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Humor Theories/Stand Up Comedy/Theories About Funny

Humorous Modes

Posted on by nwilson

Update!

Today’s update is on the three main theories that have emerged from philosophy, psychology and linguistics to explain humor (Berger; Meyer; Morreall; Raskin):

Superiority

Relief and

Incongruity

You can read up on each of them.

A Theoretical Argument

These theories are generally used to try to explain humor, and theorists, philosophers, psychologists and critics of every stripe have argued for centuries about the supremacy of one theory over another.  Incongruity is currently winning, as superiority and relief have fallen out of vogue. I don’t spend a lot of time on these, 1) because you can find longer descriptions elsewhere, and 2) because a lot of the finer points don’t relate well to stand up. Further, I refer to the “my theory is better than your theory” arguments as a quagmire that misses the point, which for me is: What do people think they are trying to accomplish when they make and consume humor?

Modes

I treat these theories as “modes,” or “a way or manner in which something occurs or is experienced, expressed, or done”  When I’m reading people talk about stand-up, whether it be writing tips, reviews, or critiques, I see moments when people say things that sound very much like one of these modes.

What I try to do in my critiques is try to point out or highlight these moments, because I argue they have implications for what the humor is thought to do. I find that these theories are not abandoned by normal people when other models come onto the scene, but rather each new model comes to be understood through these older theories, creating permutations.  This makes these modes central to understanding how humor is used, so here we go!

References:

Berger, Arthur Asa.  “Humor: An Introduction.”  American Behavioral Scientist 30.1 (1987): 6-15

Meyer, John C.  “Humor as a Double-Edged Sword: Four Functions of Humor in Communication.”  Communication Theory 10.3 (2000): 310-331.

Morreall, J. “Philosophy of Humor”Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/#RelThe, 2016.

Raskin, Victor.  Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Boston, MA: D. Reidel. 1985.

Wilson, Nathan. Was That Supposed to be Funny?  A Rhetorical Analysis of Politics, Problems and Contradictions in Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy. Dissertation in partial completion of the Ph.D. August, 2008.

Books/Fantasy

Morgan Rice’s A March of Kings

Posted on by nwilson

[Spoilers!] I’m over Morgan Rice. I mistakenly bought the third in this “Bestselling Series,” on audible, thus learning two things: 1) a lot of people know nothing, and 2) always check that a book you’re buying is the first, and if it isn’t don’t buy any more!

The first book was horribly written, and I spent my review discussing the poor characterization and overuse of key phrases, “He could hardly believe…”

This book, I began to actively hate how she writes out Thor’s thought process, or lack thereof, as here “he can’t imagine,” or “doesn’t want to seem…” or some such where she basically displays him to be overthinking everything, but coming to few conclusions and not usually doing anything productive except by pure instinct and happenstance, because “he possesses a great power he doesn’t yet understand”–which is a bullshit premise from the beginning.

Then there are the internal and external inconsistencies. For the former, the Empire controls everything but the Ring, yet the Ring sends troops every year to another land?

A few of the latter are waste dumps in the same room as the prep kitchen. Sure Medieval times were gross, but nobody has a chamber pot in their kitchen. Also, ships big enough to carry 50 (more) giants (than one carrying hundreds of men) that have masts only secured by a single rope–a rope that is at the same time thin enough to be severed by a single, thrown spear–masts that are big enough that when brought down by the spear severing the rope, sink the entire ship. It’s not merely improbable, it’s impossible, and your story becomes dumb. Expend a little effort, do a little research, and write something plausible.

The one redeeming quality of this book is that it was short.

Books/Scifi

Jasper T. Scott’s Excelsior

Posted on by nwilson

[Spoilers!] I didn’t like this book, nor the narration by James Patrick Cronin. The dialogue was at times frustrating, but more so was the bad science and nagging details. For an instance of the latter, they travel through a wormhole–fine–which requires stasis tanks, and tubes to take in food & water and pull out waste. So there’s 1) a system of tubes down their throat, 2) an IV in the arm and 3) a tube up their butt, but only 4) a cup for a males’ urine. Isn’t that a bit unsanitary? After months in stasis? Then, when removing said apparati, they unfailingly remove the throat tubes first, and the butt tubes last. Who are these people? Something up that way should at least rate second, no?

The author also brushes past the fact that we’ve made a lot of humans immortal, but doesn’t deal with any of the issues Asimov calls out, like overpopulation. Also, all the characters act as if their timelines are human scale, which, I suppose, is not surprising, given that they’ve just achieved that status; however, the effect is that although they’re immortal “in theory,” and have hopes for the future, we never see anyone who is affected by this, or lives accordingly.

Also, the wormhole is not traversable, and when the Confederation tries it they are immediately nearly destroyed, with no time dilation – which begs the question, where did the 2 YEARS of time dilation for Alex’s crew come from?

The reader, Cronin, is breathy on the ends of sentences, which becomes annoying fast, and he has the habit of making declarative statements into questions by a vocal upswing, when the sentence ends in a period. This is particularly bad when he’s reading for a military person speaking to a superior officer. It makes them sound weak and unprofessional.

Books/Fantasy

Morgan Rice’s A Quest of Heroes.

Posted on by nwilson

[Spoilers!] Don’t waste your time with Morgan Rice, a self-publishing, self-promoting fraud. I bought this book based on the many high internet reviews. The internet is wrong. “He could hardly believe…” that an editor would allow this phrase (and its variants) to be uttered so many times. The hero, Thor, stumbles through the plot, “acting on instinct,” and utterly stupefied at the situations he finds himself in, the effects of his actions, and the ways he is treated. It was past annoying by halfway in.

This repetition is not limited to one phrase, but we are frequently treated to repeat information, stuff that would be appropriate when starting a subsequent book, but not the subsequent chapter. Not to mention the basic plot repetition present in the idea of “the chosen one,” destined for greatness from birth due to his inherent qualities, B.S.

Also, the author shows an apparent lack of knowledge of weaponry (e.g. Medieval bows that you take apart and put back together? That you restring on a table? Not in my experience) and other basic situations (e.g. Saying a mounted man “strode forward,”) that leave me scratching my head.

Still the setting is novel, the action moves along, and it seems to be going somewhere. Where it goes is somewhere where I was not impressed.

Books/Fantasy

Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale.

Posted on by nwilson

[Spoilers!]
This book was great. It passes the Bechdel Test, with some strong female characters who regularly interact, and the female protagonist makes friends with mystical creatures and creates a coalition to fight the main antagonist (though it may not have worked), then throws off the yoke of traditional sex and gender roles to chart her own path. There’s some good explicit (and better implicit) commentary on social roles.

What I liked most about this book, however, was the world-building, and it’s philosophical extensions. The mythical creatures and spirits, as part of Russian folklore, are natural extensions of the earth and society. The Frost Demon represents order, and everything ordered: life & death, time (but strangely, only winter, out of all the seasons), etc. His brother, the Bear, represents chaos and all things chaotic: disorder, the undead, anger, fear. Chaos is the natural state, thus many of the earth creatures side with the Bear, but men and his societal creatures side with order, and order can cage chaos. Even the magic plays on bringing order out of the chaos: everything is potentially many things (very postmodern), and the trick is to make it be the thing you want.

The Catholic Church in all this plays an unwitting role. Preaching that the myths and folklore counteract god, the priests get the people to foresake their household spirits, which only a select few can see, thus weakening the order these spirits bring and opening up the house to chaos. To those holy folk who can’t see, the folklore seems like a big appeal to tradition. To those who can see, they have manifest proof that demons walk among us, and never look further for the why or how of it. And they are easily led astray when the spirits represent themselves as god. Only those who can see and are brought up in the folk tradition understand the roles these spirits play, and can help them and call for their aid, but these sighted folk are branded as witches and ostracized. We never see any power from the Christian god, save the power to shut mythical creatures out of their areas (churches, priests’ chambers) and even then, the baddies get in.

Overall, it makes me want to keep reading the series to see where this all goes next.

Big Theories/Dramatism

Kenneth Burke’s Representative Anecdote & the Cult of the Kill

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Burke

The final idea Burke had that was better than his Pentad was the Representative Anecdote. There are a few theories like this one floating around now, but aside from Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth/Hero’s Journey (1949; which it predates), and perhaps discussion of “Shadow Texts” [I’m missing a source for this one :-(], the Representative Anecdote was one of the better known methods for evaluating stories in the 1980’s, thanks to Barry Brummett’s work.

The Judeo-Christian Anecdote

For Brummett, Burke was just reading a text and finding out what story the plot line followed (i.e. what text it “shadowed”). However, Burke predominantly found the same Anecdote in his readings: the Abraham/Christ sacrifice. The two stories are themselves parallel within the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Burke argues that because Western society is Judeo-Christian (being that these are the dominant religions), it’s not surprising that when we try to put things [events, people, objects, institutions and ideas] into the form of a story, our minds jump to biblical examples.

Burke’s premises of this story reflect his theory of Dramatism. He argues that Dramatism, and therefore rhetoric is hortatory–it attempts to exhort, suggest or outright tell people what to do [e.g. “Thou shalt not…”]. Because we–flawed humans that we are–are doomed to fail some of the time, guilt is inherent within this hortatory system.

Because we humans are “Rotten with perfection,” always seeking to be better [even is “better” is erroneously, loosely, un- defined], our guilt necessitates that we seek redemption. And how were we redeemed in the Abraham/Christ story? Through the death of a sacrifice. The killing of the sacrifice represents our transformation via rebirth–we are “saved.” And so we find something to victimize to facilitate our transformation, a process Burke called Victimage.

Types of Victimage

Burke argued there were two types of Victimage: Scapegoating and Mortification. Scapegoating was, as the name suggests, finding someone else to hold responsible. This plays out in the plots of most stories: Crime doesn’t pay, Bad guys are punished, etc.

Mortification, on the other hand, was a kind of self-flagellation, where we attempt to flog or beat ourselves (physically or metaphorically) as penance. This process is a bit trickier when applied to stories. Burke argues that when we watch a story, we don’t just identify with the hero. Instead–at least in the best stories–we identify with ALL the characters. We assign our own positive attributes to the “good” characters, and our own negative attributes to the “bad” characters. [If we didn’t find the characters believable enough to invest part of ourselves in, the story probably isn’t that popular!] When the “bad” people are punished, we experience mortification in seeing our proxy punished. This is another aspect of literature as “Equipment for Living”–it serves a real purpose in helping us process our guilt.

Where can we find the Anecdote? And why should we?

However, this wasn’t even the most interesting part of all of this. Burke’s most useful part of Dramatism wasn’t to read literature, plays, movies and television for evidence of the Abraham/Christ myth [or for clusters of “good” terms and their “agons”, which can work in tandem], but to read speeches, memos, policy documents and laws. To read documents that are not stories and discover terms that act like characters in a story-line or plot, –terms that are victimized or redeemed–was pretty radical and requires some thought to accomplish, but once you’ve noticed the Anecdote, you can’t go back to reading arguments in the same old way.

When we find the Anecdote, it is important to ask:

  1. What is sacrificed?
  2. To what/whom?
  3. What is redeemed?
  4. What are the entailments? So what [Cui bono]?

Again, to assuage our guilt, the “bad” terms [or ideas, people, practices, institutions, etc.] and their “agonistic” clusters are usually scapegoated, redeeming the “good” terms [ideas, people, etc.]. Yes, this might make us feel better, but it also plays on our need for redemption in order to present real-world consequences to real ideas, people, practices, institutions, etc. And we need to determine, “Is the cost worthwhile?” “Is the squeeze worth the juice?”

Sources:

Barry Brummett (1984). “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method in Media Criticism.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1(2), pp.

Barry Brummett (1984). “The Representative Anecdote as a Burkean Method, Applied to Evangelical Rhetoric.” Southern Speech Communication Journal, 50(1), pp.

Kenneth Burke (1945/1969). Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press/Berkeley.

Television

Is It Time to Re-Examine Firefly/Serenity?

Posted on by nwilson

At the height of his career, Joss Whedon was enjoying the successes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Angel (1994-2004) when he created Firefly. Though it only ran one season, it has a HUGE cult following, and that drove the desire for the film. Don’t get me wrong, I love the TV show Firefly (2002), and the movie Serenity (2005), though I came to them late [I saw the movie in 2006, then came back to the series]. However, the critic in me can’t help but examining the premises of the show, and finding it a bit troubling.

Luckily, I have long known about a resource for people like me: How to be a Fan of Problematic Things. In this document, Rachel of the Social Justice League tells us there are three rules we have to follow:

Firstly, acknowledge that the thing you like is problematic and do not attempt to make excuses for it…. Secondly, do not gloss over the issues or derail conversations about the problematic elements…. Thirdly you must acknowledge other, even less favourable, interpretations of the media you like.

So in that vein, I thought I’d acknowledge the problematic elements of this show.

There is a way to read this show as a nod to the Confederate States of America

It’s a well-known fact that Whedon’s inspiration for the show was the Pulitzer prize-winning Civil War novel, The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, which follows Union and Confederate soldiers during four days at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. And Whedon modeled his world on the Reconstruction era, but set in the future.

So that brings with it a BUNCH of connotations. We like the plucky “Independents” and “Browncoats,” like Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) [and Zoe Washburne (Gina Torres)], who lost, but “still wasn’t sure” he was on the wrong side. We know that Mal just wants the freedom to “do his own thing,” and live as he pleases, which has always been a veiled defense of slavery, and misogyny, etc., etc. So this further implies that he and the crew are for slavery–and if we support him, then perhaps we do too. But we need not go all the way THERE. We should also look at the differences between the Confederacy and the Independents, and try to avoid binary distinctions. Or as I do with stand-up:

Instead, I try to recognize the possibilities…. I try to read the joke in multiple different ways.  I try to point out potential problems with the joke, but also the potential problems with the responses and I try to imagine where and when the joke would have worked and what it could do.

Basically, the idea is to recognize that texts like jokes and even TV shows aren’t closed systems, existing in a vacuum. They exist in a relationship with their audience, and different audiences bring different understandings to the table, and thus read the text differently. I try to recognize that there are positive and negative ways of reading things, and the best jokes and texts, IMHO, are those that have the most positive readings, while avoiding the worst negative readings. So let’s apply this thought to Firefly/Serenity.

Similarities and Differences

1. The Firefly Universe is not the United States

For one thing, it’s bigger–a whole bunch of terraformed planets and moons surrounding at least six stars. But this would seem to be a metaphorical extension of states–both close to and remote from the center of government–with travel between them being difficult, thus they are left somewhat to their own devices (and government).

Second, the government and culture is a combination of the United States and China. Though the Chinese are now having problems with their treatment of the Uighurs, which parallels the U.S. treatment of the Native Americans, so maybe that’s not helping either.

Ok, but it’s in the Future! Ok, maybe that’s not much help, until we dig further.

Why did the Independents rebel? Well, the descriptions of the Union of Allied Planets is that they’re neglectful–they terraformed the planets, and recruited people to go there, but didn’t adequately supply them. I don’t know that you can say the same about the United States.

Also, that they meddle, as River Tam has it in Serenity:

We meddle… People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads, and we haven’t the right

This is more just “what governments do.” They meddle and ask everyone to follow the same rules, for the good of all. However, there are governments who meddle too much, and restrict their citizens too much–China has been described as one, and the U.S. is currently walking that way…

2. The crew is [somewhat] diverse

Yes, Zoe Washburne (Torres) and Shepherd Book (Ron Glass) are portrayed by African American actors. Zoe fought on the side of the Independents, and is currently in an inter-racial relationship. We also see a couple of Black agents of the Union of Allied Planets–both in “Objects in Space,” and in Serenity. It’s not as diverse as we’d like [if the government is a collapse of the U.S. and China, where are all the Chinese?], but it’s something. So if there is slavery in this future, it might not be centered on African Americans.

3. Mal and the crew never support slavery, and act in the interests of the impoverished

Did you ever hear of “The Hero of Canton?” The man they call Jayne? The Mudders of Canton are basically indentured servants, and though in his backstory, Jayne Cobb (Adam Baldwin) wasn’t trying to help them, he did do better in the episode “Jaynestown.”

Similarly, in “The Train Job,” after learning that what they stole from the train was medicine that helped the miners in Paradiso to live their lives, Mal returns the goods.

In “Our Mrs. Reynolds,” the crew are helping the Triumph Settlement with a bandit problem, making sure their goods get where they need to go. They also help out the prostitutes in “Heart of Gold,” who are being invaded by men in a paternity suit.

Mal also fights a duel in “Shindig” over Inara Serra (Morena Baccarin) being treated as property by her client.

Finally, and perhaps most telling: In the first episode, “Serenity,” when Mal opens Dr. Simon Tam’s (Sean Maher’s) crate and finds River Tam (Summer Glau), he immediately condemns Simon on the idea that he’s human trafficking her–perhaps as sex slave.

4. They can be two different things.

Though it’s obvious, it doesn’t hurt to mention that Firefly and Serenity are not and never were a part of the Confederacy. So, unlike, say, the Confederate Flag, Firefly might be able to co-opt the “Anti-Big Government” and resentment of the Reconstruction era, without having to own up to everything the Confederacy stood for.

Yes, this allows people who like the Confederacy to like the show as well–and for some of the same reasons–it doesn’t mean that ALL of us who like the show have to like the Confederacy–we can make distinctions.

Is this “gloss[ing] over the issues or derail[ing] conversations about the problematic elements”?

I don’t think so. If we said the show was misogynistic, and the female characters were treated poorly, and I said “What about the one female character Mal liked and thus treated well?” That would be derailing and glossing over.

Final thoughts

We don’t have to be perfect, and the things we like don’t have to be ideologically pristine. Rachel of the Social Justice League concludes:

As fans, sometimes we need to remember that the things we like don’t define our worth as people. So there’s no need to defend them from every single criticism or pretend they are perfect. Really loving something means seeing it as it really is, not as you wish it were. You can still be a good fan while acknowledging the problematic elements of the things you love. In fact, that’s the only way to be a good fan of problematic things.

So, admit there are problems–be bothered, explore and think about why–but don’t sacrifice what you loved from the original text. And then move on and find other things you like as much, or more.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Things I missed?

Books/Fantasy

Mercedes Lackey’s Hunter

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[Spoilers!] The haters are just plain wrong. Yes, the book is post-Hunger Games and Divergent–it’s also post-Maze Runner, but I guess that doesn’t matter since the protagonist is female–however, it’s anything but derivative.

The post-apocalyptic genre of sci fi has been around at least since Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, even if we don’t want to go back to Gilgamesh or Noah’s Ark, so no contemporary author owns that, and Lackey has been putting out great novels for decades. This is no exception.

What made Hunger Games exceptional for me (and I suspect, others), was the insights it gives into modern society: the mindset of tyrants and dictators, as well as of teens and drug users; the role of the media; urban/rural differences, and the relation of the latter to virtually every reality TV show on E!

This book has some of those elements too, but it’s a completely different world, characters and story. The media is used to pacify the masses–ostensibly to keep them safe. The packaging (and editing) of reality is used to meet that end. Joyeux is young and rural, but also has a mix of Eastern and South American philosophies, that make her different. Plus, there’s magical creatures, magicians and hounds.

What I didn’t like was the book’s lack of closure. Joyeux goes onward and upward, but we never really learn why it was necessary, who’s responsible and what their motivations are. It forces you to read the next book, in a way that most books don’t. And I will, but it doesn’t feel great.

Big Theories/Dramatism

Kenneth Burke’s Identification and Consubstantiality

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Another in the line of “8 Burkean concepts that are better than the Pentad” are the paired concepts of Identification and Consubstantiality. For our purposes, I’ll treat them together.

Enigmatically, Burke states that Identity is not individual. Rather than Identity being a thing that we are, it’s more of a relationship we build. Burke states “a man [sic] ‘identifies himself’ with all sorts of manifestations beyond himself” (ATH 263). Thus we go out and find people that we think are like us, companies, activities and objects we like or enjoy, people we aspire to be and positions we aspire to be in. Once that happens, we see ourselves as “of the same substance” or consubstantial.

Burke calls this process “Natural,” and says that it’s a “function of sociality” (ATH 265-7), which is to say, that because we are social creatures, living within a society, and perhaps because man [sic] is “moved by a sense of order,” we “naturally” seek to align ourselves with things.

What makes this a GENIUS concept from Burke, is that what he essentially does is note that identification is the primary function of rhetoric and persuasion; that we are persuaded or persuade ourselves that we are or are like something else (Americans, hamburger lovers, White/Black, skydivers, cisgender/Queer, etc).

Perhaps we put ourselves in categories “naturally,” but others can also work to persuade us to join categories.

A is not identical with his colleague, B.  But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B.  Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so (RM 20).

So if I can persuade you to think of yourself as a White, Middle-class, cisgender male, I can to a certain extent predict how you will respond–and I can pick which aspects I want you to think of as primary, which secondary, etc.

However, there’s a bit of a paradox in all of this:

“Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division.  Identification is compensatory to division.  If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity” (RM 22).

So whenever you hear someone say, “I’m like you…” or “Don’t you, as a ____ feel…” your ears should perk up. When they say “You’re like me!” you should pause and say, “Am I, though? Do I really want to be?” And perhaps you should ask, “Cui bono?” Who benefits from me being this and acting this way?

Questions? Comments? Thoughts?

Sources:

Kenneth Burke. Attitudes Toward History.

Kenneth Burke. Rhetoric of Motive.

Books/Fantasy

Nicole Taylor’s The Witch Hunter

Posted on by nwilson

[Spoilers!] This book was just horrible. First off, I was constantly double checking as it read like a book late in a series–it just jumped right in to relationships and action that apparently had been developing for centuries. Academically, it’s an interesting writing device. Perhaps we’ll get the rest in a flashback, but no, that’s not happening.

Instead, the author “caught us up” by blatantly telling us all about the characters, which strikes me as lazy–like using voiceover in a movie to advance the plot rather than taking the time to write scenes and dialogue that reveals it. Then there’s the annoyance of characters that are familiar to anyone who reads these type of novels–there’s really not much new here.

By the time I got through all that to the plot itself, I didn’t much care that there was something there, as I was pretty done with the whole thing. I read cover to cover, but was speed reading at the end, just to get it over with as quickly as possible. I won’t be picking up any more in the series, or from the author, she’s now in the category with Morgan Rice.

Dr. Who (Reboot, 2005-)/Series 2/Television

Dr. Who Series 2: Most Disturbing Premise (pt. 2; Top 10)

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[Spoilers] Premises can be disturbing because, if true, they’re scary, or they can be disturbing because they don’t make sense. Previously, I laid out what I found scary, odd and/or incomprehensible, broken down by episode. Here I’ll rank them. Ultimately, I decided that things that don’t make sense are worse than things that are merely conceptually scary. And then there’s the “ring of truth” aspect that makes some things qualitatively more scary. Here’s my list of what bothered me the most:

10. Colonialism–as perhaps an extension of Capitalism–is alive and well in the universe.

Sycorax

From Episode 0: “The Christmas Invasion” (Russell T. Davies). We addressed Capitalism in Series 1, but whereas the Slitheen wanted to irradiate and sell off pieces of Earth (killing everybody), the Sycorax want the land, minerals, precious stones, AND to sell half the population into slavery–so which one’s worse? Caveat emptor my friends. It’s a nice bit of dramatic irony to have the British PM have to negotiate with the colonizers.

9. What did the “Pilot Fish” have to do with the Sycorax?

Also in Episode 0: “The Christmas Invasion” (Russell T. Davies), there are creatures called “pilot fish” that sense energy emissions, either from Time Lord regeneration or from the Time Vortex, [it’s unclear], and travel through space to harvest the power. However, they’re supposed to be precursors to the Sycorax, but the Sycorax aren’t here to harvest the energy, so why the pilot fish?

“Well, there isn’t a literal connection, Dude.”

“No, face it Walter, there isn’t any connection.”

It seems like they just wanted to use creatures/droids disguised as Father Christmas and Christmas trees to terrify.

8. Droids can time travel, but they don’t choose to go to the shops.

In Episode 4: “The Girl in the Fireplace” (Steven Moffat) repair droids are attempting to fix their ship, but they can’t find some basic parts so they “repurpose” the crew. However, these droids CAN build a device to punch a hole in time and space, but in a storm of myopia, they choose to go to 18th-century France to obtain the brain of Madame de Pompadour–which is just supposed to be a substitute for their central computer. Honestly, if they can do that, why not punch a whole in time and space to a spaceport? Or a parts warehouse? How about a dry-dock?

7. The Earth is now a Death Star.

At the end of Episode 0: “The Christmas Invasion” (Russell T. Davies), as the Sycorax are leaving, defeated by Doctor #10, Harriet Jones’ orders Torchwood to fire. Five green beams come off of the earth, meet in space and destroy the Sycorax ship. Where have we seen that before? And when will we see it again? True, we can’t pilot the Earth through hyperspace to destroy Jedha, Alderaan or even a forest moon of Endor, but it’s not good.

6. What we eat can make us exponentially smarter.

In Episode 3: “School Reunion” (Toby Whithouse), humans, after ingesting Killitane oil, become much smarter, and thus have the capacity to do lots of mental work. That, plus their childish imagination allows them to decode the “Skasis Paradigm”–a theory of everything. But apparently, the Krillitanes keep eating the promising students, thus slowing down their plans for world domination.

While yes, good nutrition leads to good health and improved brain function, the idea that something we eat will yield Lucy-like results is one of the drivers of the diet industry.

5. You can mind-control/hypnotize people through their blood.

In Episode 0: “The Christmas Invasion” (Russell T. Davies), the Sycorax place a third of the human population in danger. We come to find out, these people are all blood Type A, and the Sycorax are using “blood control,” a type of hypnotism, to make them climb tall buildings and stand on the ledge. Blood is powerful in this show, but the idea that it could be used in mind-control is preposterous. True, it wasn’t powerful enough to make people jump, but still.

4. Consciousness can be transferred, even without technology.

This idea is actually fairly common in fantasy/sci fi, but that doesn’t make it right. In Episode 1: “New Earth” (Russell T. Davies), Lady Cassandra O’Brien uses a device called a “psychograft” to transfer her consciousness into Rose Tyler. Apparently, it’s banned tech that compresses the consciousness of the original host. At first the device requires a lot of energy (they trip the breakers). However, then Lady Cassandra transfers her consciousness just by exhaling on the Doctor. So how did that happen? Later, the transitions don’t even rely on breathing, but just seem to happen on a Lady Cassandra’s whim, and neither the Doctor nor Rose have a say in the matter. Huh?!

3. Our entertainment technology will be used to take us over.

We saw this premise in Series 1 with Satellite 5 in Episodes 12 and 13. There, reality TV was turned into a death sentence, as the Dalek mined individual human cells for candidates for the creation of new Daleks.

Here, in Episodes 5 & 6: “Rise of the Cybermen”/”The Age of Steel” (Tom MacRae), in a parallel universe, tech designer John Lumic sells everyone EarPods, an ear-gear device that gives people neural access to the internet, but also allows for their mind control, and later conversion into Cybermen.

Also, in Episode 7: “The Idiot’s Lantern” (Mark Gatiss), it’s “The Wire,” a being that has converted itself to electricity to escape punishment on its homeworld and is using televisions to consume minds (and faces) and hopefully to reconstruct it’s body (although how that’s supposed to happen is unclear).

Then again in Episodes 12 & 13: “Army of Ghosts”/”Doomsday” (Russell T. Davies), the mind controlling earpieces are back, as are the Cybermen.

2. You have an implacable enemy, do you A) Destroy zir? B) Let zir free? C) Create a near-[but not quite]-inescapable prison, that *may* destroy zir if ze tries to escape?

In Episodes 8 & 9: “The Impossible Planet”/”The Satan Pit” (Matt Jones), Jones takes the position that Satan was an historical fact in the universe; he’s eternal. Setting aside the Doctor’s hang-up [That the devil would have had to exist before matter and time. And when was that exactly?], so this eternal, evil being has to be kept on an asteroid, orbiting a black hole–because?!? Why the, “You’ll stay here, and if you try to escape, we’ll chuck you in!” Why not just chuck him in and have done with it?

1. A species that likes to be enslaved.

Apropos of our current moment. I’ve already discussed how Wizards of the Coast (WotC) are moving to address the problem in Fantasy Role Playing Games like Dungeons & Dragons of casting an entire species or race as “evil.” The problem is, if we pretend that some creatures are just evil, then we can go genocidal on them without guilt. Further, if these creatures (orcs, drow, etc.) are evil, then there must be others, and we might go looking to confirm our biased suspicions.

In a similar vein, Episodes 8 & 9: “The Impossible Planet”/”The Satan Pit” (Matt Jones), Jones depicts the Ood as a species that likes to be enslaved. That’s also a bit racist in its conception, as Rose points out. If these creatures like slavery, then perhaps others do as well….

As usual, I’ll take comments and suggestions. Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments.