Author Archives: John Saye

About John Saye

Servicing you with novels and garbled discourse based on my impressions of shows, movies, books, story structure, and whatever else I can get into.

“The End of the World,” Doctor Who, Season 1, Episode 2

Story structure may not be everyone’s thing, but I love it and it’s a key part of this website. It’s not intentional to sit around and just look at the plot. I intend to take stories apart and see what makes a story a good story. How many of these work? I mean, there are a ton of episodes of Doctor Who and it’s not the only show that I intend to work my way through here. I remember the first time I was figuring out story structure. I was a kid watching Inspector Gadget, and it occurred to me that certain things happened in a certain order every time. This show helped me predict when things would happen down to the minute. I realized that having this kind of thing on your side is crucial for writing long-running series, especially with today’s TV shows and movies.

I want to take them apart and see what makes them tick so that I can write better stories of my own.

This show’s entry follows the style of Dan Harmon’s story circle.

Dan Harmon's story circle

The End of the World

1) In a zone of comfort

As the story begins, the Doctor and Rose travel as far into the future as the Doctor can imagine. He wants desperately to impress her. He brings her to the last day on Earth before the sun expands and destroys it. He has brought her to a place where she feels small, surrounded by rich people and the troublesome lady Cassandra. One by one strange-looking alien groups enter, all piling up to make Rose feel as insignificant as possible. The Doctor and they exchange gifts which he immediately hands off to her. These things mean nothing to him, but she doesn’t know whether they are important, so she stands there with them. Some might say that he’s in a zone of comfort here, but that Rose is standing in a zone of discomfort. She doesn’t know who this guy is. She has been rather impulsive to leave with him in the first place, and here they are at this strange party at the end of the world.

2) They desire something

The Doctor desperately wants to impress her, but he’s going about it all the wrong way. He has a problem explaining who he is because of the terrible loss he feels coming off the end of the Time War. He is not emotionally ready to deal with that in front of her. We as an audience don’t learn about the Time War until much, much later. So she wants to know who’s driving the car. Can someone trust this guy when he doesn’t want to say a word about himself? It Puts her off, and she has to deal with the response “This is who I am here, and now.” He could have said, “I come from Gallifrey, I’m a Time Lord, my world is gone, and I played a big role in its destruction, but it was necessary.” Oof. But she doesn’t get that story, she just gets either nothing or more riddles and it creates serious tension between them when all she wants to know is who he is.

3) Enter an unfamiliar situation

They gave everyone on the space station a little silver pod. It was a gift handed out when they arrived and as Rose sets out to explore; they sabotage the ship. The first casualty is the Steward (“He’s blue…”), who hosted the initial party. He announced people as they came on board. Now he’s locked in his room. There’s a very unfortunate button on his keyboard that would allow the shields to drop and the sun to burn him alive. I think it’s a kind of design flaw. I think that there should be better fail-safes involved to keep people from being able to do that. It also kind of shows the mentality of the people who are boarding this platform for the party. These are upper-echelon party members and not necessarily the savviest technical people in the universe. These are all people used to convenience, and the little robots are easily infiltrating and sabotaging the station.

4) Adapt to the situation

Rose is doing her best to fit in. They’ve been introduced to Cassandra, the last human who appears to be a stretched-out piece of skin with a mouth, eyes, and a brain in a jar hanging out underneath her. Cassandra is incredibly frightening to me because of the lengths to which she’s gone through surgery to “fix” herself to last as long as she has. Meanwhile, the Doctor is off looking for part of the heating system with Jabe, and she has figured out who he is, which is the last thing he wants to hear about. She touches a nerve and makes him cry, which is something that you don’t see often with the Doctor. You do, but you don’t see it often when he is brought to tears. He’s trying to figure out a technical problem on the ship when she brings him back to reality and confronts him about something he’s keeping from Rose. He’s not emotionally ready for it.

5) Get what they desired

The Doctor being his usual clever self, outs Cassandra for sabotaging the station. He has this kind of detective’s moment, gathering everyone in the library where he puts together the clues in front of everyone. He’s trying to act the badass, showing how the little sabotage robots belong to her.

6) Pay a heavy price for winning

Because of outing Cassandra, she activates the sabotage robots. They respond by attacking the shields protecting the ship. The Doctor has taken care of Cassandra, but as a result, he has to run down to the engine rooms and try to vent the ship before it burns up. He takes Jabe, who is a female anthropomorphized tree character, with him. He’s been treating her like his companion the whole show instead of Rose, and she perishes trying to help him. The Doctor is used to losing people, but this shows him part of his pattern and as terrible a loss as Jabe is, he has to remember that he’s got a 19-year-old woman with him. She’s someone new to traveling with him, and this world, and he hasn’t watched over her for the last couple of hours. He needs to do a better job or he could get her killed, too.

The Earth explodes, but no one is watching as they all come so close to death.

7) Return to their familiar situation

The Doctor has had it. He’s a little mean at this point. He reverses Cassandra’s escape route and brings her back to the platform, where he completes his investigation and condemns her. Rose wants to help her, but he stands there and lets her die.

8) They have changed

Rose trying to figure out what she’s going to do. He’s got to come clean with her, but she doesn’t want to push. The Doctor has made some breakthroughs. After Jabe dies, he’s ready to at least give Rose part of the picture. They’re looking out the window at the Earth, or what’s left of it, rolling around and on fire, and he explains to her that his planet burns just like this. I always imagined that subconsciously that’s why he brought her here, because he was still dealing with it in his head. It still bothers him for a long time.

But there’s hope. There’s still life in the universe, there is still plenty to fight and live for.

Doctor Who on DvD

“Rose,” Doctor Who, Season 1, Episode 1

I have started my journey into story appreciation and structure with the period of Doctor Who, which I like to refer to as New Who. It comprises the work of three showrunners and the adventures of the Ninth through the Thirteenth incarnations of the Doctor. I do not plan to include Torchwood, or other spin-offs this go-around. It’s not because they lack something, but because I feel like this version of Doctor Who stands very well on its own.

Eventually, I plan to dip into some of Classic Who, as well as what I’m calling New New Who, which begins on Disney+ in America later this month.

This show’s entry follows the style of Dan Harmon’s story circle.

Dan Harmon's story circle

Warning: spoilers ahead (can you spoil a show from 2005?)

Rose

The first series of New Who follows the adventures of the Ninth official incarnation of the alien, death-defying, shapeshifting Time Lord known as Doctor Who, or as he prefers, “The Doctor.” The theoretical “last of his kind,” The Doctor almost always travels time and space with a companion or two. They are usually young human characters, so we can relate to all the bizarre antics The Doctor gets up to.

I like to think of a companion entering The Doctor’s world like someone visiting the Addams Family. As an audience, we need characters somewhat anchored in a reality we can agree with and understand boggling for us at all the world-saving weirdness that’s coming our way. The tragic part of many companions is that once they are fully attuned to the wild universe the Doctor lives in, they must leave the nest of the TARDIS, and either retire from adventure, return to Earth, or venture out into space on their journey to make way for fresh eyes. In the saddest cases, a companion might die, have their memory erased, or get trapped in a parallel dimension.

I know I’m starting out doing write-ups of a series that started in 2005. I’m okay with that. Just wait until I eventually hop in my own TARDIS and head back to 1993 to cover the X-Files.

In this series, the primary companion is a young woman, Rose Tyler, and she brings with her the support characters of her boyfriend Mickey, and her mom Jackie. Jackie is especially interesting because it’s the first time any parent of a companion has been involved in shaking up the narrative. They remain important, if not always present, the entire time she travels with The Doctor. For this blog, I intend to think of the leads as simply The Doctor, Rose, Mickey, and Jackie. I could spend a ton of time listing cast members and that entire angle, but since I’m focusing on the story, I think I’ll just stick to the character names.

When applying Dan Harmon’s eight-part story circle, I’m used to looking at it about his Community sitcom series. He notes that early in each story, you can see distinct characters in the ensemble assert themselves as the lead at the beginning. I’ll be on the lookout for that as I go through these shows.

This one’s titled “Rose.” Guess who’s looking for big excitement, and a change in her life? I can’t guarantee that every one of these is going to follow the format exactly. I don’t expect all of them to. I do, however, expect many of these to work out and follow the example. Even multi-parters on some level should follow the pattern, so let’s look at Rose.

1) In a zone of comfort

In a zone of comfort, Rose begins her day by getting up and going to work at a shop and having lunch with her boyfriend. She’s fairly carefree, but you can tell she feels like something is missing in her life. On her way home, she gets told to take extra cash down to the basement. We quickly see that where she works, she is at the absolute bottom of the food chain, metaphorically. She’s headed down through an elevator where the only people she knows are already dead and the monsters are waking up. The zone of comfort quickly falls away when she meets the most unusual man she’s ever met. He’s a strange heroic character who wants to blow up the very building where she works. She doesn’t need this place anymore. Rose has got places to go.

2) They desire something

Everyone makes a big fuss over Rose. Her mother and her boyfriend try to tell her what to do. Her mom thinks she should get money for working somewhere that doesn’t care about her, and her boyfriend just wants to go to the pub like it was nothing. Even though the fire from the explosion the Doctor caused is still on the news. Rose doesn’t care about any of that anymore. Rose only wants to know who the mysterious man is. It’s funny when she complains to her mother about the loose cat flap in the door because they’re going to let in strays. The Doctor is a stray floating around the galaxy moving from one mission to another. Rose says the clear motivating desire, and where of course supposed to relate to her and be on her side. The Doctor is still an alien mystery even though many of us already know who he is from Classic Doctor Who. Here we are still learning about him and finding out what kind of tragic story is in his current background.

3) Enter an unfamiliar situation

After the Doctor saves Rose from the living plastic arm, she chases him out and won’t leave him alone until he speaks to her. He tells her she can get people killed if she talks, but she doesn’t care. She’s going to find out everything she can about him. She presses him for information; she wants in on the mystery. I don’t even think she knows why she wants in on the mystery yet except that she’s not satisfied with her life. She thinks she can do something better or something different, rather than sitting on the couch. Because of the big speech about the earth turning underneath her, she has to make a choice. Her choice is to follow, but the doctor cuts her off and gets away. It’s the first time we hear the noise of the TARDIS materializing in the series. She is now in unfamiliar territory and looking for a way to make it back out.

4) Adapt to the situation

If the doctor will not help her, then Rose, who has already decided that she’s in this, will do it for herself. She’s resourceful even though she doesn’t exactly know what she’s getting herself into or what she’s doing. She goes to visit her boyfriend Mickey, who has a computer, and she knows enough about it to get searching. She looks up all the clues she can figure out about him. That quickly leads her to a local conspiracy theorist’s website, which has an unwitting knack for tracking the Doctor. Clive is such an interesting character, and I wish we got to learn a little more about him, but he shows her a small history of the Doctor. It brings up a few points I don’t agree with. It’s mainly because we know that he’s just regenerated into the ninth incarnation of himself. He mentions that when he looks at himself in the mirror in Rose’s apartment. Then he never goes to any of the locations that are mentioned, such as the Titanic or Kennedy’s assassination, with this face in the series’s course. It’s probably covered in an audio story. In the absence of the Doctor telling her what’s going on, Rose goes out to find out for herself, even if that gets Mickey captured.

5) Get what they desired

When the Doctor rescues Rose from the restaurant where she and the fake Mickey are about to order pizza, she gets what she wants. The Doctor has returned; the excitement has returned, and he lets her in a little. As they run from the fake Mickey, he lets her, and us for the first time in this series, get into the TARDIS. The Doctor is standing with the fake Mickey’s head, plugging it into the TARDIS console. Then he turns and stands calmly and truthfully, answering every question that she has. He’s an alien, and so is the ship. We follow a signal to the base of the London Eye and the Doctor has to trust her a little more.

6) Pay a heavy price for winning

Rose is having a great time, hanging out with the Doctor when it comes up that Mickey is likely dead after having been copied by the Nestine Consciousness. As exciting as everything is, she realizes the Doctor thinks in a much different way than she does. He looks at everything on a different scale, and sometimes that scale means that he appears insensitive about really human topics.

7) Return to their familiar situation

Is this their new normal? Just when it looks like Rose is going to leave all this craziness behind, she gets the London Eye clue. She can see the massive Ferris wheel in the middle of London, and it’s the giant antenna that they were looking for. This has to be the place. At that moment, I believe the doctor realizes that he couldn’t have done this without her, even if he wanted to. She’s now part of his new normal.

8) They have changed

Rose has no job as the Doctor blew it up. She has no A-levels, which means she left school at age 16 or quickly dropped out after starting them. Mickey turns out to be alive, but he’s a useless mess when things get weird. She has no future unless she takes that job at the butcher (ugh!), but she’s got a bronze gymnastics medal. She could do this. She could be an action hero. This is the job for her! She transforms, leaving her old life behind, and swings into action, knocking the Autons over the edge and saving the day. Escape for everyone, including her mom.

This is the kind of breakdown I expect from each of the episodes that I look at. The more often I take one apart, the better I hope to become at creating them for myself for my own written work. I want to understand how my favorite stories function in order to create my own unique ones.

Doctor Who on DvD

New site, fresh start

Why do people start blogs? I certainly don’t know why. You’d think that something more akin to a YouTube channel would be the ticket. Everything these days is video all the time, and I certainly have an aptitude for making videos. It’s something that I might consider shortly, but for right now I really sort of want to focus on a blog. This is one of those things that I always wanted to do while I was in the hospital and tried to start over repeatedly, but never been able to make stick. I think part of it is the fact that you have to have some kind of focus for a blog. You need a subject. You need something that you can use to focus your efforts, to keep you on target. I think I finally found something that I like enough to make into a subject that I can work with. I’ll be writing a blog focused on story structure, though I may touch on other subjects as well. I would like to open the hood, so to speak, and look at stories, especially ones that I like to see how they work. I want to do this for movies and I want to do this for TV shows. For certain TV shows, I even want to get granular and go episode by episode. I want to see how many of those shows seem to stack up to each other, how their overall season arcs work, and how many times they tell the same story repeatedly. Knowing myself, I’m largely going to stick to science fiction.

Part of how I intend to achieve this examination of structure is to use two examples that I love applying to my work. I like to use two circles to describe story structure. One of them is the story circle popularized by KM Weiland, and the other one is a story circle created by Dan Harmon. Dan Harmon’s story circle is like KM Weiland’s, but more suited for TV episodes. That is something that I’m also gonna look into.

KM Weiland’s circle

Dan Harmon’s circle

Vonnegut on the shapes of stories

Each of these circles copies the motion of a clock. They start at 12 o’clock and then move around the circle in an analog fashion until they are back up to 12 o’clock again. The circles each have different numbers of steps, but the structure is similar. You find out what the protagonists want, then they get into all kinds of trouble around the bottom half of the clock, and then they get back out of it and back to the top of the hour so that you can start a new story or a new chapter or new movie or wherever you want to go next. Usually, somebody changes in a small way. It’s not always the same character, and it’s not always the same change. I think I’ll even make a page for the circles so that I can always have easy access to them. I got them on my computer but in a pinch, it would be nice if I had a place on my site so I could just refer to them, and to any other tools that I would like to use as I develop stories of my own.

These circles and graphs are building blocks, and serve as a foundation for the stories on top of them.