2 Articles in May 2013

1. This season of Doctor Who has disappointed

   Sunday, May 19, 2013 5:42 AM -04:00

   I just watched “The Name of the Doctor”, the finale to this season of Doctor Who. My roommate and her daughter were in London yesterday to see Phantom of the Opera, so I waited until this morning to view the finale with them—we had a bacon breakfast party. Steven Moffat and the BBC have been promoting this episode for quite a while now, as part of their larger promotion for Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary and the accompanying special. We were promised some big reveals that “change everything.” At the very least, we were promised the secret behind Clara, the impossible girl. In my opinion, Moffat didn’t deliver on the former, but at least he explained the latter, in his usual self-fulfilling timey-wimey way.

   No spoilers about the finale, beyond what you might have seen in previews or trailers broadcast on TV.

   I feel bad for my roommate. I suppose I sound a bit like an Eeyore to her, with my constant, academic critiques of the new Star Trek franchise (we’re going to see Into Darkness in less than hour, but that’s another blog post) and now this season of Doctor Who. We all express our love…

   Read more…

2. My top 11 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes

   Wednesday, May 8, 2013 3:14 PM -04:00

   A friend decided we are going to have a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon this weekend with two other like-minded teachers at my school. I suggested that, in order to select which episodes we watch, we should all come up with a short list of our favourite episodes. Obviously there will be considerable overlap—who isn’t going to put “Once More, with Feeling” on their top 10? We can watch the ones we all agree are the best, then each champion one or two of the favourites remaining.

   So tonight I sat down and took some time to consider what my favourite Buffy episodes might be. This is a challenge. Buffy is one of those shows where individual episodes might not be great, but their contribution to the show’s overall plot and character arcs is significant. The value of the show, to me, is the way the characters change and grow over the course of the seven years we are with them. Like many shows, season 1 is not great—none of its episodes made my list, as you shall see, although I considered several—but it is formative. It lays the foundations for the Scoobies, the starting points from which they grow…

   Read more…