Ten Little Chances to be Free

Previously on "NuWho episodes that make a lot more damn sense when you realize which classic serial they're ripping off": Utopia, Genesis of the Daleks, and Malcassairo as RTD's remix of Skaro. Now, Utopia comes off pretty badly once you set up the comparison--the Futurekind are dumb, dumb, dumb next to the Mutos, for example--but that's mostly because Genesis is fucking flawless. We're still dealing with some of Rusty's best work, which appears to be paying homage to some of the classic series' best work. What do you get when Rusty recycles a bunch of techniques from an ambitious but terribly flawed serial?

You get End of Time, that's what you get: an epic demonstration of just how spectacularly Logopolis could've failed.

( Rambling under the cut )

Everyone with any feelings at all--positive, negative, mixed, whatever--about the Doctor Who finale needs to run, not walk, to elisi's Wedding of River Song meta. Hell, if it left you cold and you're wondering why people have feelings about it, click the link.

( Spoilery commentary under the cut )

Okay, so. I guess sleep deprivation was just making me anxious and unstable. Because while I'm still going through the new-hire dance of "how quickly should I be picking this stuff up? how often should I be checking in with the guy training me? am I coming off as high-maintenance or as overly prone to slinking off into the corner and doing my own thing when I should be seeking guidance?" it is not actually that bad, and I am doing real work on a real project (data-processing wizardry for the DHS Côte d'Ivoire survey) and thus not feeling like a useless tool. Also, have totally seen the occasional person come in to work in a flowery shirt and blue jeans--nice jeans, but still jeans--so I figure that even if Crayola hair and tattered black lace are out of the question I can CorpGoth it up a little bit. Waistcoats and jewel-toned blouses and pocketwatches, here I come.

Still prone to random short-lived outbursts of meta or general enthusiasm, but it might just be all of my geekish energy getting bunched up in the evenings instead of spread throughout the day. I apparently do not have the dedication to do a full review of The God Complex, but I will say that my bitter disappointment about ( spoilers ahoy--if you've seen it you can probably guess ) was not enough to keep me from loving this episode. It did so many things right, tugged so many dark undercurrents out into the light and called them on what they were, played along with tropes just long enough to turn them on their heads, and refused to victim-blame. ( Mmmmrfrnrghl more spoilers, hands clapped over mouth, etc. )

...also I just love this episode because it makes the rest of the season so much richer and makes me want to go hunting for meta material in previous episodes, and also calms some of my lingering doubts. Mostly about whether Moffat & Co were aware of what they were writing--I am fully A-OK and on board with disturbing implications and tragic flaws as long as they're being written as such, and come on, those of us who take sadistic glee in schadenfreude and days of reckoning haven't had this much satisfaction since Waters of Mars. And since I trust Moffat not to drop narrative threads much more than I'd ever trust RTD, there is a good chance we will finally get closure on things that have been left hanging since WoM. Maybe not in the exact same way any of us thought (I have been 100% convinced that Moffat was setting Eleven up for a fall since, uh, the season opener? but God Complex did not call him out on exactly the things I expected even if the themes were similar), but closure all the same.

What I don't have, at this point, are any expectations that the plot will make a lick of goddamn sense. Moffat will probably lead us to a rousing finale, and will mash all his foreshadowing together in a way that does more-or-less lead us there, but examine the intricate latticework of showy plot twists too closely and you will discover that it's mostly held together with handwaving, duct tape, and the goodwill of the audience. I figure that as long as you assume from the get-go that you're not getting a perfectly-fitted puzzle-box plot like Blink, you're getting something that was fueled by equal parts amphetamines and acid and should probably be enjoyed in similar fashion, there won't be too much disappointment.

Back from New York! And doing some more scattered out-of-order Who rewatches. Up recently: Aliens of London/World War Three (which I had not seen before, somehow, and eeeee Harriet Jones be my BFF and also character development for Mickey and Jackie and I wish RTD had built off of Nine and Mickey's awkward-dudebro-bonding moment at the end instead of falling back on "Mickey the idiot" and all the quasi-facetious trashtalking and--yeah). And then Impossible Planet/Satan Pit.

I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT THOSE EPISODES. SO MANY FEELINGS. I DID NOT KNOW I HAD ALL THESE FEELINGS. They were, IIRC, the first ones I watched on my own after the weekly group Who-watching nights disintegrated, and at the time I was too caught up in frantic new-fandom fangirling to pick these out specifically, but in retrospect I am pretty sure they precipitated my headlong slide into watching three and a half seasons in two weeks. It is weird that a two-parter where half the cast dies gruesomely at the hands of a dodgy Satan monster should make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it sums up so much of what I love about this show. Exploration, and belief, and there being more things in heaven and earth, and people--plain old human beings at their worst, at their best, people fucking up, people trying to put things right, people clinging to whatever gives the universe meaning for them. In this case, people at their best. Fallible, terrified humans pulling themselves together in the face of the unknown to become heroes, taking that leap just because it was there, using the last of their oxygen to say oh, I'm going to die down here, but if you could only see what I've found and how beautiful it is. And Ten and Rose, who all too often turn into adolescent brats as a team--here we see them making each other better people. And the sudden reappearance of the TARDIS has shades of Tolkien's eucatastrophe, the eleventh-hour act of grace that turns the tables just when it looks like everyone's about to die, without ever turning into a cheap deus-ex-machina trick because the characters are the ones who did all the legwork.

And mushy capital-R-Romantic stuff aside, they are just such great episodes. Okay, I still think the Satan monster is a bit dodgy, mostly because it's far too closely modeled on a very specific European concept of the devil, but this time around I'm willing to accept the "whatever it is, it's probably the origin of devil myths across the cosmos" handwaving. But I love the whole idea of the planet in impossible orbit around the black hole, I love the balance struck between explanation and leaving some things a mystery, I love how many plot and thematic and character-development threads are woven together at the same time and how none of them get dropped or mangled. I love the design, I love the gritty-future aspect, I love the soundtrack, I love the tone struck throughout, and on top of all that I am just a sucker for base-under-siege episodes. Can we please get Matt Jones to write more Who? Pleeeease? Impossible Planet/Satan Pit might now be among my favorite DW eps ever--they're certainly among the few saving graces of season 2. And IMO both Rusty and Moffat could take lessons from them in starting with an incredibly ambitious concept and then doing it full justice.

(Re: subject line: I love Rose and I love Ten's stupid face and I am not a huge fan of character- or ship-bashing and I do ship it, in a way, but that way is very very different from RTD's, and I have so many problems with how Ten/Rose played out in canon.)

Still listening to ALL THE PAUL MCGANN AUDIO DRAMAS. I'm up through Neverland now and, okay, the first mini-season is uneven and full of elements that just fall flat, although even in the most cringe-inducing parts there's still Eight being awesome. (I have come to the conclusion that Eight is a heartbreakingly good man, thinly disguised as a snarky manipulative bastard, who in turn is thinly disguised as a batty Victorian eccentric. In other words, love.) But the second season is incredible. It is full of the best crack ever: aliens invading Manhattan during the War of the Worlds broadcast! Daleks quoting Shakespeare left right and center! It is also full of paradoxes and impossibly tangled time loops that would do Steven Moffat's head in, as well as a good amount of high-octane nightmare fuel. And not just the "oh god they broke time" heebie-jeebies; it figures that my first proper episode with the Time Lords had to be the one where they're not just insufferable but also a bit horrifying. Viz: if the Celestial Intervention Agency gets sick of you meddling in their affairs and decides to make you an unperson, they can erase your existence so thoroughly that even your executioners won't remember you and will have no idea that sort of thing even happens anymore.

Speaking of, these audios are fascinating from a continuity standpoint. I know they were released before the new series was anywhere near happening, but Time of the Daleks and Neverland give me chills when I think of them as leadup to the Time War--the Daleks almost managing to rewrite all of history to get the upper hand, the Doctor leaving them in a time loop with full knowledge that the Time Lords will eventually let them out to preserve continuity, a possible future where they don't get let out, Time Lords mucking about with increasingly arcane and dangerous temporal forces at the risk of unleashing unholy horrors upon the universe. And the whole "Eight almost broke all of time by rescuing one person from one historical catastrophe" season arc--the numerous and creative side effects of which give a rough idea of what eldritch travesties might've crawled out of the Time War, and fuck, it puts a whole new perspective on Ten's saving-people-from-fixed-points angst in season 4 and the specials. I know that Who has no real continuity, just a big ball of wibbly-wobbly canony-fanony stuff, but in this case I think looking at the new series in the light of the audio dramas (and vice versa) would be rewarding enough to make up for all the fanwank required to get them in the same timeline.

...also, unrelatedly, I have this burning urge to write a Doctor Who celebrity historical starring Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. There could be an anachronistic, fully-constructed analytical engine, an alien threat menacing the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, and a zeppelin chase where hydrogen airships get blown up by a giant Tesla coil. And the best part is that everything except the Tesla coil would be reasonably historically accurate: Lovelace didn't die until 1852, the analytical engine was never built but detailed plans existed from the 1830s and 40s, a partial prototype was displayed at the Great Exhibition, and the first feasible plans for a dirigible airship were also part of the Great Exhibition. Assuming aliens funded the construction of the engine, the government secretly constructed a zeppelin based on those plans before they were displayed, and both were destroyed in the course of the episode and lost to history, it could totally happen. And, you know, the Doctor could whip up the Tesla coil out of spare parts or something, IDGAF, rule of cool.

“Then I spent a long time thinking about body-swapping - so the Master becomes the Doctor and vice versa, which would give us Evil David Tennant. That would be fantastic, especially in his swansong.”

- Russell T. Davies, The Writer’s Tale

WHY was I not previously aware that RTD's original plan for End of Time involved Master-Doctor bodyswapping? Considering Tennant!Master has been right up near the top of the "fandom crack theories I wish we'd been able to see" wishlist for ages and I might have recently written a few thousand words of crappy porn with Ten and Martha and roleplaying as the Master which sprang solely from the mental image of Tennant getting to say "I am the Master, and you will obey me." And SIMM!DOCTOR and the two of them getting to play off each other and it would've been the best crack ever, far better than the six billion Masters. And the sheer POSSIBILITIES of the Master getting to impersonate the Doctor! Imagine the episode starts, the Doctor is taking control of some messy situation as normal, and then he goes and does something ludicrously evil and the title credits roll. Fucking awesome pre-theme-song cliffhanger, especially right after Waters of Mars. And at some point "the Doctor" would call UNIT up and ask them to send over Martha Jones to help him deal with "the Master," and we'd get ten or fifteen very tense minutes of her playing along before she bitchslaps him at the climactic moment and is all "the Sontarans tried to replace me with a clone once, do you think I can't tell you're not the Doctor?" Not to mention the slash would be glorious and I might've gone a bit slack-jawed when I tried to imagine the EoT bondage chair scenes with the actors swapped.

And then I flailed about this with filia_belialis and one of our tangents led to her instructing me to go watch Time Monster. Which I just finished watching. And oh, Delgado!Master, you GQ motherfucker, if it's wrong of me to secretly root for you then I don't want to be right. Even when you are doing stupid things like summoning chronovores. So goddamn classy, even when he's sending Jo and the Doctor to their deaths, and I love how laid-back Three and Delgado are about each other. "Oh yes, it must be my archenemy, of course he's up to something. I guess I'll have to go thwart him soon. More tea?"

(Am I alone in thinking that Tennant!Master would've been very, very Delgado? Only more crazy intensity and less GQMF. Not that they resemble each other, exactly, more that they're both capable of being all eyebrows and bared lower teeth and stagey classical expressiveness.)

Other things that have resulted from conversations with filia_belialis: it is now my headcanon that any time the Doctor mutters about humans and their silly linear notions of time and space, it is because Time Lords use elliptical geometry instead of Euclidean. It also explains the circular writing system. And the timey-wimey ball. Time isn't a linear progression of events any more than a cornfield in Iowa is a flat plane; the plain is part of a globe, the timeline is part of the timey-wimey ball, and the timey-wimey ball is more like a trampoline that sags under the weight of important events to make temporal gravity wells, fixed points holding other scraps of history in orbit around them. At least, until the Doctor Who writers need new rules about changing history.

...also headcanon that Academy!Koschei once built a tiny paradox machine powered by some professor's desk toy (the Time Lord equivalent of a plasma ball?), overcame Theta Sigma's initial reservations about it by using it to solve the halting problem and wowing him with Rule of Cool, and the two of them used it for increasingly ridiculous things until it overloaded its feeble power source, exploded, and unleashed a Reaper in the middle of a physics lab.

Spent a lot of yesterday (a) reading Gödel, Escher, Bach which is, so far, an amazing, cheeky, geeky synthesis of everything I love about math, logic, theoretical computer science, language, physics, wordplay, mind-bending paradoxes, the nature of intelligence, etc. and (b) kicking around Tumblr, specifically the Martha Jones tag. And oh boy, did that ever make me want to write meta. And then I saw the vid/meta about manpain that's been making the rounds, and spent this afternoon rewatching scattered episodes of DW season 3. So here, have some meta.

( Martha fucking Jones )

All of this was kicking about in my head even before I saw this vid and accompanying meta on manpain, who is allowed to hurt and for what reasons, and whose pain matters. Goes at length into fridging, the White Man's Burden, and other things that are extremely relevant to Ten's interests (cough). And that's what it boils down to, isn't it? Martha is an uppity bitch (or, alternately, a snivelling affront to feminism) for daring to be hurt over the Doctor. The Doctor is not only allowed to be hurt over Rose, he's allowed to take it out on Martha, and God help her if she says anything. God help her, too, if she silently swallows her hurt for his sake. She does both at various points and gets attacked for it.

And speaking of pain and fridging-for-motivation and other such topics, this is one of the reasons I wish Last of the Time Lords hadn't sunk under the weight of its plot!fail and Tinkerbell Jesus ridiculousness. Not only would it have been easy to fix the worst of what's wrong with it (seriously, have the Master holding the Doctor in some sort of telepathic cage or weakening field, humanity shorts out the Archangel network, the psychic overload briefly superpowers him instead of weakening him, tone down the Jesus imagery, and bam, your episode no longer outright sucks) there was some really interesting hero/villain/damsel triangulation going on. Because as it begins you've got the Master as the villain, Martha as the hero, and the Doctor as the helpless captive--and what's more, Martha gets all the manpain. She gets to walk the earth stoically witnessing its suffering with only the thought of her remote, be-pedestalled love interest to keep her going. Not only that, when the Master ages the Doctor on live TV it's not really about the Doctor for once, it's about using his pain to hurt Martha. She is the true threat, the one he's really trying to get at.

Of course then you get Jesus!Doc and everything that is awful about that, but afterwards. Afterwards there is the glorious twistedness of the Master playing the villain and the love interest at the same time, and fridging himself so that he can die laughing at the Oncoming Manpain. That is some truly epic trolling right there.

So, um, in conclusion, Martha Jones is fucking awesome and not even the worst parts of the finale can keep season 3 from being my favoritest of favorites.

So there was a fandom_secrets thread about people being terrified of Doctor Who episodes that didn't scare anyone else they know, and then I babbled at lots of people over IM about how good Paul Cornell is at disturbing me. In a good way! Sort of.

See, Steven Moffat is really good at scaring me in the way I like to be scared. Jumping at shadows, side-eyeing perfectly harmless objects, then laughing about it afterwards. Scary-movie scared. Cornell? Cornell is batting two for two when it comes to reaching deep down into my subconscious, grabbing a handful of existential terrors, and yanking on them.

Then I thought about it, and looked at a list of Who episodes, and realized the only ones I'd found truly viscerally disturbing were Father's Day, Turn Left, A Christmas Carol, and (to a slightly lesser extent) Human Nature/Family of Blood.

( Explanation under the cut )

Right, done feeling guilty about fandom infidelity. I'm probably the only person crazy enough to have kept Les Mis as a primary (sole?) fandom for five years straight--it is lovely and there is lots of surrounding material to mine, but five years in a medium-small fandom with a closed canon is enough to drive anyone stir-crazy. And since I suck at multitasking when I'm in luuuurve with something new and sparkly, what I'll probably do is take a breather from LM fandom and shamelessly indulge the Doctor Who love until the novelty's worn off. Will still be keeping up with LM fandom and modding Abaissé, just participating more sporadically. (Which is what's happened anyway.)

And now I present... my very favorite crack theories and bits of fan speculation re: Doctor Who. Only one is for season 6; the rest are for past seasons and most have been quite thoroughly Jossed, but they make me grin like a loon anyway.

- Season 3 finale speculation yields the best crack of all, especially when it comes so tantalizingly close to coming true later on. Like the person I saw claiming that Lucy Saxon had the Master's ring and was going to bring him back by absconding with Ten's hand and putting the ring on it, causing it to grow into a full body and bring us... Tennant!Master. WHY DID THIS NOT HAPPEN it would have been SO much more fun than Consolation Ten.

- My pet theory on what happened to the humans at the end of the universe (well, pet theory that lasted all of thirty minutes for me, since I watched s3 finale all in one go) was that Utopia was actually a massive spacetime rift that one could ride back to the early days of the universe. Except unprotected travel through the Untempered Schism caused some pretty funky genetic mutations in the humans who survived it, as well as giving them a particular sensitivity to the fabric of spacetime that only got heightened by living/evolving on a planet with a raw opening into the Vortex. Not that any of them minded, as they were just grateful to have been dumped on a humanoid-friendly planet with lovely red grass and orange skies...

I don't need to mention how thoroughly this has been Jossed, but it's still my personal headcanon that some of the last humans refused to become Toclafane and got sucked back to found prehistoric Gallifrey. (And, in all likelihood, name their bogeyman after the fate they'd narrowly escaped.)

- So the image of a weeping angel becomes an angel, right? Think back to "Blink": Sally Sparrow gives the Doctor her whole file on the Angel/Phonebox Incident, including several photos. That thought alone has made some people lose sleep at night, but my reaction was to stick my fingers in my ears and go "la la la, the additional information from Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone should be optional canon and I'm going to pretend it doesn't apply." Until the thought hit me: what if those angel photographs did come to life... and try to steal the TARDIS, stranding the Doctor in 1969? Which would mean Sally Sparrow caused the situation she was later called in to fix by giving the Doctor information on how to fix it.

That made me lose sleep a bit. Until I realized I might have just out-ontological-paradoxed Steven "Timey-Wimey" Moffat and the ensuing smugness was enough to ward off nightmares.

- Speaking of, you know what would be brilliant? If Moffat not only brought back the Master but integrated him into a whole Time War arc. Whether or not he used RTD's time-lock canon from End of Time, it would be everything he loves in the world: an opportunity for intensely psychological/character-focused stories, the Doctor and the Master (and I rather suspect Moff ships it), old-school shoutouts, tying time in knots via the Time War, the hordes of monstrosities and timey-wimey nightmares unleashed by the war...

- Elaborating a bit on my predictions from last post: ( Cut for s6 speculation--do not click if you're avoiding promo information! )

...actually, most of the exciting things happened on Monday, but the Great Spring Break Road Trip did continue for most of the week.

Tuesday: Down to Washington DC so I could say hi to my family and we could crash at my dad's place. "Oh, let's walk to Georgetown along the canal," I said, "it's only a couple of miles." Turns out it was more like five or six. OOPS. Oh well, it was a nice walk? And killed an afternoon nicely?

Wednesday: Met mmejavert in Harrisburg, where we hit up a few bookstores. And lo, there was much cackling and dramatic readings of bad romance-novel covers and massive fangirlage of both Les Mis and Doctor Who. (Things I will never be able to unhear: you can tap the Master's drumbeat along to DYHTPS. To large parts of Les Mis, really--just take those crashing thematic chords in the overture and add a note to make a triplet. When the beating of your heart(s) echoes the beating of the drums...)

Thursday: Baaaack up north. Attempted to make another trip to the abandoned dam I found outside Forestburgh, NY in the summer of 2009, but it's in a state park that was closed for the season. filia_belialis and I amused ourselves in the car by making up Doctor Who filks to the Battle Hymn of the Republic and then ghetto-blasting German bagpipe metal and waving cheerfully at passing hipsters as we sped back into town.

The weekend: was mostly spent on a MASSIVE DOCTOR WHO BINGE and then diving headfirst into aaaall the Doctor/Master fic. I'm now three episodes into season 5, guys. So much Who.

And... so many feelings. Especially about the Tenth Doctor. Everyone has Their Doctor, the defining one, and I think Ten is mine for better or for worse--loved Nine but that was before I began my headlong slide into the fandom. And God, Ten. It would be too simple to say "I adore him and want to smack him in equal measure." Because I adore him, and project my own geekiness and loner-complex and martyrdom kinks onto him too much, and think he is incredibly hot and suffers oh-so-prettily, and wish Russell T Davies hadn't heaped on so much ridiculously gratuitous Ten!pain after realizing how prettily he suffers, and want to kick him for being such an angstypants even as I take sadomasochistic pleasure* in how much of a woobie he is, and stare in awe at the Woobie Feedback Loop created by his perverse enjoyment in taking All The Burdens onto his poor overburdened shoulders and setting himself up to get nailed to every cross in sight, and am creeped out by his "then you leave me with no choice!" brand of moral ambiguity but am also pretty sure I like him better as an arrogant morally-ambiguous crazypants than as a bucket of angst. Because God, did they ever lay it on thick. I was okay with it in season 3! It did not trip my eyeroll meter. But in season 4, most of the episodes were great taken individually, but all together they added up to piling terrible burden onto terrible burden until it got ridiculous and oh, poor Doctor, only he can hear the singing of the Ood. And it was all gratuitous and out of left field and I would've liked it better if they'd stuck to exploring the sources of angst and trauma that already exist in his life because it's not like those are in short supply.

* Yes, both sadistic and masochistic, because I get a fucked-up emotional kick out of projecting his angst onto my massive martyrdom kink, but I also want to do horrible things to him because he suffers so prettily. This is a large part of the problem. And also why I love Doctor/Master from both points of view.

And... most of it fits together, I guess, if you look at it as him re-enacting the Time War/Gallifrey trauma over and over. Right down to his singularly irritating habit of refusing to lay smackdown on an aggressor just so he can give them a goddamn choice he knows they'll turn down, and end up doing something even more awful to them when they do. Because his sanity and coping depend on believing he had no choice but to commit a double genocide and that there was nothing, absolutely nothing else he could've done. On seeing himself as a good person who's been forced to make terrible choices and do horrific things because the alternative was so much worse. And that is interesting and complex and disturbing, I just wish they hadn't laid it on so goddamn thick.

...also, just throwing this out there: End of Time. What the fuck was that? I mean, what the fucking fuck I don't even--I want to find whatever Rusty was smoking and throw it down a black hole so nobody can ever have any ever again. And the worst part is that there is too much good stuff buried under the Bad Crack to completely write it off and go "none of that ever happened, la la la in my headcanon Ten just tripped over a brick and regenerated into Eleven."

However, I continue to be amused by all the shameless visual references to Star Wars. I started noticing them around the escape-pod sequence in "42," and then we got the Master's mini-Death-Star-meets-ANH-interrogation-bots and Jedi funeral pyre, a bus stranded on Tatooine, Ten and Jack in the Mos Eisley cantina, hands chopped off left and right, the Battle of Yavin recreated by goddamn Spitfires in space, and God only knows what else. I'm sure there were others I'm not remembering.

And from what I've seen of season 5 so far I am so glad Moffat took over. Because I may have fewer issues and feelings about what I've seen so far (well, feelings besides "fuck yes this is awesome!") but I also want to punch the screen a lot less. And it's so much less shippy--in all four preceding seasons I pretty much wanted to ship everyone with everyone, and now even though Amy is smoking hot I am content to sit back for Happy Fun (And/Or Horrifying) Gen Adventures In Space, admire the steampunk TARDIS, and bask in the fact that Moffat knows how to fucking write.