Neil Gaiman Writing for Doctor Who Sounds Like A Crap Idea To Me.

[x_los]

me:  Also neil gaiman might do an episode of Who. If so I will be SO PISSED.

9:33 PM L: o.O why?

9:34 PM me: he's a bad writer for Who. Whimsical even for that show, lazy, and his essay on the serial War Games was, if read carefully, a case study in Not Getting a show

9:35 PM "If I ever got a hold of that canon, I would un-happen so much" ...shut the fuck up. That is NOT how you approach a 40 yr old canon

 L: Ah. Well, I spose. I'm not entirely sure he's too whimsical for that show, though. >.>

  Okay, THAT is ridiculous.

9:37 PM me: This essay really proved to me he was? It's what Rachel bitches about re: his lack of political saliency, only translated into literature: he was like, "We should never ever ever have seen Gallifrey, b/c Time Lords should be from some unimaginable high, cold place beyond comprehension." And it's like: "Bitch: nothing is beyond art, k? You seem to like the IDEA of the story better than the story, and while that's at first glance charming it's actually an anti-narrative impulse. Also? In a long, developed canon? You pick out the threads you like and work with them. You don't UNHAPEN a canon."

9:38 PM L: Yeah. You don't just go "hey, I wanna write for this" and then proceed to say you'd entirely fuck up the canon.

  Also, um. Not seeing Gallifrey? = weird.

9:39 PM me: yeah, it's his typical bullshit where he prefers mythic SUGGESTION to commitment to engagement with whatever he's working on

9:40 PM L: yeah. I can see both sides of that, though I don't think never seeing gallifrey would be a good choice (possibly because it's already happened).

9:45 PM me: I think that never exploring his cultural background would be a pussy move

9:46 PM 

 L: indeed. I can just say that there is an argument for Not Showing in most cases -- there are ways they could have explored the background without showing Gallifrey, though granted those might have been better explained in a book rather than on screen.

  Wrong medium.

9:47 PM me: But I feel like in saying 'Never Show Gallifrey' what Gaimen meant was "I don't want to even hear about it ever, I want him to have dropped in from some sociological void which we never ever hear anything about b/c it's TOO MYSTICAL!"

9:48 PM L: ahhhh. THAT is a bit iffy, yeah.

9:49 PM me: I feel like sometimes in his mythmaking impulse Gaiman smothers all the other available narratives

 L: Well, yeah, but that's what you get when mythmaking.

  If that's what you do by trade, it's gonna happen.

 me: in some ways Who is a long meditation on exile and return, and you couldn't have that if you never see Gallifrey?

9:50 PM yeah, I guess that's true

  Also, I go in for worldbuilding: I LOVE the hints we get of Gallifrey's creeptastic class structure

  and in war games, that /horrible/ trial scene? Awesome

9:51 PM L: I hearts me some worldbuilding as well, but I know the need for mythic (as quite a few of my stories' worlds want to be that instead of anything else, which is tres annoying in a few dif ways).

  I....don't think I watched that scene?

 me: and the suggestion that they might blot out the names and memories of their undesirables, to the self-destructive point that they've forgotten who the Master is  in Trial of a Time Lord and by then and are helplessly unprepared against him b/c social coherence is THAT important to them? Is so creepy!

9:52 PM L: oohhh, that's creepy! :D <3

9:54 PM me: Um, it was horrible. They took the villain guy who wouldn't talk in his own defense and psycically did SOMETHING to him until he screamed and strated to babble out a defense, and erased him from ever having been, and then cordoned his entire planet off from the universe for eternity for his crimes,and then took the Doctor's companions and destroyed their memories of ever having traveled with him,and then they killed Two, forced him to regenerate into Three, burned the knowledge of how to operate or fix his TARDIS out of him and exiled him to Earth.

  that was a scary ass scene

9:55 PM L: o.O Holy shit.

  indeed.

 me: yeah, this is a kids show how?

 L: heh. it's WHIMSICAL, DAMMIT. That's how.

 me: anyway: that kind of detail about how a planet works/is TERRIBLE? is so. so. creepy.

Comments

[meaning-full.livejournal.com]

After reading this, think I agree.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Word. Also, library ep tonight! Woo!

[bagheera-san.livejournal.com]

On the one hand, I love most of Neil Gaiman's stuff, his short stories/episodic stories in particular. So I think that if he wrote an episode that left larger canon and arcs alone, it could be brilliant, or at least interesting.

But my love for continuity is stronger than my Gaiman love, so I agree - leave Gallifrey alone! Gallifrey is awesome and I miss it and it *works* as the Doctor's background.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

I used to ADORE him. Autographed book (with a little drawing he did me of a wolf in silver sharpie) and Everything adore him, I mean. But lately Rachel Swirsky, this writer/friend of mine, had been taking some piercingly good pot-shots at him, the kind which really made me question whether or not he's just constantly recapitulating this same arty hovering mythic vagueness rather that living up to the potential of say, Coraline, which was exquisite and really reminds me of Lewis's Magician's Nephew in terms of atmosphere, or the story about the Babylon Caliphate (or something like that) in the vignette book of Sand Man.

So while I think Gaiman has a lot of good stuff going on, Rachel's point is kind of well made. His imagery is unchallenging and thus boring, his work as a whole blandly inoffensive because it refuses to confront/develop anything even slightly controversial in a new way (though she gave him an out on race relations--he can handle those alright sometimes, and I might agree with her there), and really, sometimes his language is a little pedestrian.

On the whole I think sometimes Gaiman is a lazy writer, who relies on his established style without really using his platform of assured market success to push himself to creatively develop or explore something more dicey than Ananzi Boys and American Gods, both of which I REALLY disliked.

That doesn't mean he won't write a decent Who ep, but for all the good Blink-esque stand alone quality of it, do I dread the one off-hand Doctor line that bruises something else in canon? Or do I fear it'll be like Girl in the Fireplace: a good episode of something, but completely ill-placed in series!canon/not a good Who ep and thus a case of the writing maxim 'kill your darlings' (meaning 'I don't care how lovely you think that line/plot element/character is, if it's not working in the service of the story you're telling, kill it and save it for something where it DOES work, because your loyalty as a writer is with the thing you're producing, not yourself') not being met? Yeah, I totally do.

[aralias.livejournal.com]

interesting. have you this article to hand? *is curious*

i think moffat will keep his canon-hating ways firmly in line though, and given how much we get about gallifrey at the moment (i.e. not a lot, curse you doctor's daughter for not saying ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING) it shouldn't even be noticeable. hopefully what we'll have is a creepy, beautiful story with interesting characters and good dialogue that stands alone in the series.

essentially i am watching the time lords/gallifrey show (all that rubbish about other aliens just gets in the way), and i wish they talked about it more, but they won't anyway, probably, so hurrah for gaiman. i have a hankering for episodes written by people who can write...

[x-los.livejournal.com]

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/05/nature-of-infection.html

Here you are!

I just got done doing the 'Mah feelingz on Gaiman and the Short Narrative, let me show u them' dance in the comment above x_x. Suffice it to say that sometimes I like Gaiman, sometimes I'm thoroughly disenchanted with him.

But you make a good point: the episode will not be that Dalek two parter in New York. That is goodness enough. It will be way, WAY better than that. And for that I'm thankful!

[gritsinmisery.livejournal.com]

I'm kinda thinkin' all this Gaiman-will-write crap is just a couple of off-hand remarks that got blown way out of proportion. Yeah, he took a Francis when asked about it because hey, who'd want to nail that door shut before it was even opened? He can be a fan-boi of geektastic proportions. But honestly, 1) he's constantly overscheduled and 2) even script-writing time for 2010 is a long way off.

So I'm viewing the whole thingumy as just another case of fandom-wank until the episode title / writer list for the 2010 season (Would that be season 5 or 6? Are the hols specials going to be designated as 5 all by themselves?) comes out and his name is on it.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Francis? Bwah?

Eh, his lj seemed to suggest not terribly subtly that something was in the works? V. "I'll tell you when I get it" rather than if. But yeah. I'm certainly not freaking out, but for all the things listed in the response to Bagheera's comment, I'm more just pondering how I'm reconsidering my childhood love of Gaiman now and finding him not as awesome-sauce as I used to think he was.

I have nooooo idea how they're dealing with specials in terms of counting. But yeah, also not incredibly worried until it happens.

[gritsinmisery.livejournal.com]

"To take a Francis": from the character Francis Urquhart in the House of Cards trilogy. Made into a Beeb mini-series in 1990, with Ian Richardson in the lead. It's brilliant; BAFTA has it on the Top 100 Brit telly shows EVAH. Beg, borrow, or download.

F.U.'s tag line is exactly what Neil said when first asked if he was going to write a script for the 2010 DW season: "You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment." Which is why everybody is wanking over it, b/c when F.U. said it, it meant "yes."

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaah. Yeah, I did have that on Netflix, but then I dropped my netflix account and moved home and such. Though I do wonder where on the nets one downloads such a thing. The fall of TV links is sad indeed. I would so have just watched it.

Ooooooh, I see! Okay.

[draegonhawke.livejournal.com]

...may I just point out that a mythic approach to fiction does not necessarily mean a lack of engagement with the world, a lax approach to worldbuilding, or a smothering of available narratives? >:E I mean, I know you're complaining about something you perceive in Gaiman's work specifically, but way to accidentally invalidate all the work I've done on the Ulan series.

•grump•

[x-los.livejournal.com]

No, it doesn't, but then the mythic does sort of hedge out a sociological approach. It's hard to make that kind of detached analysis of, say, class and gender issues, work with the language and in the framework of the mythic. Additionally, I would feel comfortable saying that the mythic does some monolithic things to the narrative that, in general, make multiple accessible narratives the exception rather than the rule: look at subversion of the mythic, like Angela Carter's Bloody Chamber: such paratexts exist to trouble the fairy tale/mythic specifically because the source texts lack that kind of broad range of characters with diverse/conflicting motivations that compel the reader to understand/sympathize and force a deeper reading (and possibly a more dynamic one, for the reader) than 'the hero was cool and the villain was evol.'

You CAN do worldbuilding with the mythic, but do a lot of people either skimp on the world or reduce it to shiny sensory barrage to highlight the Mythic component? Yeah, high fantasy is good that that.

None of this precludes a developed world, and a writer might be able to squirrel in multiple sympathetic characters with opposing aims and address the world as a sociological reality without breaking the mythic aspect, but I feel comfortable saying that that would demand the writer's attention and skill, because it's not what the Mythic most naturally lends itself to. Does Gaiman consistently feel the need to tax himself in the aforementioned ways? No. He has a formula that consistently produces something pleasant. Entertaining, as Sam would be quick to point out. So that, not Ulan/mythic fiction, is what bugs me.