#Russel t Davies

[machetesquirrel]

I’m just going to leave this here

[sailorsally]

Word??

[toweringclam]

Everyone trying to make sense of 73 yards is kinda missing the point, IMO. It's a faerie story. It's dream logic. It's the Twilight Zone. It's running on pure vibes.

We're not in the realm of science fiction anymore. This is Occult.

[that-homoerotic-blouse]

The Doctor being the happiest in family dinners reblog if you agree

[ghost-bison]

i became curious and searched up how the name "dalek" came to be:

at first, i thought it must have something to do with the norwegian word "dårlig", which means "bad", because of the doctor's reaction in 2x13 "doomsday" when rose said they were in bad wolf bay ("dårlig ulv stranden" if i'm not mistaken): he thought she'd said "dalek". but if you look up the pronunciation, it sounds more like /dɔːleh/ (approximate english phonetic transcription) than how she said it, /dɑːlɪg/ so i thought, even though the mix-up between "dårlig" and "dalek" was done on purpose and the definition, "bad", would be pretty damn on-the-nose, it's not it. so i did some more research.

apparently, it was terry nation (the guy who invented the daleks and davros in, i guess, 1962) who came up with it. according to him, the name simply "rolled off his typewriter", so it wasn't supposed to mean anything. but like me, he got curious and found out that the word "dalek" is serbo-croatian for "far, distant".

this really pleased me for two separate reasons: first, and this is the most obvious interpretation, the daleks are aliens from a distant world, far from earth. but i mean, to daleks or chelonians or raxacoricofallapatorians or any other alien species, the same can be said for earthlings: we are far, distant from them, and any and all species are far and distant from us.

but! if you think of the other meaning behind "distant", not geographically speaking but culturally/morally speaking, that's when things get interesting: the reason the daleks are the main foe in doctor who is that they are detached, so different from any and every other enemy the doctor and unit and torchwood and the shadow proclamation and such have ever had to fight. they keep surviving and coming back because they are so distant, so alien (in the "bizarre" sense of the word) to all other species.

if you take, for example, us humans, the doctor loves our species because of our capacity for love, forgiveness, change, compassion. you see it in the people he picks: rose, martha, then donna, etc. they represent everything he loves in a human being. everything he needs, everything he misses since his own species, which used to be capable of those feelings too, has gone.

he doesn't pick soldiers and has an aversion toward them, because as much as he pretends to hate it when his companions "wander off", he keeps choosing people whom he knows will wander off, people who will question his orders, people whom he doesn't have to feel or be superior to. whereas soldiers, they are conditioned not to question, and to follow instructions, to do as they are told.

in 1x06 "dalek", when nine realizes that the dalek's gun isn't working, he says "if you can't kill, then what are you good for, dalek? what's the point of you?". then, the dalek tells the doctor, "i am a soldier, i was bred to receive orders".

soldiers, whatever species they are, are too much like daleks: they wouldn't question him. that's why, when he realized he was the last of his species, the dalek turned to the doctor, his greatest enemy ("then what should i do?"), and then rose ("order me to die"), for orders. that's why twelve refused to keep journey blue as his traveling companion in 8x02 "into the dalek": people who don't question orders are dangerous to his lifestyle.

he needs people who go against what he says. not only that, but the doctor is, himself, a soldier of sorts, and sometimes he needs the right orders (1x06 "dalek": "what the hell are you changing into, doctor?" -rose ; "the runaway bride": "doctor, you can stop now"/"sometimes i think you need someone to stop you" -donna ; 4x02 "the fires of pompeii": "not the whole town, just save someone" -donna). else caecilius' family would have died in pompeii. else the doctor would use guns, he would die, he would try to break fixed points in time, he would lose himself.

in that sense, the daleks are as far from the doctor and his children of time as can be. i wrote about it somewhere in a one-shot someday: "the daleks weren’t robots, per se, but they kind of were, for someone like the doctor, or the humans, who both felt everything so deeply when all those monsters knew was hatred".

the daleks are to the doctor what dependence and servitude are to freedom, and in that sense, they are distant.

[avemakuta]

I think the real reason that RTD went with the "I invoked a superstition at the edge of reality and now this is a fantasy world" is because he had FOUR seasons of having to write stuff like "WELL, they're not really zombies of course, they're just your basic necrokinetic chronostatic automatons made from decomposing organic matter, the reason they're weak to salt is because stray ions disrupt the psychoelectric field."

Man had to come up with fancy sci-fi explanations for werewolves, witches, ghosts, the Doctor being revived through the power of belief, etc. Bet he only agreed to come back on the condition that he could start throwing in stuff like goblins and fairy rings without having to come up with alien names and technobabble for all of it.

[josketches]

not to be dramatic but David Tennant sprinting around the TARDIS laughing with joy cured my depression

[doctorhomo]

i know it’s dumb as hell to pit the dw showrunners/writers against each other, but having the doctor have a queer, heartfelt romance in that ep felt like a proper fuck you to chibnall. “see, IM not afraid to have the doctor kiss someone of the same gender on screen, what are you so fucking scared of?”

honestly i think it’s fucked up to reintroduce two of THE MOST queer coded female companions from classic who in jodie’s final ep, then do everything you can to ignore any queerness in their characters (to the point where tegan doesnt even mention her BEST FRIEND that she shared a room with) and also do almost nothing with the 13/yaz story. i know kissing isnt the be all end all of romantic relationships ( much as it’d’ve been nice to see), but they didnt even hug. they barely got to indicate any interest in that final episode, the episode where they lose each other forever, and they dont even hug each other. they love each other. there is immense pain in their relationship, because they know nothing is certain. so shouldnt they take their final opportunity to show their feelings? shouldnt their final interaction boil down to more than ice cream?

it just speaks volumes to me that a gay showrunner is the one brave enough to tell these stories and properly show a romance. a straight man couldnt bring himself to have his wlw relationship show an overt indication of their feelings, but a gay man (not the writer of this ep obv, but the showrunner, the one making the decisions and taking the most criticism) is the one with the fucking balls to do it.

[saecookie]

Also can we talk about how great an episode Rogue is? I mean yeah great reasons to like it (unapologetically gay) but... Even beside that: great pacing, great way to weave all different plot line together, great costumes, great acting???? GREAT EPISODE!!!!

[carlytayjepsen]

happy fifteenth doctor day!!!! ✨available on my redbubble :)

[soundsofmyuniverse]

Doctor Who "The Star Beast" (2023) dir. Rachel Talalay

[justalesbianwithsomegayshit]

I love how everyone in Dr who is queer. Rose is trans. Rubys friend is trans. Carla has had gfs. Ruby wrote a song for her gay friend when her heart broke. The drag queen musical god uses they/them pronouns. And that's not even including the doctor, who's been a queer mess for at least two decades. Russel t Davies has been back for like six episodes and everyone is queer and I love it

[cactiaintracist]

why do Billie and David look like 2 kids who have been dragged into a family picture against their will

it's like they're waiting to run off and RTD is like "DON'T YOU DARE! you are going to sit on my lap and take pictures with the rest of the fam" and then grabs on to them extra tight just in case

[nillamoonstar]

[ghost-bison]

Doctor Who: 1x08 The Satan Pit (2006) / 60th anniversary special 2/3 Wild Blue Yonder (2023)

I frankly love that parallel. One scene taken out of each of the two RTD eras.

First there's the colour palettes. You can see that they're polar opposites. RTD era1 was warm all the time as talked about in this post (which I love dearly, I keep referencing it in my posts), and then we have RTD era2, which has a more modern-looking, colder palette for science fiction.

But it's also a directing choice for the mood I think, cause on the one hand, we have Rose who, we all know, would even give up on seeing her mum again if it meant she got to spend the rest of her life with the Doctor (quite like Donna back in series 4 actually, who was very prompt to say she was going to travel with Ten forever). On the other hand we have Donna in 2023 who's now got a daughter and a husband and who hadn't even planned on doing a trip with the Doctor in the first place, let alone at the edge of the universe. I mean, they were just supposed to go see Wilfred! On one side we have Ten who's slowly recovering from the trauma of the Time War and falling in love for the first time in a while and re-learning that he deserves to be loved, too. On the other side we have Fourteen who, just as Donna put it, is "staggering", and as Fifteen said, is "running on fumes". He's got FOUR regenerations worth of trauma on Ten who was already struggling as it was with one (since the Time War I mean. Maybe two if we count Nine, cause who knows what he's been through between his regeneration and meeting Rose). Fourteen went through losing Rose, Donna, Amy, Rory, River, Clara, Bill, and he went through Pandorica, billions of years imprisoned by the Time Lords in his own personal hell, finding out about the Timeless Child, etc... and now, on top of everything, he's got to deal face to face with the guilt of what he did to Donna as she's been given back to him. Anyway, it's dark, when you think about it. No wonder the colours are so much colder in Wild Blue Yonder.

Then there's the music. In The Satan Pit, the soundtrack, The Impossible Planet, has a mystical quality to it. It's slightly creepy (I mean, it IS an episode about Satan), but it's mostly mysterious. Ten and Rose are only 500 years away from home. But in Wild Blue Yonder, Fourteen and Donna are 100 TRILLION YEARS away from home. The soundtrack from that scene, The Edge of Creation, isn't just mysterious, it's eerie and ethereal and perfectly encompasses what it would feel like to stand somewhere so impossibly alien it has become supernatural (if you can't tell I am obsessed with that track and episode lmao).

I love the contrast between Rose and Donna and the questions they ask. Rose's question is cute, she's like "I've seen it in films, is that it?", it stems from a place of curiosity, like she doesn't really realize the deep shit that they're in. She's just a kid. Whereas Donna's question, it stems from a place of dread: "Where's the light?". It almost has a "The Licked Hand" quality to it (if you don't know that story: the girl is scared, she puts her hand under the bed, her dog licks it. She goes into the bathroom, finds her dog dead in the tub, and written in its blood are the words 'humans can lick too').

Then, finally, there's the order in which things have been done: in The Satan Pit, Rose remarks they're "a long way from home". Ten takes a long look at her, and seeing that she seems a bit scared, he explains to her how long it would take to get home. In Wild Blue Yonder, Fourteen first explains to Donna how long it would take to get home, and only THEN, he takes a long look at her, and finally Donna says "that's my family, over there". It parallels Rose's sentence in the sense that they both talk about home and how far away it is, but they use different words for it with a different meaning behind. Donna is more specific on what she'll be returning to when it's over (her family), whereas Rose, who isn't as grounded as her, just says "home" (which, for her, probably just means the place she grew up). I also love the contrast between Rose's "a long way" and Donna's "over there". The first implies foreign, the second implies close enough to see. What's interesting about this bit is Donna is further away from home than Rose is, geographically speaking. But for Rose, Home is actually the Doctor, just him, so she has no problem saying she's "a long way from home" since she doesn't mean it in the same way Donna would. So for Donna, when she says "over there", it's because the Home she's talking about is closer to her heart, and she's probably trying to reassure herself that she'll see her family again (I used to do something like that when I was in primary school, I'd travel all the way back to my house in my head to kiss my parents on the cheek because I was so homesick).

So that's that I guess

[lousyglitch]

Dot and Bubble really made me go from "alright, another black mirror-lite ~phone bad~ critique, RTD means well but his age shows sometimes" to "alright, it's more a critique of rich kid cognitive dissonance and not some petty jab at post-work tiktok or whatever, I can vibe with this" to, finally, "oh wow okay that's exactly what modern doctor who should be doing as a series and I'm sorry I didn't see the vision"

good job rusty D sorry I ever doubted you

also as a fan of Gatwa's acting ever since... well, boom, this was so GOOD