Alyska

So. Um. I did some very silly fanart. Enjoy.

 

Contains possible spoilers for "The Doctor's Wife" and "Asylum of the Daleks."

They did get the memories of that timeline, but not immediately after it happened.

 

For the first half of Season 6, they didn't have any knowledge of things like River's identity or who The Silence were, which they should have had, had they retained the memories of the alternate timeline.

 

So, when time went all screwy, the Amy and Rory present there were the Amy and Rory from towards the end of the season, not the Amy and Rory who were watching the Doctor die. They were taken from a later point in their timelines, and were put back there after time was repaired.

 

...huh. I think I might have just answered my own question there.

For the Melody Pond stuff, it wasn't necessarily a paradox. We'd already known that we were meeting River out of order, we just still didn't know who she was at the time. Then she specifically stayed out of the fight until after Melody was taken, to avoid crossing her own timestream. Why River went to the place with the Doctor is beyond me, but since she never truly acknowledged either version of herself, it was more like whenever the Doctor meets up with his past selves. Since, if you notice, she never actually does anything more than help Amy and the Doctor(And Rory whenever he's there before the Demon's Run incident). The most major thing that could cross the timeline, is the whole Impossible Astronaut two parter, where she comes close to meeting with her past self. But, for some reason, she doesn't seem to recall it; Silence side-effect? Regeneration? Either way, she never meets with her past self, since by the time she finds the suit, Melody escaped.

 

She said she remembered being the little girl in the space suit, but had had to pretend she didn't for Amy, Rory, and the Doctor's sake. She turned up for this event because she remembered seeing her older self there, and in this case, not turning up would have created the paradox.

 

The River in the spacesuit killing the Doctor was the younger of the two Rivers at the scene, so she didn't know what was going to happen, and was not there by choice. The older River was there because this was a fixed point in time, and, once again, she had seen herself there and therefore knew she had to be there.

 

One thing that bugs me about that season is this: At what point in Amy and Rory's timeline do they gain the memories of the "all of time is happening at once" alternate timeline? It would make sense for them to have remembered it immediately after the Doctor's apparent death (on the date that time got stuck on), but you can clearly see that this isn't the case. It seems as if they were just chilling out in their deckchairs under the stars one evening, and suddenly-bam!

 

Unless time was rewritten so that they retroactively had those memories all alongaaaaaaaaaaaaa paradoxes.

Only just watched the Christmas special last night- definitely my favourite Christmas story so far. Yay for all the Holmes references (Now, we just need to put Sherlock in a fourth Doctor hat and scarf and everything will be perfect). And Straxx. We need more Straxx.

 

"Smaller on the outside" was something I had made up my mind that I would say should I ever wind up inside a TARDIS (or similar dimension-bending building), and I am slightly miffed/impressed by Clara beating me to it.

 

 

 

 

Well, "man" works too, if you think about it- it's still presenting the Silurians as people, and "humanising" them somewhat.

 

I think that generally speaking, anything that comes out of the Doctor's mouth is likely to give any nearby scientists headaches. That's just part of the fun, though, isn't it? I don't even really classify this show as science fiction in my head- it's more or less fantasy that just happens to involve time travel, aliens and robots.

I cringe every time I hear the species name for the Silurians given as Homo reptilia. If that particular episode (was it a two-parter? I don't care.) where the Doctor keeps bloody saying that wasn't otherwise rather good, I'd just skip it, because the genus name they came up with would imply that they're closely related to humans, but they're freaking reptiles, and Reptilia is a Class, so listing it as a species name is moronic anyway, and how was nobody involved in that episode smart enough to spot this?

 

Anyway, bah humbug.

 

I noticed that too, and I probably would be annoyed by it were it not for the fact that it's not a biologist who's calling them that. It's the Doctor. He probably doesn't care about the scientific naming system invented by Earth scientists, he just likes to sound clever by throwing in some technobabble and Latin here and there. And there is a very good reason why he labelled them as "Homo"- it means "the same". The entire episode was drawing parallels between humans and Silurians, and he wanted to promote the idea that the Silurians are people and should be treated as such.

 

If a character that's supposed to be a scientist starts talking like that though, then it's a cause for concern.

But there have been different races/cultures/generations of Daleks, and each of those seems to have a different set of values/ideals. So, some versions of the Daleks emphasise "purity", while others would simply want a large army, and others would be looking for intelligence and other qualities to assimilate into their population.

 

 

Anyway, has anyone seen the Sontaran Christmas Carols yet? They're brilliant. They need to make Straxx a full-time companion, seriously.

 

Also, I was flicking through the TV guide, and came across a synopsis of the Christmas episode:

 

"The Doctor's latest adventure through space and time sees him again crossing paths with the homo-reptilian Silurian Madame Vastra and her cohort Jenny."

 

Now, normally, I would say that the phrase "homo-reptilian Silurian" was redundant, but in Madame Vastra's case...

 

... there is no way that wasn't deliberate.

Well, there's a strong possibility that they would never notice him, and that he'd end up just being randomly, pointlessly exterminated in one of their attacks on Earth. I don't think Daleks really do blogging, so Sherlock Holmes (or Watson, or Lestrade...) just ending up as, basically, a human speed bump seems quite likely to me in such a scenario.

 

There is, after all, not much clever can do against a Dalek when it's taking aim.

 

But...but... Dalek!Sherlock... the awesomeness...

 

"WHEN YOU HAVE EX-TER-MIN-A-TED THE IM-POSS-I-BLE, WHATEVER REMAINS, HOWEVER IM-PRO-BA-BLE...

MUST... BE... EX-TER-MIN-A-TEEEEEEEED!"

Yeah, I was thinking the "separate universes, mutually fictional" route. As much as I love Wholock crossovers, Sherlock Holmes existing in the same universe as the Daleks would not end well.

 

I mean, Sherlock's a genius.

 

The Daleks need genius...

There's a new minisode out that gives a bit more info on Vastra's background, and inspired a complete crack of a theory about one of Steven Moffat's other shows.

 

Now, consider the following points:

- Madame Vastra lives in Victorian London and is referred to as "The Great Detective."

-She leads a rather... alternative lifestyle for the time period, and has a very close relationship with her assistant. They call each other "my dear".

-She is occasionally consulted by the detectives at Scotland Yard to solve extremely difficult cases. She considers these detectives to be inferior beings and is quite rude and dismissive of them.

 

In other words, Vastra is basically Sherlock Holmes as a subterranean lizard woman.

 

Now, the interesting thing is that in Moffat's other show, Sherlock, there's a hint that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did exist in that universe, and was successful enough in writing mystery stories to have made a pop-cultural impact that extended into the 21st century. But, obviously, he could not have written the Sherlock Holmes novels.

 

So, my theory is that in that universe, Sir Doyle wrote stories about Vastra and Jenny instead of Holmes and Watson.

 

Not particularly logical, I admit, but it would be pretty awesome.

 

 

Ohohoh no. Don't make me drag out my set of Bayonicle jokes again. You will regret it.

 

 

But after doing a bit more research on motion capture, I think I'm actually going to have to agree with Lychir. Motion capture generally needs to be done on a green screen background in a very controlled environment, so an entirely mocapped cast on real backgrounds would actually be kind of pointless. You'd just have camera crews going out, filming patches of forest from different angles with no actors in place. It would make building sets of any kind pointless, and it would really be much better just to create everything on the computer.

 

But I actually think it would be nicer if we got to the point where motion capture was a viable option for TV series, and had a Bionicle TV show rather than a film. I think the story would work out better if it had more screentime to develop the characters and plot. In the direct to DVD films so far, we've always ended up with some important details being neglected as a result of trying to compress things.

The secret to doing well in the Skyscraper/Tree Hollow, aside from having high-level Pokemon, of course, is to have something like a Blissey in your party with Softboiled or Milk Drink, which gives you a way of healing your Pokemon in between battles. Sitrus berries are also incredibly useful there if you have a large supply of them.

Ah, but see, I think that Bionicle has the potential to reach outside what most people would call the fandom. Not everyone who went to see the Transformers films is a die-hard adult fan who watches the show, collects the toys, posts on TF forums, edits fan wikis and otherwise participates in a fan community. There are many people who went to see those films who hadn't watched a Transformers cartoon in ten years, but had fond memories of the show when they were a child. And I'm sure there are plenty of people with a similar nostalgia for the early years of Bionicle.

 

Those are the people that a movie would be aimed at. Not us.We're insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As the Scott Pilgrim movie demonstrated, if you aim soley at the geeks, you're going to fail.

 

And the need to have human or human-looking characters in movies aimed at adults seems to be on the decline. Perhaps we're not quite there yet, but the advances in technology are making it more possible to have nonhuman characters that look believable and relatable without falling into the Uncanny Valley. Then there's the fact that studios like Pixar are slowly breaking down the perception that animation/CGI films with nonhuman characters are for children only.

 

So, while it's perhaps not as likely to be picked up any more, I don't really see any reason why it couldn't work if it was properly executed.

That takes a lot of effort for the lack or money such a project has going for it. You would have to cross that financial hurtle first, however even without it, you would have to consider it would probably go strait to DVD, considering that I don't think the target audience of Bioncle fans is large enough to warrant a full release, and that is assuming that the movie would be accessible to non-Bionicle fans and draw them in.

Hero Factory is getting a feature film, to be released in cinemas, possibly live-action. If Bionicle had stuck around just a few more years, they would have almost certainly done a movie for it given the current trend. Bionicle actually has a one-up over HF in that it holds inherent appeal to the same 7-12 year old male demographic as HF, as well as having nostalgia value for a large number of twentysomething year olds.

 

But I actually think it's better that Bionicle ended before that happened, since it opens up the possibility of Bionicle being rebooted later with a feature film series.

In Avatar there were humans. In Bionicle, no. So if you need CGI for every single live actor, it starts to get redundant. Why not just make it full on CGI?

 

 

Well, you might want to have scenery from real-world locations, as opposed to rendering everything on a computer. As I mentioned above, New Zealand would be a fantastic place to film the parts of the story that take place on Mata or Voya Nui. Given that most of the main characters have humanlike proportions, you could possibly film the live actors in that location, and simply superimpose the CGI over the top, instead of green-screening everything.

 

Also, if you check out some of the set photos from the Iron Man films, you can see that in some scenes, Robert Downey Junior wears a full set of armour- in others, he wears only the helmet and chest armour, (his arm and leg armour is inserted later via mocap/augmented reality). In other scenes, the entire suit is done with CGI and motion capture. The same thing could be done with Bionicle characters, except that there would need to be motion capture on the actors' facial expressions as well as their broader body movements.

 

So, I'm not sure how practical it is from a filmmaking perspective, but the use of "live" motion capture is certainly not implausible. However, I imagine that once the setting shifted to Metru Nui, you would be looking at full CGI.

It depends on whether motion capture counts as live action. So, while the characters would be computer generated in terms of appearance, their movements and expressions would all come from live actors. If it was done by, say, the Lord of the Rings team, it could be amazing (Especially since the Island of Mata Nui is at least partly based on New Zealand).

The Matoran speak in a programming language. They don't have accents.Now, Agori and Glatorian might have accents that are based on where they come from.

Well, we know that the Matoran language is capable of changing and evolving- treespeak is proof of that, along with the fact that the Voya Nui Matoran used hexagonal letters instead of round ones. Matoran having different accents wouldn't be too much of a stretch. And from a human perspective, there is no such thing as not having an accent.

No, Rickman wasn't the original voice actor-he's just who I imagined for Kopaka before I saw Sherlock.How about John Cleese for Mutran?

After watching a Sherlock marathon, Kopaka is now voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch in my headcanon (Sorry, Alan Rickman- you're fired.)Vezon is Russel Brand. And more generally, Pohatu's Australian, Lewa's Irish or Scottish (David Tennant?), everyone is is more or less as they were in the movies.

On the topic of overanalysing, I've just realised that Doctor Hooves offers the perfect explanation as to why the Doctor can apparently speak Horse...

I say Rej-Ee-Gy-Gus. Also, just got my Shiny Charm! And now I can't even be bothered trying to test it...

Attack of the killer monster snow goons!Also, they're still messing with us as to whether it's the same Oswin or not...

Pretty sure it was confirmed by Greg that Mata Nui gave everyone in the MU the ability to speak Agori via some sort of beam. I think this was done from the robot, not from the Ignika. Lewa and a few others missed out because they were in a fortress on Bota Magna when it happened.

Apparently, another name they considered was "Dooheads"... yeah.Also, I think that if Bionicle had been called "Boneheads of Voodoo Island", it would have made that controversy with the Maoris that much worse...