"Spoilers, Sweetie!" (Part 3 of 3)

Do spoilers spoil or do teasers tantalise?

Our epic spoiler-filled discussion between Generation Star Wars' John Hood and Taking The Short View's Andrew Lewin reaches its dramatic conclusion!

In part one of our discussion on spoilers we looked at whether they were all bad, and in part two we dived deeper to investigate the nature of different potential spoilers. Finally we reach the end of our journey which looks back to the 70s, takes in a tour of movie trailers and historical disasters, before touching on how long a 'spoiler' lasts for and finally getting around to drawing some conclusions...

Andrew: So have you had any examples of where you've deliberately sought to puncture the suspense of something that you are actually intending on seeing? The only thing I can remember off hand is an old season of NCIS which ended with a cliffhanger in which a key character appeared to resign and leave for good. They were so important to the success of the show that frankly if they had exited then that would have been it for me, and I wanted to know sooner rather than later whether the actor was quitting the show so that I wouldn't waste any more time or effort on it in the meantime. (To be honest, it was a pretty lame cliffhanger in any case so it didn't feel like spoiling something so much as it was just taking care of an irritation!)

John: The Best of Both Worlds Pt I intimated a new direction for the Star Trek franchise with a psychologically damaged Captain at the helm, which was never properly explored until the movie First Contact.

Andrew: Have you ever had a situation where you've accidentally 'spoilered' yourself by thinking about a show too hard? I remember watching and rewatching the cliffhanger to the first season of The West Wing in which there's an attempt to assassinate President Bartlet, trying to work out who might have been hit and what was going to happen next. Unfortunately it was too well directed and that analysis offered up nothing, so I had to wait for the next season to come along like a good boy after all!

But I also remember getting equally obsessed with an early episode of Twin Peaks which featured a nightmarish dream sequence in which we first meet 'Killer Bob', and there are some typically Lynchian oblique clues in the visuals and dialogue as to who killed Laura Palmer. Again, I watched and rewatched this sequence intently and even wrote out all the dialogue in an attempt to figure it out; eventually something happened a couple of episodes later than seemed to chime in with what I thought I'd figured out, and I was convinced I knew whodunit. And although I had to wait the better part of a year for the big reveal, it turned out I was right! There was a great sense of "Aha!" when that happened but I wonder if I managed to spoil the moment for myself thanks to my certainty, so perhaps all I really achieved with it all was to be a rather smug smart arse!

John: One's enjoyment of film or television can cease under the microscope of hyper-analysis. Twin Peaks is a prime example! As previously mentioned, exhaustive debates with college peers, combined with academic deconstruction, culminated in an anticlimax. This in no way diminishes the series' profound impact on television leading to our beloved The X-Files. The soap noir genre is here to stay as evidenced by the rise of Nordic Noir and its English-language remakes.

Andrew: The ripple effect of the Nordic Noir dramas is just astounding, isn't it? I had no idea when I settled down to watch the first bought-in Swedish episodes of Wallander on BBC4 back in November 2008 that it would end up with such an explosive effect across the TV industry, not only here but in the US as well. Happily, my enjoyment of the various Scandi-dramas has never been affected by unwanted spoilerage.

John: Note to self: add Forbrydelsen to Netflix's My List.

Andrew: Excellent, my work here is nearly done in that case!

To come back to your point about Twin Peaks though, I'd have to say that despite my own successful hyper-analysis in this case the show was never ruined for me. In fact once again I rather think it was enhanced in this case - that simply gave me some "skin in the game" as the Americans put it. And I never found the show an anti-climax at all because it was so rich in so many other ways.

John: It may appear I've given the seminal series short thrift! However, it's more to do with Twin Peaks being mined by college tutors and fickle teenage sensibilities. Plus, I was still smarting from Doctor Who's cancellation.

Andrew: I confess I'd already bailed on Doctor Who by that point - the Colin Baker years had convinced me the show was in terminal decline. Wasn't till years later that I discovered it was actually going through a strong renaissance under McCoy when it was finally axed. But, I digress from the subject in hand...

Possibly the only time I'm truly disappointed is when a show or a film is just too simplistic and you can see through it without even trying. Maybe that's why I so took against The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug because it seemed that every plot point in the script was so mechanically obvious to anyone paying attention. I also get annoyed by shows that give away whodunit simply on the basis of casting ("Well, they wouldn't have cast a star name in a small walk-on part, now would they?") and films which blow everything in their trailer. I can forgive everything it seems except self-harming spoilerage by show/filmmakers and their PR departments.

John: Clearly they haven't paid attention to Hitchcock's Psycho. Ridley Scott did and setup Alien to suggest the would-be hero only to see characters killed off without remorse. I wonder what audiences would have made of Scott's original ending? Ripley beheaded and her voice emanating from the triumphant xenomorph.

Andrew: Yikes! I'd not heard that before. That's just a bit too dark, I reckon - I'm relieved Scott went the way he eventually did with it.

John: Trailers should serve as a tease and not a greatest hits package. The first teaser trailer for the new Star Wars movie will be greeted with a zeal reserved for a premiere and I hope it'll be as enigmatic as JJ Abrams' Star Trek and Super 8.

Andrew: I completely agree. And it's usually a clueless PR department at fault; notably, the examples you give of films that have 'done it right' come from directors with sufficient industry clout (Scott, Spielberg, Abrams) to also have control how their film is marketed. Unfortunately most directors are 'hired guns' without that same sort of authority over the whole product.

John: Have you ever avoided comic book adaptations? A primary school friend lent me a copy of Marvel's Star Wars novel, but I waited until I'd seen the movie before reading it from cover to cover. Even at the age of five, I was mindful of spoilers (especially around Christmas).

Andrew: I certainly remember having that Marvel adaptation of the first Star Wars film. In the days before in-home VCRs and video stores it was one of the few ways of being able to relive a film after seeing it in the cinema; I also had The Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture comic book versions too. However if memory serves, I think Marvel's version of Star Wars (like the Alan Dean Foster novelisation) was based on an earlier draft of the script and therefore had significant differences from the finished film that greatly irked me at the time, perfectionist about such things as I was. Now of course I see such discrepancies as Easter eggs.

John: It was rewarding to discover Easter eggs in the pages of a novelisation! Alan Dean Foster's Alien tie-in contained a scene in which Ash appears to communicate with the titular creature. Always wondered if it was shot and ended up on the cutting room floor? Ripley's discovery of the 'Dallas cocoon', detailed in Foster's prose, was restored in the director's cut.

Andrew: I was a very well behaved young lad and respected the '18' age certificate on Alien and so didn't read the book or see the film until years later. In fact I think I saw the sequel Aliens first at a university film club before finally seeing the original, since this was in the very early days of films being made available via video rentals and before films were rushed onto TV.

John: Thanks to an awesome mum; I watched Aliens on rental video; suffered from nightmares for weeks.

Andrew: I'm not surprised! Although for me it's the original that's still the most nightmarish of the franchise.

In the case of Star Wars, I'm pretty sure I only got the Marvel adaptation and the novelisation after seeing the film in the cinema. I don't think it would have occurred to me to 'read ahead' and I'm not sure it would have made a great sense to me at that age if I had read them before seeing the film; you really needed to have the movie in your mind's eye and know the characters first, surely? All that is something I miss about the modern day: you no longer get comic book versions produced or even film novelisations written, because the DVD will be along in three months anyway so why bother? Feels like something has been lost from the magic of it all.

John: Absolutely! Apps are a charmless substitute for the tactile experience of printed ephemera. I'm reminded of a giant poster of the "Space Jockey" from Alien adorning my childhood bedroom wall and being blissfully unaware of the nightmare cargo aboard the derelict spacecraft. What fun!

Andrew: Nightmare cargo - definitely not Easter eggs in this case!

John: Were the dramatic events in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. lessened by not seeing Captain America: The Winter Soldier? The latter reignited my interest in a television series that quickly waned and then delivered a phenomenal payoff due to paradigm-shifting events in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. S2 could see the series uttered in the same breath as Arrow and Game of Thrones.

Andrew: I'd actually stuck with the show throughout the first season, and thought the story evolved naturally within its own context. I was aware that some events weren't being fully explained and it was clear that they had been happening elsewhere 'off-stage' as it were, but since I knew upfront that there was a close tie-in with Captain America: The Winter Soldier I wasn't surprised or too perturbed by it. However I might not be a typical 'test case' in this instance, because a lot of the potential holes in the story were plugged by my having been a big fan of the S.H.I.E.L.D. and Captain America comics when I was a kid so I was already well up on the new enemies. Hail Hydra!

But does that mean I managed to be spoilered by 40-year-old comic books?! Considering we started off from the position of thinking that it was the Internet and social media that made avoiding spoilers so difficult today, it seems that we're doing a good job of reminding ourselves what a minefield of spoilerage we had to navigate even as children of the pre-World Wide Web 70s!

John: We've reached an epiphany as we near the end of this journey! Is there going to be one final twist to this tale?

Andrew: Okay, I'll give it a go. One last question on the subject: what's the lifespan of a spoiler anyway? When is a spoiler no longer a spoiler, in other words? It's a consideration I come up with often when writing Take The Short View reviews of classic films, where I nonetheless do everything I can not to divulge too much of the movie's plot.

Game of Thrones has come up a lot in this conversation, so I'll use it again here: presumably the events of the Purple Wedding are still too new to give away without posting spoiler warnings, yes? But what about the Red Wedding - is that still a spoiler? Or going even further back, what happens in season one with Eddard Stark? I've said already that I don't personally expect people to keep schtum about something that aired three years ago just on the off chance that someone hasn't got around to the box set yet, but it's still a massive twist to give away - just as your friend's dad inadvertently did with you for Jacob's Ladder despite that film being a "too old for spoilers" 20-plus years old.

John: This can (and does) prevent any form of substantive discourse pertaining to a series such as Game of Thrones, which is unrealistic. I mean, one can only go so far with "It's such an awesome show…". We discussed this very issue, at length, within the context of binge-viewing entire series on Netflix in A brave new (media) world.

Andrew: Yes, I think that with a long-running TV show it's impossible, if not downright ridiculous, to think one mustn't cover anything that happens after the first half hour of the pilot episode. And increasingly that's becoming true of films too where they're part of a long-running series that rely on the events of the film before. It's surely impossible for someone to review Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows without talking about the "unfortunate event" at the end of The Half Blood Prince for example, or tackle any of the Star Wars prequels without referencing Darth Vader's shock reveal in The Empire Strikes Back.

But what about stand-alone single movies? Maybe the rules are different there. When does the moratorium of keeping a film's secrets expire in this case? Should we still respect the surprise shocks of The Usual Suspects or The Sixth Sense? The fate of Marion Crane and the murderer in Psycho? Or just what 'Rosebud' means in Citizen Kane?

John: The spoilers in and of themselves may be enough to provoke someone's curiosity as we've discussed. I knew the outcome of Alien, but that didn't dilute the movie's shock factor. I say that and still delight in the memory of introducing unsuspecting relatives to John Carpenter's The Thing during a fright season: BOOM!

Andrew: Knowing some of the scenes in that film that you're knowingly subjecting them to for your personal entertainment, I have to say you are one cruel, sick and twisted man, Mr Hood! I know there was some reason I liked you!

John: Too kind.

Andrew: Heh! I was thinking about this because of another incidence in Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's BBC 5 Live review show where they reviewed Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and The Great Gatsby. The former story is over 400 years old and the latter nearly 90, they're both widely read and have inspired many adaptations - and yet Kermode and Mayo got complaints from listeners for giving away what happens in the end! Even though surely everyone at least already knows that Romeo and Juliet die in the end?! (Ooops.)

Were those complaints fair? Should we never consider something to be out of spoiler range? Or perhaps each new version of a story generates its own new 'spoiler-free zone' that perpetuates/regenerates that of the original for a further period?

John: Didn't something similar happen with James Cameron's Titanic? Sigh.

Andrew: I'm not sure there was ever a serious "Don't spoil me by telling me what happens" backlash against Titanic, it was more the standard smart arse response of people quipping "I don't need to see that because I know the ship sinks in the end." Of course the point was never that the ship sinks per se, it's which of the (fictional) characters lived or died - although I have to say that with its modern day framing sequence it pretty much gave that away in the first ten minutes all by itself. But once again, it was never really about the end of the film so much it was about the journey of getting there. Teen girls wanted to spend three hours in the company of Leonardo di Caprio (and I confess I wasn't entirely averse to hanging out with Kate Winslet for the duration) but for me as an avid student of the Titanic story from years back it was just the prospect of finally getting to be 'on board' the great, doomed liner that got me to the box office.

John: Good thing there wasn't a sequel!

Andrew: And why ever not - they could have remade Lord Lew Grade's lost gem, Raise The Titanic!

John: An excellent excuse for James Cameron to pursue his love of deep sea exploration. Not that he needs any encouragement from me.

Andrew: No, when it comes to famous real life events then I don't think a gaping hole in one's general knowledge is ever sufficient to cry "Spoiler!" when someone educates you about it. In most cases such events are knowingly used by filmmakers as narrative shortcuts precisely because they assume everyone knows them: when the Titanic crashes through the Tardis wall at the end of "Last of the Time Lords" we're supposed to immediately know the significance of the name, and probably meant to assume that the Tardis itself is the iceberg that sinks her. That's the whole joy of that brief sequence after all. Similarly when the 'next episode' caption slams in at the end of "A Good Man Goes to War" we absolutely have to know who the 'Hitler' referred to is - it's the very reason it's a laugh out loud moment. These simply can't be spoilers.

So you go and see Titanic knowing that the ship sinks, or that the airship blows up at the end of The Hindenberg. Audiences going to see Oliver Stone's JFK would have been completely assumed to know who JFK was and what happened to him. These are basic bits of knowledge. And that extends to fictional subjects as well: whoever went to see The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake or The Towering Inferno without knowing they were going to see a disaster film and that the ship flips/Los Angeles crumbles/the building burns? Only the most hardline of purists could surely argue otherwise.

John: A movie entitled Moon isn't inherently spoiled for being set, literally, on the moon.

Andrew: Indeed, although there's all sorts of things in that terrific movie that you really wouldn't appreciate knowing before seeing it.

It really is quite hard to work out what is and is not supposed to be a spoiler in any given case, isn't it? There has to be a basic knowledge about what you're going to see or else you wouldn't be watching in the first place. But that doesn't always hold: given that the early part of Jaws is all about a conflict over whether there is or is not a great white shark in the waters off Amity Island, isn't it a spoiler to give it away by referring to it as a 'shark movie'?

Ye gods, this stuff gets complicated when you start really thinking about it, doesn't it? Should we just shut up about anything that's even possibly a spoiler, or else be more laid back and relaxed and know that spoilers will happen and not get too worked about them?

John: Tantamount to Alice in Wonderland and falling down the rabbit hole.

Andrew: Actually that gives rise to a follow-up final final question after all: whose responsibility is it to avoid spoilers? Is it the person talking (or writing, etc.) or is the burden on the person who doesn't want to know to avoid them?

John: "The circle is complete," to quote Darth Vader. Subjectively, I abstain from major spoilers in reviews for Generation Star Wars in hopes it'll evoke a sense of wonder and discovery if the reader decides to see the movie, television series or play the game. Ultimately, the onus is on the individual.

Andrew: Yes, I am very much of the same mind. If I do find the need to stray into things that I think are spoilers in the course of the discussion then I'l l endeavour to post a clear spoiler warning at the top and often even during the text just before it appears.

But at the same time, like you I'm firmly of the view that the onus is on the reader to avoid reading things that might reasonably contain spoilers. If someone reads a review about a show/film that they haven't yet seen then they're pretty much asking to fall over information that they don't want to know so they have to be very careful about the sources that they trust not to do this. Hopefully both Taking The Short View and Generation Star Wars are among that group of review/news sites that earn that trust so that people who want to answer the basic question "Should I go and see this?" can get some sort of an answer without having it ruined for them in the process, but as we've already said what counts as one person's spoiler might not occur as one to another - no one's infallible. And at the same time, I don't blame those reviewers that do a 'warts and all' review that tells every detail - you just have to know to stay away from such reviews until it's safe to do so.

Which brings me to Twitter and the number of times I see people talking about a film, TV show or sporting event and saying "Oh, don't post a tweet saying what happens/what the result is! Don't spoil it for me!" Which is just rather exasperating, that people think the whole of Twitter is going to stop talking about something purely on their account. Twitter is very much a live, 'of the moment' platform and if anyone wants to avoid spoilers then they need to stay off it for the duration or else try using some of the new 'mute' tools that are around - unless they're very confident that the people they are following can be trusted to their timeline free from spoilage for an arbitrary length of time. (Tip: it won't happen.) Personally I'd rather keep my access to Twitter open. If there's something that I think might be a spoiler then I'll try to avert my eyes and skip over it, but occasionally accidents do happen (as I said, I found out the twist in "The Lion and the Rose" about five minutes after the episode aired in the UK) and that's just a fact of life. It's either learning to cope with spoilers or else sealing yourself in the world's most anti-social plastic bubble for the rest of one's life.

John: Twitter recently added a 'mute' option to its mobile app.

Andrew: I haven't used it yet, but the iOS Twitter client I use (Echofon) has had a similar feature for ages.

I do have some sympathy for people tripping over 'out of the blue' spoilers though, where someone is talking or writing about something completely unrelated and without warning they throw in a spoiler for something else. "I cut my finger and it was like the shower scene in Psycho where X slashes Y, blood everywhere!" would be a top-of-the-head example. And mean-spirited intentional spoilers rile me as much as the next person - such as people who bounded out of The Sixth Sense at the cinema and reportedly went down the line of people waiting for the next showing shouting the big twist at them.

John: Really? Thankfully never experienced that at the cinema. My worst cinema going experience to date was at a premiere of The Phantom Menace! Not so much Jar Jar Binks, but an intoxicated audience member who took it upon themselves to loudly read out the opening crawl and continued to comment until a member of staff expelled them (to applause). However, the cinema chain was unable to give us free tickets to see The Phantom Menace a second time due to the distributor's money-grabbing stipulations.

Andrew: These examples aside, though, for me it's mostly a case of 'buyer beware' when it comes to spoilers. And I absolutely apply that to myself as well: when I stumbled across that spoiler for "The Lion and the Rose" I wasn't angry with the person who posted it, just annoyed with myself for putting myself in that exposed position in the first place.

John: Agreed, unless they write for The Culture section of The Sunday Times.

Andrew: So I guess we've reached the end of our travels through spoilerdom. And what are our conclusions, I wonder?

For me it's that spoilers are a fact of life, and unless you're going to take some pretty extreme anti-social measures to avoid them it's better just to chill out and relax, and simply see it as an alternate way of experiencing the show/book/film/sporting event - and not even necessarily an inferior or 'spoiled' way of doing so, just different. I'm not one for seeking out spoilers, but only because so many find their way to my door unbidden as it is without going looking for more. I try and avoid them but then embrace spoilers when they (inevitably) happen as adding more to the experience than they detract.

And all that said: I'd still reserve a special circle in hell for any fiend who wantonly sets about ruining other people's enjoyment by intentionally telling them things they'd rather not know. Accidents and unintentional slips are one thing, but actually doing it on purpose is another matter entirely.

What about yourself, John?

John: Spoilers aren't the end of the world by any means are they? I've yet to encounter a spoiler that culminated in curtailing my enjoyment; especially if the media in question is open to interpretation such as Inception or BioShock Infinite.

This may be the perfect juncture to finish and post something speculative regarding Star Wars: Episode VII on a spoiler forum… Oh, hold on!

Andrew: Heh! Let's be careful out there, everyone.

"Spoilers, Sweetie!" (Part 2 of 3)

Do spoilers spoil or do teasers tantalise?

Our spoiler-filled discussion between Generation Star Wars' John Hood and Taking The Short View's Andrew Lewin continues...

In the first part of our discussion posted last week, we started looking into the phenomena of the spoiler and asked whether it was all bad or whether there could be an upside to it? We continue our ruminations further this week, and wonder whether falling foul of spoilers actually stops us from watching programmes; which current shows are the most spoilered; whether a whodunit is automatically ruined by knowing the guilty party; and the question of whether novels are turning into spoilers for the TV and film adaptations made from them?

John: Have spoilers stopped you watching a movie or beloved series? The controversial conclusion to Lost spread across the social media space like wildfire. I never felt compelled to watch the final season! Incidentally, I originally joined Twitter solely to discuss Lost with fellow fans.

Andrew: For me the equivalent would be The X-Files on a CompuServe forum which was one of the reasons I got online in the first place.. You never forget your first shared Internet fan obsession!

John: Halcyon memories.

Andrew: And like you, I never did get to see the end of Lost either - Sky fell out with Virgin Media and pulled their channels from the cable platform mid-season so that was it for me. But in any case, I was never as into it as many people and actually found it more irritating than intriguing to be honest. I've never felt inclined to go back and finish it off. I've heard the gist of the way it finished if not the details, but it doesn't make much difference to me.

The only scenario I can think of where a spoiler might stop me from watching something would be if the entire thing hung on a single reveal - whodunits being the most obvious example. Would I still want to see Se7en even knowing who John Doe and his last victim are? Or see all of Twin Peaks if I knew from the start who killed Laura Palmer? Or sit through 23 episodes of Murder One if I already knew who killed Jessica Costello? Or 20 episodes of Forbrydelsen (the original Danish version of The Killing) if the identity of Nanna Birk Larsen's killer was known at the outset? Or even eight episodes of Broadchurch if I knew for certain who the killer of Danny Latimer was from the first scene?

Actually ... I probably would. After all, I'll happily rewatch various adaptations of Agatha Christie stories such as Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None and Death on the Nile despite knowing every last intricacy of the plots. Even with whodunits - the good ones, anyway - it's never just the end result or the final reveal that makes or breaks the show but rather the richness of the journey in getting to that point. All of the above examples bear repeated viewings even if you know the outcome.

John: The journey is often more interesting than the destination. Alas, George Lucas struggled with the Star Wars prequels until the last moments of Revenge of the Sith.

Andrew: Yeah, there's a reason why fans have watched the original trilogy dozens of time apiece, but it's hard to find anyone doing the same for the prequels. The films are just too thin, and as a whole rely on a specific plot point (about Anakin) that can't be considered a spoiler exactly, but which might as well be in that it makes the path of the three films depressingly obvious from the get-go.

The aforementioned Oblivion is another example: it relies so much on one central twist - and works its way too slowly to this revelation. On first unspoiled viewing it's quite suspenseful, but if you know where it's going then the film is just dull. Lots of pretty production design, FX and Icelandic locations to admire, but not enough substance to the story. It seems to me to be a film that has very little rematch value once you know that key plot point, whereas by contrast Duncan Jones' Moon also relies on a big twist but the story it tells around that is rewarding enough that I can watch it again and again regardless.

John: Oblivion evoked the stark conceptual look and feel of 2001: A Space Odyssey and an Apple Store, which is OK in my Bauhaus-admiring book. Moon is a love letter to fans of 1970s sci-fi and I'll never tire of it.

You may recall I started watching Twin Peaks, again. Soon stopped in favour of The Good Wife and a self-curated Star Trek: The Next Generation 'best of' season on Netflix.

Andrew: I have to confess that I'd missed the fact you had been getting back into Twin Peaks! That show is from the pre-Internet days of course - that would have been a Twitter storm if it had come along today! Did you stop watching because it didn't live up to your memories? Or because you knew the whodunnit?

John: Twin Peaks was the subject of exhaustive academic analysis in college. Fatigue quickly set in despite the allure of teen crushes Mädchen Amick and Sherilyn Fenn.

Andrew: Granted it dipped after the reveal of who killed Laura Palmer (something forced on the show by the networks as I recall) but it had just got on the road back with the secret of the Black Lodge when it was sadly cancelled.

John: Perhaps Twin Peaks is ripe for a reboot? At this juncture I urge readers to see Remakes and reboots: is Hollywood in decline?

Andrew: Don't even tempt fate by mentioning a Twin Peaks reboot - that would be sacrilege without David Lynch. And anyway, the studios and networks are too busy looking into a whole new cinematic reboot for Battlestar Galactica and even talking about reviving Lost as a TV series, simply on the grounds that some fans are still miffed by the way both series ended.

John: Isn't Bryan Singer directing a big screen Battlestar Galactica reboot? Guess he's too busy back at the helm of the X-Men franchise.

Andrew: I guess this is getting beyond the question of spoilers: we're now straying into talking about "is this a film/show that bears repeated viewings?" If it does then no spoiler is going to ruin it; if it doesn't then we're just dealing with a not terribly good film/show in the first case and hardly worth worrying about spoilers.

So which are the current shows that you've found to be the most spoiler-tastic?

John: Looks like social media is awash with Game of Thrones spoilers and heated arguments therein. Mondays may witness a self-imposed social media blackout until after the broadcast of new episodes on Sky Atlantic.

Andrew: It took me about five minutes after "The Lion and the Rose" aired in the UK before I accidentally fell over a spoiler on Twitter. Ahh well, it was always going to happen so I'm trying not to worry about it too much. Whereas the show that I really would hate to find out too much about is True Detective, another series that my cable provider doesn't carry and which I therefore had to keep myself in the dark about it as much as possible until the DVD/Blu-ray was released.

John: True Detective boasts some of the most memorable dialogue it's been my pleasure to hear. Ever.

Andrew: I am so looking forward to seeing (and hearing!) that.

Doctor Who is always ripe for spoilers too, especially last year for the 50th anniversary shows, but not so much as of time or writing while it's off-air - although purists will hate the location filming photos that inevitably leak out. Recently there was one of Peter Capaldi and Da Vinci's Demons Tom Riley and it seemed very clear from the costume what role the latter is to play, which is actually a rather sizeable spoiler.

Other than those, have you noticed any other shows where you're constantly in danger of spoilers rearing up on you unexpectedly on social media?

John: The Good Wife and Mad Men! I'm binge-viewing both in the hopes of catching up before new series start in earnest. Rendered moot if friends are zealously tweeting prior to international broadcast.

Perhaps Sky's simulcast strategy is the way forward with Game of Thrones and 24: Live Another Day? Of course Netflix got there first with House of Cards on a much grander scale.

Movie soundtracks are replete with spoilers too. "Ben Kenobi's Death" and "Qui-Gon's Noble End" from the Star Wars saga are unambiguous. Just imagine "Han Solo's Last Stand" on the track listing for Episode VII...

Andrew: Yes, I remember that Phantom Menace faux pas: revealing a key plot twist via the album soundtrack listing which was out some time before the film itself was in cinemas. What an amazing goof by the companies involved.

The simulcast approach is certainly one way of preventing transatlantic spoilers (although I think that the real driver in this case was cutting down on torrent piracy by people impatient to see the latest episodes!) Unfortunately only works if you have access to the TV channel in question and sadly in the case of Game of Thrones and Mad Men being on Sky Atlantic, that's not the case for me; and I certainly wouldn't expect people who've seen the latest shows that way to not talk about it for months just so that I can catch up, so some spoilerage is inevitable. Even so, I was shocked to see a Radio Times 'today's highlights' piece for the week after Game of Thrones' Purple Wedding reveal that episode's shock ending in its very first line without any warning. People really are getting very slack about this sort of thing I can't help but think.

What with different countries airing episodes on different schedules, and now people binge-viewing box sets to their own schedules rather than the networks, it's becoming harder than ever to avoid key spoilers. Especially with on-demand streaming services now doing original programming with shows such as House of Cards on Netflix. Did you manage to avoid all the annoying advance tidbits with that one?

John: Yes, I managed to avoid serious spoilers in House of Cards S2 and the shock ending in Game of Thrones "The Lion and the Rose", which was miraculous. Talking torrents. Game of Thrones is by far and away the most pirated series in history.

Andrew: And yet the season 3 box set had also just become the UK's biggest-selling DVD/Blu-ray release in the last decade so far, showing that pirating doesn't seem to do all that much harm at the end of the day - at least in this case. All the more remarkable given the decline in sales of physical media in recent times.

John: There's still some life left in those silver platters despite Sony citing a flagging interest in the format.

The Sunday Times Culture review section has been known to include major plot spoilers. Entertainment Weekly is much more proficient in issuing reasonable warnings. Kudos to the editorial department.

Andrew: That's interesting - I wonder if there's a difference between the US and UK approach to spoilers? Are US publications inclined to be more circumspect about such things then? Is mainstream media in the UK just more casual or careless about letting key bits of information slip out, I wonder? Of course, specialist publications really need to be careful where they step: a magazine that divulges a spoiler to an avid fan audience without due warning is likely to pay very heavily in terms of the sort of backlash that only the most obsessive fanatics are capable of!

John: Not cool!

Andrew: I'm wondering whether that's anything to do with the historic difference in how things used to be broadcast: whether the UK publications and indeed audiences have simply grown used to details from US TV having largely leaked out by the time they air here? That might be changing with the increased use of simulcast, though. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure the first example of a show being near-simulcast that I can recall would be the Dallas episode that revealed who shot JR. The TV cameras were at Heathrow to film the arrival of the courier bringing the cans of film through customs, such was the frenzy to know!

John: Discussed Dallas over the Easter weekend when the subject of spoilers was raised by a cousin. They were intrigued by a pre-social media era. A world sans spoilers is an alien concept, broadly speaking. I'd argue a less fun one at that.

Andrew: Was it all that different? I remember everyone talking for months about the "Who Shot JR?" cliffhanger and speculating who it was, scouring the newspapers for any leaks. A different type of 'social' perhaps but not really all that far removed. We just have better tools to do it now!

Of course these days, Game of Thrones' 2am simulcast on Sky Atlantic will doubtless be achieved by the episode being transmitted digitally via satellite - takes some of the romance out of hauling film canisters through the airport arrivals lounge! But at least it keeps the secret intact ... although of course in the case of the Purple Wedding, the spoiler was already right there all along in George RR Martin's third book A Storm of Swords, so presumably a lot of people knew it was coming anyway. Does the book count as a spoiler in this case? It was published back in 2000 so it's hardly 'breaking news' in any objective sense. It would have been different if this had been a point on which the books and TV series diverged (which has since happened, but had previously been the case only in minor details.)

John: An interesting point. I've kept clear of source material when enthralled by a film or TV adaptation. For example The Hunger Games.

Andrew: I read The Hunger Games after picking up on the buzz for it as an e-book, not realising that it was about to become a film - the novel is very good, incidentally. And I also made a point of reading each instalment of The Lord of the Rings just before the Peter Jackson film of each part was released. It never occurred to me at the time that this was effectively exposing myself to "spoilers"; I just knew if I didn't read the books before seeing the film, I never would afterwards so it was a "now or never" moment.

John: Read portions of The Lord of the Rings in childhood, but am more familiar with Brian Sibley's wonderful adaptation for BBC Radio Four. An audio drama touchstone and inspired me to work as a foley artist at Radio Four; where I worked with Sir Christopher Lee (Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings).

Andrew: Oooh, that's a very cool tidbit!

I guess I always had the feeling that the LOTR films were first and foremost for people who already knew their Tolkien and that one's appreciation of the movies rested largely on familiarity with the source material in the first place. Moving on to another hugely successful 21st century franchise, I certainly feel that people are better off if they've read JK Rowling's books before seeing the Harry Potter films simply because of all the extra background details that can't be properly conveyed on film. As my recent marathon watch of all eight Potter films revealed, there are some sizeable plot holes in the movies that result from the screenplays abbreviating or skipping over crucial story points from the books.

And of course, mentioning Potter recalls one of the more amusing "spoiler" stories: Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo doing their utmost to not divulge the ending of The Half Blood Prince and going so far as to dub it "the unfortunate event" so as not to spoil it for people heading off to the cinema. I still chuckle when I hear the phrase. And were there really that many people seeing the film who wouldn't have known the shock development in advance?

John: For one reason or another I never got around to reading the books. Incidentally, Harry Potter prequel The Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is set to become a big screen trilogy at Warners Bros.

Andrew: Trilogy? Pah! Don't let Peter Jackson know or he'll be able to spin the book out into a seven-movie franchise without breaking a sweat...

John: Am I sensing consumer resistance?

Andrew: More like Hobbit fatigue.

John: LOL

Andrew: I read the first four Potter books before seeing the respective movies, but then stopped. Which I think was probably a mistake, because my recent Potter-thon made me realise just how unclear or how much stuff the movies had been forced to leave out, and how that affected the understanding of the plot. I had to go back and re-watch one of the films (the first half of The Deathly Hallows) because without the book, it didn't actually make a lot of sense. In the end I started reading the novels I hadn't got around to before, and realised just how much more there was to them than had been transferred to the movies, and how much that additional knowledge added to the enjoyment of watching the films. So are the novels spoilers in this case ... or prerequisite knowledge?

I have a similar sense when it comes to Game of Thrones because the world of Westeros that George RR Martin creates in the books is so rich, deep and detailed that no TV show can possibly hope to incorporate it all into a fast-moving visual medium. I think the producers and writers do a phenomenal job with it, mind, but it still leaves me wondering: would it be better to read the books in advance of the series, or better not to? The novels would spoil the shock twists coming up in future, but would the episodes as a whole be more enjoyable for it?

And that leads to a different question: what should the makers of new films and shows do if they are adapting stories from other sources? Should they play on that expectation that a sizeable audience will know the story and adjust it so as to create something that isn't 'pre-spoiled' by anyone's possible knowledge of the source? I'm reminded of the US version of The Killing which changed the ending because they didn't want anyone going online and finding out who the killer was in the Danish version. And I believe the US version of Broadchurch (Gracepoint) is also going to have a different resolution, which astounds me because the outcome of that is no 'plug-in and play' separate component but is absolutely woven into the very nature of the entire series. But the net result is that I now want to watch Gracepoint to see what they do with it and how well it works, whereas I would probably have been indifferent to a straightforward remake.

John: The US version of The Killing has garnered its own cult following, and Netflix has bankrolled a final 6 episodes to wrap things up after the series was cancelled, twice.

Andrew: I'm glad it found its audience, I thought the US version was a better show than it was given credit for at the time. Not sure the change in ending made a huge difference and in fact the more it strayed away from the Danish original, the more trouble it seemed to get itself into and the less satisfying it felt. Sometimes change for its own sake isn't a great strategy.

So do new adaptations have a duty to stay faithful to the source's main plot points? Or does the need for the new version to avoid 'spoilers' take precedence?

John: Game of Thrones isn't averse to diverging from the source material, which is laudable. This was evidenced in the final minutes of "Oathkeeper", surprising everyone. I squealed with delight.

Andrew: Yes, that does seem to be the first big departure from the books for the TV show; although that said, George RR Martin and the show's producers seem to be working together so closely it's hard to believe this isn't entirely consistent with Martin's vision for the as-yet-unwritten entries in the canon. I guess it could muddy the waters somewhat - do the books still count as spoilers to the TV show, or is the TV show now becoming a spoiler for the to-be-published novels?!

I also understand that the "whodunit" left hanging after the Purple Wedding is going a slightly different way in the series to the story in the books, from what I've read so far. I confess that after learning that twist, I actually went and looked up two things from the books (about who would be next to inherit the throne; and who did the deed) so this was rather a case of deliberately going out and spoiling myself on these points - not something I often do, but curiosity got the better of me this time.

What about you, any instances where you've just had to know something and gone out and tracked down a spoiler regardless?

John: The Matrix: Revolutions! I had no appetite for the finale of The Matrix trilogy, but wanted to know the conclusion without wading through the film.

Andrew: Heh! While I agree that the Matrix sequels weren't a patch on the originals, I still saw them through to the bitter end and thought they had enough merit to keep watching. Give them another go when you have time - with firmly lowered expectations!

John: If I revisit The Matrix trilogy, I'll let you know.

Andrew: Clearly I'll know it's happening when hell starts to show signs of frost!

But does it even count as a 'spoiler' if you have no intention of seeing the work in question, I wonder? I don't watch any soaps at all any more, but every now and then a storyline will pop up and be all over the tabloids and social media to the point where it will pique my interest sufficiently to go and read up on what everyone's talking about. But I don't see that as spoilers at all, since I have no involvement in the show and no intention of watching it.

Well that's my excuse, anyway - and I'm sticking to it!

Still with us? Then come back for more in seven days time when we wrap up our discussion about spoilers. The third and final part continues to look at cliffhangers, the danger of over-analysing shows and the question of just how long a 'spoiler' remains in effect for. With examples from the likes of The Great Gatsby and Titanic along the way, we finally arrive at some conclusions - so we very much hope that you will join us for that!

Doctor Who: Nightmare of Season 17

This post originally appeared on Cloister Bell in 2012.

While I've been putting an Xbox 360 through its paces and watching classic Doctor Who serials on Netflix, Andrew has expertly deconstructed S17 for your delectation!

My childhood recollection of this season is limited to Daleks crashing through aluminium walls and Julian Glover's unmasking as Scaroth in the spectacular "City of Death"...

Guest post by Andrew Lewin

Season 17 of Doctor Who has to be one of the oddest, most split-personality seasons in the classic show's history. On the one hand it contains one of the best and most beloved serials of all time, which itself also boasts the show's largest-ever episode audience viewing figure (over 16m). And on the other hand, the series contains some of the series worst and laziest disappointments.

By the latter half of 1979, Doctor Who was frankly running on empty and looking tired. Tom Baker was bored and not taking it seriously anymore; producer Graham Williams had done his best in a job that had been foisted upon him against his will two years before, but his heart was no longer in it either. The show had the same theme music, title sequence, star, costume and incidental music that it had used for the last five years: it felt stuck in a time loop. Anyone coming back to test the waters of the show post-Star Wars after five years of not watching - which was pretty much my situation - would have been forgiven for thinking they were watching a period drama rather than a science-fiction show.

That year, the show was also fighting a losing battle against slashed budgets and increasing industrial unrest with the unions. Against this background Williams came up with a cunning plan to try and do the best he could with his shrinking resources: he would split the season into two, with one half being big, impressive tentpole productions and the other half being dross assembled out of whatever sticky-back plastic he could scrape together. It was a genuinely smart plan, and if it had worked then we might be hailing season 17 as one of the best. Unfortunately for Williams, circumstances conspired against him.

His first idea for a 'tentpole' production was the return of the Daleks after a five year absence following the acknowledged classic "Genesis of the Daleks." What could possibly go wrong? It was a sure-fire winner with which to start the season. Unfortunately Dalek creator/writer Terry Nation was just as much in the grip of malaise as the rest of the show and indeed the rest of the country. He turned in a clichéd, charmless script for "Destiny of the Daleks" that lacked any creative imagination but simply fell back on the same tried old tropes that had looked dated even back in the 1960s. Add to that battered Daleks that looked as though they'd been brutalised in five years in a locked props cupboard, charmless new 'arch-rivals" the Movellans, and an actor playing Davros saddled with an ill-fitting mask not even made for him, and you have some idea of how tired and disappointing this sure-fire 'winner' ended up being. In many ways, it perfectly personified the current state of the show as a whole and displayed all the problems facing the production team.

When production on a second 'tentpole' collapsed because of union strike action - "Shada" being perhaps the most mythologised story in all of Who fandom, and well worth getting Gareth Robert's just-released novelisation of Douglas Adams' scripts for this, or better yet getting the audiobook version narrated by series star Lalla Ward - it left "City of Death" as the season's only successful aired prestige serial. And it really is excellent. A star cast (Julian Glover, Catherine Schell, even a cameo from John Cleese) and a truly innovative sci-fi idea (probably Douglas Adams' best TV work of all time) coupled with the show's first foreign location shooting and some great production values and FX. If "Destiny of the Daleks" and "Shada" had been anywhere near this level then series 17 would indeed have been a classic year.

But they weren't, and instead "City of Death" finds itself the sole stand-out in a year otherwise populated by the sacrificial budget-saving time-filling dross of "The Creature from the Pit" and "The Horns of Nimon". Between them, those two stories don't have two decent original science fiction ideas to rub together; but the scripts manage to contain more gaps in logic than there are holes in a string vest. The production values are lamentable (although "Pit" does at least use number 1 tropical forest studio set from the prop store, which at least makes it look better than the dull corridor sets of "Nimon") and the acting is extraordinarily bad from people who should know better (such as veterans Bill Fraser and Graham Crowden, the latter of whom provides one of the most spectacularly dreadful performances of a major guest star of all time. And to think, he was apparently offered the chance to play the fourth Doctor!)

And then there is "Nightmare of Eden", which finally comes to DVD this week - one of the last Tom Baker-era serials to come to the format.

Now it's a funny thing about "Eden", because by rights it falls firmly in the "dross" category. It has the same faults as "Pit" and "Nimon": some dreadfully overcooked acting (Lewis Flander's Tryst would have been too absurd even for 'Allo 'Allo, Geoffrey Hinsliff looks like he's auditioning for his later role in soap spoof Brass, while David Daker still thinks he's playing Irongron from season 11's medieval serial "The Time Warrior"); some laughably bad overlit generic-SF corridor sets; a monster that looks exactly like a man in a fur-lined rubber suit that comes complete with built-in 70s flares; FX that show a total lack of time and budget; sets that literally collapse underfoot but for which there is no time to mount reshoots.

But here's the thing: I can't help rather liking "Nightmare of Eden" for all that. Almost admire it, in fact. It's clearly not one of the production team's favourite sons of 1979, but it at least has the spirit and wits to try and fight on regardless.

For one thing, it presents an unusually overt tale of drug abuse at a time when television (let alone BBC family time TV) was very squeamish about even hinting at such things. There are some interesting science fiction concepts: the CET (Continual Event Transmuter) machine used for recording and transporting samples from explorations; the two ships stuck together phasing in and out of warp drive at the same spot; the secret of the origins of the drug in question. For the only time in series 17 in a non-Adams story, this is a show with more than one creative idea in its head at any given time, and not just that but ideas which actually weave together coherently without leaving vast gaps in the story logic. Despite Baker hamming it up dreadfully to keep his own spirits from flagging, the serial even manages to produce a half-decent sense of pace and danger at times.

I shouldn't like "Nightmare of Eden", then - but I do. I'd go so far as to say that if it hadn't had a spark of life in it, some glimmer that the show didn't have more to offer than the two stories that bookended it to either side, I might not have come back to watch series 18 at all and I would have dropped out of Who fandom for good this time.

Even so, it was clear to everyone involved that something - indeed, pretty much everything - had to change in Doctor Who for 1980. Williams finally got his parole and moved on, and the BBC hierarchy looked for anyone dumb enough or hungry enough to take on the poisoned chalice of one of the Corporation's longest-running shows. They didn't have to look far, and found the man they wanted in the Doctor Who office: production manager John Nathan-Turner. And it turned out he had a few ideas that meant that season 18 would be very different indeed, and season 17 soon became just a distant nightmare tucked away in a CET machine. Or DVD player, as we call it these days.

With over 20 years of working in the media industry, Andrew Lewin is currently a freelance writer, social media consultant and web developer/programmer. He's also a technical specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, information architecture and online communities. Andrew currently writes for motorsports website Crash.net reporting on IndyCar, NASCAR and GP2, and runs a review blog at takingtheshortview.wordpress.com, which reveals a worrying obsession for classic black & white movies, Nordic Noir and all things Doctor Who.

"Spoilers, Sweetie!" (Part 1 of 3)

Do spoilers spoil or do teasers tantalise?

A brand new spoiler-filled discussion between Generation Star Wars' John Hood and Taking the Short View's Andrew Lewin...

The return of Game of Thrones for season 4 has once again made the Internet a minefield for those of us who aren't able to watch the show in real time because of not having the right satellite, cable channel or streaming service to see the show before it makes its way to DVD and Blu-ray in 11 months time. How on earth do we manage to stay pure and spoiler-free for that amount of time without accidentally finding out something devastatingly pertinent in the meantime?

Does finding out about some major plot twist or dramatic event in advance of seeing the show in question end up ruining it beyond repair? Or is it no big deal really and everyone should just get over it? To put it simply: are you a spoilerphobe or a spoilerphile?

Andrew: Since it was mentioned in the introduction, I should confess that I am - as you know - very far behind in my viewing of Game of Thrones. Despite absolutely loving the first season, I've yet to even get cracking on the second box set. While it might be vaguely reasonable to insist that no one spoils the current season now airing on television for at least a few weeks or months, it's clearly ridiculous to expect them not to speak freely of events that happened a year ago or further back still.

As result, even before I watched a single episode of Game of Thrones I knew that the person who was the evident star of the show - Sean Bean playing Eddard Stark - didn't make it to the end of the season without a sudden reduction of about a foot in height. This is, as you can image, a rather huge spoiler - arguably it's the shocking pivotal point of the entire first year. Knowing that, you would think, would irretrievably wreck the viewing experience.

But actually, it really didn't. It certainly changed the viewing experience, I'm sure, and given a free choice then I'd have preferred not to have known in advance, but I'm not sure it did any major damage - party because the key moment came so much earlier than I'd expected, a sudden twist in fortune that still caught me off-guard when it happened. While I knew Stark's ultimate fate in the show I had managed to stop myself from knowing the details of how we got there and that made all the difference, it seems to me. In the same way I know in a general way about events such as Blackwater and the Red Wedding and now the Purple Wedding, but it doesn't impact my eagerness to get to those points in the box sets, or lessen my enjoyment of the show or the effect of those shocks when they happen anyway.

So while I don't tend to seek out spoilers, I also don't fly into a rage when one lands in my lap, and I wouldn't declare the whole show ruined for me for all time if and inevitably when it happens. Does that make me an unusually forgiving and forbearing sort of person, or are you the same?

John: I'm of the same mind, Andrew!

Inadvertent spoilers don't phase me per se, but I try to be discreet in how I disseminate information. For example my enjoyment of Captain America: The Winter Soldier was distilled in a spoiler-free review, which made no reference to the titular character, nor identity. It piqued friends interest in a movie they were otherwise disinterested in. Perhaps Marvel should appoint me to the company's social media division?

I've been guilty of very rare, and unintended, spoilers, myself! The most infamous pertained to the appearance of a 'Red Supreme Dalek' in a teaser trailer for The Stolen Earth. This was at a time when BBC America wasn't showing the series day and date with the UK. Twitter replies lit up, aptly, like the Fourth of July and I hastily apologised. Losing a few followers in the process...

Of course there's an omnipresent issue that friends can post spoilers on perfectly innocuous status updates on Facebook. I've received disgruntled direct messages from friends complaining about this. It's exhausting policing my own timeline for fear someone will reveal to the world that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father. D'oh!

Andrew: Yes, the international aspect of social media these days makes it very difficult to know what is and is not a spoiler in people's minds - what might have been open knowledge in the UK for months might still be a shock waiting to happen in another country, but how can you police that? And should you? And the nature of what constitutes a spoiler is different for people as well: like your incident with the Red Supreme Dalek, I know a number of people who regard even the official 'next week' trailers at the end of shows like Doctor Who as spoilers and have been reprimanded for mentioning something seen in them even though the network/show producers themselves have chosen to reveal it. Once I was angrily rebuked for a contribution to a conversation about who was to replace Matt Smith as the Doctor, since they regarded the international headline news that Smith had officially quit as a 'spoiler' until the very moment itself came for Smith to depart in the TV series. I think it's safe to say that was a bit of a rogue outlier when it comes to spoiler sensitivity, though. At least - I hope so!

John: Way back in 2003 I was banned from a Star Wars forum for suggesting the original Death Star would be seen in Episode III! The fact this was a 'spoiler zone' made it all the more ironic; seemingly the irony was lost on forum members too eager to protest. The Death Star did appear in Revenge of the Sith and I was vindicated!

Andrew: Okay, so maybe my guy wasn't such a rogue outlier in that case! Anyway, like you I don't mind spoilers myself but I am very aware of not wanting to inadvertently spoil something for anyone more sensitive than I am - which can make writing reviews for Taking The Short View really very tricky at times. On the whole I end up saying very little about the plot of a film or show and stick to just a couple of lines about the set-up and then outline the main characters/actors, but it's very rare for me to go into more detail than that because it's instantly spoiler territory as far as someone out there is concerned. For example, I was keenly aware that in the piece I did on Gravity I had to write it in a very specific way so as not to give a major plot twist halfway through that most other reviews seemed to me to have implicitly done.

John: There's an art to crafting reviews that capture the essence of something, whilst preserving enigma and creating a need in the reader to see it. Wish more critics would aspire to that philosophy.

Andrew: I can aspire with the best of them, but everyone slips up now and again. And it's really not easy to pull off sometimes: one review I recall as being particularly difficult in this regard was the one of Oblivion. A good rule of thumb for spoilers is "If it's in the trailer and adverts then it's fair game to talk about it" and that's what I normally go with, but in the case of Oblivion, the PR campaign was disastrous and I felt it seriously harmed a lot of the film by being too explicit: you could accurately predict the final twist from what they divulged. So when I came to writing it up I pretty much only used what was introduced in the first five minutes of the film, and didn't even credit half the cast/characters in the film because simply knowing they existed (let alone who they were or who was playing them) gave too much away. Another problem was that the thrust of the review was about the film being too derivative of a number of other science fiction films, but to start naming these influences too specifically also risked giving away and spoiling the plot twists. What's a reviewer to do in a situation like that with both hands now tied behind their back?

John: Somehow I managed to avoid the major plot twist in Oblivion almost a year after its theatrical release! Bizarre, but true.

Andrew: I remember seeing the trailer in the cinema and on the spot I thought, "Oh, then this means X, Y and Z will happen" - and it did. I think that's why so many people were disappointed when they saw it. Fortunately I didn't watch it until it was out on Blu-ray and by then some of the memories had faded.

Going back to the perils of reviewing without giving things away, there are also definitely times when it's impossible to adequately review something unless you wade headlong into full-blown spoiler territory. That's very much the case with series (film or TV) where events in a new instalment may well hang on the shock reveal from the previous one - your example of Darth Vader's declaration being very much a case in point! Or on a lesser note in the classic Doctor Who serial "Destiny of the Daleks" that I recently reviewed, where I couldn't talk about it without revealing that the story includes a) Daleks, b) Davros and c) robot android adversaries. Key criticisms I needed to make of the serial stem from these points but they're all nominally spoilers. At that point I just have to slap on a spoiler warning and dive in anyway; the fact that the show in question is 35 years old also insulates it from some criticism, hopefully!

John: Mentioning Daleks in the title precludes a shock entrance from Doctor Who's most famous foes. However, it does guarantee eyeballs. That was the brilliance of "Earthshock"! A title that gave nothing away and the return of the Cybermen was all the more memorable for it. Surprise is an elusive commodity in an era of instant gratification.

Andrew: It does make me laugh that there are about a dozen classic Who serials where the big dramatic episode one cliffhanger reveal is the Daleks crashing in, and we're all meant to be shocked - despite having already been told that the title is "... of the Daleks"! By comparison, "Earthshock" had one of the best episode 1 cliffhangers of all time (and indeed, also has the most shocking episode 4 ending as well.) Producer John Nathan-Turner was offered a Radio Times cover by the BBC to promote the return of the Cybermen and he actually refused because he wanted to retain the impact! I know JNT is a divisive figure in fandom but he also did the show a lot of good, and his handling of "Earthshock" is a prime example as far as I'm concerned.

John: JNT has my eternal gratitude for that at least.

Andrew: Of course, no one could hope to retain that sort of shock in this day and age thanks to the all-pervading Internet - or could they? I had certainly managed to completely miss all the spoilers that were apparently swirling ahead of the 2006 story "The Army of Ghosts" and consequently literally fell off my chair when the Daleks suddenly sprang into shot at the climax of what I'd completely assumed was a Cyberman story. I was obviously such a big Classic Who fan that the possibility that the Daleks and Cybermen could ever appear and interact in the same episode was just something my brain had already been pre-programmed not to accept even when all the signs had been there.

John: Shame it descended into a puerile battle between two of the Doctor's most famous adversaries. The televised Dalek vs Cybermen battle had nothing on Junior School playtime! Imagine yours truly as Earthshock-era Cyberleader coldly crushing Dalek casing. Ahem! Please, continue...

Andrew: A bit of a lost opportunity, I agree, but I'm still rather fond of it. And no one does build up quite like Russell T Davies.

Case in point: the show also caught me out in 2008's "The Stolen Earth" when the Doctor is exterminated by a Dalek (them again!) and starts to regenerate. This was at the time when we knew David Tennant was leaving, but no successor had been announced and there was still a year of feature-length specials ahead of us before the handover - or so we thought. The possibility that the show had pulled off the ultimate trick and was about to change its leading man 18 months early and without us having a clue who would be stepping into the part had me yelling delightedly "No ... no .. this can't be happening!" at the screen. Alas in the end it really was just one of Russell T Davies little writing tricks - but so very well played nonetheless.

John: Those so-called specials were anything but.

Andrew: Definitely a mixed bag, but I've revisited a few of them since and they bear up better than I'd remembered.

John: Vivid memory of savagely deconstructing "Planet of the Dead" on Twitter with scriptwriting and directing peeps. However, worth revisiting if only to see actress Michelle Ryan in a post Bionic Woman role! Ryan would have been a brilliant companion.

Andrew: Maybe. Anyway, I think it is still possible for the show to continue to surprise us today: when I sat down to watch the pre-50th anniversary online minisode "The Night of the Doctor" I had absolutely no idea who was starring in it. None at all. All the old stars had publicly said online via social media that they weren't returning and I believed them, so I guess that's an example of how you can game the Internet to send out disinformation to help guard against spoilers. I'm glad they did, because that was a terrific surprise and a total shock.

John: Wasn't that joyous? I literally had goosebumps when [REDACTED]. In the midst of last year's Doctor Who 50th celebration, I was fortunate to attend, with friends, the Official Celebration at ExCel and the inevitable spoilers didn't matter a jot. Especially as most of these emanated from the series' showrunner, Steven Moffat, during Matt Smith's final panel as the Doctor.

Andrew: Okay, before this discussion gets too monopolised by Doctor Who, what are the best things from other films/series that you can recall being surprised and unspoilered by in advance? And how much of a difference would it have made to the experience if you had known before seeing it the first time? To pick up on your mention of it before, I'll cite Vader's revelation in The Empire Strikes Back as one I had no idea was coming and which left my jaw on the floor.

John: Vader's paternal revelation turned everything upside down in the wake of Han Solo's capture by Boba Fett! Was Vader trying to trick young Skywalker into either joining the Dark Side or kill Luke as he pulled himself back across the gantry? I literally feared for Luke's life and didn't give it any credence until the months leading up to Return of the Jedi (enacting potential scenarios with new action figures). Foreknowledge would have dampened proceedings irrespective of any ambiguity therein.

Spock's death at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is another. That scene gets me every time.

I have a habit of trying to decode major plots twists, but Unbreakable alluded me.

How about yourself, Andrew? Has there been a spoiler, which enhanced your enjoyment or even piqued your interest in something you might have otherwise overlooked?

Andrew: I guess the 'spoiler' of knowing in advance about what happens to Sean Bean in Game of Thrones was ironically the thing that made me think, "Oh - maybe this isn't going to be what I thought it was. That sounds interesting, I'm going to give that a try" when previously I'd been dismissing the whole thing as a Lord of the Rings wannabe that I had very little interest in. And of course, now it's my current choice of all-time favourite TV show, so thank goodness for that change of heart!

John: High praise for Game of Thrones and understandable given how deftly the multiple subplots are threaded together! In less assured hands it could so easily unravel and become incomprehensible to even the most ardent fans. Such was the success of Sky Atlantic's promotion for the S4 premiere: NOW TV crashed (mimicking HBO Go in the US) due to a high level of demand during the live stream on Monday evening. Sky quickly compensated affected users (myself included) without any prompting. Commendable, but poses questions regarding the pitfalls of cable-cutting too soon.

Andrew: Yes, people pushing for putting everything online and doing away with broadcast channels have little idea about the reality of the network infrastructure and what it can and can't do. No surprise it was Game of Thrones that keeps exposing the problems - I'm so in awe of that show.

Like you, I have an annoying habit of 'reading' a film and working out the plot twists - even when I'd actually rather not. Unfortunately I'm rather good at it, so therefore any film or TV show that can catch me out and blindside me immediately goes up in my estimation. The trouble is that even knowing that there is a 'twist' in a film almost counts as a spoiler in its own right because then I go in looking for it and more often than not figure it out in advance.

The biggest example would be The Sixth Sense which was hugely promoted on its shock twist: I went to see the film and absolutely nailed it from the very first scene and was then rather bored of watching the mechanics of how it was followed through. Again, it was the trailers headlining the "I see dead people" quote that made it possible - damn publicists! On the other hand, The Usual Suspects is another famous 'shock twist ending' and I confess that I only narrowed it down to about five possible outcomes by the end - one of which was the right one, but that doesn't count! So high marks there for Bryan Singer's first big screen outing.

John: Have a soft spot for M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense! If only for James Newton Howard's haunting evocation of celebrated composers Bernard Herrmann and John Williams.

Andrew: Herrmann being possibly my all-time favourite movie soundtrack composer of all time, too. But that's a subject for another blog post I suspect!

John: A future post on soundtracks! What's not to like?

Andrew: My most profound shock in a cinema has to be David Fincher's Fight Club. I'm not even sure I why I went to see that film - on the face of it, it wasn't my sort of film at all as I'm totally averse to films about fighting and boxing, even classics like Raging Bull. I certainly didn't know there was any twist in it. I spent the first half thinking "This is dreadful, the plot, characters and acting are all over the place" - and then came the revelation ("Ladies and Gentlemen, please return your seats to the full, upright position...") and for a moment I literally felt physically off-balance because it changed absolutely everything I thought I'd known up to that point. I had to go back and see the film again a couple of days later, and it was a totally transformed experience seeing how it really fitted together rather beautifully yet without tipping its hand like most films would have done. As a result, I have to put Fight Club in my all-time top ten movies.

What about you - any others you've seen where you've felt, "I wish I hadn't known X before seeing that"?

John: A friend suggested Jacob's Ladder on rental DVD and the twist was revealed, accidentally, by his dad only minutes into the movie. Wholly unintentional, but there was an awkward silence thereafter.

Andrew: Oh dear! Did he already know what was going to happen in the film, or was it a lucky guess that inadvertently ruined what unfolded?

John: "This is the one where..." Pinter pause. "Yes, dad! John hasn't seen it before."

Andrew: Hard for me to ask "And in what way did knowing this spoil things for you?" when I haven't seen the film myself and don't actually want to know!

John: It would be remiss of me to answer!

Andrew: Sometimes people can just blurt out a guess that happens to be right, or because it's basically obvious. For example, it's pretty easy to say at the start of a film like Titanic that the ship sinks and pretty much everyone dies, or that in Pompeii the volcano is about to get a little active any moment; is that a spoiler? Hardly, no more than "revealing" that Noah features a big flood that wipes everyone out except the people on the ark. If someone blurts that information out at the start of a film then I guess it's enough of a spoiler to really ruin the film for some people, but to be honest they'd have to be pretty clueless about the subject matter if it does.

Actually that raises another question about spoilers: can they actually be a good thing? After all, it's the audience knowing that the boat is going to sink or that the flood's going to wipe out every living thing on earth that drives a lot of the suspense of the film. In fact filmmakers often 'spoiler' what's going on in order to achieve the dramatic effect they're after: Hitchcock always said that the difference between shock and suspense was that the former might feature a bomb suddenly going off, which would leave the audience reeling for maybe ten seconds; but if we know there is a bomb ticking down to zero in little Timmy's hands on a packed bus, the suspense of that knowledge can be stretched out to an unbearable degree over five or ten minutes. Hitch of course was a master of the latter.

John: JJ Abrams is a master of mystery and this will serve him (and Disney) well where events "in a galaxy far, far away..." are concerned. Just imagine if Karen Gillan is cast as a Mara Jade? Oops! There I go again.

Andrew: I've just finished watching reruns of Babylon 5, and what's interesting here is that the writer/creator of the show actively gives away what's going to happen through various means such as the use of time travel, premonitions and 'flash forwards.' And yet in each case, what we think we're seeing is completely turned around by subsequent developments, so by the time we see the scene actually happen in "real time" it's telling a completely different story from the one we thought it was. I guess I should say that Steven Moffat is now the modern master of that art with his timey-wimey, head-scrambling work for Doctor Who which often does the same thing.

It's probably this approach that worked for me on Game of Thrones: although I knew the twist about Sean Bean, I had no idea how exactly it happened, when or why. So in the end it worked perfectly, setting up the anticipation but not giving away so much detail that it ruined the journey. When the moment came, it was fully a whole episode ahead of when I had expected and so I was still open-mouthed and aghast at what was transpiring.

John: Babylon 5! J. Michael Straczynski's ambitious retelling of The Lord of the Rings. Loved the series and imagine how it would look today on HBO sans the spectre of cancellation every season.

Andrew: What a wonderful thought! If only ...

Think that's it? We've hardly scratched the surface of spoilers! Join us next time for the second part of our discussion, in which we wonder whether falling foul of spoilers stops us from watching programmes, which current shows are the most spoilered, and the question of whether novels are spoilers for the TV and film adaptations made from them. Join us then...

NBC reboots Heroes: Heroes Reborn

Remember Heroes? A cult sci-fi series that burned brightly for one season before fading into self-parody and added the phrase "Save the cheerleader, save the world." to the lexicon of pop culture.

Those fine folk at NBC are rebooting Heroes for a 13-part mini series in 2015.

"Shows with that kind of resonance don’t come around often," said NBC Entertainment president Jennifer Salke in a statement, "and we thought it was time for another installment. "Until we get closer to air in 2015, the show will be appropriately shrouded in secrecy, but we won’t rule out the possibility of some of the show’s original cast members popping back in."



Creator Tim Kring is on board for Heroes Reborn, but details are scarce.

Remakes and reboots: is Hollywood in decline?

A sequel discussion between John Hood and Andrew Lewin

After understandably taking a couple of months to lie back and bask in the triumph of our superlative first blogging collaboration "A brave new (media) world".

Taking the Short View's Andrew Lewin and I eventually turned our thoughts to ideas for a suitably epic follow-up topic on which to focus on next. And inevitably, things screeched to a halt as we encountered that perennial 'difficult second album' headache.

Any new topic had to be a subject of suitable importance to be able to follow-up our discussion of the future of media in a digital age, while also being something fresh and different so that it didn't feel like a tired retread of our first offering - but at the same time not be so disconcertingly different from the original post so as to put people off who enjoyed our maiden joint voyage. Not too hot, not too cold: how to find this Goldilocks topic for our efforts? No wonder sequels are so difficult to pull off successfully!

And yet one look at the Box Office Top Ten tells you that it doesn't stop studios from trying sequels. All the time, in fact. These days, reading aloud from the list of film titles sounds more like someone intoning the latest football scores. Almost everything seems to be a sequel or a follow-up or a prequel or a series or a franchise or a reboot or a remake. When something wholly new and original actually does show up in the cinemas it doesn't seem to stand a chance against these marketing behemoths. Can this really be good for creativity or for the long-time health of the industry?

Our discussion about what to do for a sequel blog post had turned into a blog discussion about sequels, and the stars had finally aligned for our new collaboration. We had our topic; now all we needed were a few thousand words and we'd have our follow-up post in the can. How hard can it be possibly be? What could possibly go wrong...?

Andrew: So John: here we are again, and here we go once more. And I suppose the big first question to ask is how you yourself personally feel about sequels, follow-ups, reboots, franchises and the like - are you for or against? Are they a good way of ensuring the audience gets a steady diet of reliable product that they know will keep them entertained? Or are they a succubus inexorably leaching out all the originality and creativity from the film industry in the 21st century?

No pressure, then. Go!

John: Obi-Wan Kenobi's disembodied voice: Use the filmic force, John!

I’m instantly reminded of a sequel discussion during the film class scene in Scream 2! There’s a heated debate suggesting sequels suck - or do they? Ironically, Scream's own post-modern sequel proves the former and fails to reprise the tension of the original movie’s first act. However, there’s much to be said for sequels…

The Empire Strikes Back (my all-time favourite film) brings melodrama and complexity to Lucas’ space opera and Aliens brilliantly reverses Alien and subverts the action genre as an anti-war movie to boot. The latter also kick-started my passion for using video cameras.

Andrew: Indeed, the question of 'are sequels any good' was a perennial discussion when I was young and the same candidates were offered up again and again as proof that they could be albeit in isolated cases: The Empire Strikes Back, Godfather 2 and Bride of Frankenstein were the most oft-cited, and then Aliens when that came along. Seems like we don't have too many new examples to add from the last 25 years of non-stop sequelising, although I'd offer Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Toy Story 2, The Dark Knight and The Bourne Supremacy as candidates for films that successfully improved on or at least equalled an already outstanding first outing.

John: Honourable mention must go to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

**Spoiler alert**

It was the first time I witnessed a beloved fictional character making the ultimate sacrifice on the silver screen. The final scene between Kirk and Spock was elegantly simple and all the more poignant for it. As the credits rolled (tears too) the audience sat in stunned silence and James Horner's score exulted.

Fast forward and it's not unknown for Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy to play back-to-back at the Hood home cinema.

Andrew: The Wrath of Khan occurred to me as well when making that initial list - it's certainly better than The Slow Motion Picture (although I have an odd liking for that flawed maiden outing…) but somehow I don't see the film as a 'sequel' per se but rather as part of a much bigger whole.

John: Sequels were taken verbatim during my formative years. The original Star Wars trilogy casts a long shadow and set my expectations for an ongoing saga.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture failed to engage after the thrilling Klingon battle, which is Star Trek channelling Star Wars (see Star Trek Into Darkness). Anything involving explosions and fast pacing (Mr Rush was my childhood nickname) was enough for my young, pyrotechnically-inclined, mind.

Andrew: Pretty much all young boys of that age are similarly inclined, I think!

John: Between blowing up G.I. Joe action figures and AirFix model kits with fireworks; you'd think I'd be Michael Bay's biggest fan! Incidentally, during a Special FX panel, at the official Doctor Who 50th Celebration, Danny Hargreaves outlined a penchant for 'blowing stuff up' from a young age too. An explosive career ignited by Terminator 2 (T2) and culminating in an exploding Dalek on stage...

Andrew: You can't take that Danny Hargreaves anywhere without something blowing up! Sounds terrific.

John: An audience of 4000 simultaneously jumped as the Skaro mutant met an end worthy of any Hollywood blockbuster.

Andrew: Of course, "Classic Who" was somewhat budget-challenged to say the least and so it was the story rather than the action or FX that made the show great. That's still true today even though the show looks great and can pull off "spectacular" with the best of them, whereas Bay's movies are a prime example of how too many blockbusters these days have reached such an ADHD crescendo that it's drowning out all of those subtle, quiet moments in films that we didn't think we appreciated as kids but actually clearly did - otherwise you and I wouldn't have such a love for something like The Empire Strikes Back as we do.

John: ADHD reaches its zenith in Michael Bay's Transformers franchise. It's as though the director has no confidence in the audience; nor his own storytelling ability (where duelling robots are concerned). I'll await Mark Kermode's review of T4: Extinction with muted interest.

Andrew: I think Kermode's lost his zeal for any more venting on the Transformers franchise. He just sighs in that "I'm not angry, I'm just terribly disappointed" sort of way.

Stepping back a bit, while Star Trek: TMP was undoubtedly too slow it was still a case that for me the thrill of seeing Star Trek on the big screen, with proper effects, just made me fall in love despite all its flaws. By the way, I trust you noticed that the director of ST:TMP was also the director of the classic original The Day The Earth Stood Still?

John: I had! Fond memories of watching The Day The Earth Stood Still on a rainy weekday in the 1980s.

Andrew: I knew that one held a special place in your heart!

John: Unlike the risible remake!

Andrew: Another black mark for sequels, reboots and remakes then, if anyone's keeping score.

Anyway, the Star Trek example shows I'm kind of implicitly leaving out of consideration the long running series that were always expected to be followed-up, so for example in the Harry Potter series the first one – The Philosopher's Stone – is by no means the strongest instalment in the run; The Two Towers is arguably the best of The Lord of the Rings trilogy; and similarly Dr No is a great little low-budget film but much improved on by the likes of From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and most recently the excellent Skyfall. But I'm not sure I'd consider any of them 'sequels' in the classic sense.

John: Skyfall paid spectacular homage to a 50-year legacy: bombastic lyricism.

Andrew: Bombastic? I'll grant you that a lot of the early Bonds had a certain appealing arrogant swagger, but Skyfall itself was very much an introspective look at the mythos by comparison. I loved it. 22 films in and the series is actually still getting better!

John: Thinking more along the use of shadow play counterpointed with 'splosions.

Andrew: Ahh, gotcha, good point.

There are plenty of other cases where a sequel or follow-up is 'good enough' – which is to say, it might not be a match to the original but is still perfectly okay in its own right. The second Jurassic Park film, for example, or the second (and even third) Die Hard are favourite films of mine even if they don't rise to the heights of the first of their kind. No matter – they were still worth doing.

John: Die Hard, Jaws and The Matrix aren't enhanced by sequels and should have remained one-offs! All heralded as cinematic touchstones by both critics and audiences alike.

Andrew: Can't argue with you on Jaws and The Matrix, but I'm partial to those early Die Hard sequels - but it's true that the first is a stone cold cinematic classic in a class of its own.

John: I may brave A Good Day to Die Hard on Sky Movies this Christmas.

Andrew: Don't. Seriously, just don't.

I guess the question is whether these examples are sufficient to declare the rule that 'sequels are bad' is wrong, or whether they constitute the exceptions to the rule that otherwise holds? I tend to think a sequel should only be undertaken if there is a real, strong, compelling creative reason to do it. If that reason is simply box office takings then it's almost certainly a bad idea and one that will only trash the reputation of the original.

Actually, let's reality check that for a minute: does a naff sequel tarnish its predecessor, do you think?

John: A good question and there's no definitive answer in my book!

Andrew: I think for me there is. I can't think of a single instance where a naff sequel has damaged my love for the original. The Matrix is still wonderful despite the disappointing follow-ups; Die Hard is still in my all-time top ten list despite how execrable this year's A Good Day To Die Hard was. Jaws is still sublime despite the shipwreck of Jaws 3. Star Wars: A New Hope isn't diminished by the spectre of The Phantom Menace. The Star Trek franchise even survived the abysmal fifth film, The Final Frontier.

John: The Thing prequel/remake of a remake falls into that category! It doesn't detract from John Carpenter's The Thing, nor does it add anything to the shapeshifting mythos and the effects fall short of Rob Bottin's seminal body horror wizardry.

Andrew: Agreed. It was a decent and respectful enough attempt but then seemed to lose its nerve and overall didn't know what it was trying to do.

But on the flipside, I do think a good sequel can actually enhance not only the series but possibly even the original retrospectively: the Bond series' appeal is surely partly down to its entire body of work over 50 years. The Star Wars films would be just another isolated piece of hokey SF froth without The Empire Strikes Back, which changed the game just as dramatically as Wrath of Khan and First Contact did for Star Trek.

John: First Contact was a terrific spin on Moby Dick with Die Hard and Aliens mined for good measure. The Borg Queen could have stepped out of an Alien movie and owes much to Swiss surrealist HR Giger - more nightmarish than anything witnessed in the Alien prequel Prometheus.

Andrew: There was indeed something thrillingly horrific about First Contact on so many levels. I hadn't connected the Borg Queen with Giger before, but it's a good comparison.

John: Thank you, kindly. Be sure to checkout HR Giger's Necronomicon if you haven't had a chance. A tome brimming with compelling conceptual art and biomechanical erotica.

Andrew: Sequels, prequels, follow-ups and series aside, how do we feel about remakes? Or as it seems we must call them these days, reboots?

John: Aside from JJ Abrams’ Star Trek (2009) reboot, the most satisfying (for me) has occurred on console and PC (sorry if this is cheating a bit by bringing video games into the equation and leaving you out in the cold, Andrew!). Namely this year’s Tomb Raider, which adroitly remakes The Descent with a sprinkling of The Hunger Games and reinvents Lara Croft’s origin story in the process. Rarely have I cared so deeply about a game’s central protagonist. A direct sequel is in the making.

Andrew: Yes, I'm afraid I have absolutely nothing of value to input on PC and console side – you're very much the expert here in that field! Although the original Tomb Raider was the very first (and possibly only) game I've ever played to a finish, so I was quite a fan of old Lara. Didn't last long into the second, though - I couldn't get the same enthusiasm for it.

John: I'll quickly chime in with another video game mention. Grand Theft Auto 5 satirises the studio system's obsession with green screen and remakes during a radio show, which players can listen to as they drive around Los Santos. A sentiment echoed by Radio Times critic Barry Norman who suggests modern films rely too heavily on special effects, sequels and remakes.

Andrew: Barry Norman speaks for me also, as he has done for the better part of three decades.

John: Sony’s Amazing Spider-Man was an enjoyable, if rushed, reboot. However, there’s the spectre of unused movie rights reverting back to Marvel and the Web-slinger graduating over at Disney - perhaps in the midst of Avengers 3? Sony shouldn't release endless Spider-Man movies simply because of contractual obligations and shareholder value.

Andrew: I guess the suggestion that a movie – reboot or otherwise - is being done purely for business imperatives such as retaining the commercial rights is an example of the sort of crushing non-creative reason for doing a movie that is just doomed to failure. In the case of The Amazing Spider-Man I don't think I'd call the 2012 movie a disaster by any means - but it just seemed terribly pointless, to basically make the same film done ten years previously and do so little to change it other than to allow Andrew Garfield to stamp his mark on the central role. Do people really have such short term memories we can just make the same film every few years with so little originality? Are cinema-goers really so unwilling to look at 'old' films even ones that are just ten years in the past? That reboot really ticked me off because of that.

The whole 'reboot' fad might be approaching the end of the road anyway. If Hasbro think that they can reboot the Transformers series by keeping on Michael Bay doing his same old tired schtick then I really think that the word 'reboot' might have lost all sense of meaning.

John: Any thoughts on the RoboCop reboot/remake? The trailer suggests a better movie than most might have feared. Ironically, Irvin Kershner was unable to distil the alchemy of The Empire Strikes Back when directing the predictably titled RoboCop 2. Only memorable due to a member of the cinema audience laughing, hysterically, whenever someone got shot and another kept disappearing with a mysterious white plastic bag. I'm laughing at the memory of it.

Andrew: Wow, seems you got a better deal and more enjoyment out of the sequel than most people did!

John: Sometimes what's happening off-screen is more compelling with a vivid imagination.

Andrew: Sounds like it! No, I have no thoughts about the coming RoboCop reboot - I genuinely do hope it's better than originally feared, but overall the response that occurs to be is once again simply: "Why?"

John: What about the Blade Runner II announcement? Do you think there's more to tell in terms of Deckard's story or is Sir Ridley Scott mistaken to return to the sci-fi genre so soon after the divisive Prometheus?

Andrew: I think Ridley Scott is such a good director that anything he does is always genuinely interesting and never cliched or pointless - look at Prometheus for example, which very much avoided being another tired Alien retread (although whether it actually works as a film or not is another matter entirely). If he's doing it then I guess he's confident that there's still something new worth mining there. I have cautious optimism.

John: Our readers maybe interested to Google the alleged early script treatment for Prometheus, which culminates in the Star Beast (the original title for Alien). Infinitely more ambitious than the mishmash that ended up on screen and would have stretched to two prequels.

Andrew: Prometheus 2 and 3, shooting back to back and coming to a screen near you shortly...

John: Will the audience care?

Andrew: It'll be interesting to see!

Your mention of Blade Runner II and especially "the predictably titled RoboCop 2" is interesting though and chimes with the mention in our intro of the top ten box office sounding like the football scores. Exactly when did it become standard to start numbering films in the title? It feels old fashioned - and lots of films like the Star Trek franchise and Nolan's Batman films pointedly refused to use numbers.

But it's actually quite a relatively recent approach. In the 30s, the sequels to Frankenstein weren't Frankenstein 2 and 3 but Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein. Offhand I can't think of anything before the 70s that used numbers - Godfather 2 might be the first, and then later there was the likes of French Connection 2, Superman 2, Jaws 2 and it became standard to use the numbering. I guess someone in marketing came up with it as a way of ensuring people kept coming to the next entry but it's not only horribly crass it also backfires because people start saying "I'm not seeing Lethal Weapon 3 because I haven't seen 1 and 2".

John: The move to more 'meaningful' titles such as Into Darkness and The Dark Knight Rises lends itself to a more literary approach and is most welcome. Of course I view cinema with the same reverence as other artistic mediums. Well, I need to justify my BA (Hons) somehow.

Andrew: Quite right, too! It was really the one genuinely new art form to really come to flower in the 20th century (I'm reserving video games to be the uniquely new art form of the 21st century, by the way.)

Not sure how much the change in approach to titles really achieves 'a more literary approach' however, much the filmmakers would like us to believe it. As we both know very well, it's not even a new idea: it's how the studio B-movie series (Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan, The Falcon, ...) were done in the 30s and 40s. I suppose the idea of 'chapters' feels even more literary, yet that was part of the Saturday morning serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers which of course is why Star Wars picked up that style and ran with it (although strangely the Indiana Jones series kind of missed out.)

Since I'm invoking seriously old classic films here - are there any big, classic movies from that era that you think should be remade? Films like Citizen Kane, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Gone With The Wind, Vertigo ... ?

John: Any attempt to remake those movies would be an indulgent folly at best! What fresh ideas could a retelling bring to the story? I'm aghast at the news of The Shining remake.

Andrew: Well, I know Stephen King hated what Kubrick did to his story with the original film, so I suspect a little author-led intervention is involved here to do it again and get it 'right'. But to be honest, I'm not sure the author is always (or even usually) right about these things - sometimes it takes a different eye to come up with the perfect result in a different medium even if it's not what the author intended. But like you, I'm not keen on the idea of remaking The Shining: even if it does bring something new to the part, it will always be in the original's shadow and unfavourably compared come what may.

Of course, remakes don't have to be bad news. Theatres have been 'remaking' Shakespeare stories on a regular basis for four hundred years; and the classic versions of The Maltese Falcon and The Wizard of Oz, for example, were not the first films of the source books. And in fact is it even right to refer to something which is a different adaptation of the same source novel as a 'remake' in the first place?

John: What did you make of Disney's prequel Oz: The Great and Powerful? I've yet to sample its frothy 3-dimensional delights on a newly won 47" LG Smart 3D TV from Sky Movies.

Andrew: Oh, just flaunt your new prize before us less fortunate mortals, why don't you! Actually I suspect that I'd recoil from the idea of letting a 3D TV in the front door...

John: So much for subliminal product placement.

Andrew: What? (Stops looking online at prices of 3D flatscreens.)

I have to confess I've not seen Oz: The Great and Powerful but at least it's not a remake of the 1939 film. My first thought was actually of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, where director David Fincher bristled whenever anyone referred to his film as a "remake' of the Swedish version and insisted it was no such thing, but a brand-new, original adaptation in and of its own right. I actually had some sympathy with that - so is there even any sense to labelling one an original and the other a remake in this case?

John: Semantics? Actresses Noomi Rapace (Prometheus) and Rooney Mara (The Social Network) imbued Lisbeth Salander with individuality. I'm loathe to choose one performance over the other as both are brilliant character studies. The spectre of James Bond haunted Daniel Craig's inferior portrayal of Mikael Blomkvist. I expected him to brandish a Walther PPK and jump into a fully-loaded BMW (seemingly the car of choice for Fincher's adaptation) to chase down the antagonist.

What about remakes that surpass the originals? John Carpenter's The Thing and David Cronenberg's The Fly transcend their sources and Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers inspired nightmares for weeks after I clandestinely watched it on late night BBC 2.

Andrew: Great point - The Fly and The Thing are both perfect examples of remakes that can be better than the original. I guess you can argue that the originals in these cases were cheap inferior B-movies with plenty of room for improvement, but let's not forget that The Thing from Another World was co-directed (uncredited) by none other than Howard Hawks - one of the best American directors in the history of cinema - so to come up with something so vastly better is quite a feather in Carpenter's cap. Perhaps his single best work as a director?

John: The lack of resolution is audacious and something I'd like to see more in mainstream movies.

Almost overlooked Alien in the above list! Take John Carpenter's Dark Star, remove the humour and add a heavy dose of Swiss surrealism!

Andrew: Alien as a remake of Dark Star? Maybe more of a sibling relationship than a remake I think. If Alien is anything, it's the old 'psycho killer in a haunted house at night' reinvented for the science-fiction age.

In the case of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Kaufman's version is so entirely different on just about every level that it too is hard to consider a remake - perhaps it's more accurately simply an appropriation of the same title. In this case, I'll take the original over the 70s version, but that's not to say that the latter isn't also outstanding on its own merits. Great new Blu-ray release of the 70s film just came out from Arrow, by the way.

I was going to say that I hope they don't remake Forbidden Planet - one of my all time favourites. One's been mooted for years but fortunately never happened. But then, arguably Gene Roddenberry got there first and repurposed the basics with a little TV series that they aired in the 60s that didn't do so bad.

John: Brace yourself for Forbidden Planet the IMAX 3D Experience!

Andrew: Urgh. Just the very thought of it makes me feel ill. Are there really no new ideas left in the world?

John: Do you feel it’s all a cash-in by a studio system starved of ideas and looking to the aisles of Toys 'R' Us for inspiration? I’m looking at the migraine-inducing Battleship, which seemingly spliced together unused footage from JJ Abrams and Michael Bay movies.

Andrew: Battleship the game is another Hasbro property, right?

John: Yes! There's talk of Risk being given the Hollywood treatment too. Maybe Hungry Hippos could be a satire on studio execs with eyes only for profit?

Andrew: Hahah! Very good! Although I'm not sure we should print that - they might get an idea and start filming next week and then it would be all our fault!

John: A bonafide blockbuster and there should be a tie-in app too!!!

Andrew: Maybe they were going for a 'house style' with Battleship for their stable of films? More likely it's a case of Hasbro wanting to exploit an existing franchise like a board game or toy range and treating a film like it has no other purpose than to be a big advertising hoarding for their merchandising.

John: By the time Return of the Jedi hit cinema screens, many of us were as excited about the merchandise as the movie itself! I owned a collection of action figures and accessories months before seeing Speeder Bike chases and Darth Vader unmasked.

Andrew: I was a few years ahead of you in age, so I, too, devoured the Star Wars merchandise - in my case, as soon as it appeared after the first movie. George Lucas really did incredibly well keeping those rights to himself. I do worry that he might have inadvertently poisoned the film industry with this innovation though - there are some films (like Cars which begat Cars 2 which begat Planes) which seem to only exist because they're huge hits in retail even if the films themselves spiral downwards in quality.

John: Diluting the brand in the process? Pixar is in the midst of a midlife crisis and only serves the insatiable merchandise machine. The last movie from Pixar I cared for was Up. A far cry from the nascent creativity born out of Lucasfilm (itself now owned by Disney) and fostered by Steve Jobs after his ousting from Apple. We know how that story ends.

Andrew: The decline in Pixar has been really quite astounding. I never expected the spark to go out so soon after the merger with Disney and of course the passing of Jobs. Makes you wonder just how big a role the Apple supremo played in the films' creation process that it should all go so wrong so quickly after he left us.

John: Pixar was synonymous with story first, second and third. Vividly recall attending an advanced screening of Toy Story and was in awe of what the pixel-pushing artisans had accomplished. For a decade Pixar overshadowed distributor Disney with superlative fare. Yes, there was merchandise, but it was subordinate and considered as far as such things can be.

Andrew: Truly did. And as you say, the secret was story first, second and third. Once again it comes down to the film having a proper creative purpose in existing other than on the corporate balance sheets. The more depressing aspect is that increasingly audiences don't seem to notice or care when that doesn't happen and they're served sub-standard fare; it's like too many of us no longer mind if we walk into a top class restaurant for a hundred quid meal and it comes to us on a plate still in the McDonald's Happy Meal box.

John: Excellent use of metaphor and a damning indictment, Andrew! I'm squeamish paying more than £6 (a Netflix monthly subscription) to see a movie at the cinema; the only exception is Gravity in IMAX 3D, which critics are lauding as an Oscar-worthy technological tour de force underpinned by emotional resonance with standout performances from Sandra Bullock. Swoon. And George Clooney. Not something you read everyday in the Hollywood trades.

Andrew: I really liked Gravity. It looked totally stunning and was a totally immersive experience. Smart, intelligent sci-fi, a new generation's 2001. And despite the fact that there isn't much of a story in the traditional sense, you're right that Bullock especially and Clooney too both give outstanding performance in the middle of all this technical virtuosity. I didn't even resent the 3D this time, which for me is saying a lot. But these days it has to be special to get me to see it at the cinema - films are a tenner here, more for 3D or IMAX, and you can buy the DVD a few months later for that.

John: A tenner for the privilege of seeing a movie, which may or may not pass projection muster? Wasn't World War Z the first mainstream movie to offer a digital download - as a premium ticket option - day-and-date with the Blu-ray disc/DVD release?

Andrew: Lots of films - even the biggest - are coming out on iTunes or streaming even before the DVD/Blu-ray release these days. The innovation I find really interesting is the smaller indie films like A Field In England that are coming out on all media on the first day of their theatrical release, allowing the audience to decide exactly how they want to consume it. It is, I think, the way of the future - although I can't decide on what the end effect of that will be. Will it provoke more remake/sequel/franchise blockbusters or will it instead allow a wider range of more innovative and creative projects to get made? At the moment all we have to compare is the rise of the made-for-streaming TV productions like Kevin Spacey's House of Cards which seem to suggest that it's amenable to new and daring projects than otherwise would never have been made.

John: Kevin Spacey said it best: Story. I don't mind how it's consumed: from iPhone to IMAX.

Andrew: I think we're nearing a consensus on that, for sure.

When it comes to bad reasons for making a movie, here's a best case/worst case example: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was on the face of it a lamentable example of a film existing purely to promote a theme park ride. Only, a funny thing happened on the way to the box office: the project fell into the hands of a team that actually made not just an okay film out of it, but a really rather excellent one. Naturally that warmed the cockles of the corporate accountants' hearts and they immediately ordered up more, but look at the leaden messes they got served up when it just became about maximising the revenue stream. What had started as a bit of a fun subversion of corporate advertising quickly lost its heart and soul thereafter. (Although this would also be another case of dire sequels not diminishing my love for the original, incidentally.)

But all that said – what is it that makes the Marvel franchise succeed where even the Mighty Mouse House falters? How are they being able to keep the quality up from Iron Man, Thor and Captain America through to The Avengers (and now S.H.I.E.L.D. on TV, although that seems to be struggling more than I would have expected) and sustain that level of creative and commercial success on what should be just another cash-in on the comic and toy merchandising?

John: Marvel deftly mapped out Phase I, II and III with an Avengers movie as the culmination of each act. It's also a rare example of the studio system co-ordinating between distribution partners from Disney (Marvel's owner) to Paramount: everyone shares prime-billing and a slice of the fiscal action. Warner Brothers has failed to grab a similar audience mindshare in the wake of The Dark Knight Trilogy. There's a palpable sense of risk-aversion at the studio that gave us the gangster genre.

Andrew: By contrast, it's odd just how much DC really seems to struggle to make its formidable stable of iconic characters flourish outside the comics. You'd think they'd be in pole position, but while they have occasional breakthroughs - Superman in the 70s, Batman at the end of the 80s, Smallville on TV, Batman again with Nolan's Dark Knight - they seem to be unable to sustain or build on the success and it simply goes nowhere. Arrow is the current big hope, but it seems to me that they're resorting to simply copying Marvel's playbook.

John: Well, DC continues to prosper on television with award-winning animated series! Since Batman: The Animated Series (the definitive incarnation and introduced 'Dark Deco' to the collective consciousness), the "Timm-verse" (as it is known) has expanded and prospered. Only recently I stumbled across the brilliant Young Justice on Amazon LOVEFiLM Instant. Back to a silver linings playbook (couldn't resist a reference to Jennifer Lawrence).

Andrew: You and your Jennifer Lawrence obsession! But you're right, I had totally overlooked the animated side of things where DC really has had better fortunes thanks to being the brave and the bold and moreover creatively daring.

Marvel's approach to live action is incredibly well mapped out. What they've done is truly innovative: they've treated the films as a sort of multi-comic book series and plotted the development just as they would a graphic novel mini-series. In other words it's creative-led rather than the accountants coming along and saying "We'll have one with Daredevil, then if that works we'll try out something with the Hulk, and then if that makes money we'll give the Fantastic Four a go..." which of course is what they did at the start - to frankly uneven success.

John: The mishmash of output was no indicator of what was to come. Beginning with the revelatory Iron Man...

Andrew: A great film, I just rewatched that one the other weekend and it was even better than I remembered it.

The other thing Marvel has done is get true auteurs to helm the films. Jon Favreau for the Iron Man films, Kenneth Branagh for the first Thor, and of course Joss Whedon for the Avengers. Big names, and not necessarily just big geeks, but talents ideally suited to the type of film being made. I'm very impressed by the way they've approached the entire project, how it puts the artistic and creative first at every step of the way, and I'm happy to see them rake in the cash as a result. It's a franchise (or series, or sequels, whatever we're calling them) that's founded on creative endeavour that just happens to make a pile of cash in the process.

But is the Marvel approach the future, though - or just a one-off anomaly?

John: This could be anomaly on a grand scale: a capricious alignment of the stars within the vertically integrated firmament. Especially given Disney's insatiable acquisition trail. Why bother spending money developing new intellectual properties (IPs) when there are existing ones ripe for commercial exploitation.

Andrew: "Vertically integrated" says it all, doesn't it - it's all down to economics these days and it's all become as formulaic as a car production line. But who are we kidding, it always was - hence we refer to show business and the film industry, it's always been a money-making endeavour first and foremost - works of art, should they appear, are just a happy accident.

John: Disney has announced an exclusive distribution deal with Netflix, which will witness new Marvel superhero franchises exclusively on the platform from 2015. Hopefully these new offerings will redeem the studio in the wake of the lacklustre Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Andrew: So are we kidding ourselves and developing a grass-is-always-greener/rose-tinted-glasses view of this? Were things any different or better in the so-called golden age, or has it always been this way?

John: There's an inherent ideological tension when any art form meets commerce and Hollywood will continue to rise and fall as cultural trends shift. The biggest issue the studio system has will be the distribution of content, which we've debated, at length, previously. Maybe in a few years we'll be writing about a merged Apple Disney Netflix empire…

Andrew: I wouldn't be at all surprised about that, certainly. As for an inherent problem when art meets commerce, does that mean we are being a bit blinkered about the golden era? Hollywood was pretty much the Gold Rush of the 20th century as filmmakers charged to the west coast to get a slice of the action; and we've never seen any 'art form' as mechanised and industrialised as the era of the studio system in the 20s, 30s and 40s - and yet they managed to produce many of the all-time classics.

If I were to try and paint a difference between that era and today, I'd suggest that maybe it's one of ambition and courage. Back then, everything seemed possible and the big studios had the profits they needed from their vast output of movies that allowed them to take more daring chances with a small proportion of them. These days, however, every film is so big and expensive that a single one could be the Heaven's Gate that bankrupts the studio concerned, making everyone nervous, afraid and playing safe - which means ending up with a load of look-a-like middle-of-the road pap controlled by the accountants rather than the director. And the safest such fare of all is the "We'll have another one of those," or "Trade off the nostalgia by remaking another of this."

It's a shame, however inevitable it might be. It was brought home to me the other week during the 50th anniversary celebrations for Doctor Who, when someone pointed out that a show using that pitch wouldn't have a hope in hell of getting commissioned today. And look what we would have missed out on…

John: A sobering thought and our paths may never have crossed had it not been for a mutual interest in the good Doctor's adventures!

As we draw this discussion to a close, Hollywood has announced a new big screen Terminator reboot to be accompanied by a television series! I was fond of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles S1. And Lucasfilm is considering an Indiana Jones reboot at Disney alongside yearly Star Wars movie releases between each chapter of the new trilogy. How long before Marvel vs. Star Wars hits cinema screens?

Andrew: So still more reboots/remakes/TV spin-offs of stalled movie franchises by cribbing from the Marvel 'how-to' playbook. It's just so wretchedly predictable. Honestly, I can't think of anything that sums up my frustration and disappointment at the state of the entertainment industry better than the Terminator announcement in particular.

It all makes me really value and appreciate truly original visions like Gravity, and I'm pleased such films get the success and recognition that they deserve. But I have to admit, I'm certainly not immune to catching a case of sequelitus every now and then - I'm very much looking forward to seeing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug despite how a slim original volume has been over-stretched to a three-part, three-hour bloated epic. I guess there's a place for the odd blockbuster sequel and franchise even in the most curmudgeonly heart after all.

Is that a suitably Christmas note on which to wrap up, do you think?

John: Indeed! Why don't we end with a subtle link to my Christmas top ten, Andrew?

Andrew: What an excellent idea, John!