It’s no secret that Doctor Who has gone downhill quite a lot in the last couple of seasons. So, as a thought experiment, I decided to figure out how, in the extremely unlikely hypothetical event (particularly since I don’t work in television) that I was appointed as the new showrunner for Doctor Who, I would go about fixing all the stuff that has gone wrong under Chibnall (the timeless children, etc.).

I would start with the post-regeneration sequence. The 14th Doctor would emerge from regeneration, declare that something has gone terribly wrong, and fall over in cardiac arrest. …

The problem with the Timeless Child overarching plot of season 12 of Doctor Who was far simpler than many believed. It wasn’t too complex, nor did it fail because it tried to be too progressive — it all just came down to bad, and even terrible, storytelling.

In its conception, the Timeless Child was not a bad idea — in fact, it had the potential for greatness. It could have recontextualized everything we knew and thought about the Time Lords. But it never came close to reaching this potential. Every step of the Timeless child story arc had serious storytelling…

(Warning: Contains spoilers.)

At the end of the first episode, it really looked like HBO’s Watchmen had tried to tackle the problem of modern racism and whiffed it.

In fact they hadn’t whiffed anything — by the end of the season, HBO’s Watchmen had become a compelling and nuanced examination of racism, white supremacy and the reaction against it. But that wasn’t at all clear at the end of the series premiere.

The problem was that groups such as the white supremacist Seventh Kavalry are reactive — they don’t exist in a vacuum and the violent racism they carry out…

WARNING: Contains spoilers for Watchmen

Does Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan have free will?

It’s a question that both the graphic novel and HBO’s sequel series — which just finished a run as one of the most compelling shows on television — lend themselves. Jon Osterman, aka Doctor Manhattan, is a blue-skinned god who is omnipotent and omniscient — he knows all and sees all. He is also utterly alien.

Comic books and their screen adaptations have no shortage of gods. In many ways, the entire genre started with the godlike character of Superman. Superman was soon joined by Wonder Woman. Within…

One of the most notable thing about the new Ghostbusters: Afterlife trailer is what isn’t there: a backlash.

The trailer sets itself up as a sequel to the original Ghostbusters, with most of the action revolving around a little girl (the granddaughter of Harold Ramis’ character Egon Spengler) becoming a ghostbuster. The video was an immediate success, getting over 7.4 million views on YouTube in under 24 hours, with 240,000 likes and only 14,000 dislikes.

This is a stark contrast to the trailer for the 2016 reboot directed by Paul Feig, which suffered a massive backlash. By the first day…

In last night’s stunning segment about HBO’s legal victory over coal magnate Bob Murray that included a musical number with line dancers, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver made a strong case for implementing anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) legislation in every corner of the United States.

Unfortunately, he did not go nearly far enough. While anti-SLAPP legislation is indeed a necessary safeguard against businesses and large corporations terrifying critics into silence through the threat of legal action, American defamation law is badly broken: it needs to be easier to sue people for libel and slander.

This is not…

The Nazi Titanic is kind of amazing.

For the course I teach this term, I delivered a lecture on the sinking of the RMS Titanic, using a modern disaster analysis framework to demonstrate how the pieces of a catastrophic accident fit together. As a happy side-effect, my wife and I ended up watching most, if not all, of the major cinematic takes on the Titanic. It was an incredible voyage, and not one that led to the places one might imagine…

Atlantic (1929)

Atlantic wasn’t the first Titanic movie to be made (the first movies about the sinking were made…

Nothing quite prepares you for how your life changes when your first child is born. The joke is “say goodbye to sleeping,” but this is not always true. It’s also casting a net that is not nearly wide enough.

Perhaps the biggest change comes down to availability. There are times when your child needs you, and the other parent will not do. You end up permanently on-call. Your life comes to revolve around your child, and rightly so. If you spend any serious amount of time gaming, this can upend your hobbies. But, it does not need to kill them.

…