dalesramblingsblog
Dale's Ramblings
Ramblings about anything, from a small fish in the Caspian Sea of media criticism... but usually about out-of-print Doctor Who books. He/him, 21. WordPress: dalesramblingsblog.wordpress.com Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/dalesramblings
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Oh hi random noisepuppet clip crossing my dash unprompted, pull up a chair, we've been waiting for you!
"Stonehenge derives its name from stone and also from henge."
Type of thing to make you want to rent a horse every half hour (every day). 🙏 #iykyk
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Brief Look at Judge Dredd Novels, Part X: Dredd vs Death by Gordon Rennie
So. We've... skipped ahead a bit. About eight years, to be precise. And there's absolutely nothing major that we need to talk about that happened in the interim which might have an impact on how we read the decaying urban hellscape of Mega-City One. I mean, yeah, I suppose I was born in that gap and am currently less than a year old at the time of the novel's publication, but why are you trying to pin all this post-apocalyptic stuff on me?
Oh alright, in the grand tradition of "science fiction released in the year 2003," let's stop playing coy and simply admit that it's tough to read Dredd vs Death, the first of Black Flame's newly launched set of Judge Dredd novels, without viewing it through the prism of 9/11 and the Iraq War.
The most obvious culprit here is undoubtedly the Church of Death's attempt to break the Dark Judges out of their imprisonment by crashing an h-wagon into the tower above said prison, but even the nature of the Church as a decentralised group of religious fundamentalists waging warfare in urban environments feels pointed.
Similarly, Rennie includes a moment in which Dredd ruminates on the vampires' undead status depriving them of the meagre rights possessed by an average citizen of Mega-City One, evoking Donald Rumsfeld's infamous categorisation of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as the "living dead." More literally, the presence of hordes of zombies ties the novel into a post-9/11 fascination with those particular members of the undead, from 28 Days Later through to Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil films and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead.
All of this, however, makes Dredd vs. Death sound considerably more complex and nuanced than it actually is. I mean, that's not to say that it's completely without depth, but it is, first and foremost, concerned with serving as a novelisation of Rebellion Developments' contemporaneous PS2/Xbox/Gamecube/PC game of the same name.
Putting all my cards on the table here, I'm forced to admit that I've never actually played the game, but it's nevertheless quite apparent that Rennie has had to do some finessing of the narrative in order to better measure up to the different standards inherent to the change in medium from video game to prose. Some of these tricks work quite well, including giving Anderson a more active role than she seems to have had in the original game.
Particularly delicious is the reframing of the zombies' attack on the megamall from the point of view of a "living mannequin" caught up in the chaos, a nice way of adding tension to what was presumably just another level in the game itself. Added on to this is the cute touch of having the living mannequin's brother-in-law, referenced in his internal monologue, show up later in the novel for a similar sequence.
But ultimately, once it comes down to the climactic showdown with the four Dark Judges, it's impossible to avoid the impression that we're simply watching a progression of boss battles committed to the printed page. They're very well-translated, mind you, and the decision to distribute the boss battles between Anderson and Giant as well as Dredd is a characteristically shrewd one, but it becomes very clear that any post-9/11 depth one might care to read into it is largely incidental.
Still, the whole thing has an endearingly propulsive, runaway freight train quality that helps it avoid the fate of overstaying its welcome, so it's hard to complain too much. As far as novelisations of video games go - a genre in which I haven't dabbled too much, but that I find hard to believe contains too many gems - my intuition tells me that this is likely to be one of the stronger examples.
Current ranking:
Dreddlocked
Deathmasques
Wetworks
Silencer
The Medusa Seed
Dread Dominion
Dredd vs Death
Cursed Earth Asylum
The Hundredfold Problem
The Savage Amusement
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Look, I respect Jeri Taylor a lot for saying "Hey the Kazon kinda suck" to Michael Piller, but doing the exact same "Oh no *these people* with their gangs and their rap music are subverting wholesome white America" stuff with the holographic Klingons in Real Life less than a year later does kinda dilute the point, no?
(I swear, y'all, I am not *trying* to critique Voyager overly harshly but this streak of conservatism keeps popping up and it's really not a good look. We're still only two episodes past Favorite Son. BTW why do they keep giving the weirdly misogynistic scripts to Lisa Klink, what's up with that? This never happened back in Season 2, which is kinda amazing since that season was an absolute mess.)
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Watched Hacksaw Ridge the other night and spluttered apoplectically to my friends on Discord about how awful it was, but I liked the stuff I wrote too much to confine it entirely to the group chat so here you go, with only mild corrections:
Hacksaw Ridge is technically well-constructed, but it is ultimately a well-constructed piece of sickening propaganda dressed up in a thin veneer of anti-war sentiment, even as it routinely dehumanises the Japanese soldiers as a matter of course. And at the heart of it, we have the good Christian Minecraft server dweller of Desmond Doss, whose convictions in God will thankfully save all us doomed sinners
It would be stupid to lay any of the blame for the ensuing four years of American politics at the feet of Hacksaw Ridge, but it ends up speaking perfectly to the mood of early November 2016. Unfortunately, nothing it says on that subject manages to be anything more than reprehensible.
If you wanna know how you get a country that elects Donald Trump, it's not entirely wrong to say that, somewhere along the line, you have to pass through a country that considers Hacksaw Ridge a worthwhile piece of cinema.
Never has an ostensible argument for pacifism been more creepingly insidious.
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Eraserhead and its consequences for society.
i love 80s music because you'll be watching the music video to the most tragic and beautifully written and sonically interesting song you've ever heard and it'll have one shot like this
#is this the place to confess that despite basing my entire online persona around a david lynch protagonist i still haven't watched#eraserhead?
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I was somehow today years old when I learned about TNG/DS9 guest star Lawrence Tierney's arrest record. Holy shit, there's a rabbit hole and a half.
#star trek#star trek ds9#star trek tng#lawrence tierney#s1e12: the big goodbye#s5e18: business as usual
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I'm a bit late but I just wanted to say a huge double thank you both for 1000 yearly views on the blog - and by mid-April?! seriously, it took until August to reach 1000 in 2023, which kinda shows how jam-packed those last four months were - and 6000 lifetime views. It never stops being surreal to me.
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On the latest instalment of Dale's Ramblings, BBC Books make their first proper engagement with the Seventh Doctor's era and we pick apart the myth of Season 27 in Mike Tucker and Robert Perry's Illegal Alien.
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#doctor who#bbc past doctor adventures#seventh doctor#ace mcshane#cybermen#mike tucker#robert perry#virgin new adventures#obliquely but c'mon it's relevant
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dance hall crashers walked so that wedding crashers (2005) starring owen wilson and vince vaughn, dir. david dobkin could run
#can't even be bothered capitalising this one#dale's ramblings#i'd blame this one on the chronic fatigue but let's be real we both know that's a lie
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Me when I watched Metropolis a year or so ago and kept getting the same ad for a funeral parlor. I guess they thought the only people who would be watching a movie from 1927 were people who were born in 1927?
I love my targeted ads. “Turning 65?” Lmao.
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"You, William Russell, have been sentenced to the Realm of Pre-Filmed Inserts!"
i love classic who production methods so much
oh, this actor needs a holiday for a week?
guess their character gets shoved into a cupboard for a whole episode!
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Never has a Star Trek show been more aptly described than in Zack Handlen's contention that Deep Space Nine represents Trek's Island of Misfit Toys. You're really gonna tell me that you think anybody could move from the straight-laced professionalism of the Enterprise to this comparatively janky old space station (affectionate) staffed with a bunch of intensely dysfunctional people just sorta thrown together almost at random?
C'mon now.
while i get why people say worf's character changed/got worse in ds9, i also think that's kind of missing the point. WORF changed between tng and ds9. he's not in the same environment, the same structure of the federation's flagship, the same people he spent the last decade with. he adapted to ds9. not in a particularly healthy way all the time, but he was tested in different ways so his reactions were different.
and! why does every character arc have to be completely positive? sure it's nice to see a character mature and hone their talents or whatever, but progress isn't linear. and worf had a hard go at it, honestly it's refreshing that he's even more of a bitch in ds9 than tng.
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The horror, the horror... John Peel finally returns to the world of Doctor Who after three years, and the results aren't pretty. It's War of the Daleks time, folks.
Pray for me.
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#doctor who#bbc eighth doctor adventures#wilderness years#bbc books#john peel#daleks#eighth doctor#sam jones#davros
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Uh yeah about being more measured... I mean I suppose that's true, I did only say "more," didn't I? This is shaping up to be an angry one, folks.
I don't know if this is an unpopular opinion but I just think Spider Daleks are fucking stupid and exactly the kind of unnecessary flashiness you'd expect from the guy who brought you Knight Rider 2010 and that rejected Omen pilot.
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Also I swear the final review will be more measured than this, but wow I am really not liking this book.
I don't know if this is an unpopular opinion but I just think Spider Daleks are fucking stupid and exactly the kind of unnecessary flashiness you'd expect from the guy who brought you Knight Rider 2010 and that rejected Omen pilot.
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I don't know if this is an unpopular opinion but I just think Spider Daleks are fucking stupid and exactly the kind of unnecessary flashiness you'd expect from the guy who brought you Knight Rider 2010 and that rejected Omen pilot.
#doctor who#daleks#john leekley#man i'm trying not to spoil my review too heavily but this thing is just#it's truly unbearable#spider daleks#also why is john leekley seemingly only capable of working on failed pilots#one of the worst track records
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Like genuinely, if you have any sort of chronic fatigue I *do not* recommend this book. I haven't really done much today besides read War of the Daleks but as it turns out that's all it takes to physically drain me of all energy ig.
Somebody help me, John Peel has had to write about a woman for more than three pages and it's absolutely horrendous. I thought the "BBC Books can't imagine a single character dynamic besides love triangles for their companions" thing couldn't get any worse, I take it back Christopher Bulis, Steve Lyons and Mark Morris, anything but hearing John Peel write sequences of female characters being attracted to Paul McGann.
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