If you're referring to the possibility of her regenerating
I was thinking more of the jump-in-the-air-swirl-around-and-shoot-things bit. The Doctor exhibits a lot of what could broadly be classed as super-powers, though they tend to be signified as being-terribly-clever within the show. River has gradually begun to show the same tendencies. We're encouraged to think of her as time-lord-special rather than human-special. If you see what I mean.
Babylon 5 was obviously incredibly influential. Though you can see how its attempt at ARC plotting was so tightly woven that it ended up over-constraining the show. Buffy, for instance, managed much better by not committing itself too far in advance. I've noticed a certain move away from ARC plotting in a lot of shows recently, but I don't think we're going to return to the 1980s when genre shows tended to default to the assumption that the audience couldn't even remember last week's episode, let alone anything that had come before. A lot of 70s shows (e.g. Blakes' 7 and Survivors) seem a lot more adult, in that respect, than the stuff that was being churned out when I was a teenager and I think now we'd refer to the things those shows were doing as "ARC plotting". Interestingly, I suppose, a lot of Doctor Who's flirtations with ARC plotting (e.g. the E-Space trilogy and the Black Guardian trilogy were 80s experiments. Though the Key to Time was in the 70s). But I thing B5, for all its faults, really marked a sea change in the way the producers of genre shows regarded what their audience wanted from them.
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-21 09:45 am (UTC)I was thinking more of the jump-in-the-air-swirl-around-and-shoot-things bit. The Doctor exhibits a lot of what could broadly be classed as super-powers, though they tend to be signified as being-terribly-clever within the show. River has gradually begun to show the same tendencies. We're encouraged to think of her as time-lord-special rather than human-special. If you see what I mean.
Babylon 5 was obviously incredibly influential. Though you can see how its attempt at ARC plotting was so tightly woven that it ended up over-constraining the show. Buffy, for instance, managed much better by not committing itself too far in advance. I've noticed a certain move away from ARC plotting in a lot of shows recently, but I don't think we're going to return to the 1980s when genre shows tended to default to the assumption that the audience couldn't even remember last week's episode, let alone anything that had come before. A lot of 70s shows (e.g. Blakes' 7 and Survivors) seem a lot more adult, in that respect, than the stuff that was being churned out when I was a teenager and I think now we'd refer to the things those shows were doing as "ARC plotting". Interestingly, I suppose, a lot of Doctor Who's flirtations with ARC plotting (e.g. the E-Space trilogy and the Black Guardian trilogy were 80s experiments. Though the Key to Time was in the 70s). But I thing B5, for all its faults, really marked a sea change in the way the producers of genre shows regarded what their audience wanted from them.