Roundup

[jaggedwolf]

Doctor Who

Caught up on all of Thirteen's episodes. Oh boy.

Again, same caveat that I haven't watched any of the earlier Doctors. My knowledge of them comes from vague osmosis via Tumblr and when someone in my life was quite into DW.

I adore Thirteen. She's so fun to watch, between her mannerisms and her thought processes. I enjoyed how she went from showing her arrogant snarly side only when the fam wasn't around to laying down the law in the Shelley episode. There's some surface-level friendliness covering up a lot of deliberate distancing and positioning of herself as fundamentally alone. Which I guess isn't too surprising, given that she's the regenerating alien travelling with 21st-century humans. As a newcomer, I'm cool with The Timeless Child reveal, though I bet there's lots of wank about it.

All the companions have their own instinctive styles. Graham is ready to default granddad everyone (the astronaut convo was good), Yaz really does approach things like a police officer (de-escalating where possible and taking initiative where not), and Ryan approaches everyone as if he's meeting them in everyday life (he got challenged to a duel and didn't even realize it, ha).

Yaz is naturally my favourite of the three. Her heart-eyes for Thirteen hardly hurt either. I'm still not over that Byron-Clairmont parallel. So while I ship Yaz/Thirteen, it's in a sort of, alright Yaz, have a nice torrid affair and adventures with the alien, and then stay the fuck on Earth before you get screwed, from what I've osmosis-ed happens to most of the previous companions. And yet...I'm not sure what Yaz wants out of Earth. I'm not sure she does either. The only people close to her we've seen are her family, who she keeps at an emotional distance. Even at the end of Demons of Punjab, where she's traveled across time to see her grandmother's wedding, she declines hearing her grandmother's version of the story. It's enough of a throughline that I wasn't super-surprised by the nightmare episode revealing attempted-runaway teen Yaz, tbh.

Favourite Episodes

The Women Who Fell To Earth: An excellent introduction to everyone, my only complaint being what happens to Grace. :(

Demons of Punjab: I didn't expect a historical about Partition, and the choice to focus on a single family was excellent for distilling it to a single episode of television. There's something awfully sad and real that while Thirteen justifies their initial intervention on the basis of "can't have a world with no Yaz", Yaz owes her very existence to the murder of her grandmother's first husband during a terrible time. The watch stopping not in a moment of violence but during the wedding was a nice touch.

It Takes You Away: Properly spooky and weird (the frog!).

Fugitive of the Judoon: I lost my shit at realizing who Ruth was, that was an excellent reveal.

On the flip side, I think the worst episode has to be Orphan 55. Every turn it became less logically sound, we pivoted to multiple clunky speeches on climate change, and somehow two kinda-bad-guy randos we thought died heroically showed up at the end to die heroically again, I guess?

I dunno if I'll ever get around to watching the other Docs. Though, Twelve does look like a good grumpy old man, and I've been hearing a lot of Pearl Mackie's voice in my Forest 404 listens...

Critical Role

For reasons, I ended up watching this Beau/Jester compilation of the first 51 episodes, and it's so interesting to see how much more easygoing their friendship there is, compared to the current awkwardness and uncertainty. Like, would we get Beau pulling the blanket up for a sleeping Jester now? I feel like the answer is no.

Fic Recs

here come the dreams by starstrung - Beau/Jester, injury recovery with so much quality pining

Other Links

Via st_aurafina, The Shadow Passes, a new Thirteenth Doctor short story on the BBC site.

Betraying My Hometown - Some might say that a home to which one cannot return is the only true hometown.

Comments

[auroracloud]

As a newcomer, I'm cool with The Timeless Child reveal, though I bet there's lots of wank about it.


... Weeeeeellll, some of us are upset because this really changes the premise of who the Doctor is and why. I love the Doctor as a character partly because they don't fit into the society they're born into, and choose to be a rebel and behave differently, go out to the universe and travel with humans and all that. The keyword being choose. It's been a recurring theme throughout the show's history. The Timeless Child implies that the Doctor was different because they were born different. It has the implication "of course, that's why the Doctor never fit in, they weren't even one of those people to begin with". It implies you can't be different unless you're of a different origin. And those of us who've always felt different from the society we were born into, and have drawn courage and inspiration from the Doctor to dare to be different anyway, may feel like we've had the carpet pulled out under us, and not know how to engage with the show now that it's stopped supporting us and has started implying something entirely different. I wouldn't call that wank, necessarily.

Granted, I haven't engaged in big internet arguments about it, I've just complained about it in my journal and grumbled in the comments of other fans in similar feelings and stopped engaging with the show entirely until I can sort out my feelings. And yeah, I also know not everyone gets this implication/meaning out of the story, but I personally haven't been able to shake it, haven't been able to stop seeing the story like that.

I didn't mind changing the Time Lords' past; on its own it would be an interesting treatment of themes like history and origin stories nations tell about themselves and how unreliable it is. I just hated them making the Doctor be the Timeless Child. (It's still hard for me to even write those words in the same sentence. I'm emotional about this show.) I've hated the Special Doctor narratives anyway, where it's somehow inherent in their situation like with some of the Last of the Time Lords stuff back when that was a thing (9th and 10th Doctor). I'm not that into Chosen One narratives.

Also I didn't think it adequately explained the Master's actions, but that's another thing.

Sorry for spouting several paragraphs at you! I'm not trying to start an argument or expect you to have answers/counterpoints, and I realize that as a newbie to the show you come to it at a different angle anyhow, and you're absolutely entitled to your opinions and feelings! If you enjoyed it, good for you. I just wanted to point out that not liking the Timeless Child does not necessarily count as "wank". I'm sure there are many dudebros who just can't stand the idea of the Doctor having originally been multiple people of colour of different genders (and I derive some satisfaction from the thought of their pain, heh, even as I reject the story), but there are many of us whose issues with the story are quite different.

Anyway, Pearl Mackie's Bill Potts *points to icon* is a delight, and she's and Twelve are amazing together. Twelve is indeed an excellent grumpy old man, complete with attack eyebrows and a Scottish accent. If you want to check out another era of the show, that's definitely a nice one to try. The episode quality varies a lot, and the finale doesn't do right by Bill and I'm still angry at that, but the good or average stories from Twelve and Bill together are a delight to watch.

And I agree about Orphan 55 being the worst episode of the run, for the same reasons, plus that it depressed the hell out of me. And I really loved Demons of the Punjabl.

[jaggedwolf]

That's super fair. I'm coming at this with a lot less context, so it didn't read as a Chosen One narrative to me.

Twelve and Bill are probably the New-Who pair I'm least spoiled on (thought I still am spoiled enough to know why Thirteen was so vehement in keeping the humans away from the Cybermen), which is an incentive. Episode quality varying a lot is totally fine, given how Thirteen's run has been. The not-great endings for companions is probably one of the things holding me back - I get sad at even sympathetic one-off randos dying, ha.

[st_aurafina]

As a newcomer, I'm cool with The Timeless Child reveal, though I bet there's lots of wank about it.
As an oldcomer (???!!) there was wank about it, but I personally loved it and all it said about the Time Lords.

I, too, lost my shit at the reveal for Ruth - I adore her! I hope she's in many more episodes.

I know you're not feeling like watching past eps right now but hit me up if you want recs, I've been watching since the seventies. (And I love all of it.)

[jaggedwolf]

The Ruth reveal was so well-done, I had a moment of "LOL the bad guy changed to a snazzy outfit, oh wait-". And then the two doctors got miffed with each other. I wouldn't mind seeing Ruth!Doctor again.

The Timeless Child thing certainly casts The Time Lords in an interesting light. I'm oddly hoping that not all of them are actually dead, because it would be nice to get some non-Master intel. Finally, I may have been a little too amused that the random dude in Ireland flashbacks were a metaphor for the Doctor's own experiences, because usually the alien stuff's the metaphor.