Part Two: The Pitch

In our continuing look back on the life of our yearling predecessor, here’s Jono’s emailed pitch (dated 20 February 2006) to fan creators outlining what form Zeus Plug would likely take. For the most part the contents stayed the same, although there were some added – Jumping the Quark being a notable one, and of course Fast Return was yet to be born. On the other hand ‘Scenes We Love’ became ‘Classic!’ and ‘For And Against’ didn’t eventuate (I think I just didn’t want to talk about Jackie Tyler then. Love her now though) In all we stuck to our guns, but of course once the Blog was born – well, watch those principals vanish! Oh, and the self-addressed envelope thing as I recall came from the lack of Rotorua chapter for Dave, but there may have been a Palmerston North fan interested as well. hey, we weren’t monsters, you know!

Hi,

ZEUS PLUG, an NZ Doctor Who micro-zine, is due to be launched at the end of March. Pete and I have been developing this over the last six months, and would like to give you an idea of how this new ‘zine will have its own place in the NZ Who fanzine market.

WHAT WE ARE
Zeus Plug is not TSV, and it’s not RTP. To make a somewhat lame analogy, TSV is the solid meat and three veg, RTP is the crazy vegan platter, and Zeus Plug is the play lunch your Mum made you – fun, irreverent, clever, easily digestible and ultimately disposable. ZP is not meant to be a collector’s item – the last thing that we expect is that people will hold on to our issues for very long. In fact, the aim will be for them to be a solid 15 minute read. Nothing more.

WHO DOES WHAT
I’m going to be editing this puppy overall, with Pete looking after the visual layout of each issue, and involved editorially.

WHAT YOU WON’T SEE IN ZEUS PLUG
Story files
Review sections (although we might do the odd new TV story)
New / Missing Adventures
Big Finish
Fan fiction
Articles that are actually lists
Interviews, including with NZ fans

CONTRIBUTIONS
Zeus Plug will be made up from a core group of regular contributors, rather than from unsolicited material. There are two fanzines already for people to have their work published, so there’s no need for another. There is no minimum commitment to contribute, but on various occasions there will opportunities for involvement in a number of regular features, which include:

1) I’VE NEVER SEEN… Picking a DW story you have never seen, giving your impressions before, during and after.

2) SCENES WE LOVE – That moment you adore from a Doctor Who story – anything from a line of dialogue, to an FX shot or an entire scene. What and why!

3) FOR AND AGAINST – A one sentence statement (eg: Jackie Tyler is essential to the new series) is the subject of a mini-debate – one person stating why they agreed, the other person opposite.

There will also be regular spaces for opinion pieces, but we must stress the importance of conciseness in all articles – there is limited space, so opinions should be well thought out, and to the point.

We suggest 500 words maximum. If you can’t contain your argument in that many words, you’re probably saying too much.

SIZE
No 100 page epics – instead, Zeus Plus will be the equivalent 8 A5 pages long – hence the easily digestable tag. In a nutshell, it’s 2 A3 pages of content, folded into a handy pocket sized A6!

TIMING
Zeus Plug will be published monthly on the last day of each month, with deadline being the 15th of that month. The first issue will be out on March 31 .

DISTRIBUTION
Zeus Plug will be available free of charge to anyone who sends a stamped self-addressed envelope to the ZP address. It will also be sent to any current NZ chapters for distribution at meetings.

Hope that gives you an insight into what we’re doing. If you want to know any more, or would like to put your hand up to be involved, please email me.

Regards,

Jono

PA

Being a retrospective of Zeus Blog’s precursor, the 2006 pubzine Zeus Plug.

Part One: An Immaculate Conception

Zeus Plug was born the hotel bar at the City Life hotel, with the first proper ideas being thrown around at the Vulcan cafe on Vulcan lane on a Saturday morning in December 2005. Jono and I had discussed the possibility of working together on something zine-like since the days of Telos, and it happened that by then, perhaps a year after interviewing him about Telos for RTP!, and with the new series reviving interest in fan activities, we realised that the time was right. But we weren’t going to settle for the traditional route. Perhaps because we’re both rampant egotists, we declared that our creation would be unique, and unprecedented. It wouldn’t be a fanzine as others would know it, but a sort of social experiment, albeit one set within a very small community – the lesser-known New Zealand Doctor Who fan. Who drank in pubs.

I’d seen pubzines before – Concrete Elephant, a mainstay of the Fitzroy Tavern was one that came to mind, and I recalled the excitement when it  arrived at the gathering I’d attended – copies were small, free and low in number and they went very quickly. I’m no economist, but I could see the lesson of supply and demand working very well. And neither Jono and I were in it for the money. As it turned out, it was a good thing we weren’t, or ZP would never have existed.

Over a cooked breakfast and too many hot caffeinated beverages we drew up a manifesto that was scintillating in its simplicity: no  reviews, no lists, just opinion. We decided that having been fanzine readers for long enough the one thing we really wanted out of any fan publication was something worth reading, and that’s usually an opinion. Reviews can have opinions, but are sometimes tied down through wanting to please everyone, whether it’s the distributor of said merchandise who offers the zine free copies, or (in post-original series days) the creator – a fan themselves and therefore only a few degrees of separation from the reviewer. If we could deliver short, sharp bursts of opinion and argument packaged in a neat portable product that any unassuming fan could stuff in their pocket or read on the bus, then we’d be breaking the A5 mould that so many zines before us had shrugged themselves into.

We got bolder – make it a fan experience by refusing to send issues out to people, instead making ZP something you had to make the effort to go somewhere to collect and therefore meet other fans and (uh-oh!) interact with them. Tied to a neutral venue like, say, a pub, and you [should] avoid any suggestion that the zine was a ‘chapter’ thing. We wanted to be guerrilla. It didn’t always work – Christchurch doesn’t really do pub meetings, so it became associated with their chapter meetings (although RTP! is essentially a chapter zine anyway, so little lost there), and early on the ‘c’ word was linked to Auckland pub meets and ZP. We made an effort to stamp that fire out quickly. The last thing we wanted people to do was to take the issues home and place them in an airtight folder in between Zeta Minor and Zoë Herriot.  If there ever was a publication that wasn’t aimed at a completist, this was it. You should pick it up, read and then use it as a beer coaster for the rest of the evening. Never happened though… We were just too damned desirable!

Most of all we wanted to change zines. We thought they’d become stale and predictable, relying on the same names and tropes and formula. We actually used some of those same names, and a formula of sorts was noted by RTP! in its review of the early issues early on, but our response to that was swift. We, I believe, also didn’t hang around long enough to really get predictable and stale, quietly leaving the party just before the zine’s debut as a TSV supplement. There was the general sense between Jono and I that neither would be around for the long haul. And that was fine by us.

PA

At a point just over halfway through Torchwood Children of Earth my wife turned to me and said “where’s the Doctor in all this?” I didn’t know she cared. And yet in a way it’s this lack of the Time Lord that drives 2009′s miniseries, for although he and his interest in Earth’s survival is mentioned in only one episode, CoE is a production over which his shadow (as interpreted by Russell T Davies) is cast long. Glib, cloying, weepy – you could call the Tenth Doctor a lot of things, but by and large he is a hero, and a figure who has generous accommodation on the winning side. Not so his human counterparts in Torchwood, and therein lies the interest in this story. Read the rest of this entry »

Bizarre news of the day from the Twittering of Mike Skinner AKA The Streets.

A repeat appearance of sorts from Mr Skinner, having already appeared in musical form in Father’s Day.

JP

We are, I think, in an envious position at this point in time for being a fan base granted the indulgence of looking wistfully into the future not only for Torchwood but also (if you insist) Sarah Jane Smith and Kidz or whatever it’s called and even K-9 and Kidz too for those that might be interested in that sort of thing. These spin-offs aside however, the main attraction in Who fandom’s stargazing must be the core series itself. 2010 has the be the most anticipated year for Doctor Who since 2005, a phrase which looks as absurd as it reads, but you get my drift. Next year we will have the most complete turnaround in personnel in six years, including a new TARDIS crew, Executive Producer, Producer and possibly composer to boot. It’s the end of the Gold-en Era, you might say. The show has already been primed for HDTV, but to address any concerns we have a new TARDIS prop and, we’re told, new insides as well. Less extrinsically the show may have a new ‘feel’ being the beginning of the post-RTD, Moffat Age. What that could mean varies widely – my impression of what we’re likely to see in the new series will differ from yours, his, hers, theirs and so on. The concensus is that we’re in safe hands, but it won’t be business as usual. The Moff has revealed little (and good on him), and despite the odd spoiler photo we’ve not much to go on. So what would you like to see in year one of the Matt Smith tenure (besides a strong case for there being a year two and so forth, obviously)? And what do you expect to see?

Here are some quotes to start the ball rolling:
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7531310.stm)

[On returning friends and monsters]

“We’re not in the business of being nostalgic, we’re making nostalgia for the future, new monsters, new friends.”

[On who the show is aimed at]

“Doctor Who is at its best when it’s brand new and you’ve always got to remember that there’s a new bunch of eight-year-olds watching every year and it has to be original – it has to belong to them.”

[and once more with feeling:]

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/tvnews.php?id=47147

“…fundamentally, the absolute paradigm of Doctor Who stories is — right from the TARDIS — is that everything you see is brand new. I always think there should be more new stuff than old stuff in Doctor Who. “

It’s the usual deal – likes, wants, expectations on your behalf. But has fandom’s collective and varied anticipation ever been so imperilled?

We’re back like spoiler pictures, baby! What better way to ring in the changes than a new set of clothes, TARDIS and screwy-driver? We can talk about all that later of course, and we will, but in the mean-time…  

TORCHWOOD WRITER FALLS ON SPORK Crikey hell – who could have seen the ratings success that Children of Earth would prove to be? Absolutely zomgazing, full credit to the boys, and lots of viewer and fan reaction mainly due to the big shocker in the story (well, that there’s actually a story was a shock itself of course), the mancandy-ectomy that was Ianto’s death. Goodbye, Cardiff’s Teaboy. We can laugh about this of course, and how some of us have, but others did not take the development so well. Co-writer James Moran’s blog The Pen is Mightier Than the Spork was the victim of a barrage of complaints from ‘Janto’ fans who had just, well, had enough of all this sort of thing and in the modern way took Moran to task for the group action and pretty much demanding the Doctor’s timey-wimey intervention to undercut much of the drama of the whole thing undo the crime. Well, fair enough – if we can drag Earth around the cosmos on the end of a TARDIS grinning into the camera like loons surely resurrecting a dead Torchwood member is no trouble? I mean, what could possibly go wrong with that? 

THE NAME’S POND… Of course it is. We’ve had a River and a Lake after all. What’s next perhaps, a cameo by Billy Ocean?

NEW CLOTHES, NAME, DEUS EX SCREWDRIVER, OLD CHUM It’s all too much, too soon! We can’t possibly deconstruct so much visual input in one sitting! Luckily we know some people who can, and as usual, it’s best to step away from the immediate Who fan community for real clarity. Take it away, intolerant potty-mouthed Americans of Aint-It-Cool-News forums:

 Such a missed opportunity. by Hint_of_Smegma Jul 20th, 2009 12:20:56 PM When they rebooted Dr Who, with Eccleston, they could have made the show genuinely something special – serious and well written with touches of humour. They picked the wrong showrunner though, and it was too kiddified to be taken seriously. I know, I know – it was always aimed at the kids somewhat in the good old days – but at least then it assumed the kids were bright enough to understand interesting science fiction ideas and it had more than it’s fair share of darkness. They could have capitalised on that and aimed at the more grown up market than the kids – instead, we get this day glo, manicly acted dose of confection for the ADD afflicted youngsters of today’s British council estates. Great. In terms of acting, we went from Eccleston – who is a great actor – to Tennant – who is a parody of an actor – to this non-entity. The words ‘diminishing returns’ come to mind. And don’t get me started on the writing.

Er, which bit wasn’t about the writing again?

Jesus, that guy’s haircut makes me want to punch him in the face by hamster factor Jul 20th, 2009 01:25:40 PM Sorry, that’s the automatic reaction I have ever time I see a pic of this dude. I hope he’s a kick ass 11th doctor – but that emo hair is going to take some getting used to.

I have no comment on this, but it did make me laugh.

Twilight Emo Doctor by fiesterJul 20th, 2009 01:28:55 PM Is he a vampire now? On the plus side the new companion is a babe. Love the busty ginger.

Oooh yeah! That Donna Noble – whew!

David Tennant CAN NOT ACT by _Palmer_EldritchJul 20th, 2009 01:30:58 PM His pseudo-comic routines ruined several episodes of the show, and when he tried to be emotional he was downright annoying. So while I wanted to vomit all over Tennants face, I just want to punch this new doc real hard. Ergo: improvement.

You wanted to do what? We’ll be hearing more about bodily functions soon, folks!

Tennant will be too busy filming the DR. WHO movie to play Bilbo by SpyGuyJul 20th, 2009 01:46:55 PM Details this Saturday at the DOCTOR WHO panel at Comic-Con, no doubt.

Hmm, yeah. Doubting confirmed doubly then – no movie, no Bilbo.  

Bottom Line by kwisatzhaderachJul 20th, 2009 01:48:38 PM Moffat is the most talented writer on Who since Robert Holmes. Nothing to worry about, RTD and his farting aliens and shitty Master and all his big camp excess is gone. The future starts here.

I told you! These Americans and their famous toilet obsession!

During his 12th regeneration Dr. Who will turn evil. by FarealJul 20th, 2009 02:09:46 PM Any real Dr. Who fan knows that in a previous episode, Dr. Who faced an evil version of himself. I can’t wait…

Yeah… about that Valeyard thing…

  11th Doctor? 12th Doctor? by HagakureJul 20th, 2009 02:13:49 PM Strictly speaking (in terms regeneration cycles) couldn’t we say David Tennant was the 10th AND 11th Doctor? He did, in fact, go through a regeneration again at the end of last season but then channeled it into that chopped off hand. But still, it is fun to point out semantics.

Oh no it isn’t.

God, that man is one creepy looking poofter. by thedarklinglordJul 20th, 2009 02:15:49 PM Sorry, but nobody is going to be able to adequately fill the role after Tennant, least of all that pedophile-looking goober. The series is now dead to me.

*Sniff!*

my problem with this is… by ObscuraJul 20th, 2009 03:31:53 PM lack of continuity. changing both the doctor and the companion together is gonna be a big shift. it may break the show, throwing out almost every character anyone recognizes is a dangerous move.

Agreed. Down with this new Jon Pertwee/Caroline John regime!

Looks like a couple who can by kabong Jul 20th, 2009 03:36:28 PM RELATIONSHIP

Yep, thats what I’m worried about too, Mister kabong

Will the racist bastards let the 12th Doctor be Black? by FarealJul 20th, 2009 07:58:05 PM The 7th or 8th Doctor should have been Black, but I guess the racist bastards in charge of the Dr. Who show just couldn’t let a “brother” take over. I guess we will have to wait for England to elect a Black prime minister before we will see a Black Dr. Who. We all ready know there will never be a Black King or Queen. Racism is alive and well in the United Kingdom!!!

Er… 

How does this show change? It’s an old dude in a box! by lockesbrokenlegJul 20th, 2009 10:08:47 PM

I genuinely think that has to be the most brilliant summation of the show I’ve ever read!

Tennant is a gurning tit. by brock landers babyJul 20th, 2009 11:48:17 PM

Okay, maybe this too.

Doctor Poof by smackfuJul 21st, 2009 04:27:54 AM“

It only took me three seconds to write that! (including a spell check)”

i’m going to give this mr. smith a try. by mr. smithJul 22nd, 2009 02:56:05 AM i was heartbroken when eccelston left, then tennant came along and became my second favorite doctor. that’sthe genius of doctor who, i’ve come to enjoy many actors for their fleshing out of a great character.‘

Many’ meaning… two then, right?

You can’t make this stuff up. Fortunately you can cut and paste it:

lockesbrokenleg by dioxholsterJul 20th, 2009 05:49:28 PM British people are like carnival people.

You’re awesome. Moving right along…

NEW NZDWFC MESSAGE BOARD 100 PER CENT BETTERER
It’s still a mouthful of initials though. Change! More change, I say!

OUTPOSTGALLIFREYBASENEWSBASETHINGY OH I GIVE UP. THAT TOO
And pretty cool it is also. Well, in these early days all new forums look good because they’re less busy and easier to browse and we haven’t yet succumbed to the weird ‘Wrinkly’ ‘Squee myself in public’ subforum phenomenon. Yet. Paul’s rating well, as noted of course. And elsewhere, an old TSV article gets more recognition than it probably deserves (exept for Alden’s parts in it which are, like the new message board, quite fab).

B.L.U.R.W.H.O
At last! After years of wondering what tuneless ditty Vicki was attempting to whistle in The Chase, that answer can now be found. And all without the aid of VidFire – yay!

THE RETURN OF THE TOM
And it’s music to our ears to hear that Mad Tom Baker the Mad is returning to the world of audio in a set of new stories! Hooray! After infamously rejecting Big Finish’s offer of a script by Paul Magrs he’s now to work on a series of stories for the Beeb written by… er, Paul Magrs. Oh well. Oh, and Tegan’s back on audio soon too (for BF) again, so for seasons 17 on we’re sorted for all available companions and Doctors now being on audio! We didn’t miss anybody out, did we?

Oh dear.

Okay, changes on a large scale took place over the course of Children of Earth and the Torchwood Cardiff we all knew and loved/dreaded and heckled is quite the different beast. Different line-up, different organisation, and most likely a different base. As you have probably guessed, I’m keeping things vague here so nobody’s spoiled, but for those of you who have seen the story and are in the know, what do YOU think the future of Torchwood is, given the enormous ratings success that it had and the potential for the series to continue?

There’s the immediate issue of what to do now – 2010 sees Eve Myles starting a family and John Barrowman’s dance card full, so that’s two core cast members unavailable for filming ’til 2011 at least. Time for a spin-off? Should the production team dare to bring in new team members to meet the regulars later? Or could the NEW Torchwood audience be satisfied with a step back in time to anoher team, perhaps one we’ve already seen (George and Harriet? The ones Queen Victoria would refuse to believe existed?). Is it time to go to Scottish Torchwood and meet Archie?

Should we dare a rest for the show after such a tremendous build-up?

Yours suggestions and predictions are, as ever, welcome!

PA

Here it is – the first pic (sort of) of the new costume.

Didn’t see the bow-tie coming, but the old-school look is good. Brown continues to be a trend.

And who else thought ‘Awakenings’?

JP

I have a minor obsession, and in fandom I don’t think I’m alone in this. There’s a great part of me that, while enjoying past stories and the series’ long and mostly noble on-screen history, can’t resist wondering how it would be if things were ‘tweaked’ a little. By this I don’t mean CG-ing the Menoptra (not really a high priority) or adding a laugh track to Terror of the Vervoids (hmm…), but actually reinventing what we’ve seen and known for years – decades in some examples.

THE REVISION THING

I’m also not talking about change for the sake of change, or as a would-be marketing ploy. I really like the new CG work on the Remastered Star Trek I’ve seen – usually as stills (which for me has never been a forgiving medium for CGI), but I’m aware that some fans have called the move gratuitous and little more than another opportunity to flog stuff die-hards have owned for years. A similar argument was made for the Red Dwarf re-releases. The important thing here is that neither series was greatly changed beyond some cosmetic dabbling. Of course, one might argue that this sort of change isn’t minor at all, and that a story’s looks DO have a bearing on the reception, even in a revisionist sense. Go too far, tweak too much even in defending one’s ‘artistic vision’ and you get the remastered Star Wars trilogy (after which, George Lucas went on to do the reverse of the above and re-release the ‘originals’). Some fans would decry any molestation of a past story to be an affront to its original creators and audience.

CARRIED AWAY BY A BOOM MIKE SHADOW

Die hard fans get proprietary over the look and feel of the past – in a way we’re as much anchored to it as we are to Billyfluffs and Zarbis colliding with camera equipment. We’ve become so used to them in the early episodes we accepted for years the ‘it was done live!’ defence and forgiven the old series’ shortcomings because some of those same shortcomings have become an essential ingredient of their period. For years Doctor Who was identified by its apparently ‘wobbly sets’ and squeezy bottle spaceships. We’ve become nostalgic for the slightly shoddy, and the new series with its whistles and bells looks strangely uninvolving at times, possibly because it’s too smooth, or doesn’t yet betray these endearingly organic elements. Which brings me to a major observation over the past few years on the late-lamented Restoration Team Forum: namely, what to ‘fix’ and what to leave. For every ‘revisionist’ fan who covets a VidFired Seeds of Death with a nicely silenced Ice Warrior/door lintel head-butt there’s another ‘preservationist’ fan who baulks at those imperfections being airbrushed over and wants to see that boom-mike in shot that they’ve relied on spotting for years. There’s a line between the two, and the RT to my mind do their damnedest to please either side of it – so we get ‘alternative’ CG effects as well as the (often duff and mis-staged) originals. Both the revisionists and the preservationists were on the board vying for the attention of a group of professionals – fans themselves – who just wanted to present old stories in their best light, on a limited budget.

FANDOM EDITS

Some fans go even further of course, and take matters into their own hands. Recent history provides memorable examples – negative fan reception to The Phantom Menace begat several versions of The Phantom Edit, a re-cut, retooled version of Lucas’ prequel that removed some of the comedy and exposition (not to mention Midichlorians), reduced baby Anakin’s ‘whoopee’ time and turned Jar-Jar’s patois into believable alien language. Re-edits and ‘corrections’ were also made to Highlander, Matrix and Dune movies. For some time on theonering.net fans with technical know-how and strong opinions talked of recutting The Lord of the Rings into a narrative that more closely matched that of the book. Budding CG artists have reworked bits of The Five Doctors and some early regeneration scenes and put them on YouTube. Some, regrettably, have been since removed, reminding us that this sort of thing is of course not actually legal, although in the spirit of mash-ups the BBC have largely been understanding over smaller efforts.

LET’S DO THE TIMELASH AGAIN

So then, I want to save Timelash. I really do. I awaited the new DWM eagerly just to see what this issue’s ‘Fact of Fiction’ covering the story would reveal about it; what was cut from it (and in some cases we could assume, blithely recorded over with Coronation Street by a VHS-recycling JNT), and how the story flows. The answer, although the article is charitable, is that lots was cut in the editing suite and lost forever (seven minutes, but hey they kept the safety belts scene), and there are two endings and neither of them work. The story is flabby in places and its overseas edits had some awful non-cliffhangers fabricated to match a broadcast duration that the BBC wasn’t using itself in 1984. There are duff performances, fragile sets and Santa’s Grotto as a location – but there’s also a story in there I like, and among such small fare as the Colin Baker era, would dearly love to rehabilitate. Timelash isn’t a bad story after all – it’s just a mediocre one written by an amateur, script-edited at gunpoint by a man near the end of his tether, enacted by about fifty-percent of its cast and finally edited in post-production amid some agitation between its director and its producee. Some might say not an atypical Doctor Who story then. My ambitions involve a shorter story, more Herbert, some better modelwork, a topping and tailing of some scenes, perhaps some CGI or lens-flaring on the dreaded box of tinsel, and maybe even a re-score. Lose the seat belts and some of the rebels, tighten the story up. The end result would be not-Timelash, for better or worse. But my question is, to use Timelash purely as a fan exercise – is this sort of thing enough to ‘save’ a story, to ‘improve’ it, or re-tell it in a new and interesting way?

And if not Timelash, then what story would you like to be locked in an editing suite with?
(longer replies may be considered for a follow-up posting!)

Update: and we have an addition already! Here’s Al:

Rewatching Invasion of time recently I couldn’t help but notice that there are a few scenes during Leela and Rodan’s sojourn to outer Gallifrey which are just crying out for that lovely Mill Capitol to be plonked in the background. When the girls first appear on a quarry ridge line there’s acres of empty sky behind them for the duration of a lengthy scene – and similar matte-friendly shots later on as Leela leads the charge back to the Capitol.

Of course, there’s much more to re-editing than just adding a special effect. My own pick for an extensive rework would be ‘The Mutants’ – I’ve always felt that there’s a good story here, buried under a couple of surplus episodes worth of padding.

Recently, a commentator on this very blog said “‘Deus ex machina’, at least among fans, would appear to translate as: ‘I didn’t like the ending’…” Can’t entirely deny that right now, so let’s examine it! Moreover, let’s stick with the new series.

As everyone knows, ‘Deus ex machina’ means ‘god from the machine’ aka the tendency for a ‘god’ to be lowered (via a ‘machine’) at the end of ancient Greek plays to solve all ills. More modernly, as the OverthinkingIt article on this very topic in Doctor Who , it means “any time when something or somebody who has not been a major part of the story so far shows up at the end of a play, movie or TV show more or less at random to dictate how it ends, usually making everything the characters have done up until this point seem irrelevant by comparison”.

I think, for Doctor Who, we can perhaps be more specific. “An ending where a previously unseen plot point gives the Doctor god-like powers beyond that even of his sonic screwdriver.” Not entirely accurate, as we’ll see in the next paragraph, but it’s what it feels like. This is where the ‘I didn’t like the ending’ translation comes from, namely the unseen plot point. Surprise! With one bound he was free! Another translation is ‘Cop out!’

Let’s not dance around the issue, and cut to the first, best example. In this case it isn’t entirely unforeshadowed, and moreover doesn’t happen to the Doctor. Yep, we’re talking Rose in The Parting of the Ways . She gains the powers of a god due to the power emanating from the machine . How more a literal insertion of the phrase can you get? It originally referred to the stage device, it wasn’t a story point, and there it is, as in your face as possible!

This, to me, is the most egregious example possible. It’s RTD going ‘I turn Rose into a god because I can’t think of another way to solve this problem’ (and possibly ‘because I fetishise her’ but that’s a different topic). (Fine, I’ll acknowledge that RTD could have easily come up with a different ending, and it did lead to the amazing ending of the Ninth Doctor… but he didn’t!) The fact that this is just so obvious and in your face makes it not ‘post-modern’ or ‘deconstructionist’, it’s just annoying in levels too large to ignore.

The other obvious example is in, of course, The Last of the Time Lords . You too can become a god if everyone chants your name! No amount of technobabble logic can get away from the sheer effrontery of the Tinkerbell solution which gives the plot equivalent of whip-lash. Fie! I cry, Boo! It doesn’t give the Doctor other powers (other than the ability to ignore the laser screwdriver) or lead to his death, nor even the Master’s end, so there is no greater meaning as in Rose’s transformation, it’s just to get him back from Dobby-form.

(And while these are RTD examples, the end of The Forest of the Dead doesn’t give much hope that the next production crew won’t deify the man.)

Does ‘Deus ex machina’ = ‘I didn’t like the ending’? Maybe, but there is cause.

JE