"So this is the Hobbit. "

Bilbo Baggins: You can promise that I will come back?
Gandalf: No. And if you do, you will not be the same.

The Hobbit

The great discussion among fans regarding The Lord of the Rings is whether or not Jackson's omissions from the original text for the movies are justified.  For The Hobbit, it's the other way around - the debate is going to revolve around the parts that were either extended or outright invented solely for the movie. 

For example, a lot of the narrative deals with the villainous Azog, leader of the goblin hordes, who is eager for revenge on Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the dwarf band, for cutting off his left hand in battle.

In the book? Azog gets one line from Gandalf:

"Your grandfather Thror was killed, you remember, in the mines of Moria by Azog the Goblin."

Similarly, Gandalf's fellow wizard Radagast the Brown, played in the movie by Sylvester McCoy of Doctor Who fame, also gets one line in the book - well, really more of a reference than a line:

"I am a wizard," continued Gandalf. "I have heard of you, if you  have not heard of me; but perhaps you have heard of my good cousin Radagast who lives near the Southern borders of Mirkwood?"

It's a big jump from that single reference to the somewhat slapstick character in the movie who occupies ten or fifteen minutes of screen time.*

And that's where the problem comes in. It's been generally expected that in order to extend The Hobbit to the same length as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there was going to be some expansion of certain parts of the novel.  But there's a difference between expansion and creation, and a lot of what I saw in the three hours on screen was outright invention.  Sadly, in that act of invention we are faced with a very simple and obvious truth: the people doing the inventing are not J. R. R. Tolkien.

The unfortunate result is that the new scenes don't ring true against the rest of the narrative. The section with Radagast was an interesting extrapolation, but there was a lack of dignity to the character that didn't seem right to me.

 A council of war takes place between Elrond, Galadriel, Gandalf and Saruman at Rivendell - again, created from whole cloth for the movie version - which was completely off key, at least to my experienced ear.  Not badly written, but not the right style, not for Tolkien. One of the hallmarks of Tolkien's heroes is their directness and honesty, and to hear Gandalf and Galadriel having a concealed magical conversation was in direct contrast to the style of the book.

Finally, the climax of the movie involves a bonding moment between Bilbo and Thorin, where Bilbo rescues Thorin from death at the hands of goblins, thereby finally establishing Bilbo's value to the quest and to Thorin personally.  Which is great, except it's another manufactured moment - in this case, to give the movie a climax that Tolkien didn't write for the end of Chapter Six of his book.  Which takes us to page 112 of my 285 page paperback copy, so presumably there's some further creative moments to come in the next two films.

 - Sid

* Radagast is discussed at greater length in the appendices to The Return of the King, but I guarantee there's nothing there about caked white streaks of bird guano in his beard and a sledge pulled by a trained team of Rhosgobel rabbits. 

 

The Infinite Oswin?

It’s smaller on the outside.

Clara Oswin Oswald, Doctor Who: The Snowmen  

Good evening. I'm a lizard woman from the dawn of time, and this is my wife.

Madame Vastra, Doctor Who: The Snowmen

This year's Doctor Who Christmas Special, The Snowmen, was all about snow, and, like snow, it was elaborately structured, full of little gaps, and, well, flaky.

It's not all bad, there's a lot of clever bits - it's the sort of brilliant dialogue and very good acting that makes Doctor Who a pleasure to watch in spite of the occasional dodgy plotline.  Sadly, this is one of those dodgy-plotline episodes, with one too many odd coincidences and forced plot advancements.

This episode marked the arrival of Jenna-Louise Coleman, the widely promoted new companion for the Doctor, although we'd sort of already seen her in Asylum Of The Daleks back in September where she first appeared as Oswin Oswald the soufflé-baking Dalek, who didn't survive the episode. In The Snowmen, she also plays an Oswin, Clara Oswin Oswald in this case.

Ms. Coleman's Oswin, in both incarnations, is plucky and perky, clever and cute - which is pretty much the standard shopping list for the Doctor's companions since they rebooted the series.  Unfortunately, at the end of The Snowmen, she's also dead.

Two Oswins down and counting, with a third Oswin on deck at the end of the special.  My god, imagine if that's all the Doctor does this season, travel from place to place and from time to time, having adventures with different iterations of Oswin who always die at the end!!  (Perhaps not as much fun as it sounds.)

I realize that on Doctor Who, being dead isn't a barrier to quiet enjoyment, but didn't we just spend the last couple of years killing off Rory and/or Amy every ten minutes?  Let's just hope that the next Oswin manages to get through more than a single episode.

Regardless, I would be remiss if I failed to recognize the introduction of what may well be the first married human-lizard lesbian couple on television. (I have to wonder where they found a member of the clergy in Victorian England who was willing to conduct the ceremony.  On the other hand, they do have access to a time machine.)  However, this may be premature. If anyone in the readership is aware of another married human-lizard lesbian couple on television, please do speak up. After all, I didn't watch any of the V reboot, who knows what they got up to.

 - Sid

 

I know, some people decorate the tree.

Has everyone had a happy holiday season?  Personally, I spent most of the night before Christmas trying to find a way to get my brain back into my head.

Perhaps this requires some explanation...

Having somewhat unexpectedly finished off Arkham Asylum, I thought it might be fun to revisit Fallout New Vegas (the sequel to Fallout 3) with the aid of some downloadable content, or DLC as it is more commonly known.  Personally, I think that DLC is one of the best innovations in gaming for quite a while, allowing game developers to easily add value to a game purchase over time without having to develop a whole new game engine - or having to invest in packaging and disk burning, for that matter.

I purchased two additional modules for FNV and started out with Old World Blues, a visit to the Think Tank at Big Mountain, a hidden scientific base originally dedicated to pure research which later became involved in weapons development as part of the war against Communism.

After the transition from New Vegas, I awakened in the main dome only to discover that while I was asleep, the disembodied brains making up the Think Tank had shared the wealth by removing my brain as well.  Even worse, when they weren't paying attention, one-time Think Tank member Doctor Mobius had somehow stolen my brain and taken it to his dome in the Forbidden Zone.

I eventually fulfilled the main quest for the module by defeating the evil Doctor Mobius and his robot scorpions - well, to be fair, the overly confused and not terribly malicious Doctor Mobius - after which he generously offered to let me ask my brain if it wanted to be reunited with its body.

Of course, my brain wasn't interested, and I was required to find a way to convince my wayward cerebellum to return to its home in my cranium.  Which might not have been too bad until I discovered an unexpected glitch in the game which stuck my brain in a loop of reminiscences about shared memories (if one can share memories with their own brain...anyway, you get the idea.)

But let me tell you, whatever the challenges of overcoming my brain's distaste for life in my body might have been, they were nothing compared to the challenges of getting the damn game to function properly, a challenge made even more difficult due to the need to reboot the computer every time the program started to loop.

The down side of the sort of freedom offered by an open world game like Fallout is that it's impossible for game developers to anticipate every possible configuration that a player might create, and as such it's not uncommon for bugs in the software to prevent players from accessing certain portions of the game.  Generally, there's only one solution:  reload a previous save of the game and change as many parameters as possible going into the nonfunctional area.

So - back out into the crater containing Big Mountain to kill some more of my fellow Lobotomites (I wasn't the only visitor to be relieved of their grey matter) until I leveled up and felt that I could take another shot at the buggy brain conversation. To help load the dice, I did everything I could to alter the parameters before initiating the conversation with my brain: dropped some weapons, loaded some Intelligence and Persuasion modifiers, and even stood in a different place in the dome.

And then, after all that, although I managed to get past the problem and my brain finally agreed to rejoin its body, I unwittingly went through the wrong exit at the end of the game and launched the "He decided not to restore his brain" conclusion.  At which point I wrote the whole thing off as a lesson in humility, and left my brain in a bottle.  And you know what?  There were no problems starting the next module without a brain.  This may well be some kind of larger editorial comment on computer games - or at least on the players.

 - Sid