’t have a DVR.  I think it did reair, but at 4:00AM, which is a bit late for me.  So I’d wait a day or two – depending on my work schedule – and watch the episodes on the BBC America website.  Up to episode 8, “The Witchfinders.” I started watching it, but I think I wasn’t feeling all that well and after five minutes or so I turned it off.  And I kind of forgot about it.  It wasn’t until the day the final episode aired that I finished watching it as well as “It Takes You Away.”

And it was a couple of days before I saw “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos,” but that was due to some issue with the website.  Of course I had seen some spoilers for it, which didn’t excite me.  “Oh, this villain that I had forgotten about because I didn’t think them that special comes back?  Joy.” And I was going to write up these thoughts after the end of the season, but work and stuff got in the way, and I decided to wait until the New Year episode came out, which I found as just more of the same.  And then work and other stuff got in the way, but here they are, finally.

Now, do I think this last series of Doctor Who was as good as earlier series?  No.  But that’s not new.  I think Doctor Who peaked in the Tennant years.  But this last series did nothing to stop the trend.

One of the things that really excited me during the Series 1 was when the Doctor first notices that he’s being followed by “Bad Wolf.” I remember going online searching out lists people had made on when Bad Wolf had appeared and reading through their theories.  I don’t know if it had been mentioned in any promos or anything that the series would build up to something, but I love the idea of long story arcs.  In later series I’d spend hours thinking about what the connections were and what they were building up to.  The destinations weren’t always great, but the journeys were fun. 

So when this series came out and it was stated that they were just individual episodes without an arc, it was like them saying, “Oh, this thing which is one of the things you enjoy most about the show, we’re not doing.”

Now if the individual episodes were spectacular, I’d get over it.  But the episodes this series were just … fine.  Which isn’t a slam, because I think 90% of Doctor Who episodes are just fine.  I found the beginning of “It Takes You Away” super interesting, but it then kind of fell on its face.  Which, again, isn’t new, “The Doctor’s Daughter” for example.

So if the individual stories aren’t that great, and there’s no overall arc, perhaps the characters and acting can make up for it.  Well, no.  I think they made a mistake by having so many companions.  In “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” they had to introduce the latest Doctor, three companions, two other supporting characters, and a villain.  It was too much.  I think they would have been better off just trying to introduce the Doctor and one or two companions.  That way they’d have more time to develop this main character.

And speaking of companions, there are some issues I have.  About two-thirds of the way through “Resolution” I thought, What’s Yaz doing here?  She got a couple of people’s phone numbers.  That was basically her role.  Yes, it fits with her being a cop, but in an episode where a couple of cops are killed, you’d think there would be opportunities for drama.  Does the Doctor drop Yaz off for her shift each day, or is Yaz burning through her vacation days?  What if Yaz called in “sick” and it was her partner and substitute that were killed?  That would make her question what she was doing and if she wanted to be a companion or a cop.  That’s not the only thing they could do, but it would be something.

Something that confuses me a bit, is Ryan’s dyspraxia.  I had never heard of it, and after the first episode I assumed it was there for some reason.  But it seems like it only ever comes up if the writers remember.  To be honest, I do wonder if the actor is acting out symptoms of dyspraxia, but I’m not paying enough attention to notice.  They made a big deal of it in the first episode, but then it seemed they – and me – forgot about it.

Since I wrote about Yaz and Ryan, I should also say something about Graham.  I like Graham.  Well, I like the idea of him.  I would love to see the Doctor with just an older companion, someone with more life experiences than the youthful companions the Doctor usually has. 

Which I guess now brings me to the Doctor.  Now some will probably say that I don’t care for Series 11 because the Doctor is a woman now.  But I didn’t care that much for Series 10.  I think my biggest issue with Whittaker’s Doctor is that I don’t know how to describe her Doctor.  I don’t have a sense for her unique take on the character.  To be honest, this is usually something I do in hindsight.  For example, I wasn’t all that impressed with Smith’s Doctor and I realized it was because I was comparing him to Tennant’s.  Tennant’s Doctor could be silly, serious, frightening (what he did to the little girl in “Family of Blood” still creeps me out) and he could go back and forth at ease.  Smith, I felt, could be silly and serious, but all the attempts at frightening were cringing, in a bad way.  How much of that was because of their inherent acting abilities, the direction, the scripts, I don’t know.  I’m not saying I think Actor A is better than Actor B, I’m just saying I preferred one’s version of a character over another’s. 

Going back to Whittaker, after eleven episodes, I don’t really have a feel for her version.  Eccleston only had thirteen episodes, but I feel I know his Doctor far better.  And I think a big reason for that is that he started out with only one companion.  With fewer main characters, you can spend more time with the ones you have.

So what’s my final opinion?  I hope Series 12 is better.  Of course, I’ve been hoping that for the past two or three series.  One of these days it will have to come true.

Quick thoughts on the new Doctor

So the other day “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” aired marking the first episode of the Thirteenth Doctor as played by Jodie Whittaker.  Afterwards I saw many tweets and Facebooks posts about how she is now some people’s favorite Doctor.  And I found that a little … odd.  By no means am I saying she’s a terrible Doctor, it’s just that I enjoyed Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor, but it took half a season or so for me to realize that I enjoyed David Tennant’s Doctor more.  My current ranking of my favorite, new Doctors goes Tenth, War, Twelfth, Ninth, Eleventh.  I don’t know where Thirteen fits yet.

Trying to fit her in based on her first episode is, as I said, odd.  Especially since the episode itself wasn’t – in my opinion – all that special.  I mean, the Doctor is a little out of it because their regeneration is still cooking.  When have we seen that before, except in “The Christmas Invasion,” “The Eleventh Hour,” and “Deep Breath.” Give me four or five regular episodes to see the fully formed Doctor in new adventures and then I’ll start jostling her into my rankings.

One thing that does give me hope that Thirteen ranks pretty high, is that in “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” there were a few moments where I thought I saw the Twelfth Doctor shining through.  I can’t really put my finger on it, but there were a couple of lines and just the way she said them or moved made me think of Peter Capaldi.  If it wasn’t just my imagination, then we could be looking at some good Doctor Who.  Let’s hope we have the combination of a good Doctor with good writing.