Urge to rewrite the DW season 3 finale: RISING.

[tenlittlebullets]

Kicking back with tea, popcorn, and Tom Baker serials. DID YOU KNOW THAT Utopia seems several orders of magnitude less disjointed once you realize the entire episode is a Genesis of the Daleks ripoff, right down to the mutants in the wilderness and the rocket with the lethal fuel cylinders.

NOW YOU KNOW.

This is only intensifying my desire for fic where the paradox machine rips open a spacetime rift on Utopia, the last survivors of humankind fall through it, and they wind up back near the beginning of the universe on prehistoric Gallifrey, where the still-open Vortex rift will cause them to evolve into Time Lords. Which, honestly, is where I thought RTD was going with this, until I realized what he was actually doing with the Toclafane. The whole idea is so much cooler, though, when you realize Utopia is a Genesis ripoff--it could've been Genesis of the Time Lords, FFS.

Comments

[ariastar.livejournal.com]

...No wonder I always watch Utopia with the very strong impression that I'm experiencing the most delightfully old school thing to ever happen on New Who! THANK YOU FOR CLEARING THAT UP.

As always, I am entirely in favor of your last-humans-first-Time-Lords theory.

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

The thing is, though, that... well, I've only watched half of Genesis, but there are important reasons why there are mutants in the wilderness* and "it is feared that they are what we might become," and the rocket with its lethal cylinders that need to be moved around is also much better-supported by the plot. Whereas Utopia makes more sense and seems less like RTD was just throwing things at the screen once you make the Genesis connection, but it also makes it super fucking clear that they are not there for any reason besides RTD wanting to ride on Terry Nation's coattails.

Maybe I will watch the second half of Genesis and it will become clear that RTD was going somewhere with his remix and trying to use the same elements to say something different, but at the moment I am about eight million times less impressed with Utopia than I originally was. Because Genesis is full of thinky thoughts and weighty issues, and it takes serious work to recycle bits of it in order to say... not much at all.


* Spoilers: Skaro has been locked in war for centuries, and Davros has been conducting sketchy bioengineering experiments on his own people in the hopes of finding a way for them to win. The failed experiments--or just the soldiers who inhaled too much poison gas in the trenches and grew extra limbs--get tossed out into the no-man's land to be hunted down for sport or captured as slave labor, and both sides continue the war with the uneasy knowledge that that could be them if and when it degenerates into a biochemical-weapon apocalypse. How Rusty pulled his generic "savage subhuman tribes" shit out of this is beyond me, and if I found the Futurekind vaguely offensive before, now I am completely gobsmacked.

[tweedymcgee.livejournal.com]

I thought that rocket in Utopia looked a little familiar, but now that you spell this out, I am going DUH for not having put two and two together. Ye gods, your idea would've been way cool. Though also a MASSIVE retcon.

Re: Futurekind: I kinda thought they were just weaksauce Reavers, lifted shamelessly from the Firefly-verse.

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Re: Futurekind: I only twigged once I realized the rocket was a massive Genesis ripoff/homage. It may or may not have been intentional on Rusty's part, but once you have one reference, the comparisons are inevitable.

Ye gods, your idea would've been way cool. Though also a MASSIVE retcon.

This is true. Though possibly a more satisfying and elegant one than retconning the Master's whole backstory into "lulz the drums made him crazy."

(do not mind me, drunk!commenting at 3am...)

[filia-belialis.livejournal.com]

Seconding the feeling of DUH--I didn't spot the paralells when I watched Genesis! Granted there were years between my watch of Utopia and of Genesis, but still. And please write this

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Lol, I spotted them mostly by going "Haha that looks eerily like the shot of them almost falling out a doorway in Utopi--OH. DUH. FANBOYS RUNNING THE ASYLUM."