Doctor Who

English men are more charming when they drop in unannounced into a gal’s home from one of these (my bf isn’t cool enough without the latter).


As much as I love Steven Moffat, trigger of my impish hostility towards cemetery statues, shadows, and creepy library books (mind the children), Neil Gaiman’s season needs to get underway like the "Voyage of the Damned"! Not that Matt Smith is half bad, though he’s just not half as interesting as monologue wonder boy, David Tennant.

One day, I’ll fathom why this show is so awesome despite its episodic adherence to the same story arch. Here’s my reductive outline of the series:

1. Episode after episode of English folk toeing the line before something/someone absolutely ordinary (relative to their time setting) is pod-snatched by aliens and chaos ensues. Or Daleks/Cybermen hover over in hoards and chaos ensues. You get introduced to many flighty, feckless protagonists to be saved by the Doctor and your imagination-lackluster kids have more perfectly mundane or insane things to be paranoid about.



2. The Doctor (our “Gentleman and a Scholar”) and his lady (most likely) sidekick skid in from their prior time leap with the TARDIS. His assistants act as his inquisitive “Watsons” through which he explains the whosit and whatsit to the audience. He resembles not so much a Doctor and more so an alien bounty hunter and in some instances an ambulance chaser of heroic credo since the aliens often seem to anticipate him. His school teacher crush in Human Nature precociously inquired whether anyone would have died if he simply had not arrived.

3. Distracted while the Doctor is busy wiping the galactic floor with aliens or some other stock adversaries like the “Dark Messiah” Master, the “Elderly” Time Lords, or (any housewife will break it down for you) the kitchen-appliance assembled Daleks, you don’t ostensibly notice how this time travel series is devoid of history. Yet admittedly, H. G. Wells was more liberal with his futuristic settings and rinky-dink space gadgetry as well as per popular reception.

4. Because this is still a children’s program, the Doctor doesn’t leave a bed-scattered pile of groupies like James Bond and seems oblivious to his lovelorn female TARDIS-fluffers. The result, broken secondary plotlines of romantic intrigues aside from his rumored wifey. River couldn’t be more femme fatale even without her red hyper-pumps that would make Eddie Izzard proud. As intriguing as it may be that she is keen on the Doctor's many faces, she does get a tad Edgar Allan Poe repetitive with her crow-sinister refrain, “Spoilers”.



5. Christmas Specials.

6. The Doctor wields his sonic screwdriver in the manner of James Bond. And it works like a universal remote control. But just like a remote control, it only works on electronic devices… and alien lifeforms.

7. Television programs work well when the main characters best multitudinous situations and obstacles but essentially the character is sustained as originally introduced (some development/improvements permitted). For the Doctor, many different men played this specific Time Lord over its long history. As much as you can write their personalities into the Doctor archetype, he’s never quite the same because these are totally different actors! Yes, we see past the dandy accessories. Even with the converse sneakers…or bowties!

8. There are tense “take my hand” or “trust me” junctures aplenty between the Doctor and his assistants (and on occasion, tertiary characters), and surely the lass of limited options will take his word if it means survival. Though, just as often as not, the Doctor will be wrong and the assistant will find him/herself MacGyvering their way out of a critical conundrum. *Cough* mulligan.

9. The Doctor occasionally very nearly talks very vicious monsters/adversaries to death.

10. The show usually ends with a Joss Whedon style Doctor vs. alien confrontation after a timely (hah) game of tag (mind the flying objects or conspicuous CG laser beams). And, more often than not there are fatalities. Dum dum duuuum!

Heroes

Just imagine waking up one morning to discover you have amazing powers which you can neither understand nor control.

Then you are approached by a shadowy individual who claims you are a new breed of man: genetically mutated, living proof of evolution itself. And then, as if that wasn't already enough to deal with, you realize you are being monitored and abducted by an evil company that is trying to protect all the other, non-mutated people.

'Wait a minute,' you say. 'I've seen this one. The bald guy from "Star Trek" in a wheelchair gets into everybody's heads, while Xenia from "Goldeneye" and the jealous magician from "The Prestige" try to stop Gandalf from messing up magnets. And there's a dam or something, I'm not really sure.'

Yes, it sounds like "X-men," doesn't it? In the words of "Heroes"-creator Tim Kring, when asked the same question at an early production meeting: 'Well, it just isn't. So there.'

Nonetheless, just in case you find yourself wondering which show you are watching, I have created a handy 10-step guide.

You are watching NBC's "Heroes" if...

1. You recognize that the acting is mainly crap, but don't care.
OK, Sendhil Ramamurthy and Jack Coleman are decent in their roles as Mohinder Suresh and Noah Bennett. But come on, Ali Larter's take on split-personality manifests in Jessica screaming at herself in the mirror. Greg Grunberg lumbers about as Matt Parkman, and somehow manages to screw up the mind-reading acting even more than Mel Gibson did in "What Women Want."

2. The writers do not respect their audience.
The show's inconsistency is its greatest blunder. The writers seem to forget that audiences are smarter these days, and will probably pick up on major plot holes; or perhaps they don't care.

Tension is never sustained because all interesting story-arcs are immediately axed at the start of the next episode: Mr Bennett takes a bullet to forget his daughter, only to remember it all again because of a note. That girl who can IM with her mind just disappears. Matt Parkman gets shot five times in the chest, only to recover without a scratch.

And come on, you know, deep-down, that Hiro and Ando were definitely in LA at the end of the last episode, carless and powerless, and yet somehow they are now in New York again.

3. You are watching it online (legally!) in what is certainly one of the first of many forays to come by a major network into the digital world, as the big-wigs realize that people want to watch shows for free, when they want, where they want. RIP TV-links.

4. Your main bad guy is a disappointing, whinging emo loser.
Sylar's origin story as Gabriel, the unloved clock repairman, negates virtually all of his character's impact. Casting Malcolm McDowell as the evil villain, and leaving his emotional baggage unexplained, would have been far more effective and scary (and far too much like Magneto).

5. You no longer trust yourself to remember if certain characters have met before. But the writers seem to be oblivious to all previous episodes anyway, so why shouldn't we be. The sheer enormity of the cast makes the show nearly untenable: characters and their subplots disappear for episodes at a time, preventing all understanding of the season's progress so far.

6. Having eyes that turn black and then kill everyone (or put them to sleep or something) now counts as a super-power. Let me remind you that Wolverine had adamantine knives that pierced through his knuckles.

7. You find yourself strangely craving a Nissan.
'Look Ando, Nissan Versa!' / 'Oh Dad, thank you for The Rogue!'
And since when do NYPD patrolmen drive Sentras? Extra points if you can guess the cars that Peter Petrelli and D.L. both drove.

8. Look! We don't know what this is, but it's definitely science stuff!
Why does a high-school lecture about Darwin require Bunsen burners and jars full of colorful chemicals? Not to mention Dr Suresh's sped-up theory of evolution.

9. Characters use their powers only at the most inopportune times.
Why the hell does Claire cut off her toe, stick her hand in boiling water, jump off a platform, etc? Yes, she can regenerate, but it still hurts! And why the hell couldn't Peter just fly into space himself?! And why doesn't Hiro just go back in time and stop himself from saving Kensei's life the first time around? Jeez.

10. Milo Ventimiglia is gasping about being a bomb or something. Every show has its defining moment. I think this one was in the second episode: 'Nathan, don't you get it! I think I can fly!'

Somehow, though, none of this matters. Despite all the talentless writing, atrocious acting, cheesy romances, and dead-end plot developments, I still watch the show, and care about what happens to everybody. Kind of.

And if two-dimensional characterization is what it takes to perpetually keep Hayden Panettiere in a cheerleader's outfit, then so be it.