With Act 6 Act 6, Hussie’s taking Homestuck to new levels of fourth wall breakage, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 1 flash animation. Its beauty and sheer awesomeness rivals Cascade in places, and draws you even more into the story, quite excellent considering we’ve been on a two-month break. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

- First of all, if you navigate to the A6A6I1 page, it doesn’t look at first like there are any more pages. The link to the next page is farther down, and you get too involved in the animation right away to question it, so you assume this is the only page that’s been released. In archive binging, this will be a dead giveaway as to what will happen, but here it provides the added effect that a single long flash was what was intended, but circumstances require Hussie to advance the narrative following it in an unconventional manner.

- The first hint that this flash is not normal is the meteor; its tail rotates so far as to leave the panel, and the meteor only gets bigger from there. It takes a few seconds to register this, but the tail overlaps the “ACT 6 ACT 6 INTERMISSION 1” text at the top, so your attention is drawn there (and away from the sound icon, which quickly moves to the top left corner of the screen).

- Like with Cascade, you may at first be frustrated that your screen can’t see the whole thing at once. Unlike Cascade, I think this animation was very much designed with that in mind. The panel moves down the screen but stays the same size, so you have to scroll to keep up with it. The meteor stays on the screen at this point, so it seems to have left the realm of the panel, like it’s actually physically on the MSPA web page. (Jade does the same thing several seconds later.)

- Once the panel showing Skaia settles, the meteor occupies another, thinner panel on top of it. This is a familiar setup from Doc Scratch’s narration towards the end of Act 5, and you might think you can relax with the scrolling. You’d be wrong. The panels immediately start growing vertically again, and Jade breaks out of the panels to appear in front of it, very appropriate for a character who has the powers of a First Guardian.

- Those two panels widen vertically until they’re too wide to fit on a standard computer screen. This fits nicely into a transition to a single, extremely tall panel of Earth, and now we’re in full Cascade territory, where we know the panel exists, but it’s too big for us to see the whole thing. Of course, panels are still a part of the animation, because the meteor exits a smaller panel on the top left corner. So we have panels-within-panels, and even that one isn’t stationary or staying the same size.

- Then there’s a very thin panel of Jade riding the meteor, which quickly conveys a sense of speed, and brings a nice break of emptiness to the page. Jade leaves that panel; another one appears after it that’s about a normal size. You scroll up to keep this one centered, too.

- Hussie plays into that scroll, because that’s where everything starts glitching, and the animation borders get really apparent. These are neither consistent from glitch to glitch, nor do they reach the border of the true animation, which is lower, but they are right at the edges of your monitor based on where you last scrolled to.

All along the way, Hussie is playing with the panels to give a sense that these characters inhabit a four-dimensional world, which sometimes breaks into the webpage itself. Rather than just being a cool gimmick, this sets up the idea that Caliborn’s messing with the game cartridge does have the power to physically alter the world of Homestuck itself. Since it has been hinted previously that Lord English might only be able to be defeated with glitches, this flash could be a very important setup.

Imagine you have to fix a computer, and you have no idea if it’s a hardware problem or a software problem. If you are over 40, this is probably not a difficult thought experiment, as this is an everyday occurrence for you. Now imagine that the computer is the size of three football fields, and in a pitch dark room, and all you have are a dim flashlight and a 500-page instruction manual that’s half English and half Japanese. That’s sort of what reading Neuromancer is like. I didn’t know what was going on half the time, but I did know that somewhere near the end, a computer would be either fixed or broken, and also that the protagonists had to hurry it up for fear of being annihilated by slow-acting poison or fast-acting wild robots.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a 1980s science fiction book that’s decades ahead of its time, is full of beige prose. You’ve probably heard of purple prose, wherein an author is excessively florid to describe something rather simple. Beige prose is the opposite: Gibson will never describe something in ten perfectly clear words where two rather ambiguous ones will do. This is hard science fiction (which is to say, closer to science than fantasy), so some of the lingo is real but obscure. Sometimes Gibson makes things up, if the technology he wishes to describe doesn’t exist yet, and he doesn’t always fully explain what this new technology does. Some words are foreign, as Gibson writes about a future where Japanese and other cultures are more prevalent than before. Worst of all, Gibson frequently leaves out details that are not directly important to the story, or which will be revealed later, so sometimes it’s not clear whether or not you’re supposed to understand what’s going on.

Beneath all that, the plot is a pretty classic noir tale. More specifically, it’s a classic heist story. A retired software thief is brought back for one last job, which will make him set for life. There’s a couple of femme fatales, a mysterious boss, and plenty of twists and turns, which rarely felt cheap to me, but that might have been because sometimes I figured they had been set up when I hadn’t been paying attention. The character types are all pretty straightforward; the most interesting one is the thief’s boss, Armitage, who has an interesting backstory and the best payoff of the group - and he’s not even around for the climax.

Character and plot are not Gibson’s strong suits. No, the big selling point for Neuromancer is for its setting, which is dense, even more so than Philip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov. This is an alternate future with tons of new technologies, and international troubles that are barely hinted at. (Blink and you’ll miss the allusions to World War Three.) And Gibson’s writing, in this regard, continues to inspire other authors even to this day. The setting is very reminiscent of Blade Runner and other city-focused cyberpunk stories, and large sections have been lifted from it to make Inception. There’s a chunk near the end that plays out like the Limbo sequence of that movie, nearly word-for-word. And despite all the beige prose, the mechanics are less arbitrary and make more sense here than in Inception.

I wouldn’t recommend this book if you want some light science fiction reading, and I’d be lying if I said Neuromancer wasn’t a slog every now and then. But if you’re up to the challenge, there’s something quite beautiful about Neuromancer, in its writing style and in the sheer amount of thought put into every individual word. I finished it wanting to reread it, and I’m sure there’s more I’d pick up now that I know the plot. Since it’s summer and you may have some time to kill, I’d say give it a chance. Just don’t ask me what happened at the end, because I’m still trying to figure it out.

Disney: 1, Paramount: 0.

If summer blockbusters had a scorecard, that might be what it would look like right now. Star Trek Into Darkness did well, but Iron Man 3 had the second-biggest weekend opening in film history (behind its prequel, The Avengers), and it just hit $1 billion in revenue. IM3 wasn’t overwhelmingly better received by the critics, incidentally; most people seem to agree that both it and STID are solid movies. In fact, Rotten Tomatoes puts Trek nine points ahead of Iron Man 3. On the other hand, the Trek fans are a little more miffed.

To be fair, the die-hard Marvel fans were upset too, but only briefly. Both movies have a lot in common, but the most important thing is that they both remix existing elements from their respective canons. Iron Man 3 takes a lot of disparate elements, including Warren Ellis’s “Extremis” biomechanical interface and Matt Fraction’s villain plot from “The Five Nightmares”, both from fairly recent stories. The big element is also the one the advertising focused on, the depiction of the Mandarin, one of Iron Man’s most feared villains. What upset the fans was that the Mandarin here turns out to be a fake, a carefully calculated ideal terrorist image so that an American scientist can continue his deadly experiments. However, they seem to have backed off because their complaints were essentially petty. The Mandarin as originally written is an overblown racist stereotype, a mystical squinty-eyed Asian, and to use him not only to play into current American terrorist fears but also to point at those fears and say “see how predictable you are” is sort of a brilliant narrative touch.

Star Trek Into Darkness does some remixing, too, but it’s at a disadvantage out of the starting gate because it draws from less material, and not because there’s a dearth of it to work with. Yes, STID is Wrath of Khan 2.0. The names are different and some of the events are subtly changed, but it’s still pretty transparent, and we kind of knew this was coming from the moment we heard Cumberbatch was playing a notable Trek villain. There aren’t too many of those, besides Evil Kirk.

Someone once wrote that over time, good characters never change, but their environments do. This illustrates pretty well the difference in adaptation policy between the new Iron Man and Star Trek movies. Marvel really sells with the Iron Man movies that Tony Stark is a lovable douche, and Iron Man 3 largely serves as a vehicle to gently nudge Stark’s character into an endgame position from where he started in the first Iron Man. The new elements to the story are villains, conflicts, issues, environments for Stark and his friends to bounce off of. Since this is a cast of characters we’ve come to love over four movies (I’m counting The Avengers in this, since Iron Man 3 is as much a follow-up to that movie as it is to the other two Iron Man films), there’s a real emotional core to everything we see onscreen. Marvel has worked tirelessly throughout the MCU to create a continuity not just of world mythology, but also of characters, and this has allowed the franchise to continue for seven films and counting without really losing steam.

Star Trek Into Darkness is less concerned with creating continuity, and I believe this is strongly to the film’s detriment, because the original Star Trek series had a very concrete status quo from episode to episode. In STID, most of the remixed elements do not let the characters breathe, but jerk them around from plot point to plot point, or put them through character moments that feel shallow and unprepared-for. Kirk is relieved as captain of the Enterprise, Spock stands on the verge of death, Scotty resigns from the crew, and Kirk dies… and not a single one of these events, which would have been pretty daring in the original series, lasts more than ten minutes onscreen. The exception is Scotty, but the plot sort of forgets about Scotty for half an hour or so before coming back to him. The whole film feels very temporary, and the plot veers wildly with little sense of focus. It’s very difficult to get invested in, especially when the characters’ statuses switch around every twenty minutes.

This isn’t to say that Iron Man 3 is better than Trek at everything. The acting is excellent in both; Bones in particular reminded me why he’s my favorite character of the original series, and Scotty gets the lion’s share of the great comedic moments. And I’d have to give the visual edge to Trek, not because Iron Man 3 looks bad, but because Trek tries more ambitious things. It’s genuinely fantastic at depicting spaceships that are very large, and in some cases unwieldy, in a way that I’ve never seen in a Trek film before.

But rather than rely on cheap tricks to get an audience, I think the Trek franchise needs to slow down and find a reliable rhythm before trying anything as world-shaking as Into Darkness again. When I saw the first film, I thought this new cast was crying out for a television spin-off to depict their adventures. I understand there’s an ongoing comic series that does that, but I really want to see these characters on screen. And since this movie ends with the beginning of the Enterprise’s famed five-year mission, there’s still a chance we’ll get something as relaxed and thoughtful as some of the original cast’s best moments. I’m not giving up hope.

But Disney and Marvel won round one of the summer blockbuster season, to me, because I found Iron Man 3 moving, thoughtful, filled with fewer plot holes, and overall more fun. I’m continually excited with the direction of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; I think it’s in good hands.

Next month brings the next big summer smackdown, and Disney’s in one of the corners again: Pixar’s Monsters University releases a mere week after that other big comic book movie of the summer, Warner Brothers’ Man of Steel. Should be something to look forward to - are you ready?

Glee finished its fourth season a week ago. You had no idea, did you? I didn’t. I think most people have stopped watching Glee by now. I’m surprised it has any viewers to speak of; Ryan Murphy probably has a faster viewership growth rate with his other show, American Horror Story. A few years ago, though, it was the most popular new show on the block. What happened?

I didn’t watch the show regularly, at first. My main exposure was through the music. The first time I saw Glee was a blurry iPod recording of the pilot’s now-infamous finale, “Don’t Stop Believin”. I could barely hear it, but it’s telling that this is what my friend decided to show me, to try to get me into the show. This is what captured him.

The following year, I put Glee in my car’s CD drive to pass the time and I followed the music religiously ever since. It got better when the piano sheet music came out, so I could actually play along. See, whenever I watched the show, I was disappointed: the characters don’t grow, and the plots are stereotypical or repetitive (or both). But when I listened, I loved it. Not because there are original songs, but because I’m hearing new versions of stuff I already know, and am gaining some exposure to some other, good pre-existing material.

When Glee started releasing albums of its music, it topped the movie/TV soundtrack charts in a heartbeat. Nobody buys movie/TV soundtracks anymore (besides us movie music nuts), but people bought the Glee albums, and their EPs, and special releases. My running theory is that Ryan Murphy and the rest tapped into (wittingly or not) a steadily growing culture at the time, the remix culture. It is fun to see re-imaginings of things you thought you knew; Facebook and Youtube were growing, and people had started creating GIFs in earnest. It’s a modern culture that started as far back as American Idol, and Glee rode that wave. The mash-ups, I maintain, are some of Glee’s best moments; the last great song I remember hearing from them was the season 2 mid-season premiere, “Thriller / Off With Your Head”.

So what happened? Well, Glee fell due to a lot of reasons. The writing, somehow, got worse; the show lost focus as some characters left for college and new ones entered; show fatigue set in. But let me posit that the music got less interesting, too, and that that’s what killed Glee’s popularity. It’s not that the quality went down; the autotuning was already nigh-unbearable at the beginning of season 2, and still I listened to it. No, I think the internet beat Glee at its own game. Sam Tsui, “United State of Pop”, and a whole host of remixes popped up, and without the embarrassing writing of Glee. I think the show lost relevance, and with it, an audience. What do you think?

EDIT: willwritefordietcoke points out that Glee still has an audience; it’s just been degraded from “most of the US” to “cult” status. Which is fair, and I did discount them in the above article. Still, I think the reasons for why the show lost most of its popularity still stand.

There are a lot of great things about the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, but halfway through season one, we got the last element: big, catchy musical numbers. The cast is all too happy to put down what they’re doing during “Winter Wrap-Up” and perform a choreographed song-and-dance routine; and this continues to occur as the series continues. And they’re generally great: Daniel Ingram is very good at what he does.

Unfortunately, there are no new songs during the Great Pony Drought of 2013, but the brony community is pretty resourceful and creative, so there are artists that are almost as good as the show. Here are five excellent pony songwriters.

5) Joaftheloaf

If you like sad songs, Joaftheloaf is for you, because he’s pretty great at it. Joaftheloaf has written two songs about Scootaloo (the orphan), one about Trixie (the outcast), and one about Luna (but who doesn’t write songs about her?). He managed to take what is, to my mind, one of the fandom’s most controversial fanfics, “My Little Dashie”, and turn it into a fairly touching anthem. And then, of course, there’s the swing jazz number “Swing! Tavi! Swing!”, which featured in April’s best animation, “Once Upon a Time in Canterlot”. Bring tissues, because you’ll need them.

BEST TRACKS: “Swing! Tavi! Swing!”, “When Home’s Lost (Part 2)”, “The Hardest Thing”, “For Dashie”

4) Sherclop Pones

This one’s cheating a little bit, because Sherclop doesn’t just write songs. They write songs for their popular abridged series, “Friendship is Witchcraft”. But that means that of the five artists on this list, Sherclop hews most closely to the structure of the show’s songs: fairly quick, simple melodies, and very catchy. The lyrics are about as dark as you’d expect from this black comedy, but they’re delivered in a very upbeat way, and they’re all hilarious.

BEST TRACKS: “The Gypsy Bard”, “Pinkie’s Brew”, “It’ll Be OK”

3) Jeff Burgess

More so than the other artists of this list, Burgess branches out to not just pony music, so his catalog of tracks is still small. But boy, are they great. Burgess does some really interesting stuff with his music. One specialty appears to be AU stories; “Somber”, his most recent release, is an upbeat story of Twilight Sparkle’s fall into darkness, which happens to be a take off of “Some Nights”. And “Farewell, Applejack” paints a background of Applejack’s parents going to war. On the canon side, “Home” is the best Luna/Celestia song I’ve ever heard. Keep an eye on him.

BEST TRACKS: “Somber”, “Farewell, Applejack”, “Home”

2) dBPony

It’s easy for pony songs to get nostalgic, melancholic, or any other assortment of sad, but give credit to dBPony for keeping things upbeat. There’s the Apple Bloom-centric “Miles”, about her search for a cutie mark, and the crazy rock song “Daddy Discord”. But best of all is the song that undoubtedly spun out of last season’s episode “Wonderbolts Academy”, the late 90s / early 2000s style rock anthem “Wonderbolt”. It perfectly encapsulates Rainbow Dash’s ambition, and her hopes and dreams.

BEST TRACKS: “Miles”, “Wonderbolt”

1) MandoPony (Andrew Stein)

Where to begin? Andrew Stein is an underrated gem of the fandom. He provides his own vocals (and also provided vocals for the David Larsen-penned song accompanying “Double Rainboom”), but he’s also among the best lyricists I’ve ever heard, and that’s not just within the pony fandom. His collaborations with AcousticBrony are wonderful, from his Scootaloo song “I’ll Fly Higher” to the two Element-centric, “Loyalty” and “Kindness”. But best of all is the way he captures character. Spike, Zecora, Fluttershy, Shining Armor, Alicorn Twilight, and Derpy all get their moments in the spotlight. And you’ve gotta give him credit for writing “Picture Perfect Pony”, which has spawned one of the fandom’s best animations. It is fairly clear to me that Andrew Stein is the best songwriter in the fandom today.

BEST TRACKS: “Kindness”, “When I Find My Wings”, “Picture Perfect Pony”, “A Long Way from Equestria”, “I’ll Fly Higher”

edwardspoonhands:

I love Tumblr…big big love. And I like that you can like or reblog something without commenting on it, because, like, not everything needs commentary…not everything needs to be analyzed to be amplified.

But when I post original content (specifically blog posts or videos) I really like to know what people think about those things…and more than just the sliding scale of “how many notes did this get.” I want deeper information than that, and so I’m always diving into the notes to see what people say when they reblog stuff, but mostly, people don’t say anything. 

YouTube comments are great, but one of the things Tumblr is really great at is facilitating a broader public discussion. And I’m not saying people should go out of their way to comment on a reblog, nor am I saying that there aren’t often lots of good discussions, but I just dove down about 200 notes deep onthis thing that I posted and didn’t see a single additional word associated with any reblogs.

Is Tumblr becoming (or has it always been) a place where you define yourself simply by the things that you like, and not by the things you say and think? I know some people aren’t comfortable sharing themselves like that, but it’s almost always worthwhile to say something if you have something to say.

I guess what I’m saying is that the internet is a two-way street…we are all creators…I don’t ever want to lose that.

As someone who blogs primarily original content (in the form of movie, television, book, comic, and video game reviews), I sympathize entirely. I’m hard-pressed to get into double digits in likes or reblogs on any given review, and even harder pressed to get a textual response of some sort. One problem may be that the comment system of Tumblr is close to non-existent, but the ability to re-appropriate content is easy. The website has always been a content appreciation resource in my eyes rather than a content creation source; the problem is, I write on Tumblr because there are no other blog sites (Wordpress, Blogspot, etc) that have quite the same level of traffic. It’s a difficult problem, and I’m still waiting for a platform that would really suit the particular combination of discourse and traffic I’m looking for.

“Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love.” - J.K. Rowling

We do not grieve for the dead. We grieve for the living, to try to understand why some people are taken away from us when we think we needed them the most. So now I’m doing what any critic would reasonably do when one of our number moves on. I’m writing about it.

We live in a flood of criticism. It’s so easy to get your hands on media today that everyone thinks they have some authority to comment on it, myself included. Even media itself comments on other media. Look at films like Shrek or The Princess Bride: each makes fun of well-worn tropes while still telling a heartwarming tale in its own right. Everyone’s looking over everyone else’s shoulder. “What are you doing? I have some ideas on how you could make it better.”

And a select few manage to rise above the tsunami of criticism, and above all of them there was Roger Ebert. You could argue that he endured because he was one of the first. Ebert popularized criticism, particularly with the TV show he pioneered with Richard Roeper. Like Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” centuries before, Ebert showed us, “You see?  Criticism is as much personal expression, as much an important part of the human conversation, as art is. And this is how it is done.”

But I do not think being first out of the gate was ever the only, or even most important, distinction Roger Ebert had as a critic. The word “criticism” holds a negative connotation because so much of it is negative. It’s often “here’s how you could improve”. But Ebert’s reviews are so frequently optimistic. Every review, even his notorious “two thumbs down” reviews, showed a deep passion for the art of filmmaking, and he could find the good even in the terrible. (Remember when he gave Watchmen four stars, for the sheer mesmerizing visual filmmaking? Or when he credited Nicolas Cage as one of the most indispensable actors of all bad films?)

Roger Ebert had a particular point of view, a constant passion, a charming wit, and an eloquent tongue. He was a monolith not only of criticism, but of all culture, in part because he never talked down to his readers, but considered them as equal and fellow filmgoers. He was and continues to be a huge source of inspiration to me, and likely to many writers. And with his passing, he has left a gaping hole in the world of film criticism that may never truly be filled.

thewatermonchichi:

alemonmoonsky:

niamharthur:

The Philosophers International Trailer (x)

Em…Can someone please tell me why Tumblr isn’t talking about this?!!

Right Tumblr, I know I posted this video yesterday, but since then the proper film twitter sent me the official trailer link and asked me to spread it around so they can get as many well-deserved views on it as possible.

Come on guys, I know we can do this! 

Share as much as you can!

what is this even i am SUPER EXCITED NOW

HOLY SHIT!

I have no words.

Nope. Wait. Actually, I have one word.

DAMN.

Science fiction has the potential to be the most thought-provoking genre of all fiction. While fantasy deals with what is not, and many other genres deal with what is, science fiction sets itself in what could be. The best sci-fi writers use this tool to explore thought-provoking questions about the human condition, and about how the choices we make affect us and our futures. (The worst ones simply wallow in all the cool gadgets.)

I bring this up because I’ve just finished watching the first season of the rebooted Doctor Who, and praise all things: it’s one of the better kind.

A brief history lesson. In 2005, ten years after the last incarnation of Doctor Who and fifteen years after the last incarnation that lasted longer than a single movie, BBC brought back the old science fiction show and gave it a facelift. They had the help of Russell T. Davies, who singlehandedly wrote and produced a large chunk of the new season; Davies more or less defined the tone of the good Doctor for a new generation of viewers. One change he made was to move from a “serial” storytelling format, in which story arcs could last anywhere from two to eight episodes, to a more traditional single-parter or double-parter format. As a result, while 26 seasons preceded the reboot, new seasons are referred to as “series”; thus, season one of the reboot is called “series one”. (As with many reboot numbering systems, it’s more complicated than it should be.)

The story of Doctor Who goes like this. Rose (Billie Piper), moody teenager and professional normal person, is one day attacked by aliens masquerading as mannequins. A mysterious man calling himself the Doctor (here played by Christopher Eccleston) saves her; he has a time travelling police box, and he asks her to go on adventures with him. Accepting his offer, Rose leaves her normal life behind, and thus the frame narrative is set up for a show that veers wildly between genres. There is historical fiction, futuristic sci-fi, cautionary dystopia, time travel paradoxes, and gripping horror, but you can bet that somehow Doctor Who will bring aliens into the mix. It’s always aliens. Most amusing is how the show can engineer situations where two members of completely different species can have a conversation at a dinner table while both appear human. It’s a trick that allows Doctor Who to focus on the emotions and ideas, rather than the special effects.

Because let’s face it, if you’re going into Doctor Who for the effects, you will be disappointed. We’ve moved beyond rubber suits — most of the time — but the CGI looks pretty fake, too. Even something relatively simple, like a space station (in an episode with few other effects) can look pretty out of place. The technology improves over the course of the series, but it’s never good enough to rival movie standards.

Doctor Who cheerfully acknowledges its camp and sort of rolls with it. The first episode has an early sequence in which Rose and the Doctor run down a hallway, and the scene is shot from a lot of different angles to make the simple choreography look more exciting. It’s a cheap, cheesy trick, and the early episodes have a lot of moments like that, especially when it looks like the characters are seconds from death. That can be frustrating from a production angle, but on the flip side, some of the camp is really charming. One set of villains are a race of green lizard people that hide inside the bodies of extremely fat humans, and fart all the time due to their suits not quite fitting right. You’d never expect fart jokes in a scifi series to be comedy gold, but they are.

There’s a pervading sense of joy in the early episodes particularly, coupled hand-in-hand with a sense of newness. Eccleston’s Doctor starts the series like he’s a kid in a toy store, always excited to see new places and times with his companion(s). As the series continues, there’s a shift. The Doctor loses some of his naivete in the face of ethical conundrums and true horrors, both of which are hallmarks of solid science fiction writing. We come to learn about the Doctor’s history, which involves the apparent death of two species, including his own, and thus discover a lot of emotional baggage that he’s carrying. Sometimes the Doctor is truly scary, like when he faces down the last of a hateful, exterminating race called the Daleks, and becomes just as hateful towards it.

And then there’s Rose — happy to escape her old life for months at a time, even if it means leaving behind the people who love her, to the degree where they’ll call her out on it eventually. Really, the adventure and camp from the series’ beginning is eventually brought down to earth, and the emotional stakes get a lot higher. This is at the same time as a new character, Jack Harkness, is introduced, and he steals every scene he’s in, so the show is never entirely somber, but by the time you’re about halfway through the series, there’s a good chance you’ll really care about the characters and their fates. This, along with the complex sci-fi issues dealt with, is where Doctor Who will draw you in; it’s not just fun and games (although that is some of it).

The episodes range in quality, but surprisingly, the series has a pretty well-defined three-act structure. This may be because Davies wrote eight of the thirteen episodes, but even the episodes he didn’t write come together pretty nicely. The first five episodes are about Rose’s departure from her home; she feels significant ties to it until the end of the first two-parter. The next three episodes break down the optimism of the Doctor as the humans he travels with fail him again and again. The last few of the season continue to address Rose’s complete departure from reality, and bring the Doctor’s past back to haunt him. A lot of continuity is brought back in the last few episodes, as the lizard-people make a reappearance, along with two Big Bads from previous stories.

There are two episodes that don’t really fit into the overall character arcs, a two-parter set in World War II, and they are written by none other than Steven Moffat. They’re also the best episodes of the season, really digging into the horror genre and providing the show’s best ending. (Yes, even better than the season finale.) Watch Steven Moffat, he’s going places. Hell, he may even be running the whole damn show a few seasons from now.

Does the show have flaws? Of course. Take Rose’s supporting cast, consisting of her boyfriend and her mother. I like their role early on; they can’t come with Rose (or don’t want to), but they provide her with a sense of normalcy when she does come home, or they remind her what happens when she leaves home for an extended period of time without telling anyone. But later, after these characters have more or less accepted that Rose will only be on Earth infrequently, I dislike their roles. They whine, and selfishly want Rose back, and often fail to support her when she needs them. Rose has a selfish streak, too, but once each set of characters has accepted the new status quo, I’d expect them to move on.

And some episodes are weaker than others. The nadir, unfortunately, is the time paradox episode, which I was greatly looking forward to. It’s nice for the Doctor’s characterization, because Rose screws up massively upon having access to time travel. She successfully saves her father from death, unleashing aliens who start erasing things on sight (I told you Doctor Who could bring aliens into anything); and even when Rose sees the devastation she’s caused, she doesn’t want to give him up, and the Doctor sees her as a dangerous asset. But the tone of the episode is often heavy-handed; the background music leans heavily on the strings, and everything is overly romanticized in a show that’s usually very snappy and often funny. It sticks out like a sore thumb.

But ultimately, these flaws are not enough to keep Doctor Who from greatness. Of all the cult shows (Firefly, Arrested Development, Buffy the Vampire Slayer — actually, half of them seem to be written by Joss Whedon), Doctor Who may have the biggest fanbase. There are so many different things to like about it (great characters, variety of genres, humor and drama and romance) that chances are you’ll find something in this show that appeals to you. The writing is thoughtful and character-driven and it all ties together quite neatly by the end of the season, and most importantly, the adventures are always fun. Doctor Who started as a children’s show, but it’s evolved into something that’s compelling for viewers of all ages.

I consider myself to have some authority on young adult trilogies, having read a fair few myself. I’ve seen them collapse under their own weight after one book (The Knife of Letting Go and its sequels) or two (A Crack in the Line and its sequels). I’ve also seen trilogies that veer off in a jarringly different direction partway through. The Golden Compass is a straightforward steampunk fantasy (well, as straightforward as that genre can be, anyway); its second sequel The Amber Spyglass is a biblical epic.

It is with a fair amount of admiration, then, that I report that Suzanne Collins has written a trilogy that hangs together rather well, and that Mockingjay feels not like an arbitrary authorial addition, but a necessary conclusion to a three-book-long narrative, as well as a self-contained story in its own right.

True to form established by chapter-ending and book-ending cliffhangers, Mockingjay picks up right where the previous book left off. District 12 is destroyed, and its few survivors, including protagonist Katniss Everdeen, have taken refuge in the technologically advanced District 13, where the rebellion against the tyrannical Capitol is being planned. Remember how Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows threw away the “year-at-boarding-school” format to make room for a half-camping, half-war story? Well, Mockingjay, at first glance, does the same thing. Instead of being about a year at the Games, it’s about the final stretch of the conflict that’s been building between the citizens and the Capitol.

One slight problem: Katniss isn’t treated as a soldier, but as a figurehead. Members of the resistance effort have grown so attached to Katniss that she’s too valuable to use in battle. So at the book’s start, Katniss must decide whether or not to become the Mockingjay, a symbol of inspiration rather than a true soldier. She resists at first but eventually consents, at which point she is made over to appear presentable in much the same way she was prepared before the Games. And the bird Katniss is named after, the mockingjay, can only repeat what other people say to it.

So Katniss participates in war games - staged re-enactments of battles rather than the real thing. Most of the actual fighting happens offscreen. When Katniss is a participant, she’s often heavily guarded. Not only is Mockingjay not a war story (at least, not at first), it dabbles in the same sort of violence-for-entertainment stuff that the first two books did.

Of course, that’s until the final third of the book. There, in the series’ ninth and final act, the rules are blown wide open. Mockingjay acts almost as a cautionary tale: the camera crews are so intent on capturing Katniss in battle, that when it finally comes, they aren’t ready for it. Yet for once, Katniss acts without worrying about how she’ll come across on camera, as a true military leader. There are more deaths on screen than there were during either of the previous two books, and they are horrifying and meaningless, not faces on a checklist counting down how much longer the Games will go on. The book’s last act is shocking, and after eight ninths of play, the trilogy needed this section of truth, so that everything else can be retroactively compared to it.

There’s an interesting twist with regards to Peeta, too. Thanks to the Capitol, he has a difficult time telling what’s real and what isn’t, and when he finally appears on screen, everyone including Katniss is suspicious of his loyalties. For once, this isn’t a Katniss and Peeta story; Gale takes the stage, and we finally see the chemistry between him and Katniss. It’s been a long time coming, since like Twilight this series hinges a lot of its romantic drama on the love triangle which we’ve only seen one side of before, and here… well, seeing Gale during the war effort shows exactly what sort of a partner he would be like to Katniss, and it’s easy for the reader to draw conclusions as to who she should choose, if either.

But the other characters aren’t really fleshed out that much. Katniss’s squad in the book’s final third is barely characterized at all; shocking as their deaths are, you can tell from the beginning that they are cannon fodder. The problem is that the new characters of District 13 aren’t all that interesting. Katniss doesn’t care about most of them, and neither should we. Her superior, President Coin, gets some good moments, and her ultimate role in the series (along with which other figurehead she directly mirrors) is pretty easy to figure out. Fellow tributes Beetee and Finnick are similarly interesting, but that’s just holdover from Catching Fire. I think the second book in the trilogy was my favorite, actually, because it made the greatest effort to fill its Games with a series of interesting characters that wouldn’t all be dead by book’s end. In Mockingjay, Katniss wants to work alone, and the people who are supposed to be helping her in District 13 aren’t very good at it. Oh, well.

The ending has a sort of dreary karmic inevitability towards it. Katniss had a goal when she started off the trilogy’s series of events, and this goal ultimately fails. The forces that could have held control over the Capitol and which are established as evil are taken down, but instead of a vast government revamp, a new leader comes to power in the same position. The love triangle isn’t resolved because of a great decision Katniss makes, but because of what sort of naturally happens. War doesn’t bring glory. Just like the end of the first Hunger Games that Katniss participated in it, she ends her time in these books with severe emotional trauma.

So where does the series leave us? With one significant change to the world: there is no longer a Hunger Games. That’s right: the premise of the books, the title of both the series and its first book, is abolished. In my mind that makes a lot of sense. I always found this premise flimsy: why didn’t the districts rise up sooner? I feel that Collins came up with it to tell the story she wanted to, and once the Games had served their purpose, Collins could get rid of them.

Still: it is a very good story. Some of the plots are better realized than others; some characters are interesting, and some not; and above all, the trilogy is packed to the gills with symbolism and themes. It’s not perfect, and like I discovered with Game of Thrones, if a series has only one thing going for it, good as the thing is, it won’t be enough. (Game of Thrones only has good characters.) But Mockingjay and its prequels work decently as a story, not just a bundle of themes, and as a trilogy it is tremendously better work than half of the stuff in the young adult market these days. The books are definitely worth a look - but read until the end if you do, because The Hunger Games isn’t by any means the end of the story.