#the crucible opera

[invisibleicewands]

Please come and see me because I’ll be dead soon’: how Michael Sheen got sucked into a forever chemicals exposé

An opera-loving member of high society turned eco-activist who was forced into police protection with a panic button round his neck. A Hollywood actor who recorded said activist’s life story as he was dying from exposure to the very chemicals he was investigating. Throw in two investigative journalists who realise not everything is as it seems, then uncover some startling truths, and you have “podcasting’s strangest team” on Buried: The Last Witness.

On their award-winning 2023 podcast Buried, the husband and wife duo Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor dug into illegal toxic waste dumping in the UK and its links to organised crime. This time, they focus on “forever chemicals”, specifically polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and set out to discover whether one whistleblower may have been decades ahead of his time in reporting on their harmful impact.

“It’s amazing how big the scale of this story is,” says Ashby, as we sit backstage at the Crucible theatre, where they are doing a live discussion as part of Sheffield DocFest. “With this series, we don’t just want it to make your blood turn cold, we want it to make you question your own blood itself.”

It all started when Taylor and Ashby were sent a lead about the work of former farmer’s representative Douglas Gowan. In 1967, he discovered a deformed calf in a field and began to investigate strange goings on with animals close to the Brofiscin and Maendy quarries in south Wales. He linked them to the dumping of waste by companies including the nearby Monsanto chemical plant, which was producing PCBs.

PCBs were used in products such as paint and paper to act as a fire retardant, but they were discovered to be harmful and have been banned since 1981 in the UK. However, due to their inability to break down – hence the term forever chemical – Gowan predicted their legacy would be a troubling one. “I expect there to be a raft of chronic illness,” he said. He even claimed that his own exposure to PCBs (a result of years of testing polluted grounds) led his pancreas and immune system to stop working. “I’m a mess and I think it can all be attributed to PCBs,” he said.

However, Gowan wasn’t a typical environmentalist. “A blue-blood high-society Tory and a trained lawyer who could out-Mozart anyone,” is how Taylor describes him in the series. He would even borrow helicopters from friends in high places to travel to investigate farmers’ fields. Gowan died in 2018 but the pair managed to get hold of his life’s work – confidential reports, testing and years of evidence. “I’m interested in environmental heroes that aren’t cliche,” says Ashby. “So I was fascinated by him. But then we started to see his flaws and really had to weigh them up. My goodness it’s a murky world we went into.”

The reason they were able to delve even deeper into this murky world is because of the award-winning actor Michael Sheen who, in 2017, came across Gowan’s work in a story he read. He was so blown away by it, and the lack of broader coverage, that he tracked him down. “I got a message back from him saying: ‘Please come and see me because I’ll be dead soon,’” says Sheen. “I took a camera with me and spent a couple of days with him and just heard this extraordinary story.”

What Gowan had been trying to prove for years gained some traction in 2007, with pieces in the Ecologist and a Guardian article exploring how “Monsanto helped to create one of the most contaminated sites in Britain”. One was described as smelling “of sick when it rains and the small brook that flows from it gushes a vivid orange.” But then momentum stalled.

Years later, in 2023, Ashby and Taylor stumbled on a recording of Sheen giving the 2017 Raymond Williams memorial lecture, which referenced Gowan and his work. Before they knew it, they were in the actor’s kitchen drinking tea and learning he had conducted a life-spanning seven-hour interview with Gowan before his death. So they joined forces. Sheen isn’t just a token celebrity name added for clout on this podcast; he is invested. For him, it’s personal as well as political. “Once you dig into it, you realise there’s a pattern,” he says. “All the places where this seems to have happened are poor working-class areas. There’s a sense that areas like the one I come from are being exploited.”

Sheen even goes to visit some contaminated sites in the series, coming away from one feeling sick. “That made it very real,” he says. “To be looking into a field and going: ‘Well, I’m pretty sure that’s toxic waste.’” Sheen was living a double life of sorts. “I went to rehearsals for a play on Monday and people were like, ‘What did you do this weekend?’” he says. “‘Oh, I went to the most contaminated area in the UK and I think I may be poisoned.’ People thought I was joking.” Sheen ended up being OK, but did have some temporary headaches and nausea, which was a worry. “We literally had to work out if we had poisoned Michael Sheen,” says Ashby, who also ponders in the series: “Have I just killed a national treasure?”

The story gets even knottier. Gowan’s findings turn out to be accurate and prescient, but the narrative around his journey gets muddy. As a character with a flair for drama, he turned his investigation into a juicy, riveting story filled with action, which could not always be corroborated. “If he hadn’t done that, and if he’d been a nerdy, analytical, detail-oriented person who just presented the scientific reports and kept them neatly filed, would we have made this podcast?” asks Taylor, which is a fascinating question that runs through this excellent and gripping series.

Ashby feels that Gowan understood how vital storytelling is when it comes to cutting through the noise. “We have so much science proving the scale of these problems we face and yet we don’t seem to have the stories,” he says. “I think Douglas got that. Fundamentally, he understood that stories motivate human beings to act. But then he went too far.”

However, this is not purely about Gowan’s story – it’s about evidence. The Last Witness doubles up as a groundbreaking investigation into the long-lasting impact of PCBs. “We threw the kitchen sink at this,” says Ashby. “The breakthrough for us is that the Royal Society of Chemistry came on board and funded incredibly expensive testing. So we have this commitment to go after the truth in a way that is hardly ever done.”

From shop-bought fish so toxic that it breaches official health advice to off-the-scale levels of banned chemicals found in British soil, the results are staggering. “The scientist almost fell off his chair,” says Ashby. “That reading is the highest he has ever recorded in soil – in the world. That was the moment we knew Douglas was right and we are now realising the scale of this problem. The public doesn’t realise that even a chemical that has been banned for 40 years is still really present in our environment.”

To go even deeper into just how far PCBs have got into our environment and food chain, Ashby and Taylor had their own blood tested. When Taylor found 80 different types of toxic PCB chemicals in her blood it was a sobering moment. “I was genuinely emotional because it’s so personal,” she says. “It was the thought of this thing being in me that was banned before I was even born and the thought of passing that on to my children.” Ashby adds: “We’ve managed physical risk in our life as journalists in Tanzania and with organised crime, but more scary than a gangster is this invisible threat to our health.”

In order to gauge the magnitude of what overexposure to PCBs can do, they headed to Anniston, Alabama, once home to a Monsanto factory. “As a journalist, you have an inbuilt scepticism and think it can’t be that bad,” says Ashby. “But when I got there I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I hate to use words like dystopian, but it was. There is a whole massive school that can’t be used. There’s illnesses in children and cancers. It truly was the most powerful vignette of the worst-case example of these chemicals.”

It’s bleak stuff but instilling fear and panic is not the intention. “Obviously, we’re really concerned about it,” says Ashby. “And although the environmental crises we face do feel overwhelming, it is incredible how a movement has formed and how individuals are taking action in communities. The lesson to take from Douglas is that the response doesn’t have to be resignation. It can be agency.”

[walkthebass]

The absolute soap opera of the second half of Crucible of Gold is killing me. Granby's gay! Hammond develops a cocaine habit! Will Napoleon marry the Incan Empress?? TUNE IN NEXT WEEK TO FIND OUT!

[felassan]

The Art of Dragon Age: The Veilguard - more preview pages, under a cut due to spoilers. Preview pages come from Amazon.

( Other batches of preview pages, spoiler warning for links:

[Foreword]

Google Books pages [Part One]

Google Books pages [Part Two] )

Antiva We wanted the city of assassins to be opulent, seductive, and theatrical. The tongue-in-cheek design concept was 24/7 Batman opera: dark roofs to perch on, rich interiors with daggers behind every curtain. Antivan designs worked best in high contrast with rich colors. It increased the overall drama. We made the rooftops the domain of the Crows. Above the city they move freely, striking bold silhouettes for the population to thrill at. Some parts of the city have sunk deeper into the sea.

Antivan Crow Costumes The Antivan Crows are murderers, yes, but they are wealthy, flashy, stylish, sophisticated murderers. They are not a goon squad killing innocent, helpless people. They are what Antiva has instead of an army to (for a price) protect the nation from threats both foreign and domestic. While outsiders may see them as swords for hire with delusions of grandeur, the Crows are a celebrated and integral part of Antivan culture. This is you working alongside Antonio Banderas in Desperado, not Steve Buscemi in Fargo. They may not be nice, and it is totally reasonable for a player to be opposed to working with assassins, but this specific group is not intended to be uniformly grim. Crows aren’t shy about displaying their wealth. [Center] Originally designed as a seasonal Halloween costume, this Crow was too good not to build. Costume design for a faction that’s all about theatricality gave us a chance to go big.

There are still a lot of different archetypes within each faction.   For the Crows, they can range from ominous to bombastic. It was fun to explore the range of Crows, from the elegant to the scoundrels. We briefly explored giving Crows functional grappling hooks. While the Crows were mostly about leather and silver, we still wanted to have some heavy armor in their lineup.

Furniture tells you a lot about a region. In the case of the Deep Roads, we went for as many single-cut stones as possible. Paragon sculptures celebrate prominent figures in every profession. [top right] A tongue-in-cheek design for a dwarven mining suit. Bas-reliefs, sculptures and signs all speak about what life was like in the Deep Roads before they were abandoned.

[top center] A mobile crucible. [center left] Crane powered by a walking wheel. [center right] A walking wheel-powered pile driver. [center bottom] Industrial-level blacksmithing equipment, including a trip hammer, a grinding stone, and bellows. [bottom right] An industrial-grade blast furnace where tons of metal are smelted and poured out into giant molds.

Rivain Castaways making new lives. The majority are human, descended from Tevinters and their longstanding trading partners. There are ethnicities here who don’t seem to match the currently documented list of nations, hinting at shores not visited in living memory, and there are also Qunari. Some fleeing the Qun. Some not fleeing, but reinterpreting. There is a sizable Qunari community, and it is finding converts and alarming both Tevinter and the Qunari triumvirate. Rivain is a mix of outcast people making something new. Life beneath Rivain is just as varied. Banners of conquerors over buildings touched by many cultures, smuggler tunnels, Tevinter public works, the bones of conquered cities and even deeper infrastructure, elven ruins, deep roads, and deeper roads. Rivain was a great palate cleanser between dense urban regions, midnight swamps, and vast caverns. It may be beautiful, but it’s no less dangerous to navigate. From the earliest sketches, we wanted a land of tropical colors, infested with dragons.

Arlathan Forest Arlathan Forest, once the seat of power for the ancient elven empire, is now a realm where magic runs wild and twists reality itself into new and terrifying shapes. Artifacts from that long-ago time have begun to activate. Infused with the powerful magic that saturates the very ground in the forest, they have made what was already a dangerous place far stranger and more deadly. [right] [there is one more caption in this image that I cannot make out the text of]

Book art credits:

BioWare art: Matt Rhodes, Ramil Sunga, Albert Urmanov, Christopher Scoles, Nick Thornborrow, Steve Klit

Volta art: Gui Guimaraes, Stéphanie Bouchard, Akim Kaliberda, Alejandro Olmedo, Alexey Zaryuta, Julien Carrasco, Maksim Marenkov, Marianne Martin, Mariia Istomina, Marion Kivits, Matti Marttinen, Mélanie Bourgeois, Pablo Hurtado De Mendoza, Rael Lyra, Rodrigo Ramos, Thomas Schaffer, Tiago Sousa, Tristan Kang, Vladimir Mokry, Yintion J, Joseph Meehan, Stefan Atanasov, Julien Carrasco

Additional art: Marc Holmes, Thomas Scholes

[daughterofheartshaven]

Using the Doctor Who EU to recontextualize the whole Timeless Child thing

Or, why the Doctor is a dhampir.

Salutations!

Maybe you saw my essay here about how Gallifrey wasn't actually destroyed by the Master using the Expanded universe as my evidence. Now, I want to tackle The Timeless Children's other controversial plot point - the titular Timeless Child's relationship with the Doctor. Also, perhaps you have heard of the Doctor Who book Lungbarrow, and how it connected the Doctor to a mysterious figure called the Other in Gallifrey's ancient history. So how are those connected? Was the Doctor really the Other? And just what is the story of the Timeless Child?

So let's talk about the Timeless Child. Let's talk about the Other. Let's talk about Patience. Let's talk about Division. And let's talk about vampires and where regeneration really comes from.

Shall we get started? Buckle up for another ride into the endless pit that is the Doctor Who expanded universe.

Okay, ground rules first. Anything seen on tv, happened. I can recontextualize as much as I want (and I'm gonna do that, believe me) but it still has to fit with everything we see onscreen. I also have to use all of an EU source if I use it. No picking and choosing bits. However, that same loophole applies to EU material - I can recontextualize those as much as I want, too.

With that out of the way, let's meet the stories that are our players. I'm going to be sorting them into medium by category this time.

Tv stories:

Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children: The controversial Thirteenth Doctor episodes. I'm assuming you're familiar with if you're reading this.

Fugitive of the Judoon: The Thirteenth Doctor story that introduced the Fugitive Doctor. I'm assuming you're familiar with this.

Flux: The Thirteenth Doctor story that followed up to the Timeless Child plot points in a way that is very relevant to this discussion. I'm assuming you're familiar with this.

A Good Man Goes to War: An Eleventh Doctor episode that established some of the history of the Time Lords

The Brain of Morbius: A Fourth Doctor story. Notable for this discussion because it featured brief images of ten faces that were implied to be incarnations of the Doctor from before the First Doctor. These are collectively known as the "Morbius Doctors".

State of Decay: The Fourth Doctor tv story that established the series lore on vampires

Books:

Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible: the Seventh Doctor book that laid the groundwork for Lungbarrow and its Gallifrey Lore

The Pit: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

Goth Opera: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

Damaged Goods: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

Cold Fusion: A book starring the Fifth and Seventh Doctors that is notable for introducing the character of Patience

Lungbarrow: the big Gallifrey Lore book. I will be going over this one in depth

Interference: Shock Tactic: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

The Infinity Doctors: A very confusing Doctor Who book (this will get explained later)

The Book of the War: The first book in the Faction Paradox series

Audios:

Zagreus: A Big Finish story starring the Eighth Doctor and Rassilon

Patience: A Big Finish story starring the Eighth Doctor

Comics:

The Tides of Time: A 70s comic starring the Fifth Doctor

The Bidding War: A 2010s comic with some vampire lore

Monstrous Beauty: A 2020s comic with some vampire lore

Origins: A recent comic that features the Fugitive Doctor

Okay, so there are kinda four threads running together that tell a more complete story, but were all written independently of each other. The story of the Timeless Child and Division, the story of the Other, the story of Patience, and the story of the Yssgaroth War. Let's go through them in order.

Also while the Other, the Timeless Child, Patience's husband, the Fugitive Doctor, the Infinity Doctor, the Morbius Doctors, and the Doctor are all presented as more or less the same character who all call themselves "the Doctor", I will be referring to them all separately. I have a few reasons for doing this which will become clear later, but it's also helpful for reasons of clarity.

Prologue: Where all this mess came from

So in the 70s, there was a tv story called The Brain of Morbius. Morbius was a Time Lord president who decided it was Morbin Time, tried to conquer the universe, and caused a civil war on Gallifrey in just about the only interesting thing to happen on Gallifrey between Rassilon's presidency and the Doctor being loomed. He was killed, but one of his followers managed to save his brain and is trying to make Morbius a new body so it can be Morbin Time again. The Time Lords decide to throw the Doctor at this problem, and he ends up getting into a mind-bending contest with Morbius (who was by that point in an artificial body). During this, both Morbius and the Doctor's past incarnations are shown on a screen, and then we see ten new faces while Morbius says, "How far, Doctor? How long have you lived?". A lot of people assumed those faces were Morbius's, but the intention from the producers was that they were prior faces of the Doctors (I will be referring to these incarnations as the Morbius Doctors moving forward, as that is how they are generally reffered to in the fandom). Trouble is, the rest of classic who completely ignored that.

Oh and if you're worried, while Morbius won the mindbending contest, it left him disoriented enough that he was able to get mobbed by the Sisterhood of Karn and pitched off a cliff, averting the renewal of Morbin Time.

And with that out of the way, let's get on to the real attractions.

Part 1: The Timeless Child and Division

So this story is the most straightforward of the three. In Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children, it is revealed that in Gallifrey's prehistory, a Gallifreyan scientist named Tecteun travelled off-world (in her world's first exploration of another planet) and found the Timeless Child by a portal to another universe. She took the Timeless Child back to Gallifrey and discovered that the Timeless Child had the ability to regenerate. Tecteun was able to synthesize this regenerative power and give it to her own people, becoming one of the founders of modern Time Lord society in the process. Later on, the Timeless Child and Tecteun were both recruited into something called Division, a time-active-interventionist group that skirted around or outright ignored Gallifrey's laws. It is also stated that the Timeless Child's memory was wiped - at least once, possibly more than once - in order to control them. It's also suggested that Tecteun seems to have regrets about all of this, given how she left a message for the Timeless Child in the matrix about it.

This is where the story gets fuzzy. The next time we see anything, the Timeless Child has evolved into the Fugitive Doctor. She is seen working for Division in the flashbacks in Flux and Origins, but following Origins, she goes on the run from them. The events of the Fugitive Doctor's flight from Division play out in Fugitive of the Judoon. She is able to assassinate Gat, the Time Lord seeking her capture, and while it comes at significant personal loss, there is nothing to indicate that the Fugitive Doctor is unable to make a clean getaway.

By the story presented in Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children, however, the Fugitive Doctor is assumed to have been captured with her memory wiped to eventually become the Doctor. Let's put a pin in that assumption, though. That same story also shows the Fugitive Doctor and the Morbius Doctors being a part of the Doctor's past.

Tecteun, meanwhile, had become head of Division (if she wasn't head of it to begin with). Origins briefly shows her leading Division at the time of the Fugitive Doctor, and she is finally shown meeting the Doctor proper in Flux. There, it is revealed that she had started considering the entire universe a scientific experiment, but due to the Doctor being considered too much of a rouge element, she decided to use antimatter called flux from outside the universe to destroy the universe, with Division being safe outside the Universe. She also released a pair of Great Old Ones, Swarm and Azure, with the intention that they would kill the Doctor. Tecteun's plan was that the old universe would be destroyed, and that Division would conquer the universe that the Timeless Child originated from.

This plan did not work.

Swarm and Azure instead killed Tecteun and destroyed Division, before being destroyed by an entity only known as Time (and I could go on a whole tangent on what her deal is, but I'm gonna save that for another post). It's not shown explicitly in the show, but I also believe Time removed the destruction of the flux from the universe as well (mostly because planets explicitly destroyed in Flux are shown still existing in the future of the series).

In any case, during the Flux event, the Doctor was able to recover the archive where the Timeless Child's wiped memories were stored, but she ultimately decided not to access them.

It's never stated which universe the Timeless Child comes from in the show, but we're gonna circle back to that. It's also not stated how long Tecteun ran Division between its founding in early Gallifreyan history and its destruction during the Flux event. We're coming back to this, too.

Part 2: The Other

Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible establishes two very important things about Gallifreyan history. One, all Time Lords became sterile early in their history - shortly after the conclusion of their war with the vampires (more on that war in a bit). Since then, instead of having sex, they have big cloning machines called Looms that make new Time Lords. And two, Rassilon (the founder of Time Lord society) had two major co-founders - Omega, and one other whose name was lost to time. He gets called just "the Other."

Rassilon and Omega were both established as characters in the classic series, but the Other is an invention of the books in the 90s (from the reader's perspective at least - he was a behind the scenes idea from the last few seasons of classic who, but he was never explicitly mentioned onscreen). He gets cryptic references all over the Virgin New Adventures book line, but this only gets concrete in their final Seventh Doctor book, Lungbarrow.

Where we get to know them in the book, Omega is presumed dead, and the Other and Rassilon are having a falling out. Omega's death is weighing heavily on the Other, and he thinks Rassilon is going power-mad and is trying to have the Other killed. Omega's last and most impressive creation, the stellar manipulator called the Hand of Omega, is quite possibly the Other's only friend by this point. The Other wants to leave the planet and so he tells his family to escape, and then confronts Rassilon with his intentions. Rassilon Does Not Like This and tries to have the Other stopped, and blocks all spaceports to make this happen. The Other then calmly walks into the primary generator for the looms and is never seen again.

And then, ten million years later, out from a loom, comes the Doctor. The Doctor's looming process was unusual, with the Doctor later claiming he could remember just before it happened, waiting to be born. (Although given the Doctor was five years old at the time he said this, that may be a little suspect). In any case, the Doctor lives a fairly normal life for a while, until he is found by the Hand of Omega which sees in him its old master. Shortly thereafter, the Doctor is confronted by the Time Lord Glospin (explaining his deal is a little complicated but he's a part of the same Family House as the Doctor is, the titular House Lungbarrow), about some irregularities in the Doctor's biology before being driven off by the Hand. It's ambiguous if either of these were the deciding factor, but the Doctor takes the Hand and leaves Gallifrey shortly thereafter.

Of course there's one last little piece left to take care of. If you're familiar with Classic Who, you may know that when we first met the Doctor, he was travelling with his granddaughter, Susan.

Lungbarrow claims that the Doctor's first trip in the Tardis was to travel back to Gallifrey's prehistory and meet the Other's granddaughter, the last child born before the Time Lords became sterile. She recognizes the Other in the Doctor, and considers him her grandfather. The Doctor doesn't quite recognize her, but takes her on as his first companion in the Tardis. And thus, Susan joined the Tardis crew.

The other thing that's important is uh that Lungbarrow has an actual plot. And said plot is only tangentially related to the above. Everything I just said is presented as three flashbacks in Lungbarrow - one straight narrative sequence (the argument between Rassilon and the Other), one where the Doctor shares his memories of leaving Gallifrey (basically everything that happens with Glospin, the Hand of Omega, and the Doctor first leaving Gallifrey), and one where several characters enter the Doctor's subconscious and have a dream sequence (including the Other walking into the Looms and the Doctor meeting Susan). The subconscious trip has some moments to it that are super trippy and metaphorical, and I'm gonna use that fact later. But for now, on to part 3!

Part 3: Patience

Like I said earlier, Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible is the story that establishes that all Time Lords are sterile. At the end of a civil war in Gallifrey's ancient history, the leader of the losing side, Pythia, cursed the people who would become Time Lords with sterility before killing herself. (Her followers, by the way, left Gallifrey and eventually became the Sisterhood of Karn). The Time Lords, desiring to avoid extinction, created breeding engines known as Looms, which would create new Time Lords through what was effetely cloning. That's the story presented in Cat's Crade: Time's Crucible, anyway. But if you look at other places in the EU, this story starts to crack. An Earthly Child introduces Susan Forman's explicitly biological son, for example. And in Lungbarrow, the Time Lord Andred is able to get a human, Leela, pregnant, although the character's future appearances in Big Finish are notably child-less, suggesting the pregnancy failed somehow (either that or the child removed themselves from history as part of joining faction paradox and became the character known as Intrepid, but this is a tangent).

So are Time Lords sterile? Yeah, I think so. For the most part. But we know that not all of them are. A rare few can still reproduce sexually. There is another Time Lord who had a biological child that I've yet to bring up, as well. Her true name was lost to time, so we know her only as Patience.

This is her story.

The character of Patience has some truly strange origins, even for the Doctor Who EU. In the 1982 comic The Tides of Time, the fifth Doctor briefly sees an illusion of someone who looks familiar to him, created by the demon Melanicus using something called the Event Sythesizer (no, I'm not going to explain that). The art shown is close enough to Second Doctor companion Zoe Herriot to assume that's who the author and artist intended the illusion to be of, but that's not the direction later stories went in.

The character of Patience was introduced proper in 1996's book Cold Fusion. It also features the Fifth Doctor, in an earlier point in his life then The Tides of Time. In it, a prototype Tardis crashes into a planet that is later colonized by humans. The humans discover one pilot, comatose, who by all rights should be dead. She isn't. They take her back to their big fancy lab and attempt to find out more about her with basically no success.

Enter the Doctor. (And also Tegan Jovanka.)

When the Fifth Doctor stumbles into this, he is able to help the pilot complete her first regeneration. She is unable to remember much of anything from prior to her regeneration and is from Gallifrey's distant past. She is, biologically, something of a proto-Time Lord: she speaks a different language then the Doctor naturally, she only has one heart, and a few other things. She's explicitly more-or-less a contemporary of Rassilon.

Not having a name for herself, she adopts the moniker "Patience" on Tegan's unintentional suggestion. Despite all this, Patience and the Doctor recognize each other on some level, and neither really have any ideas as to why - the Doctor shouldn't even be able to recognize the dialect of Gallifreyan she speaks, as it is dead by his time. Patience has some garbled memory of fleeing from arrest as ordered by Rassilon (with the implication being that any fertile Time Lords were having their births stopped so that the loom-born were to inherit Gallifrey). Patience's escape came with the help of her husband, whom authorial intent confirms as one of the Morbius Doctors. In any case, in the present day, Patience is starting to properly recover when she is shot in the back of the head, apparently killing her. Her body then disappears. The Fifth Doctor's memory of Patience is lost shortly thereafter when the Seventh Doctor orchestrates the Fifth Doctor losing his memory of the whole adventure in order to preserve the timelines. The Seventh Doctor only met his prior self after Patience's body had vanished, meaning that the Doctor's entire memory of Patience was erased - except, perhaps, for some vague recollection which we see in The Tides of Time.

While Patience's fate is followed up in the book The Infinity Doctors, The Infinity Doctors is a very strange book that doesn't really contribute much to this ongoing discussion. The Infinity Doctors is deliberately evasive about which Doctor it stars, with its protagonist being sometimes implied to be the First Doctor and sometimes the Eighth. It's very possible that Patience and Omega (yes he's here but I'm not going to explain that) are the only characters in the story from the Whoniverse as we understand it, with everyone else being from a different universe. I might do a breakdown of The Infinity Doctors someday, but now is not that day.

The only other information we have about Patience comes from the 2021 audio story fittingly entitled "Patience". In it, the Doctor tells uses an ancient artifact that takes the form of a deck of cards called the Paradoxica to analyze time and hide his companions - Liv Chenka, Helen Sinclair, Tania Bell, and Andy Davidson (yes, the Torchwood character. no, I'm not explaining that either) - from the Judoon. The narrative is interspersed with the Doctor telling a fairy tale about a woman completing an impossible task (emptying an ocean with a bag that had a hole in it) and receiving the child she desired once she had spent an eternity completing this task. The story ends with the confirmation that this woman was Patience, and that she gave the Doctor the Paradoxica. How this happened is left unsaid - either she gave it to her husband who became the Doctor, or this happened during the events of Cold Fusion.

Part 4: The Yssgaroth War

Unlike the other narratives I've just rambled off, the Yssgaroth War is much more of a patchwork from various places around the EU, so this is gonna be even more scattered than I have been thusfar.

State of Decay, for being a story set in the pocket universe called E-Space, ended up being one of those foundational Gallifrey lore episodes of the classic series. That's the serial that established that at the dawn of time, the Time Lords fought and won a massive war against the vampires.

Yes, you read that right. This is one of my favorite pieces of Doctor Who lore.

State of Decay establishes that the Great Vampires were massive bat-like creatures who could drain the life from entire planets and who created more traditional vampires as their servants. Rassilon lead Gallifrey against them, and ordered the construction of "bowships," which were giant spaceship crossbows that could be used to stake the Great Vampires. The Great Vampires were ultimately defeated by the Time Lords. EU sources generally agree that this was the biggest war the Time Lords ever participated in until the Time War ten million years later.

The book The Pit would add a couple of new details about the conflict. It would rename the Great Vampires "Yssgaroth" and claim that the Yssgaroth originated from outside the universe - the early time travel experiments overseen by Rassilon ripped a hole in reality and the Yssgaroth were what came through with intent to consume the universe. These details are supported by Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible and Interference: Shock Tactic.

A couple more recent comics have fleshed out the Yssgaroth War a bit. The Bidding War further reinforces that the Yssgaroth are from outside our universe, with it showing that during the Time War, the Time Lords opened a rift to the Yssgaroth dimension in an attempt to use them as a weapon against the Daleks. Monstrous Beauty was the first story to show us the War proper, depicting Rassilon personally leading forces against the vampiric army.

And this would all be interesting but irrelevant to our discussion if not for two stories published in the early 2000s that both seek to recontextualize the Yssgaroth War and the Time Lord's rise to power.

Let's start with Zagreus. The story as a whole is dedicated to deconstructing Rassilon's façade as a benevolent and reasonable ruler and instead reveals him to be a xenophobic tyrant who wished to remake the universe in his image - something that lines up with pretty much all of Rassilon's appearances post-Zagreus. As part of this, the vampire Lord Tepesh states that before the war, the vampires were peaceful and Rassilon provoked them because he feared their power. Tepesh is presented by the narrative as an unreliable narrator, but the point he makes is still worth noting.

The other story I need to talk about is The Book of the War. While the book's primary focus is The War in Heaven (for the uninitiated, that's basically spin-off series Faction Paradox's version of the Time War), it does give a lot of relevant information about the Yssgaroth War. First of all, it gives the timing of the War being right after Gallifrey established History as a concept - by "anchoring the thread" and making a linear history, the Time Lords accidentally let the Yssgaroth into the universe. While this contradicts some of the timings given by some of the sources mentioned above (other sources agree that it was the early experiments that caused the Yssgaroth to enter the universe not the final establishing of History and mastery over time), this can be excused since The Book of the War is an in-universe document and so may not be completely accurate. What makes this book relevant is that it also theorizes that the Time Lord's regenerative capabilities were stolen from the vampires. Even for an unreliably narrated book, this is treated as speculation, but as a concept, that is fascinating.

Interlude: when regeneration happened

There is some inconsistency in all of these sources as when regeneration first became a property of the Time Lords. The Timeless Children has it come shortly after they discover interstellar space travel, and far before time travel, but several of the VNA-era books (including Cold Fusion and I think Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) depict early time-travelling Gallifreyans as being without regeneration. The tv episode A Good Man Goes to War states that regeneration came about as a result of exposure to the Time Vortex. My personal take is that The Timeless Children showed Tecteun discovering regeneration, and initially only shared it amongst herself and her elite (Rassilon, etc.). After the Looms went into effect, they started Looming more and more Time Lords with regenerative capabilities, until eventually it's a shared trait among all Time Lords. After ten million years, the artificial origins of regeneration have been lost to time, but the symbiotic nature of the Time Lords to Tardises and the Time Vortex has meant that a being conceived in a Tardis could be engineered to have limited regenerative capabilities.

Part 5: Bringing it all together

So back to the Doctor and Gallifreyan history. Uh, how does this all make one cohesive story?

Okay so our story starts with Tecteun and finding the Timeless Child by a portal to another universe. She takes said child home, discovers from it the secrets of regeneration, and so on and so forth. Tecteun, Rassilon, and Omega become the three founders of Time Lord society.

So that's the first thing there. The Other, as revered in Time Lord history, isn't the Doctor or some version thereof. The founder whose name was lost to time was Tecteun. And Tecteun discovered regeneration from the Timeless Child. This child, for whatever reason, starts calling themselves the Doctor.

But wait? Wasn't there some theories running around that the the Time Lords stole regeneration from vampires? And that vampires initially weren't as hostile to the universe before Rassilon saw them as competition?

Yes, yes, there were. It's simple, really. The Timeless Child was from Spiral Yssgaroth. They're a vampire.

(I really wish I had been clever enough to come up with that on my own, but I'm not. Pretty much everything else here is out of my own brain, but that is a fan theory I saw on the internet.)

In any case, the Yssgaroth War was motivated, at least in part, by the Vampires' outrage that their secrets and child had been stolen. But, as history records, they were defeated.

And for a time afterwards, Tecteun and Rassilon continue to rule Gallifrey together. But Omega's apparent death shortly after the end of the Yssgaroth War weighs heavily on them both - and they're both ambitious enough to not quite appreciate the other being their equal. Trouble is, they kinda need each other. Rassilon, despite his posing, isn't a scientist - he's a politician. He needs his scientists to continue to work miracles, and Omega is already gone, so that just leaves Tecteun. Tecteun, for her part, is no leader. She wants power but doesn't have the people skills. And she still cares deeply about her people and about the vampire she has come to see as her child. The two drift apart - Tecteun becoming the leader of Division which she took increasingly off-world while Rassilon becomes more and more the sole face of leadership on Gallifrey.

Eventually this reaches a boiling point. Tecteun and Rassilon have lost all trust in each other. Tecteun makes preparations - including leaving the message in the Matrix we saw in Ascension of the Cybermen / the Timeless Children. She and Rassilon then have the confrontation that we saw in Lungbarrow. But Tecteun doesn't throw herself into the looms - she takes herself off Gallifrey through technology Rassilon doesn't know about and begins to cut Division's ties with Gallifrey altogether. Division has already begun recruiting across the universe, so she figures she can leave Rassilon to his one planet. Notably, she also leaves the Hand of Omega behind on Gallifrey, where it is eventually put in a vault and forgotten about. She maintains contact with Gallifrey only through her agents, one of which is the Timeless Child.

For their part, the Timeless Child has gone through several incarnations. They've had their mind wiped to hide that they're not Gallifreyan, and they have then been the Morbius Doctors, including Patience's husband. The Timeless Child has had a personal life (as seen by their marriage to Patience), but they're increasingly being a full-time agent of Division.

In any case, right now the Timeless Child is the Fugitive Doctor. And she plays along with Tecteun for a while. However, following the events we see in Origins, she goes on the run. Tecteun has Division track her to Earth, where the events of Fugitive of the Judoon play out. The Fugitive Doctor manages to get away as we see, but she doesn't know of any way to get away from Division long-term (as Big Finish is currently exploring) - and, away from Tecteun's influence and protection, she's starting to work out that she's not the Gallifreyan she thinks she is.

In an act of desperation, she pilots her Tardis back to Gallifrey - on the very same day Tecteun left. She takes Tecteun's place in Lungbarrow's story, and throws herself into the Looms, where she dies, dissolving into the giant vat of Gallifreyan genetic material.

This leaves Tecteun searching time and space desperately for the Timeless Child. At first, the Timeless Child seems nowhere to be found. But eventually Tecteun discovers that there is a time traveler called the Doctor out and around the universe. An investigation into the Doctor reveals that they've been all over the universe. Trying to just grab them and do a memory wipe isn't an option because they've done too much. Tecteun doesn't realize this Doctor is a different person to the Timeless Child, to the Doctor they left a message in the Matrix for.

Tecteun had probably never been that good of a person, but she used to care. She used to care about Omega, but he's gone. She used to care about Rassilon, but they burned too many bridges. She used to care about her vampiric child, but she takes this as a betrayal. And whatever good left in Tecteun dies.

Tecteun decides to destroy the universe and start over in a new one where she can control everything, so she picks a point far in the future where Gallifrey will have been destroyed naturally so her home planet will be unaffected. By convivence, one of the Doctor's most common destinations - Earth - happens to be at that point. Tecteun initiates the Flux event in Earth's time and releases Swarm and Azure to finish the Doctor off.

The Doctor stumbles into this, but she's operating off incomplete information from the Matrix. She doesn't realize that she's not the Timeless Child, since the Master seemingly destroyed any records that she could check his claims against. So when Tecteun and the Doctor confront each other, they both assume that the Doctor is the Timeless Child.

And this becomes a moot point because the Doctor finding Tecteun and Division HQ allows Swarm and Azure to find it as well. They kill Tecteun and destroy Division. If you're reading this, you probably watched Flux, you know how this goes.

It's not clear if Rassilon is aware that Tecteun died shortly after their argument. He certainly comes to the conclusion that she won't be an ongoing concern anymore, and, as the last survivor of Gallifrey's founding trio, uses his remaining lives to rule Gallifrey unopposed. With no one to oppose him, he removes Tecteun's name from record - as far as he's concerned, she betrayed him and does not deserve to be remembered.

Ten million years pass.

The House of Lungbarrow looms a new Time Lord, but, for whatever reason, this particular Time Lord has a significant amount of the Timeless Child's genetic material mixed into their genetic soup. This new Time Lord chooses to call themselves the Doctor - in unconscious echo of their genetic predecessor. Their amount of vampiric genetics makes them genetically distinguishable from other Gallifreyans if close examination is done, but for a while no one has any reason to do this.

This is also why I get to call the Doctor a dhampir - they're not a true vampire, but have a nontrivial amount of vampiric genetics - or, to use the terms of The Book of the War, they carry the Yssgaroth Taint.

These genetics are still enough to get the attention of the Hand of Omega, which has been mothballed for those Ten Million years. Maybe the Hand sees the Timeless Child in the Doctor, or maybe it's just intrigued by someone who isn't just another Time Lord. In any case, Glospin confronts the Doctor, the Hand drives Glospin off, and the Doctor leaves Gallifrey with it.

He also leaves with Susan. She isn't from the dawn of Gallifrey. Instead, she is a Loomed Time Lord of the Doctor's era who found herself ostracized and disliked. That being said, she found community with three other Time Lords: the Doctor, the Master, and another Time Lord named Braxiatel. The four of them are all outsiders from their own Houses, and so consider themselves a house unto themselves, and Susan, as the youngest, began referring to the Doctor as "Grandfather", as that term is reserved for the head of a House (something that is established in The Book of the War), as she views him as the head of their little house of four.

In any case, the Doctor and Susan leave Gallifrey. The Master loses his mind when he realize he got left behind, steals a Tardis himself and heads out after the family he thinks abandoned him. Braxiatel stays behind and becomes a successful politician and art collector.

A couple hundred more years pass.

We're now in the events of Lungbarrow. The Doctor shares his memory of leaving Gallifrey with some of the fellow members of his House. However, he edits Susan out of the memories he shows - technically, he went through the criminal justice system for this, but Susan never did and he doesn't want her to. Gallifrey has seemingly forgotten about her, and he wants to keep it that way.

And then he has his vision trip dream sequence where he sees the past and sees the Timeless Child walk into the Looms. He then sees a memory of himself meeting Susan. This isn't literal - it's symbolic of Susan and the Doctor's relationship changing and evolving as they left Gallifrey. The Doctor knows this isn't literal, but it's in his best interests to act like it is - he's not in control of this dream sequence and several other people are there (including one of the Doctor's enemies), and he still wants to protect Susan, so he goes along with that story.

The Doctor continues their life and eventually gets to the Thirteenth Doctor where she meets the Fugitive Doctor in Fugitive of the Judoon. When she scans herself and the Fugitive Doctor, the two register as the same entity. However, Time Lords are not biologically identical across regenerations - the Doctor has to have something specific to herself that she is looking for.

And she actually has one. At some point in the Doctor's life, they found a genetic quirk that has persisted across their regenerations. They don't know it, but it's the Yssgaroth Taint. Since the Doctor has never encountered another Time Lord with the Taint, she is by this point assuming it's a quirk of her own biology, so takes her sonic detecting the Taint in the Fugitive Doctor as confirmation that the two are the same.

And then shortly after the Doctor meets her genetic predecessor, the aforementioned stuff with Tecteun happens. It's possible that the Doctor themselves has noted the ambiguities in their backstory and heritage but given that there were several thousand years of life between the Seventh and Thirteenth Doctors, it seems likely that they don't think to try to analyze it that closely.

And that's a wrap! If you have any thoughts on all of this, I'd love it if you would share them! Thank you!

[gallifreyanhotfive]

Hi!! I really really want to get into the academy era eu stuff, but I just have no idea where to start 😭😭😭 do you have any audio/novel/etc recs to start off with? Thank you so much!!

-✨️🪐 anon

Hello! So sorry I didn't see this sooner - I've been quite busy lately (busy enough I forgot to submit my Big Finish Short Trips this year...)

Anyway, for the Academy Era, the starting off point is generally Divided Loyalties. In this novel, there is a long dream sequence of the Academy Era. Since it is a dream, it might not be 100% accurate, but it's what we have.

Otherwise, most of the information we have on the Academy Era comes from the occasional reference in a bunch of different stories. Some of them have more Academy Era material than others...

We can get some pretty good insights from some DWEU material (beyond what is in the TV show). I won't list spoilers here just in case that wasn't what you were looking for (though I have other posts that do entail this information), but here's the list I can think of off the top of my head. Some of these are stories with just general young-Time-Tot era references (not necessarily at the Academy but still the itty bitty, pre-leaving Gallifrey guys), but I'll include them anyway. And some of these references are quick, so be prepared.

Novel: Divided Loyalties

Novel: Tomb of Valdemar

Novel: Deadly Reunion

Novel: Lungbarrow

Novel: The Death of Art

Novel: The Dark Path

Audio: Time in Office

Audio: Darkness and Light

Novel: The Time Lord Letters

Short story: The Nameless City

Audio: Planet of the Rani

Audio: Master

Comic: The Glorious Dead

Comic: Weapons of Past Destruction

Comic: Space in Dimension Relative in Time)

Short story: The Three Paths

Audio/Novel: Mission to Magnus

Novel: The Eight Doctors

Audio/Novel: Cold Fusion

Audio: The Eleven

Audio: Blood of the Time Lords

Audio: The Widow's Assassin

Audio: Crossed Lines

Short story: Celestial Intervention - A Gallifreyan Noir

Short story: The Legacy of Gallifrey

Novel: Timewyrm: Exodus

Novel: Goth Opera

Audio: The Toy

Short story: Birth of a Renegade

Short story: Rebel Rebel

Audio: Neverland

Audio: The Next Life

Novel: Island of Death

Novel: Unnatural History

Novel: Christmas on a Rational Planet

Audio: Disassembled

Comic: Flashback

Audio: Together in Eclectic Dreams

Audio: The Last Line

Short story: Report on Term's Work

Audio: The Wormery

Audio: Storm Warning

Novel: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible

Novel: The Infinity Doctors

Short story: Seven Deadly Sins

Audio: Order of the Daleks

Audio: The Apocalypse Element

Audio: Prisoners of Fate

Novel: Original Sin

Novel: The Twin Dilemma

Anyways, these are the ones that immediately pop to mind when I think of stories that have references. It's not a complete list, mind, just the ones in my head at the time of writing. They are also not in any order, just the order I thought of them.

Regardless, most of these are just references, and you may not want to read an entire novel for a single reference...If that is the case, let me know, and I can explain some more!

[thenightling]

I don't understand why so many people seem surprised or reluctant at the idea of horror musicals. It has occurred to me that there are more horror themed musicals than any other genre within the musical format. Note: Some of these are stage musicals, some are movies, and some are both. Little Shop of Horrors Sweeney Todd: The Demon barber of Fleet Street Phantom of The Opera Phantom of The Opera: Love Never Dies The Rocky Horror Show Shock Treatment Evil Dead: The Musical Carrie White Lestat (Two very different versions but same cast) Dracula: The musical Dance of the Vampires (Tanz der Vampire) Jekyll and Hyde Richard Campbell's Frankenstein The metal opera Frankenstein: The New Musical Young Frankenstein Dead Man's Party (performed at Six Flags every Halloween season) Beetlejuice: The musical Beetlejuice: Graveyard Revue (Universal Studios) Edward Scissorhands (The ballet) Teeth The Lost Boys (in workshop now) Death Note: The Musical The Canterville Ghost Dorian! The Remarkable Mr. Gray Bat Boy: The Musical Hocus Pocus Spooktacular stage show Hocus Pocus the musical (in development) Ghost: The musical The Addams Family (Broadway musical) The Princess and the Goblin Bad Cinderella Labyrinth The Black Labyrinth (unofficial Labyrinth sequel) The Wizard of Oz Wicked Over The Garden Wall Something Wicked This way Comes: The musical Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Coming out of Their Shells Lazarus The Nightmare before Christmas Corpse Bride Monster Mash: The Musical Rockula Red Riding Hood (direct to video musical) Into The Woods The Little Mermaid Frozen Alvin and the Chipmunks meet The Wolfman Alvin and the Chipmunks meet Frankenstein Repo! The Genetic Opera The Devil's Carnival The Hunchback of Notre Dame Monster High: The Movie Monster High: The Movie 2 Descendants Descendants 2 Descendants 3 Descendants: The Rise of Red Zombies Zombies 2 Zombies 3 Zombies 4 Hadestown Scooby Doo and The Witch's Ghost Faust: The Rock musical The Crucible Stage Fright Frank Wildhorn's Dracula The Musical Frankenstein: A Rock Opera Dracula: The Rock Opera Admittedly some of these might count as scifi or just supernatural / fantasy but they still had Gothic or horror elements. I can name more horror musicals than I can mane other genres of musicals that are performed in the English language.

[evil-mcytblrconfessions]

while we’re on the topic of fanfic i think a lot about this one high school au (with mermaids) fanfic i affectionately call the “soap opera fic” because the entire thing felt like a soap opera. each chapter got better and better. the dialogue was ICONIC i quote “thou painted maypole” to myself all the time. begging the authors to please come back i need to know how the arc where they put on a performance of the crucible ends

.

[ethereal-maia]

✨💥💛 All About Me 💛💥✨

Hi! Welcome to my “about me” page. I could hypothetically make a carrd but I have never done that before and this seemed easier.

Some things I really like lately:

War and Peace / Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

Cinderella (in general!! I just really like her 🫶)

Poldark (2015)

Candy Land (yes the board game)

Grishaverse

Ever After High

The Crucible (Arthur Miller)

We Have Always Lived In The Castle

The Great Gatsby

Little Thieves series by Margaret Owen

A Little Princess

The Secret Garden

Les Miserables

Crime and Punishment

Anne of Green Gables / Anne With an E

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Don Giovanni (yes the opera)

Jesus Christ Superstar

My Top Three Favorite…

Books:

The Inquisitors Tale by Adam Gidwitz

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Musicals:

Rogers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella

Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

Jesus Christ Superstar < this one is a recent obsession… but like i truly believe it’s in my top three now.

Movies:

Return to Oz

Easy A

Cinderella (1997)

Links:

Spotify

Bored and want to read an all-too-long presentation by yours truly? Click here!

AO3

Dividers from @saradika-graphics

Thanks for stopping by! 🌟

[shakeatradefeather]

August 2023 release includes:

Halls - Turbine Theatre - July 2023 (3) - Final Matinee Performance

The Lion King - West End - August 2023 - Filmed from the stalls

We Will Rock You - West End- August 2023 - Danny Natrass as Galileo

Phantom of the Opera - West End - August 2023 - Amazing stalls capture of the new cast

Hamilton - West End - August 2023 - Alex Tranters debut as King George III, Aaron Lee Lambert as Hercules Mulligan/James Maddison, Alex Sawyer as Alexander Hamilton

The Crucible - West End - August 2023 - An mostly unobstructed capture from the stalls*

Groundhog Day - West End - August 2023 - Filmed during the closing performance

Death Note: In Concert - West End - August 2023 - Filmed from the stalls

Frozen - West End - August 2023 - Laura Emmitt as Elsa, Ben Irish as Hans

Cabaret - West End - August 2023 - Sally Firth as Sally Bowles, Toby Turpin as Ernst Ludwig

Please DM for my order form, website and discord links!

[an-aura-about-you]

hi I watched an opera version of The Crucible tonight and now I'm fundamentally different as a person.

[ausetkmt]

I first saw Bamboozled as a 15-year-old, in April 2001, at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton, south-west London, and it threw me for a loop. Written and directed by Spike Lee, the film is an intense satire about a frustrated African American TV executive, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), who creates a contemporary version of a minstrel show in order to purposefully get himself fired, and expose the commissioning network as a racist and retrograde outfit. However, the show, which features its black stars wearing blackface, becomes a huge hit, prompting Delacroix’s mental collapse, and an explosion of catastrophic violence, the effects of which are felt far and wide.

In a fraught contemporary climate where the mediation of the black image in American society is at a crucial juncture, Bamboozled’s trenchant commentary on the importance, complexity and lasting effects of media representation could hardly feel more urgent. Each time an unarmed black person is killed, then hurriedly repositioned in death as a thug, a brute, or a layabout by mainstream media outlets – as has happened recently to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Samuel DuBose and countless others – we are seeing the perpetuation of old anti-black stereotypes, forged in the crucible of mass American art, reconfigured for our time.

Lee’s film traces a grim continuum between stereotypes old and new, connected by knotty skeins of institutional racism. Many critics at the time of the film’s release suggested that Lee had needlessly reopened old wounds; that the dark days of minstrelsy were comfortably behind us, and that we should move on. Yet Lee’s vision was not only necessary, it proved remarkably prescient. During the course of writing this book, I rewatched episodes of garish reality TV shows like Flavor of Love (2006-8), starring the clock-wearing rapper-cum-jester Flavor Flav, and The Real Housewives of Atlanta (2008-). I had to concede that Bamboozled’s nightmarish New Millennium Minstrel Show didn’t look so far-fetched after all. I sat gape-mouthed in front of Lee Daniels and Danny Strong’s musical soap opera Empire (2014-) – a wildly entertaining but exceedingly dubious carnival of black pathologies – and couldn’t help but wonder if it was the type of show that would get Bamboozled’s master-wigger network boss Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport) hot under the collar at proposal stage.

When, in October 2014, I saw footage of freshly signed rapper Bobby Shmurda literally dancing on a table in front of a group of executives, exactly like performer Manray (Savion Glover) does in Bamboozled, I began to wonder whether Lee was in fact a secret soothsayer. Not even he, however, could have predicted the transcendentally weird tale of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP leader in Spokane, Washington, who was revealed to have been white, and posing as African American all along. At the time of the incident, many wags on social media suggested that Lee would be the ideal man to direct Bamboozled 2: The Rachel Dolezal Story.

Bamboozled’s shrewd commentary on the lack of behind-the-scenes diversity in mainstream entertainment is also especially relevant today. The presence of figures like Robin Thede – head writer on The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, and the first black woman to hold that position on a late-night network comedy show – and Shonda Rhimes, the powerful showrunner behind Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder, is heartening. Yet a report released in March 2015 by the Writer’s Guild of America West revealed that minority writers accounted for just 13.7% of employment: a dismal statistic. Moreover, Rhimes’s success didn’t insulate her from being disrespectfully branded as an “Angry Black Woman” – that most pernicious of stereotypes – in a rancid, supposedly flattering article by Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times

While most of us can cheer the incrementally increasing diversity on our film and television screens, Bamboozled forces us to question the quality and progressiveness of these roles. Ostensibly it’s great that talented actors such as Mo’Nique (Precious, 2009), Octavia Spencer (The Help, 2011) and Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave, 2013) are winning Oscars, but isn’t the shine taken off somewhat by the fact they were rewarded by the establishment for playing, respectively, a psychotic “welfare queen”, a neo-Mammy in a white savior period picture, and a chronically abused slave? Why don’t black women win Oscars for playing complex heroines or crotchety geniuses like their white male counterparts? Because old stereotypes die hard within an industry that prefers stasis over change. Perhaps even more disturbingly, there’s something inherently soothing about such stereotypes for mass audiences – a point particularly relevant to the wild popularity of Bamboozled’s own minstrel show.

And how far have we come, really? Ridley Scott cast a host of white actors (including a fake tan-enhanced Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton) in his Middle Eastern epic/flop Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014), but his response to complaints was both flippant, and distressingly matter-of-fact: “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.” The best riposte to Scott and his film came from independent black film-maker Terence Nance, who wrote that “[l]ike The Birth of a Nation before it, [Exodus] traffics in absurd cultural appropriation and brown-faced minstrel casting/makeup techniques to rewrite African history as European history, and in so doing propagates the idea that European cultural centrality is more important than historical fact and the ever-evolving self-image of African-descended people as it is influenced by popular representations of people of color in Western media distributed worldwide.”

Nance, however, is just one talented black film-maker among many (Dee Rees, Tina Mabry, Haile Gerima, Julie Dash, Barry Jenkins et al) who have struggled to attract funding to tell artistic and personal stories outside of the monolithic, corporate world of mainstream entertainment which Bamboozled so acidly depicts (even if it is set in the world of TV rather than film.) Lee has long been vocal about the struggles he’s faced in raising funds to tell black-focused stories, and even he had to go cap in hand to fans on Kickstarter to crowd-fund his idiosyncratic, low-budget vampire movie Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014). Da Sweet Blood is his most excessive, least easily readable work since Bamboozled, but it can’t match his earlier film for sheer visceral impact.

Bamboozled, then, is a genuine one-off, but I can detect traces of its relentless, irritable, questioning approach in a variety of contemporary art. I see it in Justin Simien’s excellent college-set satire Dear White People (2014), which was inspired by horrific, real-life blackface parties at universities across America. I see it in the antic situational comedy of Key & Peele, whose best sketch, musical spoof “Negrotown”, compresses the madness, pathos and insight of Lee’s film into four-and-a-half harrowingly hilarious minutes. I see it in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins thrillingly audacious play An Octoroon (2013), which reconfigures blackface tropes in daring ways. Most of all I see it coursing through the veins of Paul Beatty’s scabrous satirical novel The Sellout (2015), about a shiftless young black Angeleno who hatches a plot to reintroduce racial segregation, and takes an elderly slave – a disturbed former “pickaninny” star of Little Rascals films – while he’s at it. Like Lee’s film, it plays as a shotgun blast to the face of formal convention, it’s stubbornly resistant to a single concrete interpretation, and it has a lot of very painful things to say about America today.

ABC’s enjoyably gentle sitcom Black-ish (2014-), meanwhile, simultaneously echoes Delacroix’s crisis – with its premise of a middle-class black ad executive (Anthony Anderson) jockeying for position in a white corporate space – and feels like the kind of show Delacroix, free of Dunwitty’s pressure, might have concocted himself.

Lastly, I couldn’t help but think of Bamboozled while poring over Ta-Nehisi Coates’s epic essay in the Atlantic, The Case for Reparations, which uncovers, in forensic detail, the institutional plunder of black Americans from slavery to redlining to mass incarceration and its destructive impact on families. Coates’s fury is more controlled than Lee’s, but it’s equally sincere, and his essay shares with Bamboozled the central imperative to look directly into the heart of past racial sins in order to plot a productive way forward.

It is time, then, to take a close look at Bamboozled, which deserves to be respected as much more than a mid-career oddity in Lee’s filmography. It is a vital work that’s equal parts crystal ball and cannonball: glittering and prophetic, heavy and dangerous.

[heavenboy09]

Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊 To You, 1 Of The Greatest Irish Actors Of The Century Since Pierce Brosnan

Born On June 7th, 1952

He was born in Ballymena, County Antrim, the son of cook Katherine "Kitty" Neeson (née Brown) and primary school caretaker Bernard "Barney" Neeson. Raised Catholic, he was named Liam after a local priest. The third of four siblings, he has three sisters, Elizabeth, Bernadette, and Rosaleen.[citation needed] He attended St Patrick's College, Ballymena from 1963 to 1967, and later recalled that his love of drama began there.

He is an actor from Northern Ireland. He has received several accolades, including nominations for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and two Tony Awards. In 2020, he was placed seventh on The Irish Times list of Ireland's 50 Greatest Film Actors. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2000.

In 1976, Neeson joined the Lyric Players' Theatre in Belfast for two years. His early film roles include Excalibur (1981), The Bounty (1984), The Mission (1986), The Dead Pool (1988), and Husbands and Wives (1992). He rose to prominence portraying Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg's holocaust drama Schindler's List (1993) for which he earned an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination. He followed by starring in Nell (1994), Rob Roy (1995), Michael Collins (1996), and Les Misérables (1998). He took blockbuster roles portraying Qui-Gon Jinn in George Lucas' space opera Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), Ra's al Ghul in Batman Begins (2005) and Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia trilogy (2005–2010). He also starred in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002), the romantic comedy Love Actually (2003), and the drama Kinsey (2004).

Beginning in 2009, Neeson cemented himself as an action star with the action thriller series Taken (2008–2014), The A-Team (2010), The Grey (2011), Wrath of the Titans (2012), and A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014). He is known for his collaborations in the genre with director Jaume Collet-Serra, and starred in four of his films: Unknown (2011), Non-Stop (2013), Run All Night (2015), and The Commuter (2018). He also starred in Martin Scorsese's religious epic Silence (2016), the fantasy drama A Monster Calls (2016), Steve McQueen's heist drama Widows (2018), the Coen brothers' western The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), and the romantic drama Ordinary Love (2019).

Neeson is also known for his work on stage. He made his Broadway debut in 1993 with his performance as Matt Burke in the revival of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie earning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play nomination. He then starred as Oscar Wilde in David Hare's The Judas Kiss in 1998. He received his second Tony Award nomination for his performance in the 2002 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

Please Wish This Legendary Distinguished Irish 🇮🇪 Actor A Very Happy Birthday 🎂 🥳 🎉 🎈 🎁 🎊

You Know Him & Of Course You Love Him.

The 1 & The Only

MR. LIAM NEESON 🇮🇪

AKA IRISH BAD@$$ OF MANY BIG ICONIC MOVIES 🎥 IN CINEMA

HAPPY 71ST BIRTHDAY 🎂 MR. NEESON #LiamNeeson #Quigonjinn #RasAlGhul #Zeus

[gett-merkedd]

I. As I write these lines, election season is in full swing. The walls are plastered with posters of every color where people claim to be of every flag, every “color” of opinion. Who doesn’t have his party, his program, his profession of faith? Who is not either a socialist, a radical, a progressive, a liberal, or a “proportionalist” — the newest fad? This abnegation of the self is the great malady of the century. One belongs to an association, a union, a party; one shares the opinions, the convictions, the rule of conduct of another. One is led, a follower, a disciple, a slave, never oneself.

It’s true that this is less taxing. To belong to a party, adopting someone else’s program, adjusting to a collective line of conduct, is to avoid thinking, reflecting, creating one’s own ideas. It is to dispense with acting by oneself. It is the triumph of the famous theory of the “least effort,” for the love of which so many stupid things have been said and done.

Some call this living. It’s true: the mollusk lives, the invertebrate lives; the plagiarist, the copycat, the babbler all live; the lemming, the traitor, the slanderer and the gossip all live. Let us leave them and dream not only of living, but something more: “to feel alive.”

II. To feel alive is not only to be aware that we are regularly performing the functions that maintain the individual (and, if you like, the species). Nor is feeling alive to perform the acts of one’s life within a narrow design, in line with some wise book written by some author who knows nothing of life but its hallucinations, crucibles, and equations. To feel alive is certainly not to keep to neatly graveled paths in a public garden when the capricious trails of wild undergrowth are calling out to you. To feel alive is to vibrate, thrill, shudder with the perfume of flowers, the songs of birds, the crashing of the waves, the howling of the wind, the silence of solitude, the feverish voice of crowds. To feel alive is to be as sensible to the plaintive chant of the shepherd as to the harmonies of great operas, to the radiant influence of a poem as to the pleasures of love.

To feel alive is to render exciting those details of one’s life that are worth the trouble: to make of the latter a fleeting experiment, and of the first an experiment that succeeds. All of this with no constraints, with no program imposed in advance; according to one’s temperament, then, to one’s state of being in the moment, one’s conception of life.

III. One can think oneself an anarchist and vegetate. One can mirror the anarchism of one’s newspaper, one’s favorite writer, one’s group. One can call oneself original and deep down be nothing more than a second- or third-degree add-on or outsider.

Being bound by the yoke of a so-called “anarchist” morality is to be always tied down. All a priori moralities are the same: theocratic, bourgeois, collectivist or anarchist. Doubled over under a rule of conduct contrary to your judgment, reason, and experience, to what you feel and desire, on the pretext that it is the rule chosen by all the members of your group, is the act of a monk, not of an anarchist. It is not the act of a negator of authority to fear a loss of esteem or incurring the disapproval of your circle. All that your comrade can ask of you is not to encroach on the practice of his life; he cannot go farther.

IV. An essential condition for “feeling alive” is to know how to appreciate one’s life. Morals, sensations, rules of behavior, emotions, knowledges, faculties, opinions, passions, meaning, the brain, etc. — so many means that can allow us to approach our life. So many servants at the command of the “self” for it to develop and expand. Mastering them all, the conscious “negator of authority” does not allow himself to be mastered by any of them. When he succumbs, it is from lack of education of the will. This is not irreparable. The studied “one-beyond-domination” is not fearful; he enjoys everything, bites into everything, within the limits of individual appreciation. He tastes everything and nothing is repugnant to him, so long as he maintains his moral equilibrium.

Only the anarchist can feel himself living, for he is the unique one among men, the only one whose appreciation of life has its source in himself, without the impure intermixing of an authority imposed from without.

— Émile Armand, To Feel Alive

[devil-doll13]

I’m 100% sure Abigail is a closet theatre nerd. Like everyone else hated Shakespeare but she just devoured it with a passion. Her favourites are probably Hamlet and Macbeth, (3 witches anyone?) maybe A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Phantom of The Opera (she had a crush on the Phantom probably lol), The Crucible, Carrie and Heathers: The Musical would appeal to her a lot as well.

Abby would’ve loved to go into drama more but low confidence at the time/bullying/moving around bc her relatives dropping like flies etc. stopped her from doing so. She absolutely regrets not doing it now.

[you-me-on-selftimer]

2024: EVERY SINGLE SHOW I SAW

JANUARY

Dinosaur Jr, 1.26 at Aura

Beethoven’s 5th, 1.28 with the Portland Symphony Orchestra at Merrill Auditorium

MARCH

Unto house show, 3.1 at Secret Island (basement show)

Aeden MacDougall & Those Electric Nights, 3.21 at Prism Analog

Andy Shauf with Lutalo, 3.23 at First Parish Church

Unwound with The Cherubs, 3.25 at Paradise Rock Club

APRIL

High school all-girl bands (a friend’s students), 4.29 at Portland House of Music

MAY

L’Rain, Duffy x Uhlmann, 5.4 at SPACE Gallery

Ride with Knifeplay, 5.8 at 3S Artspace

The Crucible (opera by Robert Ward), 5.19 at the Old Red Church in Standish

Girls Getting Ready, 5.25 at The Criterion

JUNE

Hemlock St house show, 6.7

Dylan Earl and Tiger Saw, 6.16 at Prism Analog

Emma Cora Claire band, 6.25 in backyard on Vesper St

JULY

Wednesday with Babehoven, 7.1 at 3S Artspace

Emma Cora Claire band, 7. ? in backyard on Vesper St

Folk Implosion, 7.18 at Oxbow

AUGUST

Lupo Città with Kid Congo Powers and the Pink Monkey Birds, 8.16 at Space

Titus Abbot jazz group, 8.22 at The Apohadion

SEPTEMBER

Bikini Kill, 9.6 at The State Theatre

Lolabelle with Modern Contemporary and Ernest Braun, 9.25 at The Apohadion Theater

Vampire Weekend, 9.27 at TD Garden

OCTOBER

Lolabelle with Those Electric Nights, 10.19 at Hardshore Distillery

MJ Lenderman and the Wind, Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, 10.22 at The Royale

NOVEMBER

Craig Finn with Katy Kirby, 11.7 at Vinegar Hill Arts Theatre

DECEMBER

Wednesday (solo) with Cryogyser (solo), 12.13 at SPACE Gallery

Coming up….

DBT?

Nick Cave

Hard Quartet

[songoficarus]

ough. how do i find people that rp classic/contemporary literature stuff. my friend and i are mad fixating on the odyssey (epic the musical reignited a burning passion i had in high school when we first read it) and now i'm fixating on a bunch of other similar stuff.

like. does anyone roleplay characters from the giver, phantom of the opera, the crucible, frankenstein (ough frankenstein), jekyll and hyde, romeo and juliet, oliver twist, les miserables?! please i'm dying. suffocating. disboard tags are useless i fear