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

[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.