Andraste

So: how about those Doctor Who specials, then? On the whole I enjoyed them, with a few reservations. Which is what I'd say about the first RTD era, come to think of it.

First of all: much as I was looking forward to Tennant and Tate returning, I was unconvinced that the Fourteenth Doctor would feel separate enough from the Tenth Doctor to justify giving him a whole number to himself. However, I am glad to have been entirely wrong about this. While of course he's got a lot in common with Ten, the performance feels distinctive enough that you can really tell that he's been three other people in between. Even if I'm still convinced that RTD really did this to make the number of Doctors line up with the number of actors after Moffat put the War Doctor into the timeline, it ended up feeling right to me.

( Spoilers accidentally renamed one of the fundamental forces of the universe, oops. )

I started writing this for an entirely different iteration of halfamoon but hey, better late than never!


Paper Dolls (500 words) by Andraste
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who (1963)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Tegan Jovanka, Nyssa of Traken
Additional Tags: Half A Moon 2023

Summary: The wardrobe room is amazing, until it isn't.

It has been observed many times that while the internet may not have actually increased the number of stupid things that are said in the world each day, it has definitely made those things louder. This has had many terrible effects, but still, every now and then there is the joy of seeing someone do something so stupid that everyone in the world goes '... you what?' at the same time. In the last couple of days, that person has been Tory MP Nick Fletcher, claiming that young men are being driven to crime because there were some female Ghostbusters in 2016 and Jodie Whittaker is playing Doctor Who. The only role models left for boys are the Kray twins, apparently.

Twitter and beyond have produced many delightful responses to this - I think the last time I saw so many good news memes involved thirty to fifty feral hogs. Many of these have taken the form of sarcastic pictures of Marvel superhero posters, and it's not hard to see why. However, if Iron Man and Captain America and Hawkeye and Spider-Man and Doctor Strange and ... well, let me stop there or we'll be here all night ... aren't heroic enough and/or we're determined to confine ourselves to British television programs, there seems to be plenty of male characters in those as well. Everything from Good Omens to It's A Sin to The North Water, not to mention what seems to be an extremely steady supply of crime dramas with male leads. There's even a new version of Around the World in 80 Days coming out next year starring David Tennant!

More than ever, I am hoping that RTD does not cast another white bloke as the next Doctor. (I would happily accept a Black or Asian man, if only for the comedy value of being able to say 'see? the Doctor is a man again! You got what you wanted!' while all the same awful people continue to whine. Because you just know that Black Panther and Shang-Chi and any character played by Idris Elba mysteriously do not count on their list of good examples for young boys ...)

Stuff that has happened over the past week:

1. Local anti-vaxxer riots that involved people spitting on healthcare workers and pissing on the Shrine of Remembrance.

2. An actual earthquake.

3. RTD is returning to Doctor Who.

4. Plague continues, da capo al fine.

5. JMS is rebooting Babylon 5 on the CW?????????

I think that I am going back to bed before something else happens.

Take Tonight by Andraste
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: The Doctor/River Song
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Eleventh Doctor, Twelfth Doctor, River Song
Additional Tags: Fanvids, Embedded Video, Download Available

Summary:

Maybe it isn't the wrong order after all.

Since the new series came back, it's made an art of the big, bombastic finale - fourteen of them in all, if we count The End of the World and The Time of the Doctor, and they certainly fit the bill. While there's several I truly enjoy, only one of them is my favourite story of the entire season it concludes.

There's just so many things I love in this two-parter. One more timey-wimey plot! Properly scary Cybermen! Moffatt indulging himself to establish that all of their spin-off media origin stories are true at once! (I may have punched the air when the Doctor mentioned Planet 14 and the Voord. Take that, people who don't think the comic strip counts!)

The part I do not love is - look, there is a reason the planned Twitter rewatch of this got cancelled, because it would have been spectacularly poorly-timed to talk about this story while Black Lives Matter protests were going on everywhere. I know Moffatt didn't mean what happens to Bill to come across That Way. Any more than he meant it That Way when the other major black character who appeared during his era was also killed and turned into a Cyberman. Any more than RTD meant it That Way when the Master forced Martha's family to dress up as maids just a few episodes after she'd been forced to dress up as a maid. Any more than Chibnall meant it That Way when Grace was killed off in the first episode of his run so other people could be sad about it. But, you know, that doesn't actually change the fact that Doctor Who has a long history of treating the bodies and lives of its black characters in racist and unpleasant ways and I really hope it's actually stopped now. It would be nice if Ryan did not die and/or get turned into a Cyberman in his last appearance, is what I'm saying. (Also I guess he should not dress up as a maid, but somehow I don't think it would come across the same way if he did.)

At least the whole thing is ameliorated a bit by Bill using her Cyber-powers to save the day and by joining Clara in travelling the universe with her immortal girlfriend by the end. (Please, Big Finish, get Clara and Me and Bill and Heather in the same story. Maybe Clara and Me have also broken up by now and Clara and Bill can kiss???)

( Now onto the glowing review of everything else about this episode. )

(I am spoiler cutting this so you can go and watch it now. Well worth thirteen minutes of your time. Plus however long it takes you to stop crying.)

( And now a list of the most important Sarah-Jane-related facts we learned today. )

... or, alternately: 'the one where Ace kills an evil clown with a laser death robot and nobody really comments.' (I mean, the clown richly deserves it. But I feel like it says something about the tone of this story that everyone who survived the circus has a body count at the end of it. Except technically Kingpin, I guess, but the whole thing is his fault and he should feel bad.)

Anyway, Stephen Wyatt only wrote two stories for Doctor Who: Paradise Towers and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. While they have quite a lot in common in some ways, in others they couldn't be more different. I always find the two a fascinating contrast in how much production can make a script look better or worse. I have a huge soft spot for Paradise Towers and will argue forever that it's a GREAT script, but one of the most interesting things about it is that just about everything that could have gone wrong with it did. While there are a couple of great performances (from the delightful cannabalistic rezzies) the casting in general went awry from the beginning. The Kangs are too old, the guards are too young (they were meant to be Dad's Army types to explain why they weren't away at the war) and the usually excellent Richard Briers made some, er, eccentric choices when it came to portraying the Chief Caretaker. Meanwhile, the robot monsters were terrible, the lighting was worse and the less said about the awful score the better.

With The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, things couldn't have been more different. Even the stuff that went wrong behind the scenes made what showed up on the screen better. There's no way it would have looked this good if they'd shot it in a studio as planned, instead of in an actual tent in a studio parking lot. (There was asbestos removal going on at the BBC television centre time, hence the abrupt shift to a far more convincing venue.) And while I'm sorry the effects department nearly blew up Sylvester McCoy, the over-enthusiastic explosion gave us what may be the best shot of the Seventh Doctor ever.

It's one of those delightfully juicy Seventh Doctor stories where there are layers of things going on, in both the text and the subtext. I once saw it summarised as 'we hate our jobs, we hate our audience, we hate our fans, we hate ourselves' and there's certainly some biting commentary about Doctor Who itself going on here. I admit it, Whizzkid's lines about the posters and 'I know it's not as good as it used to be, but I'm still terribly interested!' crack me up every time. All of that ends up working even better in hindsight in light of the show's imminent cancellation. And then even better again twenty-two years later now that it's turned out the Doctor survived that experience, too.

But of course that's not the only way of reading this - there's a lot of musing about hippie ideals and selling out and it's no accident that the Gods of Ragnarok choose to look the way they do or that Captain Cook wanders around a lot of places saying disparaging things about foreigners and wearing a pith helmet. Semiotic thickness indeed!

This is my favourite performance from McCoy in the role. (Well, maybe my second favourite if you could the BBV audio Punchline. But he is officially playing some completely different character that travels though time and space in a police box in that one, so maybe it doesn't count.) While he had to be taught the actual tricks, his career as a stage performer gives him the perfect background to pull off those scenes in Episode Four. And of course Ace is great as always, on another adventure where the Doctor takes her somewhere she hates and makes her confront her fears. "This thing better work or I'll kick it's head in!" in is a definitive Ace line.

It's also lovely revisiting this after listening to some of the recent Big Finish adventures where the Doctor meets up with Mags again - she always felt like one of those characters that could have been a companion if things had gone a bit differently, and I'm glad that the audio people were finally able to make it so after all these years. (Which reminds me that I still have a few of her audio adventures to catch up on ...)

And if for nothing else, I would love this story for the best bit of background business in Doctor Who: the robot clown that puts its hand over its mouth in shock when the Doctor calls Cook a crushing bore.