Style

I'm reading Rex Stout's detective stories for the first time, and they're all kinds of fun.  Great stories, great characters, and a style that rivals Graham Greene's in its subtlety and skill.  I'll often laugh out loud while reading, sometimes because it's funny but mostly because of some stylistic gem.  I'll read a line and for a minute it will seem like any other sentence in any noir-style hackery ever written, and then I'll get struck with the sly poetry of Stout's word-craft.

There's not much of a premium placed on style these days - there's some good storytelling going on, but style and craftsmanship in writing seems to be considered archaic or pretentious or not worth the effort for readers whose artistic sensibilities were formed by more visual media.

Recently my family had a conversation about the craft of making movies.  I mentioned that I thought most of the geniuses of style, the Wodehouses of today, are making movies or TV shows rather than writing books.

My favorite example is Wes Anderson.  He uses the cinematic medium the way Wodehouse crafts the written word - shot after shot of playful and exquisite beauty, heartbreaking whimsy heavy with the "weight of glory."  My top three favorite movies include his so-far masterpiece The Darjeeling Limited, and my next twenty would probably include the rest of his work.

He has a new movie coming out next year, and I just watched the trailer.  The cast is a who's who of Wes Anderson's favorites - Owen Wilson, Jason Bateman, Bill Murray - with some fabulous additions like Ralph Fiennes.  I squealed in fangirl delight throughout the trailer, and then felt happy because, even if they aren't novelists, there are artists making art today that makes me just as excited as I would have been in 1938 waiting for the next installment of Nero Wolfe or Bertie Wooster.

Walking Together

Mother Aparecida, 

today I feel like you once did
before your God and mine,
who proposes for our lives a mission
whose contours and limits we ignore,
whose demands we only glimpse.
Yet in your faith that "nothing is impossible with God,"
O Mother,
you did not hesitate,
and so I cannot hesitate.

"Behold the handmaid of the Lord! Let it be done unto me according to your word!"

In this way, O Mother, like you,
I embrace my mission.
Into your hands I put my life
and we will
– you-mother and me-son –
we will walk together,
believe together,
fight together,
win together as your Son and you always walked together.

(Pope Francis' consecration to Our Lady of Aparecida, WYD 2013) 

From Rocco, who has some beautiful and strong words about the Pope, Our Lady, and the vital role of popular piety in the life of the Church.

Review in Five Bullets: In A World...

This weekend we saw a really enjoyable indie comedy about a female voice actor trying to find her place in the competitive, male-dominated world of professional voiceover acting.  Quite the premise, hm?

Five bullets, in no particular order:

1) I like movies that allow you to get inside an obscure community or esoteric field of knowledge - to immerse yourself in some little pocket of humanity that you didn't even know existed.   In this case, it's the voiceover acting industry.  No idea, obviously, if it's true to life or if such a community even exists as distinctively as it's shown in the film.  And I would hope that it doesn't consist entirely of self-absorbed narcissists, as also shown.  But it's fun to consider nonetheless. 

2) Demetri Martin as Louis was the stand-out performance.  I loved him in Flight of the Conchords, but have been very bored by both his stand-up and his short-lived sketch show, which somehow managed to be both bland and off-puttingly bizarre.  However, he's fantastic in this role, which requires high-level comedic skills but also has some depth.  The scenes between him and Lake Bell are charming and hilarious.  He should do more indie comedies.  Lake Bell's character, Carol, has some of the qualities of what's usually called the Manic Pixie Dream Girl - socially incompetent in a way that is improbably attractive, has a tendency to mumble/ramble, etc.  This bugged a little but not as much as usual.  Bell has great timing and her character is much more developed than the typical Zooey Deschanel or Greta Gerwig creation.  

3) This movie is rife with absolutely loathsome characters, as well as more sympathetic ones who make some terrible choices.  One thing that was nice to see was that bad moral choices are portrayed as bad moral choices: characters are accountable for their actions.  One character is unfaithful to her husband - in a lot of movies, this might be shrugged off or at least softened somewhat with "everybody makes mistakes" language or a shifting of blame onto her husband or her circumstances.  Not here - the hurt she causes her husband is not glossed over, and when she apologizes it is with a complete acceptance of responsibility for her choice and its consequences.  Her husband's forgiveness and their effort to begin repairing their marriage are acts of love, but are not presented as an implicit excusing of her actions.

4) Also unusual is the way the romance develops between Louis and Carol.  The series of miscommunications and missed connections that comprises the first two thirds of the film is pretty standard rom-com stuff, but better written and executed than most.  When they finally do connect and admit they "like" each other, they spend an evening out doing fun get-to-know-you activities.  It ends with a kiss at the door but not the normally requisite bed scene solidifying their Status As A Couple.  Not that it's implied that this is off the table for them later, but it was still refreshing to see a romantic relationship take shape around shared interests and clear enjoyment of each other's company instead of just physical attraction.

5) I love, love, loved the scene at the end where Carol has started a workshop for women to "find their voice."  Throughout the movie, she encounters several women with the sort of infantile, pouty vocal inflections a lot of women seem to think make them feminine or attractive or influential with men.  At the end she's shown with a number of them gathered in a recording studio, ready to learn to use their voices in a way that reflects their dignity and allows them to communicate powerfully and effectively.  The right kind of feminist message.

Seven Quick Takes

Still digesting the Holy Father's beautiful interview.  My whistle-into-the-wind from yesterday was a small attempt to counteract some of the knee-jerk negativity I observed from people who read a couple of headlines and reacted to those without reading the interview itself.

 I don't have anything more to add at the moment, other than to direct you back to my post from before the interview hit about the need to be grateful for the gifts being given to the Church at this point in history.

If you've reached saturation point on interview talk, turn off your tablet and go say a quick prayer for a lovely and very sick young man, L., a friend of my husband's who's reached the end of his strength in dealing with his mental illness and needs some supernatural aid.

If you haven't reached that point yet, please pray for L. anyway, but enjoy this handful of links from some sensible and articulate people about our beloved Holy Father and what he has to say:

1) Aggie Catholic

"I challenge you to see Francis as an earthly spiritual father. Sometimes he is going to ask us to grow in ways we don't want to. But, it may be good for us anyway."

2)  JoAnna Wahlund

 "So please, fellow Catholics, the proper response when reading a MSM headline about the Pope changing a long-held doctrine of Catholicism is not panic or rage or despair. Rather, it’s a yawn, an eye-roll, and a resigned sigh – as well as a realization that we’re once again called upon to engage in the new evangelization for the sake of the Kingdom in the realm of social media and among our friends and family."

3) Stephen White

"Being a Christian is not, first and foremost, about ideas and rules. That is not to say our faith does not engage our minds or demand obedience (it obviously does both); it is simply to observe—and this is fundamental—that faith does not begin there. Everything Pope Francis says in his interview should be understood in this light."

 4) Mark Shea (I promise he doesn't call anyone a bedwetter in this one)

"When you focus too much on fighting the world you start to think like the world, trying to run the Church by rules and laws and slogans and power and fear and punishment and not by putting first things first: which is Jesus Christ and our personal encounter with him. The press can’t be expected to get that. But we Catholics *must* get that.”

5) Simcha Fisher

"The one thing that everybody knows is that the Church is against abortion.  What the world doesn't know is why the Church is against abortion.  What the world doesn't know is what the Church can offer instead of abortion.  The world doesn't know why life is worth living. This is the message that every pope in recent memory has been preaching -- that life is good!"

6) Cardinal Dolan

"It is becoming more evident every day that we are blessed with a Pope who is a good shepherd after the heart of Christ. "

7) And for my last quick take, I'm going to link back to the interview again, because really...just read it yourself.

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

The Interview

Just finished reading the Pope's interview.  I'll get back to you about it once I've had a chance to mop up my heart, which seems to have melted all over the floor.

What a beautiful gift this man is to the Church.

And in the meantime: you know how the media is going to distort, misquote, and butcher his words?

WHO CARES.

Just read it yourself.  Ponder and delight in what our Holy Father has to say to us.  Enjoy being Catholic.

More from The Porch

More on Pieper, language and the truth over at The Porch!  Fun.

Also, a very insightful and much-needed look at various flavors of dissent within the Church today.

Say Thank You

“The Church is not falling to pieces. It has never been better. This is a wonderful moment for the Church, you just need to look at its history. There are saints that are recognised by non-Catholics as well as Catholics – I’m thinking of Mother Theresa – but many men and women perform acts of holiness every day and this gives us hope. Sanctity is greater than scandal.”

 -- Pope Francis, yesterday


I tend to hang around with people who are very protective of the Church's doctrinal, liturgical, and cultural heritage, which makes sense, because I am one myself.  So I get a front row seat on some of the ways that something good - the desire to safeguard the Church's heritage - can sometimes start warping over time into something bad - defensiveness, panic or elitism in the face of the perceived societal onslaught against the Church and those who love her.

When our thinking starts to trend this way, it can be poisonous for all kinds of different reasons.  Lack of charity is one: I've been a bit troubled lately by some things I've read from people who seem to think Pope Benedict's words about a shrinking Church are a mandate rather than a warning.

However, the words of Pope Francis yesterday highlight a different pitfall we can encounter when we allow ourselves to be too focused on the problems in the Church and the world.  That pitfall is envy.  My brother wrote about envy yesterday, which got me thinking about the different ways that particular deadly sin can trap us.

Sin causes us to see the truth less clearly.  Envy specifically blinds us to the good things we've been given and the way grace is active in our lives.  We focus on what others have and what we don't have, rather than recognizing and thanking God for his gifts.

But envy can be focused not just on ourselves personally but on the Church in the context of its two-millennium history.  We can find ourselves looking back with increasing jealousy to that wonderful time fifty years ago, or one hundred years ago, or back in the thirteenth century when men were men and heretics got their comeuppance. 

Part of that is just nostalgia, but part of it is a little more insidious, I think.  It's envy, which causes us to focus on the gifts the People of God received at other points in our history and to become less alert to ways He is active here and now.  And that leads us to something even more poisonous: ingratitude.

The well of grace hasn't just dried up - God is, in this particular time and place, quenching the thirst of a parched Church both generally and in all kinds of specific and concrete ways.  Believe me - in a generation or two, Catholics are going to look back at this period in the history of the Church and marvel at the holy and wise people who guided us, at the theological developments that increased our understanding of the deposit of faith, at the ways the Gospel took hold in new cultures and how those cultures enriched the Church...the list goes on.

We don't have to wait for generations to pass.  We shouldn't wait.  We should thank God now for the way his Holy Spirit, unchanging yet always new, is at work in the world, actively, dynamically, now.

Eyjafjallajokull

My brother recently posted this word on Facebook - he encountered it in his class on Old Norse.

(Pause for the customary moment of University Envy. *I wish I was studying Old Norse.  Latin, Old English, and Sanskrit are not enough.  Being a grown-up is stupid!*)

Anyway, that reminded me that Norse Sagas are pretty awesome.  My other brother and I used to sit around sometimes reading out loud from the Prose Edda.  One of us would read the English and the other would follow along with the original language, stopping at interesting words.  The sagas aren't just of linguistic interest, though; they are legitimately great stories and often drily and beautifully hilarious.

Right now I'm reading a marvelous book recommended recently by Jen Fulwiler: The Long Ships, by twentieth century Swedish author Frans Bengtsson. It's set in northern Europe during the period when most of the sagas were being recorded and is itself a contemporary saga of sorts, following the life of a Viking chieftain named Red Orm.

It's very much in the spirit of the sagas stylistically, though smoother and more cohesive narratively.  It has the same slight long-windedness, flawed but lovable characters and unbelievably dry but gut-busting moments of humor.

The role Christianity plays in the story is interesting as well, and I would imagine pretty accurate historically.  A lot of the Vikings have converted to Christianity, but with vastly different levels of sincerity.  Some notice that this new god seems to be gaining influence and figure they might as well jump on the bandwagon; others are baptized at swordpoint or to improve their "weather-luck."  Christian beliefs and rituals are sort of mashed in with the traditional pantheistic ones: at one point, a Catholic priest interrupts a pagan ceremony and accidentally causes the priest conducting it to fall to his death.  The participants barely bat an eye, and just swap out the old priest for the new one, forcing him to step into the ceremonial role.

Mostly, The Long Ships is a great adventure story: lots of fighting and feuds and love-making and travel.  It's simply fun to read and a great break from my usual navel-gazing and morose reading fare.

The Porch

This new blog by a group of twenty-something Catholics seems nifty.

The most recent post is a brief commentary on the relationship between some of my own philosophical hobby horses (language, meaning, the dignity of the human person), with some quotes from the marvelous Josef Pieper.

Which reminds me: I still owe myself a series of essays on Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

Seven Quick Takes

1) It occurs to me that anyone visiting for the first time probably thinks this is a Doctor Who fan blog.  Sheesh.  Thing is, the things I'm thinking about tend to be filtered through whatever literary or artistic work I'm currently engrossed in, thus the multiple Who posts.  However, I'm on to Baby Hipster Who now, and I'm not really feeling it, so this will probably be the last of those for a while.  Yes, I know I said the same thing about darling David Tennant.  Hush.

2) We got to see Cardinal Dolan speak last night at the Archdiocese of Milwaukee Pallium Lecture.  He sold out a 4,000 seat theatre, and it was exhilarating to walk around downtown right before the event started and feel like we landed in some kind of Catholic utopia. A trio of Franciscan friars would walk by, and then we'd sit down next to a group of Catholic teenagers discussing religious freedom.  And there were priests EVERYWHERE.

3) The lecture itself was titled "Who Do You Say That I Am: Encountering Christ and Responding to Christ Through His Living Body, The Church."  The Cardinal talked about how vital it is that we as Catholics return to a deeper understanding of the essential relationship between Christ and his body, the Church.  He gave three suggestions for restoring this understanding: 1) recognize the Church as our spiritual family 2) strive for a renewal of effective apologetics and 3) become a repentant Church uniting our woundedness with that of Christ.  Fantastic.

4) I skimmed through a few news articles about the lecture this morning, and found them surprisingly balanced and positive.  The Journal-Sentinel article actually demonstrated a decent understanding of some of the themes Dolan raised, and didn't even mention the bankruptcy, lawsuits, etc etc etc.  Of course, the need was felt to bring up the one minor (and in my mind, irritatingly unnecessary) political reference of the evening, which actually came from Fr. Paul Hartmann, not the Cardinal.  Ah, well.

5) Moving on to sports.  I would like to triumphantly note that, before to the start of last night's NFL season opener, I told my husband that Peyton would be incredibly hungry this year and would be playing like it was his last season.  Was I right or was I right?  

6) However, I probably arrive at my stunningly accurate sports predictions from a slightly different perspective than, say, an ESPN sports analyst.  It's the same way I'm able to predict the story arc of a book or TV show - by looking at the narrative.  In this case, it's Peyton's personal narrative as an athlete.  He's one of the most insanely driven and ambitious NFL players ever, and a couple of years back had to sit out an entire season due to a neck injury that would have ended most careers.  He decided instead to go overseas for some terrifying Frankenstein treatment that is ILLEGAL in the United States, making me nervous every time I watched him play last year that his head would just pop off or something.  Despite the fact that he's back on the top of his game, he's clearly playing on borrowed time and gosh darn it if he isn't going to at least match little brother Eli with one more Super Bowl win.  Thus ends the lesson in applying literary analysis principles to athletic careers.

7) As evidenced by these mildly slap-happy Quick Takes, the Summer of Shakespeare is finally over and we're slowly regaining our sanity.  I'm oh-so-glad it's over, but grateful for what we learned, especially about the the value of time.  The ability to once again balance our time between work, relaxation, time together, time with our families, art, education, prayer...well, it's just making me giddy.  I think we are in for a truly grace-filled autumn.  

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

RIP Seamus Heaney

Your translation of Beowulf will always have a special spot on my shelves.

The Doctor and The Master

I promise this will be my last post about Doctor Who for a while.*

When I wrote about Doctor Who the last time, I talked about how the sci-fi trappings are just incidental to what makes the series great: the characters and their relationships.  Specifically, the central character of the Doctor is extraordinarily compelling, and like a lot of heroes in a lot of great stories, tells us something about our Hero in the Great Story of salvation history.

It may be misleading to refer to the Doctor as a Christ figure.  That makes it sound like he's just an allegory, or suggests that all of his choices are perfectly admirable.  The character of the Doctor is a man, who can and does make wrong choices.  He wouldn't be interesting if he didn't.

But truth through story is so much more subtle and yet more impactful than allegory could ever be. 

"The Master" is often referred to as the Doctor's "nemesis."  In many instances, he appears to be the typical sci-fi super-villain, an egomaniacal, genocidal lunatic, set to destroy individuality and re-make humanity in his own image.  And the Doctor is the one whose job it is to stop him, of course.  So in that sense, "nemesis" seems an appropriate word.

But the relationship is radically different at root than the usual hero/evil nemesis framework.

In the final episode of the third season, the Master has taken control of the earth with an army of cyborg/human hybrids, etc.  (This is still sci-fi, people.)

The Doctor is imprisoned and seems to be beaten.  The Master taunts him with images of the destruction he is wreaking on the world and with his own powerlessness.

Several times, the Doctor tells the Master, "I have one thing to say to you."  Every time, the Master silences him, usually violently.  But he keeps persisting.

"I have one thing to say to you."

What is this one thing he has to say?  Perhaps he knows a secret from the Master's childhood that, when spoken aloud, will cause the Master to psychologically self-destruct.  Perhaps he has a grand and sweeping statement to make about how the human race, despite its apparent weakness, has some hidden weapon that will ultimately defeat their would-be destroyer.

But no, that's not it.

"I have one thing to say to you."

And at the end of the episode, over the Master's screams of protest, he says it.

"I forgive you."

That's the one thing.  That's the driving force behind the Doctor's efforts to reach the Master and to stop his evil, destructive choices.

Of course the Master has one bullet left in his gun: the ability to reject the Doctor's forgiveness and to refuse his own ability, as a Time Lord, to regenerate and continue his life under the Doctor's protection.  He dies in the Doctor's arms, proclaiming his own death a victory.

Later in the series, the Master reappears, of course - reincarnated after storing part of his life-force in a ring covered in ancient symbols...you know the drill.  (This is still sci-fi, people.)

The Doctor pursues him, and the two meet face to face once again.  The Doctor listens to him rave for a while, and then has this to say:

The Doctor: You're a genius. You're stone cold brilliant, you are, I swear, you really are. But you could be so much more. You could be beautiful. With a mind like that, we could travel the stars. It would be my honour. Because you don't need to own the universe, just see it. Have the privilege of seeing the whole of time and space. That's ownership enough.

The Master: Would it stop then? The noise in my head.

The Doctor: I can help.

Granted, I'm a little over-emotional lately, due to bone-crushing exhaustion.  But these scenes just sent me reeling.  Because that's what our Savior says to us.

I forgive you. You could be beautiful.  I can help.

Christ offers his forgiveness and his healing to us tirelessly, repeatedly, God himself with very human tears of pleading in his eyes.  He wants us so badly, and will never stop telling us how beautiful we can be if we agree to travel with him.

Frighteningly, we have the ability to refuse that love.  We can look into Christ's eyes as he holds us in his arms, pouring his life into us, and tell him we want none of it.  We are offered that choice day by day, minute by minute. 

It is also frightening, but also hopefully exhilarating as well, to realize that this is the love we are asked to imitate.  If we are true followers of Christ, we should want to look into the eyes of those who have hurt the world and us most deeply and speak those words: I forgive you.  You can be beautiful.  And we should mean them.

Sometimes Doctor Who annoys me, with its ridiculous aliens and its sometimes clumsy plotting and its occasionally inconsistent ethical framework.  But at its best, it's the kind of story to which all makers of stories should aspire, showing humanity in all its hurt and helplessness but challenging us to consider that there is something - Someone - infinitely greater and more powerful at work who has just one thing to say to us.


______________
* Yeah, right.

Refined

Three days left of the Summer from Hell of Shakespeare, and I'm trying to keep this in mind:

Praise our God, all peoples,
    let the sound of his praise be heard;

he has preserved our lives
    and kept our feet from slipping. 

For you, God, tested us;
    you refined us like silver.  

You brought us into prison
    and laid burdens on our backs. 

You let people ride over our heads;
    we went through fire and water,
    but you brought us to a place of abundance.

-- Psalm 66:8-12

Homesick

To me, Scottish traditional music is the most beautiful in the world.

I like classical music and always have.  It's what I first learned on the instrument I always wanted to play, and some of it speaks to me very deeply.  I also like Renaissance polyphony and Gregorian chant and 60s rock and some old time and bluegrass and lots of more contemporary folk-inflected pop.

But to me, Scottish music is the most beautiful, and this remains true no matter how many arguments I hear about how this music or that is objectively better, or richer, or more complex.

I first heard Scottish music, really heard it, at the Ohio Scottish Arts School, a week-long Scottish arts workshop at Oberlin College.  My interest in the music had been developing for a while before that, and I'd heard plenty of recordings and even played some of it.  But I can't say I really heard Scottish music until I heard it played by my fiddle instructor, Bruce.

Bruce is short, squat and red-faced, wears hideous cutoff jean shorts and has a cauliflower ear from years of rugby.  When he's had a few (dozen) glasses of wine, he starts doing headstands in the middle of a session.

Also, he seems to have just up and swallowed the whole deep ocean of Scottish history and tradition, like that guy in the folk tale, and when he plays it just comes flowing out of him.  His fiddle is like part of his body.  I don't think I caught my breath for days after hearing him play for the first time.

Bruce gave me a scholarship to come back to the workshop the next year, which strangely might be one of the things I've received in my life that has made me the most proud.  To me it meant that he saw potential in me, so that maybe some day I could come close to doing what he does when he picks up a fiddle.

There's a word in Welsh that's not easily translatable into English: hiraeth.  It's most commonly rendered as "longing" or "homesickness," but those are oversimplifications.  To me it conveys much the same thing as C.S. Lewis's notion of "joy" and touches on that most fundamental of all human longings, the divine homesickness for a home we've never seen but that we know to be our ultimate destiny.

You can't go looking for this feeling - it just comes on you, brought on sometimes by the most trivial or unexpected things.  It is painful, because it is shot through with a deep awareness that we can't fulfill that deepest longing fully - not yet, not in this life.  But the hope is there too, the knowledge that there is a Person who can and will fill the emptiness, and that every small experience of virtue or truth or self-sacrifice or beauty is His footprint.

Scottish music is where I've encountered this feeling most often, and I don't think it's necessarily a coincidence that it's a Celtic language that actually puts a word to it.

This past weekend at Milwaukee Irish Fest, I discovered the first new band I've heard for a while that plays Scottish music the way I learned to love it.  They are from Nova Scotia, actually, and their music is billed as "fusion," meaning they use some non-traditional instruments and are inspired by different genres in their approach to traditional music.  But make no mistake - they are deeply rooted in the Scottish tradition and breathe incredible life and passion into it.

They have some absolutely kicking arrangements of dance tunes, but my favorite thing they played was a waltz.  When you find out that this tune was written as a wedding gift for a friend, it takes on an even deeper resonance, musically, emotionally, and even theologically. 

As Bruce would say, have a listen.

Jenn and Anthony's - Sprag Session

Who?

 I've always liked science fiction.  Star Trek is near the top of my Favorite Things list, and my dad had an anthology of classic sci-fi short stories from the 50s and 60s that I read cover to cover several times as a kid.  I've read Heinlein, Asimov, Vonnegut, et al.

Sci-fi is a philosopher's genre: a lot of sci-fi stories are essentially ethical or metaphysical thought problems dressed up with robots or mutants or parallel universes.  I like the way a sci-fi story will push some reality past its expected limits to explore the implications.

Given that I'm a sci-fi loving Anglophile, it's surprising that Dr. Who never really crossed my path.  I'd barely even heard of the show up until a few years ago.  Then, suddenly, I started hearing about it absolutely everywhere: the TARDIS popped up, like it does, all over my newsfeed and blog reader, month after month.

So I tried watching it, beginning with the 2005 reboot...and I couldn't get into it.  I really, really wanted to like this charming Northerner and his adventures in space and time, but for the longest time I couldn't manage to get hooked in.

Okay, relax.  I've gradually come around.  But it wasn't an instant love affair.

I think part of my slow start stemmed from the show's visual style.  The sometimes poor special effects are notorious, but it goes beyond that.  In general, I think the writers allow the storytelling to ride a little too heavily on effects, bad or good, and especially on the visual impact of various weird creatures.  I prefer it when the impact of a TV episode flows from the suspense and mystery and weird twists of a well-paced story more than from the fear and disgust and shock value of strange and unsettling images.  Star Trek keeps all of these things well-balanced, I think, whereas Dr. Who leans a bit too much on the latter.

Also, philosophical and ethical reflection is not as front and center in Dr. Who as in a lot of sci-fi.  It's there, and I'm seeing it more now that I'm two seasons in.  But a lot of episodes follow some pretty well-know sci-fi tropes and plot devices: robots who want to kill us, robots who want to make us robots, and of course zombies.  Lots and lots and LOTS of zombies. There's not all that much treading of new ground or asking of probing questions.

However, as I said, I've now settled in and I'm enjoying the show quite a lot.  I think the real genius of the series lies in the characters rather than the plot, and especially (of course) the central one.  The sci-fi trappings are actually kind of non-essential to what makes the show great.  That's why some of the best episodes are the time travel ones, because they delve a little deeper into the characters by placing them in a different historical and cultural context.

Speaking of the Doctor: am I the only one in the universe who likes Christopher Eccleston's Doctor best? I'm not really qualified to have an opinion on this since I've so far only seen him and David Tennant.  Well, I did go back and watch one episode of Classic Who from the 70s, but the Doctor was unconscious for most of the episode, so I really didn't learn much.

Anyway, Christopher Eccleston's Doctor just has more...substance to him that David Tennant's.  His performance has so much more weight and nuance and charm and doesn't rely on yelling and slap-happy bluster.  David Tennant is adorable and Scottish, but lacks a little in artistic maturity. Also, David Tennant's Doctor and Rose get way too gooey.  What is with all this hand holding and incessant hugging?  Harumph.

And then there's that smile, which somehow carries the weight of the Doctor's thousands of years of pain and loss.  That's acting for you.

UPDATE:  About David Tennant?  I take it all back.  Still love Christopher Eccleston...but David Tennant is a more than worthy successor.