arachnekallisti (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
arachnekallisti) wrote2010-01-03 12:07 am
arachnekallisti) wrote2010-01-03 12:07 am
Entry tags:
The End of Time: WTF RTD?!
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.
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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...
no subject
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.
no subject
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.