This year, BBC America decided to do the smart thing and show new episodes of Doctor Who on the same day they debuted in Britain. This cunning plan lasted for five weeks, because they then decided that no one in America watches television on Memorial Day weekend. The final two installments of this initial half-season therefore were delayed a week, which was especially unfortunate because they were also the two with SHOCKING. PLOT. TWISTS!

I tried to hold out, but then I ran headlong into a flock of spoilers for the final minutes of “The Almost People.” So, buh-bye BBCA! You were filled with commercials and you ruined the cliffhanger sting with your credit-squeezing, but I was willing to put up with you so long as you were in synch with the U.K. Word to your scheduler: a week is an eternity in the universe of cult TV.

So, if you are a good boy or girl and are still waiting for the U.S. debut of the half-season finale, “A Good Man Goes to War,” I urge you to go elsewhere now, because there is nothing ahead but spoilers. From this point onward, you have no one but yourself to blame.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

“A Good Man Goes to War” was an object lesson in both what is good and bad about Doctor Who in the Steven Moffat/Matt Smith era.

Make no mistake, it was fun to watch. It lobbed out–and tossed aside–more ideas in 15 minutes than many shows manage in an entire season. Headless monks with an “attack chant?” A Sontaran warrior doing penance as a nurse, genetically engineered to lactate mother’s milk? That latter one was worth an episode in itself, yet here it was a throwaway.

And that’s to say nothing of Madame Vastra, a Silurian adventuress hunting (and ultimately eating) Jack the Ripper in Victorian England, and her katana-wielding human maid Jenny. And they’re lesbians! The fan fiction writes itself!*

Toss in some superfluous Cybermen, and you’ve got another example of the kitchen-sink approach of last season’s “The Pandorica Opens,” in which the Doctor was jumped by every monster costume hanging around the special effects shop. (In fairness, previous showrunner Russell T. Davies did this sort of thing as well.) It’s entertaining, but sacrifices common sense for fan-gasm.

As both a character-defining event and a cliffhanger, “A Good Man Goes to War” was oversold. We were told that the Battle of Demon’s Run would be “the Doctor’s darkest hour.” “He will rise higher than ever before and then fall so much further,” said River Song (whom I’ll get to in a few moments). But did any of that happen? Okay, he stormed a military base and sent the troops fleeing, but was that rising higher than the time he faced down an entire Dalek fleet with no weapons and no plan?

And how far did he fall? Sure, the wicked Madame Kovarian twirled her eyepatch and ran off with Amy’s baby for a second time, but that’s another day at the office for a serial adventurer. Maybe falling “so much further” was the revelation that the word “doctor” was becoming equivalent to the word “warrior” in galactic society, but that ground was well-covered in the Eccleston and Tennant eras. Was it really more of a blow to his psyche than the failure of the “Time Lord triumphant?”

Then came the revelation that River Song was in fact the grown-up version of Amy’s daughter Melody Pond. For some reason, this sent the Doctor into a giddy spin as he rushed off to save the baby that we already know will be just fine. As cliffhangers go, it’s got the urgency of that time the Master walked down a flight of stairs.

Which brings us to the frizzy-haired elephant in the room, River Mary Sue Song.

A “Mary Sue” is an idealized fictional character who serves as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the writer. The term usually comes up in discussions of fan-fiction, but it applies to professional work as well. The maligned boy genius Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation was the Mary Sue of show creator Gene Wesley Roddenberry.

River Song’s Qualifications for Mary Sue-dom

• Whenever she’s on screen she’s the center of attention.
• She breaks in and out of a maximum-security prison at will. She treats history as her personal Post-It Note pad. And she flies the TARDIS better than the Doctor does**.
• She’s introduced to us as already having had an undefined, but presumably romantic relationship with a future Doctor. She’s not just a potential love interest, she’s a fait accompli***.
• She’s a deadly shot with a laser gun, yet the Doctor–who notoriously abhors violence****–not only doesn’t seem to mind, but admires her for it.
• The story arc that has all-but-consumed the last two years of the show? It’s all about her.

In River Melody Williams-Song-Pond we have a character conceived in the TARDIS and engineered to be an anti-Doctor weapon. She regenerates. She’s super-strong. She’s Amy and Rory’s child. She’s possibly the Doctor’s future wife and very likely his future lover.

And I cannot wait until Steven Moffat achieves whatever he intends to accomplish with her. So long, River. Don’t let the police box door hit you on the way out.

* Truthfully, I enjoyed Vashta and Jenny. But if there was ever a Holmesian double-act (Google it) introduced as ready-made for their own spin-off media, it was these two.

** Also see: Adric.

*** You cannot prevent the catharsis of spurious philandery.

**** Remember when the Doctor kept telling Leela to put away her poisonous Janus Thorns? Neither does the Doctor.

Dave Doctor Who enough already, Mary Sue, River Song

It’s not often that I weigh in on former pop princesses turned drug-addled sluts, but really, enough with the Britney bashing. Tabloids, you’ve won: you’ve convinced us that Ms. Spears is a crazed, baby-endangering ho-bag.

The November 28 Star magazine, which has been festooning checkout aisles everywhere I’ve been this past week (I have no idea what it was doing at PetSmart), advertises “Inside Brit’s Crazy House”, an expose’ about her (alleged, remember it’s all alleged) double-locked secret room adorned with “pink handcuffs, ceiling mirrors and bizarre costumes.” My God, that’s shocking. Bizarre costumes? For a pop singer? On the other hand, I don’t see the big deal about the rest. I mean, who doesn’t have pink handcuffs and a mirror on the ceiling?

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether Britney is one bullwhip shy of the Marquis de Sade, let me just say this: I DON’T FUCKING CARE. Britney Spears was barely interesting when she was a former Mouseketeer playing the I’m-so-innocent-don’t-you-want-to-fuck-me card, and she’s even less interesting in her new persona as a stupefied hayseed who used to perform or something.

She’s pathetic, and you guys are pathetic for continuing to pile on her. I’m not gonna make some self-serving YouTube video or anything, but for fuck’s sake, leave the girl alone for twenty minutes and perhaps she’ll start to make some less destructive choices.

Dave Rant Britney Spears, enough already, tabloid fodder

In the ’60s, we got to the moon by flying through a PICTURE of the moon.

While my love of so-called “Silver Age” (1956-69 or thereabouts) DC Comics remains unabated, I have to admit that in rediscovering them through the massive reprint volumes known as Showcase Presents I’ve found that all too often, they…well, let’s just say that they’re not quite as good as I remembered.

Must be a Russian robot.

The Showcase books, which reprint entire runs of comics in chronological order, aren’t necessarily the ideal format for these stories. Consuming issue after issue in one go rather than waiting a month or two for the next installment highlights their repetitive and formulaic nature.

Submitted in support is the most recent volume, featuring the Metal Men. This unusual super-team debuted in 1962, in issue #37 of the original Showcase title. Showcase (no “Presents” back then) was a book which tried out new characters and concepts, with the most popular given their own titles. “Metal Men” was originally intended as a mere fill-in story, but the heroes were so well-received that they appeared in four issues before spinning off into a bimonthly series which ran for another seven years.

Lead became so concerned over his atomic weight that he developed an atomic eating disorder.

The Metal Men were robots created by the brilliant Doc Magnus, each a shape-shifting humanoid endowed with the properties (and anthropomorphized personality) of a metallic element: noble Gold, strong man Iron, slow-moving Lead, hot-headed Mercury, weakling Tin, and beautiful Platinum, the latter the only female in the band.

Look, I said it was the ’60s.

It was established from the beginning that the effectiveness of the Metal Men as superheroes stemmed from their imperfections. The “responsometers” that governed their actions left them with human-like emotions, ironically making them better at their job than mere robots would have been. On several occasions, Doc built duplicate Metal Men without this flaw, and the dopplegangers inevitably proved a danger to others.

Platinum (aka Tina) got the worst of it, exhibiting stereotypically “female” behaviors as only a ’60s comic book writer could envision them. While the other Metal Men were loyal to their creator, Tina was in love with Doc, and said so…constantly. Doc had to keep reminding her that she was “only a robot.”

Get used to this line of conversation. It’ll come up again.

As I mentioned, comics of this period frequently repeated themselves, often for the benefit of new readers. You could bet that most of the following would occur in any given Metal Men story:

• Mercury would arrogantly declare that he was the only metal that was liquid at room temperature.
• Doc would tell Tina that she was not a woman, and that she should behave like a robot.
• The Metal Men would announce their respective atomic weights and/or boiling points. DC Comics were scientific like that.
• Tin would fret about his uselessness, then rush the latest menace in a foolhardy and ultimately futile gesture. (Each time he met another pathetic fate, the other Metal Men commented on his bravery. To them, it seemed that “bravery” was expressed as pathological, self-loathing suicide.)
• Tina would act like an unpredictable woman, forcing Doc to remind her that she was, in fact, not one.
• One or more of the Metal Men would die horribly, to be rebuilt in a later issue. (The very first story killed off the entire team.)
• Did I mention that Tina was really a robot? And not a girl?

Just another day at the office for Tin.

The Doc and Tina relationship got pretty sick. Doc kept promising to ship her off to the Museum of Science (or, as I prefer, Museum of SCIENCE!!!). This he eventually did, but they sent her back because the patrons complained.

Museum goers are a tough crowd.

That’s because the Museum of SCIENCE!!!, when gifted with a metamorphic, self-aware work of unparalleled genius–which could stretch itself thinner than a human hair and was capable of pleasuring others in ways of which human women had never dreamed–could think of nothing better to do with it than to lock it in a glass coffin and demand it to stand very, very still. And they were dissatisfied when it began to mope.

I can hear the families now:

“Mommy! That robot lady is crying!”

“Well, naturally, Jenny. She’s a sentient being put on eternal display in an enclosure slightly larger than herself. Now, eat your ice cream while you appreciate her endless, living hell.”

I know that rationality was not the order of the day here, but it occurred to me that if one was a scientist who had committed to donating one’s fabulous platinum robot to the Museum of SCIENCE!!!–and had, in a previous story, built a second model without those pesky human behavioral traits–one would really be an asshat to give them the crying one.

That’s Doc Magnus, inventor and asshat.

Only 37 more times. This issue.

Dave Comics assholes, enough already, it's science!, Metal Men, robots, sexual harassment, Silver Age

Here’s the view outside the front window of my house this morning.

It’s frickin’ March 10, we’re still getting snow; and I’m sick, sick, sick of it.

I hate winter. I hate slick roads and icy sidewalks, I hate gray skies, I hate when it gets dark at 4:45 pm, and most of all, I hate being cold. If I never had another winter, I wouldn’t miss it. Sure, give me a white Christmas; drop a few inches of snow on Christmas Eve. But let it melt by December 26.

Even though this has been by no means a terrible winter–I never did have to shovel the drive–I’ve been ready for it to be over for weeks. And yet it persists.

Last Sunday, it was absoutely gorgeous out, with sunshine and temperatures in the high ’60s. Vic and I took our first neighborhood walk of the year, and after a few blocks, we were so warm that we had to take off our sweatshirts.

The next day, it started spitting snow again.

Go away, winter. Don’t come back.

Dave Rant enough already, miserable weather