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Oh, absolutely. For example, Ghostlight's pretty high up on my list of favourite stories ever. smile

Hopefully it's understood that when we talk about what's 'good' or 'bad' then we're speaking casually and in a fannish way rather than with any sort of critical weight behind us. There's an implicit IMO tagged onto anything that can't be anything other than opinion.

I belive though that is is possible to make some objective statements about writing. You can judge which script has more depth than another, which is more consistent, which has the greater thematic unity, which has more original ideas, which has more subtlety, etc.

BUT it's not a given that the presense or absense of depth, consistency, unity, originality, subtlety, etc make something good or bad because not only do opinions vary about the importance of such virtues, but the virtues themselves vary according to what you're trying to write.

People criticise Doctor Who all the time for breaking the rules of the science fiction genre. This is because it hasn't occured to them that Doctor Who isn't playing by the rules of the Science Fiction genre. It will look like bad writing if you try and analyse it as science fiction, but its often fantastic writing when you analyse it as the Children's Show/Science-Fantasy/Myth/Comedy-Horror/New Weird/Steampunk/Gothic/Tragedy/Timey-Wimey Thing that it actually is.

People who think they've got the set of rules that determines good writing have in fact only got a set of rules that determines a particular kind of writing.

Look at the amount of fans who've decided that Russell is a 'bad writer' because he's prone to chucking in a Deus Ex Machina or two. At some point in their lives they've been told that Deus Ex Machinas are Bad Writing and that that is a Rule. Well, it wasn't for Sophocles or Euripides, neither of whom are generally thought of as 'bad writers'. Nor was it for anyone until Aristotle decided that it was a Rule, along with the rest of the arbitary gubbins in Poetics.

Likewise. I was on rec.arts.drwho during the Nineties. I pray I will never see such things again.



That's related to the arguement that snobbish types use against 'genre fiction'. Whether the genre's horror, crime, fantasy or SF then being part of that genre means following certain conventions and repeated patterns, in a way that literary fiction doesn't have to.

Austen can do whatever the hell she likes, wheras someone writing a Detective Story has more things they have to do for it to count as a Detective Story.

I think the elitists kind of have a point there. But what I'd say in response is that genre fiction always has the capacity to transcend its conventions, and that the really good stuff happens at the place where we see that happening. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a Gothic Horror while also being a potent challenge to, and a remorseless critque of, the genre of Gothic Horror. Exactly like Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey is.

That's part of the appeal of Doctor Who for me. Nobody can confine its storytelling to the rules of just one genre because nobody can put forward a convincing argument as to what that one genre should be. So it can do whatever it likes.

MEANWHILE!
You may enjoy Ghostlight more when told in the form of lolcats...
http://ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com/20503.html
smile

xd Ahh, hilarious. That sums up the plot rather well, in my opinion. Very informative, critically thought of, and of course, with references to burnt toast.
How can it get any better? 3nodding

If I ever finished "Ol' Doc Whoie: The Duo Docs" & put it online, I could gleefully ruin "The Two Doctors" for lots of people. rofl
(See my Journal for the 1st few pages)

Well, constantly using quick-fix endings get rather boring after a while. When the Seventh Doctor fooled Davros into blowing up Skaro with the Hand of Omega, that was sort of cool. When he used the exact same trick on the Cybermen a couple stories later in 'Silver Nemesis', that was lame (well, the entire story was lame, but the ending made it even more so).

In much the same way, having the Earth about to be overwhelmed by a massive Dalek invasion fleet, a horde of alternate universe Cybermen and millions of Daleks released from the Genesis Ark, or billions of demented Toclafane, only to have them all quickly dispatched by erasing them from existence with the power of the Time Vortex, sucking them into the void, or reset-buttoning them back to Utopia gets old after a while. Just for once I'd like to have a season finale that didn't involve an unstoppable alien invasion that gets deus ex machina'ed back to LaLa Land at the end.

Unless it's an invasion of Tribbles.

You make a very strong argument, but not one that gets us past the 'subjective' thing, as those big fat Audience Appreciation figures show that the vast majority of people who watched the episodes you discuss didn't find them rather boring.

Nonetheless,

Ahh, I always shout things like that at the screen n 3n Most of them, of course, seem to regard back to LOLCATZ, which is sad sweatdrop Nonetheless, voiceovers are also fun, especially after eating Cookie Dough ice-cream twisted

Well, it's better than how the book Congo ended. If you've seen the movie, the blimp WAS the solution to the climax. You know how the movie does no justice to the original books. Well, the movie was way better than the book.