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lunawho47 · 4 years

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Buzzfeed Unsolved: The Mysterious Doctor and the Omen of the Blue Box (Part 1)

Fandoms: Buzzfeed Unsolved and Doctor Who

Genre: Total Crackfic, Humor

Rating: 16+ (for language)

Summary: A script for Buzzfeed Unsolved, in which our two favorite jackasses, the Ghoul Boys, discuss the various internet theories surrounding the identity of various mysterious figures known only as “the Doctor” and the blue box that tends to appear around them. Well, Ryan wants to discuss the theories; Shane thinks it’s all urban legends and bullshit.

A/N: So, I’ve read a lot of these mock scripts going around for Unsolved discussing CW’s Supernatural as though it was real, and I thought they were hilarious. So, my brain started wondering what theories the reddit and conspiracy boards would think up about mentions of the Doctor, the Doctor’s companions, UNIT, and Torchwood. And to be honest, my brain came up with A LOT of theories that would make sense, and this format seemed a fun way to discuss all of them. It was originally going to be a one shot, but as I started writing, Shane kept interrupting in my head about how stupid all of it sounds, and that kept making the script longer and longer. So, it’s now going to be a few parts long cos the history of DW (even when seriously truncated) takes a long time to go through when you try to use the serials to make arguments about the Doctor’s potential identity(s).

So, here’s part 1. Please let me know if you like it and would like to see more. And if Shane and Ryan sound anything like themselves because if they don’t then the whole thing is nowhere near as funny as it should be.

Ryan: Today on Buzzfeed Unsolved we're looking into the puzzling mystery of an entity known only as "The Doctor" and the corresponding omen of a blue box. It's a mystery that, in its more comprehensive moments, is whimsically strange and, most of the time, is just plain batshit bizarre.

Shane: Okay, so I can hear the air quotes around the name, and you called it an entity. Are we talking like, cryptid creature that is based in reality or am I going to be sitting through theories about zombie plagues and Ant-man Ax murderers again? Just what am I in for here?

Ryan: No zombie plagues, and the Doctor has never murdered anyone with an ax. At least, not in any of the records available. It's just...well, it's hard to explain here, so let's just get right into it. Just bear in mind this is Gene Wilder Willy Wonka levels of weird when it's at its most sensical. And it's rare that this story makes any sense at all.

Shane: Alright, I'll confess I'm...intrigued. I'm ready to listen.

Ryan: Alright, here we go. *opens folder*

Ryan (in his Unsolved VO): The first documented evidence of a being calling itself "The Doctor" is in the files of now deceased British UNIT officer Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart.

Shane: Wait. UNIT? What's that? Sounds like something out of a video game.

Ryan: (wheeze) It does a bit, yeah. But there is paperwork evidence that verifies this group -- lame as the acronym is -- actually existed. They were set up in the mid-1960s by the United Nations to look into unexplained phenomena and for a long time they were a covert operation. The British Prime Minister knew they existed, and they answered to Geneva, but they weren't known to the wider public until after they shut down three years ago.

Shane: I'm sure that meeting went GREAT. 'Hey, everybody, thanks for coming down this Monday morning. Erm...thanks for protecting us from alien invasions for the last 50 years and for keeping such a great secret about it. Here's your reward: you're all fired, and we're going to tell the entire world what your names were and let you deal with the press about it for the rest of your life. Have a great rest of your Monday!' (Wheeze) What a bunch of shitty bosses.

Ryan: I mean, based on what little there is to read about how UNIT operated, the Brigadier we'll be talking about really had to go to bat for the organization in front of the Prime Minister a lot over the years in order to keep the operation going. After the Brigadier died, they were able to keep going for awhile, but as you'll see from some of these stories we'll be looking at today, the organization was considered obsolete long before it was disbanded.

Shane: Okay, so the Doctor first appears in conjunction with this UNIT?

Ryan: Right, so in the 1960s, there was some weird circumstance that led to the London Underground shutting down and the Brigadier, who was only a Colonel in the regular British army at the time, ran into what he described as a "(quote) man with a foppish haircut, ratty waistcoat, and tartan patterned clown pants; a young teenage girl; and a full Scotsman (end quote)."

Shane: So which is the Doctor?

Ryan: In this case, it's the first description. The man with the clown pants on. (wheeze)

Shane: (wheeze) Do you think he had clown shoes on, too?

Ryan: See, I know exactly what you're picturing right now. You're thinking of a guy with a depressing Beatles haircut and complete clown regalia, including the extra large shoes.

Shane: I am. 100% And you know, given some of the things we saw when traveling around London, including on (*with a terribly fake posh Oxbridge accent*) the Tube, a man dressed as a clown running around the platforms underground wouldn't even register as weird on a normal day.

Ryan: (Conceding) That is true. And on a normal day, I'd agree with you. But, bear in mind, this was the 1960s -- not the modern day -- and the Tube at the time was closed to the public because of this unknown threat the army was trying to deal with. And what's even more notable -- the reason why the future Brigadier apparently wrote about it in his official report to the Prime Minister -- is that the man who called himself the Doctor, together with the two other civilians, saved the day. The details are sparse, but the Brigadier makes it clear that the Doctor is the one who figured out what was really going on and managed to deal with whatever the situation was with minimal casualties.

And that's just the first time the Doctor and the future Brigadier crossed paths. There are later documents that report the Brigadier -- now promoted from Colonel and officially a Brigadier -- came across the same man and Scotsman, but a different young girl in London just weeks after the military organization known as UNIT was founded. And AGAIN, whatever the situation actually was, the Doctor and his friends were the ones that helped UNIT save the day.

Shane: Am I the only one who finds it suspicious that the details are always missing? Like, shady organization set up by the government to look into extraterrestrial happenings? Sure. (*puts hands in the air in surrender to argument*) I'll buy that. Governments do shady shit all the time. But, I mean, things like shutting down the London Underground and alien happenings in the city of London itself. People are going to notice, right? And how shitty are the Brigadier's write ups that no one remembers or knows any of the happenings in Britain's capital? "Dear Prime Minister, stuff happened. Doctor did some other stuff. Stuff stopped. The end. TTYL." Sounds like someone was crap at his job and when things just luckily worked out, everyone just swept it under the rug.

Ryan: You see, I would agree with you there. BUT...there are pictures. We can't show them to the audience because of copyright, but if you know where to look online, people love to discuss the Doctor and all the people who have gone missing while looking for the Doctor, so. Investigate at your own peril. But, Shane, here you go.

*the audience can't see the photos hidden by Ryan's open folder, but we see Shane's expression.*

Shane: (*laughs*) That Doctor looks like a moron. I mean, I still think the Brigadier must have been crap at his job, but he was bang on his descriptor of the Doctor looking like a clown. And I take it the guy in the kilt is the Scotsman?

Ryan: Yeah, I looked up what full Scotsman means when I read the description and apparently it means a guy who wears a kilt with no underwear on underneath it. Before that, I just assumed that it meant this other guy was wandering around the Underground, playing bagpipes and singing songs from Highlander or something.

Shane: You thought this guy was wandering around singing Who Wants to Live Forever over a decade before the film came out. (wheeze)

Ryan: Well, when we get into the theories that idea won't seem entirely out of place, I don't think.

Shane: Well, I'm going to go ahead and call a preemptive bullshit on that theory.

Ryan: Noted.

Ryan: (back in Theory VO) The next record of the Doctor's appearance comes about in the 1970s when a man is admitted to a local hospital after collapsing outside of a blue box in the woods.

Shane: There was a blue box in the woods? Like, human sized or was he scrunched up in it like Shroedinger's cat?

Ryan: We'll get back to the box in a minute, but it's larger than a human, yeah. In fact, it was something called a Police Public Call Box, which were common to see on city or town street corners in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. The idea was that if police or citizens saw a crime being committed, they could either phone the police from the box or shove the criminal in the police box and go fetch a policeman. But what's weird about the box in this case is: 1) it's in the middle of the woods, and not even on like, a hiking path or anything. But, the legit WOODS. And 2) it's the 1970s and police call boxes are no longer really a thing at this point. But, once the man calling himself the Doctor gets to the hospital it gets even stranger.

Shane: I mean, everything about this story so far feels like the Brigadier spinning a yarn, but keep going.

Ryan: So, the Brigadier gets a phone call from the hospital that a man called the Doctor has been admitted to the hospital.

Shane: Wait, how did the hospital know to call the Brigadier about that? Was there a national bulletin? Is the Doctor a wanted man or something?

Ryan: I don't know, man. Maybe the police just call UNIT whenever something with the label "fucking weird" comes across their desk. I don't know. This is just what the report says.

Ryan: (theory voice) Due to a situation UNIT was overseeing in the area at the time, the Doctor's appearance was notably auspicious for the Brigadier, so the UNIT officer went to see if his friend could help with the investigation. However, when he got the hospital, he discovered that he the man calling himself 'The Doctor' was not anyone he recognized.

Shane: Wait...what?

Ryan: (laughing). I told you the situation at the hospital is weird. So, the Brigadier is told that this man who has helped him out before has been admitted to a hospital that is nearby a situation that UNIT is investigating -- a clear sign, in the Brigadier's mind, that this Doctor who is injured is the same one he's met twice before -- and then discovers that it's a completely different man.

Shane: Well, I mean...that's not *too* weird. I mean, the man is in a hospital, and you usually see doctors in a hospital. And I'm sure a lot of doctors are known more by their title than their surname. There are millions of doctors on the planet, so I don't know if two different people wanting to be called Doctor is all that unusual.

Ryan: (with a haughty smile) That makes perfect sense, but listen to this.

Ryan: (Theory voice) The Brigadier assumed at first that the patient calling himself the Doctor was a coincidence and started to leave the room. However, he found himself called back when he heard the unknown man call the Brigadier by name. The conversation made it clear that, not only did the patient know the Brigadier's full name, but also knew the circumstances under which the Doctor and the Brigadier had met both times before. Information which, at the time, was highly classified and known only to those in the Prime Minister's office and those who had been in the UNIT planning room at the time of the situational crises.

Shane: Okay, I'm going to call it. I'm going with spy. I think the Doctor is a code name and this guy inherited the call sign and the information from the Doctor's previous operations.

Ryan: So, you think this is like, a 007 scenario?

Shane: I mean, I'm sure you'll peddle some alien abduction theory or some other supernatural bullshit, but...yeah. I'm going spy call sign. Makes sense to me so far.

Ryan: Well, you might not be a *total* dipshit, but...we'll see. There's still quite a bit more to cover. This isn't even the tip of the weird iceberg.

Shane: (sarcastically) Oh joy...

#buzzfeed unsolved #bfu #doctor who #fanfiction #(or at least fanfic adjacent)#the mysterious doctor and the omen of the blue box

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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One day, the Trump superpower of his shameless self-regard may fail him

By Megan McArdle | Published October 04, 2019 5:40 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 7, 2019 10:25 AM ET

Take a break for just a moment. Step back from the dizzying rotation of the impeachment-grade news cycle and the frantic hurly-burly of partisan disputation. Enjoy a deep cleansing breath, and cast yourself back to a more innocent time, like the spring of 2015. Then just sit with it for a moment, pondering how absolutely astonishing our current predicament really is.

President Trump is on the fast track to impeachment — all right, yes, it’s not really all that surprising. But when you think back over the past four years, don’t you feel your breath catching in your throat, your eyes widening, your mouth falling ajar as you contemplate the amazing fact that Donald Trump ever became president of the United States, and thus, liable to impeachment?

I’ve literally lost count of all the moments at which I thought well, he’s done it now, no campaign could possibly survive that unforced error. Starting in July 2015, when he said of John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured.” This from a man who’s certainly no war hero, in part because a friendly podiatrist secured him a draft deferment for (apparently evanescent) bone spurs.

Americans don’t like anyone who impugns the honor of the nation’s warriors, especially not anyone who avoided service and is insulting a warrior who spent more than five years being tortured by the enemy in a notorious communist prison camp. Obviously, the Trump campaign was over … er, I meant to say, just begun.

There was still plenty of time for Trump to attack the parents of a dead soldier, to claim that judges of Mexican ancestry shouldn’t be allowed to oversee the trial involving a class-action lawsuit over his now-defunct Trump University and, in a hot-mic recording, to be revealed bragging about groping women. There was still time for reports about Trump routinely stiffing small vendors, for the clip of him discussing his own daughter in a salacious radio interview. And, gosh, that’s only the very craziest, most indisputably unacceptable stuff that happened before commander bone spurs became commander in chief.

How could any candidate have survived just one of these thermonuclear scandals, much less all of them? Trump must have had some previously undetected superpower — and in reality, he does, a quite obvious one: a perfect lack of concern about anyone except himself.

A normal person, possessed of a modicum of empathy and a healthy capacity for shame, wouldn’t have done such things. But if a normal politician had somehow done them, and gotten caught, he likely would have slunk away, withdrawing partly to avoid further public shaming but also to shield innocent bystanders — his family, his party — who would otherwise suffer for his sins. Not Trump, who seems largely indifferent to any suffering except his own and entirely immune to remorse, or its wistful cousin, regret.

Which is why his supporters like him. They were tired of having concerns about immigration dismissed as racist, beyond the pale — and they tired, too, of having their opinions about crime, terrorism or trade met with the same unanswerable accusation. Trump ignored the whole pious apparatus of unspoken rules that axiomatically excluded their arguments from the public square. The fact that he was shameless, brazen and unconcerned by procedural nicety, in his campaign and in his presidency, was one of his main attractions.

These traits have delivered enough victories — the 2016 election, the confirmation of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court — that his supporters are loath to question them now. Possibly his supporters are right; maybe Trump’s devil-may-care indifference is pure genius and will bring still more victories for those who followed him down the road less traveled.

Yet it seems at least worth asking why so few politicians chart the course of nakedly shameless self-regard. Was Trump simply the first explorer daring enough to discover a novel route to power? Or is this an extremely risky passage, safe to travel only under unusual circumstances, and otherwise a dead end?

I’d argue the latter, though of course I — effete #NeverTrumper — can be expected to say nothing else. But even his most ardent supporters ought to recognize that superpowers can make one a villain as often as a hero, and that this particular superpower is at the very least risky for them.

Because if the waters turn stormy and the public rebels — if polls suggest we’re looking at a Democratic president and a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate — then the day will come when even many of Trump’s supporters want him to stage a strategic withdrawal. And on that day, they’ll discover that he pays exactly as little heed to his followers as he does to anyone else who is not named “Trump.”

It’s not news that Trump is corrupt. What’s new is how he is succeeding in corrupting our government.

By Fred Hiatt | Published October 06, 2019 5:44 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 7, 2019 10:25 AM ET |

It is no longer surprising to see President Trump wielding the government as an instrument purely for his personal benefit or vengeance.

What is both alarming and new is how government, increasingly, is giving way and giving in.

Three years into Trump’s term, we are witnessing the accelerating erosion of a bedrock American principle: that the awesome power of government will be wielded fairly, based on facts and evidence, and without regard to political fear or favor.

A normal government that cared about corruption in Ukraine, as officials in this administration sometimes pretend they do, would seek improvements in its judicial system. But Trump has no such concern, as you can tell from his July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president. He never mentions corruption, but presses only for two specific investigations he hopes will benefit his domestic political fortunes.

A government committed to rescuing Americans from unfair detention abroad — as Trump likes to boast he is — would be committed to rescuing all Americans from unfair detention abroad.

But this administration picks and chooses, based on Trump’s whims and grudges. For a Christian cleric held in Turkey, Trump goes all out. For a New York Times reporter endangered in Egypt, the administration does not bestir itself, as Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger recently recounted.

Some officials have indulged these impulses almost from the start. That Times reporter barely escaped arrest two years ago. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s dishonest maneuverings to get a question about citizenship added to the 2020 Census took place in the spring of 2017. Last year, officials devised their policy to separate children from parents at the border, and then repeatedly lied about it.

But as time goes on, the government more and more is endorsing and amplifying policies that serve Trump’s political interest. Just recently:

●As soon as Trump decided to make political hay out of California’s homeless population, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler accused the (Democratic) state of allowing human feces to pollute its waterways and demanded action. Around the country, 3,508 community water systems are out of compliance with standards; only California attracted the EPA’s attention.

●When the House Ways and Means Committee requested Trump’s tax returns, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Charles Rettig flatly refused — though the law says the returns “shall” be turned over if requested.

●When another House committee wanted former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to testify about Trump’s efforts to fire special investigator Robert S. Mueller III, White House counsel Pat Cipollone — who is supposed to represent the law, not the president’s personal well-being — happily asserted executive privilege on behalf of this tale of obstruction, though Lewandowski never actually worked in the White House.

●Indulging another Trump obsession, the State Department has intensified an investigation of Obama-era officials who sent emails to Hillary Clinton — including by retroactively classifying some of their messages, as The Post reported a few days ago.

●When the intelligence community’s inspector general ruled that the whistleblower complaint about Trump and Ukraine should be sent to Congress, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel conveniently offered a contrary opinion. No, the OLC said, “the appropriate action is to refer the matter to the Department of Justice.”

●Which was doubly convenient, in fact, because Justice, with great efficiency, determined that — although soliciting assistance from a foreign power on behalf of a political campaign is against the law — Trump had nothing to worry about, on the pretext that prosecutors were unable to assign a dollar value to the help he had solicited. Case closed. Case never even opened, in fact.

What’s going on? Senior officials who had the fortitude to defend the rule of law have gradually been replaced by those who put ambition over principle. A few who still try to do the right thing are kept in vulnerable “acting” positions and hemmed in by toadies and hacks in subordinate positions.

Meanwhile, honest civil servants leave or become demoralized. They watch first-class research agencies be deliberately disrupted and degraded. They see Trump firing (Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch) and threatening (the still anonymous whistleblower) honest professionals. Resistance to abuse of power naturally dwindles.

Yes, take this as a warning of what a second term would mean. Norms get eroded, a nonpartisan bureaucracy can be corrupted.

But remember also that the whistleblower and intelligence inspector general refused to bend. Thousands of public servants like them are continuing to fulfill their missions as best they can. We need to keep faith with them as they work, often under pressures we can’t imagine, to keep government fair and honest.

The new GOP strategy: Don’t believe the president

By James Downie | Published October 06, 2019 7:00 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 7, 2019 10:25 AM ET

You knew there was never going to be just one whistleblower. A president who stands on the White House lawn and asks foreign countries to investigate his political opponents was never going to otherwise keep such schemes to a small circle of loyalists. And so it has come to pass. ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos revealed Sunday morning, “ABC News has learned that the legal team representing the first whistleblower is now representing a second whistleblower. Attorney Mark Zaid told me that this second whistleblower is a member of the intelligence community with firsthand information on some of the allegations at issue.”

Confronted with that new information on the various Sunday morning talk shows, Republican congressmen and senators largely opted for the same mix of misinformation and non-answers that they’ve been stuck with even as poll after poll shows support for an impeachment inquiry rising. In one area, though, a new talking point has emerged: Don’t believe the president.

This goes back to the president’s appearance on the South Lawn on Oct. 3, when Trump asked China to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter. There’s no way to defend a president publicly asking a geopolitical rival to investigate domestic political rivals, so Republicans have decided to pretend he didn’t do that. The first up was Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): “I don’t think it’s a real request,” he told reporters Friday morning, “I think he did it to provoke you to ask me and others and get outraged by it.” Republicans on the Sunday shows followed suit. “I doubt if the China comment was serious, to tell you the truth,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) on CBS’s “Face the Nation." On ABC, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) feigned incredulity: “George, you really think he was serious about thinking that China’s going to investigate the Biden family?”

It isn’t the first time that Republicans, confronted with a controversial Trump quote, have said the president wasn’t being serious. Trump even told special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that his infamous request to Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails was a joke. That Capitol Hill Republicans would go back to this well is no surprise; it’s an easy dodge when, according to The Post’s Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, GOP lawmakers and aides say privately that their “collective strategy is simply to survive and not make any sudden moves.”

The difference this time is that the president himself isn’t claiming that he was joking, not in any of his numerous Twitter missives since that South Lawn appearance. Instead, he laid into criticism from Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) about his request to China. And Sunday afternoon he said on Twitter that he would “would LOVE running" against Biden.

Not only wasn’t Trump joking about asking China to investigate Biden, he isn’t pretending that he was. In other words, Republican politicians don’t want you to believe the president.

One reason Trump fit in so well with the GOP and especially its Fox News propaganda arm is that he and those around him have made livings telling people not to believe their own eyes. Years of “Trump’s a brilliant businessman, not a bumbling heir with multiple bankruptcies” easily transitioned to “Mexico will pay for the wall, not taxpayers.” But the narrative of “right good, left bad” was always bigger than one person, even one as influential as the president. Now, that narrative demands a new reality: “Don’t believe Trump even when he’s telling you to believe him.” The myth has swallowed Trump himself.

Watch: ON WEBSITE

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