#so I had no context for the time lords being a problem other than gallifrey knocking earth out of orbit if it materialised!!

[eloquentornot]

Yeah! When I saw her eyes sparkle golden and then she was talking to the seed, I still felt like it was really ominous, but then... like the Doctor, I got caught up in the "joy" of it all, the only danger was that it was going to bloom on Earth and destroy everyone, so since it turned out to have benevolence to it and along with the people it absorbed decided to fly away, it was a good thing after all... but still, those people were killed. By Villengard.

And I guess, for the Doctor, also, maybe he got distracted with his own "it's supposed to be me saving you" which then of course the moral of that moment is that he can let them do the heroic sacrifice instead sometimes, and yeah I guess overall it just got forgotten that originally the problem was that Villengard are the bad guys using a time hotel to test a new power source with no regard for Earth's history... actually if they're from a future where humans are big customers (if they're not entirely human themselves even) then it doesn't make sense for them to want to plant the seed on Earth in the past which would also destroy the time hotel probably... maybe making it want to shoot away from Earth at just the right moment was actually part of their plan!!

(Still, might have been an accident that it became That star? And even if not, there can be arguments of, if they knew it would become that star, is it their fault for just following the destiny of a bootstrap paradox? Or are they from a timeline where that didn't actually happen and they decided to change history to make it so there really was a star there around that time that could change the outcome of a debate about Biblical historical accuracy or something at some point in future history and that leads to making the Anglican Marines more extreme/blind faith/etc and less likely to question the wars perpetuated by the algorithm???? But this is getting a bit too far outside of what's shown in the episodes, lol!)

Hang on, hang on… does Villengard still end up using the star as a power source and is it implied that Villengard precipitated Christianity intentionally

I think this needs clarification

[mintyimperiatrix]

just finished reading the Infinity Doctors and i'm now going to make it everybody else's problem, so welcome to what is probably going to be the opposite of a concise review by someone who knows utterly fuck all about any of the 90s books, yeehaw (spoilers)

~~

so in all honestly i literally only read this because it's the only other time that i'm aware of that Patience appears and after reading Cold Fusion i wanted to find out more about her. imagine my feelings when i find out that this entire book is set in a different universe :D

for real though it took me a good while to figure out wtf was going on. i didn't know if it was pre-Hartnell or a Doctor from the future or what but i think it's the latter because there's one line about how he doesn't wear a velvet coat anymore, implying he's after Eight and i know it was written wayy before Nine was cast but his description fits Eccleston's so well which to me points to him being yet another alternate Ninth Doctor so ig Nine just gets to vibe on Gallifrey in this timeline instead of facing The Horrors(tm)

speaking of timeline stuff it kinda just felt like a compressed version of the Doctor's life from the main universe. he remembers Patience here so clearly married her as Hartnell rather than before. Hedin's around so i figure he just didn't die, which makes sense if the Omega shennanigans in the Three Doctors and Arc of Infinity also didn't happen which i have to assume is the case judging by the entire plot of the book. there were also references to something that'll off the Time Lords later on which tracks with the Time War but again this was pre revival so i'm guessing it's some Faction Paradox stuff since that was also referenced. it follows the concept that the Doctor's half Human and his parents are Penelope and Ulysses which is not something i'm a fan of normally but knowing this is an alternate universe i think it has potential. he called the TARDIS a family heirloom at one point which is bizarre but in that context somewhat works

and the Magistrate is the Master right? surely that's gotta be a unanimous opinion, right?? i loved him though, probably my fav character in the book. exactly what you'd expect a Gallifrey-bound incarnation of the Master to be like. i was sad when he was killed/vanished/whatever, i wish there was some sort of follow up on that or even just a reaction from the other characters at all. there was one line though where Larna notes that it's obvious that he's in love with the Doctor and vice versa and that made my thoschei shipping brain squee with delight.

loved Larna too! we all had that one hot teacher she's just the only one lucky enough to actually snog them. i loved her dynamic with the Doctor and the Magistrate and i like to think she exists in the main universe, probably re-engineering Gallifrey's staircases and turning down constant offers to join the High Council

i would like to have strong words with Lance Parkin regarding his repeated de-shoeing of female characters though and of the random mentions of curves and figure that never occurs with male characters. i wouldn't mind the emphasis as much if the same had been done for the male characters, and it's not like there wasn't opportunity for it however in the scenes where the Doctor is naked briefly or the Magistrate is wearing tight fitting clothing not once is it given the same depth of description as the scenes with Patience or Larna. the introduction of systemic sexism on Gallifrey was also so incredibly unnecessary and i have no clue why anyone would feel the need to specify that "of the thousands of Time Lords on Gallifrey only around a dozen were female" like huh???

speaking of Gallifrey i did enjoy (for the most part) the depiciton of Time Lord day to day. i'm not fond of the distinction between Gallifreyans and Time Lords, in my mind all Gallifreyans are Time Lords some just don't live in the Citadel, but the stuff about Infinity Chambers, the way they decorate their rooms, the random tech like Z-Caps and Force Knives, the obsession with protocol and proceedure, it's all gorgeous. the use of TARDIS/Time Lord dynamics was stunning (there's a soft moment between the Doctor and the TARDIS at the end and i love it), also the use of different pronouns for different TARDISes was a welcome treat

onto Patience though, the reason i read the book. it referenced her fate from Cold Fusion but because of the everything about this book i assume it's a different version of Patience which honestly i'm glad about because i'm not sure how i feel about the idea of the Doctor marrying the woman who was at his birth and proceeded to raise him. also don't like her being Omega's wife, that's really weird??? i enjoy the idea that she's older than she initially appeared in Cold Fusion though, past regenerations for her would be cool but i doubt she stretches back as far as the Doctor does in the main universe. it was so fun to see her again though albeit a different her

on the whole i'd say a very good book but with enough iffy bits that i wouldn't rate it too high. bit of a slow burn but in a good way! i love Sontarans and i didn't know going in that they were there so that was incredibly welcome. i really like the Infinity Doctor and i wouldn't say no to more content with him, even just an unbound comic strip or something because i really like this take on the character

[tea-understands]

“Nobody asked about my writing” meme

@modernwizard​ : thank you for the inspiration!

I’m sure you guys would send me asks if i ever reblogged one of those writing memes but most of the time i wouldn’t know how to answer most of the questions. so, this is not about you not being a supportive audience. this is about me being a faint-hearted squirrel.

 1: what are you currently working on? 

the next chapter of my Sherlock fan fic. (no really. for once in my life i’m actually making some progress - that is, whenever i’m not on tumblr lol) as well as editing some of the already posted chapters for when i’m finally going to update the thing.

i’ve also started a Doctor Who fix it. which is coming along really slowly.

2: summarize your current project 

it’s been YEARS and i still can’t come up with a better summary than the one i posted on ao3:

“A kidnapped teenage girl. A political conspiracy. Bees. And somehow in the midst of it all, John learns a few things Sherlock forgot to mention about those two years.“

But really, i also get to explore a few things about John’s past. and Sherlock’s pre-series past. IF you want to read it, please feel free to contact me, because the version on ao3 comes with a couple of mistakes i’m getting rid of the moment i’m posting the next chapter! (i don’t want to edit them now because i don’t want people to get a notification, thinking i’ve posted the next chapter only to find i did some minor edits). AND YES, I KNOW I HAVEN’T UPDATED THAT FIC FOR YEARS. I’ve been busy.

for my DW fix it:

The universe is ending, but that’s the least of the Doctor’s problems.  (I need you to understand that the universe ending is literally the subplot in this one!)

Yeah, i need to work on that summary. Basically, I want to re-write some of the plot of the Flux story arc, and, while being at it, i’m also changing a few bits and pieces about the Timeless Child.

3: summarize your current project poorly 

A crime fighting graduate chemist and an ex-army doctor team up to stop a political conspiracy involving bees. (Am I doing this right?)

The Doctor, Yaz and the Master investigate the Division and happen to save the universe in the process. They also bring back Gallifrey by accident. The Master is not happy about this.

4: describe your favorite character or characters

HOW AM I EVEN SUPPOSED TO CHOOSE? (like, this is exactly why i hardly ever post writing ask memes). Let’s do something else instead: describe why you’re looking forward to writing your project:

BBC Sherlock: series 3 just doesn’t find the time to deal with a lot of interesting topics which could be turned into a nice little story (Moran, the aftermath of The Empty Hearse, why does Sherlock volunteer to help with the wedding preparations, i want to tackle Sherlock and Mary’s friendship in general, also Mary and Janine’s. Sherlock and Mycroft’s. And i’ve always wanted to write a case fic involving bees).

DW: how did the Master go from Missy’s redemption arc to destroying Gallifrey? What did he do during those 77 years on Earth? Just the Doctor and the Master’s complicated past (and future?). Yaz. Ruth!Doctor. Time Lord Telepathy. Australia. Lizards (like, actual lizards).

5: post a line from your current project without any context 

BBC Sherlock: Sherlock had shown him a glimpse of the dark secrets holding the threads of the universe, the ugly, elemental puzzle pieces of human nature which, any later, Sherlock would have been too self-conscious to trust him with. 

DW: For a moment the world dips into golden star dust and she does her best not to think of endings and beginnings.

6: how do you get through writers block?

depends on what’s causing it. but these days i usually switch projects and work on my other fic instead. sometimes, going through my ao3 bookmarks and revisiting some old favourites help.

7: would you want to live in the world of your current work? 

BBC Sherlock: no, there are already enough political conspiracies in this one, thank you very much.

DW: a hard no! i know i said it was a sub-plot, but the universe *is* literally ending.

8: briefly discuss your outlining process, if you outline 

i don’t actually write an outline. but i have a pretty good idea of where i want my story to go and what i need to deal with in the next chapters to get there.

9: what is the aesthetic of your current project 

BBC Sherlock: at times dark, at times light and sparkly but always soft. much softer than the show (while still very much dealing with torture. like. i literally wrote a torture scene, which is probably the hardest thing i’ve ever done and hopefully ever will do. 0/10. wouldn’t recommend). does emotional closure count as an aesthetic? no? it should.

DW: i know hurt/comfort isn’t an aesthetic BUT it should be. maybe cottage core in space?

10: what song sums up your current work the best?

*forgets every single song she’s ever listened to*

i tag: @aelaer @natalunasans @beguilewritesstuff and literally whoever wants to. if you see this post consider yourself tagged.

[user-2-electric-boogaloo]

A Comparison of RTD and Steven Moffat: Saving The Day

So for this analysis I’m going to compare when Moffat and RTD save the day well and when they save it poorly. There are a few bits of criteria I need to explain.

 First I will only be including main series, no Torchwood, no spin-offs, and no mini episodes.

Second, I have to define what makes a good and a bad ending (my examples will come from episodes written by neither of them): 

Bad endings include when the sonic saves the day (see The Power Of Three) (there are exceptions, see below), when a character spouts some useless technobabble that doesn’t make any scientific sense/when it doesn’t make logical sense in general, when the Doctor invents/presents a machine/equipment that miraculously stops the baddy and is never referred to again (see Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS), and any other ending I deem to be bad (see The Vampires of Venice)

Good endings include when the sonice activates a device that has been well established to save the day, when technobabble is used that actually makes some scientific sense, and just generally when the baddy is destroyed in what I deem to be a creative manner that makes sense with all the things that had been set up in that episode (see The Unquiet Dead).

There will also be cases where there isn’t really a day to be saved, however this happens more often with Moffat.

Let us begin (obviously there will be spoilers but the last episode in the list aired nearly 4 years ago so what you doing with your life).

RTD:

Rose: Bad

What even is anti-plastic?! Like seriously, he’s faced the Autons loads of times and has never thought to use it any other time.

The End Of The World: Bad

The Doctor just goes up to the appearance of the repeated meme (ha meme) and rips its arm off. He then just summons Cassandra back by twisting a knob which apparently everyone can do if “you’re very clever like me”.

Aliens Of London/World War Three: Good

Just nuking them all was a bit dodgy but I’ll give it to him purely because it had been set up earlier in the episode and it is a genuine option that could have been taken.

The Long Game: Good

The heating issue was set up within 2 minutes of the episode starting. It’s always good to see the Doctor using his enemies weakness against them.

Boom Town: Good

Only just. It’s technology that hadn’t been showcased ever before and came out of nowhere, but I’m allowing purely because it was setting up The Parting Of The Ways.

Bad Wolf/The Parting Of The Ways: Good

See above. It was set up the story before so it works.

The Christmas Invasion: Bad

This was so close to being good. If RTD had just let the Sycorax leader be honourable then everything would have been fine. Instead he had to let him be dishonourable and then the Doctor through the Satsuma at a random button that for no apparent reason caused a bit of floor to fall away.

New Earth: Bad

It only makes sense if you think about it for less than 10 seconds as just pouring every cure to every disease ever into a giant tub and then spraying said supercure onto them all, then having them hug each other to pass it on. That is suspending my disbelief just a bit too far.

Tooth And Claw: Good

Everything is set up in the episode so I’ll allow it but I fail to see how Prince Albert had the time to ensure that the diamond was cut perfectly.

Love And Monsters: Bad

It’s Love And Monsters. Need I say more?

Army of Ghosts/Doomsday: Good

It was very clearly set up throughout the episode.

The Runaway Bride: Bad

I don’t like how a few bombs can supposedly drain the entire Thames.

Smith And Jones: Good

All the events were well established

Gridlock: Good

It’s a fairly bland way to save the day, just opening the surface to all the drivers. But how else could he have done it?

Utopia/The Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Time Lords: Bad

As much as I like the idea that he tuned himself into the archangel network, he basically turned into Jesus. It is arguably the least convincing ending in modern Doctor Who history.

Voyage Of The Damned: Bad

Why was he the next highest authority? If he’s the highest authority in the universe why didn’t they default to him in the first place? If not then why not default to Midshipman Frame? And if he’s somehow in between them then why? Also Astrid killed herself for no reason when she easily could have jumped out of the forklift.

Partners In Crime: Good

It works in the context of the episode, but I don’t see why they needed two of the necklace things.

Midnight: Good

It’s human nature, you can’t get more well set up than that.

Turn Left: Good

It works logically

The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End: Bad

Donna just spouts a load of technobabble whilst pressing buttons and then the Daleks are magically incapacitated.

The Next Doctor: Bad

Why do the infostamps sever Hartigan’s connection with the Cyberking? As far as I remember it ain’t explained.

Planet Of The Dead (co-written with noted transphobe Gareth Roberts): Good

A good couple scenes are dedicated on getting the anti-gravs set up.

The Waters Of Mars (co-written with Phil Ford): N/A

The day isn’t really saved cause everyone still dies anyway.

The End Of Time: Good

Using a gun to destroy a machine is much better than using the sonic to destroy it.

Summary for RTD:

Out of 24 stories written by him, I deem 10 to be bad endings with 1 abstaining. That’s 41.7% of his episodes (43.5% if we don’t count any abstaining).

Steven Moffat:

The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances: Good

You’ll see this a lot with Moffat, he knows how to explain things without stupefying levels of technobabble. “Emailing the upgrade” is a perfect example of this.

The Girl In The Fireplace: Good

Some basic logic, the androids want to repair their ship, but they can’t return to it, they no longer have a function so they shut down.

Blink: Good

Always loved this one, getting the angels to look at each other, however they do look at each other sometimes earlier in the episode.

Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead: Bad

This is more of a problem with the setup of the episode, I don’t like that he can negotiate with the Vashta Nerada. I’d rather see them comprehensively beaten, but I guess it’s good for the scare factor that they can’t be escaped from.

The Eleventh Hour: Good

He convinced the best scientists all around the world to set every clock to 0 all in less than an hour. In the Doctor’s own words “Who da man!”

The Beast Below: Good

The crying child motif pretty much ended up saving the day (well for the star whale, life went on as normal for pretty much everyone else).

The Time Of Angels/Flesh And Stone: Good

The artificial gravity had briefly been set up earlier so I’ll allow it.

The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang: Good

Everything had been set up perfectly, the vortex manipulator, the Pandorica’s survival field thingy, the TARDIS exploding at every moment in history.

A Christmas Carol: Good

Literally the entire episode is the Doctor saving the day by convincing Kazran not to be a cock.

The Impossible Astronaut/Day Of The Moon: Good

The silence’s ability to influence people is their whole thing, so using it against them is a good Doctory thing to do.

A Good Man Goes To War: N/A

The day isn’t really saved, Melody is lost, but River shows up at the end so is all fine? I love the episode it’s just the day isn’t really truly saved (yes I know Amy was rescued but she still lost her baby).

Let’s Kill Hitler: N/A

There isn’t really a day to be saved. They all get out alive but no one is really saved other than maybe River but we all knew she was gonna live anyway.

The Wedding Of River Song: Good

Whilst opinion is divided on the episode, the ending still works. the Tesseracta was established in Let’s Kill Hitler, and the “touch River and time will move again” was established well in advance.

The Doctor, The Widow And The Wardrobe: Bad

I don’t like how the lifeboat travels through the time vortex for no reason but to rescue the dad. It don’t make no sense and I don’t think it’s explained

Asylum Of The Daleks: Good

Oswin had access to the Dalek hive mind so of course she should be able to link into the controls and blow everything up.

The Angels Take Manhattan: Good

Paradoxes really do be something powerful, and they even acknowledge how nobody knows if it’d work so I’ll let it slide.

The Snowmen: Bad

Lots of people cry at Christmas, why are the Latimers anything special?

The Bells of Saint John: Good

The whole episode is about hacking so why shouldn’t the Doctor be able to hack the spoonheads

The Name Of The Doctor: Good

It was the story arc for the season pretty much, so of course it was explained well in advance.

The Day Of The Doctor: Good

Both the storing Gallifrey like a painting and the making everyone forget if they’re Human or Zygon works in the context of the episode.

The Time Of The Doctor: Bad

Since when were the Time Lords so easily negotiated with?

Deep Breath: Good

I like the dilemma over whether the half-face man was pushed or jumped.

Into The Dalek: Good

It’s set up well with this new Doctor’s persona of actually not being too nice of a guy (at first).

Listen: N/A

There isn’t a day to be saved. It’s just 45 minutes of the Doctor testing a hypothesis and I low-key love it.

Time Heist (co-written with Steven Thompson): Good

It works logically so I’ll allow it however it isn’t very well set up at all.

The Caretaker (co-written with noted shithead Gareth Roberts): Good

The machine to tell the Blitzer what to do was set up well in advance so I’ll allow it.

Dark Water/Death In Heaven: Good

The fact that Danny still cares even as a cyberman is set up fairly early on after his transformation.

Last Christmas: Good

He does use the sonic to wake up Clara but he convinces the others to wake up through talking so I’ll allow it.

The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar: Good

It’s set up well with that little scene from actually inside the sewers.

The Girl Who Died (co-written with Jamie Mathieson): Good

IDK why the vikings would randomly keep electric eels but they’re set up well so I’ll ignore it. 

The Zygon Inversion (co-written with Peter Harness): N/A 

Not including this one as it’s only the second part and I’d argue the ending is most likely Harness’.

Heaven Sent/Hell Bent: N/A

Again there isn’t really a day to be saved, yes Heaven Sent really is amazing but it’s only the first part and, being completely honest, he dies several billion times before finally getting through the wall.

The Husbands Of River Song: N/A

Again there isn’t really a day to be saved here.

The Return Of Doctor Mysterio: Good

He gets Grant to catch the bomb which is good. But he does just sonic the gun out of Dr Sim’s hand and says UNIT is on its way which just sort of wraps it up very quickly.

The Pilot: N/A

No day to be saved here.

Extremis: Good

You could technically call it the sonic saving the day, I consider it to be the Doctor emailing the Doctor to warn him of the future.

The Pyramid At The End Of The World: Good

The fire sanitising everything makes sense and it’s in character for Bill to love the Doctor enough to cure his blindness in return for the world

World Enough And Time/The Doctor Falls: Good

Yes it is the sonic just blowing the cybermen up, but it’s blowing them up with well established pipelines so I’ll allow it (also the story is amazing).

Twice Upon A Time: N/A

No day to be saved here. Just Doctors 1 and 12 getting angsty about regenerating.

Summary for Steven Moffat:

Out of 39 stories written by him, I deemed 4 to be bad with 7 abstaining. That’s 10.3% of his episodes (12.5% if we don’t count any abstaining).

Conclusions:

Moffat was much better at saving the day than RTD

Moffat liked telling stories where the day didn’t actually need to be saved

I’ve spent way too long on this and I need to sleep

If I spent as much time on this as my coursework I’d probably pass

If you’re still reading this, you probably need to get a life

[yeonchi]

Doctor Who: The Hiatusbreaker Update

In other fandoms, people have always talked about how their favourite show has been ruined by something. I never thought I’d see myself at the eye of the storm until The Timeless Children. I’ve let a lot of other things go up to that point, but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The main reason why I wanted to make this update was to address my thoughts on the Series 12 finale, share some post-review reflections on previous episodes and talk about how I intend to deal with this series going forward. This post also coincides with a special watchalong of The Timeless Children (not part of Doctor Who: Lockdown) as part of the Doctor Who Day celebrations for 2020.

At the moment, I don’t have any Doctor Who-related things planned between Revolution of the Daleks and Series 13. I wrote a post back in May talking about some of the Doctor Who-related things released during lockdown, but I don’t have anything else at the moment. I have considered reviewing some old episodes in a special series, but I don’t know if there would be any point in it. I have been covering my personal project in the Kisekae Insights series, which is heavily influenced from Doctor Who (and tokusatsu), so feel free to check it out.

Going back to The Timeless Children

I usually write my reviews without having read other reviews in order to minimise bias. As such, there have been cases where I’ve had to address things I’ve missed in the review of the next episode, mostly because I’ve read other reviews addressing them. After mulling over my thoughts for the past 6-7 months, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to write a follow-up about the Series 12 finale, and here it is.

One thing I would like to reiterate from my review of that episode is how Chibnall managed to diversify and whitewash the Doctor at the same time. If we’re supposed to believe, from the Master’s words, that the Doctor is the Timeless Child, then it means two things; the Doctor has been diversified thanks to Ruth and the Timeless Child’s incarnations, while the Timeless Child was whitewashed thanks to the previous known incarnations of the Doctor, who were all played by white actors. The only thing left is for the series to confirm the connection between the Doctor, Ruth and the Timeless Child, which is basically the only reason why I’m still watching this series at this point. Even if Chibnall decides to reverse the heavy retcons caused by the episode (which I think is highly unlikely), I’m still not going to forgive him for this.

That being said, I feel that the Timeless Child arc can go either one of two ways, given the information we already have. A good outcome would be to say that Ruth is the Timeless Child and the Doctor is merely a clone of her, which is why they have the same body, but not the same memories of each other, except maybe a link (which was how the Doctor managed to use the Timeless Child’s memories to get out of the Matrix). The bad outcome, which is what I think we’re heading for, is that the Doctor is the Timeless Child and that her previously known incarnations came after Ruth. This is just a quick and simple breakdown I thought up; the arc could go in a different way that we weren’t expecting, which could potentially be better or worse than what we’ve seen already.

Why did I pinpoint Ruth as the “final” incarnation of the Timeless Child, so to speak? I think that the older Brendan getting his memories removed in the visions of Ireland in the Matrix is actually Ruth after she was turned in to the Division. Ruth wanted to leave the Division and they were willing to grant her wish, but they had to capture her first so they could remove her memories, which is how Fugitive of the Judoon happened. As such, the “Morbius Doctors” could be placed between the Timeless Child’s incarnations and Ruth, if we’re playing by their logic.

There was something else that I missed from that episode. Some reviewers stated that when Tecteun was experimenting on the Timeless Child in order to uncover the secret of regeneration, she was essentially killing them multiple times, which is more horrifying given the fact that they are a child and the incarnations shown are played by children. I can understand why these reviewers would think that, given that the regeneration of a Time Lord means the death of an incarnation and the birth of a new one, but honestly, the thought never crossed my mind when I first watched the episode. It didn’t have any bearing on my opinions when I wrote the review and even if it did, they wouldn’t change much.

I honestly can’t believe how the episode tried to pull an Ultraman Orb and have the Doctor essentially telling herself that she isn’t limited by who she was after giving us a 45-minute canon-breaking exposition dump. It’s almost like Chibnall thought we would forget about this arc because it either didn’t matter or because there were more pressing things happening at the time, but luckily for him, a lot of people managed to see through that. In pretty much every Ultraman series since Orb in 2016, there’s always an arc that shows the main character having an identity crisis, then gaining a new power after overcoming it.

Putting that into perspective, Doctor Who has previously explored the Doctor’s dark side and other aspects that he either forgot or never thought he had in the first place. At the same time, it has also explored how the Doctor serves as a hero, a healer, or just a doctor. The “forgotten past” thing was already explored previously with the War Doctor; the Timeless Child arc only served to give the Doctor excessive mystery and elevate the Doctor to an even godlier status beyond the Time Lords, who were already godly enough as they were.

And let’s not forget how this arc irreparably broke canon in a way nobody else would have dared to do. I don’t understand how some people felt this was groundbreaking when it only served to complicate the story even more. Anyone who unironically thinks this probably doesn’t care as much about canon integrity than I do. Kamen Rider Zi-O has been criticised by fans for breaking canon integrity, but I don’t have much of a problem with it since everything was returned to normal in the end (or at least it had to). Producer Shinichiro Shirakura is another source of ire for fans in regards to canon integrity (among other things), but I digress. I’ve compared Chibnall to Shirakura before, but if I had a choice, I’d probably pick the latter over the former.

It goes without saying that the Timeless Child arc would have been less problematic if it were done earlier, say in place of the Steven Moffat era. The Moffat era cemented the twelve regeneration limit and established that the Eleventh Doctor was the final incarnation in the Doctor’s first regeneration cycle; before Series 7, the Timeless Child arc as it is would have fit perfectly well with or without the regeneration cycle question.

Moffat era hindsight aside, it also goes without saying that that arc would have been less problematic if the Timeless Child wasn’t the Doctor. As I said in that episode, they could have been some unknown kid that Tecteun and the Time Lords were exploiting for their powers of regeneration. From there, we could still explore the Timeless Child’s origin and confirm their link to the Doctor by saying that the Doctor (as we know him) was actually a clone of the Timeless Child (like I theorised for the arc’s good outcome).

Some people believe that the arc would have been better if the Master was actually the Timeless Child, but personally, I don’t think it would work that way. The Master’s past is just as complicated as the Doctor’s and let’s not forget that there is still the question of Ruth’s existence to be answered. Like I said, I would rather have the Timeless Child be an entirely original character altogether instead of shoehorning it into an established character’s history, particularly in a show with 57 years of history behind it. I wouldn’t even wish this arc on my worst enemy, to be honest.

With or without this arc, I think that destroying Gallifrey for a second time, after it was anticlimactically restored in Hell Bent, is just unnecessary. That episode aside, how has nobody managed to think up of a story arc for the Valeyard in the years since the revival of the series? We’ve gone past the window for the Valeyard’s creation and all we got out of it was some allusions in the Moffat era.

Remember that we only have the Master’s words and redacted Matrix information as evidence for the Doctor being the Timeless Child; we still don’t have any solid proof on how that came to be. We don’t even fully know how Ruth fits in to all this. I look forward to seeing a resolution to this in Series 13.

Loose thoughts on previous episodes

Continuing with the pattern from the above segment, I’m going to give some post-review follow-ups for some important things in the rest of Series 12 and some episodes in Series 11.

Racism - Looking back at Rosa, I compared the instances of racism shown in that episode to some examples of left-wing racism I’ve heard from right-wing YouTubers and I’ve noticed that the left aren’t as blatant about it or they dress it up so that it doesn’t look like they’re being racist. In contrast, according to the left, right-wing racism seems more obvious even when disguised (particularly in the past when discrimination was accepted as a way of life), though I guess it only seems that way because news spreads fast in mainstream media and social media, sometimes putting comments out of context.

Jack Robertson - Remember that Donald Trump expy from Arachnids in the UK? I’m honestly wondering if Doctor Who unintentionally predicted Joe Biden while trying to satirise Trump because it was mentioned in that episode that Robertson was only running for president in 2020 because he hated Trump for decades. That being said, I still think it’s unlikely that Robertson would have run as a Republican presidential candidate. Also, I can’t believe I missed the opportunity to use “Yaz’s Mum” as a running gag in the review for that episode given how it was used in the episode itself.

LGBT representation - In the review for Resolution, I mentioned that Richard (the security guard at MDZ) being gay doesn’t feel shoehorned compared to Frankie in Arachnids in the UK. I’ll own up to missing the mark on that one because I’m straight and I didn’t realise that Richard being killed 25 seconds after his debut made him just as shoehorned as Frankie (who was also killed in the episode). In contrast, LGBT characters who weren’t as shoehorned in Series 11 were Angstrom in The Ghost Monument (whose wife was killed by the Stenza, onore Tim Shaw) and James I in The Witchhunters (based in historical belief). I still think that they did it better in Praxeus with Jake and Adam. Also, let’s not forget that LGBT representation has been a thing in Doctor Who since the 90′s, with the debut of Jack Harkness in 2005 and the retconnings of past companions’ sexual orientations (like saying “oh, they were gay all along” which I’m a bit iffy on).

The Master - Since O’s debut in the series premiere, I’ve been struggling to fit that incarnation into the rest of the Master’s timeline. This was because in the Series 10 finale, Harold Saxon’s incarnation killed Missy with the full blast from his laser screwdriver, preventing her from regenerating.

Later on, two works were released that essentially confirm O as Missy’s future incarnation. In the Big Finish audio story The Lumiat, Missy used an Elysian field to break herself down and rebuild herself, giving her a new regeneration cycle in the process. The resulting incarnation called herself the Lumiat and had an adventure with a past Missy, only to be shot by her and left on another planet to regenerate.

In the 2021 edition of the Doctor Who Annual, there is a short story detailing a conversation between the Thirteenth Doctor and O. O briefly reminisces about being Missy and how she spent too long in the Doctor’s company. Therefore, we can confirm that O’s incarnation comes after Missy instead of between Saxon and Missy as some people thought.

With this, my theory that Saxon didn’t give Missy the full blast has been debunked, but my theory that the Master wouldn’t want to rob his future selves of chances to spite the Doctor still stands, even if it was unintentionally caused by the Master turning good for a while. I guess the Master’s ability to escape from predicaments is remarkable, yet unquestionable.

Police brutality - At the end of my review on Orphan 55, I expressed my disgust on climate protesters complaining about police brutality because the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have suffered more police brutality since 2014. After hearing about the police brutality in the various protests that have risen up this year, particularly in regards to the coronavirus and Black Lives Matter, my stance regarding the police has changed and I’m an ACAB person now. I’ll talk more about it in my end-of-year review post.

Chameleon Arch - In Fugitive of the Judoon, Lee Clayton served as Ruth’s “husband”, or protector, while she was hiding from the Time Lords on Earth. If Lee isn’t human, then what is he and how did he manage to disguise as a human? I had thought that Lee was not a Gallifreyan, but his interaction with Gat seemed to imply that he was. But if he was able to disguise himself as a human like Ruth while still being aware of her true nature, then it is possible that Lee also used a Chameleon Arch, just not on the full setting that would transform a Time Lord into a human and give them new memories. In the comic The Forgotten, the Eighth Doctor recalled to Chantir how he convinced the Master that he was half-human through the use of a broken Chameleon Arch, so it is possible that a fully working Chameleon Arch would also be able to do something like that. This is assuming that “bio-shield” is another name for said tool.

“I’m still quite socially awkward” - Yes, this is about that bit at the end of Can You Hear Me? when the Doctor was apparently being dismissive of Graham’s concern about his cancer coming back. I still stand by what I said about the Doctor being socially awkward, but I’ve softened my stance recently and I now believe that the Doctor’s reaction could have been a little different. It could have gone something like this: “I should say a reassuring thing now, shouldn’t I? I’m still quite socially awkward, but I just want you to know that you’ve got me, Ryan and Yaz in the TARDIS, and we’ll be there for you if anything happens, just as you have been there for us.”

I must give credit to this episode for helping me to open up about some of the (girl) friends I’ve lost during my years in high school and to reach out to an old fan of mine who was there when I started my English dub rants. In regards to the former, I’ve recently decided to fully open up about the one crush I had during high school and the storylines I made in my personal project with characters based around me and her. You can find it in Parts 15 and 16 of Kisekae Insights, but be warned - to put it simply, it’s pretty cringe and all over the place. If you decide to read it, then prepare to have your expectations subverted.

Regarding DWexit

Doctor Who Series 13 is currently in production and is projected to premiere in late-2021, with eight episodes instead of ten or eleven (if we’re counting festive specials). In the Series 12 epilogue, I mentioned that there may come a time where I feel that it is time for me to move on from the series, since it hasn’t been as good as it was before, the gaps between series just seem to be getting longer and longer with fewer episodes being made each series and the premiere schedule for each series hasn’t been regular for some time now.

While the main reason for these delays and episode cuts this time around is due to new regulations and protocols implemented as a result of the coronavirus, I think there could be another factor behind it, which is that the executive producers, Chris Chibnall and Matt Strevens, might not want to stress out the production team or themselves because they are inexperienced or because they know how stressful producing 13 episodes and a Christmas special can be (not counting spinoffs). I’ve been as grateful as I can be for being able to have new episodes to watch, but given everything that’s happened, I’m starting to recognise that even my gratefulness has its limits.

To be honest, I’ve never really had that much of a problem with the SJW stuff, which is why I may seem a bit lenient on that front, but I am wary of the criticisms that certain people have made in that regard. The bigger problem for me, in fact, is the possibility of the BBC pandering to China. In 2017, BBC Worldwide signed a deal with Shanghai Media Group for all the existing revival series episodes and spinoffs along with the first right of refusal for all future series up to Series 15 (this means that SMG will always be the first to be offered the rights for the series before the BBC can pass it on if they refuse). I had believed that the series was banned there because science fiction and time travel were its main themes, but I guess that may have just been a rumour.

SJWs somehow being low-key pro-China or whatever aside, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that Doctor Who is beginning to fall in that direction, at least not at this point in time. They’ve mostly stuck to the West in terms of political references, which I’m fine with, but the moment they talk shit about the Hong Kong protesters, that’s going to be a strike in my book.

Speaking of strikes for the series, I only have one for the Timeless Child; the one I gave for casting Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor is one I’m probably going to forgive. I could care less about the Thirteenth Doctor being a woman or an expy of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors given how the Timeless Child arc turned out so far or is going to turn out in Series 13. The prospect of a second female Doctor (straight after the Thirteenth) doesn’t even seem that much of a problem to me despite me initially framing it that way.

As I said, the only reason why I haven’t given up on this series yet is mostly because I want to know how the Timeless Child arc plays out. Aside from that, I’ve been struggling to decide whether I want to give this series up and if so, when, because Doctor Who and tokusatsu are the only things I have left after giving up (following new) anime and video games years ago (along with Koei Tecmo and their fanbase). As for this review series, I’m planning to end it at the end of the Thirteenth Doctor’s run, because my intention was to review Jodie Whittaker’s episodes of Doctor Who. Barring the possibility of a third strike, I’ll probably remain a casual fan of the series after Whittaker leaves. I’m honestly hoping that Chibnall doesn’t give me a reason to give this series up, but regardless of this, I’ll always remember the Ninth to Twelfth Doctors as my golden era for Doctor Who.

Addressing rumours

I’m not one to talk about rumours like this, but when you’ve got a long time to wait before new episodes, there’s only so much you can do with what you have. Also, after watching The Timeless Children, I heard from Nerdrotic (my other alternative to Bowlestrek besides The Oldest Nerd) that the reveal was actually rumoured in November 2019 and that he predicted that the Doctor would be revealed as originally being female.

Given my thoughts on Series 12, I became sceptical at other rumours I’ve heard about Series 13 and considered whether they would end up being the case. I’m going to address a few rumours that I’ve heard and discuss the probability of them coming true. Coincidentally, they come from Noel of The TARDIS Zone YouTube channel, but I’ll link to this article that has used one of his videos.

TARDIS exterior changing - Apparently, due to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the exterior of the TARDIS might be changed due to how the police are seen by the public. I would probably like it if the chameleon circuit was fixed; like Evolto, the TARDIS could still keep its current exterior as a preferred form, choose a new exterior as a preferred form or adapt to its surroundings. I wouldn’t really like it if the chameleon circuit was fixed only to have it break again in a different form and use Black Lives Matter as a means of justifying it. Aside from this, if people had a problem with the police box design of the TARDIS, why hasn’t there been any major outcry about it before?

Thirteenth Doctor being bisexual - Honestly, given the Yaz favouritism I’ve seen in the series, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up shipping her with the Doctor. Even then, has the Doctor’s sexuality ever come into question or been a question that needs to be answered? We’ve seen Captain Jack kiss the Ninth Doctor in The Parting of the Ways and in the past, the Doctor has never necessarily cared about his sexuality most of the time (particularly in the Classic Series).

Planet of same-sex couples - Didn’t they already do this in The Tsuranga Conundrum? Oh wait, I might have gotten the wrong idea...

Davros is a puppet for a female Kaled warlord (1:21 in video) - “haha Hitler was whipped lol” - I’m sorry, I just had to make that joke given that the Daleks have been compared to the Nazis. I don’t think that would happen because there’s no evidence that some woman was manipulating Hitler behind the scenes. Plus, there’s the problem of Terry Nation’s estate to get past, because people apparently need permission to use other people’s things. I don’t think they would approve.

Thirteen to apologise for past mistakes (1:36 in video) - I don’t see why this needs to be a thing if it ends up happening. There’s a reason why people say things like “don’t dwell on the past, but learn from your mistakes”. It doesn’t mean going back and correcting them because sometimes, there are things that just can’t be helped.

In April 2020, during the first run of Doctor Who: Lockdown, Paul Cornell released a story named The Shadow in the Mirror which showed the Thirteenth Doctor freeing Daughter of Mine from the mirror (every mirror) that the Tenth Doctor trapped her in at the end of Human Nature/The Family of Blood. As I said in the post about Doctor Who: Lockdown, I wouldn’t have seen the need to free Daughter of Mine, let alone the Family of Blood. Remember why the Doctor gave them their punishments in the first place? What’s stopping Daughter of Mine from freeing the rest of her family so they can go back to seeking immortality again?

I think it was pretty short-sighted of Paul Cornell to write that story, plus it was an excuse for him to use the free pass given by The Timeless Children to make the Thirteenth Doctor a Mary Sue. Also, who’s to say that he probably wrote it on a whim once he heard that they were going to do tweetalongs of those episodes?

Chibnall recasting Second, Third and Fourth Doctors as women (from different video) - The rumour says that Ruth would be the replacement for the Second Doctor. I know Chibnall was being stupid with the Timeless Child arc, but surely he isn’t that stupid, because all this will do is complicate canon even more. Therefore, I don’t think it will end up happening, but I wouldn’t really put it past Chibnall to do it; for the record, if I learned about the Timeless Child rumour last year, I would have had the same reaction as well.

Series 13 to be Chibnall and Whittaker’s final season (different source) - Remember “chaos in Cardiff” back in August last year? The state of Doctor Who nowadays must be pretty bad if these rumours are making people hope that they’ll leave sooner rather than later. Usually, revived series showrunners usually work for two Doctors and Doctors usually do three series (as a tradition started by Patrick Troughton in order to prevent being typecast). Jodie Whittaker leaving after Series 13 would be likely since it will be her third series, but Chris Chibnall leaving with her would be strange to see. Honestly, I’m not bothered about when they’ll leave; I’m just here to enjoy the ride.

Christmas Special things

Signs are pointing to Revolution of the Daleks being a Christmas special, so I’m going to presume that that will be the case. Let’s take a look at a couple of things that I’ve heard in preparation for it.

First of all, I’m glad I waited until this point to post this, because at the time of writing this, I just saw confirmation that John Barrowman will be returning as Captain Jack Harkness. As if we didn’t work it out already when he returned in Fugitive of the Judoon. Frankly, I would have been surprised if he didn’t return, given how he didn’t return for The Timeless Children.

Secondly, it’s been reported that this special will mark the departure of Graham and Ryan, but the prospect of them returning in Series 13 hasn’t been ruled out. Tosin Cole has been cast in the AMC drama 61st Street, but given the impact of the coronavirus in the US, production of the series has been scheduled to begin in 2021 (in this article from August), so it wouldn’t be surprising if Ryan had some cameos in Series 13 alongside Graham as well. Such a shame that not a lot of focus was put on Ryan’s dyspraxia.

Look forward to the review when it comes out after Christmas Day or New Year’s Day (if my predictions are wrong).

UPDATE - 30 November 2020: So the trailer for the special has been released and it’s going to be released on New Year’s Day. I probably should have expected this; either the BBC doesn’t think Christmas is politically correct or they would rather put better shows on Christmas Day. Either way, it’ll be a hiatusbreaker episode, just like this post.

I’ve also learnt that Chris Noth is reprising his role as Jack Robertson, which is something I didn’t expect to see. It’ll be interesting to see whether he ends up being president in this episode, though from the looks of the trailer, I wouldn’t think so. His promotion of the Daleks in the trailer (“These machines are going to change the world!”) harkens back to Winston Churchill in Victory of the Daleks, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that episode ends up getting ripped off.

One thing I forgot to mention - what happened to the remaining humans who came back to the 21st century, namely Ravio, Yedlarmi and Ethan? I hope they make an appearance in the special, because it would be a waste of they weren’t.

Before I finish up, there is one more thing I want to mention: why the hell can’t I get into the Doctor /who/ General forums now? Those guys used to be on 4chan, then they moved to 8chan, then they moved to a separate forum when that got shut down and they didn’t bother to go back when it was revived as 8kun. Since the end of Series 12, you need a password to go in now and I’ve been unable to find out why that is the case.

Anyway, that’s it for the hiatusbreaker update. Stay safe and I’ll see you all again at Christmas time.

[rassilon-imprimatur]

Time Lords and Alternate Timelines and Universes

Episodes of Doctor Who like Inferno or any of the appearances of “Pete’s World” can’t seem to help causing a question to pop up in the minds of some fans... 

Does this alternate universe have Time Lords? 

First off, there’s a difference between an alternate timeline and an alternate universe. We’ve seen that Time Lords are able to navigate timelines with ease (they call it “jumping time tracks”), and interestingly, Gallifrey almost always seems to be immune to to conflicting temporal pathways. However, alternate universes are very much beyond the Time Lords. 

Lawrence Miles’ The Cosmology of the Spiral Politic says it better than I ever could: 

There are many universes, and in no way is our current universe the “right” one or the “real” one. The exact number of other universes is obviously unknown, and debate still rages as to whether the number is infinite or just absurdly large (interestingly, this mirrors the far older debate about the size of the universe itself). Since we belong to a species which was born inside space and time, it’s sadly impossible for us to imagine anything happening beyond space and time, and we inevitably tend to think of these other universes as being simple geographical locations; as if we could burst through the walls of our own universe and keep travelling until we came to the next. Clearly this is ridiculous, but at the same time it’s the only way we can feasibly picture things. Since space doesn’t exist beyond the limits of the universe, even the word “outside” is badly-chosen, yet we have no other way of considering it.

There is an expanse between universes - frequently referred to, most notably by the Celestis, as an “ocean” - but it’s an expanse without either time or scale in the conventional senses. Here we’ll once again refer to it as Ur-space, though “space” is yet another misleading term, as nothing can move through it (there’s no distance there to move through). Nonetheless, we can think of universes as being “close” to each other or “far away” from each other, as long as we remember that we’re using these words purely for our own convenience. And since we tend to think about exploration in sea-going terms, we generally use the same terminology as the Celestis and imagine the many universes “floating” on the Ur-space ocean. (Similarly, it’s known that Ur-space is occupied by things other than universes, and in keeping with this nautical theme they’re often referred to as Swimmers. Unlike the universe/s we know, these Swimmers might actually be described as living beings, though in truth they don’t meet most of the requirements needed for something to qualify as life on Earth. In fact they’re vastly more complex, so it might be more useful to say that no living thing on Earth meets the requirements needed to qualify as life among the Swimmers. It’s thought, however, that they have no real intelligence of any kind. 

Intentional or not, the lore of the Void in Doctor Who episodes such as Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday fits well into Miles’ descriptions of an “expanse” between universe. This essay is an excellent description of how universes that occur naturally work, but one cannot help but wonder how the (oft misused) term of “parallel universe” fits in. 

In my opinion, Simon Bucher-Jones and Jonathan Dennis’ The Brakespeare Voyage has out the definitive stamp on how alternate timelines and universes work in Doctor Who’s context: 

Think of the universe for a moment as having three additional directions (alterward, paraward, and otherward) all at right angles to the ones you know (length, breadth, width and time). This is a tremendous oversimplification, but it may help.

Paraward, we find a sheath of histories which are either eternally separate from our own anchored time or which diverge and return to it so far in the past, or so far in the future, as to be – functionally – eternally separate from it in terms of the noospheres of the Great Houses. The physical laws of these universes are identical to ours, but all else is different. We call these paraward space-time entities ‘parallel worlds’.

Timelines which result in these Paraward worlds seem to branch off into their own universes. So, the Earth of Inferno and Pete’s World seem to fit this bill. At some point in this divergence, these timelines become their own functional realities, and develop the Void between them, like universes that are “spawned” naturally and float amongst each other. These paraward worlds, by being completely separate universes, seem to be the exception to the Time Lords’ defense from alternate and parallel time tracks, as David A. McIntee’s Face of the Enemy and Paul Cornell’s Timewyrm: Revelation reveal that the universe of Inferno had different versions of the Time Lords. 

(Craig Hinton’s The Quantum Archangel also confirms that the Inferno Earth was a result of a timeline divergence becoming a different universe.)

Miles’ also touches on this in The Cosmology of the Spiral Politic: 

The fact that nearby universes seem to originate from common ancestors has led to the description of universes close to our own as brother- or sister-universes, although there’s an obvious risk of this kind of language leading us to take the “genetic” analogy far too seriously. Besides which, the technology doesn’t exist in any known culture to (as it were) DNA-test a universe, so the exact relationship between one universe and another is always open to debate.

This has also, inevitably, led to the description of other universes as “parallel” universes. Although this is technically correct, the word “parallel” is potentially misleading. Generations of fiction and speculation have led us to think of parallel universes as universes which are in some way connected to our own, in which history has somehow split off from history as we know it, and this is wholly untrue. No physical connection exists between universes, at least not in their adulthood, though more than one child-universe could potentially grow inside its parent as part of a “litter”. (In fact, if you can ignore its connotations in fiction then “parallel” is quite an appropriate word. Parallel lines never meet, never connect and never intersect).

Bucher-Jones and Dennis continue in The Brakespeare Voyage: 

Alterward, we find those histories which divert, at crucial or innocuous moments alike, from ours. Here are the worlds where a toe goes unstubbed, or a vital battle is lost, where the five hundred and eleventh hair on a sloth in the forest has gone grey in one world, and white in another. Many (perhaps most of these) rejoin the main anchored universe as their micro-changes fall away into quantum uncertainty. When the million sloths are dead and decomposing, what effect will the colour of one hair have had? A few (the mathematics contains several high order infinities, so the number itself may be high) do not appear to rejoin, either eternally leading outside the ‘time-space’ horizon approachable by a normal time-ship, or curving back in closed loops longer than our normal ships can reach, beyond the futures we can access. We call these alterward space-time entities ‘alternate worlds’. Perhaps paraward is just a way of talking about extreme alternates, and alterward is just a way of talking about probability bundle universes. 

So, Afterward worlds are timelines that diverge from the standard time track, but are not independent enough or strong enough to exist in separate universes, and therefore exist as different time tracks. These are the alternate worlds that Time Lords exempt from joining (for the most part), and these are the alternate worlds devoured by the Chronovores in order to spare the limited space and matter of the universe (as detailed in Hinton’s The Quantum Archangel). Any alternate timelines that co-exist with each other in the same universe (Doctor Who’s The Iron Legion, Faction Paradox’s Warlords of Utopia) are ruled over by one version of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. 

Lance Parkin’s The Infinity Doctors strongly implies that the Time Lords, by becoming the Time Lords, made it impossible for them to have alternate and parallel versions in the same universe, regardless of time tracks/timelines...  

Gallifrey’s nameless sun rose over the Capitol Dome, as it had done since the first days of the universe. No sunlight penetrated the Dome itself, but the Oldharbour Clock that stood in the Eastern parts of the Capitol marked the occasion by chiming Nine Bells. On the ledge beneath the vast clock face, an intricate mechanical ballet began, as life‐sized animated figures emerged from their positions and set about their daily routine. They were gaily painted and beautifully dressed, certainly symbolic of something, although even the few Gallifreyans that had noticed them couldn’t agree what it might be. One of the problems was that the clock had never been built. Not in this timeline, anyway. It was a paradoxical survivor from the Time Wars, probably the only vestige of its parallel Gallifrey still in existence. It had just appeared one day, no one remembered when. The analogue Time Lords that had built the Tower had imbued the clockwork figurines with a degree of sentience and the capacity for self‐development.

... and in the same novel...

There was a gleam in Sontar’s eye. “I wonder who it was that the Time Lords fought? It must have been a glorious conflict, and a magnificent victory. Yet you choose to honour those that died by forgetting them. You should remember, Time Lord, that all your power, and this beautiful city, were not built without sacrifice.” 

The Doctor nodded. “Oh, no. Gallifrey honours its dead, as you will see. When we reach the Panopticon you will see the Flowers of Remembrance of the Lost Dead. There –’ he pointed across the city to an unassuming geodesic structure – ‘is the Tomb of the Uncertain Soldier.”

“You value a lack of decisiveness in your military? This man died because he hesitated?”

“No, no, no. This was a Gallifreyan body recovered from an alternate reality. We couldn’t identify him because that soldier, and many like him who fought in the Time Wars, didn’t hesitate at the critical moment, they chose to cancel out their own timelines for the greater good of Gallifrey.”

“An impressive sacrifice. It would please me to hope that my own men would destroy the universe rather than let it fall into enemy hands.”

The Doctor smiled forgivingly, and didn’t correct the old General.

All versions of Gallifrey that would and could exist in alternate timelines were destroyed by the fact that a Gallifrey became the dominant version. 

Cody Quijano-Schell’s Iris Wildthyme short story “The Golden Hendecahedron” retcons regeneration into a means of Time Lords circumnavigating the need to contort to and obey the pathways of alternate timelines... 

“Remember when I… the other Iris… was talking about how I don’t exist in parallel universes?  It’s a part of being a time traveller. We travel between possibilities instead of branching off down the paths of infinity.” She rubbed her fingers together slowly as if she was feeling her own fingers.

Tom noticed this Iris was aloof. Easy going. A little spacey. “So you’re saying most people, every choice they make creates a parallel timeline, one for each possibility?” He was surprised when she let out a loud, bold pleasant laugh.

“That’s right! But being adrift in time and space isolates you from that mundane reality. And that’s why travellers like me… change the way we do.”

“When you become a new Iris it’s not just your body healing itself…”

“…it’s the cosmic balance of possibilities being restored. Oh, you’ll get people trying to tell you it’s just a survival mechanism, but the change goes beyond biology or even technology. It’s temporal. It’s cosmic chance. It’s… infinite possibilities brought to life. Even removed from normal time, and all those branching quantum possibilities…the cosmos demands periodic change and new possibilities.”

... which really puts a fascinating spin on regeneration, don’t you think? 

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #454545} p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #454545} p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #454545} p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #454545}

[chevd-blog]

My Two Cents: Whitewashing and Politically Correct Casting in Film

I’m poking the hornets’ nest again. 

Recently, it was announced that the Twelfth Doctor, Peter Capaldi, would be leaving Doctor Who at the end of the 2017 season. Now, I’m a pretty big fan of Doctor Who, so of course, this was a big deal for me. I’m going to be sad to see him go. At first, I’ll admit, I was skeptical-- I absolutely adored David Tennant and Matt Smith in the role, and Capaldi’s version of the Doctor was very different. But in time, despite being older and initially quite a bit more abrasive, the last season truly made me a believer (particularly his performances in “The Zygon Inversion” and “Heaven Sent”).

But I digress.

Of course, with the news of Capaldi’s departure, there’s been the inevitable wave of conjecture-- who will play the Thirteenth Doctor? And of course, part of this conjecture has been the now-commonplace suggestion that the role in question need not go to another white male actor. This is something that has been seen with increasing frequency in recent years, and which has been directed at everything from Star Wars to Marvel to James Bond. As a fan of these franchises, I’m invested in this discussion. So, against my better judgment, I find myself compelled to broach the subject of how to approach race and gender in casting.

Before I begin-- I realize that identity politics can be a very thorny and divisive subject, even in the context of the film industry. I’d like to note, as a white male film fan, the opinions I express here are only my own, and should be taken with a grain of salt. I mean absolutely no disrespect to anybody else, and I appreciate other perspectives on the issue, including ones that diverge from my own, so long as they are respectful as well.

So what is whitewashing? Basically, it’s the practice of productions casting white actors for non-white roles. It’s a very old practice that Hollywood has undertaken ever since its inception. This 2016 segment from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver sums it up quite nicely (warning: NSFW language):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XebG4TO_xss

(Just as an aside-- while the John Oliver segment succinctly sums up the issue pretty well, I don’t agree with the entirety of it. For example, Tom Cruise’s role in The Last Samurai was a fictional character, but one which was based largely on a real historical figure named Jules Brunet. Admittedly, the film did take some liberties with the character, portraying him as American, where Brunet was actually French. Also, while it is largely open to audience interpretation, my impression of the film was that the “Last Samurai” referenced by the title was actually Ken Watanabe’s character, and not Tom Cruise’s.)

As shown here, there’s been quite a lot of backlash against whitewashing in recent years, with demands of more political correctness in casting becoming much more frequent. On the whole, honestly, I have to say I find fault with both sides of this dichotomy. Yes, whitewashing a movie like Gods of Egypt is absolutely ridiculous. I acknowledge that. And I also acknowledge that Hollywood has a long history of white actors being given preferential treatment. On the other hand, blind political correctness of any kind irks me as well, because it feels like an incomplete, disingenuous, kneejerk reaction to a complex problem. It doesn’t actually fix anything, it just breeds resentment. I suppose, for me, the governing principle is actually as simple as plausibility and faithfulness to the source material. Let’s take this on a case-by-case basis, using some of the properties that are most important to me, and I’ll explain my stance on each.

Let’s start in the realm of sci-fi. As a general rule, I would say that diversity is a boon in sci-fi, because one of the inherent appeals of the genre in the first place is the removal of real-world racial barriers. There have been so many fantastic non-white characters in my favorite sci-fi canons: Sulu, Uhura, Worf, La Forge, Tuvok, Chakotay and Torres in the Star Trek universe, Lando Calrissian and Mace Windu in Star Wars, Morpheus in The Matrix. Likewise, for women, there’s Princess Leia, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, and Trinity. All of these characters have had a profound impact on me, and serve as a way for sci-fi to do what it does better than any other genre: reflect on the human experience, which in no small part includes our diversity. So long as there’s no conflict with the continuity, I’m satisfied. So from my position, the uproar over Finn from The Force Awakens made no sense. In the context of the continuity, there was nothing that really seemed problematic to me about the character being non-white, and I’d love to see more good roles created for females and non-white actors in sci-fi. This is an instance where I oppose whitewashing and unequal treatment of women.

Fine, I hear you say. The characters you’ve mentioned here were all clean slates when they first appeared in their respective franchises. What about non-white or female characters who are already established, as with live-action adaptations of books or animated series? Here, again, I reassert my stance against whitewashing. The best example I can cite here is the upcoming Ghost in the Shell movie. I’ve been a big fan of GitS since the first season of Stand Alone Complex aired on [adult swim] over a decade ago, during my early college days. I desperately want this to be a good movie. And in fairness, until the movie comes out, I’m trying to withhold too much judgment, but... I have to admit, I’m not thrilled by the casting of Scarlett Johanssen as Motoko Kusanagi. I don’t like the concept of discarding an established character’s core identity for the sake of being more sympathetic to a certain demographic of viewers.

Conversely, though, this is the same problem I have with the other side of the coin: political correctness in casting for its own sake. To demonstrate, let’s talk now about a character who was originally created as a white male: James Bond. I’ve been a fan of the James Bond movies since I was a kid, so this is a franchise which is uncommonly close to my heart. I have every single Bond movie in my collection, and I’ve seen them all multiple times. Growing up, I respected Sean Connery’s classics, and the grace brought to the role by Roger Moore, but of course, my favorite was the current one at the time, Pierce Brosnan. For me, there was nobody else who could make the role his own like Brosnan did. And then Daniel Craig was cast. As I was with Capaldi’s Doctor, I was a bit skeptical of Craig’s Bond at first. It wasn’t because he was the so-called “Blond Bond”, as he was called by so many others. It was because he was so serious, so dry, so gritty. Whatever wry sense of humor Brosnan brought to the role, Craig seemed to remove. In retrospect, it was probably for the better, considering that Ian Fleming’s original books depict Bond as a lot less “fun” than the movies made him out to be through the years, and I recognize that Daniel Craig is a talented actor. In Skyfall, I was heartened to see him even starting to lighten up with the role ever so slightly. With recent rumors of Craig’s retirement from the 007 mantle, though, much has been made of creating a female “Jane Bond” role for an actress, or, as mentioned in the clip above, casting Idris Elba. Now, as I just mentioned, I realize the movies have not always been faithful to the plot elements in Fleming’s books, and for the most part... yeah, it’s not that consequential to me. However, I do feel that changing the role of James Bond himself purely for the sake of political correctness is a bridge too far. I don’t say this to cast aspersions on Idris Elba, who is a truly phenomenal actor. But it is a complete, wholesale abandonment of Fleming’s original intent with the character. As an artist and an occasional writer myself, that doesn’t sit right with me. Yes, the Cold War is over, and popular attitudes about Bond’s womanizing ways have changed-- but to alter the core identity of James Bond would, I feel, fundamentally shatter the franchise. For those of us who have invested decades in the franchise’s evolution, and in the character’s development, it’s essentially saying, “All that time and emotion you put into following this is now completely nullified, and you don’t matter.” And truthfully, what logical sense does it make, to alter a pre-existing character’s identity, when someone could just as soon come up with a completely original non-white or female spy character? You want a franchise? Go for it. Own it. Create a new character to rival James Bond and Jason Bourne at the box office. I’ll be standing in line at the theater for a ticket just like you. I’d welcome diversity in this genre too. I just don’t see the sense in throwing 50+ years of continuity out the window and antagonizing longtime fans of 007 to accomplish it.

So what about the Doctor, who, like James Bond, also has 50+ years of precedent to consider? Well... the Doctor is a Time Lord, from Gallifrey. Things are a bit different for Time Lords, as there actually is established precedent for drastic canonical identity changes during regeneration, including race and gender. During Capaldi’s tenure as Doctor, his longtime Time Lord arch-rival, the Master, resurfaced with a new female identity, Missy-- and it was a great plot twist. In the past week, once again, I’ve seen Idris Elba suggested for the new role. In this case, I say-- yeah, great, if he wanted the role, I’d totally support that, because it doesn’t contradict the character’s canon. There are only really two things I’d prefer to see in a new Doctor: 1) that it remains a British role, and 2) that it goes to someone who will be able to believably embody the Doctor. That’s it, no skin color or gender requirements.

In conclusion-- my biggest problem with the usual arguments about this issue (and to some extent, about identity politics in general) is that the discussion really isn’t so simple as to merit a black-or-white response. No single answer is correct for every instance. Whitewashing is a perpetuation of an exclusionary status quo, but baseless political correctness can damage a franchise’s credibility as well. When it comes to casting, my suggestion is to practice moderation, make decisions based on what is best for the craft of storytelling on an individual basis, and look to the source for a guide.