Frozen II, Star Wars, and Why the Future of the Film Industry Concerns Me a Little

I recently saw Frozen II and The Rise of Skywalker. I think these movies are similar for many reasons; They’re both sequels to successful interesting films from a few years back, they’re both huge messes that are barely coherent as stories, and they both appear to be unwilling to take any significant narrative risks. I want to briefly talk about the failures of both movies, because I think they reveal some troubling tendencies present in what is swiftly becoming one of the only production companies around.

Consequences in Frozen 2

During the climax of Frozen 2 Anna and Elsa learn that their Grandfather built a dam not as a way to help the indigenous people, but as a way to weaken their land and make them subservient to his colonizing nation. Elsa dies gaining this knowledge, which also kills Olaf who has been talking about the impermanence of life all film long. Anna decides that she has to destroy the dam in order to make things right, even though doing so will destroy her home city of Arendelle. She does it and water rushes towards Arrendelle, a city which has been abandoned anyway, only to be saved last minute by a resurrected Elsa who then brings back Olaf as well. The message being, I guess, that colonialism has no lasting consequences and making up for the sins of the past will require no sacrifice from anyone.

                You may be thinking at this point, “Christian, did you really think they’d kill half the main cast in a kids movie?” I did not, but it was also not me who decided on the main themes of that movie, Frozen 2 is a movie largely about the inevitability of death, and the certainty that to make things right we need to be willing to make sacrifices. The movie thoroughly set up that Arendelle was a city built upon atrocities and in order to make reparations it must fall, and then at the last minute someone decided that that was a scary message and had Elsa right up to the city on a horse and save it. This was not a moment of triumph for me as a viewer, but rather one of great disappointment at the movie’s inability to follow through on its own ideas and themes. Frozen 2 is a movie with no ideology, no beliefs, or at least no backbone. 

                And that’s frustrating because only two years ago Disney released another movie with very similar themes that did follow them through to their conclusion; I am of course talking about Thor Ragnarok; Like Elsa and Anna, Thor learns that his home was built on the back of colonialism and like them he learns that in order to set things right his home needs to be destroyed. But unlike Frozen II, he follows through and in the end Asgard explodes into little pieces. Its one thing for a company to slowly become more cowardly over time, it’s another when that apparently takes 2 years to happen.

The Failure of The Rise of Skywalker

                The Rise of Skywalker is the most disappointing movie in the Star Wars franchise. I understand why someone might argue that that is The Phantom Menace, but at least that movie felt like it was made for a reason with a coherent ideology. Skywalker plays like a movie made by focus groups in order to please as many people as possible. The Rise of Skywalker is a movie that tried to indicate its lack of backbone in the trailer, and very quickly establishes it in its own title crawl. Now, Skywalker has a lot of problems besides cowardice, it’s a completely incoherent film for one, but I’m not particularly interested in talking about its failure to be a coherent story, even though ultimately that was my biggest problem with it. Instead I want to talk about all the ways it refuses to do anything in the least bit interesting.

Rey From Nowhere and the Democratization of the Force

              

                The final scene in The Last Jedi showed a young slave boy pick up a broom with the force casually as he stared up at the night sky. This worked to accentuate a theme the movie had demonstrated by revealing that Rey’s parents were not royalty or Jedi but rather nobodies who sold her for drinking money. This revelation helps to demonstrate that the force doesn’t just belong to the rich and powerful, but rather to anyone. Rey and the boy both come from nobody and nowhere but they matter just as much as someone who comes from noble blood.

                Skywalker reveals that this isn’t true so early on that I almost don’t consider it a spoiler; Rey is in fact the granddaughter of Sheev Palpatine, and her parents were brave and noble people who “sold her to protect her.” After this Rey’s power and importance are always presented as the result of her bloodline. Kylo Ren and Rey both matter because they are powerful people descended from powerful bloodlines. This could have been somewhat okay if the filmmakers had decided to show force users from many backgrounds show up, except they don’t. The closest we get is a suggestion that Finn may be force sensitive, except that ultimately the movie seemingly forgot about Finn and his storyline entirely. At the end of the movie Rey has the opportunity to at least reject her royal bloodline, which she does but then takes the name Skywalker suggesting names and titles are still important to her and to Star Wars.

Snoke and Palpatine

                During a key scene in The Last Jedi Kylo Ren slices Supreme Leader Snoke in half and takes his title. This excited me because Snoke was in fact really boring as both a character and a villain. By killing him we are able to focus on the interesting villain in this franchise, Kylo Ren, and we are given an opportunity to have a third movie that does not directly resemble the first two. In the opening title crawl of Skywalker we are informed that Palpatine is back from the dead. Shortly afterwards we learn that he somehow has a fleet of star destroyers that he was saving in the sand which are crewed by… ghosts maybe? Sure. Which are crewed by ghosts. He then instructs Kylo to bring Rey to him so he can kill her, but secretly he wants to turn her to the dark side. Disney had the opportunity to have a Star Wars movie that was unpredictable and unique, and instead decided to make Return of the Jedi but dumber.

Repairing Broken Things

                In The Last Jedi Kylo smashed his mask into little pieces, and then Rey and Kylo break Luke’s lightsabre in half. Skywalker just allows us to assume that Leia fixed the lightsabre offscreen and shows us Kylo fixing his mask.

                          

                I think this one is unintentionally hilarious; these things are destroyed in Last Jedi in order to show us both the consequences of violence and anger, but also to allow a new future for the franchise. We see in Kylo smashing his mask a metaphorical smashing of the imitation of the aesthetic of earlier Star Wars movies, so by fixing it Skywalker is declaring its intent of never doing anything new or different.

Making its Own Mistakes

                Skywalker doesn’t just retcon away all the most interesting things from The Last Jedi, it also undoes everything interesting it attempts to do. Rey unwittingly murdering Chewbacca is undone in the next scene, C3PO’s memory wipe is undone about 20 minutes later, and Hux is killed the moment we learn he’s the mole and then never mentioned again. Rey almost kills both Chewie and BB8, and feels guilty during the scene itself, but will be back to her old self by the next scene. Kylo has little to no dialogue after his conversion back to the light side. Rey dies only to be immediately brought back to life, only for Kylo to then die leaving us with Rey alive and Kylo dead after briefly teasing us with a more interesting ending. This is a movie that doesn’t only lack the strength of the previous film’s convictions; but doesn’t have the strength to follow through on any of its own.

                             

Other Problems

                There are so many other things I could talk about. The pacing and plot of the film feel so inconsistent that at times I wondered if it had been pieced together from several other cuts. The final act is incredibly dumb and misses several opportunities to have any kind of thematic resonance. There are other things that bother me such as how Finn’s role has been reduced to mostly yelling Rey’s name a lot, or how the film has pretty much completely cut Rose Tico out entirely. It’s an incredibly flawed film and I really don’t feel even vaguely up to the task of pointing out all the ways it failed.

Mass Effect 3, How I Met Your Mother and Controversy in Media

                In 2012 Bioware released the video game Mass Effect 3 causing a massive fan backlash from those who didn’t like the ending. The fans demanded a new ending and they soon kind of got one. Bioware made longer more detailed ending videos that addressed some of the complaints without undoing any of the larger ideas or plots they had made. Whether this qualified as too little too late depended largely on who you asked, but ultimately, I was relieved. If people altered endings as soon as fans complained, then endings to stories would become pointless endeavors. They may as well just type Insert Preferred Ending Here. A few years later the sitcom How I met your Mother did just that when they released the “happy” ending on dvd which was edited to be exactly what fans wanted it to be.  I’m not claiming that either ending is particularly great, but in order to make art that speaks to people we have to be willing to take risks and try things that might not work. 

                I don’t have a problem with fans expressing that they didn’t like an ending, although I do think there are good and bad ways to do this. When artists are forced to capitulate to fan demand and media is made to please the loudest, most irritating parts of the fanbase it does not lead to compelling narratives. It’s fine for people not to like The Last Jedi. My problem is when the next movie in the series is majorly altered to please those fans to the point where it barely works as a film, not to mention as a conclusion.  

                Some argue that that is not what happened here, and that Disney is smart enough to recognize that the fans who hated Last Jedi were a loud minority. I would think that if that were true then they would be smart enough not to release Rise of Skywalker in the first place. Disney doesn’t want to make art; they want to make something that appeals to everyone so that they can make all the money in the world.

Why all this Matters

                When I left Frozen II I said “Disney, if you are going to make all the movies, could you at least try to make good ones?” Of the top 20 highest grossing movies of all time 14 of them are owned by Disney. At this point Disney is actively trying to beat its own records. And they are only interested in making more and more money. The film industry is becoming increasingly monopolized under Disney, and now we can see that rather than leading to Disney realizing that they can’t fail and taking more risks this is leading to Disney getting safer and safer and making more “crowd pleasing” remakes.

The Rise of Skywalker feels like a film in which a committee went through a reddit post and tried to address every complaint they saw; as a narrative it is a mess of ideas sewn together, and as a film it often feels like a list of plot elements and not an actual movie. Solo had a similar problem, as did Rogue One. Frozen II on the other hand felt like a much braver screenplay that scared a committee who then forced the ending to be more “crowd pleasing”. 

                When I watch Frozen II and The Rise of Skywalker I do not get frustrated just because I watched a couple bad movies; I get frustrated because I’m worried that what I’m watching is the future of the film industry.

Love and Sorrow: Or why you should watch The Leftovers

Are the gods not just?"

"Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”
 C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Some shows and movies are difficult to convince people to watch. Sometimes it’s because it’s best watched with as little information going in as possible[i], sometimes it’s because the premise is too high concept[ii], and sometimes it’s because the whole thing does not sound like fun to watch. The Leftovers seems to fall squarely in those later too categories. Its concept is alienating especially considering that up to now its mostly only been used to proselytize, and its themes and purpose do not sound like something that sounds particularly entertaining. My purpose here is to attempt to convince people to watch The Leftovers for almost entirely selfish purposes; I want people to talk to about this show.

The Leftovers takes place three years after an event known as the Sudden Departure, in which 2 percent of the world vanished. We follow the residents of a small town as they try to live in this world that doesn’t make any sense anymore. No one knows what caused this to happen, although people all have their own ideas and theories. The first season has an unrelenting bleakness as characters struggle to go on in a world that has lost all meaning. When you are grieving none of the regular formalities of life make sense anymore, and The Leftovers is about a world in which everyone is grieving. All the regular parts of life start to seem useless and unreal, and the world starts to have a nonsensical feeling. The first season has a magical realism[iii] aspect to it as the characters stumble through this weird world they live in. And we don’t really know what is real and what isn’t. We don’t know what’s going on with the birds or the dogs or if that one guy can actually remove psychological pain with his hugs, and we don’t need to.

            When I like something I often go and read negative reviews of it.[iv] In the case of The Leftovers the most prominent complaint seemed to be about the perceived similarities to Lost[v]. A lot of people were mad when the show started because they said it was a mystery show that would never answer its questions. In a way they were right because the Leftovers was never going to answer its questions. But unlike Lost, the lack of answers in The Leftovers is the point. One of the truly unsettling things about life is that none of us have any clue why we are here, or what the point of any of this is. We stumble along through it all trying to make sense of it, and trying to find a purpose. Sure, I have certain beliefs[vi], and I truly do believe, but I don’t know any of it for certain. In the Leftovers there cannot be answers because the Leftovers is about grief, and there are no answers in grief. None that are good enough at least. 

The truly frightening implication of the Departure isn’t that it could happen again, but rather that it might not. In the last season people seem to almost be hoping that something will happen on the seventh anniversary of the Departure, whether that something is the end of the world or merely a second Departure. If it happens again then maybe people could just accept it as another kind of natural phenomena such as a hurricane or an earthquake, but if it doesn’t then that might mean that it happened for a reason. If it happened for a reason, then it might mean that those who were left behind were left because they weren’t good enough. It could mean that they missed out on something important. And that’s a problem. We live in a world where someone we love could be gone tomorrow, and we need to live with that. I don’t think it’s the knowledge that we could die that truly horrifies us, but that our loved ones could. 

“Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.” 

 C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

I have lost people close to me, but never due to death. However, over the last few years I've had quite a few people die who I knew, but didn't know well. There is a strangeness in the grief for an acquaintance. Some of it is in the regret that I lost a chance to know this person better, but most of it is a genuine sadness that this person was gone, and it is a sadness that is really hard to know how to express. I think I've never quite confronted the idea of death. I'm not sure I actually understand it.

Life is uncertain. Life’s uncertainty is often horrifying, and often thrilling. Sometimes when I start new things and meet many people I can’t help but look around and wonder which of those people will someday seem like necessary fixtures in my life. One day someone who was a stranger could be someone we can’t imagine not knowing, and someone we couldn’t imagine not knowing could be gone forever. And it’s that uncertainty that can be unbearable some days. Life would be far less scary if someone would just tell me the spoilers. This is part of the human condition. Life is terrifying and we just want to know why.

What seems to often be missed in the public understanding of the Book of Job is that it doesn’t actually offer any real answers to the question of why we hurt. God essentially makes a wager with Satan who thinks that God cannot be certain that his servants love him if he continues to reward them. So, he punishes Job to see if he will curse him. Job is given advice by his friends, and by his wife, and none of it is helpful. Job eventually does demand God give him answers, and God does show up. He just doesn’t offer any answers. He asks Job why he thinks he can question his judgement when Job is just a man. And Job apologizes, or he doesn’t[viii], and God gives him greater rewards than before. The book depicts suffering, and directly criticizes those who try to give advice to people who suffer. The friends give advice of varying quality, but it doesn’t matter how good the advice is since they shouldn’t have given it in the first place. We aren’t ever really given an answer for why life hurts so much, because there isn’t one. At least there isn’t one that we can understand.

“I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.” 

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces[ix]

Which brings me back to The Leftovers, because that’s what the show is about. It’s not about mysteries, or at least not about manufactured ones. It’s about a mystery that we all have to try to solve, and ultimately none of us truly understand. It’s about the question of why we all have to suffer so much, why life has to continually hurt so much. And its answer is simple. Life is so uncertain that we have no choice but to hold those who we love close, even though we seem to hurt them so much, even though we never seem to make the right choices concerning them. In the end all we have is each other. 

“We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.” 

Neil Gaiman, Signal to Noise

At the end of The Leftovers two people are sitting together in a small house. One of them tells the other a story that she has been scared to tell him because she thought he wouldn’t believe her. After she tells him she looks at him waiting for him to her she's crazy, and he doesn't: 

"I believe you."

"You do?"

"Why wouldn't I? You're here."

"I'm here."

         The world feels likes its getting worse. I don't know if it is, or if that's just part of getting older. The environment seems to be in tatters and people don't seem to be doing much about it. The threat of nuclear war is hanging over us again, and hate and fear seem to be becoming ever more present in politics and in life. It's hard not be frightened of the future.

          The Leftovers is a show that is very aware of the uncertain nature of the world, and while it doesn't exactly have a solution, it does feel as though it offers a lot of hope. If there is one message that I took from it it's probably that we are in this together; Be kind, say sorry sometimes, forgive often, and believe each-other. And remember to hold your loved ones close to you because they could disappear at any moment.

And watch The Leftovers. It’s really good.

“... and we held our breath, just for a moment, to see if the world had ended, but it hadn't, so we yawned and drank our champagne and carried on living, except for those of us who died, and everything continued such as before.” 

 Neil Gaiman, Signal to Noise

---

[i] Watch Cabin in the Woods or Never Let Me Go

[ii] Watch The Good Place

[iii] Sorry, Trevor, I couldn’t think of a better term for it.

[iv] We could chalk that up to me being open minded, or non dogmatic, or we could say that I hate myself. Who knows really.

[v] This is mostly because both are created by Damon Lindelof.

[vi] https://www.ccel.org/creeds/nicene.creed.html

[viii] There’s some debate about the translation from Hebrew.

[ix] Read Till We Have Faces. It's really good.You should read it regardless of what you think of Lewis’s other work. 

Ramblings about Life

I've decided to revive this old dead blog. Last time I decided to revive it I explained why I don't write more, and wrote about depression and the fear of failure. I don't want to repeat myself, and I'm going to try not to, but I'm also going to talk a bit about my life, about where my life is going, and how that factors into things like this. Mostly I'd like to talk about insecurity.

A couple years ago I was accepted to seminary despite failing Greek about a million times. Shortly afterwards I also decided that I wasn't going to go to Seminary. This left the question of what I was going to do. So I worked. I'd been working as an Educational Assistant for a couple years, and so I kept doing that. As I did so I decided that I probably could do the teacher's job, and so I applied to Education Programs at various universities, and then promptly got rejected from most of them. Last Spring was the most depressed I've been in years. I had very little motivation, or energy to do anything. I was gloomy, and probably not the best company. Long story short, I got into King's and my life had a direction again. I feel considerably less depressed. It's nice.

I want to talk about that feeling of being an impostor though. It was a feeling I often had in university. It's a feeling I often have now. The feeling that I'm here because I tricked someone into letting me in, and that before long they're going to figure it out and ask me to leave. I'm not sure where it comes from, but it's hard to shake.

When I was in high school I had a Physio Therapist who visited periodically to work with me in the gym. I hated it. I was always worried that everyone would find out and make fun of me, or that they would think that I was a freak. That I would be found out. One day she informed me that she was going to be coming with me on our bowling field trip. I informed her that that wouldn't be happening, and in the end I won. High School is hard enough without having an adult come with you to help you bowl.

I try to be open about these things now, because I think it's good to be open about our differences. It's not an easy thing to be open about. There is a desire to try to be the same as everyone else that is hard to shake. As a child I fought to be the same as everyone else, and I'm glad I did. A lot of aspects of that are still leftover. I had speech therapy for nine years, and because of that I would repeat what I had said under my breath after I said it in order to practice speaking better. If you listen closely you will notice that I often still mumble to myself after talking.

The thing is that I'm pretty sure that these feelings of being an impostor are probably a lot more common than I think. A lot of us think that deep down we're not like everyone else, and so we're worried that we'll be found out.

When I was a child I failed swimming lessons, and was told it was because my arms were floppy. So I started swimming daily. A different time my gym teacher almost failed me, so I started going to the gym at times when I knew no one would be there in order to practice on my own over and over.

When I failed Greek the first time I did work hard. Later it became harder and harder to work hard at it. I would stare at the letters and just feel panic. Once I was sitting in class and felt like the walls were closing in, and so I left and sat in the corner of the library until I calmed down.

The anxiety is there for a lot of things. As I got older I thought social situations would get easier. Sometimes they are, other times I stand silently around people wishing that I could think of something to say.

I think our society has enough of a Social Darwinist philosophy embedded in it that it is hard to shake the idea that we need to be talented and special in order to belong.We need to prove to ourselves and others that we belong and that we should get to belong. You can see this in movies; if there is a person with a disability we make sure that we demonstrate that they are really good at something else.

I find myself often thinking of the Beatitudes from Matthew 5:
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

There is nothing there saying that the most capable or most amazing or most successful will be blessed.

Many of us question whether we should belong even when we seem to have been accepted. I wish I could convince myself that my presence isn't an irritant; That I add something of worth to the places I go. I think it doesn't really matter if I do or not though. We need to stop judging what people add or what good they do. We need to accept people for who they are, and love them. I do more damage to myself and others wondering if I belong than I would if I just got over it. It's easy to say that I'll get over something, it's slightly harder to do it.

The world seems to be getting more divided and more angry all the time. We spread messages of hate and fear, and separate ourselves from each-other more and more.

In school I have to think a lot about what kind of teacher I would be. And it's hard because there's a lot to keep in mind. I want to be the teacher who fights for the unwanted child. Who helps the child who is outcast. I want to be the teacher that cares, but who doesn't? Does anyone go into teaching saying "I just want to help the really smart kids"? Maybe. People can be jerks.

I think I failed Greek repeatably for many reasons, but one of them was because I decided I couldn't do it. The difference between my attitude towards Greek and my attitude towards swimming is that as a child I never really thought I couldn't do it. Failure was never an option to me, and I probably need to regain some of the "I think I can" attitude.

I really want to end this with something wise, but I don't know if I feel wise at the moment.

I'm going to end this by saying that I hope this made sense, and that it wasn't too whiny. I don't want to be the person who always talks about how hard they find their life to be. I want to be the person that people feel comfortable coming to. I don't want to be the person constantly worried that people think he's annoying. I want to be the person who people think won't judge them. It's hard. I'm working at it.

Maybe everyone feels like a fake at times. Maybe we can all be fakes together.

A Quick Introduction to Big Finish Doctor Who, Part Four

Shortly before the 50th anniversary I watched a Doctor Who webisode, not expecting much of it. It started normally; a woman was in trouble and trying to get help, but then the Doctor entered and he was played by Paul McGann rather than Matt Smith. For a lot of people this was their first introduction to the Eighth Doctor, or at least it was their first reintroduction in a very long time. Soon people were demanding more, signing petitions, and saying a Doctor that good deserves more than one episode.  He had more than one episode. He actually he had over 80 episodes, they just weren't on TV.

The Eighth Doctor in his incredibly impressive TARDIS console room

Shortly after Big Finish had started producing Doctor Who plays they decided they wanted to try making stories with Paul McGann's short lived Eighth Doctor. The problem was that McGann had only done one episode, which was poorly received by Doctor Who fans. Everyone assumed that he would be bitter, or at least that he would want no part of it. It turned out that they were quite wrong, McGann loved Doctor Who and was only really sad that he didn't get to do more.

The Eighth Doctor's second outfit.

They had the rights to his Doctor as part of their deal with the BBC, but the Doctor Who movie had been made in part in the states and the rights to all the original characters belonged to Fox, and so Big Finish had to start over, which was probably for the best. Everyone involved was really excited; finally they had a chance to produce new episodes of Doctor Who, and they could really explore what happened to the Doctor after it got cancelled. The novels had already been doing this, but this was different since it had the actors and television writers involved. As a result of this the Eighth Doctor stories are different than the other dramas they produced. For all the other Doctor's I've only covered stories from the first 50, but these ones divide very nicely into four phases and so I will discuss the whole series.

Who is the Eighth Doctor? 

For a guy with only one episode he sure has a lot of costumes.

The Eighth Doctor makes me feel somewhat like a hypocrite. He has a lot of the qualities that annoyed me about the Tenth Doctor, and yet he's one of my favourites. He's a breathless enthusiastic Edwardian adventurer, which probably explains why he has had two companions from that time period. He has an innocence and joy that a lot of the Doctors lack, and yet he is also filled with a sorrow that doesn't overcome his enthusiasm. This is where I think he differs from the Tenth Doctor; Ten's happiness often feels forced, as though he is a depressed person trying to act cheerful. Eight, on the other hand, is genuinely cheerful, he's just also genuinely sad. He has experienced more tragedy than any other incarnation of the Doctor, and yet he still manages to be thrilled by the adventure.

The Early Adventures

The Doctor and Charley Pollard

These are the ones made during the same time as all the other stories I've discussed. The Doctor leaps into action on R101 and quickly meets his first companion, a young Edwardian adventuress named Charley Pollard. Charley was meant to die on the R101 which leads to all sorts of problems for the two of them. This is the least story based of all of the Eighth Doctor's adventures, but still has enough of a story line that I'd suggest listening to Storm Warning first.  Chimes of Midnight is one of the best things Big Finish has ever produced. Listen to it.
Highlights: Storm Warning, The Stones of Venice, Chimes of Midnight, Seasons of Fear, Neverland
Best Avoided: Minuet in Hell, Time of the Daleks

The Divergent Universe

The Doctor, Charley, and C'rizz

The Doctor and Charley find a universe of Anti-Time and things get a bit weird. Charley and the Doctor are sent into an alternate universe where there is no perception of time and no familiar enemies or allies. The worlds are all experiments conducted by someone much more powerful, and the Doctor and Charley have no familiar tricks or tools at their disposal as they explore them. This shouldn't be a bad thing, but it mostly is. The stories are extremely experimental, which is fine, except most of the experiments fail. And the Doctor goes from being cheerful and extremely likable with an edge of sadness and anger, to angry and depressed. He loses everything that made his incarnation so great. There are a couple good stories, but mostly this should be avoided.

During this time the Doctor gets a second companion named C'rizz, who's a genetically engineered serial killer monk. The less said about that the better. I think the idea was to add some edge and moral ambiguity by adding a companion who does evil actions that he doesn't appear to truly want to do, but it's mostly just annoying.

The other problem with the Divergent Universe arc is that it's supposed to run for four seasons, but only got two. In 2005 something significant happened, Doctor Who came back on TV and Big Finish decided that they needed to have the most recent Doctor be more accessible in case anyone wanted to listen to him, and swiftly brought him out of the Divergent Universe. This was unfortunate as the writers were just starting to find their stride with the Divergent Universe stories, and since it meant that they had to shove two seasons into one story which made the conclusion very confusing.

After this there were more stories in the regular universe, but I'm including them here as they still continued a lot of the Divergent themes and plots, and since a bunch of them were slightly rewritten Divergent stories anyway.

Highlights: Natural History of Fear, The Last. Terror Firma, Other Lives, Memory Lane, The Girl Who Never Was

The Eighth Doctor Adventures

The Doctor and Lucie Miller

The Doctor arrives on a dying planet in the midst of evacuation and meets a man who claims its all an alien conspiracy. This is all fairly routine for him, but more oddly he also finds a young woman name Lucie Miller who he's never met before standing in his TARDIS. She claims that the Time Lords have sent her to him as part of a witness protection program, although she doesn't know what she witnessed or why she needs protection.

This is essentially Big Finish trying out the new Doctor Who series format. They cut down the long stories to 50 minutes each, and have huge complex season finales, and it works remarkably well. The Doctor is back, and even better than he used to be, and his new Lucie Miller is pretty great too. The Eighth Doctor is a man who has lost almost all of his companions and yet he still manages to have a youthful enthusiasm and love of the thrill of adventure. The Eighth Doctor was fun again.

That is not to say that they are without flaws. It has an over-reliance on classic series villains, and some of the plot points in the finales make little sense. Some of the stories also could have been better served by being a bit longer. So really it has a lot of the strengths and weaknesses of the new Doctor Who series. These stories largely ignore everything that came earlier, making them a great jumping on point for new listeners.

Since these all have season arcs I will be listing necessary episodes rather than the highlights. These are not necessarily the best, but are the most essential in order to understand the story.

Season 1: Blood of the Daleks, Horror of Glam Rock, Human Resources
Season 2: Grand Theft Cosmos, The Zygon Who Fell to Earth, Sisters of the Flame, Vengeance of Morbius
Season 3: Orbis, Hothouse, The Eight Truths, Worldwide Web
Season 4: Death in Blackpool, Situation Vacant, The Book of Kells, Deimos, The Resurrection of Mars, An Earthly Child, Relative Dimensions, Lucie Miller, To the Death

Dark Eyes

The Doctor and Molly O'Sullivan 

The Eighth Doctor Adventures end very tragically. The Doctor is alone again and finding it harder than ever to go on, and so he decides to go to the end of the universe to see if there are answers there. He's stopped by the Time Lords who give him a new job, there is a woman in World War I who the Daleks want for some reason. The Doctor needs to find her and protect her. He begrudgingly agrees and soon finds himself wrapped up in something much bigger than he expected. This is a different format again; the whole series is done in box sets of 4 stories each that work together to make a larger adventure. It's sometimes hit or miss, but overall is really good stuff. And it's largely helped by having one of the best companions he's had yet, a WWI nurse. These stories also follow The Eighth Doctor Adventures pretty directly, so it's probably the worst starting point for new listeners.

A Quick Introduction to Big Finish Doctor Who, Part Three

Colin Baker was fired. The BBC blamed him for the failures in the show and let him go. He asked to return to film a regeneration episode, but they refused to give him more than one scene. He didn't want to play a scene, and so Sylvester McCoy played him in a blond wig. Really. I have no idea why they did this. Sylvester McCoy is a foot shorter than Baker, and quite a bit skinnier. Didn't Baker have a stunt double they could have used? Or couldn't they have grabbed a random person off the street? Anyway, the TARDIS is shot, the Doctor falls on the floor, and regenerates. Why? No one knows.

The Seventh Doctor

Sylvester McCoy played two incarnations of the Seventh Doctor. Okay, that's not actually true, but he may as well have.
 

When trying to fix the perceived problems with Doctor Who they decided that people just didn't like the Doctor. It never seems to occur to people that the problem is that the writing is garbage, so instead of firing the writers they decided to change the Doctor. So they cast someone short and goofy who reminded them of one of the most popular Doctors, Patrick Troughton. So for his entire first season the Seventh Doctor is goofy, foolish, makes mixed metaphors, and plays the spoons. And he is awful. Just terrible. Then something strange happened. New writers came in and decided to completely overhaul the Doctor.

The Second Seventh Doctor is quieter, sterner, and much more manipulative. He's the darkest he's ever been and the most mysterious he's been in years. He's often described as the chess master, as he always has a plan and plays everyone in the room with ease. There are aspects from his earlier portrayal intact; he still rolls all his r's, and makes the occasional mixed metaphors, but he's a very different Doctor. During his time the TARDIS interior all but disappeared from the show, as his Doctor always knew where he was going and what he was doing. We didn't need to see a scene where he tries to discover where he is, because he already knows. He went there on purpose and knew what would happen. An example of this is Remembrance of the Daleks, wherein the Doctor spends the majority of the time avoiding the Daleks and trying to prevent from getting a hold of Hand of Omega. The Daleks get a hold of the Hand and use it, only to be wiped out entirely as a result, as was the Doctor's plan from the beginning. The Hand destroys all the Daleks except one, but the Doctor tracks that one down and convinces it to kill itself. The Seventh Doctor would have somehow managed to end the Time War in seconds if he was there. It also would have turned out that he started it on purpose.

That isn't to say he was just cold and cruel, he was capable of great sympathy and kindness, but he was the most dangerous incarnation of the Doctor. Unfortunately, this came at a time when the BBC hated Doctor Who. The budget was next to nothing, and it was put at the same time as some of their most popular programs, and a couple years later it was cancelled. This era had some of the strongest writing since when Baker was on the show, but it ultimately was cut short.

I would recommend skipping McCoy's first season entirely and starting with Remembrance of the Daleks. Although you could watch Dragonfire for Ace's introduction, and the stupidest cliffhanger ever (he literally hangs off a cliff for no reason). That said, I think that McCoy's era would probably be the most painless transition for fans of the new series.

The Companions

Yes, I chose an annoying picture of Mel, but it was easy to do.

The Seventh Doctor had two companions on screen. The first was Melanie Bush, who doesn't fair much better here than with the sixth Doctor. Mel is the stereotype of the classic 60's companions, although most of the 60's companions weren't like this, She terribly irritating, has little actual character, and screams a lot. A lot. Mel leaves for no reason. Later in the books they reveal that the Doctor brainwashed her to leave so he could recruit Ace. The Seventh Doctor was occasionally kind of evil.

Ace was pretty much the opposite of Mel in every single way.

Then we get to the person more generally considered to be the Seventh Doctor's companion. Dorothy Gale "Ace" McShane. Ace doesn't like her mum and doesn't use her birth name. In a lot of ways she's the stereotypical rebellious 80's teenager. Despite this she is far from awful, and in many ways is the prototype of the modern era companion. She's a twenty-something working class girl from modern times. I'd call her the proto-Rose if that wasn't insulting to Ace. Ace was fun, tough, and liked to blow stuff up. She even invented her own explosive called Nitro-9. Ace and the Doctor was the best companion and Doctor pairing that the show had had since Romana.

Professor Bernice Summerfield, archaeologist

If Ace is a proto-Rose then Bernie Summerfied is a proto-River, but again that's kind of insulting to Bernie. She's a intelligent, daring archaeologist from the future. She traveled with two different Doctors, sometimes out of order. She's disorganized, has a bad memory, and keeps a diary. She apparently is implied to have slept with the Eighth Doctor in one of the novels, but let's just count that as not actually cannon and never speak of it again. She originated in the novels, and eventually got her own, and then got her own Big Finish series. Despite this all, she is only in two of the Seventh Doctor's radio plays.

The Best

In some ways I am limiting myself most with the Seventh Doctor by only counting plays from the first fifty, as he didn't really find his feet till after that. He has some good stuff here, but it was most difficult for me to choose five of his movies.

5. The Fearmonger

An assassin is on the run, his accomplice is sitting in a mental institution, while their intended victim is making speeches and riling up trouble. A terrorist faction is about ready to create another demonstration, and a radio program is reporting on all of it in order to make money. Meanwhile someone is possessed by a nasty alien called a fearmonger. The message here is a bit obvious, and the execution lacks subtlety, but its still an exciting, entertaining story with a fairly well executed twist. The story is a thriller and kept me on my toes, yet still has relatable human characters that are easy to connect with. It would have been easy for a lot of these people to come across as caricatures and while it does come close to that, the characters all feel human partially due to great performances. The story is about intolerance and racism, and is not subtle at all, but it still mostly works and never feels too preachy. 

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/the-fearmonger-623

12. The Fires of Vulcan

During his time working for UNIT a police box was found buried at Pompeii, as old as the city itself. Now the Doctor has found himself there and knows that his TARDIS will be caught in the volcanic Eruption. Mel is not so certain and refuses to give into the Doctor's fatalism. It's a very similar idea to The Fires of Pompeii, except there are no silly volcanic monsters, just the Doctor and Mel trying to survive in a doomed city's last days. McCoy manages to play his sillier earlier version of the Doctor with much more gravitas than usual, while Mel is only slightly annoying. The story of Pompeii is better served here by making it a pure historical. What happened at Pompeii was a tragedy and no lava monsters are needed to make it interesting.

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/the-fires-of-vulcan-635

13. The Shadow of the Scourge

A homage to the New Adventures novels that came during Doctor Who's "wilderness years" written by Paul Cornel, who happened to be one of the most popular writers of that period. The New Adventures were known for being darker and making the Doctor even more cold and manipulative. This play strikes a good balance; it's dark and occasionally scary, but not without humour and light moments, and no one is out of character. At a hotel there are three conventions triple booked; an experiment in time travel, a seance, and a cross stitch convention. The Doctor is convinced that this is a recipe for disaster and so he goes to check out the last one, being a cross stitch enthusiast of course. His companions are left to investigate the other two, that is until the Scourge arrives. It's dark and weird, and the villains are ridiculously over the top. Despite this it works, mostly because the TARDIS team of Bernie, Ace, and the Doctor are so effective. 

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/the-shadow-of-the-scourge-636

46. Flip Flop

A lot of Big Finish's best stuff comes when they experiment with the format of radio, and try doing things they could never do on TV. This is one such example; Flip- Flop has two stories called Black and White that can be listened to in either order. They both tell a story in which the Doctor and Mel arrive in a dystopia, and quickly run into people who want to change it by travelling back in time. The Doctor explains that such a thing could just make things worse, but they don't listen and by doing so create a new dystopia. It's a bleak, fatalistic exorcise in futility. Ultimately these people are creating their own nightmare over and over again, and there's not much to be done about it.

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/flip-flop-212

49. Master

Ten years ago a horribly scarred man with no memories was found outside of town. He soon became the town's doctor and even inherited a very nice mansion from a patient. A mansion that some people say is cursed. Now, ten years later, he has invited his two closest friends to dinner. It's not an entirely pleasant night, on of his friends is a police inspector who is very shaken up by the most recent murder in a long string of serial killings. His other friend, the inspector's wife, wants to attempt a seance in order to discover the doctor's past. Their seance is quickly interrupted by a weird little man outside the house, a man who seems to know the town's doctor very well.

      This is my favourite of the three villain stories, although it's also the most inconsistent of them. It's at times fascinatingly deep in its discussion of good and evil, but it also becomes ridiculously silly at other moments. The incarnation of Death shows up near the end, which just feels wrong for Doctor Who, but there's so much good stuff here, including a long scene in which the Doctor and Master discuss evil and free-will, that I'm willing to forgive the odd silly moment. It's a story that I never seem to get tired of, despite the aforementioned problems. 

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/master-215

The Worst

36. The Rapture

The Doctor and Ace go clubbing, and that's about it. The Doctor travels to Ibiza with a world weary Ace who demands a vacation free of monsters. She's really annoying in this one. For some reason to demonstrate that she was battle scarred and tired, the writers have her insist on being called McShane. It gets tiresome immediately. The Doctor sends her to a club run by angels where she mostly just hangs out as other people experiment with drugs. It is so fun to listen to other people partying! Anyway, that goes on awhile and then the Doctor shows up, and the fake angels do stuff, and I get really bored. Ace runs into her long lost brother, a plot point so stupid that I didn't believe it was real until the end. Then there's some more clubbing, some evil angels, a ridiculous explanation, a forced climax, and... Oh good, it's over. Annoying, tiresome, and surprisingly badly acted, this is one worth avoiding. I really like the cover though. 

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/the-rapture-202

39. Bang-Bang-A-Boom!

The Doctor hosts a talent show. No, seriously. The Doctor poses as a commander of a starship on which there is a talent show, and a murder. I think it's mostly going for comedy, but it never becomes funny. It's tiresome, and annoying, with some dreadfully irritating alien voices. There's not a lot to say about this one, except that it's a failed experiment best forgotten.

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/bang-bang-a-boom-20

For the next one I'm going to switch things up a bit and do a general introduction and overview of all things Eighth Doctor.