The End of Time: WTF RTD?!

[arachnekallisti]

It was a bit like eating a smoked salmon, asparagus, white truffle and champagne risotto made by someone who can't actually cook. All the ingredients were fantastic, but had been put together with only the haziest idea of in what proportions, in which order, and for how long. Still, if you prodded the sticky mess and picked off the charred bits, there were some delicious morsels in there.



First, the epic:

- Speaking of delicious morsels... wasn't that fanservice-tastic? The Master bondage, and the Doctor bondage, and the sheer number of "oh, just snog" moments... and the bit where the Doctor is strapped to the bondage chair and telling the Master how beautiful he is, and the bit where they almost end up working together to destroy the Time Lords... OTP. Just OTP. Look me in the eye and tell me it's not canon.

- Wasn't Wilf brilliant? That scene in the cafe in the first part, and the bit on the spaceship with the gun... I've always liked Wilf, and I'm kind of glad he didn't turn out to be a Time Lord or anything, just a pretty awesome human being.

- The Time Lords were pretty damned impressive, in a high-fantasy sorceror-king kind of way. What with their mad tattooed prophetess and all. That list of all the creatures they used for the Time War - the Nightmare Child, the King Who Never Was and his army of Might-Have-Beens - sounded incredibly evocative, and a little bit Vitriarch. That and the idea that the Time Lock has the last day of the Time War repeating over and over on Gallifrey - that's a new level of horrible. That's Rauxes.

- Also, we don't know where the Master went in that flash of white light? Back into the Time Lock, perhaps? The idea of the Time Lords trapped in the same repeating day with the Master bent on revenge is impressively nasty. "Ever wondered what your spleens look like, Lord President? Oh, that's a shame, I seem to have made a bit too much of a mess of them. Tell you what, I'll show you next time round."

- Do we think that was really Rassilon? Back from the dead, like some kind of twisted King Arthur? Or was it just some megalomaniacal Time Lord who'd declared himself Rassilon II? Either possibility is pretty cool, though.

And the mess:

- RTD writes like a bad Living Greyhawk module. Many cool set pieces, with only the haziest of ideas of how we get from one of them to the next. There was too much stuff going on here, and we could've done with having fewer and better subplots. Did we need Naismith and his daughter at all, for starters? And WTF was all that bobbins about "The Cult of Saxon" and Lucy mysteriously having the right counter-potion?

- Why lightning-shooting-Master? OK, the ritual clearly brought him back as a lich, but why the sorceror levels as well as the template?

- Rotten waste of a perfectly good Donna, though. Why was she not out kicking arse with her mad admin skillz, distracting the Master and so on? All she got to do was panic and pass out, and the only damage she did to the Master's plans was due to a defence mechanism the Doctor had put in her brain. On reflection, Donna more or less got the classic Campbellian Hero's Journey before being nobbled by the Diabolus Ex Machina in Journey's End, which means that she never got the Return With Your Accumulated Wisdom phase. I was hoping that the Doctor would restore her memories, thus letting Donna have a proper Hero's Return, but no. At least she got some financial compensation out of it.

- For that matter, if the Doctor had keeled over and regenerated right after saving Wilf, I would've been in floods of tears. However, as the Doctor wandered on through his tour of the universe on more last legs than a particularly determined centipede, the tears dried and were replaced with a puzzled frown and occasional glances at my watch.

- Isn't it just a bit dodgy that Martha and Mickey, the only two black companions, get paired up together out of the blue like that? Especially with Martha previously having had a thing going with Tom? Mind you, I guess they were kind of awesome together. Like Nick and Nora Charles, only with fewer martinis and more Sontarans.

- Although the cameos at the end were kind of heartwarming (so Jack is moving on after CoE, Sarah Jane and Luke are just plain awesome, and Donna's got married at last), they did kind of kipper the pacing. Not necessarily unsalvageably - we could've harked back to Five's regeneration in The Caves of Androzani. We could've had the Doctor angsting at Wilf about how maybe he'd lived too long, and maybe the universe would be better off without any Time Lords at all, and then the Ood could've showed up and shown the Doctor visions of his companions kicking arse and having fantastic lives as evidence that he was still a force for good and should regenerate after all. At least that way there'd have been a bit of plot drive still.


Anyway, this has kind of inspired me to go hunting fics for my favourite fascinatingly wrong Slashy Nemeses again, and here are some recs:
1. Chasing The Paradox - a lovely, twisty, timey-wimey Doctor/Master romance, kind of sweet and deeply disturbing at the same time.
2. Intoxication - Academy-era fic, in which Ushas has to cope with Koschei's attempts to seduce Theta Sigma crashing through her study whilst she is trying to revise. Fairly dark comedy, in which Koschei comes over distinctly stalkery, with some dubious consent issues.
3.The one where Koschei goes all BDSM on Theta's arse - Academy-era fic, as NSFW as you might imagine, all psychological and creepy with definite consent issues.
4.Bit of femmeslash for a change of pace - Rani/GLaDoS. It really does work.

Comments

[huggyrei.livejournal.com]

The drawn-out death scene did kind of spoil things. When he finally died, we all cheered and threw party popper streamers at the screen.

[arachnekallisti.livejournal.com]

I spent most of it vaguely wondering if he was going to survive the radiation and get hit by a bus on the Powell Estate. Or possibly run over by Rose. chaosdeathfish spent it shouting "Just die!" at the screen.

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

So many things were horribly overplayed. The knock. When it finally happened it was perfect, the timing, the reaction, gorgeous, then it happened again and again and totally killed the scene. Give us some credit Rusty, you actually got foreshadowing right, just once, give us credit that we can spot it without a sledgehammer.

[arachnekallisti.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's part of the problem. Great ingredients, no idea of what the relative proportions ought to be.

[prochytes.livejournal.com]

As you know, I enjoyed it immensely, pacing issues and all. Sometimes I wonder whether the odd distribution of materials at the end of RTD's stuff is actually aimed at making some sort of a point about how problematic the idea of closure, ending, and conventional plot is when dealing with a semi-immortal time-traveller, or his actually immortal associate. Thus, the false closures, bizarre flashforwards, and weird pacing help to suggest how hard it is for the Doctor or Jack to wrap their minds around human ideas of narrativity. Rather over-ingenious, as interpretations go, however, and I am not sure that what you gain is worth what you lose.

I loved the Time Lords. The litany of terrors from the Time War successfully freaked me out more in the course of one sentence than some horror films manage in two and a half hours. It was indeed like all the best bits of Greyhawk distilled. Wilf was exceedingly awesome, and the Silver Cloak was an idea of genius. I do hope that we shall see more of them, some day - the exact antipodes of the Baker Street Irregulars.

The Cult of Saxon was a bit of a waste of an interesting idea, I thought. It would have been great if, for example, they had been originally introduced as antagonists for an episode of S2 Torchwood: many possibilities for angst if the Books of Saxon contained a true record of what happened to Torchwood Three during the Year That Never Was. (Of course, what with production schedules and all that, it would have been a pipe-dream, but a nice idea, all the same.) As things stood everything was a bit compressed. But I did love the tone of Lucy's voice as she was laying the well-deserved smack-down on Hubbie - again. It is not often that a high-fantasy Disrupt The Ritual moment is conducted in the register of a domestic dispute.

Naismith and his daughter can be justified, I think, as introducing the thematic play with parent/child relations which runs through the episodes: the Doctor thinking of Wilf as his dad; the red fields on the estate of the Master's father; the Doctor and the Master as wayward Sons of Gallifrey. Naismith and Gel were rather like some old-school Who human villains, in fact: greedy and unprincipled enough to start the ball rolling, and almost immediately thereafter squashed by it when it does.

Fun Theory for the Day: the circumstances of Ten's regeneration consciously evoke elements from all the previous ones. Thus:

A. Age and weariness - "A Time Lord lives too long" (One).

B. Intervention by a renegade Time Lord (Six, Seven).

C. Intervention by the Time Lord top brass (Two).

D. Massive dose of radiation (Three, Nine).

E. Falling from a great height, with extensive foreshadowing (Four).

F. Taking the bullet for a friend (Five, Nine).

G. Ending the Time War (Eight [presumably], Nine).

Some of those are very tenuous indeed, of course. Fun idea, though.

[arachnekallisti.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to work out what it is about RTD's weird pacing that gets on my nerves, and I think that's turning into an essay on how to write good crack!fic, and when the Rule of Cool stops being enough.

I'm still trying to turn the Cult of Saxon into something cool and interesting in my head, for when I do that Lucy-centric fanfic. I don't want to get in your way too much if you want to use them in the "Distant Drums" sequel we discussed. I like the idea of writing them as yer basic Cthulhu cult, with an intriguing choice of cosmic horror.

Which also suggests to me the possibility of HPL being inspired to create Nyarlathotep by a run-in with the Master. We definitely had Time Lords as Cosmic Horror enough in The End of Time.

[prochytes.livejournal.com]

the possibility of HPL being inspired to create Nyarlathotep by a run-in with the Master.

Ooohh, yes. I can definitely see this. The charismatic Front Man for Cosmic Horror, who seems to alternate between reverence and contempt for his "masters". And also (using the CoC expanded continuity for comparison) addicted to anagrammatic or punning pseudonyms...

[arachnekallisti.livejournal.com]

That's another one on my to-write pile, then. I wonder which Master and which Doctor would work best for this one?

Ideally I'd want a Doctor who was in-between companions and who would recruit HPL as a temporary companion - although given HPL's raving xenophobia, the Doctor would probably freak him out every bit as much as the Master and his allies.

[prochytes.livejournal.com]

Interesting question...

In some ways Delgado!Master is very tempting: there is the strong Ubermensch vibe and also what would undoubtedly appear to HPL as a sinister, raffish exoticism. (Of course, Delgado himself was actually a half-Spanish Cockney, but HPL was not exactly noted for his sense of cultural distinctions.) On the other hand, the Time Lords of this period are still capable of turning up incognito in bowler hats. Maybe Eight and Ainsley!Master? This could work nicely because

a) Eight was amiable enough to get on with anyone, even HPL.

b) The Time War is looming and the Gallifreyan gloves are coming off (or, aha aha, going on).

c) Post-Survival Cheetah virus-infected Master would really screw with the ailurophile HPL's head.

Of course, Eight is strictly contemporary (for what that is worth in a time-travel continuity) with Roberts!Master, but one could hand-wave that by saying that Ainsley!Master was the one the Time Lords brought back for the War: Roberts!Master did not last long enough for him to become Koschei's default setting, as it were.

[ignisophis.livejournal.com]

What annoyed me about the ending, even more than its interminability, was the impression that half the Whoniverse is too incompetent to survive without the Doctor's help! The boy genius can't cross the road, Martha & Mickey can't survive as freelancers, Jack can't pick up another human in an alien bar for gods' sakes! There are even elements of Donna & her new hubby being unable to make a decent life for themselves (re: Wilf's comments in part one) without the Doctor's help. Some of these do also have more favourable interpretations - the Doctor giving Jack permission to 'move on' from his guilt and not repeat Ten's mistake of isolating himself, RTD's concerns about the audience influence of SJA characters never looking both ways before crossing the road - but still left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

Was also extremely irritated by the circumstances surrounding the Cabinet of Death - magic glass which blocked radiation & the 'Master wave' but not light or sound, using (if I followed the dialogue correctly) a nuke as a power source (nuclear bombs don't work like that!), magic radiation of a kind you can pour down pipes and gets soaked up by the Doctor's tissues such that he can safely hug Wilf afterwards without even needing to change his clothes, he can flick a switch to let Wilf out but somehow doing this with his sonic screwdriver rather than his finger will bring down DOOM... it would've been much easier to swallow if they'd used some technobable names instead of calling it 'radiation' and 'a nuke'.

Still don't know how the Doctor survived falling dozens of feet through glass onto marble and was able to walk afterwards - maybe what actually started killing him was the internal injuries from that, and it was the beginnings of a slow regeneration which enabled him to get up afterwards and 'soak up' the radiation?

I really like the theory that the mysterious female Time Lord was actually Susan, which also gives some nice parallels with Jack's actions in TW:CoE. I wonder how much of the speculation that it was Ten's mum is based on relative apparent ages, which we all know means nothing when dealing with Time Lords!

The bits about the Cult of Saxon and the Conspiracy of Lucy were a bit throwaway, would've been good to see more of them. The manner of the Master's resurrection seemed a bit too much like magic rather than science compared to the rest of the show, though.

Other than that: really liked Wilf & the Silver Cloak, squeed massively over the immense slashiness, was very disapointed Donna didn't get to do more than panic and pass out and wed, was awed by the fantastic portrayal of the Time Lords gone psycho, was less annoyed by the RTD Apocalypse Reset Button now we've come to expect it of him, was chuffed to see a cameo from Rusell Tovey whetting my anticiation for S2 of 'Being Human' :)

[arachnekallisti.livejournal.com]

Yes, the problem with the epic mess is that even the epic gets kippered a bit by the application of Fridge Logic. It works fine for the eight year olds. They are less susceptible to Fridge Logic than the rest of us, and more capable of just running on Rule of Cool.

There are so many cool theories about who the Time Lady in white was; Susan, Romana, the Rani... I like the Susan one, although prochytes is selling me on the Rani one. Think about it - she's a biologist, she likes the diversity of life the universe has to offer, she might well consider life as a disembodied mind to be a fate worse than death.

[ignisophis.livejournal.com]

The Rani is certainly a possibility... I don't know enough about Whoniverse canon to judge how well the "being lost" line works for Susan or the Rani?

[arachnekallisti.livejournal.com]

Well, Susan got dragged off round the universe by her grandfather when he left, and was eventually ditched on 21st century Earth after a Dalek invasion because the Doctor reckoned her current boyfriend was probably better for her. This means that Susan probably spent a good while stranded on Earth trying to pretend to be a perfectly normal human before getting back to Gallifrey, however that happened.

As regards the Rani, the "being lost" line might refer to her exile from Gallifrey, presumably before being called home for the Time War.

I am half tempted to write three different Woman-in-White point of view fics, one for each possibility.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Oh, how I am loving academy-era-Koschei! I've bookmarked Chasing the Paradox as well, although I never seem to find the time to read novels, let alone novel-length fics.

Because I am lose and fail, the steampunk jewellery-making workshop was already fully-booked by the time I got around to looking. But they're having a steampunk fashion event on the 30th, and that doesn't need booking..

[arachnekallisti.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I missed the jewellery-making workshop booking too. See you at the steampunk fashion show?

Glad you're liking the fic. I may post some more links when I find more of the good stuff.