Bev Vincent

We got a little rain, but nowhere near as much as I expected as a side effect of Hurricane Alex, which struck Mexico as a Category 2. I think Houston is getting it worse than we are on the north side.

Happy birthday, Canada. You don’t look a day over 142.

So, it turns out that ABC couldn’t even burn off the last episodes of Happy Town over the airwaves. I thought #7 was going to be on last night but 7 & 8 were shipped off to Hulu instead. In the final seconds of the last episode, we do indeed learn who the so-called Magic Man is, but it’s one of those WTF moments. Many, many more questions than answers, fer shure. Like, was the Sam Neill character serious when he said he ruled the minions of darkness, or was he just scaring off a bunch of gullible hicks? And what was the deal with that German movie The Blue Room that looked like it had the guy the sheriff shot in it? Alas, thus ends the saga of a quirky TV show that might have had some potential but will forever exist only as eight episodes and eight million unresolved mysteries.

Two unexpected themes or situations come up in the Stories: All-New Tales anthology. The first, which I’ve mentioned before, is metafiction, which seems to have inspired a lot of writers, and the other is Christmas. There have been two Christmas-ish stories so far. The one about the twelve days of Christmas in in the 23rd century and the other that is sort of a spoiler, so I won’t mention it.

I finished Gene Wolfe’s “Leif in the Wind,” which was ultimately reminiscent of an Outer Limits or Twilight Zone episode. Then I read “Unwell” by Carolyn Parkhurst, which is about a manipulative older sister who can’t stand to see her sister (who, at 70, is about to be married for the first time) happy. She feigns illness to lure her sister away from her busy planning, but she has an even more twisted (and cruelly delayed) trick in store. “A Life in Fictions” by Kat Howard is the next in the list of metafictions, but it’s an interesting twist. The main character’s ex-boyfriend is a writer and every time he uses her as a character in one of his works, she vanishes from reality. As time goes on, she finds she’s losing grip on who she really is, no longer certain of her favorite color, or even what her name is. Jonathan Carroll is one of my favorite novelists, but I’ve only read one or two short stories by him. “Let the Past Begin” is about a man whose pregnant girlfriend (and she may not be pregnant by him) once had a strange experience with an eastern European seer who cautioned her that the father of her child had a curse that would be inherited by her child. He has cause to doubt her sanity. A fascinating story, very much with the feel of Carroll’s novels, but it cut off like a French film, without resolution and certainly before I expected it would end.

We still haven’t seen any effects from Hurricane Alex, but the rain is on its way, apparently. Three to five inches in some places. Eighty percent chance of rain today and tomorrow, 50% on Friday and Saturday, with lingering rain on Sunday. Sounds like we’re in for a soggy long weekend.

What struck me most about Stewart O’Nan’s story “Land of the Lost” from Stories: All-New Tales was that it was based on the same kind of story as a novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo several years ago. In O’Nan’s story, a woman becomes obsessed with trying to find the buried body of a murdered child based on scant details provided by the killer. She doesn’t know the victim–she only read about it in the paper or heard it on TV. In my manuscript, which is called The Silent Desert, a father travels to West Texas to try to find the body of his murdered son with only minor clues about its location, too. During his quest, he meets a woman who was doing much the same thing as the main character in O’Nan’s story, though perhaps not as obsessively.

I started “Leif in the Wind,” which is a science fiction story by Gene Wolfe in which an exploration team is returning home after a years-long journey during which some of the team has died. One of the three remaining astronauts believes he saw birds on their destination planet before they depart, though the planet is clearly uninhabited (from the POV of the other two, at least). During the long, long, long return trip, either the guy was right or his delusion is spreading.

It’s interesting that I should read an SF story when I’m in the process of working on one myself. I have this oldish story that has limited marketability in its current state. Written for a themed anthology where it failed to pass muster. However, I had the idea last weekend to take it out of Earth history and put it in space. Not sure how it’s going to work out, but it’s an interesting idea, at least.

Law and Order: Criminal Intent was interesting last night. It had a rather pointless wrap-around story with Nichols in London spilling his heart about the case to an un-named woman that seemed to exist only to fill in time. However, the core of the story itself was right out of Agatha Christie or PD James. Two men die in a mansion. At first it seems like they’ve killed each other swordfighting, but the scene proves to have been staged. It has all the tropes of a classic British mystery: old money, mental illness, butlers, messages left in the event of death, interesting wills, bankrupt estates, hidden staircases and rooms, mysterious taps in the night, rare and valuable books. For good measure, throw in a Da Vinci code-like second century manuscript that threatens to rewrite the history of Christ’s trial, and a cabalistic group, The Conclave (i.e. Opus Dei, the Templars) who will stop at nothing to keep the secret from coming out. And the culprit, well, talk about a deliberate cliché!

Next week is the CI season finale — two hours, starting an hour earlier than usual. Set your recorders appropriately!

Tropical Storm–and soon-to-be-hurricane–Alex is churning things up down in the gulf. It’s probably going to come ashore near the Texas-Mexico border, but we’re on the wet side of the storm so we’re probably going to see some heavy rains over the next day or three.  That’s not a bad thing. So long as we don’t get flash flooding, we can certainly use the precipitation.

I updated News From the Dead Zone this morning. It’s been a while. Lots of links to clink on to amuse you.

I read “Samantha’s Diary” by Diana Wynne Jones in Stories: All-New Tales  last night and this morning. It takes place 200 years in the future when most Christmas traditions have fallen by the wayside. Samantha starts receiving all the gifts delineated in The Twelve Days of Christmas from a secret admirer. It doesn’t even start out cute. She doesn’t know what to do with a pear tree or the partridge it comes with. Plus, the gift-giver is absolutely true to the spirit of the song, so the next day she gets another partridge in a pear tree along with the turtledoves. And so on. By the time the eight cows with their milkmaids show up on day eight, her house is a disaster, with geese pooping everywhere. Other than the valuable heirloom rings that she’s been amassing since day five, she wants none of it. She has to place a standing order with the pet supply shops for all the kinds of birdseed she needs for Σ(n) partridges,  Σ(n-1)*2 turtledoves,  Σ(n-2)*3 french hens, and so on. Then the lords show up with their trampolines–so they can leap. Get it? If it sounds tedious, it certainly gets that way quickly. Both for the character and for the reader, unfortunately. And I’m not exactly sure what happens at the end. I think I missed something.

We watched Life Story (aka The Race for the Double Helix) last night. This is a 1987 BBC movie based on James Watson’s book about how he and Francis Crick worked out the structure of DNA. Jeff Goldblum is Watson and Juliet Stevenson is Rosalind Franklin. The soundtrack is hilarious, and some of the jump cuts between scenes are overly dramatic and very 1980s, but it’s an interesting story despite all that. Poor Maurice Wilkins comes off rather ineffectual, knocked totally off balance by Rosalind Franklin’s introduction into his department. Goldblum is all arms and legs and weird hair and darting eyes…in fact, not so very different from his character on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. It’s hard to realize that something so instantly recognizable now, something so fundamental to our knowledge of evolution and genetics was a total mystery a little more than 50 years ago.

On Saturday I went to ApolloCon for several hours. Met up with Michael Bracken, Bill Crider, Lee Thomas, Gabrielle Faust and a guy who looked like Brian Keene wearing a kilt. The con is a little different than a horror convention in that there is a lot of gaming going on (including, interestingly, crokinole, a game I used to play when I was a kid) and a fair number of people in costume. One guy, who looked like an anorexic Darth Vader, must have been hellaciously hot. There was the usual smattering of starfleet regalia, including a fetching young woman who had her very own tricorder, and some costumes that I didn’t recognize at all. The dealer room had a mishmash of booksellers, gaming equipment sellers, authors, herbal supplements and the type of geeky t-shirts that the gang from The Big Bang Theory would probably have been all over.

The panels were also an interesting mishmash, including subjects such as hurricane preparedness, e-publishing and e-readers, general writing, the role of the “Mary Sue” in fiction, body mutilation/art in the genres, and flirting at conventions. I went to a few panels, wandered the dealer’s room and, by 4:00 decided I’d had my fill. I watched the last few minutes of the US/Ghana World Cup match on the big screen in the lobby before heading out. One wonders what Bill Clinton and Mick Jagger found to discuss in the stands. The general consensus around ApolloCon was that they were comparing little black books.

I finished “Goblin Lake” by Michael Swanwick, which descended utterly into metafiction without really seeming to have much new to offer the trope. I enjoyed “Mallon and Guru” by Peter Straub, which is either a vignette outtake from A Dark Matter or else Straub still had Mallon on the brain when he was invited to contribute to Stories: All-New Tales. Spencer Mallon is in India on a quest to visit a famous guru when he has some mystical (perhaps) experiences en route. The meeting with the guru is probably less than he hoped it would be.

“Catch and Release” by Lawrence Block is a non-supernatural story about a former serial killer who has taken a page from his love of fishing and now does exactly what the title suggests with his potential victims. He believes that a fish, if it has any feelings at all, feels never so alive as it does in the moments after a hook snags it, when it is yanked from the water, gasps for oxygen and is released, so he tries this out on female hitchhikers and other vulnerable people. He’s not entirely sold on the concept, though…

Named for a classic jazz piece, Jeffrey Ford’s story “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” benefits from a second reading. I wasn’t quite sure exactly what was going on after I finished it the first time, but I think I’ve pieced it together now. The story has the feel of a noir 30s tale. I pictured it entirely in black and white. A cool guy picks up his gal for a spin out to a popular restaurant/jazz joint on the edge of the desert, with mysterious references to the gap in time since they last went out together. Everyone loves Dex, it seems, except for a guy who is fixated on numbers. It seems to be one of those “caught in a loop” stories where the characters are offered a way out. Very moody and stylish, if a bit hard to grok.

Chuck Palahniuk “Loser” is a wry, quirky story about a sorority sister who takes acid before being selected as a contestant on The Price is Right. Since the whole experience is through her eyes, it’s truly bizarre, and the loser of the title isn’t exactly who we expect it will be.

I was interested to learn that the actress who plays Amelia Pond, the younger version of Amy Pond in Doctor Who, is actually Karen Gillan’s cousin. Doctor Who Confidential for the final episode of the new season has quite a bit about a publicity tour the actors and showrunner did of New York City a while back. They were just putting the finishing wraps on The Big Bang but were helping to launch The Eleventh Hour in the U.S. Matt Smith seems a natural in front of the adoring fans and interviewers.

And now, regarding the finale:

They didn’t take long to dispatch with the massive crises established at the end of The Pandorica Opens: Amy seemingly dead and the Doctor confined in the Pandorica. Surprisingly, though, they returned to young Amelia on the night she was waiting for the Doctor to return–only this time he doesn’t. And there aren’t any stars in the sky any more, even though she insists on putting them in her drawings. Stars are now as mythical to her family as the raggedy doctor.  (There was a funny reference to the cult of stars and that “shifty” Richard Dawkins, a British scientist who popularized science a la Carl Sagan.)

Her trip to the National Gallery was like something out of A Night at the Museum, with all sorts of wonky impossibilities on display, including a decrepit old Dalek. The pandorica was the main exhibit and once Amelia follows the clues, it opens…and what a surprise. “Okay, kid, this is where it gets complicated.”

Complicated indeed. As the Doctor says, he’s willing to cheat the rules of time to save the universe. His cheating includes the use of a vortex manipulator (Cheap and nasty time travel. Very bad for you. Trying to give it up.) which is essentially a wrist-mounted TARDIS that lets him generate one paradox after another. They very cleverly outfit him with props so we can tell where he’s coming from when he pops back to 200 A.D. The fez was the best part, a running gag of sorts (What in the name of sanity have you got on your head? River Song asks). Apparently the producers were so afraid Matt Smith would become enamored of it that they would only write it into the script if there was a countering scene where the fez was destroyed. Among the apparent paradoxes and rule violations: Amy and Amelia hanging out together, the Doctor encountering the 12-minutes-in-the-future version of himself, and the self-fulfilling trips back to prime Rory with instructions and Amelia with directions that Rory and Amelia both instigate. The funniest bit was Amelia complaining she was thirsty, so the Doctor jumps back a few minutes to steal her drink to give to her now…which means she was only thirsty NOW because the Doctor took her drink THEN. Screwy, farcical good fun.

I’m glad we’re going to learn more about River Song in the next series, because she and the Doctor work so well together. When he interrupts her own infinite loop inside the TARDIS, he greets her with “Honey, I’m home.” To which she responds, “And what sort of time do you call this?” as a wife might chastise an errant husband.

The thematic statement that is the crux of it all actually came from The Pandorica Opens: If something can be remembered, it can be made real again. The end of the episode was very sweet, with Rory and Amy returned to their reality, only it’s a better reality because the crack hasn’t been sucking away bits of her existence all her life, including her mysteriously absent parents. It goes to show that Moffat had the whole thing mapped out from the beginning and the season truly did have a strong arc. Interestingly, one bit that some fans were complaining about as a continuity error was revealed to be a clue: the Doctor’s message to Amy when she had her eyes closed to keep the Stone Angel from taking her over–his admonition that she had to remember what he told her when she was seven. Apparently his suit is different in that scene from the rest of the episode, though I couldn’t tell.

The wedding was a lot of fun (dig the Doctor’s dance moves) and Rory makes a perfect comedic foil to Amy’s outrageous force of nature. “Mr. Pond,” the Doctor called him and, yeah, that’s the way it is.

So, all in all a pretty spectacular and brilliant ending to the season, with a hint of what’s to come. A married couple as companions on the TARDIS–that must set a precedent. The pandorica clue from the first episode is resolved, but the silence isn’t, and that will be at the heart of next season, along with more about River Song. I guess the Orient Express will be the Christmas special–that sounds like fun.

One thing that has intrigued me about this whole McChrystal affair is that I saw a segment on him on Sixty Minutes several months ago and I came away from the piece thinking that he was an interesting guy who didn’t always play by the standard conventions and thought outside the box. Had a good head on his shoulders. There is a take-home message here for writers who are interviewed. Reporters know that after a while you let down your guard and forget about the tape recorder or the camera. It seems strange, but it’s true. Case in point.

I read a few more stories in Stories: All-New Tales. Walter Mosley has a vampire story called Juvenal Nix that has some interesting premises that aren’t exploited to their full potential, unfortunately. After a black civil rights activist is turned into a vampire, he loses all interest in racial matters. In fact, he effectively becomes colorblind, in the metaphorical sense. That could have been interesting. The story of his conversion and the relationship with the white female vampire who turned him is erotically charged. Then, after a couple of decades of mostly existing and feeding, he decides to use the powers he has acquired as a vampire to help people. He hangs out his shingle, sets up shop, runs ads, has a web site designed, the whole nine yards. Also an idea with lots of possibility. The story derails when someone hires him to slay a strange creature that is feeding on homeless people living in the subway system. Nothing about this story development seems to arise from anything before.  It’s just weird. If this had been a creation story about Juvenal Nix, a character from another book or series, this might have proved important, but it left me scratching my head at the end.

Richard Adams, of Watership Down and Shardik fame, contributes a quirky little story called “The Knife” that on the surface seems to be about an abused child’s revenge but is really about the storytellers reaction to being told this long-secret story. At first I thought it was a trite story, but the way it is resolved stuck with me.

Jodi Picoult’s story, “Weights and Measures,” is about the way a husband and wife react to the death of their young daughter. She has amazing control of the English language and some creative ways of saying things that impressed the hell out of me. In addition to the usual grief aspect of the story, there is a magic realism element that pushes it beyond the norm. A sad, sad story, but also a poignant and effective one.

I’m partway through “Goblin Lake” by Michael Swanwick, which starts out by being about the legend of a lake where things that are dipped into its waters come back changed. It then suddenly becomes an underwater fantasy with a strong metafictional overtone.

I’m looking forward to next week’s episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. It’s being staged like a classic whodunnit murder mystery like something out of Agatha Christie.

I upgraded to WordPress 3.0 after yesterday’s post. Every now and then I follow the warnings and do a full backup of my site before I push the automatic installation button, but mostly I just push the button and hope nothing goes wrong. It was a major update, from 2.something to 3.0, so by all rights I should have been more prudent, but I wasn’t. Nothing bad happened. Everything went like clockwork. Haven’t really explored the new features yet.

I’m continuing to read Stories: All-New Tales, moving on to Joe Lansdale’s tale, “The Stars Are Falling.” It’s set in East Texas (naturally) after the Great War. The main character returns from the dead, coming back to his wife and young son. He essentially abandoned them to join the fray, going via Canada to get to the European theater. Because he can’t read or write, he couldn’t communicate so for all intents and purposes he’s been dead to his family for four years. The question Lansdale is very cagey about is whether he might really be dead. The voice of these characters is interesting–they’re early 20th century, of course, but also poor, uneducated and isolated, living on a farm well away from the nearest town. Another fine entry in what is proving to be a very good anthology.

I’m just now checking out the cover art for the first time. That’s one thing about the Kindle–unless you deliberately go and look at the cover, you miss it since books open by default at the first page of text. I see a metaphor there: the pen is mightier than whatever ungodly creature that is arising from the water.

I’m still working my way through my review of The Passage. Big book–lots to write about.

I’ll be a day-tripper at ApolloCon this weekend. I’m just going in for the day on Saturday. I don’t know any of the Guests of Honor, but I do know a few fellow attendees, including Michael Bracken, Bill Crider and Lee Thomas. I’m just seeing the program for the first time–an interesting mix. There’s a writing panel with Bracken and Crider up against a “Hurricane Ike” panel at 10 a.m. There are also more acronyms than you can shake a S.T.I.C.K. at, including the ever-intriguing LARP and FILK.

I’m surprised that I haven’t heard many people talking about the new anthology Stories: All-New Tales, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. I bought it for my Kindle last week and the stories thus far have been uniformly very good-to-excellent. So far I’ve read Roddy Doyle’s terrific “Blood,” about a man who is trying to hide his sudden craving for blood from his wife, “Fossil-Figures” by Joyce Carol Oates, about the divergent lives of twins, one of whom tried to consume the other in utero, “Wildfires in Manhattan” by Joanne Harris (an author previously unknown to me) about Norse gods living in Manhattan as ordinary humans (somewhat), “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains” by Neil Gaiman, a revenge myth involving a dwarf, “Unbelief” by Michael Marshall Smith (an assassination story with a twist) and “The Devil on the Staircase” by Joe Hill, in which the text is laid out like stairs for much of the story. Next up is the Joe R. Lansdale entry, and that’s still only scratching the surface.

I posted my review of Villain by Shuichi Yoshida last night. I’ll be working on my The Passage (Cronin) review this week.

We watched the French film Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants) this weekend. The main character is an independent movie producer (loosely based on Humbert Balsan) who runs Moon Films…or rather, it runs him. His nearly fifty movies have some critical success, but no financial success, so his twenty-year-old company is perpetually on the verge of collapse. He has a loving wife and three daughters (the eldest of which is played by the star’s real daughter) who play second fiddle to the demands of his company all the time. He’s always on the phone (sometimes on more than one phone at once) and his hands barely touch the steering wheel when he drives because he’s juggling phones, cigarettes and everything else. Though the company’s financial troubles are mounting, he is in complete and utter denial. He’s still picking up the tab for expensive dinners. The budget for a film directed by a moody, unpredictable Swedish director (loosely based on Lars Von Trier) is running out of control. Then something happens midway through that will come as a complete shock to anyone who doesn’t know the story of Humbert Balsan. The film then switches gears to focus on the wife and daughters. In typical French film fashion, the credits roll unexpectedly. However, we found a lot to discuss after the movie was over. The director expertly observes things and lets the viewer come to conclusions. Things aren’t divulged through narrative or dialog that serves no purpose. Definitely worth watching.

Matt Smith’s first season as Doctor Who is almost at an end. The episode that aired in England this week, The Pandorica Opens, is set in large part at Stonehenge, which is appropriate given that it’s the solstice. The episode ties together all the questions that have been asked throughout the season, and even acts as a Greatest Hits of itself, bringing back Van Gogh, Liz X, Churchill and, most importantly, River Song, who leaves the Doctor one of her typical messages like something out of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Another scene is reminiscent of the cantina from Star Wars and the tributes continue with Raiders of the Lost Ark theme music playing while the characters descend into the Underhenge. It’s all one big mashup that culminates in the mash-up of all mash-ups, a who’s who of every major villain the Doctor has ever faced. To be honest, I was working on the theory that the Doctor was already inside the pandorica. It’s good to see everything that’s been set up begin to pay off. Rory’s return was welcome, though how his final actions will be resolved remains to be seen. No previews for The Big Bang at the end of the episode, so we don’t even get a hint. A terrific finale for a mostly excellent season.

My essay “The Tangled Web We Weave” is now up on Storytellers Unplugged. It’s about the work involved in adding something significant to a novel between drafts.

I received my copies of  Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads, edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner for the ITW. In anthologies, my name doesn’t often make it to the cover, but it did here. If you look very carefully under the R in “Reads,” there’s my name. My last name is also halway down the page on the far left. My essay is about Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. I haven’t read the piece in quite a while. I like it!

Charles Tan interviews Nancy Kilpatrick about vampires and the Evolve anthology. My name comes up.

“Just my luck to be garotted at the end of turtleneck season,” the enigmatic movie memorabilia shop owner says on Happy Town, episode six. A very cavalier way of shrugging off an attempt on his life. The best part of the episode, though, was his courting of the town’s matriarch. Charming. I also liked the bit with the stranger-in-town and the croquet mallet. A significant breakthrough in the Magic Man case is wasted by the sheriff’s bullet. Only two episodes left (none next week, I understand). First FlashForward and now this…two shows that will vanish with a lot of unanswered questions.

If you want to check out Sarah Mclachlan’s new album, Laws of Illusion, before buying it, you can listen to the whole thing for free at music.aol.com today.  Also Tom Petty’s Mojo, and a number of other albums.

I found out via Tim Lebbon’s Facebook post that Crowded House has a new album, Intriguer. It’s already available in the UK but won’t be released in the US until July 13. I’ve been a big fan of theirs since the beginning. I remember when Split Enz released True Colors, which was notable because of some great songs but also because the LP was laser-etched to create cool colors when you held it up to the light.

Another discovery: thanks to Lee Thomas’s LiveJournal post, I learned that ApolloCon is in Houston at the end of the month. Not only in Houston, but near the airport, which means it’s only about 25 miles away. I think I’ll check it out on the Saturday.

I was drawing a blank when it came to my monthly Storytellers Unplugged post, which is due tomorrow. Couldn’t even think of where to start for a topic. I thought that for the first time since the blog’s inception I might miss a month. Then, yesterday morning, out of the blue, a topic came to me that fit in with what I’m working on at present. I love it when a bolt of inspiration strikes like that. Check out “What a Tangled Web We Weave” tomorrow.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent really isn’t quite the same without Goran and Eames. Goldblum and Burrows are doing fine, and last night’s episode was decent, but I still miss D’Onofrio’s quirkiness.

I finished The Passage this weekend and am working on my review. My biggest fear about the book is that it would end on a cliff-hanger without any sense of resolution. I wasn’t disappointed with the way the novel wrapped up some threads, but it’s going to be really tough to wait at least two more years for the continuation of the saga. I liked the book very much. He plays tricks with the reader a little too often, but a lot of things from the very beginning came back into play at the end in ways that I appreciated.

Breaking Bad had a very good season finale, too. Once Jesse got to the apartment, I had a pretty good idea on what note it would go out. The show’s runner admits that he doesn’t yet know what happens next. It was just picked up for a fourth season. I enjoyed seeing the PI, Mike, with his granddaughter, and the scene at the chemical warehouse was both funny and brutal. I liked the part where he got the guy to show him where the lurking gunman’s head was by raising his hands, and the exchange with the woman at the front desk afterward was hilarious. “Is she still there?” She responds in Chinese, talking for what seemed like two or three minutes. “She says ‘yes,'” the guy responds. It was also nice to see Gale at home–a guy so fastidious that he uses a laser or UV sensor to make sure his tea water is at the right temperature. His shelves are lined with books on Marx but he’s currently reading Everything’s Eventual by Stephen King. Young Walt reminded me of his character from Malcolm in the Middle. They kept the cameras far enough away to pull off that trick without too much makeup.

AMC also aired the first hour of the Rubicon pilot last night. Color me intrigued. It has tons of puzzles and code and subterfuge, and it has the look and feel of a BBC miniseries, something akin to State of Play. It got off to a rousing start with a scene featuring a guy who committed suicide because of a 4-leaf clover tucked into his morning papers. I’ll be keen to see how it continues come August.

This week’s Doctor Who, “The Lodger,” was pretty silly. Yeah, we got to see the Doctor doing new things (playing football, taking a shower, handling money), but the promise of the creepy upstairs lodger summoning bypassers to his assistance didn’t do anything for me at all.