Dodgy Wood Analogy *Turn Left spoilers*
lol, two more complaints about Turn Left to be commented on...
11. but I just can't get over the one MAJOR flaw with any "events change history" episode - the full butterfly effect. Why didn't such and such happen when such and such happened and wouldn't thingamabob have carried on and the world would have ended because of the woogabib in such and such an episode...
*le sigh* Stop taking everything so literally! Disbelief... try temporarily suspending it. You'll probably find you enjoy television (and possibly life) a lot more.
I know it's hard if you have a literal mind as a result of a literal and logical education but, just sometimes, things don't actually have to make total logical sense to be good, or even great. They can succeed because they make you feel the right emotions or because they provide enough sketchy info to conjour up the right impression of a whole world. Not everything needs to be explained. Storytelling isn't always done like that and doesn't always NEED that to make it's point. It's not a flaw. A MAJOR flaw would have been to give too much detail and make the episode really dull because of all the unnecessary explaining and hoop jumping. Storytelling is the art of entrancing your audience with an idea and a character's journey, it doesn't have to be about dotting every single i in order to achieve that. It just has to do enough to create the right spell.
This was a great episode because it made so many people feel exactly what they were meant to feel (and that's where I think it was far better than Moonlight, which did suffer from a lack of depth). It took the audience through extreme highs and lows in a breathless rush. It was a success because it made the impossible plausible and fascinating for 45 mins.
Is your life really improved by missing the beauty of the whole wood because you're complaining that the species of trees are a little bit wrong?
ETA: I'm not saying it's wrong in life to want things to be dotted and crossed like that. It just can be very wrong in fiction. It's the insistence of this as a "flaw" in the story that got me worked up. It's not. It's a preference on the part of the viewer and, in some ways, it's an ignorant preference that places more importance on ultimately irrelevant details than it does on the job of the author to create a believable, interesting story. Canon is an evil straitjacket for writers. It poisons creativity if they're forced to concentrate on keeping to it rigidly. This is the problem I've addressed before with the whole notion of retcon (the term, not the drug). Retcon has come to imply a negative act. Expanding canon - branching it out and wandering down back alleyways - is NOT a negative act of rewriting the past. Creating more story is NEVER a negative act.
The sheer size of the Doctor who canon (and fanon too!) is the best example of this. It doesn't all fit together neatly and, more than that, it doesn't have to. It's all Doctor Who. Trying to force it into neat time lines is a waste of time because the sheer creativity of the TV series, the novels, the audios... it's mind blowingly beautiful in it's diversity and craziness and creativity. The only true canon in Doctor Who is about being creative and telling a beautiful, ugly, uplifting, tragic, funny, weird and wonderful story with fascinating characters... everything else is movable type.
12. It shows that BBC are cutting back with this show and it showed it too with all parts of past shows put into the show.
*gigglesnort*
It did come across as a episode done a bit on the cheap. On the other hand, it's pretty cool to create a stonking episode out of old bits! Can we class it as one of those trendy mash ups? *wink* Or proof that good storytelling doesn't need to cost a lot...
11. but I just can't get over the one MAJOR flaw with any "events change history" episode - the full butterfly effect. Why didn't such and such happen when such and such happened and wouldn't thingamabob have carried on and the world would have ended because of the woogabib in such and such an episode...
*le sigh* Stop taking everything so literally! Disbelief... try temporarily suspending it. You'll probably find you enjoy television (and possibly life) a lot more.
I know it's hard if you have a literal mind as a result of a literal and logical education but, just sometimes, things don't actually have to make total logical sense to be good, or even great. They can succeed because they make you feel the right emotions or because they provide enough sketchy info to conjour up the right impression of a whole world. Not everything needs to be explained. Storytelling isn't always done like that and doesn't always NEED that to make it's point. It's not a flaw. A MAJOR flaw would have been to give too much detail and make the episode really dull because of all the unnecessary explaining and hoop jumping. Storytelling is the art of entrancing your audience with an idea and a character's journey, it doesn't have to be about dotting every single i in order to achieve that. It just has to do enough to create the right spell.
This was a great episode because it made so many people feel exactly what they were meant to feel (and that's where I think it was far better than Moonlight, which did suffer from a lack of depth). It took the audience through extreme highs and lows in a breathless rush. It was a success because it made the impossible plausible and fascinating for 45 mins.
Is your life really improved by missing the beauty of the whole wood because you're complaining that the species of trees are a little bit wrong?
ETA: I'm not saying it's wrong in life to want things to be dotted and crossed like that. It just can be very wrong in fiction. It's the insistence of this as a "flaw" in the story that got me worked up. It's not. It's a preference on the part of the viewer and, in some ways, it's an ignorant preference that places more importance on ultimately irrelevant details than it does on the job of the author to create a believable, interesting story. Canon is an evil straitjacket for writers. It poisons creativity if they're forced to concentrate on keeping to it rigidly. This is the problem I've addressed before with the whole notion of retcon (the term, not the drug). Retcon has come to imply a negative act. Expanding canon - branching it out and wandering down back alleyways - is NOT a negative act of rewriting the past. Creating more story is NEVER a negative act.
The sheer size of the Doctor who canon (and fanon too!) is the best example of this. It doesn't all fit together neatly and, more than that, it doesn't have to. It's all Doctor Who. Trying to force it into neat time lines is a waste of time because the sheer creativity of the TV series, the novels, the audios... it's mind blowingly beautiful in it's diversity and craziness and creativity. The only true canon in Doctor Who is about being creative and telling a beautiful, ugly, uplifting, tragic, funny, weird and wonderful story with fascinating characters... everything else is movable type.
12. It shows that BBC are cutting back with this show and it showed it too with all parts of past shows put into the show.
*gigglesnort*
It did come across as a episode done a bit on the cheap. On the other hand, it's pretty cool to create a stonking episode out of old bits! Can we class it as one of those trendy mash ups? *wink* Or proof that good storytelling doesn't need to cost a lot...