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June, 2010

Jun 27

2010

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★ Thoughts on the Dramatic Structure of Doctor Who

Posted by in writing

A few minutes ago, I fin­ished watch­ing the final epis­ode in this season’s Doctor Who, star­ring Matt Smith. A sat­is­fy­ing and clever end to a great story.

The show is an inter­est­ing one from a dra­matic stand­point: good fic­tion will usu­ally chart the jour­ney of a char­ac­ter along a line describ­ing his devel­op­ment. There should be a fun­da­mental, irre­vers­ible change between the char­ac­ter at the begin­ning of the story and the char­ac­ter at the end. This does not work for the Doctor. How do writers get around this? They sub­ject his com­pan­ions to peril; and they have his com­pan­ions undergo ‘growth’ on his behalf.

Not only this, but the stor­ies often struggle with the prob­lem of the ‘deus ex mach­ina’ — solu­tions to story prob­lems that arrive seem­ingly from out­side the story itself. In today’s epis­ode, it turns out that a prison box happened to have the abil­ity to recre­ate the entire uni­verse. As did the brain of the Doctor’s assist­ant, Amy Pond. This hap­pens rather too much, but, inter­est­ingly, does not appear to wound the story fatally. Indeed, these inter­ven­tions have almost become a trade­mark of the show.

It’s also inter­est­ing to com­pare my own guesses about the dir­ec­tion of the show, pre-broadcast, to how the show turned out. This is fairly straight­for­ward because I wrote a spec­u­lat­ive script in January. Overall: pretty much on the money with regards Amy’s impend­ing mar­riage and the romantic rela­tion­ship between her and the Doctor; and wide of the mark in terms of her pro­fes­sion, which turned out to be a kisso­gram rather than a police officer (got that from a leaked set photo). Writing the script was an enjoy­able exer­cise, but some­thing I prob­ably won’t come back to, given that the plot of my story was very sim­ilar to The Beast Below.

DOCTOR WHO AND THE DIAMONDS OF BLOOD

1 EXT. SPACE

FX: THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Bang! The sun is a bril­liant, white orb. We drift back and the sun dims. The EARTH swooshes past. The sun: dim­mer and dim­mer. We pass JUPITER, SATURN, URANUS until we slow down on the loom­ing, majestic, black disc of PLUTO. It is no brighter than a tomb­stone on a moon­lit night.

A series of SHOTS, over which we hear the NARRATOR; an old man, tired.

FX: SHOT ONE

(PLUTONIAN MOUNTAINS)

…DISSOLVING TO:

FX: SHOT TWO

(PLUTONIAN PLAINS)

…DISSOLVING TO:

FX: SHOT THREE

(PLUTONIAN PLAINS 2)

NARRATOR

I am one of the ancients, born in the fires that marked Creation, to die alone in the ice cold dark­ness at the end of all things. I wander from galaxy to galaxy, from star to star. I am the last of my kind.

CUT TO:

2 EXT. ICY PLAIN ON PLUTO

NB All scenes on PLUTO take place at NIGHT.

FX: A BLACK PLAIN, WITH HINTS OF ROCK LIT BY MOONLIGHT. WE CAN’T SEE ANY STARS.

IN LONG SHOT ON THIS PLAIN: THE TARDIS MATERIALISES.

The WHITE LIGHT atop THE TARDIS throws a pale, stead­ily illu­min­a­tion for a few metres around it. We can­not, how­ever, see behind the TARDIS yet.

HOLD on THE TARDIS for a BEAT.

THE TARDIS opens. Softly.

THE DOCTOR steps out. He looks mis­chiev­ous, as though on the verge of a prank.

He walks onto the sur­face of PLUTO. His steps are comic tip-toes.

We see AMY stand­ing at the door to THE TARDIS, smiling.

THE DOCTOR turns to her. He puts a fin­ger to his LIPS.

THE DOCTOR removes A PIN from his pocket.

He holds it up to the light. Lets it scintillate.

He drops the PIN.

(DING!)

AMY

We’ve got the whole planet to ourselves?

AMY leaves THE TARDIS.

THE DOCTOR

It’s not actu­ally a planet. More of a plan­et­oid. Or a big, inhospitable -

AMY

Wait — we’re not going to suf­foc­ate, are we?

THE DOCTOR

The TARDIS is pro­ject­ing an envel­ope of oxy­gen, nitro­gen, and so on; the usual sus­pects. Fresh as an alpine meadow. Minus the cow pats, of course. That would be tak­ing verisimil­it­ude too far.

AMY

What should I be wearing?

THE DOCTOR has his back to AMY. She can’t see as he pro­duces NOT JUST ANY POCKET WATCH with a GLOWING DIAL.

THE DOCTOR

(looks at the watch)

AD 13 times 10 to the 4th?

AMY

What’s that?

THE DOCTOR

It’s a date.

AMY

What? This? Now?

THE DOCTOR

Of course. It wouldn’t be a date otherwise.

AMY

Well, I had no idea. You should have said earlier, in the TARDIS.

THE DOCTOR

Why would I? It wasn’t AD 13 times 10 to the 4th then.

AMY

You are so alien.

AMY walks across the sur­face of PLUTO away, cast­ing her eyes about.

AMY

So we’ve got a whole planet to ourselves?

THE DOCTOR

It’s not a -

AMY

Whatever it is, it’s dark.

THE DOCTOR

Not much sun­shine this far out. Plenty of peace and quiet, though. Over-rated, I feel. Give me a ker­fuffle any day of the week. Even malar­key. At shenanigins, I draw the line, obvi­ously, like any sens­ible person.

THE DOCTOR crouches to pick up the PIN. Something cap­tures his atten­tion on the ground.

AMY, absorbed by her own thoughts, looks up at the black sky.

AMY

Doctor?

THE DOCTOR’S POV: Lying on the sur­face are sev­eral DIAMONDS. He puts one in his mouth and bites.

THE DOCTOR

(con­tin­ues)

Diamonds? Well, that’s not right, is it?

AMY

Doctor, where are the stars?

THE DOCTOR

Hmm? Directly above your head, I shouldn’t won­der. No light pol­lu­tion on Pluto. Prepare your­self for the most beautiful -

THE DOCTOR looks up.

There’s noth­ing there. Just BLACKNESS.

AMY

Doctor, I think we’re being watched.

THE DOCTOR

Amy, I can assure you that there is noth­ing on this — well, to use the ori­ginal Greek for the wrong term — this ‘wan­derer’, apart from ourselves, the TARDIS -

In an INSTANT, the entire PLAIN is illu­min­ated in a hellish red light.

FX: We look up to see the under­side of a HUGE, SPHERICAL SPACESHIP. It’s con­vex base is about the size of the Millennium Dome. Unlike the Dome, it has a CIRCULAR HOLE in the middle. This is where the light comes from. The SPACESHIP has massive legs like a NASA lunar lander.

THE DOCTOR

(con­tinu­ing)

- and a very large, flash­ing, not to say wink­ing and blink­ing, spaceship.

THE DOCTOR — still crouch­ing — looks at AMY.

HIS POV: THE TARDIS is, we now see, perched on the EDGE of a MASSIVE SHAFT that has been sunk into the PLAIN. The OPENING is identical in size and shape to the HOLE in the base of the SPACESHIP.

THE DOCTOR

Of course, a space­ship on Pluto — that’s not unusual. Improbable, but not unusual. The real ques­tion is this.

He holds up a DIAMOND.

AMY

Blimey, you’re a fast mover for a nine-hundred-year-old.

THE DOCTOR looks at AMY, looks at the DIAMOND, looks DOWN — and real­ises that this might be cre­at­ing the wrong impression.

AMY looks at him. Is he serious?

THE DOCTOR

Ah, no. Listen. Me? No, no. Now look -

As the dialgoue con­tin­ues, their voices are drowned out by a RUMBLE that trans­forms into a DEAFENING ROAR, which builds as they talk:

AMY

- this is very nice and everything, and you’re prob­ably a great catch for a spe­cial lady who is, well, alien and…and likes to travel! Or even settle down and have…something with tentacles -

THE DOCTOR

- I didn’t mean that, I just meant there shouldn’t be any of these dia­monds on Pluto, that’s all, for the love of Omega. I’m tech­nic­ally mar­ried to a sac­red hand pup­pet on Ragaloos Six, anyway -

Suddenly, the GROUND begins to SHAKE.

PRAC: DUST ROLLS.

THE DOCTOR and AMY fall prop­erly to the ground and reach for each other.

PRAC: PIECES OF THE SPHERICAL SHIP — WIRING, A METAL PANEL — CLANG TO THE GROUND AROUND THEM.

THE DOCTOR

(roar­ing)

Back! To! The TARDIS!

AMY, hold­ing her ears, nods.

THEIR POV: The TARDIS.

They crawl along the ground.

REVERSE: Closer, closer to the TARDIS.

THEIR POV: THE TARDIS teeters on the edge of the ABYSS, then tips in!

THE DOCTOR and AMY look on in horror.

AMY

The TARDIS is indes­truct­ible, cor­rect? You’re always say­ing that.

THE DOCTOR

Yes, I am, aren’t I?

The PLUTOQUAKE stops.

THE DOCTOR stands up, pulling AMY upright too.

THE DOCTOR

(con­tinu­ing)

Let’s go.

He turns on his heel and walks away from the HOLE.

AMY

What about the TARDIS?

THE DOCTOR

What about her?

AMY

Can’t you just fish it out with it your sonic screw­driver or something?

THE DOCTOR stops.

THE DOCTOR

Fish her out with my sonic screwdriver?

AMY

It, her. I’m just…throwing out some ideas.

THE DOCTOR

Fish her out?

AMY

You’re the one who brought me here to what should have been the most serene, far-away, quiet place in the uni­verse but turns out, by the way, to be the loudest, scar­i­est, red­dest, bizarre alien court­ship ritual -

THE DOCTOR

(angrily)

You see that big hole in the spaceship?

AMY

I only said ‘fish it out’.

THE DOCTOR

(with airquotes)

It’s a ‘laser’. It hasn’t star­ted yet. This —

(points upwards without looking)

- is the pre-laser scan­ner that looks for weak­nesses in the rock before blast­ing it to pieces and since I’m sorry to say that my Nivea Factor Sixty is in the TARDIS, which is at the bot­tom of that shaft, I would very much like to watch the show from over that rise where view­ing will not be inter­rup­ted by such trivial incon­veni­ences as the both of us explod­ing into puffs of mostly carbon.

AMY allows her­self, frost­ily, to be tugged along.

THE DOCTOR

(to him­self)

‘Fish it out.’

AMY looks wounded. Then -

PRAC: AMY’S FEET RISE FROM THE GROUND, PEDALING.

PRAC: AMY REACHING DOWN FOR THE DOCTOR.

PRAC: HE CLASPS HER HAND; FLOATS UP ALONGSIDE HER.

AMY

What’s hap­pen­ing?

THE DOCTOR

You’re the expert.

AMY

You mean we’re being fished-?

THE DOCTOR

Very very prob­ably. Hold on.

THE DOCTOR and AMY cling to each other as they waltz up into the belly of the SPACESHIP.

CUT TO TITLES

Jun 05

2010

3

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★ Re: Your Brains

Posted by in neuroscience, New Category, psychology

There are easy prob­lems and there are hard prob­lems. Examples of the former include build­ing a space elev­ator, put­ting a man on the moon, and cur­ing can­cer. They are redu­cible to steps that make sense within our the­or­et­ical con­cep­tion of how the world works. They are dif­fi­cult but there is no reason, yet, to con­sider them impossible. We might, for example, fore­see­ably con­struct a virus that infects the cells of its host to recon­struct his or her DNA accord­ing to the per­fect model those cells once held.

But when the ele­ment of impossib­il­ity is intro­duced, we might call it a hard prob­lem. Answering ‘What is mean­ing?’ is a hard prob­lem. Likewise free will. Likewise con­scious­ness. These three con­cepts are endur­ing. They are also likely to be fic­tions from which even the most hard­boiled thinker can never fully sus­pend her dis­be­lief. These fic­tions are some­what like books we can never close.

Our defin­i­tions of ‘com­puter’ are prob­ably dif­fer­ent, gentle reader. I use it to mean a class of machines that pro­cess inform­a­tion, and this class includes clocks, ther­mo­stats, the brain, and my MacBook Pro. The reac­tion to my use of this word in the con­text of the human mind is typ­ic­ally one of dis­be­lief and centres on a desire to be excluded from a list of things that do not appear to share essen­tial human char­ac­ter­ist­ics with us. (Clocks have no mean­ing­ful internal life; they have no choice but to tell the time once they are wound; they are not able to con­sider the world.)

I men­tion this because the semantic bound­ar­ies of such terms are crit­ical to any dis­cus­sion. When the bound­ar­ies are made por­ous, or trampled under boot, the debates are rendered obscure.

This is the weight on my heart this morn­ing upon read­ing an edited chapter from Marilynne Robinson’s book Absence of Mind. Robinson’s prose is elab­or­ated to the point of fog­gi­ness. It would sur­prise me if even a philo­sopher could decrypt the nuances of her argu­ment. To repeat, these con­cepts are as hope­lessly dis­tant to the human mind as stars to a tele­scope; they’re hard enough to see without someone mon­key­ing around with the tripod.

Let us say the mind is what the brain does. This is a defin­i­tion that makes the mind, whatever else, a par­ti­cipant in the whole his­tory and exper­i­ence of the body. Pinker offers the same defin­i­tion, but mod­i­fies it dif­fer­ently. He says, “The mind is what the brain does; spe­cific­ally, the brain pro­cesses inform­a­tion, and think­ing is a kind of com­pu­ta­tion” – exclud­ing the felt exper­i­ence of think­ing, with all its diverse bur­dens and colorations.

The exclu­sion of the felt exper­i­ence of think­ing is a prob­lem with natur­ism, i.e. the applic­a­tion of object­ive, verbal descrip­tions to phen­onema (like felt exper­i­ence) that are essen­tially sub­ject­ive. This is not a prob­lem that psy­cho­lo­gists — or any­one else, for that mat­ter — has been able to fig­ure out yet. It’s a hard prob­lem and the prob­lem is not with Pinker.

Later, she cri­ti­cises a fla­vour of evol­u­tion­ary psy­cho­logy (the sci­ence of view­ing the mind as a machine optim­ally designed for its envir­on­ment) like this:

Might there not be fewer of these inter­fa­milial crimes, hon­our killings, child aban­don­ments, if nature had made us straight­for­wardly aware that urgen­cies more or less our own were being served in our propagat­ing and nur­tur­ing? There is more than a hint of dual­ism in the notion that some bet­ter self – the term seems fair – has to be dis­trac­ted by ingra­ti­at­ing pleas­ures to accom­mod­ate the prac­tical busi­ness of biology.

This is not fair and it stretches Pinker’s quite defens­ible prop­erty dual­ist approach in order to imply that, being dual­ist, it some­how inher­its the flaws of extreme sub­stance dualism.

Later still, Robinson rolls up her sleeves and enters into another dif­fi­culty: the dis­tinc­tion between mind and soul. Unfortunately, this takes her back to another lin­guistic conun­drum that may not have an asso­ci­ated conun­drum in the sense of how the words are typ­ic­ally employed. It has only been since the renais­sance, as far as I’m aware, that we have been able to con­sider the mind as some­thing non­phys­ical but not neces­sar­ily syn­onym­ous with a super­nat­ural entity such as the spirit. To blend these, then sep­ar­ate them arbit­rar­ily, adds an ele­ment of obfus­ca­tion that, again, makes these dif­fi­cult pos­i­tions still more dif­fi­cult to understand.

It would be pre­ju­diced of me to imply that artists (even an Orange prize win­ner) should play in their own fields and leave the philo­soph­ical pas­tures to those who know them bet­ter. For a start, the dis­tinc­tion between art and sci­ence is a per­ni­cious one, and, second, philo­soph­ers (not to men­tion psy­cho­lo­gists like me) don’t know the answers either. These are hard ques­tions. But there is a danger that lin­guistic vir­tu­os­ity can take on the form of leger­de­main. The topic demands clearer treat­ment before any­one can do the impossible and pull a bunny from the hat.