‘Freedom of Expression’

I hate this phrase.

There are many countries where people’s freedom of speech and expression is oppressed, often violently. It is a basic human right that everyone should be given for the sake of a fairer and enlightened society. The problem is that people use this phrase to justify all sorts of twaddle. 

No, You DON’T Have The Right To An Opinion

(I apologise if this post is a little short, but I really don’t think any more needs to be said on this issue.)

The oxford dictionary refers to ‘Opinion’ as: “A belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty.” So, an opinion is just a thing with little justification that gets thrown out there to be devoured by anyone with actual logic, and played around with by those with none.

The phrase “in my opinion” might as well be replaced with: “speaking from a biased, flawed, unjustified standpoint taken directly from my rectum...”

Debates should be contain at least one factual view, followed by a conclusion drawn from said facts. Eg: “America has the most high-school shootings in any first-world nation, and the only similarity between each shooting is that the person responsible for the shooting has access to guns – therefore, gun control is needed NOW.”

It’s fair enough to say: “therefore, my opinion is that gun control is needed NOW” because the opinion is based on fact. But if it’s fact then there’s no need to undermine it with opinion. Why not just say what you conclude, and if there is a flaw or disagreement in the conclusion then the other people debating will point it out.

‘Opinion’ has become like ‘literally’ – a meaningless buzzword inserted into a banal sentence to make that sentence seem less banal. For the next episode of Question Time, they should install chairs that drop the occupant down into an enclosure of tigers if s/he says “in my opinion.”

The Trouble With 'Sherlock'

So I no doubt offended half of the world by saying that not only is current Doctor Who severely flawed, but the show has never been perfect. Now, I might as well offend everyone else in the world by being possibly the only person on the internet to criticise Stephen Moffat’s other massively successful BBC show: Sherlock.

Perhaps Sherlock would be a far better show if I wasn’t overly-familiar with Moffat’s work. If the opening credits said that the show was written and produced by Sheridan Ponsonby, I would probably look upon the whole thing more fondly. But, the fact is that Sherlock himself is stuck between two worlds: intentionally flawed, and unintentionally heroic.

Sherlock is emotionally oblivious, self-absorbed, and constantly endangers others for the sake of the case. These are all character flaws created to produce drama and tension as Sherlock attempts to function in the real world. This is a good thing, and was something sorely lacking during Matt Smiths reign of Doctor Who – as the Eleventh Doctor was basically a god of time and space.

But that’s the problem – despite the base flaws, Sherlock is perfect. He can solve cases in a matter of seconds. He walks into a room and knows everything about it. He’s anti-authority. He has a fussy, mother-like figure look after him. He has at least two women perpetually attracted to him despite him acting like a jerk to them. The closest thing he has to a female antagonist is one who constantly flirts with him. He rents a flat in the heart of London, and never has to worry about money. He’s portrayed by a curly-haired heartthrob with a voice that’s ruined a thousand upholsteries. He does science, but not the icky kind of science where he dissects things but the sexy kind of science where he wears goggles and fiddles around with tubes. He can play the violin so well that he actually composes his own music. He even comes back from the dead! He also evades arrest at the end of series 3 because he’s just so awesome we can’t possibly punish him for MURDER.

He’s actually the most intelligent version of Holmes since that one time Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation cosplayed as him in one episode…and Data was an android capable of learning every language in the world in a matter of seconds (hence his name).

Sherlock is a fantasy. Specifically, it’s Stephen Moffat’s fantasy. He’s created a character that’s perfect in the sense that he has no responsibility or care for anything other than the thrill of the chase. Women find him attractive, and everyone else sticks by Sherlock despite the fact that in reality Watson would’ve left after the first series and Sherlock would’ve been kicked out of his flat the moment he started putting heads in the fridge – then would have been dropped by the police after he almost gets innocent people killed

Out of interest, I took this Mary Sue* test for Sherlock, and got a score of 125. The test says that anything above 50 is a very bad Mary Sue. I think that says everything, really. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to board up my shattered windows in preparation for the next wave of abuse. 

*A ‘Mary Sue’ is basically an author surrogate, or self-insert character. It’s a character who’s idolised by the author despite being poorly written and shallow.

The Trouble With ‘Doctor Who’

…what happened?

Doctor Who Christmas Specials are reliably awful, to the point where despite watching every episode during the rest of the year I will refuse to watch the Christmas special because I don’t want to ruin my Christmas.

They conform to every whimsical cliché associated with Christmas whilst attempting. This year I managed to get to the 12 min mark before shutting off iPlayer. My palm immediately hit my face when Clara awakes to find Santa crashed on her roof.  Then we have a sudden shift in tone to deathly-serious, then back to painfully unfunny comedy, then to deathly-seriousness, and then Santa rides in on a reindeer. Then he gets off the reindeer and uses a remote control to lock the reindeer like a car. It’s at that point I turned off. I then looked at the reviews to find that the critics had obviously seen a completely different episode to the one I did.

I wasn’t invested. The tone was jumping from your typical snow-encrusted magic to hard sci-fi with no transition or space to breathe. And within the first ten mins we had already seen the monsters in full-frame with clear bright lighting. Not to mention these monsters were blandly designed and had a telepathy-related power that I swear every alien in series 8 had.

What happened? How did we go from An Unearthly Child to this?

Of course, Doctor Who doesn’t do hard sci-fi anymore. That’s fine. Doctor Who has endured for over fifty years because it’s evolved, and if you want to see how quick and readily the show evolves: look at Tom Baker’s run. At the start the show was a gothic horror, then showrunner Peter Hinchcliffe was fired because people were accusing Doctor Who of being ‘too dark’ – which is ironic considering that Tom Baker’s first few years were in hindsight the best the show has ever gotten. Then the show became a pantomime in space, which is clearly what inspired current Showrunner Stephen Moffat to include a central-locking Rudolph. This era was awful, and so Doctor Who was dragged kicking and screaming into the 80’s with a brand-new theme tune and a new hard sci-fi tone. Tom Baker was still on board, but his characteristic joy was gone – mostly because Baker was ill during shooting.

The show had radically re-jigged its theme and tone thrice, all with the same lead-role. And each era had it’s good and bad stuff, though the panto-era only had one good thing in the form of The City of Death.

Because, and this is the most crippling thing: Doctor Who is and has never been perfect. What sums up the show for me is how The Caves of Androzani – one of the best episodes not just of Doctor Who but of any sci-fi show – being immediately followed by The Twin Dillema…which is one of the worst episodes not just of Doctor Who but of any sci-fi show. This tragically funny sequence of events demonstrates how Doctor Who has the potential to be (and at rare moments is) a truly fantastic show, yet it so often hides behind the sofa of shlock. The good/bad ratio is probably at 1:50.

But there are times when one series as a whole will be better than others. As I said, the Hinchcliffe-era was the golden age of Doctor Who. Meanwhile, everyone can agree that the Peter Davidson-era was bland with a handful of exceptions, the Sylvester McCoy-era started as awful then suddenly became good, and we don’t mention the Colin Baker-era. It makes us want to hurt people.

The last series showed promise with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, who is vastly different from any other incarnation – but the problem is that the show is turning into Sherlock In Space…only written by a ten year old with a fetish for middle-aged women. Moffat once again claimed that the show was ‘getting darker,’ yet we opened with giant dinosaurs and closed with Santa Claus Conquers The Bland Aliens.

Can someone please pull this man away from the writing desk?