The year of spoiler lockdown is OVER

[petronia]

And then we watched all the specials, five hours** straight through. XDD Tomorrow I rejoin the real world!


** Plus fifteen minutes of awesome megalomaniacal self-indulgence

Comments

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Omedetou XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Inorite XD

(omg the needle swung so fast between GOOD CRACK and BAD CRACK it was a literal BLUR)

(I feel sorta like RTD had buried a thread of INSANITY in Ten's character like the little paper tab in a mini Babybel cheese so that when the time came as he knew it surely would he could give a sharp tug and shiz would go entropic so fast that we would be BEGGING FOR OUR FAVORITE CHARACTER TO DIE

I applaud this actually it's master troll genius)

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

It is sort of genius! but I wonder how much of it was, like, conscious, deliberate, etc. (haven't seen commentary from him on the specials and it's not the kind of thing he'd admit to anyway, prolly). It's merciful to the viewership, in a bizarro way, like delivering an anesthetic. FWIW tho I hear a lot of folks bawled like babies anyway. XD;

Btw I agree he's a troll (obvs) but I don't think he's only a troll, I mean, not every piece of his storytelling is just to get a rise out of somebody. Or maybe it is but that's not to say he's not also in earnest. Sometimes. Earnest in lulz.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The Confidentials are frustrating because there's so much that reads obviously deliberate to me that they won't talk about at all!

It's merciful to the Beeb too as the general sense of relief may push more ppl over into watching 11th's tenure, rather than throwing a strop because Tennant is out. XD In all seriousness though I like this better than if they had just gone with yr basic "Doctor is lovely and heartbroken and finally dies saving ppl/Earth like Space Jesus" even if it is alienating and dark as fuck. For one thing the Space Jesus thing gets on my last nerve, and this carried me right through the last bit of RTD/The Doctor snapping and being like FUCK THIS NOISE CAN HAS MASSIVE SENTIMENTALIST SELF-INDULGENCE TIEM NAO. That and my general appreciation for OTT. XDDD

Also it is a good ending because it retrospectively makes the rest of the series better seen in its light - like all the bits where Ten was a real cold self-righteous fucker under the fluffy open love for humanity was leading somewhere and not just thoughtless/inconsistent writing. (Even if it was. XDD)

"Troll" is extreme for most of what Davies does, yeah, it's more "haters gonna hate".

definitely the wrong place for this XD

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

So I watched the first six episodes of Doctor Who 2005. I liked Rose and could see her appeal more I could the last time I tried to watch, back in 2005 -- whatever happens, she can just go with it, very important if you're being constantly chaperoned from one absurd situation to another. And she has a kind of moral certainty and grounding that must be very attractive to the Doctor, who can't empathize with the Victim of the Week because he must always look ahead to the Big Picture.

I'm still a little alienated (har har) by it all, though. There's just this kind of... anti-intellectual vibe to Doctor Who, where the Doctor assures us that humanity survives the ecological mess it's made of the Earth and goes on to great things, but whenever an individual human shows signs of wanting to understand the unknown, the Doctor (and Rose) censures them so they'll know their place. See: Charles Dickens, Mr. Stanton (though XD, those jabs at the American self-important-getting-things-done-no-time-to-deliberate "decisiveness"). Not to mention that A-levels crack.

Please tell me, how is humanity going to survive the imminent global apocalypse and conquer the stars if only people who already know everything, like the Doctor, are allowed to know anything? Sorry, but without people who try even though they might fail, we're never gonna get anywhere.

Anyway. Please tell me this changes later on!

Amused that the graffiti sprayed on the TARDIS in episode 4 is also the title of episode 12. LOL foreshadowing.

Re: definitely the wrong place for this XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Please tell me, how is humanity going to survive the imminent global apocalypse and conquer the stars if only people who already know everything, like the Doctor, are allowed to know anything?

Hmm well there are a bunch of ways to answer this:

1) The Doctor does end up touching a lot of ppl's lives not just Rose etc. and they mostly go on to do cool shiz, thematically it's more "normal ppl are extraordinary given the right circumstances". Not can become extraordinary, are already but haven't had the chance. Like Tolkien's hobbits. XD To this end, the point of Rose is that she's a working-class non-higher-educated shopgirl with no obvious prospects of advancement, yet she turns out to be awesome. (last pt fan debatable obv)

2) I wouldn't call this streak in DW "anti-intellectual" so much as it is "anti-democratic", unlike other shows with such themes the writing doesn't even pay lip service to due process w/r/t hidden information and shadowy govt orgs and that does bother me a lot.

3) The "normals can't know about what's out there" gets FUBARed further on. Oh boy does it get FUBARed. XD;;

4) There's at least one ep I can think of that deals specifically with the going-out-to-the-stars bit, but it's one of the 2009 specials and I really have no good way of talking about it at this point. XD;

Amused that the graffiti sprayed on the TARDIS in episode 4 is also the title of episode 12. LOL foreshadowing.

You're good. XD There's something like that in every season (multiple somethings, by S4) but I never spot it in advance.

Re: definitely the wrong place for this XD

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Rose is awesome! At least so far.

Well what I mean is, there's no respect for the principles of scientific advancement, where you need people who obsessively catalog everything even if that does make them assholes. XD; There's current Earth tech, and then there's the Doctor's magical blue pen that fixes everything, and there's nothing to suggest how humanity gets from Point A to Point B.

I can see the people who hang out with the Doctor going on to great things, because once you've fought off the Daleks nothing else seems too hard. But what about the jobs that require KNOWLEDGE more than ATTITUDE? The Doctor already has all the knowledge, so the Companions are never called upon to provide that, only attitude.

(I think my science-stream-academic-achiever-ness is showing through, here. ^^)

Glad to know that the writers get the show's shortcomings and work to correct them, though, even if it's not in a coherent way. XD

Re: definitely the wrong place for this XD

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I won't pretend this show is all brilliant, though, a lot of the season-ending big-splash mythology-arc stuff in particular is this combination of awesome and truly dire that makes for great fanwankery and ratings-busting event television. XD The actors pull the scripts' chestnuts out of the fire fairly often.