TrueGentleman

Even at its best, the series can only aspire to be high-grade fan fiction.

Although DC has enlisted its top-shelf talent in this enterprise, the roster doesn't include their current golden boy, Grant Morrison. As it turns out, he declined their offer:
Alan Moore - who repeatedly refused to continue Watchmen as a franchise after negotiation problems over creator's rights - has some pretty tart comments about this:
Oh, and here's the Comedian cover:

Putting virtual costume pieces on sale for a limited time is a baffling sales move that Paragon Studios keeps making. (Either its marketing department is still thinking along brick-and-mortar lines, or there's some coding reason why having everything available all time would be a problem.) The better online retail strategy is to discount items at various times, e.g. themed costumes with holidays, and offer them at full price the rest of the year. It's not as though there's actual inventory to warehouse.

He seems to keep going back and forth on answering the question of his tenure in interviews. Here's some more of what he said at the National Television Awards:
And referring to his eventual successor in light of Tom Baker's record stay in the role:
So, if there's one thing we've learned in this thread, it's that one Doctor Who-related question leads to another that rarely gets answered.

That's definitely an ingenious substitute for a monkey face. With your permission, I may want to try it out on a concept simian char of my own. Homages to Detective Chimp and Congorilla will have to wait for a proper ape pack, though. (Please get on this, Noble Savage.)

Matt Smith is all for it (name-checking Tom Baker, David Tennant, Christopher Eccleston, and Paul McGann). Moffat's been a little more secretive, though.

Congratulations - that's most impressive. (The CoH costume creator really does need a proper ape/chimp/gorilla face, though.)

That presupposes a strict progression of cause to effect. One must take a non-linear non-subjective viewpoint when it comes to such matters. How else would Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, and Peter Davison be able to appear as the Doctor in later episodes?

(Things do get a bit complicated with all this wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey ... stuff.)

If Big Finish adventures count, then Tom Baker is back in the running thanks to his new recordings.

And I thought "Who is the 'best' Doctor?" was this programme's most heated debate...

So, the role of "The Doctor" is like a conferred title, i.e. considered permanent until a successor steps up?

Interesting - thanks for the article. I'm not sure what to make of it, honestly. On one hand, in the recent piece I linked to earlier, he says that Doctor Who "is bigger than all of us actors in it. It's bigger than everyone in it and it will continue far longer, way after me. I am here for a very small period of time." Next he says, "I'm here for the future, I love working on the show. I have no plans to leave." But later he says, "I've got a year of Who and then I'll take it from there really" (which may just refer to his contractual period).

Whatever the case, I hope he stays in the role as long as he enjoys it and can bring his best to it. There's no term limit to the Doctor.

Did he? Do you have more to go on? After his first series, he'd periodically mention that he wants to do movies, too, so the expectation is that he'll relinquish the role in a year or two - or who knows? He's definitely sticking around for the 50th anniversary.

Interesting - I haven't been keeping an eye on CPU usage lately since I'm playing only infrequently. I'm going to have to try out windowed mode again since I switched to full screen a while ago. I'll report back what I find.

I will say, however, that nothing beats playing a native client (Cider being better than nothing, I suppose).

Well, the gorilla learned its lesson to a degree and made the entry-level travel power available at 20 and dialing down the other level stages, but otherwise, it's designated mounts as a combination of money sink and speed throttle. The broader question is why anyone would create a virtual world and then make it difficult to travel around it. Paragon Studios understands that travel should be part of the fun of playing and therefore gives us multiple options early on for getting around.

Similarly, a few other MMOs have features similar to SSKing, but for the most part, game studios fail time and again to allow players the freedom to play alongside whoever they want.

He'll repay your efforts - he and Karen Gillan just won their respective categories in the National Television Awards for acting. Incidentally, Smith confirms that he won't be leaving soon (contrary to rumor).

Otherwise, as the t-shirt says...

I call shenanigans! Statesman has clearly publicly faked his death in order to avoid confronting Emperor Cole and the righteous forces of Praetorian Earth. This obsequious eulogy by his servile lackey is an obvious ploy to enlist the so-called heroes of Primal Earth for a show of force in order to have them gang up on our glorious leader at a later date.

That's precisely why it seems most relevant here, although an in-game speech from Statesman during the SSA would also have been suitable.

If Positron wishes to bury his friend, that's one thing, but this is a public eulogy that has more in common with a classical funeral oration. Positron is not merely extolling Primal Earth's pre-eminent hero in hopes of inspiring others to strive to fill the place in the city he leaves behind (or at least avenge his death), but also articulating a public expression of what it means to be a hero in Paragon City, since Statesman embodied that ideal.

That's an impressive catalog of great deeds for a superhero and a multi-generational portrait of a family man. What's missing, though, is a fully articulated worldview that motivated him to become a hero, differentiating Primal Earth's Marcus Cole from the villainous versions apparently in every other parallel universe. All the classic superheroes (and their nemeses) have defining creeds or personal outlooks that ground their high-flying adventures. We certainly know the philosophies behind Lord Recluse's campaign for world domination and Tyrant's quest for total control - and they're justifiably celebrated or reviled from here to Praetoria. Statesman, however, never possessed any shades to his character besides a four-color "might for right" comic book heroism.

If we don't really know what Stateman stood for, why should we be moved by his fall?

I and my sci-fi–loving friends blocked out yesterday evening to watch the first three episodes in a batch. By the end, we had come up with our own catch phrase to explain away the numerous plot holes in all the con-of-the-week stories, "He's from 1963!"

Why can't our heroes put out an APB on the former warden's murderer? He's from 1963!

Why can't our heroes ask for SWAT backup before they go off to stop the sniper? He's from 1963!

Why doesn't the TV-pretty detective tell her uncle that she's found out her grandfather was really a prisoner? He's from 1963!

Why does Hauser have to cancel the Amber alert since they know who the kidnapper is? He's from 1963!

Why are our heroes going to have to spring the bank robber? He's from 1963!

In our book, genre shows receive one full pass for suspension of disbelief. Alcatraz-as-The-Philadelphia-Experiment already used up this show's. J.J. Abrams & co. will have to make the effort to build up some suspense and paranoia if the time-travelling prisoners conceit is going to resonate. (For an example of that kind of atmosphere done right in a sci-fi procedural setting, see Joe Ahearne's series Ultraviolet.) Maybe we'll let another batch of episodes accumulate before giving it another chance. At the moment, it doesn't have much in common with that other island-based time-travelling show aide from its credentials.

Moffat has been quite clear that he regards Doctor Who as a family show, so his series has been even more kid-friendly than RTD's. It's a far cry from Tom Baker's "gothic horror" era under producer Philip Hinchcliffe.

I would have preferred River Song to have been left alone to preserve her mystery, but at this point, her character has been acceptably fleshed out. The real problem is that Alex Kingston is growing noticeably older while River is supposed to be younger than when she was introduced. As for the Mary Sue charge, Russell Davies already went down this path with his Marty Stu character, Captain "Shiny Teeth" Jack Harkness.

By the way, his name is Moffat. (Georgia Moffett is the actress who played the titular Doctor's Daughter and is now married to David Tennant.)

He may look young, but with his jutting jaw, high forehead, and gangly limbs, he looks sufficiently odd to play a human-like alien. Moffat described his performance as a young person put together by old people.

Smith makes a strong first impression, but he does take a little longer to establish his characterization of the Doctor. He's fully settled in to the role by "Amy's Choice", and by the season finale of "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang", he's become one of my favorite Doctors. His Series Six gives Troughton, Baker (Tom, obviously), and Tennant some serious competition.

"Motion capture" is at this point a misleading term - it should be upgraded to "performance capture". When the older technology was able only to render basic movements and stick-figure limbs, it barely counted as computer-assisted rotoscoping. Actors are now able to employ a board array of facial expressions and body language as part of their performances, with a range that's expanded from the subtle to the exaggerated. It's the art of finding a balance between those extremes that separates performance capture from "live" movie acting or mime. When this is done well, it's an amazing phenomenon. Too often, though, either the actors don't full comprehend they need a different style of performance (e.g. Tom Hanks in Polar Express, Jim Carrey in A Christmas Carol, or, frankly, most of Serkis's fellow cast in Tintin), or the directors just assume the animators will do whatever they do with the raw footage (e.g. Beowulf or any number of video game cutscenes).

Here's how Serkis defines what he does:
The Academy didn't have any problem nominating John Hurt in the Best Actor category for his makeup- and costume-enhanced performance as John Merrick in The Elephant Man or the CGI-bolstered Brad Pitt for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. (And it appreciates that makeup and costume design, while crucial to everything we see of the actors on screen, are important enough to merit their own categories without detracting from actors' theatrical talents.) When is it going to realize that performance capture is no less legitimate?

Very much so. Jimmy Wales had this to say with respect to Dodd: "10 million people contacted Congress. That's not an abuse of power, that's democracy. He had best get used to it."

It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.

I'd much rather watch that than the rather mediocre-looking lineup for the real event.