The End of Time: Guns and Life and Death Decisions

The Doctor Who finale.  The end of David Tennant as the Doctor. A choice: to kill or let the Earth be destroyed.  A choice that he must make with a gun and a bullet.

OK, so guns, something that the Doctor does not use and murder.  Must be a really good and juicy ending to the story arc.  Oh, wait he shoots a machine.  Really, he was given an A or B question and he chose C? RTD is just fucking with us at this point right?

Now, to put this into perspective, let’s look at a good use of a gun as a plot device.

Full Metal Jacket.  If you have seen it: congratulations, you have seen a great movie.  If you haven’t: get your ass down to the video store and get a copy.

So the movie starts out with a group of recruits being trained to go to Vietnam.  Their Gunnery Seargent uses mockery and verbal abuse to harden the recruits into fighting machines as he feels it is his job to product warriors to go fight overseas.

I mean just look at this guy.  The recruits are in their underwear and this maniac is screaming at them because of some petty shit he finds to be an insult to the American way of life.  That’s a scary dude and on top of that he’s trained to kill.

So he picks on this one guy, Pvt. Pyle who is overweight and probably borderline mentally retarded.  He makes this guy’s life miserable.  The rest of the platoon at one point haze Pyle and beat the shit out of him with bars of soap wrapped in towels.

After that, Pyle seems to improve, but he’s actually gone crazy and ends up going apeshit and killing the Gunnery Seargent before blowing his own brains out.

Now why did I mention all of that.  Throughout the training, the recruits have the importance of their rifle drilled into their heads.  When Pyle goes crazy, he starts talking to his gun.  He then uses the gun to kill the Seargent and then himself.

The gun is used as a plot device as it it’s usage defines the recruits as soldiers (that’s how they kill the enemy) and then is used by Pyle to kill the Seargent and himself.  OK, so that makes sense as you kind of see it coming and when the murder happens, it is a satisfying end to the story arc.  The reaction follows the action of training as Pyle had become desensitized to killing.

On the other hand, the shit that we get in The End of Time is not logical.  The Doctor is told that he must kill to sever the link.  It is almost like the woman in white and Wilf are training him to kill.  You would think that he would shoot The Master or Rassillon or maybe he is another part of the link, so maybe he kills himself.  Shooting the machine doesn’t make sense.  We are told that The Master is the link, the other side is Rassillon.  Having The Doctor be the bridge I could buy since he ended the time war, but the machine had no part in the Time War.

My advice to RTD: “Stop writing crappy endings, if you can’t come up with an ending for an arc yourself, just steal one from someone who could.  Your fans won’t be upset, heck you can even make it a nod to a fellow filmmaker and people will respect you for it.”

The old series was great because there were consequences for The Doctor’s actions.  Perry never made it back to Earth, The Doctor could have stopped the Daleks from existing but failed.  He changed the course of events on planets, but that hardly happens anymore.  RTD teased us about killing Rose, but then he didn’t kill her.  He teased us about a companion dying but then no one died.  Hell, even David Tennant’s own death sequence turned into a frigging walk down memory lane.

I just  hope that the next season brings some better stories.  Otherwise Dr Who is turning into another Heroes, but worse.  Even Heroes kills off some of its characters in order to show that a plot exists.

Heroes: The Angry History

OK, so I saw the season finale and wow, just wow.  What a pile of shit!

Really, the evil mastermind can be defeated if everyone just walks away?

He doesn't try to raise a bunch of walls to keep people from leaving?

How about locking the individuals away in cells and making them stay?

No, they puss out again and the whole season has built up to...drum roll please...a talking to.

That's right, they talked the bad guys down.  Sylar was so damn cool being able to fight off like one damn guy.  Oh wait, it should have ended with him fighting the entire carnival and not being able to let any of them die, so he goes all berserk and beats the shit out of all of them while protecting all of their lives at the same time.  How's that for an ending?  And I just came up with that...while I was writing it...and I'm on the john.  OK, that last part is a lie, but my point still stands.

And don't get me started on the Peter v. Samuel confrontation.  They pushed dirt.  I don't care how you slice it...they pushed dirt.

So, what did they stop, like 1000 people being violently killed by Samuel.  Oh, wait, in the time they did that more people died of hunger and disease in Haiti (probably).  So, why don't they just grab the guy who can make shit grow, convince him that Samuel is a douchy guy and have him grow cabbages for Haiti.  Why cabbages you ask?  Why not carrots and apple orchards and a bunch of other stuff that is really good for you? Because free food should not taste good, it should just nourish you so you don't die, otherwise you're OK with getting handouts, but that's a different matter.

Why didn't they make it more epic, like Samuel was going to cause an Earthquake and hit Manhattan with a tidal wave 600 feet tall so it will kill millions of people across the eastern seaboard.  You know, some really epic shit like in season one where they were going to nuke New York.  You see, that was really messed up and so had to be avoided.  1000 people dying at a carnival.  You can write that off as the ferris wheel spinning out of its holding and crushing them all to death.  You can't write off 6 million people, but 1000, well there's lots of example throughout history where a few people in an isolated area can just be written away by the media.

All in all, the bit with Claire revealing that she has powers was awesome and it does set up a neat next season, but the rest was a pile of crap.  I'm still waiting for the main characters to go all X-Men on us and they haven't.  I blame all of the bad ratings and the declining popularity on the writers and their inability to move forward with a perfect setup each season.

Season 1 ended well.  Then you had a rival team of supers in season 2.  So what happens, they go rob a bank.  Really a bank? Not a nuke silo or a toxic gas storage facility?  They want cash?  OK, why not.  They also have an immortal guy who wants to kill off humanity with a virus.  Great idea, but wait, he gets frozen in time and buried alive.  Yeah, that's a good use of evil Wolverine with a great accent and the ability to deliver awesome one liners.

Season 3 started off all right.  You had an evil corporation, headed up by a guy who can steal powers from the good guys.  You even had a pair of twins with the power of life and death. Awesome, oh wait, the life brother gets clubbed to death.  The death sister gives up her power (which she could not control, which basically writes plots by itself) and then the evil guy with the power over death gets his powers frozen and then shot in the head.  Does his regeneration kick in when everyone walks away?  I would think not otherwise he would have shown up again.  And surely they weren't stupid enough to just walk away without checking.  Oh and for good measure, why don't we make it so the main good guy who was the ying to Sylar's Yang can't have more than one power at once.  Yeah, that's some good writing.

And then we got the disaster that was Season 4.  Carnies...the bad guys are carnies...think about it.  Oh, and the main bad guy is a walking Irish stereotype.  He should have just had a rant about potatoes at some point just to complete the insult.  Plus he attacks civilian population and has a family of outcasts.  Why didn't we just call Samuel Ira and complete the idea.  He could have worked for a snobby British family and had then shit all over him in his childhood.  While we're stealing random things from history and mixing them with racist stereotypes, let's just to town on it.

Overall, I used to be a huge fan of this series and it has become a very sad thing over the years.