Well, then

Quickly, before getting on the train, two articles mainly about actors I like. The first one makes me sigh. Well, roll my eyes. Et tu, Damian Lewis? Then again, Ian McKellen's retort is amusing.


Sir Ian McKellen has hit back at Damian Lewis after the Homeland star said he did not want to end up a "fruity actor" known for playing wizards.

McKellen, who reprises his role as Gandalf in the Hobbit sequel The Desolation of Smaug, said "no one needs to feel sorry for me" after Lewis alluded to his career as one of the reasons why he wanted to break out of the theatre.

Lewis, in a Guardian interview in October, said he worried in his 20s that he would be "one of these slightly over-the-top, fruity actors who would have an illustrious career on stage, but wouldn't start getting any kind of film work until I was 50 and then start playing wizards".

McKellen was forthright in his response but, like Lewis, declined to name names. "I wouldn't like to have been one of those actors who hit stardom quite early on and expected it to continue and was stuck doing scripts that I didn't particularly like just to keep the income up," he told the Radio Times.


In other news, I was aware that there was a new film about the Beat Generation poets, featuring Daniel Radcliffe as a young Allen Ginsberg (the late A.G. probably would get a kick out of all the handsome actors playing him, because the most recent fore that was James Franco in Howl, and if you've seen photographs of Ginsberg, even when young...), but what I hadn't known was that Michael C. Hall was also in it. This is good news and makes me hope the film will be released on my side of the Atlantic as well. Because Dexter disappointed me so much post season 4, I haven't seen Michael C. Hall in something in ages, and he is a very good actor. The article makes the film sound intriguing, and has comments from Hall on David Fisher, too, who is still my favourite part of his.

December Talking Meme: Clara Oswin Oswald

Talking about Clara Oswin Oswald is near impossible without employing spoiler cuts, which may be part of the problem - or the advantage, depending on your point of view. Recently, I stumbled across a clever observation of elisi's, to the effect that back in 2005, when RTD had to relaunch and reintroduce Doctor Who to a new audience, the Doctor was (to many) the unknown, the mystery, whereas the Companion, while also a new character, was the familiar (living in easily recognizable and identifiable circumstances). By the time Moffat took over as showrunner, the Doctor was more than familiar to the audience; and thus, Moffat made the Companions the mystery. Or rather, mysteries.

This of course is one of the chief issues of the yay and nay sayers of the entire Moffat era. Personally, I think it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. It mostly works with Amy in her first season; I still have a problem with the way the whole crack mystery is handled (i.e. ultra important when it's an arc episode, not a problem when we get a standalone), but Amy herself, personality-wise, comes across clearly from the moment little Amelia Pond prays to Santa. (I didn't "get" Amy emotionally until about mid season, but that wasn't for lack of a sense of personality; retrospectively, I wondered whether it might have been, but now the international iPlayer has put up the fifth New Who season online, and rewatching early Amy episodes confirms she's there from the start.) The mystery as to what the crack in time has to do with Amy is solved by the end of her first season, but that's not the key to her personality, and Amy remains interesting beyond its solving.

"Who is River Song?" is a mystery set up already in the RTD era via the Moff's Library episodes and key to the first two Moffat seasons; while I have considerable problems with the ultimate answer, River in season 5 is an incredibly compelling, interesting character, and her appearances are not dependent on providing an answer to the question for their appeal. It was, perhaps, only to be expected that when Moffat introduced his next regular Companion, she, too, would be a mystery, and she, too, would meet the Doctor out of sequence; Moffat really does love the timey-wimey, and he is, love him or resent him for it, undoubtedly the DW writer who does the most with the possibilities and paradoxes of time travel.

The problem, to me, with how the Companion-as-mystery gambit was executed the third time around isn't that the introduction wasn't good, or the question not interesting. It's that the introduction(s) was/were maybe too good, and the follow-up paled because the very set up of the question made it impossible not to.

( And now I really must employ the spoiler cut )