#resuscitation of evilness

[festering-remains]

Convulse - Resuscitation of Evilness (1990)

[dkettchen]

and this, kids, is why we do safe isolation and make sure the cable’s not live before we fuck with it or the machine wiring attached to it

[dandelion-grl]

this gonna be me if i ever get to gaze upon chris redfields fat bagonzas irl

[ang3lspi-t]

.

[hystericfae]

I THINK I'd do anything for him

and Lucas...unfortunately

[unholy-boi]

can you imagine being simon petrikov. the love of your life sacrificed herself to cure you from a cursed crown that trapped you in your own head for like a thousand years. you are the last living remnant of a time long gone. you dont know how to live without your fiance so you keep trying to summon her through increasingly morally grey acts. you want to die so fucking bad. god put a whole universe in your brain as a little treat for himself. a little girl keeps coming to your museum house to tell you she wants you to go back to being in fucked up. you are keeping an evil goose in a cage in your house and it mocks you. your daughter doesnt really need you as much as you need her and she has her own life now. the only way you can make a living is by capitalizing on the horror of your own displacement. while trying to summon your wife, a cat came out of the back of your head and proceeded to destroy your house and your shrine to your wife. you had to resuscitate the shitty evil goose to try to summon your wife again. This time a whole human woman came out of the back of your head. you really want to believe that she is just a manifestation of your prior madness. the goose is fully dead now and you have no more options in the way of getting your wife back. you go dissociate in the shower. god summons you in the nude to his fucked up room in front of the manifestations of your madness, now on-model to how theyre supposed to look. and then he shows you your final moments with your beloved fiance. and everyone is like wow simon you suck now. youre so lame now why are you so sad and stupid and lame. and theyre like dude just like get over it go do something else lol. you try to give up and god puts you on a fucking conveyor belt and tells you to perform the same ritual that youve been trying to use to get your wife back this whole time so you can put his favorite little guys back in your brain. their whole world is shitty because youre a normal guy now and they both want their world to be better and magical. heres a really good option for you: go back to being the fucked up guy that everyone wishes you were and essentially fade from existence while that guy takes your place everyone wins but you youre basically killing yourself and relapsing in one move. who gives a shit. might as well. youve got nothing to live for anymore anyways.

[sunderwight]

SV Malevolent AU where, due to a system error (Shen Jiu not actually dying from the qi deviation? Mu Qingfang being present and resuscitating him in time maybe?) Shen Yuan ends up only half-possessing SJ by gaining control of his eyes.

SJ, of course, fully believes that he's been possessed by a demon and wants to evict the creature in question as soon as possible. However, he's still a paranoid bastard before anything else, so his first attempt is to just quietly do it himself after chasing Yue Qingyuan and anyone else away from his house. He doesn't want either a reputation for being weak and susceptible to possession, or one for having ties to demonic influence. There's enough grime on his reputation and the ONE thing he has confidently never been at risk of adding to it was consorting with demons, and he'd like to keep it that way.

Except, of course, Shen Yuan's not a demonic spirit, so none of the efforts to "evict" him actually work. Much to Shen Yuan's relief. A blind cultivator is still plenty formidable, but after a few days of deadlock over the issue, and with Shen Yuan fully in control of Shen Jiu's eyesight but otherwise unable to do much, Shen Yuan negotiates with the system (which SJ cannot perceive at all) to be able to tell Shen Jiu some things. Enough to get him to do something other than crack and run out of his house to let the other peak lords try their hands at ousting SY.

He tells Shen Jiu that he's not a demon (not for the first time, not that SJ believed him) but that he IS a spirit from another realm, and that he got turned around somehow on his way to try and warn this world about an impending catastrophe. SJ is naturally still suspicious, but after SY provides him with enough tidbits of information to verify that he's not completely lying, he decides to at least entertain the idea that SY isn't a demon and that a more nuanced approach is called for (also this route is appealing for him because it means he can still avoid telling anyone else that there's anything wrong with him).

Thus, uneasily, the two Shens reach a truce. Shen Yuan offers to help SJ navigate the world by describing things to him (within the privacy of their now-shared mind, of course), and SJ just sort of gives up on destroying him. For now.

Shen Yuan also, of course, tries to stop SJ from abusing Luo Binghe. Both because he would do that regardless, but also because he's now co-piloting SJ's body, which means he has a vested interest in making sure it retains all of its limbs. This has varying degrees of success.

But mainly I think this would be hilarious because Shen Jiu would essentially be held hostage to Shen Yuan's descriptions of things. Flowery, detailed and fascinated descriptions of monsters (at least these are useful because SY also has encyclopedic knowledge of their weak points). Largely vibes-based descriptions of scenery and women. Glowing assessments of Luo Binghe. Constantly bringing up Liu Qingge's beauty. Shen Jiu doesn't need his own shidi described! He knows what the asshole looks like! Go possess his body instead if you like it so much! (SJ was maybe kind of hoping that would happen when the spirit did something during the debacle in Lingxi Caves -- but no, SY just saved Liu Qingge's life, like some kind of not-evil creature. Infuriating!)

[avayarising]

Deaths of Dick Grayson

Part of the Batfam Death Project.

Dick has died four times and travelled to a world of the dead twice. Total time dead: up to several weeks.

Verifiable deaths

1. Killed by the Joker (Emperor Joker, 2000)

Dick was killed by the Joker after Joker stole reality-altering powers from Mxyzptlk and remade the universe to his liking.

It’s unclear exactly how he died, but Joker kept Nightwing’s dead and rotting corpse alongside Tim’s and Jason’s.

Dick was brought back to life when the universe was restored by Mxyzptlk and Hal Jordan (as the Spectre) after Superman defeated Joker.

Time dead: unclear, but it is definitely multiple days and looks like it could be several weeks.

2. Briefly killed by Mr Fun (Batman: Family 2:7, 2003)

Dick was killed by Mr Fun, a skilled assassin working for a gang boss calling herself Athena (who was also CEO of Wayne Enterprises and trying to bring it down from the inside). Mr Fun crept up on Nightwing, hit him in the head with a golf club and then, while he was concussed and disoriented, used pressure points to stop his breathing and heart.

Cass fought Mr Fun off Nightwing, but Mr Fun shot her off the roof with one of dead Nightwing’s wrist rockets. When Cass recovered, Mr Fun had left (to kill the person they were supposed to be guarding). She returned to Nightwing and resuscitated him using CPR, which apparently cured his head injury too.

Time dead: long enough for Cass to fight off Mr Fun (which wasn’t easy) and recover from being shot down, and then give Dick CPR, so probably a good few minutes.

3. Killed and raised by Lex Luthor (Forever Evil 6–7, 2014)

Dick was hooked up to a murder machine involving a bomb wired to his heart, such that it could only be disarmed by killing Dick. Lex Luthor stopped his heart by making him swallow a pill.

Batman of course then started going feral on Lex until Lex persuaded him that he could bring Dick back, which he did with a shot of adrenaline to the heart.

Time dead: long enough for Batman to get in a good couple of punches on Luthor, plus time for Luthor to detach Dick from the machine, so probably up to two minutes.

4. Beaten to death by groblins (Dark Nights: Death Metal 7, 2021)

Dick, along with other members of the Batfamily, was overwhelmed by a swarm of ‘groblins’: mindless evil Jokerised Robins invading from the Dark Multiverse, led by the Robin King (an evil child Bruce Robin). His death happens off-panel but we see his corpse lying on the ground.

(Then Bruce, who was already dead and a Black Lantern, raised his dead family members as zombies.)

Dick was restored to proper life when Wonder Woman, powered by the determination of her friends, defeated the evil Batman Who Laughs and persuaded the gods to remake the multiverse as it was before the evil universes invaded the good ones.

Time dead: somewhere from quarter of an hour to an hour? Or perhaps a lot longer, if it took longer to rebuild the world. It’s always a little tricky to be sure when world remakes are involved.

Afterlife visits

A trip to Dis (Titans 1:4, 1999)

Dick, along with the rest of the Titans, signed a magic book created by a demon called Goth that summoned them to Dis, a region of Hell. Goth had positioned himself as an actor and superstar and got his fans to sign the book, then led them in a chant to transport them to Dis.

Kory was amongst those who had signed the book and was transported, so Dick and the rest of the Titans went after her.

They discover that the way to get out is to find things to care about, and spend some time individually persuading people to care one at a time, but they start to lose hope, infected by the aura of apathy in Dis. Kory, who is less affected, attacks Goth and throws him down from a height, causing his fans to return to the mortal world because they are worried about Goth and the Titans to return because they are worried about Kory.

Time in afterlife: looks like several hours.

Hell heist (Nightwing 4:103, 2023)

Raven created a portal to bring Nightwing, along with Beast Boy and Cyborg, to Hell to find Blockbuster’s contract with the demon Neron, wherein Blockbuster sold the soul of his firstborn daughter, a nine-year-old called Olivia.

They found the contract and returned to the mortal realm, also courtesy of Raven. (Turned out Neron’s contract was easy to thwart: Dick just had to become a foster parent and assume legal guardianship of Olivia. Neron tried to tempt Dick with super powers, but while Dick very much enjoyed the free sample he was not even briefly tempted to give up Olivia for them.)

Time in afterlife: probably a few hours of travel, fighting, and research.

Batfam Death Project Masterpost

[thechekhov]

Dungeon Meshi Quick Reacts

CH.30 (Good Medicine)

I kind of assumed that things would get worse from here...

...yeah, there's no 'but' to that. Getting Falin back so quick was too good to be true.

Aren't those the ghosts Falin talked to? They could be friendly.

"ee gads! a hairless little man!" I'd be frightened too if Chillchuck was suddenly behind a door I'd just opened.

Chillchuck, buddy, less than 24 hours ago you threw a knife directly into a dragon's eye. You can take care of some worgs, right?

Senshi's a card carrying member of the smells-okay-to-me-chief club.

Orcs be like 'oh, dragon's gone? Hm. Curious' and then just carry on. Wouldn't you be worried that something took out the dragon? Could be even more dangerous than the dragon itself.

I feel like at this point Falin might be just that.

MOUTH TO MOUTH RESUSCITATION!

Marcille, I don't think you have a lot of options.

......just realized those moose antlers are holding up her rack. Talk about a pushup bra. Damn. Respect.

Wait go back to that "create monsters to do their bidding" thing again. Was that the little mini dragons or does that include larger monsters like the dragon itself?!

OR something that was IN the dragon, controlling its actions and make it act irrationally? Is that why the Sorcerer wasn't surprised to see Falin as a separate thing outside the dragon? Was the assumption that whatever THING it was had escaped and become Falin?

And for all we know... it kinda had. It had merged with her spirit....

Or maybe I'm way off.

Congrats on the larger story plot! :D You're now in even more danger! Hoorah!

Chillchuck, a normal person would just go 'I'm leaving, pay me'. You're giving yourself away, worrying for them.

I can't hate him for the reasoning here. The deeper you go, the less likely you are to be found. The only person who cares enough about Marcille and Laios and Chillchuck to find their bodies are.... each other. So if they're dead here, they're likely dead-dead.

I want to nestle into her bosom and live there as a little creature.

Moreso than when she was literally in the gullet of a red dragon?! Come on, be reasonable. At least she's alive now. And remembers who she is.

Ooooh friendly ghosts. Makes sense why Falin was so chill about them.

All the more reason to believe there's something to be done!

Love the doggo yawning behind Chillchuck.

He's a coward, but being afraid isn't necessarily a sign of weakness. It's a sign that you realize how dangerous a situation is. Cowardice isn't stupidity, no more than ignorance of danger is bravery.. I think the orc leader is maybe realizing he's not doing it for completely selfish reasons. Mad respect to her though.

It WAS Falin, wasn't it? It wasn't as if it was a thing pretending to be her. She was there, and she was revived successfully, and then the soul confusion thing happened.

......damn. What a small holiday they got, before the next horrible thing happened...

hey, Marcille is not dumb! She's got loads of braincells! they're just all focused on doing evil stuff and being gay.

🎯

That's right! It's just like you, Chillchuck!

Was that... there before?

Oh, okay, no, it was. Hm.......

This stupid man is about to full a Falin and jump out a window to go look for her, isn't he.

Gods, this sucks for him so much. For all of them. Because they.... they WERE successful! They rescued Falin! They brought her back from the head! They DID that!

But now, instead of getting the reward of it, she's just gone. Is it better, because she's alive?

Or worse, because the threat is even more nebulous?

If they all died, would it be worth it?

who's the coward...? he's ready to go back.

For Falin, they went down there. They risked themselves.

For them, after talking to him only a bit, the orc leader went from 'hey, nice snack for my dog' to 'we're helping you get that girl back'.

It's about the CONNECTION!!! IT'S ABOUT HELPING EACH OTHER AFTER LEARNING TO UNDERSTAND ONE ANOTHER!!!

[temperamentalaquarius]

"Why doesn't Dick tell Jason he killed the Joker" because taking a life is one of Dick's greatest regrets and to Dick perpetuating the cycle of Joker's violence does not prove that he loved Jason or cared that he died, it just shows that Dick is capable of the same cruelty and disregard for human life as the evils he fights against when pushed. Moreover I don't think Jason would react positively to that info because

a. The Joker is still alive which would again prove to Jason that his death didn't have an impact and

b. Jason wanted Bruce specifically to kill the Joker to prove that he loved Jason/cared that he died, so if anything finding out that not only did someone, who was not Bruce, kill the Joker but that Bruce resuscitated him would probably just hurt Jason more.

TLDR it's not about Jason's catharsis that would not occur it's about Dick's regret at breaking one of the core tenants of his moral code

[pikahlua]

I feel like we were all anticipating the moment Katsuki gets put out of his misery and finally holds Deku’s hand— only for it to get off-screened! That was the biggest plot twist imo. Why do you think that was?

I mean, to be fair, we DID see them hold hands when Katsuki was resuscitated, but I was openly not satisfied with that being all we got lol.

Maybe it'll be on-screened in the anime. A girl can hope.

As for why? Man, I don't know. Time/space constraints? Evil editor conspiracy? Horikoshi blushed too hard when he tried and threw it in the trash? I don't know and I could drive myself crazy thinking about it or move on with my life and ask the fanart community to rectify this for me. One of those sounds more fun.

[cripplecharacters]

Sorry to bother you,

Your blog is wonderful! Since it's one of the most dialogue/explanation oriented, i wondered if i may please come to you with a more general doubt. i'm sincerely confused... Why is "curing" disability bad per se?

So far, the arguments (on Tumblr) seem to be,

i. Consent.

ii. Generalisation. ("Everyone will want this same thing".)

iii. The undercurrent ideology holding disability as a flaw to be "cured" (including the use of the term "cure").

On which we all agree, they're implicitly bad no matter if it's disability or a haircut. Very well.

But.

What of magical healing per se is inherently bad? Because being given a choice implies that for every given person agreeing, there are going to be others who won't. So we should still write our fantastical society around them, that's not in any way in question.

But these, the possibility of magical treatment and the non-necessity of the same, are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to "take one before the other", they can very well coexist.

Last question (i promise), is seeking treatment for oneself bad?

Like, if there came up a quest to get the glittering flower blooming once a millennia guarded by the Evil Dragon of Evil and capable of magically taking away OCD and PTSD, sign me up! Or if there's a spell to resuscitate my thyroid or an alchemical pill that solves ADHD's executive dysfunction. i mean, that's kind of what my medications should do if they weren't so costly and inaccessible, and that would be a one-time thing too.

Autism's doing alright, i'd keep everything, thanks.

Disclaimer, i'm obviously not advocating for eugenetics (as this term has been often used and misused in these discussions, better to precise).

All these conditions in one way or another define me and effect my life in a pervasive, quotidian way, or/and on a more existential scale. Not always in bad ways -my life is not a tragedy, and this i wish to make clear. i'm not saying that a "magic cure" should come before a change in society to accommodate disability. What i'm advocating for is their coexistence, as a choice -not evil per se, but nocive if inserted in a context of ableism, negation of individual consent, and, indeed, choice.

Or at least that was what i was arguing for until a few months ago. Now however, seeing as the collective opinion is one of strong rejection for these ideas, i believe there must be some important fallacies in my reasoning, and i wish, before everything else, to correct them. To understand.

Sorry for the monologue, but, may you help me?

Thank you for your time and for your kindness,

Anonymous Sloth.

Thank you for your ask! The reason curing disability is bad in media is because the disabilities cured often cannot be cured in real life. People with incurable disabilities already have so little representation, taking away the characters they see themselves in with an impossible cure is incredibly disheartening. I live with multiple incurable physical conditions, and I’ve accepted that I’ll live with them for the rest of my life. Day to day I already deal with people saying how much better my life would be if I didn’t have these conditions I had no choice in getting, I don’t want to see that in my stories! If someone has my conditions I don’t want the author to get rid of them with magic, I want to see that character going on cool adventures and being badass! Sure a magical cure might be nice, but that’s never going to happen. I’m going to be living in this body for the rest of my life, and I want to see stories where people like me get to live their lives with their conditions!

Disabled people should be allowed to see themselves in sci-fi and fantasy stories! People who can’t be cured, who can only have their symptoms managed, who have to be on medication/assistive devices the rest of their lives and who don’t want to be cured should be allowed to see themselves in media without the constant reminder that most able bodied people think their lives would be so much better is they would simply stop being disabled.

Additionally, even conditions that do have cures or ways to manage them aren’t realistically portrayed. There are never any symptoms, side effects or rehabilitation, it’s always portrayed as a magical cure that completely gets rid of the disability. This rarely happens in real life, and I don’t think it’s wrong for someone who shares a condition with a character to want to see that condition accurately portrayed.

It’s perfectly fine for a disabled person in media to want to seek treatment, plenty of disabled people in the real world also have to fight to get treatment (though the fighting is usually against insurance and doctors, not dragons and wizards). But like I said above, it should be at least somewhat realistic. The world is already over saturated with stories of people getting magical cures that make everything better forever, but what about cures with long lasting or permanent side effect? What about healing that requires extensive physical therapy? Or someone who needs to take potions for the rest of their lives to manage their condition? These realities should also be portrayed. Sure maybe some people want to see an escapist fantasy where their conditions could get cured, but not everyone wants that and it’s almost entirely done by abled authors who fathom why anyone would want to see a disabled person who isn’t trying to ‘overcome’ their disability.

We’ve also reblogged this post & answered this ask that deal with similar topics if you want to check them out.

I hope this helps! Have a nice day,

Mod Rot

-

Everything Mod Rot said.

Basically, it's like giving us representation and then taking it away. Readers with that disability are going to read that book and relate to that character. Having a character like you in a work can be so important. But then the character is magically cured of an incurable condition, and now they're completely abled. Good for them. But the reader is still disabled. The reader will still always be disabled.

Disabled representation is already so rare. It's not really nice to take away what little we have.

- Mod Aaron

Echoing what everyone else has said, I want to add an extra thing:

If there was a wealth of disabled characters in media, represented with respect and nuance and care and all that, some stories involving disability being cured wouldn’t feel out of place, because there would already be so much to see that it would be an interesting departure and not posed as the only option for a happy ending.

And if you’re writing something about curing a disability that you have because that’s your experience and it’s what you want, that would make sense as well.

But since so many representations of disability in media have the underlying message that the only way to truly be happy or worthy or whatever with a disability is to have it cured, to have the least amount of signs of disabilities ever, then adding more of the same to that can be not just frustrating but harmful.

An “overcoming” of disability, a “making invisible” of a visible disability, or a cure for a disability are not the only stories worth telling about disabled people—because they are also not the only lives worth living for disabled people.

— mod sparrow

[marvelfanfn2187a113]

Something to Hold Onto

Dean Winchester x little sister!reader, Sam Winchester x big sister!reader

Requested by Anonymous

Synopsis: John is dead, so the three Winchester siblings find something to hold onto

Warnings: mentions of (John’s) death, this is really short but super sweet.

Those agonizing seconds watching the doctors try to resuscitate your father seemed to last a lifetime. Your older brother Dean’s hand was clasped in yours, and your little brother Sam was leaning heavily on your shoulder, as if he was resisting the urge to jump past you and into the hospital room.

The three of you clung to each other, knowing that if even one of you let go, none of you would be able to resist running to your father’s side.

Not that it would have done anything, because after that lifetime of precious seconds, the doctor called out the time of death.

You wanted to rush in then, to scream that no, it wasn’t possible, there had to be a mistake.

John Winchester couldn’t die. He was the strongest of all of you, he couldn’t be gone. He wouldn’t.

But he was.

…

Dean was forced to return to his room to get some rest, and you and Sam followed him silently.

None of you spoke as Dean settled on his bed, you climbing in to sit beside him. The air remained silent as Sam sat on the chair next to the bed, leaning his head sideways so that it lay in your lap. Not a word was exchanged, nor would it be. The three of you didn’t need words, and you knew it wouldn’t help. If you tried to speak, you knew you would break down. Your brothers would either cry or they would shout, and that would help no one. Each other’s company was all that could bring comfort right now.

Dean leaned his head against your shoulder, his hand moving to grip yours. You moved your free hand to Sam’s hair, and he closed his eyes as you comfortingly ran your fingers through his dark locks.

Sam was the first to fall asleep, and though Dean was still awake when you dozed off, he was asleep when you woke up.

You stayed immobile as you watched your two brothers sleep. You knew that once they awoke, the three of you would have a lot to do; you would leave the hospital, and try desperately to solve the mystery of the yellow-eyed demon that you were almost certain was responsible for taking John from you.

But for now, you wanted them to sleep. Sam’s face was so peaceful without that furrowed brow that was evidence of his constant worry. Your little brother thought he was evil, but as you watched him now, you knew it couldn’t be further from the truth.

Dean’s whole body was relaxed in a way that it never was when he was awake. He carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, and with dad gone that weight just got a whole lot heavier. But for now, he didn’t have to feel that weight. He let it slip away in sleep, and you wished it could last forever.

But it couldn’t. Regardless, you knew the three of you would be just fine, as long as you had each other.

As long as you had something to hold onto.

Taglist:

@nyotamalfoy @mrvlxgrl

[mordaciousmurderer]

i wonder how katara resuscitated zuko after he was struck in the last agni kai. part of me thinks he didn’t die because when i went through frame by frame i saw that he still redirected the lightning it just went through his heart.

in my opinion, it would have made more sense from a medical/story standpoint if she used bloodbending to save him. with that amount of electricity we can assume that his heart just completely stopped. if we’re operating under the assumption that healing (as in the subcategory of water bending) simply just restores damaged cells then that realistically wouldn’t have done much to resuscitate him.

BUT! if she had used bloodbending to stimulate bloodflow then that seems like the perfect way to restart a heart in this universe!

although, if katara had used bloodbending to bring zuko back i think that would have uprooted a lot of the stigma surrounding bloodbending. the entire show, water bending was illustrated as a more passive form of bending. hama and bloodbending was introduced as a way to demonstrate the ‘evil’ within water bending.

in relation to katara, she’d undergone a lot of change and growth as a person. her maturity level has always been higher compared to the rest of the gang. so i can assume that she would recognize the potential benefit of bloodbending. true good and evil are subjective concepts so any form of any bending could become corrupt in the wrong hands. take the fire nation as an example! as the sun warriors taught, fire is a form of life and energy not just destruction. On the flip or “evil” side of that, the fire nation at that state had distorted the root of fire bending with hate and rage.

[weepingchoir]

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 14: A FULL SEASON REVIEW

Another decade, another frantic Doctor Who resuscitation. (Not that there were news of potential cancellation, but things must’ve been dire for the BBC to sell one of their most storied shows to the Mouse.) Chibnall is out, Moffat on retainer, Russell “Thee” Davies is in. The theme song is the best since Matt Smith, which, through weird and inexplicable coincidence, was also the last time I watched Who with any serious interest. Good start.

The Star Beast

While not technically part of the season, the specials preceding series 14 signal the beginning of a shift in tone and rules for Doctor Who, including the introduction of the new Doctor. Not yet, though. First we get an OLD DOCTOR FUCK YES DAVID TENNANT IS BACK.

I already know Tennant won’t stick around, and I’m glad. That would’ve stunk of Disney nostalgia-raking. Nevertheless, as a returning viewer, I’m grateful for the breakfall. “The Star Beast” doesn’t yet carry the magic that’ll characterize Gatwa’s series. It’s a standard scifi monster of the week serial, and the monster rules. Looking for returning companion Donna Noble, the Doctor runs into the Meep, a no-pronouns gremlin-Yoda puppet living in Donna’s shed, under the care of her daughter, Rose.

UNIT comes under attack by Kamen Riders. The Meep tears off the blorbo mask to reveal a genocidal dictator on the lam from the Intergalactic Criminal Court. It’s a hilarious turn in an episode whose emotional core relies on Rose’s transgenderedness. Pronouns are a real-time strategy game and evil space aliens are better at it than humans.

Quick dustup on weird plot shit: if Donna remembers the Doctor she dies. She has to remember anyway, in order to stop the Meep’s ship from taking off. Turns out that she’s since become immune to Time Lord neuron overload by offloading it on her daughter. Donna and Rose expel the toxic memories by harnessing their feminine emotional intelligence.

I don’t want it to land. Facing the Doctor, who was a woman one episode ago, Rose says that a man could never understand how she just harnessed the divine feminine. Nevertheless it passes, maybe because any representation of a transgender woman as through-and-through female is a gasp of fresh air. For better or worse, this also cues the season’s cardinal rule: what you feel is true is more important than what makes sense.

Wild Blue Yonder

The TARDIS crashlands at the edge of the universe and disappears when it senses danger, one of those things that it’s never done before and will only do again if it’s funny or cool.

The “edge of the universe” is a spaceship floating in ink-black, with Marvin the Paranoid Timebomb making its way down the hall, one step at a time. This is a great opportunity to ease us into the budgetful new Doctor Who, with sleek but understated shots of the spaceship’s exterior. When the Doctor and Donna split up to fix the ship, they converse with each other’s doppelgangers: “not-things” from beyond reality, looking to assimilate physics. Communication with the not-things goes awry as an eerie set of medium close-ups pull back to reveal their overlong limbs.

Backed with half a decade of set chemistry, Tennant and Catherine Tate ace all four characters in this bottle episode. Much of the runtime consists of the Doctor and Donna’s mind games against each other. It’s less a restatement and more a self-justifying exploration of why bother with a last hurrah for two fan favorites. Well-earned, too, as the Doctor nearly leaves the real Donna to die in the ship’s explosion. It’s impossible to be done exploring the fullness of a relationship. But one day, and soon, we will have to move on.

The Giggle

 Two crucial stopgaps against the not-things. One, a line of salt on the floor, which the Doctor tricks them into thinking they can’t cross, since they’re sorta vampires. Two, cognitive dissonance. It’s hard enough for the uncreatures to assimilate beliefs, let alone simultaneous contradictory ideas.

The Doctor fears that, by invoking fiddly rules at the edge of reality, he’s opened a door for fell mythos. This episode stars the Toymaker, a villain from a partially restored First Doctor serial. Originally a Fu Manchu caricature, the new Toymaker is Neil Patrick Harris putting on a German accent, which he can always do, it’s never racist.

The Toymaker has snuck a mind-warping signal into every screen, starting with the 1925 Stookie Bill experiment. Now mankind is mad , reacting with explosive hostility at any confrontation. Over the last decade, as writers have moved from mocking subsets of people for being on phone to everyone being on phone, we’ve uncovered more cohesive portrayals of what 24/7 connection is doing to us. Writ large, more and more of us are looking to win arguments. Even losing is a thrill.

It’s a contrived plan for a villain whose power transcends mere limitless control over physical matter. The only thing that binds the Toymaker is the rules of the game. We can trace the evolution of TV drama by comparing his first appearance to his last, William Hartnell’s almost congenial gotchas to Tennant’s panic at genuine omnipotence. The Toymaker traps the Doctor and Donna in a theater for a puppet play about the many deaths of the former’s companions. The Doctor, ever the hero, denies them three times.

Well, are they dead? These specials have proven that, even in the megacorp mines, fan favorite returns don’t have to be Rise of Skywalker gruel. Donna, and the Fourth Doctor’s returning Mel Bush, bring necessary continuity to the transition into new-new Who.

Not everything, at least, has to end in tragedy. When the Toymaker commandeers the giant laser gun the government is cool with UNIT keeping in uptown London, the Doctor bigenerates, splitting into straight Tennant (presumably) and gay Ncuti Gatwa. Together they beat the Toymaker at catch, which banishes him for good.

From here on, we follow Gatwa’s Doctor. Tennant stays with Donna. There is movement in rest, organic, within. Their relationship may continue to develop, just where we can’t see it. Not everything is for screen consumption.

The Church On Ruby Road

Every time I see this episode’s title I get Hüsker Dü’s “Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill” stuck in my head, except the Inter Arma cover because that’s the first time I heard that. The Doctor is fortunate enough to run into one of the few actresses that can match his energy, Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday: songwriter, orphan and ingenue. Ruby lives a zoomer kitsch apartment with string lights on the walls, alongside her adoptive mother and grandmother. She suffers from a curse of bad luck, bewitched by an airshipful of baby-eating goblins.

The Doctor and Ruby stop the goblins from eating a baby, to the tune of an R&B paean to Jabba-the-Hut, the only logical step from the Toymaker’s Spice Girls lipsync sequence. The goblins retaliate by traveling in time to eat baby Ruby, abandoned by her mother on Christmas day on the porch of The Church That Lives On Ruby Road. Watching Ruby’s mother go, Gatwa cries his series-first tear of silent grief. He’s very good at that.

The Doctor’s rule of no self-interaction has fucked his opportunity to let Ruby meet her biological mother. Pay attention, this’ll be on the test. Other than that, “The Church” is an easy, fun, low-stakes introduction to the Doctor’s companion and many of the season’s dominos, only some of which will receive a proper knockdown.

Space Babies

The first real ostentatious show of Disney budget is a quick but lush visit to James Cameron's Mesozoic. A CGI diplodocus doesn’t have to be bad. CGI baby mouths, on the other hand.

Budget cuts strand a colony spaceship, replete with babies in a bizarre state of semi-suspended animation: they’ve been toddlers for six years. Only accountant Jocelyn remains. The babies are terrorized by the Boogeyman, a snot monster generated by glitched-out educational software. Jocelyn almost airlocks the Boogeyman until the Doctor reminds her that it’s kind of her baby also.

The Doctor’s memory of Ruby Road changes to feature Ruby’s mother pointing at him. It starts snowing indoors, another magic plot puzzle piece. Cue tear of silent grief. There’s not much else to say about “Space Babies”. It’s a lot of terrible ideas, executed with functional neatness: quoting a friend, the platonic ideal of a Russell T 6/10.

The Devil’s Chord

1925 again! There’s a whole pantheon of Toymaker-type evil gods. This one’s Maestro, the god of music, played by a spectacular Jinkx Monsoon. Over the course of four decades, Maestro ruins music so thoroughly that even Abbey Road sounds like dogwater.

The Doctor and Ruby negotiate with the Beatles, who make dodgy gestures towards the whole of music being an embarrassing business. It’s never made clear how Maestro has convinced the world of this, or, like the Toymaker’s giggle, why they bothered when they have the power to eat music itself. We’ve crossed into the realm of magic. It’s not about the method, but the goal: within a hundred years, musicless mankind will self-exterminate to vent its anger, leaving Maestro to enjoy pure aeolian tones.

It’s hard to agree that music is the salve keeping mankind from abject violence when contending with the history of, Burzum, Chris Brown or Meni Mamtera. Nor does the idea that Maestro can be defeated by a seven-note scale available to basic Western music theory hold much water. “The Devil’s Chord” is an altogether less cohesive “The Giggle”, and only three episodes after its predecessor, too. On the other hand, as a piece of musical cinema, it’s a brilliant watch for Monsoon’s performance, the playful metanarrative gestures, and the closing number, ‘There’s Always A Twist At The End’.

Boom

On the ravaged planet of Kastarion-3, there is only war. A landmine vaporizes a guy, attracting an 'ambulance' automaton to euthanize his friend Vater by reducing him into an awesomely gross flesh tube.

Gatwa leaves the TARDIS in a super-sexy leather jacket and steps on a mine. What follows is ten agonizing minutes of the Doctor and Ruby figuring out the logistics of the situation. The Doctor can’t move off the smart mine or exhibit high emotion. On finding Vater’s tube, Ruby convinces the Doctor to let her hand it to him to use as a counterweight, in a move that almost kills them both. The pressure is immense, achieved with nothing but close-ups to tears of silent grief and a silly prop of a landmine with LEDs.

Vater’s daughter finds the duo, triggering the flesh tube to generate a grief counselor hologram of her father. Ruby gets shot while managing a haywire ambulance. The only way to get the ambulance to treat her is to admit that the Kastarians never existed. With a full third of characters dead, Cyber-Vater betrays its parent corporation to end the war. This is the most stressful Doctor Who gets, in all the best ways. For a second, and against all logic, I was even convinced it might be the end of Ruby Sunday.

“Boom” is the closest Gatwa’s Doctor has to a companion capsule episode. This focus on their relationship might’ve gone over even better if it’d been earlier in the run, especially given “The Devil’s Chord” has the opposite problem. I suspect the prime reason why it’s placed in an awkward middle slot is to not give away the game: “Boom” front-and-centers Susan Twist, who’s played minor roles in almost every episode since “Wild Blue Yonder”, as the face of the combat ambulance AI. There’s always a twist at the end, remember?

73 Yards

The Doctor’s always stepping on some bullshit. After intruding on a ritual circle, he disappears, leaving Ruby alone with a mysterious woman that’s always standing 73 yards away. Everyone who talks to the woman flies goes no-contact with Ruby: a hiker, a bar-goer, UNIT, even, in a harrowing turn, Ruby’s adoptive mother. So Ruby spends the next twenty years alone. Without her family, and also alone in this ethereal way where she’s meant to be on startlit adventures, not half-there on a wine bar date.

Gibson carries this mammoth episode on her shoulders, evolving from panicked 20 year old to middle-aged, purpose-driven mercenary. The closest thing to a co-star is the cinematography, following her eyes towards the woman-shaped hole in the near horizon. This is one of the subtler metanarrative moments of the season: the woman is impossible to photograph, blurry in pictures just as she’s never in focus for the camera.

Ruby makes up a mission: save the world from ‘Mad Jack’ Roger ap Gwilliam, a presidential candidate whom the Doctor off-hand warned would lead the world to nuclear ruin. Infiltrating, Jack’s presidential campaign, she maneuvers the woman into manifesting next to him, which makes him run screaming from office. The world is saved. Ruby isn’t. As she lays dying of old age, alone, the mystery woman is revealed to be herself, traveling back in time to warn the Doctor off the circle.

This is the furthest Doctor Who can stray from its own standards before becoming a different show altogether. The theme song doesn’t even play (shame). Not a coincidence, it’s also the episode to most demand that we trust emotion over logic, and it pays back that trust with dividends. It doesn’t matter that we never find out why there was a shrine to Mad Jack atop a cliff in Wales twenty years before his time, or the mechanism by which Ruby created a closed time loop. The important bit is the emotional resonance, the click of catharsis when we discover just enough details to let it rest.

Dot and Bubble

I feared, as “Dot” opened on a woman so dependent on social media that she can’t navigate her immediate surroundings without GPS, that this would be the Phone Bad episode “The Giggle” had managed to surpass. The truth is more complex: Finetime’s residents can afford to spend all day Whatsapping because they’re the offspring of another planet’s leisure class, here on permanent vacation.

Giant man-eating slugs have invaded Finetime, and the Dot-Bubble navigation system is walking people straight into their maws. Our lead is neither Gatwa nor Gibson, but Callie Cooke as Lindy Pepper-Bean in yet another of the acting masterclasses that characterize this season. An ongoing tension point is whether Lindy can keep her Bubble down long enough to string together two tasks. This means the season’s highest ratio of close-ups to other shots. Cooke carries this focus with recidivist disdain, processing the situation in arbitrary bursts only to default to anger at the Doctor for intruding on her groupchat, or elation at meeting a celebrity singer.

The slugs are an invention of the Dot, which, after years of servicing Finetime, has learned hate. Huddled outside the habitat dome, the all-white survivors reject the Doctor’s 'dirty' safe passage, and strike out to colonize the wilderness, ‘like their ancestors’.

Laterally to Phone Bad, an ongoing trend in wronghead fiction is Rich Bad. Movies like Bodies Bodies Bodies portray the bourgeoise as a self-obsessed bunch who will fall snarling on themselves at the first provocation. This is not what makes the bourgeoise dangerous, but in fact the exact opposite: because the rich have everything to lose, they will close ranks against you, no matter how much good you’ve done for them, no matter what you could yet do.

Rogue

Before the season ends, anybody want to defend England one last time? Playing nobility at a Regency London ball, the Doctor runs into Rogue, a bounty hunter who mistakes him (at gunpoint) for a shapeshifting, murderous Chuldur.

The Chuldur are fans of Bridgerton, on Earth to cosplay it to death. In order to lure them out, The Doctor and Rogue publicize their whirlwind romance. If “Dot and Bubble” was a response to the idea that Gatwa might run into racism if he travels to the past, “Rogue” is its inversion: the plan works because the modern Chuldur can’t resist the titillation of wearing a black gay man. They run after the hypervisible Doctor, while the white Rogue becomes “the other one”. He’s less problematized, less interesting, the one you get stuck with if you don’t call intersectional shotgun.

After the trap is sprung by accident, Rogue's banished alongside the Chuldur to a random dimension of nobody’s knowing. The Doctor declares it’s impossible to find him. We’ll see about that.

For all its nods towards fandom, “Rogue” isn’t a po-faced condemnation of fan culture. Ultimately, the Chuldur too are defeated through cosplay. Plus, it’s a straight beat-by-beat of the strongest points in Who structure: strong side characters, scifi logistics, a villain as goofy as it’s horrific. Whether its back-to-back placement with its thematic mirror, or as a segue to the season finale, is ideal, is anyone’s guess. 

The Legend of Ruby Sunday

The Doctor asks for UNIT’s help in figuring out why Susan Twist follows him everywhere. On 2024 Earth, she’s Susan Triad, tech CEO on the verge of releasing some kind of Alexa thing. But before we get to that, the Doctor decides now’s the time to meet Ruby’s biomom.

Using a ‘Time Window’, Ruby visualizes The Church That Lives On Ruby Road. Ruby cries: the Window refuses to show her mother’s face. The machine goes all creepypasta on some UNIT boot. Panicked, the Doctor chases down Triad, who reveals she can remember her past lives in dreams.

Triad pulls away to her conference. Though she’s live worldwide, her soundstage is empty, the crowd canned. Where much of this season has dealt with the phenomenons of mass media and TV, “The Legend” digs into a grief specific to Doctor Who, an ill-kempt archive of decades forever on the verge of cancellation.

Little else happens, for two good reasons. First, this episode is a two-parter. Second, much of its runtime is dedicated to extracting maximum stress out of the situation. Ruby is too compromised to act, while the Doctor and UNIT are late from the start, only just figuring out the situation in time to witness it unfold. The big reveal paying off all this anxiety, crossed purposes, fear and despair is, unfortunately, a CGI dog with a hat.

Empire of Death

Sutekh is a Fourth Doctor villain who’s been locked in the Time Vortex for thousands of years or a dozen seasons, whichever’s longest. He has spawned harbingers like Triad in every planet that the Doctor’s visited, and his “dust of death” has the power to kill nost just everyone, but everyone at every point in time. In the era of streaming television (and stream-only television), the C-suite can overnight erase all evidence that a show ever existed.

Through a bit of absurd circular logic, the Doctor declares that the Time Window’s memory of a TARDIS is in fact a functioning TARDIS. The crew escapes to roam a deserted universe. The memory TARDIS begs to tie long-dangling plot strands into knots of neat logic. Instead, a bunch of nonsense dialogue happens. When Ruby asks the Doctor why Sutekh has a The Mummy thing going on, the Doctor answers “cultural appropriation”, and fails to elaborate. Laterally, when Ruby casually lists the chameleon circuit’s AOE as 73 yards, the Doctor asks how she knew that. She’s not sure. Nothing comes of this.

Because Sutekh is incapable of seeing Ruby’s mother, the Doctor decides it’s all tied together and heads to a government office in Mad Jack Britain, containing the UK’s forcibly harvested genetic data. Much more cohesive commentary on racism than reminding us cultural appropration is a thing Doctor Who has done. Armed with knowledge, the Doctor baits Sutekh into the Time Vortex, where he forces him to, like, kill death and then die in turn.

It’s a fantastic turn of character for the Doctor, who oft makes a spurious point of not killing in order to condemn villains to fates worse than death, or adopts a ‘War Doctor’ persona which kills a bunch of people anyway. It’s a matter of framing, but also a genuine point of no return. As for less satisfying character beats: Ruby gets to meet her mother, who’s just some middle-aged Instagrammer with a bad haircut and a passion for rocky beaches.

So why was this character immune to everyone from the Time Window to Sutekh, and the unwitting carrier of Ruby’s inherited power to make it snow? Because, the Doctor explains, we cared about her.

Which begs the question: who is we?

The easiest answer is: the last people left alive in the universe. But Ruby’s been making it snow since “Space Babies”. Not proximity to the Doctor either, else the Doctor himself would have magic powers: on the contrary, he’s spent the whole season grappling with his limited ratfic ability to deal with the supernatural. And there’s millions of orphans out there. Ruby is, in this regard as in most else, not special.

Taken all together along with the season’s metanarrative overtures, which keep going right up to the last second of “Empire”, the only answer is that we are the audience. Or the audience and the crew, anyhow: the camera, the screen, Ruby’s protagonism and the people that accept it. We have imbued Ruby Sunday with transcendental power, because we would like her to transcend.

This doesn’t work unless I am more emotionally than narratively invested in Ruby Sunday.

Not that I didn’t get torn up when Ruby met her mother. But that’s just cinema trickery. A season’s worth of promises, a bit of music, very good acting: of course I was going to care. Not more than I care about finding out what the fuck was going on, though. As an explanation, this all rounds out to: what was going on is what was going on. Ruby’s mom was important because she mattered to us, and it mattered to us because she was important. Me, I refuse to be complicit.

There is an unpleasant extreme to the logical lens, the CinemaSinners combing through scripts, sacrificing the greater story to the tendentious idol of Plot Holes. Doctor Who has long been plagued by these types, pitfalls of being an easy-watching BBC show with a large audience. Series 14 scans like a concerted effort to not give these guys an inch. In overcorrecting, it created a maudlin mess of unfulfilled promise.

That is as far as the season's connected plotline goes. Fortunately, most of the episodes are gems, directed with a sense of fun almost unseen in the revival series’ longstanding gloom. The Doctor has turned into a killer, maybe for good. We are promised that his tale will end in tragedy. I hold out hope that, next time the story tries to hit me where it hurts, it’ll follow through.

7/10

[eregyrn-falls]

Folks who haven't been able to buy The Book of Bill through other means -- TheMysteryShack.com has it, including the Barnes & Noble exclusive edition with 16 extra pages!

While supplies last. Most importantly, I believe that TMS does ship internationally, although that may not be cheap. If in doubt, message the shop to ask about it.

I'm an idiot! Here's the link to the store.

Text from images:

For all of you still living in the world of Gravity Falls, Alex Hirsch has brought back his most nefarious of villains — Bill. The Book of Bill is Bill’s chance to tell his story, from his evil origin to an interactive array of puzzles and ciphers, all brought to you by the mastermind himself. This is Gravity Falls as you’ve never seen before. Even better, the Barnes & Noble exclusive brings you even more Bill. Did you miss him? Admit it, you missed him. The demon that terrorized Gravity Falls is back from the great beyond to finally tell his side of the story in The Book of Bill, written by none other than Bill Cipher himself. Inside, Bill sheds light on his bizarre origins, his sinister effects on human history, the Pines family's most embarrassing secrets, and the key to overthrowing the world (laid out in a handy step-by-step guide). This chaotic and beautifully illustrated tome contains baffling riddles, uncrackable ciphers, lost Journal 3 pages, ways to cheat death, the meaning of life, and a whole chapter on Silly Straws. But most importantly, The Book of Bill is deeply, deeply cursed. Alex Hirsch, #1 New York Times bestselling author, resuscitates this infamous villain and invites fans to a Bill's eye view of the Gravity Falls universe. There are many who believe this book is too dangerous for human hands. But if you can't resist, just know this: Once you make a deal with Bill, it's not so easily undone... Beware: This book travels to dimensions meant for older readers. Available in two sinister varieties. The normal RED foil jacket version and the exclusive GOLD foil jacket version. The exclusive version includes 16 extra pages of Bill's twisted life advice!