Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl
The darker side... Oh, please, how cliché. You forgot "gritty." I'm thinking that kind of deconstruction, in vogue all too often, makes me sick.
If you knew me at all, you'd know I'm the last person who'd want to jump onto the dark-and-gritty bandwagon just for its own sake. That's not what this is about at all. Just the opposite, in fact. This idea came to me -- back in the '80s, by the way, before there even
was that much of a dark-and-gritty bandwagon to speak of -- because I recognized that the system Klaatu endorsed was much darker than he admitted and that there had to be a better way of achieving peace. The message I had in mind was far more optimistic and
Star Trekky: That true peace is achieved, not when you're afraid to fight, but when you no longer
desire to fight. That still hating other people but being terrified to try to kill them because you know the robots will kill you first is very, very far from being actual peace, and that real peace won't come until people overcome the will for hatred and violence and choose to stand together. The story I wanted to see would be an optimistic one in which the peoples of Klaatu's civilization rose up against the false peace of the robotic oppressors and strove to create a free society that would practice genuine peace based on mutual understanding rather than mutual terror.
So, yes, it would've been a deconstruction to reveal that Klaatu was basically working for the bad guys. But deconstruction isn't always cynical. Klaatu's view was the cynical one: That people are incapable of genuine peace and can only be coerced and threatened into nonviolence. I refused to believe that was the moral solution to the problem, and I wanted to see a story about finding a better way. A story about resisting an oppressive system doesn't have to be dark and depressing; see
Star Wars, for example.
There's also the fact that Klaatu was very much a colonialist in the old Civilising-Mission vein -- seeing himself as a member of a wiser, superior society, coming to a land of primitives and looking with condescending amusement and scorn at their folly, and delivering a message of paternalistic benevolence that's basically "I will give you the chance to elevate yourselves to my society's kind of enlightenment for your own good, and if you don't accept my kind and selfless offer, my people will bomb you out of existence." At the time the movie came out, it was easy to see Klaatu as the hero, but in this day and age, that kind of patronizing attitude toward another culture doesn't really come off as well.
I take Klaatu's word for it that they are realistic that nothing is perfect, but that they are peaceful, and they are free to pursue better things in life and they approve of their solution as a society.
I have to wonder what generation you're from, and if you have the experience of living during the height of the Cold War. I grew up in the '70s and '80s with the fear of nuclear annihilation hanging over my head at every moment. People of my generation took it as a given that the world could end any day, for no reason other than that some early-warning radar mistook a flock of geese for a flight of missiles. We had drills where we huddled in the basement corridors of the school in the flimsy hope that it would protect us from nuclear blast and fallout. Look at Carl Sagan's
Cosmos from that era -- in his segment about the Drake Equation and the odds of civilizations existing on other planets, his most
optimistic estimate was that only one percent of technological civilizations would survive their nuclear age. That's the kind of terror we lived with every day of our lives. Trust me -- it did not feel peaceful.
That is why I know that Klaatu lied when he said his people were at peace. The mere lack of war is very, very far from actually being peace. Living every day in terror of extermination is not peace of any kind. Peace doesn't come until people mutually agree that they don't want to fight anymore.
So I don't have any source for it and I don't remember where I first heard that Russel T. Davies had the concept for an original series lying around in the drawer for a while but the BBC only agreed to make it as Torchwood. And that the Torchwood series was orginally meant to be a police series about a police officer but then Jack Harkness got added and so it became part of the Who universe.
But whether he said so in an interview or on a convention I have no idea. I'll have to go ask people who know more about this and come back to you.
Well, the sources I found about the backstory of
Children of Earth were quoting from Davies's own
A Writer's Tale book chronicling the creative process in his own words. That's probably the most in-depth, firsthand account there is, and if it had included the claim that CoE had been meant as a non-
Who series, I think that would've been a big enough deal that the various accounts I found would mention it. But not one of them did.
I can see though how someone would revisit an old idea and change it into a new script. In an old Doctor Who yearbook I found a short story by Steven Moffat, which later became the episode "Blink". It has different characters and a different ending, but the weeping angels and the time travel aspects are already there.
Oh, certainly. Writers do that all the time; I've done it myself on a number of occasions. Moffat's "A Christmas Carol" was also derived from his first published prose
Who story, "Continuity Errors." But just because something is done from time to time, that doesn't prove it was done in this specific case.
But admittedly my experience is very different to everyone else's, so I can only write my POV. I seriously don't know how I would have reacted to it if I already had been well in the fandom.
Okay, here's the thing you need to keep in mind: The subset of fans who hate a given thing have this annoying habit of pretending that they speak for all "true" fans, that only an outsider to the fandom could possibly like the thing they hate. But that's not fandom, just extremism. No fandom is uniform. Any fandom is going to incorporate a diverse range of tastes and attitudes, and no one group of it has the right to claim they hold a monopoly on fandom. Fandom just means people who like a thing, and different people are always going to like different aspects of a franchise or like it in different ways.
So never let anyone tell you that you have to be a non-fan in order to appreciate something, or that being within fandom would mean your attitudes were in lockstep conformity with those of every other fan. That's not how fandom works. You don't have to hate
Children of Earth to be a
Torchwood fan. There are lots of fans who love it. Just like there are lots of
Star Trek fans who like the Abrams movies, and
Star Wars fans who like the prequels, and so on. As long as you like
something, then you're a fan. That's all it means. (The standard folk etymology is that "fan" is short for "fanatic," but that's never made sense to me. David Gerrold once wrote that it was actually short for "fancier," someone who fancies something, i.e. likes it or is fond of it. That strikes me as a far more reasonable derivation, both conceptually and phonetically. Abbreviations tend to favor the stressed syllable -- e.g. "fridge" for "refrigerator" -- so I think if people wanted to shorten "fanatic" to one syllable, it would be "nat." Although I recently saw Gerrold cite the "fanatic" derivation on Facebook, so that puzzled me.) So never let anyone tell you that you don't belong to fandom just because you don't hate the things they hate. Fandom is about liking, not hating.
And another character is the look alike cousin of Carmine from Laverne and Shirley! (played by the same actor) The title character, "Nancy Blansky" appeared on Happy Days (set in the 60s) before the debut her own show.
It's been a while since I watched it and I totally had forgotten about Cuba Gooding, Jr., but reading this discussion it just did come back to me. I usually don't tend to re-watch episodes I didn't enjoy very much / found boring.
