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Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The Talons
posted by clake at 8:38 PM (0) comments
Klake and I have rejoined Netflix in order to catch up on seasons two and three of the new Doctor Who series. (Yes, I've managed to get my wife interested in something this geeky - but only the new ones. She won't touch classic Who with a twelve foot pole.) Doctor Who is one of those things for which you put up with frequent disappointment, because when it's really good the payoff is amazing. A while back I noted on Facebook how wonderful an episode "The Girl in the Fireplace" is. Since then, we've seen "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel" (both are just "okay"), "Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit" (interesting, with neat special effects, but pretty much just copies a jumble of stuff from H.P. Lovecraft, the Alien movies, and Event Horizon) and then finally "Love and Monsters" (Imagine those occasional X-Files episodes where they cast aside the entire tone of the series to do something quirky and funny. This started out with some promise, but went downhill quickly. You could forgive the fact that the Doctor is barely in this episode, if it weren't for the fact that everything that happens is insultingly stupid. If you put writer Russell T. Davies anywhere within 500 meters of a fart joke, the dude will run for it at full speed).
A side-effect of returning to Netflix is once again having access to the numerous classic Doctor Who episodes they have available streaming right on the website. I took the opportunity this past weekend to view "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" and it was exactly what I needed after watching several hours of mediocre Who. Talons is a very well-loved classic episode and for good reason. The writing is good, the tone is spooky, the victorian setting is nicely realized, and Tom Baker is absolutely on top of his game in his portrayal of the Doctor. The villian is an evil, evil man posing as the Chinese god Weng-Chiang, who sends his minions out into the streets of London to vanish innocent, young girls into his wicked lair. Among his minions is the "Peking Homunculus", which looks like a creepy-ass ventriloquist's dummy in traditional Chinese dress, but is in fact something even weirder.
Of course, in the end the Doctor and his cohorts defeat the bad guy and all is well. While surveying the aftermath in Weng-Chiang's now silent lair, they hear distant shouting. Not to worry, it's merely the call of the muffin man! The Doctor buys everyone muffins. As if this episode weren't great enough, it ends with mention of the English muffin: one of the greatest things ever done with the concept of bread since its invention. They are just so great.
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Friday, March 07, 2008
The threshold of the symbolic
posted by clake at 2:11 PM (1) comments
A week or so ago, little Plake insisted on typing something on our laptop. We opened up Microsoft Word and gave him free reign with the keyboard. The results are enjoyable, if a bit avant-garde:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dp8bjfg_13fqx86dw8
I'm so proud!
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