Liking books, TV shows and movies: Characters

Whether or not I liked a book, a movie, or a TV show, I like to try to understand why I felt that way about it. I prefer to be able to explain my reaction (to myself, or to others) in a way more substantial than simply ‘I love that book!’ or ‘I can’t stand that show’.

In general, I’m also attracted to systems, and in thinking about the appeal of stories told in various media, I’ve become quite attached to the four ‘appeal characteristics’ defined by librarian Nancy Pearl: Setting, Story, Characters, and Language.[1] Pearl developed her criteria for use with mainstream fiction books (specifically, to help librarians quickly gauge what a patron liked about a particular book so that they could be more effective at recommending others). When thinking also about genre fiction and about stories told in media other than books, I find it useful to loosen her definitions around these characteristics somewhat, and to add another two characteristics to the mix.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share a little about each of the six characteristics I use when reflecting on how I received a story.

Two things that I don’t set out to do here:

• I’m careful to try to distinguish this personal reaction from any assessment of whether the story was well told (‘good’) or not. I find that a book being well written or a show or movie being well made is a pretty poor predictor of whether I will like it.
  
  I like lots of stuff that is, on any objective assessment, poorly made; and conversely, a lot of stuff that’s won wide approbation doesn’t appeal to me at all. In other words, I find the Metacritic or IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes score has little to no correlation with whether I’ll enjoy watching something.
  
  When talking to people about a book, TV show, or movie, I try only ever to say something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ if I genuinely think it was well done or not. When discussing my personal reactions, I try to adhere to ‘I liked it’ or ‘I didn't like it’.
• I don’t usually think in terms of dislike or hate: I usually find it more useful to think in terms of an absence of appeal. I try to reserve ‘dislike’ or ‘hate’ for things that I actually find distasteful, annoying, or offensive in some way. Happily, I find that such things are few and far between. It’s much more frequent that I just don’t find anything to enjoy in a particular book, movie, or TV show.

Finally, I’m very conscious of the unspoken pact between storyteller and audience; I’ll keep coming back to the question of what kind of story am I being told, and what therefore might I expect from such a story.

This week, characters.

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Characters

As a reader or viewer, characters might appeal to me in one of two ways: because of what they are or because of who they are.

What

A question of ‘what’ can be examined by reference to their role in the world of the story and by imagining the author or filmmaker saying:

‘Let me tell you a story about a...’

So, to use just a few random examples, if that sentence is:

‘Let me tell you a story about a sorcerer.’

or

‘Let me tell you a story about a sea captain.’

or

‘Let me tell you a story about a rocket scientist.’

chances are I’m already listening for more. Conversely, if the pitch is:

‘Let me tell you a story about a cop.’

or

‘Let me tell you a story about a doctor.’

or

‘Let me tell you a story about a politician.’

chances are I’m already wondering what the teller might bring to the story that would possibly make me want to listen to the tale to follow.

Steinbeck once put it:

[French literary theorist] ‘Boileau […] insisted that only gods, kings and heroes are worth writing about. I firmly believe that. The detailed accounts of the lives of clerks don’t interest me much unless, of course, the clerk breaks into heroism.’[2]

I tend to agree.

On the other hand, it would be a mistake to think that I’m going to dismiss a story just because the central characters don't belong to some pre-determined set of Acceptable Professions for Protagonists. All I’m doing here is acknowledging a set of preferences that I know I have. This is not Procrustes’ bed.

Who

This second way of examining characters is a little more nebulous. It asks whether this imaginary person—whatever their role in the world of the story—is, subjectively to me, interesting as a person. Perhaps a very crude litmus test here would be a variation of that familiar hypothetical question that asks us who, out of the whole world and all of history, we would invite to dinner if we had a chance. Similarly, I might wonder whether the character is someone with whom I’d like to share a meal.

For examples, I can look to books I’ve enjoyed in the last few years that have contemporary settings (to avoid any degree to which setting—to discuss another week—might influence how interesting I find these fictional people).

So, the central characters in Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle are a male porn star and a woman suffering a psychosis.  Davidson portrayed them with such sympathy and tenderness that I felt that I knew and loved both of them by the end of the book. And although not one of the main characters in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex cast a fireball, commanded a patrol boat, or launched a rocket, each of them would be more than welcome at my table too.

Another litmus test: do I actually care about the fate of this character? Have I got anything invested in this imaginary person at all? The most memorable counter-example for me: when a main character is ambushed, shot, and—I thought—killed close to the end of season 1 of The Wire, it had zero emotional impact for me at all. This left me fairly certain that I had nothing invested in that character.  The death of Adric in season 19 of Doctor Who moved me far more, and that was a character I despised.

Considering the characteristics of a breakout novel, Donald Maass suggests:

‘A work of fiction grips our imaginations because we care, both about the characters in the tale and about ourselves. To put it another way, we are concerned about the outcome of the story because what is happening to the characters could happen to us.’[3]

This seems entirely reasonable to me, but the converse is also true: if I don't care about the characters, I’m less likely to be gripped by the tale. Maass’ focus is a little different (he’s writing about the plausibility of the basic premise of the story) but he continues:

‘Looked at that way, the requirement that a premise be plausible is not so strange. If it could not really happen, then why should we bother with it?’[3]

Or, presumably, if I never actually cared about any of these fictional people anyway.

Credibility

Which brings me to the credibility of characters. I've come to understand that some folks highly value psychological credibility in fictional characters: they want these characters to behave, react, and talk as real people behave, react, and talk. They want characters to have motivations that seem like plausible reasons for them to do things they do in the course of the story. I have few such expectations. To quote Steinbeck again (talking about his second novel, To a God Unknown):

‘Its characters are not “home folks.” They make no more attempt at being human than the people in the Iliad.’[2]

Rather, I look for psychological credibility in characters that is commensurate with the kind of tale being told. The characters in Middlesex are ‘home folks’, and I respect and value the high degree of plausibility in Eugenides’ portrayal of them. However, if I’m reading epic fantasy or most kinds of sci-fi, I have no such expectations and probably even prefer characters who are larger-than-life: here I do want ‘gods, kings, and heroes’.

I think much of my dissatisfaction with some recent sci-fi TV franchises is due to a growing trend to try and humanise and naturalise their characters.  The companions of the revamped Doctor Who series are certainly more well rounded than any of their counterparts on the classic series, and to me, the show is all the weaker for it. When a character becomes a companion travelling in the TARDIS with the Doctor, I really could not care less about the home life of the family that they leave behind.

I suppose that for me, credibility intersects with the ‘what’ and ‘who’ in that if I’m interested in a character by virtue of what they are, I don’t need or perhaps even want psychological credibility. But for me to care about who that character is, they probably need to have that credibility as a prerequisite.

Transformation

Finally, a note on growth and transformation, the  expectation that the events of a story should change the characters who participate in them. Writing in 1973, David Gerrold saw this as an essential difference between plays and movies on the one hand, and TV series on the other:

‘In drama other than series television—say, a play or a movie—the event that is being told is the most important event in the hero’s life. It is the whole reason for the existence of a story about this person...

What the hero learns from the event is what makes it the most important event in his life...

The story is about the lesson that this person has to learn—and these are the events that will teach it to him...

[...]

In a series the form has to be turned upside down—the events depicted must not be the most important events in the hero’s life. Otherwise, there’s no point in going on with the series. Everything after that would be anticlimactic.’[4]

Since the 1990s, the rise of TV shows with season-long and series-long story arcs has certainly changed this landscape. Characters on TV now do grow and develop as their counterparts in plays, movies, and novels have done.

I’m certainly open to growth and transformation in characters in all these media, but neither do I insist on it. I’m aware, though, that this kind of character development is very important to some people, and for example can lead to a strong preference for serial TV over episodic (or as Gerrold called it, ‘semi-anthology’ TV).

Again, I think it comes down to the type of tale being told.


Next time, I’ll discuss setting.

A dozen songs I love

In no particular order. Just because I was asked for some suggestions.

Red on Blue — Stringmansassy
Silent all these Years — Tori Amos
Love's Recovery — The Indigo Girls
When I was a Boy — Dar Williams
Love Song for a Girl — Diana Anaid
The Belly of the Whale — Washington
The Time it Takes — Holly Throsby
Like Diamonds — Monique Brumby
It's You — Kathryn McKee
Ghost — Ingrid Michaelson
Juliet — Thea Gilmore
Lying next to you — Deborah Conway & Willy Zygier

Some thoughts on The Wire

I had The Wire recommended to me by a couple of friends independently of each other, so I thought I'd take a look. One of them suggested that the appeal of the show might not become apparent until ten episodes in, so although the first couple of episodes didn't impress me, that's what I set out to watch.

It seems evident to me that show creator David Simon was aiming for a highly naturalistic depiction of police work, populated by psychologically credible characters with complex motivations. I think that The Wire succeeds on all these counts. If its depiction of police work is not accurate then it is at the very least convincing to a lay person like me. And most of the characters are well developed and at least somewhat three-dimensional.

However, ten episodes is all of this that I'm going to watch.

Ultimately, the show just never told a story that I was remotely interested in listening to.

While credible, I found the characters to be thoroughly and terminally boring. I never became invested to the point of caring about the fate of any of them. (Oh, OK, D'Angelo maybe). Put another way: I've just come away from watching one of the show's protagonists shot (and, I thought, killed) and it made zero impact on me.

Ultimately, The Wire is the story of a bunch of characters I never cared about, busy doing stuff I never cared about, set in what must be one of parts of planet Earth I find dullest and least appealing. There's no argument from me that it is skilfully put together, but neither is there any reason why I would be interested in seeing the outcome of that investment of skill. It's like seeing those people who build large and highly complex models out of toothpicks or matchsticks: the skill and intricacy is unmistakable, but the end result is almost never what I would consider to be a very good model.

I don't know whom I would recommend this to: probably only people who are interested in police work and who value highly naturalistic storytelling.

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While fact-checking the above before hitting the Publish button, I have learned that I was mistaken about Simon's intentions for the show. He didn't see it only in terms of naturalistic police drama, but:

"really about the American city, and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals. Whether one is a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge or a lawyer, all are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution they are committed to." (DVD Commentary track, quoted on Wikipedia)

Elsewhere, he says:

"It's masquerading as a cop show, but I hope it's going somewhere else," Simon said during a phone interview from Baltimore, where the series is set"

"This is a testament to middle management in an era where the stock price matters more than the product. Where an employee's loyalty or innate human value matters less than how (they) can be used or utilized." (San Francisco Chronicle)

I can clearly point to specific instances in the ten episodes I watched where this intention shows through, but they are so few and far between that I cannot regard them as meaningful. If that was indeed what he set out to do, then I think he failed. 

In my opinion. The Wire stands or falls as a cop show. 

A TV test plan

Recently, I've become interested in trying out some TV shows that folks seem to talk about a lot, even if (especially if!) they wouldn't be the sort of thing I would usually be drawn to myself. (My list of things to sample is here)

The problem is: how to sample a new show? And if it's not the kind of thing you usually watch, how many hours and dollars do you invest to find out if you like it or not?

• Plan one: read some "top ten" lists on line to find out the episodes that fans of the series regard most highly. Choose one at (semi) random and watch. This was my initial plan, but so many series these days rely on season-long and series-long arcs to propel them, that jumping into the middle of things might not be a good test. OK then, how about:
• Plan two: watch the pilot episode (or first epsode, at any rate). Presumably, this is what sold the show to the studio and network, so the appeal should be evident, right? However, introductory episodes contain a lot of expository material and might not be really representative of the series as a whole. So...
• Plan three: watch the pilot episode and a highly acclaimed episode from later in the series. However, when this plan still left me feeling that two very highly regarded shows have nothing at all in them that appeals to me (Breaking Bad and The Wire, FWIW) a friend suggested that these series rely so much on their buildup of characters and plot that they can only be appreciated by watching them in order from the start. In the case of The Wire, he suggested that it might take around eight ten hours for the appeal to become apparent. That seems like a big investment to me, but...
• Plan four: out of curiosity, I'm giving it a go, and will watch one episode a week for the next six eight weeks (I watched episode 2 today).

(Movies are easier. If, an hour in, I'm asking myself "why am I still watching this?" I just turn it off.)

So my question: how do you assess a show that someone recommends to you? And how much of it do you watch before you give up?

A new spin on "Breaking Bad"

Recently, I watched a couple of episodes of Breaking Bad, since the show has gained such rave reviews. For whatever reason, the series left me cold—I just couldn't seem to care about the characters or their fates.

I've written it off now as "not for me", but I did find myself wondering what the show needed to get me in. I tried to think of twenty different takes on the show that might have got me interested, and ended up with twenty-two. That's two extra story ideas for you! Absolutely free!

I make no claim of originality :) Many of these are ideas that have been explored elsewhere, and some readers will be able to identify the origin of some specific ideas from some of my favourite shows :) Some of the ideas are quite similar to others on the list.

Which one do you like the best? What do you think would be the worthiest repositioning of Breaking Bad? I've created a survey on SurveyMonkey: if I get more than ten responses within the next two weeks, I'll publish the outcome!

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1. While scouting out a potential location for a new meth lab in the desert, Walt and Jesse witness the test of a secret hypersonic hunter-killer drone. It isn't long before they're pursued by both the CIA and Lockheed-Martin's own corporate security. They are sheltered and hidden by a group of anarchist hackers devoted to exposing the drone's existence.

2. Walt creates a new, well received, and profitable meth recipe that sells extremely well. Not long after, repeated users begin to suffer from nightmares so terrible that eventually they cannot sleep at all. Death soon follows, with all victims exhibiting the same unusual physical trauma: a small puncture wound in the back of the neck that extends right into the brain stem. Walt is abducted by a strange cult that forces him to continue producing this recipe. As the stars reach a particular alignment in the heavens, the cultists are distributing the drug to humanity, in order to offer the people of earth as a sacrifice to their strange, alien god!

3. Walt stumbles across a completely new drug which even in small doses produces intense euphoria in its users, without any side effects or physical addiction. Moreoever, it can be produced easily and cheaply using home ingredients. Despite his best efforts, the recipe gets out and soon millions of people around the world are spending each hour of the day completely blissed out. As society begins to crumble, Walt searches for a way to block the drug's effects.

4. Driven into hiding in the desert, Walt and Jesse are awakened early one morning by a loud bang. At dawn, scouting for the source of the noise, they find what appears to be a crashed aircraft of unusual design. Searching the wreck for survivors, they find the bodies of creatures of clearly extraterrestrial origin. One of the aliens is still alive but apparently wounded. Despite Jesse's misgivings, Walt decides to take the alien back to their hideout and there nurses it back to health, trying to learn to communicate with it in the universal language of chemistry. Walt helps the alien contact its own kind. When the rescue ship arrives, the aliens offer to repair Walt's body, which he accepts. They also offer to take him with them on their exploration of the galaxy, which he also accepts. Jesse goes along to, against his better judgement, to offer the aliens a contrasting view of humanity.

5. Starts out as above, but this time there is no rescue ship, and the crash has not gone unnoticed. The skies are soon humming with black, unmarked helicopters. Walt and Jesse are now on the run from the US government's alien hunters, while their new friend is still injured from the crash!

6. While exploring some caves in the desert to use as a storage depot, Walt and Jesse stumble upon a scantily dressed woman lying unconscious. They give her water and revive her. They discover that she doesn't seem to speak any English, but using his knowledge of chemistry, Walt recognises some of her words as Greek. They follow her tracks back into one of the caves. As they delve deeper and deeper, they become aware of a strange glow up ahead. They emerge into broad daylight from a cave mouth in the side of a mountain and see a Greek-looking city sprawled out beneath them. They soon learn that they are inside the earth, and this is where the Atlanteans fled! The series depicts Walt's and Jesse's adventures exploring Atlantean society and in aiding the Atlanteans in their struggle against the lizardpeople with whom they share the Earth's core!

7. All over New Mexico, the bodies of young, recently dead people are returning to life: awakening with a terrifying hunger for human flesh! The only link between them? These young folk had all used meth from one of Walt's recent batches: and this was a big batch! Jesse discovers that only total incineration can stop the undead and Walt gets to work on producing napalm for the flame throwers with which he and Jesse will roam the state, cleansing it of the menace.

8. People who had used meth from one of Walt's recent batches report disturbing hallucinations. A dissatisfied dealer tracks down Walt and forces him to take a dose himself. Walt sees shadowy, flickering figures around him and realises that these are not hallucinations, but ghosts. Soon demand for this recipe skyrockets, because even people who wouldn't normally use meth buy it to try to make contact with loved ones who have passed on. However, Walt is soon visited by vengeful spirits who don't want to be found. He must balance making customers (and therefore) dealers happy and defending himself against the angry ghosts.

9. Walt learns about a new rocketry competition with a million-dollar prize. The competition puts a cap on the cost of materials used to build the rocket, and Walt realises that the way to coax more performance out of the vehicle is to focus on propellants. He stops cooking meth and begins researching hypergolic fuels instead. He must keep unhappy meth dealers at bay while developing the ultimate liquid-fuel propellant!

10. Walt's cancer progresses and he realises time is short. He is presented with an unusual opportunity when it turns out that one of the end users of his meth is an illicit cybernetic research lab, which has been using the drug on its test subjects. Walt takes up the lab owner's offer to transplant his brain into a crude but fully cybernetic body (think something like the robot from the old Lost in Space series). The operation is successful and Walt can continue his work, but as time goes by, begins to feel his empathy for other humans slipping further and further away.

11. NASA announces the discovery of a large asteroid that will strike the earth in four months with cataclysmic results. There is no reasonable hope of destroying it, diverting it, or mitigating its likely effects. Suddenly the whole earth is walking in Walt's shoes: sentenced to certain death within months. Walt uses the insights he has gleaned about living with a terminal condition to comfort others as civilisation collapses around them.

12. The earth is visited and almost immediately overrun by alien invaders who turn humanity into a slave species as they strip-mine our planet for valuable minerals. The alien technology and physiology makes most of our traditional weapons useless against them, and all organised resistance is crushed immediately anyway. The aliens have one weakness though: their weakness for meth! The drug is even more effective on them than on humans, and more addictive too; however, more than a few uses prove quickly fatal for them. Walt has to balance his desire to see the earth free against his qualms about committing murder on a mass scale. All the while, the alien overlords are hunting for the source of this threat.

13. The series continues in its present format, but introduces surreal elements, such as unexpected vistas or personages behind doors or peeking out of scenery. Imagine a tense scene between Walt and a powerful drug lord. Now imagine the same scene with a samurai picking out children's nursery rhyme tunes on a harpsichord in the background. Imagine that Jesse opens the back of a van to discover a giant, hot-pink praying mantis within. He closes the van and opens it again to find that the mantis is gone! No reference is ever made to these occurrences in dialogue. Each episode is introduced and concluded by a different fruit or vegetable "speaking" (via a voiceover) in heroic couplets. One episode could feature a stick of celery, the next episode an aubergine etc etc.

14. While Walt is cooking, a reactor vessel explodes and he is overcome by noxious fumes. He comes to lying in a temperate forest and hears hoofbeats in the distance. As he gets to his feet, he is confronted by a knight on horseback who Walt initially takes to be a ren faire re-enactor until the knight takes him prisoner and drags him back to his castle. Walt remains in the mediaeval period for two days and subject to court intrigue before returning to our own time. He is able to recreate the circumstances of the accident, and this time finds himself at the siege of Tenochtitlan in 16th century Mexico! Again, he remains for two days before returning home. Walt works on perfecting time travel and visits an amazing range of exciting moments in history!

15. Jesse is shot during a deal gone sour. Both he and Walt are amazed to find no bleeding from the wound, but a hole neatly punched through circuit boards and hydraulic tubes. They realise that Jesse must have been replaced by an android double some time within the last season or so. Amazingly, the robot is not only physically indistinguishable from Jesse, but apparently has all of Jesse's memories intact as well! They locate the real Jesse and rescue him from the lab where he was duplicated. But now the two Jesses must determine whether either is more real than the other and whether authenticity of identity is in any way meaningful.

16. Civilization is destroyed by an atomic holocaust and Walt must use his knowledge of chemistry to keep himself and Jesse alive. Gradually, they gather a small group of other survivors around themselves, all of whom come to rely on these skills for survival itself!

17. Walt and Jesse have a tense meeting with a drug lord in the desert. The drug lord fires a bullet into the ground to show that he means business. However, the bullet from the large-calibre handgun strikes an ancient creature that has been slumbering beneath the earth for millennia! It lashes out and devours the drug lord and nearly gets Walt and Jesse too before they flee to safety! Soon, the monster is preying on livestock and humans around New Mexico. Walt feels responsible and has to devise a way to track and kill it.

18. Walt gains a mysterious new buyer who doesn't want meth but a strange new drug for which he provides the formula. Walt eventually learns that the drug is actually a food source for aliens captured by the US Air Force and held captive at a secret base in the New Mexico desert! Walt tries to figure out how to free the aliens while not arousing the suspicion of the air force.

19. Walt and Jesse are captured by members of a Colombian drug cartel and are being flown to that country for some "special treatment". However, the light plane makes a forced landing into the Amazon rainforest during a storm. Walt, Jesse, and the pilot survive. The pilot is injured, but as he is also a certified airframe and powerplant mechanic, he instructs Jesse how to make makeshift repairs on the aircraft. Meanwhile, since they lost almost all their fuel when the wing was punctured in the crash, Walt has to figure out how to synthesise enough ethanol to power the aircraft out of the jungle and to civilization. All the while, all three of them must contend with the perils of the rainforest!

20. While Walt is cooking, a reactor vessel explodes and he is overcome by noxious fumes. When he comes to, the world seems to have completely stopped around him. He soon determines that he has been shifted into an accelerated time stream where he is moving so fast that he appears to vanish from the outside world. Conversely, the world seems to stop for him. He is now effectively invisible and can move at infinite speed relative to the frame of reference inhabited by the rest of humanity. The effect only lasts a few hours (Walt time). Walt begins by stealing ever-increasing amounts of cash from his former business associates but then gets tempted into other crime as well as delivering his own brand of vigilante justice to the world. Absolute power begins to corrupt Walt absolutely.

10% More Ideas! Absolutely Free!

21. Walt is forced to sample his own wares by a dissatisfied customer and finds himself in a strange alien city, inhabited by impossibly beautiful and mostly naked people. Walt soon learns that he already knows their names -- names like Athena, Thor, Isis, and Quetzalcoatl! He is in a place where the ancient gods play with the fate of humanity even to this day. Thor wants to kill him on the spot for his intrusion, but Isis thinks it will be more amusing to work him into their games and use him to walk among humanity, forced to do their will! Walt is returned to Earth with divine mischief to make, and in full awareness of what he is doing -- who would believe him if he told them anyway? He learns that to defy the gods is to invite intensely painful punishment. Now he is forced to work as an unwilling puppet, a catalyst for their caprices and occasional malevolence. Can he outwit the gods themselves?

22. Walt gains an extremely wealthy customer who buys in vast quantities and pays generously -- but in gold bars. Not long after, he is abducted with a bag placed over his head. When the bag is removed, he finds himself in a subterranean cavern, surrounded by weird creatures. He is told he stands before the throne of the Goblin King who demands to know why Walt has been poisoning his subjects! When the King is finally convinced that Walt was not intentionally getting the goblins hooked on meth, he presses Walt into his service, carrying out missions both upon the earth and below it, to make amends for the harm he has done.

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That's it! Congratulations if you read this far, and remember that survey!

How big should the Lego Death Star be?

A friend is currently building the Lego Death Star (set 10188)—a seriously impressive model with nearly 4,000 pieces that builds up to a sphere 40 cm in diameter.

Image copyright LEGO Group, used under terms of their Fair Play licence

I think I love it all the more because its “cutaway” design reminds me of the Palitoy Death Star playset from a long time ago:

Image copyright SpeedBreaker from the ToyArk forums, used by permission

(You can see more of it in this Toyark post and this guided tour on Star Wars New Zealand. And yes, I still have most of it... around here... somewhere).


But this got me thinking: obviously both the Lego playset and its Palitoy antecedent are way out-of-scale and depict the Death Star in a purely figurative sense. So, how big should the Lego Death Star be, to be in scale with the supplied figurines (minifigs, in Lego parlance)?

We need to know two things:

• the size of the “real” Death Star
• the scale of a minifig

Neither answer is completely straightforward.

The Lego Death Star is actually a mix of features of two different Death Stars, as featured in A New Hope and Return of the Jedi respectively. The second was supposedly larger—according to most sources much larger—than the first. The figures vary between references, but Wookiepedia favours a 160-km diameter for the the first, and a 900-km diameter for the second. For the purpose of this exercise, I will assume that:

• the Lego set depicts the first Death Star (really, only the Emperor’s throne room is definitively a second Death Star feature) 
• the first Death Star had a diameter of 160 kilometres.

The scale of a minifig is also problematic, because a minifig is not proportioned like a normal human:

Human figures are a work of NASA in the public domain; minifig created from the LDraw Parts Library and used under the terms of their licence

By comparison, the minifig is proportionally much wider than a human of the same height. Let’s ignore that and look only at height. Minifigs stand 4 cm tall. If an average human is around 170 cm tall, then the minifig represents a human at roughly 1:43 scale, close to the 0 scale used in model railways or the 1:48 scale (“quarter scale”) popular in the scale modelling of aircraft.

With these assumptions in place, the maths is now quite simple: 160 km divided by 43:

3.7 km! 

Yep; a Lego death Star in proportion to the minifigs would be nearly 4 kilometres across!

Just for fun, I thought I'd superimpose that over a map of Brisbane:

Brisbane photo copyright NearMap, used under the terms of their community licence

I know this won’t be very meaningful to anyone who’s never lived here. If that’s you, maybe you’d like to do the same with a map of your own city. It’s truly surprising how big a properly scaled Lego Death Star would need to be!

Afterword:
While looking for pictures of the old Palitoy Death Star playset, I found that Eric Druon of France has created his own Lego interpretation of it:

Copyright Eric Druon, used by permission of the creator

Visit Eric’s site for more pictures of this amazing creation. He also has original Lego creations for various other popular media franchises there—well worth a look! :) 

Essential Doctor Who — the classic series

Ever since I wrote my newcomers’ introduction to Star Trek, I felt I really should do the same for Doctor Who.

I came to the new, 21st century version of the show as a long-standing fan of the classic 1963–1989 series, but it’s clear that the new series has many viewers who aren’t that familiar with show’s previous incarnation. If you’re among them, and you’re curious, it’s principally to you that I offer this suggested viewing list.

I have selected:

• one story from each of the first eight Doctors (in the new series, Christopher Eccleston was the ninth, David Tennant the tenth, and Matt Smith the eleventh Doctors). 
• stories that pair each of those Doctors with the companions with whom they’re most closely remembered.
• stories that reflect the typical length of four 25-minute segments (I made one exception).
• stories that showcase some of the series’ recurring villains, although none more than once each (again,I made one exception).

Note that the structure of the classic series was significantly different from that of the new one. Although the exact figures changed over the years, for much of the show’s history, a typical season consisted of around five or six individual storylines, each told in around four to six 25-minute episodes. Each episode (up to the last) within a storyline would conclude with a cliffhanger intended to bring the audience back next week. Early seasons of the show included considerably more stories and more individual episodes; later seasons considerably fewer of both.

Watching these stories now, with the individual episodes back-to-back often seems to produce a little awkwardness; the pacing of the storylines is a little off-kilter. All we can do today to mitigate that is to remind ourselves that they were not constructed to be watched this way, and to extend a little understanding to the show’s writers and producers.

My recommendations then:

1. “The Aztecs”
   (4 × 25-minute segments, black & white, season 1, 1964, with William Hartnell as the first Doctor)
2. “The Tomb of the Cybermen”
   (4 × 25-minute segments, black & white, season 5, 1967, with Patrick Troughton as the second Doctor)
3. “The Claws of Axos”
   (4 × 25-minute segments, colour, season 8, 1971, with Jon Pertwee as the third Doctor)
4. “Genesis of the Daleks”
   (6 × 25-minute segments, colour, season 12, 1975, with Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor) 
5. “Kinda”
   (4 × 25-minute segments, colour, season 19, 1982, with Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor)
6. “Vengeance on Varos”
   (2 × 45-minute segments, colour, season 22, 1985, with Colin Baker as the sixth Doctor)
7. “The Curse of Fenric”
   (4 × 25-minute segments, colour, season 26, 1989, with Sylvester McCoy as the seventh Doctor)
8. “Doctor Who”
   (90-minute TV movie, colour, 1996, with Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor)

As with my previous Star Trek article, I’d love feedback from anyone who follows this recommendation.

Update 30 March 2013: Today, The Guardian published an excellent infographic today as a one-page summary of the show’s 50-year history (classic and new eras)—well worth a look.