#that was time war 3! tune in next time for brax getting clown vored

[whifferdills]

GALLIFREY: TIME WAR: UNITY: The main victim of Time War's pacing issues: you don't really get that it's been 15 years and two lifetimes since "The Devil You Know". Or like. I didn’t on first listen, at least, idk maybe it works for other people? Anyway. Drop this one into the ‘flawed but somehow more interesting precisely because it’s flawed’ category...

This is a Leela who is tired, who is no longer interested in fighting for someone else's cause, who is defensive and insular and surrounded by mines and the graves of people who tried walking over them. And Romana doesn't get it, certainly: her friendship has always been transactional (it has to be...this is not a woman who can easily conceive of herself outside of the roles she plays and the jobs she performs). Leela has always ultimately agreed to fight alongside her, or if not then for a predictable cause. And she...won't.

Leela's exhaustion is familiar. Of course the city runs on slave labor. Of course Daleks and Time Lords are vying for control over the planet's oil so they can eke out an advantage in this war no one will win. Of course Romana and Narvin are trying to leverage her emotions to their advantage. & like...her wife is dying and her son is growing up into a fight she can't help but push him into.

Understand I am not doing the fandom-brained ‘hurr durr there is no platonic explanation for [experience common in platonic relationships]’ thing here, this is Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) dir. Richard Brooks levels of like, the space in the narrative where the queerness isn't anymore. It doesn't Not work as an intense platonic relationship (this series - and the franchise in general - beyond all the guff mostly turns on the complexities and complications of deeply-felt, transformative friendship) but also....you can see where they were going for a lived-in marriage and replaced it with ? at the last minute and every beat plays exactly the same but now the context is a ghost. It's a negative space drawing.

So we're left with a Leela who lost her son, who wasn't really her son; and her wife, who was only subtextually her wife; and her friend, who she now believes is an echo detached from the source. A harbinger or carrier of the war, not even allowed the full text of her grief, cast adrift again but this time with the personification of Gallifrey-as-grand-illusion. There's an interesting thread where Leela is as contemptuous of Narvin as she's ever been, but also trusts him enough to leave him with Vega and Rayo, and is delighted to find his box of scavenged weapons. & then from the other direction, Romana taking Vega's name...like it's such a weird and chunky shuffling-around of traditional family dynamics that relies on three pointedly-undefined relationships both being and not being romantic. What the fuck is actually textually happening in this story. This is making cartoon steam come out of my ears ~

DEPARTMENT OF OOO BABYGIRL YOU NEED THERAPY: "I deserve much worse...this is a clean slate I haven't earned. This is the opposite of a redemption. This is cheating."

DEPARTMENT OF THINGS ROMANA ONLY SAYS IN FRONT OF DALEKS: "I will never betray those I love" I'm scromiting