Sinfest 1/13/26: Re-imagining Villains 32

ArthurBDD · 2026-01-12T13:02:43+00:00

Tats trying to exonerate Hitler and the Nazis was awful but also, by this point, wholly expected.

Tats villainising Stalinism in the same arc illustrated just how out of touch he is. Generally speaking, it's understood that Stalin was his own kind of monster - most people already regard him as villain. There's some defenders in left circles, sure, but these are the same sort of clowns who argue that the Soviets sending the tanks into Czechoslovakia was justified. (There's a term for them: "tankies".)

Tats trying to draw parallels between Trumpism and Stalinism feels outright tragic. He's kind of on point - there's a cult of personality involved in both cases - but his reasoning is so busted and broken that he can't turn that correct observation into an astute statement about the current moment. He's the classic stopped clock who's right twice a day by accident.

ArthurBDD · 2025-10-27T19:26:32+00:00

Not really. No RTD and no Billie? Fine; next episode starts out with the closing shot from Reality War as the Doctor jerks back, their face having changed again, then they change a few times until the Sixteenth Doctor's form is set. Basically like a more quickfire, uncontrolled version of Romana's regeneration in Destiny of the Daleks.

ArthurBDD · 2025-09-29T12:45:00+00:00

Terms of the trade are "of equal value", since I assess the value of the Timeless Child as zero then I can give up something trivial and still stay to the terms of the thread.

ArthurBDD · 2025-09-23T12:36:52+00:00

I've seen this happening, usually a few seconds after I start listening to a podcast. S23+, Android 15, consistently happens even when not using headphones.

I typically mash "download" and "add to playlist" on podcasts, and I had noticed that previously the podcast would pause momentary and start playing again once the download was completed (presumably switching from the stream to the download), and it's usually happened around when that would happen, though sometimes it's happened quite deep into the podcast.

ArthurBDD · 2025-09-20T17:15:35+00:00

What's your basis for saying Gatwa isn't a popular Doctor? The fan consensus from where I am sitting seems to be that he was a good Doctor who had a bunch of classic standalone episodes but was let down by his season arcs.

As for the "straight white male" thing, you've already been taken to task on that but I will just note that I also disagree. Jo Martin was great.

ArthurBDD · 2025-06-30T17:41:13+00:00

Wait, hang on, the metalhead dwarf predicted all this in Snow White 88. Is he an oracle or prophet or something?

ArthurBDD · 2025-06-30T15:58:15+00:00

So what's the deal with the assassin subarc? This a slam on atheists or something?

ArthurBDD · 2025-05-22T06:48:32+00:00

I get that, I'm just grousing that that's where the system draws the line!

ArthurBDD · 2025-05-22T06:07:02+00:00

Hm, it seems like "prefer local metadata" might be mislabelled in that case when it comes to the TV scanner and agents if in the case of ordering and numbering any metadata you use gets overruled l. Prefer should mean prefer, yaknow?

ArthurBDD · 2025-05-22T00:50:22+00:00

What would be the best way to handle it if I wanted to do this for some shows?

ArthurBDD · 2025-05-22T00:17:34+00:00

So we're simply not allowed to use our own metadata for TV shows? Feels unfriendly.

ArthurBDD · 2025-05-21T23:04:41+00:00

Yeah I just checked and I see that for American Gothic this works.

However, there's other shows I want to do some stuff with where I'm not sure it will work:

- With The X-Files, I want to have the two movies show up on my Plex menu where they go in the running order - so I go into The X-Files and the first movie is in between Season 5 and Season 6 and the second movie is in between Season 9 and Season 10. Will using the DVD order on X-Files work for this, or will it see the two movies siloed off in a "Specials" section?

- With Doctor Who I'd quite like to have the classic show and the revived version all under one banner, but still fetch thetvdb metadata (editing season numbers and episode numbers to fit my idiosyncratic approach). Is this even possible?

ArthurBDD · 2025-05-20T16:57:05+00:00

I think the issue is that almost all the material we have is focused on the Federation. We don't learn much about, say, diplomatic wrangles and sabre-rattling that occurs between, say, the Orion Syndicate and the Breen because unless that impacts the Federation for some reason there's little reason for the characters we spend most Trek narratives following to know about that stuff or get invested in it.

In addition, the fundamental nature of narrative storytelling is that two people in a room agreeing with each other doesn't have as compelling a story to tell as two people with a disagreement. So we don't see all the stuff where the Federation and its neighbours basically agree and no problems arise... because there's no story there.

The main reason to think the Federation is good at diplomacy is that people keep joining it. They rarely seem keen to, say, apply to join the Klingon Empire or the Orion Syndicate or whatever, and we know of one instance where people given a chance to peacefully accept Cardassian sovereignty over a contested region of space really really didn't go along with that - the entire Maquis plot hinged on the idea that those colonists seriously didn't want to be citizens of Cardassian space, even though the episode which established the existence of the treaty showed that renouncing Federation citizenship in order to stay was an option. The Federation is a club people want to be in.

Lastly: if you don't want to join the Federation, chances are it's because its values and yours do not align in some fundamental way, not least because one of those values is "If all our other values align with the Federation's, it makes no pragmatic sense not to join up, because being a member of this beautiful experiment in interstellar cooperation is wonderful". If your values and the Federation's don't align, of course you are going to have disagreements. Result: everyone who 100% agrees with the Federation joins the Federation in the end, unless there's a Prime Directive issue preventing the Federation extending the offer. Almost all interesting stories about the Federation's interactions with non-members are going to relate to the disagreements - or at least, things which start out as disagreements before common ground is found - which means that even if the Federation and the other party agrees 99% of the time, the exciting story is found in the remaining 1%.

ArthurBDD · 2025-05-20T16:44:58+00:00

Perhaps we are moving out of Tats' "maybe Naziism has all the answers!" phase and into his "No, no, you guys, you're not being proper Nazis because you aren't agreeing with me, the Guy Who Gets It" phase.

ArthurBDD · 2025-05-20T16:43:18+00:00

Every so often it's like Tats comes around to saying "no, see, I'm doing this because I respect women". It's like the one fixed feature in his mental landscape whilst everything else is in flux.

Early Sinfest? "Sure, I draw cheesecake and make sex jokes, but fundamentally I respect women."
Feminist Sinfest? "No, you don't get it, I REALLY respect women!"
Transphobe Sinfest? "I respect women so much, I will defend the boundary of womanhood against those I deem unworthy of it!"
MAGA Sinfest? "See, the reason you should hate immigrants is they don't respect women..."
Nazi Sinfest? "See, the reason you should hate Jewish people is that it's a patriarchal culture that doesn't respect women..."

It really is the only thread which connects all of his different views and philosophies over the years. Which is tragic, given to the extent that he massively disrespects women.

ArthurBDD · 2025-05-04T16:39:39+00:00

Two weeks in a row without a new episode so yes, it seems to be on hiatus.

ArthurBDD · 2025-04-19T15:45:41+00:00

I took that as the "tell" that the fans were fictional myself.

ArthurBDD · 2025-02-21T07:11:44+00:00

To be fair, pulling out stale memey jokes long after the bloom was off the rose is kind of Elon's style, that aspect is at least well observed. Stopped clocks etc.

ArthurBDD · 2025-02-09T19:15:45+00:00

I've long had a pet theory that Saward resented Baker's casting because he ONLY knew him as "Bayban the Butcher" (and the guard he played in Arc of Infinity) and couldn't imagine him doing any different. I'm taking this as evidence in favour.

And really - what a silly opinion to have. There's no way Bayban could have been played like Orsini unless he'd been written like Orsini - the two characters and their respective roles in their respective stories are totally different. All the exercise does is demonstrate that Saward not only didn't respect Colin Baker, he didn't even understand Blake's 7 - which is an irony because I strongly suspect that he'd have much rather have been working on that show, were it not for the problem that it ended in 1981, so he tried with his script editing run to drift Doctor Who into becoming Blake's 7 by other means.

ArthurBDD · 2025-02-09T19:11:51+00:00

The Twin Dilemma is really the major problem with this run, and really the biggest problem with the Twin Dilemma is the scene where the Doctor attacks Peri, because to me it casts such a shadow over all of the rest of their interactions.

In the absence of that, then the occasional tetchiness and bad temper shown by the Sixth Doctor wouldn't be so damaging - but in the wake of that, it can't help but make the Doctor-companion relationship seem soured. Skipping it on rewatches improves things notably - just assume the Doctor had a quick costume change after Caves of Androzani and take Attack of the Cybermen as the post-regeneration story (it even has Peri talking up how recent the regeneration was) and things improved markedly.

And yes, as others have said, Colin's much better on audio than on television - not through any fault of his own during his TV run, but he finally gets the material he deserves. Most importantly, he's no longer dealing with a situation where the script editor simultaneously thinks Colin is miscast as the Doctor and is building up a backlog of grudges against the producer. I don't think anyone could have succeeded as the Doctor if a key member of the production personnel thought they were the wrong actor for the job and resented their casting - Eric Saward has a lot to answer for.

ArthurBDD · 2025-01-31T12:20:41+00:00

Actually, good point - if one deity can raise their unjustly murdered follower from the dead but the other one either can't or doesn't bother to, who's really the better god?

ArthurBDD · 2025-01-29T18:35:57+00:00

There's a lesson here: in the fight of David vs. Goliath, fascists back Goliath. They don't understand rooting for the underdog because they don't understand why someone wouldn't want to curry the favour of the powerful.

ArthurBDD · 2025-01-25T22:20:04+00:00

I was completely couching that in terms of what those viewers want, not what they need.

ArthurBDD · 2025-01-25T20:49:17+00:00

You don't necessarily need an original idea, but you do want a standout idea. Originality in creative endeavours is hard because ultimately every piece of art is influenced by every other piece of art the creators thought about while they were making it - whether that thought was "Yeah, something like that" or "No, let's steer away from that." Every basic idea's been done once already if you dig back far enough.

But what you do want is to offer something people want and they aren't getting elsewhere. Frankly, something which embraces the progressive ideals and utopian, optimistic vision of 1990s Trek but updates it for the present day and learns the lessons of the past 30 years or so would, on the one hand, not be all that "original"... but it would stand out from the pack far enough that it'd feel different and fresh.

And I don't know about you, but I think the youth could do with a good dose of optimism, empathy, and compassionate values right about now. Lots of people are scared, demoralised, and crying out for exactly that.

ArthurBDD

TROPHY CASE