#so I watched scream of the shalka lately | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

precise-desolation · 7 years ago

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[[Okay, guys. I am slowly, slowly working my way through drafts. I’ve been mostly over on my Doctor Who blogs lately. What with the reveal of the Thirteenth Doctor’s actress (yes, actress; I am excited) and with having finally watched Scream of the Shalka recently, I’ve kind of thrown myself headlong back into that fandom. I haven’t consistently watched the show since sometime in undergrad. Mostly because I didn’t get BBCA, but also because I just got so fed up with Eleven and his companions who were puzzles rather than people that I didn’t feel like making the effort to keep up anymore.

And I am very long-winded and also a huge Whovian, so I will put the rest of my rambling under a read-more.

But my roommate and I are watching New Who (we started with Nine because he’d never seen any Doctor Who) and Twelve has given me hope. Watching Clara change when she was with Twelve verses when she was with Eleven is like night and day. Takes a few episodes, but it’s like “Wow, you’re actually a human being with actual flaws and strengths and feelings and not just an enigma with no personality.” I do rather agree with the theory that Peter Capaldi came in and led a revolt and somewhere along the lines they just tied Moffat up and shoved him in a broom closet, because the writing did basically a complete 180. It still has its issues, to be sure, but it’s amazing the differences.

I’ve also, as I said, watched Scream of the Shalka finally. It’s part of the Doctor Who Extended Universe (or EU) and hails from the time after the movie but before New Who when BBC was almost certain they would never get the show back on air. Their solution? The internet. It’s this very short six part flash animated story arc featuring a new Doctor and Master. Of course, if you’re familiar with the movie, the Master dies at the end. But more specifically, he falls into the Eye of Harmony, which is basically the heart of the TARDIS. That bit is important. And then at the very end of the movie, the Eighth Doctor receives a message about a war between the Time Lords and the Daleks and returns to Gallifrey to lend whatever aid he can.

Of course, that movie was supposed to bring the show back on air. (I remember my dad losing it over that. Have I mentioned I was raised by utter nerds?) But it just kinda... didn’t. That was the only thing Eight ever appeared in on screen until Night of the Doctor, the short prequel to the 50th anniversary special, Day of the Doctor. A full seventeen years later. (Although they did do another flash animated short featuring the Eighth Doctor around the same time as Scream of the Shalka.) Now, this was back in the day before YouTube. Yes, there was an internet before YouTube. We had things like NewGrounds and Albino Black Sheep. Which featured a shitton of flash animated videos. I remember this because I am old. But in keeping up with the tech of the day, they flash animated these arcs. Which can make them a bit odd to watch if you aren’t used to that.

Scream of the Shalka, though... It introduced the first Ninth Doctor and a new version of the Master. This iteration was later replaced in the primary canon by Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor when New Who started. There are some striking similarities in the two, but also a world of difference. Eccleston’s Nine was very much a soldier who had seen too much of war. That was true, too, of Shalka Nine. However, the Shalka Doctor was much, much closer in characterization to the Classic Who Doctors. I think the only New Who Doctor who has come even remotely close is Twelve, but even there the differences between Old and New are steep. There’s a huge difference, too, in the characterization of the Master between Old and New Who. Again, I’d say the closest to the Classic Who characterization is Missy. So it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the dynamic between Twelve and Missy is also the closest to the dynamic between the Master and Doctor of Classic Who out of all the Masters and Doctors of New Who. But the Shalka Doctor and Master retain that very definite “best frienemies” sort of relationship. They act like an old married couple, assuming that married couple consists of a psychopath who enjoys making the other’s day miserable in tiny, petty ways and also occasionally poisoning their food and a put-upon “responsible” partner who runs around the universe cleaning up the other’s messes.

So some of the things I’ve mentioned earlier should make it no surprise that I grew up on Classic Who reruns. My father actually wanted to name me after one of the Fifth Doctor’s companions, that is the extent to which this has been involved in my life. I watched primarily Four and Six growing up, but did see bits and pieces of the others. And one thing I have always loved is the relationship between the Doctor and Master. It’s dysfunctional as all hell and most definitely not healthy, but it’s also interesting and oddly charming. Mostly, I think, for their snark and pettiness over ridiculous things at some times but their genuine concern for one another at others. And they did care for one another, no matter how disturbing the manner in which that care and affection was expressed. They had been close friends since childhood, a point which is addressed in both Classic and New Who as well as extensively explored in the EU. Their relationship was dynamic and layered and interesting to watch unfold.

Scream of the Shalka retains that. As I said earlier, at the end of the movie, the Master dies by way of falling into the Eye of Harmony. The heart of the TARDIS. The TARDIS is no ordinary ship, though. It’s sentient. It is essentially a living, intelligent being that grows and changes and expresses opinions and makes decisions. It just also happens to be a bio-mechanical entity. And it exists across all of space and time simultaneously, which is how it’s able to travel the way it does. So basically what you have, then, is a living mobile supercomputer. Another detail about Time Lords is that when they die, their consciousness is uploaded into a huge database, called the Matrix. (No, I could not make that up if I tried.) Time Lord technology. So it stands to reason that if Time Lords can upload their consciousness into what amounts to a really advanced computer data base, then a sentient supercomputer of a species that has co-evolved with and been heavily influenced by Time Lords would be able to do the same thing. This is why the manner of the Master’s death is significant. He fell into the heart of the TARDIS. His physical body would have been destroyed, as the Eye of Harmony is basically a star trapped in an endless sate of decay. But I see no reason why his consciousness, which basically amounts to electrical impulses, couldn’t have been uploaded by the TARDIS.

So if he was destroyed, how is he present? Well, that’s not terribly clear. You see, all we really have, at least in a film format, of the Shalka Doctor and Master is six, fifteen minute episodes. Not a whole lot of time for backstory. However, two things are revealed that are extremely significant. The first is that the Doctor is apparently not able to travel freely. Someone - ostensibly the Gallifreyan High Counsel, since it’s not addressed whether or not Gallifrey survived the war in this timeline and the Doctor was living as a fugitive prior to the war - seems to be controlling or limiting his and his TARDIS’s ability to move within the Time Vortex, just based on his dialogue. So he is seemingly a prisoner in his own TARDIS. That does make the Master’s presence make more sense. Evidently, at some point the Doctor was either so desperate for company or missed his friend so badly that he built an android fashioned after the Master. (He appears to be a blend of Delgado and Jacobi.) One would have to assume, then, that he was also able to download the Master’s consciousness from the TARDIS into the android. Now, the Doctor is many things, but an idiot is not one of them. Letting the Master back out to roam the universe, this time in a body made of circuitry rather than soft, vulnerable flesh, would be a terrible mistake. The Doctor may be fond of the Master, perhaps even love him, but he is also aware that the Master is dangerous. Because of this, he has fail-safes built in that don’t allow him to leave the TARDIS and that give the Doctor the ability to switch him off if need be.

And if you’re wondering, I do have good reason for thinking all of these things. As far as the Doctor and Master’s relationship, when the Master is first introduced in Scream of the Shalka, he tells Alisha that “I pride myself that I am the dearest companion of the owner of this craft.” Fast forward to New Who and we have a scene where Missy gifts the Twelfth Doctor a legion of cybermen so that they can conquer the universe together. The Tenth Doctor tries to get the Master to abandon his scheming and run away with him to see the universe together. Their close, if horrendously fucked up, relationship is a well documented fact of the Whoniverse.

And then there’s the situation with the Doctor’s ability to travel and with the Master’s reappearance as an android. In one of the first scenes of Shalka, the Doctor is seen seemingly shouting at the sky that “I won’t do it!” It’s worth noting that at this point he doesn’t even know what “it” is. He basically walked out of his TARDIS, went ‘this is not the time/place I was looking for,’ and then declares he won’t do it. “It” ends up being saving humanity. Again. As to the Master, given what we know of Time Lord tech, the nature of TARDISes, and the manner of his most recent death, it’s really the only logical answer.

And I don’t even remember where I was going with all of this, but it’s a quarter to 3am. So I am going to go sleep now before I ramble for another two pages or so.]]

#off mission #who is the author #[[Have I mentioned lately that I am a fucking nerd?]]

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