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whoovesnassistant · 4 years ago

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A Hello, A Thank You, And A Brain Dump.

Dear PwPP team,

I am a recent fan, and I am quite an odd one. I am a lover of everything Doctor Who, so much so I have memorized everything about the Doctor and his interactions during the 2005 revival. Yet since I have watched basically all the doctor who media I had access to (Excluding the most recent season because it does not interest me in the slightest, no offence to 13’s actor) I was without any Doctor Who content that actually interested me.

Well until I made a discovery. You see, when I was moving to a new house, I found a figure I did not remember owning. It looked like a My Little Pony version of Doctor number 10. It fascinated me because It was officially licensed! So, I went down a rabbit hole, and found a whole new Doctor Who community, lost to YouTube, or even, Internet time entirely.

That’s a little bit of a dramatization, but the point still stands that I discovered something that a lot of people forgot. The thing is, I know nothing about the My Little Pony area of fandoms, but I found this new world of Doctor Who so fascinating. Not only that, but it was a whole community!

It was intoxicating! Doctors that I’d never dream of! And actually seeing the doctor see something he truly did not know! But most of all… people who understood what made Doctor Who, Doctor Who.

I’m not a My Little Pony fan, not in the slightest, but as a Doctor who fan, your series is beyond stellar! I know when people understand Doctor Who or not, and you all did know on a level I don’t even thing some real Doctor Who show writers do! Also, your adaptation of the doctor feels so real, it is just stellar!

So, now I have to thank you, all of you. You gave me hope about the future of Doctor who will be bright and full of life! You let me see a new world of story telling. I never saw audio plays used like a legitimate series to such effectiveness and its truly brilliant and has inspired me to try to work on something similar, in due time.

Yet, lastly, thank you so much for the pure, utter joy your work emanates. Yet again, I’m only a Doctor Who fan, but this series has genuinely gave me more enjoyment that some Doctor Who episodes. It is just, raw, stupid, enjoyable, and oh so timey-wimy fun! Even with some real Doctor Who-esc dark/sad moments that makes it feel like I’m listening to a real BBC and Hasbro collaboration!

In fact, the work of your team gave me a Idea for a episode I just couldn’t keep in my head. I know you most likely have plans for all the future audio plays, but I am a story teller through and through, so consider the last part of this letter like a pitch. Yet again, I’m not trying to be entitled and be like “Here’s my idea, Now make it!”, no I literally have no other living soul to share this idea with and its killing me.

Now if I had to title it, it would be a two part play called “Turn Timer” and “Pestering Past”. “Turn Timer” would start with the Tardis crew just bumbling around in time and space. Maybe heading from or to an adventure. Yet when the Tardis enters modern times, it gets thrown off course due to a temporal blackhole (Or something?) making the Tardis materialize in front of a mansion that should not exist, that stands right dead center in the Evergreen Forest (if I got it wrong don’t kill me). The master of the house would be a unicorn named Turn Timer, and would be letting any travelers stay.

Yet when the Doctor reluctantly stays in a room, they discover that some of the travelers have been seeing a hairless ape-like creature attacking residence, even Turn Timer who would have been attacked, saying that they just popped up a few months ago and he’s been trying to cover it up for business.

Soon, after the Doctor and Tick Tock (Sorry but I have to say this here, that name did NOT age well) go off without Derpy who does not quite trust Turn Timer because…. well I made the name reverse Time Turner for a reason. Yet both the Doctor and Tick Tock does not notice the clearly weird name, so that means duel plot! Yay!

Eventually the smart duo would figure out that these creatures are just human like Autons. Yet, since humans, or even humanoids, don’t exist in this universe, this is extremely odd (at least I think, I still know jack about My Little Pony). Also Imagine this would lead into some funny jokes about how the Doctor needs to explain what the hell a human is, and I just imagine Tick Tock confused Autons being exactly like humans and not just modeled by them.

Meanwhile, Derpy would be grilling Turn Timer (Also again, only a Doctor Who fan but I can just imagine the Donna theme here and it makes me smile) and I Imagine that 70% of this second plot would be jokes. Until before the Auton realization, where Turn Timer makes the mistake of saying Doctor instead of Time Turner (Which I assume he would sign in as) and would be forced to knock out Derpy. Now, after they figure out the Autons are Autons, and the jokes are done, I’m guessing that Turn Timer would project some sort of communication hologram or magic thingy to the Doctor so they can have an exchange that goes along like this.

TuTi “Hello Doctor! Sorry but i did not expect for your assistant to be able to see past my perception field.”

Doc “ What did you do to Derpy Turn Timer?”

TiTo “and what perception field?”

TuTi “ Oh don’t be daft, Doctor! I swear ever since you regenerated you have become so thick! you can’t even see what is so clearly obvious! You only know one person who would know the correct configuration for a humanoid Auton, and be smart enough to do it! ”

Doc, in his serious voice, “ Who are you?”

TuTi, Outraged “Don’t act like you don’t know! We are best friends! The bestest of friends that have ever existed. Long before you started taking your pets onto your Tardis. You know deep down, and you are running away from it! Like you ran away from your universe! Our Universe! I am tired of seeing your adventures in this world like you did not live in another.”

TiTo “Who are you then?”

Doc, still serious “Don’t humor him”

TuTi “ Oh Doctor….Can’t even ask your own questions anymore can you? How far you have fallen from what you once were. You once could snap your fingers and make army’s turn and run away. Now you can’t even keep your pets (Companions) on a tight enough leash anymore.”

Doc “ Wait, fingers? how did you-”

TuTi “Oh now you are getting it. Finally, we are getting back the Doctor that counts. My Doctor, The Oncoming Storm! The Great Exterminator! The Destroyer of Skaro! And lastly, The Timelord Victorious!”

Doc panicked and angered yelling (Probably) “Who are you?”

TuTi “ Finally…. Well… I am the master of the house.. the Master! Of the house.”

That is where “Turn Timer” would end and go into “Pestering Past”, which would pick up with the Master finishing his evil monolog and him and Derpy being in some sort of cave with the Masters Tardis being rigged as a paradox machine. Derpy would probably be in some sort of status field but still being able to interact with the Master.

I am sure they would discuss why the Master was so obsessed with getting the Doctor to recognize him. The fact that in the Doctor Who universe, The Master was so utterly empty without his “Best Friend” he could not stand to exist in a world without him, So he tracked the Doctor down, even through different universes just so he could have fun with his “Best Friend”.

Also probably telling Derpy more about the Doctor than he has. And most likely telling stories about when the Doctor was very angry, and why he is the last of the timelords. I thought this would be a very interesting thing to pop up later on, a Derpy is wondering if the Doctor is worth being around if they could do such a thing then turn around and say its horrid.

On the topside, I’m imagining the Doctor more scared and upset than seen in your audio plays. The fact that he came to a whole new universe, a place to make a new start and have less weight to carry, has been shattered by probably the only person that could have followed him. And to make it worse, it was someone who knows almost as much as the Doctor without his self control, and knowledge of his past life.

When the Doctor and the New Master meet face to face, I imagine it would be a battle of chaotic personalities on each side. Also, In my characterization of the Master, I think he would be sarcastically energetic to counteract the Doctors normal energetic craziness. Also, for the hell of it, let’s make the Master obsessed with pegasi instead of unicorns because narrative symbolism.

Lastly, we would learn that creatures that don’t belong in the world of My Little Pony (Cybermen and Terror are my best examples) where caused by the Masters Paradox machine. This gives a reason why they appeared and connects things in a neat little bow. Also gives a reason for Tick Tock to be mad too, due to the fact that the Master indirectly fueled the war he lost his family and time period for.

And that’s all I have. I don’t know how it would end except I think the Master would snatch Derpys Tardis key to use it to make something to keep tabs on the Tardis crew.

I’m sorry that half of this thank you and appreciation letter was more about my ideas than how I adore yours. Everyone on the PwPP crew to me is absolutely stellar! You all have made something truly amazing from a Doctor Who story telling standpoint. Lastly, please have fun making your audio plays or whatever you go on to do. It breaks my heart watching people create and have no fun in it.

With love and appreciation,

Raven.

We’re happy this show has brought you plenty of Doctor Who entertainment, even if you’re not an MLP fan. It’s always fun to learn about people who are generally a fan of one but not the other, who are still big fans of our series.

We aren’t really taking any ideas since we have a solid outline of what the rest of the episodes will be, and we can’t really reveal what characters might be appearing later. Your idea was a fun take on the Master though, perhaps consider writing a fanfic, as I’m sure people would enjoy it and we’ll be willing to post fanfics here.

#long post #submission

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writeroutoftime · 4 years ago

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la la land - chapter one

pairing: steve rogers x reader

summary: as a struggling actress in the big city, you aren’t sure how you are going to get your big break. similarly, starving artist, steve rogers, doesn’t know how to move on after a deal gone wrong. what happens when the two of you meet and learn more about yourselves, love, and the power of dreams than you ever thought possible?

warnings: none

word: 2058

a/n: oh my goodness, I am so excited to final be posting this story!! yes, I know you’re probably think - another series rita, really? but yes, another series!! so, this was actually for @marvelcapsicle‘s writing challenge, and not only is it overdue, but beth has actually decided to step away from tumblr. however, I still wanted to write this story, and I hope you are excited to read it. the story will follow the general plot of la la land, but I will take some liberties here and there. anyway, please enjoy the first chapter and have a fabulous day!

There are some lines of dialogue taken from the La La Land script and some song lyrics that inspire dialogue. I do not own anything from La La Land or Marvel, this is purely for creative enjoyment.

oOoOo

New York City. The big apple. The city that never sleeps. A city full of dreamers and a mesh of everything imaginable. Thousands flock to New York every year in hopes of achieving the impossible, pinning down that dream that makes their life worthwhile. It doesn’t matter if they are destined to be starving artists, each day brings a new sun and new opportunities, and no one can tell those dreamers otherwise.

The subway car rattled and whistled as you held onto the standing rail for support, your other hand gripped a rumpled sheet of paper. Eyes closed, you mouthed the words that had been memorized for days, playing the scene over and over in your mind. To any observe you looked ludicrous, but the only thought you could care about was getting that one line right.

“Damn it.” you mumbled when you looked down at your script to see that you had flipped two sentences.

Completely engrossed in your own world, you didn’t notice that the subway train had stopped, nor the tall man that stood before you impatiently tapping his foot and glaring daggers at you. With a scoff, you stepped by so that he was able to squeeze through the doors right before they closed with a ‘whoosh,’ though you didn’t miss the subtle finger he gave you. Some people were just assholes.

However, the man was pushed out of your mind a moment later when you realized, as the train began to move again, that you had missed your stop. Panic consumed you and one glance at your phone told you that you were already pushing making it to your audition on time. Jittery for the next few minutes, you ran out of the subway car as soon as the doors opened at the next stop and bolted up the stairs onto the busy, New York sidewalks.

Dodging against the flow of pedestrian, left and right, you saw that you only had minutes to make it to the theater on time. With your mind focused on the destination, you didn’t see the woman with a tray of iced coffees headed your way until they were spilled down the front of your white shirt. There wasn’t anything that could be done, and you ran away shouting an apology over your shoulder, speeding up when you saw the theater in sight.

Slightly sweaty, out of breath, and with a stained shirt, you shrugged the cardigan you had shoved into your purse on and handed your headshot and resume to the assistant collecting them in the lobby. He gave you an unimpressed looked at your tardiness, but still lead you back to the waiting room where other actresses sat for their turn to impress the higher-ups.

When you walked in the room there was a table full of producers and directors absorbed in their phones, fingers flurrying across their screens, not even given you a second glance. Once you cleared your throat, one of them looked up and nudged the others around her to signal that there was another ‘wannabe’ actress in the room. With a deep breath, you started the scene you had been practicing for days.

“And I swear to God, she was wrecked. It was pure lunacy. Oh God, I know…” you began the scene you knew by heart, phone up to your ear in faux conversation. “No, no, Turner’s fine. So, you- are you waiting ‘til Denver to tell her?” you recited, your smile tightening up as you let your character’s emotions begin to take over, though the fear that ran through you was 100 percent yours. “No, you’re right. I understand.” you said, tears shining in your eyes. “No, I’m happy for you, I just-“

“One second.” you were suddenly interrupted by one of the casting directors as he motioned for another figure to join the room.

As you stood vulnerable before these strangers, they had the audacity to treat you like a movie they could simply press pause on when it was time to place their dinner order. Holding your fake, and soon to be very real tears, you watched as the exchange took place before someone noticed you were still there.

“Uh, thank you.” the one director interrupted. “We’ve heard enough.” she told you and gestured for the door.

“Um, o-okay.” you mumbled with an incredulous look and tried to exit with what little pride you could muster. Out in the waiting room, you saw a handful of other women that looked exactly like you, and you sighed as you shrugged off your jacket, not caring if everyone saw your coffee stained top. No matter how much you practiced or how confident you felt, there was always another actress ready to one-up you, or an assistant ready to interrupt your audition.

Another subway ride later and you made it back to your apartment, kicking off your shoes before you flopped dramatically onto your bed. It had been such a long day between waitressing and another failed audition, that in that moment the only thing that sounded appealing was a hot shower. However, once you stepped out of the shower, it wasn’t long before your roommates barged into the bathroom door, disrupting your pity party.

“Where’s the sauna?” Nat asked with a laugh as she opened the door to the steamed-up bathroom.

“I was trying to give you a dramatic entrance.” you told her over your shoulder on the way back to your room.

On the way there, you ran into Wanda who gave you a hopeful smile. “How’d the audition go, y/n?” The grimace you gave her was all she and Natasha needed to know as they shared a look. “Well you are coming to the party tonight, right?” Wanda asked as you closed your bedroom door.

“I’m not going.” you called out, wincing slightly at their shrieks of protest.

The two rushed to your door and pounded furiously until you emerged, now donned in sweats and a sleep shirt, ready to spend the night with your latest Netflix binge. That was, until Natasha and Wanda cornered you in your own room, grilling you about the party.

“Come on it’s going to be so much fun. A party thrown by Tony Stark and we’re invited! Besides, when else are we going to see New York’s finest all in one room?” Wanda teased as Natasha looked through your wardrobe.

“I don’t want to go.” you repeated. “It’s just gonna be full of social climbers and I don’t feel like ass kissing all night.”

“But you have the perfect dress.” Nat teased as she pulled out a dress that had sat in the back of your closet for months, never having the right time to where it. “You’ve got the invitation.” she told you.

“You’ve got the right address.” Wanda chimed in, and the two pulled you up from the bed, the dress pressed up against your frame.

“Come on, y/n. Someone in the crowd could be the one you need to know. What do you have to lose?” Nat pressed. “Directors and producers galore, looking for you to star in their next show.” she said as she framed the scene dramatically.

“I think I’ll stay behind.” you told them with a shrug and pushed your roommates out so they could get ready.

Only a few minutes later you heard Nat and Wanda call out a goodbye quickly followed by the door closing behind them. As the silence of your apartment surrounded you, the thoughts began to swirl in your head. Yes, the audition today didn’t go as planned, but when had that stopped you in the past. Maybe the perfect part was waiting for you at that party. With a new sense of determination, you threw the dress and some heels on and rushed to catch up with your friends.

Nat and Wanda heard the clack of heels behind them and stopped to watch you approach. “Get it, girl!” Nat cheered as they gave you a moment to show off your dress before the three of you linked arms and pranced towards Tony Stark’s apartment complex.

Travelling through the city surrounded you with bright lights, neon signs, and an atmosphere that made anything feel possible. The party was in full swing when the three of you stepped out of the elevator, and you weren’t sure where to look first between the decadent decorations and glamorous people. Wanda quickly dragged you to the bar to grab a drink, but it wasn’t long until you found yourself separated.

While you tried to keep an optimistic attitude, the longer you were around these people, the faster the walls of silver and gold that had been built up in your mind began to deteriorate. Instead of New York’s finest in the room, you saw sleazy, cheating elites, and when you wouldn’t give them what they wanted, they were quick to move on to their next, potential victim.

Finding the bathroom, you stepped away from the noise and chaos and reveled in the cooler, silent air for a few minutes. Clenching the porcelain sink, you stared in the mirror and wondered what you were doing there? Did you really expect to just be offered at a part by going to a party? You scoffed at the notion, knowing that out in the party, there were so many that shined brighter than you, and you were just another crowd chaser.

When would this end, and could you truly find what you were looking for in New York City? As a young girl, the city seemed so magical and full of hope. It was like a flame and you were the foolish moth who had packed up from the only home you’d ever known and tried to create a whole new life. But, just maybe, this wasn’t the city for you, maybe the flame had burned you too many times. There just had to be a place where you’d find you who were going to be.

It wasn’t long until you tried to find Wanda and Natasha to let them know you were going to leave. While they offered to leave with you, you knew they were enjoying themselves and didn’t want to ruin that. Instead, you grabbed your phone to call an Uber, but groaned when you saw no available drivers were near you for at least another twenty minutes. Deciding the subway would be quicker, and cheaper, you began to walk towards the closest station.

On your way there, you noticed a class or gathering of some sort going on under some tents in the park off to your side, but it was the art that lined the entrance to the class that caught your attention. The sign advertised one of those classes where people paid to paint along with the instructor to feel like an artist for the night. However, the examples displayed held so much more depth and detail than your typical skyline of New York. Whoever had painted these was wasting their time with these classes and deserved to be in a museum. Each one looked like it had taken ages and it was in a style you weren’t really familiar with, but one that sparked something warm and inviting within you.

Glancing up, you watched a tall, blonde man, hunched over his easel as he was sucked into the moment and threw colors across the canvas. While you couldn’t see the picture, you guessed it was just as wonderful as the others, and the way his eyes were slanted in concentration made you smile. Even when a man, who you assumed to be his boss for the evening, approached the artist and began to scold him, you couldn’t look away. When you looked at his art, you felt something, and you needed to let him know.

The two of you locked eyes from across the way, and you felt your body bring you closer to him. As soon as he was in earshot, you were ready to sing his praise. “I just saw your art, and I-“ you began before he bumped into your shoulder as he walked away.

There was a moment of confusion in your mind as you stood there and stared where the man had just so rudely brushed by you, until you scoffed and continued towards the subway.

#steve rogers x reader #steve rogers imagine #marvel x reader #marvel imagine #captain america x reader #captain america imagine #steve rogers imagines #marvel imagines #captain america imagines #la la land series

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photolover82 · 5 years ago

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The Masked Singer Season 3 Episode 16: The Finale/The Winner is Announced (Commentary & Reveals)

Hello fellow lovers of the Masked Singer. Welcome to the last Ana’s Masked Recap of Season 3 (don’t worry I will be back for season 4 in the fall... hopefully, depending on how busy I am). In the meantime, I am probably going to do more recaps of other shows (maybe AGT or World of Dance since they are starting up next week, let me know if you want to see that, I have no idea how I will do it but I will give it a shot) Anyways, for the last time *sheds a tear*, let’s freaking do this: (P.S. they are spoilers just a warning for y’all & I will be revealing them as I go similarly to the format of when eliminated contestants are revealed episode by episode, oh & we are still doing PANEL SPOTLIGHTS woohoo but this time we are gonna give all the judges’ guesses & reward them with a 🏆 or give them the 💩 emoji)

Alright, first & foremost, we have the mask that came in 3rd place, who was:

*DRUMROLL PLEASE*

THE FROG

Performance: To be honest, his performance of “Bad Boy For Life” by P. Diddy was probably the worst performance of the night, only because there wasn’t any improvement. It was the same kind of performances that he has been doing, which makes sense why he got 3rd place. However, I do gotta give him credit because rapping ain’t easy & he is a great dancer so congrats to him on being in the finals.

Having said that, the frog was revealed to be:

*DRUM ROLL PLEASE*

BOW WOW (AKA SHAD MOSS)

Yup, guessed it since his first performance! It was pretty obvious due to the clues & here are the latest set of clues:

Road to Finals Clues

Australian Flag= hosts R&B Friday Nights, an Australian night time radio show

Toy car with a 9 on it= reprising his role on the 9th Fast & Furious movie

likes shade no matter how you say it= reference to his real name Shad

Finale Clues

People saying things about him on social media= he has a problem with people trolling him on social media (i.e. the Bow Wow Challenge)

Playing Basketball= he was in the movie Like Mike

PANEL SPOTLIGHT AKA PANEL’S FINAL GUESSES:

Jenny: Lil Romeo 💩

Ken: Kid Cudi 💩

Robin: Bow Wow 🏆🏆 (2 because he came up with it & said it for weeks)

Nicole: Bow Wow 🏆 (she just rode Robin’s coat tails but whatever I'll still give it to her... even though she at first said MC Hammer which was a terrible guess)

Alright, now onto our runner-up who was:

*SAD DRUMROLL*

THE TURTLE 🥺😢

Performance: OK I am so upset about this one, because I feel (and a lot of people I saw on social media felt the same way as me so I don’t feel as dumb for feeling this) that he had the best performance of the night with Before You Go by Lewis Capaldi and he should’ve won honestly. He was the most vocally diverse on the show, he legit gave me chills & if it were based on talent, he would’ve won. This is genuinely the first season in which I don’t agree with who the winner is. In my heart, Turtle won but he didn’t get the trophy. Actually never mind let me give him a trophy: 🏆, here ya go, you deserve all the love in the world & I genuinely am a big fan of you with or without the mask.

Having said that, let’s get into who he was unmasked (someone who I am still a huge fan of... the same feeling I have towards Astronaut I have towards him):

*DRUMROLL PLEASE*

JESSE FREAKING MCCARTNEY

(Yes I said freaking because I am hyping him up, btw he came out with a new single, it’s called Friends & it slaps, I 100% recommend it if you are a fan of the Turtle like myself)

Ok, again, I saw this coming, I’ve listened to his music since the Disney Channel days (around like his Beautiful Soul days... 2004-2006 or so) so I recognized his voice immediately & I did some clue digging... and here are the latest set of clues:

Road to Finale Clues:

Chocolate Chip Cookies= voiced Theodore in Alvin & the Chipmunks

Surfboard= played a surfer in Summerland & won Teen Choice Awards

Finale Clues:

entered next phase of life with new Mrs. Turtle= got engaged last year

PANEL SPOTLIGHT AKA PANEL’S FINAL GUESSES:

Jenny: Jesse McCartney 🏆

Ken: Nick Jonas 💩

Robin: Adam Lambert 💩💩 (worst guess ever... does he even know Adam Lambert’s voice?)

Nicole: Jesse McCartney 🏆

Now, time to introduce to you, the winner of Season 3 of The Masked Singer:

*DRUMROLL PLEASE*

THE NIGHT ANGEL

Performance: Ok, yes, she’s the first female to ever win The Masked Singer & congrats to her for that, that’s amazing, girl power (I am a girl myself so I love that). However, her performance of River Deep, Mountain High by Tina Turner wasn’t anything groundbreaking nor was it enough to beat the Turtle. I can say that about her performances in general. They are great, but they aren’t anything spectacular. Not saying that she sucks by any means, she is a great singer, I just don’t think she won based on talent alone, but probably because she is a female & they wanted a woman to win the show this season since men have won twice before. I am a bit disappointed, this is the first time I don’t agree with the winner of the show & it makes me sad because I am the first person to want a woman to win, but this time I don’t feel like it was deserved. It is what it is though, no hate towards her by any means.

Having said that, the winner of the Golden Mask trophy was revealed to be:

*SUSPENSEFUL DRUM ROLL PLEASE*

KANDI BURRUSS

Again, this was not surprising at all! It was pretty obvious due to the clues & here are the latest set of clues:

Road to Finale Clues

Party Hat= did a song called Tardy for the Party

“Rights, Gates, Board” = Bills, Bills, Bills reference

Finale Clues

Having kids= Kandi has 3

PANEL SPOTLIGHT AKA PANEL’S FINAL GUESSES:

Jenny: Kandi Burruss 🏆

Ken: Teisha Campbell 💩

Robin: Kandi Burruss 🏆

Nicole: Taraji P Henson 💩(she was way too confident on this one, and she was way like way off)

Oh wow! It's the end, I cannot believe it! I just want to say thank you to anyone who has read any of these posts, I work really hard on them so it makes me happy to see people liking them or reposting them or even reading them in general. I genuinely am a fan of this show & all I say is just my opinion, for fun & entertainment purposes, so if you have a different opinion, that’s cool, let me know what it is & we can chat about it. Alright, so that’s a wrap for season 3, and hopefully next week I will see you guys with another show recap! BYE!!

#the masked singer #frogmask #bow wow #turtlemask #jesse mccartney #nightangelmask #kandi #season 3 finale

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catz4444 · 6 years ago

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Two Hearts Are Better Than One Chapter One

Two Hearts Are Better Than One

Prologue

A blue box floated in the vastness of space. Within her four exterior walls was impressive technology that could shake any human’s perspective on reality and space, and an ability to travel through time and space. Even more impressive than the technology and the boxes capabilities though was the lonely man that the box had stolen.

He was alone again. He often was alone, even though he sometimes had companions.

He was the last of his kind. The very last of the once great race known as the Time Lords. Anyone else would break under the all of the loss that this man had gone through, but the Doctor was stronger than his loss. Still, some moments the loss and loneliness was overwhelming and overpowering and he wanted only to succumb to his sorrow. He often wished for a more permanent companion who would not leave him as all of his companions in the past had.

“Where to now?” the Doctor asked the TARDIS as he stroked her console.

The TARDIS hummed, seemingly trying to come up with a time and place to cheer up her Time Lord. They were connected, her and her Time Lord, and she could feel his pain. It was nearing the level of pain that he felt directly after the Time War. The pink and yellow human known as both Rose Tyler and Bad Wolf had saved the Doctor when the Doctor saved her from mannequins in the shop Rose worked in. She gave him a reason to show off and see the happy things in life. They once again saved each other when Rose absorbed the time vortex into herself to save him and he did the same to save her, but now Rose was gone.

The loud red human called Donna came to the Doctor suddenly. She appeared within the TARDIS and pulled the Doctor out of his sadness of losing Rose by distracting the lonely Time Lord. The distraction did not last long though, as Donna declined his offer for her to travel with him. The Doctor was once again alone.

Before the TARDIS could pinpoint a destination, the Doctor stumbled backwards with a shocked cry. Another presence brushed against his mind. It wasn’t just the presence of any mind though, it was a distinctly gallifreyan. It was the mind of a juvenile male gallifreyan to be more precise. It was strangely familiar, yet somehow different. Before the Doctor could try to properly contact the young Time Lord, however, the Doctor was forcibly thrown away from the younger’s mind. The only thing left from the brief contact was a strong sense of fear and panic.

“What? How? What?” He exclaimed as he ran around the console of the TARDIS trying to lock onto the traces of the mental signal before it was gone.

“It can’t be possible,” The Doctor said, hoping he was wrong. It had to be some sort of trap or a cruel lie, but it couldn’t be. Nothing could so accurately imitate the mental call of a young gallifreyan in such distress.

“No, no, no!” The Doctor hit the control panel. “How can we not track the signal?”

The Doctor began wildly typing in coordinates with only the vaguest idea of where the boy could be. Even if his search took years, he would find him. The you Time Lord was in trouble and here was a possibility that the Doctor wasn’t the last anymore.

“Maybe I’ve just finally lost the last of my sanity,” The Doctor said. Only a few seconds after saying those words, he threw the lever to set him on his search. “But I have to try.”

Chapter One

It had been a progression of many things that led to thirteen-year-old Harry Potter flying on the back of a Hippogriff with Hermione in an attempt to save his innocent godfather. So many things had went wrong that year, just like they had in the two years before it, but everything in the rescue seemed to be going well.

The two teenagers had managed to save Buckbeak the Hippogriff from an unjust execution. The only things that the two friends had left to do of their plan was to first pass the Hippogriff off to Sirius and then return to the hospital wing before they were found missing. Harry was saddened that Sirius would have to go on the run, but without Pettigrew as evidence they would be unable to clear Sirius’ name. At least with Sirius away and alive they would have a chance to find a way to clear his name later.

Buckbeak was flying high into the air as they soared over the forbidden forest towards the direction of the tower that Sirius was being held in when the plan went askew. Hermione was sitting behind Harry, holding onto his back tightly to try to still her racing heart, when her fear of flying was proven logical. A strong gust of wind picked up causing the large Hippogriff to tip sideways. Buckbeak quickly righted himself, but not before the two riders slipped off.

Hermione screamed and almost lost her grip on Harry entirely before Buckbeak grabbed her in his strong talons. The only thing that was keeping Harry from falling to his death was his too large shirt which Hermione had clutched in her hands.

“Harry!” Hermione shrieked. “I can’t hold on to you! You’re slipping!”

Harry tried to swing around and grab onto Hermione’s arm, but his blind grab missed and he was only able to grab the time turner which had fallen out of Hermione’s shirt during the fall. Harry’s sudden movement only managed to make the situation worse. Hermione lost her grip on Harry’s shirt. The chain of the time turner snapped and Harry went plummeting, possibly to his death, for the second time that year. This time, however, there was no headmaster there to save Harry. All that he had was a small time turner that he held against his chest as he fell into the forest below.

Harry tumbled as he fell and slammed into many tree branches. The thinner branches gave way with loud cracks as he hit them, but the larger ones were not as kind. When Harry hit one of the large branches, the impact was enough to shatter the time turner in his hand. The glass from it was driven into his chest dangerously close to his heart. The time sand entered with the glass and made its way into his bloodstream.

Harry fell around ten more feet before he finally hit the ground. He laid on his back, breathing shallowly. The pain in his body was intense. He figured that he must have multiple broken bones and possibly a concussion. Just as Harry began to try to take in the full scope of his injuries, a pain greater than all of the injuries combined tore through his chest.

The golden time sand had reached Harry’s heart and was being pumped all throughout his body. Every cell in his body was being destroyed and rewritten. The pain was intolerable and Harry was no stranger to pain. The worst pain of all ripped through his chest. It felt like his heart was being ripped in two.

As Harry slowly awoke the sound of running water filled his ears along with other sounds of the night. Harry inhaled sharply. His lungs didn’t inflate, but he still felt something in his body fill with air. His pulse quickened to a rate which should have killed him and he felt beating coming from both sides of his chest.

Harry’s eyes fluttered open and although he knew that he lost his glasses in the fall, he was able to see and take in more details than he ever had before. He could see every vein in every leaf on every branch on every tree. Looking past the trees, he could see the stars in the sky brighter and clearer than ever before. Names that he couldn’t recall learning floated through his head for them.

In a state of near panic, Harry tried to bring his focus back to his current location on Earth. He quickly found that that was the wrong decision. Figures and knowledge flooded his mind. He suddenly knew his exact location in not only Scotland, or the Earth, but the entire solar system. He registered how fast the Earth was spinning and revolving and exactly how many seconds it had been since he had passed out.

It was all too much for the teenager. He called out, both vocally and subconsciously in his mind, for help. Although the cry from his mouth went unanswered, he quickly felt another mind brush up against his own.

It was ancient and powerful, full of loss and rage. But it was also kind and held a promise of help. The brush of the other mind against Harry’s own felt both comforting and foreign. After only a few seconds of being connected, Harry yanked himself away from its touch in fear.

Harry sat up and tried to focus on the reason that he was in the forest to begin with instead of anything that had happened since his fall. He managed to block out the overload of information as he pulled himself to his feet, using a small tree for support.

Harry tried to take a step forward but instead fell to his knees. He pulled himself back up and tried again, this time managing to get a few feet away from where he had landed from the fall.

Harry walked through the forest in the direction he knew that Hogwarts would be. A nagging feeling in the back of his mind was telling him that something was wrong, but he didn’t register what it was until he heard the howl come from his Defence professor. Harry had gone back in his own timeline again during the fall.

Harry came to a clearing and saw his past self standing with Hermione, Ron, and Professor Snape as Lupin turned into a wolf. He quickly hid behind a large tree, knowing instinctively that his past self seeing him there would be disastrous. From his position behind the tree, Harry was still able to see Lupin and the rat.

The rat.

Suddenly Harry had an idea. He saw Pettigrew take off in the distraction of Lupin’s transformation. Harry took off after him, his veins and mind full of adrenaline.

The teenager reached for his wand but decided not to test it yet at the last moment. He instead bolted ahead of Pettigrew, managing to get ahead of the rat without being seen.

“Got’cha,” Harry said as he grabbed the rat off of the ground.

Pettigrew started squealing and screeching in Harry’s grasp, but with a quick thought, Harry willed him to be silent and still.

Harry tried not to spend too much time wondering about what he tried to reason away as wandless magic. He instead stuffed the rat in his pocket and made his way back through the forest towards Hogwarts. He stopped just within the forest and waited until he knew for certain that he had passed the point that his past self had fallen.

During the time that he waited, Harry tried to take in what had happened to him. The fall should have killed him. Even if he had managed to survive it, he should have died of the injuries that he had sustained before anyone could find him. What he should most definitely not have been able to do was walk away on his own.

Harry turned his focus inside. He found that he had more control of both his respiratory and circulatory system than he ever had before. Harry tried to take his pulse but found not the rhythm that he was used to, but a strange new one.

Harry began to panic once again. He swiftly veered his mind away from his present line of thought. Those thoughts were stored away for a later time, almost successfully dammed up in the back of his brain.

Once Harry knew that exactly enough time had passed, he continued on to the castle. He made his way to the top of the tower where he and Hermione had planned to land and say goodbye to Sirius. Both his godfather and his best friend were already there. Hermione was shakily trying to tell Sirius what had happened.

“Hermione,” Sirius said as he tried to both calm the panicking girl and understand what she was telling him. “I need for you to calm down and tell me again what happened.”

“It’s Harry,” Hermione said between sobs. “He was coming with me and he fell. Merlin! Mr. Black, he couldn’t have survived a fall from that height. He’s dead!”

“No,” Sirius said in disbelief. “I just got back to him. He couldn’t have died.”

Harry heard the end of the conversation as he came up the stairs.

“Who couldn’t have died?” Harry asked as he walked up to them from behind.

“Harry!” Hermione slammed into him for a hug causing Harry to grunt in pain. “How are you alive?”

“Careful Hermione,” Harry said as he slightly pulled away. “I’m a little sore.”

“Don’t think that you’re going to get out of answering me, Harry,” Hermione’s voice was stern, but there were tears in her eyes and a smile on her face.

“The time turner broke when I hit a tree branch,” Harry shrugged. “I got sent earlier in the night and just landed on the forest floor.”

Although the story was partially true, it didn’t answer Hermione’s question. She was too relieved to notice the logical flaws in the explanation though. Harry was thankful for that.

“Are you ok?” Sirius asked.

“Just a bit bruised,” Harry said looking down. He then noticed the blood on his shirt. “I also got a bit scratched from the glass of the time turner breaking.”

Harry didn’t know what had happened to him. He did know that he wasn’t ok though, but he was alive and if they waited too long he wouldn’t be able to say the same about Sirius. Harry pushed his problems to the side once again that night. They could wait.

“Mr. Black,” Hermione said.

“Please call me Sirius,” Sirius interrupted. “Mr. Black makes me feel old.”

“Sirius,” Hermione started again. “You need to go. Harry and I have to be back in the hospital wing soon and you can’t be here when they come to give you the kiss.”

Sirius looked apprehensive about leaving.

“You really don’t have to leave,” Harry stuck his hands in the pockets of his oversized jeans.

“What do you mean?” Hermione asked.

Harry pulled the stunned rat out of his pocket and held it up by its tail.

“I can’t believe it!” Sirius exclaimed. His grey eyes widened in his skeletal face.

At the same time, Hermione looked at Harry in shock. “You aren’t supposed to medal with time.”

“This was ok to change,” Harry said, and somehow he knew that it was true. “We should probably bring the rat to Dumbledore before the aurors come for Sirius.”

Sirius transformed and followed the two teens to the hospital wing, leaving the hippogriff hidden on the roof. They arrived just before Dumbledore locked the door.

“I take it that you were successful?” The old headmaster asked before he saw the black dog following behind them. “What’s this?”

“Sir,” Hermione said. “We need to go to your office.”

Harry once again held up the rat.

“It seems that we do,” Dumbledore said as he led the way to his office. “It also seems that I have some aurors to call.”

Events moved swiftly after the aurors were called. The head of the department, Amelia Bones, showed up on the case first. Minister Fudge came as soon as he found out. The minister spent the rest of the time both trying to cover his rear and insisting that Black was guilty. Sadly for Fudge, with Pettigrew in custody, there was little to no doubt about Sirius’ innocence to any of the aurors. Harry and Hermione were questioned indepthly and Sirius’s name was cleared of all charges within an hour.

“Could you inform Mr. Black that the charges against him have been dropped and the kiss order has been called off?” Bones asked. “We’ll just need him to come in so that he can be officially exonerated.”

After she said that, Sirius came out from under Dumbledore’s desk where he had been hiding as Padfoot. He transformed back.

Fudge was outraged that Sirius had been there the entire time. He tried to say that he should be arrested for being an illegal animagus and any other crime that he could accuse Sirius of. His accusations, of course, fell on deaf ears and Bones simply told Sirius to register when St. Mungos declared him healthy enough.

Sirius flooed to the ministry with Bones, Fudge, and Dumbledore. Harry and Hermione were reluctantly left behind.

“You should go to the hospital wing and let Madame Pomfrey check you,” Hermione’s words barely registered to Harry.

“I’m fine ‘Mione,” Harry assured her. “I’m just really tired. I think I’m just going to go up to the dorm and sleep for a while.”

It took a few more minutes of insisting that he was just tired for Hermione to let him go. During that time, Harry’s focus began to slip. The parts of his mind that he had suppressed started to slip past their bindings. Thoughts and theorems and things that he shouldn’t know began rushing through his head.

Hermione said that she was going to go and check on Ron. After she left for the hospital wing, Harry somehow managed to make his way back to Gryffindor tower and up to his bed. He kicked his shoes off and climbed in.

As soon as Harry’s head hit the pillow, he was asleep, but even in sleep, Harry couldn’t escape what had happened to him. His time of rest was filled with dreams that seemed more like memories.

He saw burnt orange skies and silver trees. Domed cities, and academies. People in silly hats, and otherworldly creatures. All of that, however, was just the beginning.

#Harry Potter #doctor who #Doctor Who fanfiction #harry potter fanfiction #time lord harry potter #10th doctor #harry potter doctor who #Sirius Black #Martha Jones #TARDIS

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Doctor Who: Ranking Every Single Companion Departure

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Graham and Ryan have left Doctor Who, and it was sad/joyous/on telly (delete as applicable), but where do their departures rank on the all-time list?

The question of “Who counts as a companion?” is a tricky one. Overall it’s an ad hoc combination of different criteria, with allowances made for the exceptions that are intended to fulfil the companion role on a one-off basis. The ranking system is based on whether the departure makes sense for that character, how well it’s built up to, and what it says about Doctor Who in a larger sense. The article only covers TV stories because I value what remains of my sanity.

That’s all the exposition. Please enjoy this non-linear history of production compromises.

47. Peri

Peri spends almost her entire time on Doctor Who being miserable, scared and under threat (even Big Finish doing a timey-wimey farce with Peri has abuse as a plot point), but there’s no compassionate release for her. Her mind is erased so her body can host another. She dies scared and alone, and it’s unlikely the Doctor could have saved her. While this is horrible, it could function, very bluntly, as an indictment of the Doctor and his treatment of Peri, but then it is revealed that this didn’t happen.

Peri is instead married with a pink love-heart around the flashback (the Matrix is corny AF apparently). This is because producer John Nathan-Turner changed his mind about killing Peri after they’d filmed her death.

On one hand: yay, someone not dying. On the other: she only goes to a slightly better place, and when companions return from the dead it tends to require some cost to the Doctor. Here, any previous suggestion that the Doctor mistreated his companion is abandoned. Peri’s happy ending, rather than death, is that the Doctor abandons her without explanation and her new husband is an angry warlord who doesn’t seem the type to understand PTSD.

46. Leela

Producer Graeme Williams hoped that Louise Jameson would stay on in the role of Leela, despite Jameson insisting that she was leaving, and so didn’t write the character out. Leela was a warrior, intelligent but steeped in tribal superstition, and the investment in making a potentially problematic character work in her earlier stories gave way to more generic writing, hence Jameson’s departure. At the end of ‘Invasion of Time’ Leela abruptly announces that she wants to marry the Captain of the Time Lords’ Guards.

To borrow a term from critical theory: this is total f****** dogs***.

Jameson was happy for the character to be killed off but instead she ended up married on Gallifrey. We never see her again. It’s a lazy piece of writing; disrespectful to the actress, the character and the viewer.

45. Dodo

Poor Dodo never really stood a chance. Originally intended to be from Sixteenth Century France, producer John Wiles and script editor Donald Tosh remembered that previous historical companions had been deemed unworkable and so another was probably a bad idea. Instead, Dodo started off Cockney until the BBC told the Doctor Who team that she had to speak in Received Pronunciation English.

A happy-go-lucky soul, the production team never warmed to their creation and Dodo is sent away to recover from hypnosis halfway through ‘The War Machines’, and we never see her again. Polly tells the Doctor “she’d like to stay here in London and sends you her love” two episodes after her final appearance.

44. Sergeant Benton & 43. Harry Sullivan

Sergeant Benton and Harry Sullivan appear in ‘The Android Invasion’ as if it’s just another story for them. Benton last appears as an android duplicate and Harry says nothing during the final fight scene. They never appear again. For all of the strengths of early Tom Baker stories, emotional resonance is not one of them.

42. Katarina

Katarina was brought in for the final episode of ‘The Myth Makers’as a replacement for Vicki, and then sacrificed herself in ‘The Dalek Master Plan’. The production team had decided that, as a Trojan handmaiden, Katarina’s ignorance of modern and future technology meant she’d be hard to write for. This makes sense to an extent, except that her death involves her activating an airlock. So we have a production team creating a problem but solving it by suggesting that it wasn’t insurmountable anyway. As the Doctor says at the end of ‘Dalek Master Plan’: “What a waste.”

41. Sara Kingdom

Having killed off Katarina, the production team needed a new companion to fill her role for the rest of ‘The Dalek Master Plan’, so Terry Nation wrote in a Space Security Agent inspired by The Avengers’ Cathy Gale. After killing her own brother, believing him to be a traitor, Sara Kingdom joined the Doctor and Steven’s attempts to stop the Daleks from using the Time Destructor. Ultimately Sara is killed by the device, ageing to death. As the planet around them turns to dust, Sara’s body does likewise and is blown away by the wind.

It’s a horrific fate, to the extent that cuts were made to the sequence. Sara Kingdom was always designed as a short-term companion, and actor Jean Marsh wasn’t interested in joining the show permanently.

Companion deaths aren’t intrinsically a bad idea, it’s just that they can’t be regular, expected events or else the show becomes ‘Come with me for an adventure, you’ll probably die. Yes I’m a psychopath’. They’re usually short-term solutions to mistakes but the momentum of the Doctor’s failures here could have gone somewhere. Instead, the show casually resets itself to the status quo on a flimsy pretext, so these deaths mean little. If Doctor Who doesn’t care about their impact, why should the audience?

40. Liz Shaw

New producer Barry Letts had decided that Liz Shaw was too intelligent to be a Doctor Who companion, and the interpretation most generous to Letts here is that Liz wanted to continue her own work rather than be drafted by UNIT as an assistant. While I hope this was the intention, it’s still a move that implies a reductive take on the role of the companion (that they’re a function rather than a character) and reinforces the paternalism of the Doctor: fatherly, yes, but also dominating and controlling.

39. Polly and Ben

Polly and Ben follow the Doctor into the TARDIS in ‘The War Machines’ and discover at the end of ‘The Faceless Ones’ that they’re back in London just when they left. They ask the Doctor his permission to leave, saying they’ll stay if he needs them. The Doctor is sad to see them go but doesn’t stand in their way, although he does suggest that Ben can go back to the Navy to become an admiral and Polly can… look after Ben.

It’s a pat, patronising little scene that comes and goes suddenly, especially as Polly and Ben haven’t actually been in the story since Episode Two. Polly and Ben leave and the Doctor and Jamie immediately start talking about their next adventure. The production team had decided the characters weren’t working, and the best you can say is that they were given slightly more ceremony than Dodo.

38. Astrid Peth

The thing about Astrid’s death is that it’s impossible to type ‘She pushes a mugging gold-toothed businessman down a ravine using a fork-lift truck (in slow motion)’ in a way that conveys any sense of pathos. People talk about Andrew Cartmel’s time on Doctor Who influencing Russell T. Davies’ approach, and while they’re wrong (RTD would have written it like that anyway, even if the Cartmel era didn’t exist, but fair play to Cartmel for being on that wavelength) few ever mention ‘Time and the Rani’as an influence. Russell T. Davies’ writing sometimes feels like he’s gleefully trying to combine the tone of Sylvester-McCoy-playing-the-spoons-on-Kate-O’Mara-while-Kate-O’Mara-is-dressed-as-Bonnie-Langford, with the opening ten minutes of Up. Sometimes he actually does it! This was not one of those times.

37. Adric

The Davison companions tend to get good leaving stories that are apparently based on some unbroadcast version of Doctor Who in which they’re completely different people.

So on one hand obviously the death of Adric was a memorable piece of television that affected people deeply on broadcast, but on the other hand it’s a glorified jump-scare. Adric is on board a space freighter about to crash onto prehistoric Earth and cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. He doesn’t know about that last bit, so instead of getting into the escape pod he attempts to solve a logic puzzle that is stopping him from controlling the ship. His bravery in going back to the ship doesn’t achieve anything. In fact if he had succeeded it would have changed history dramatically, so he dooms himself for nothing.

It’s brutal, in comparison with earlier companion deaths the emotional fallout is poorly handled, and it doesn’t pay off anything we’ve seen earlier. Consider Adric’s character up until his final story – a reckless know-it-all who keeps joining the bad guys – and it doesn’t join up with his final story and fate. The initial setup of Adric feeling like an outsider is swiftly resolved rather than used as motivation for his death. There’s no redemption, just a cruel and unlucky moment of bravery for the sake of a semblance of drama.

36. Amy and Rory

Steven Moffat’s first companion departures are not his best work. Initially Amy and Rory broke a trend: companions leaving as they get married off. Only then Moffat wrote a poorly handled pregnancy storyline where the characters’ emotional responses felt implausible, and unlike his softening of the Twelfth Doctor’s character the attempts to address this were bumpy. Then for Amy and Rory’s departure he has River Song, the Doctor’s wife who he rarely meets in chronological order, tell them that he doesn’t like endings and “never let him see you age”.

This reminds you that the Doctor isn’t only manipulative and scheming on an epic scale, and the fact that he tries to convince Amy not to try to go after Rory continues is more in-your-face selfishness (another example of the Seventh Doctor era being on similar wavelengths to the post-2005 show), rather than feeling like a genuine concern for her safety.

Now, I love Doctor Who, I like that the hero is flawed but that they try to be hopeful (and Moffat addresses this successfully elsewhere). The issues with giving the Doctor flaws are whether they’re dealbreakers for people watching, and whether or not they’re deliberately done. This feels like it’s aiming for a commentary on the Doctor but goes too far, and I can understand people finding this hard to watch.

As with many of Moffat’s ideas, just because it didn’t fully work here doesn’t mean it won’t crop up again later.

35. Kamelion

There are a lot of cases of a companion leaving because the production team can’t make them work, but this is a bit on the nose.

Like Adric’s death, Kamelion begging the Doctor to destroy him would have much more impact if it followed through more substantially on previous stories. Unfortunately Kamelion’s character was that of a shape-shifting robot where the robot prop didn’t work, and rather than have him just assume a human guise they simply never wrote him back into the series until his final story. As a result, there’s no real relationship in play when the Doctor grants Kamelion’s wish. On the other hand the robot’s plight is consistent with what little we know of him.

While it’s never fun to watch someone beg for death, it’s more of a testament to Gerald Flood’s acting and Peter Grimwade’s script for ‘Planet of Fire’ that his death scene works.

34. Donna Noble

Everyone remembers the sequence in ‘Journey’s End’ where the companions pilot the TARDIS and drag the Earth back to the right place while “Song for Freedom” builds and Freema Agyeman looks directly at the camera. It’s joyous. It’s huge. It’s wonderful.

The 10 minutes that follow are bleak.

Rose gets her compromised happy ending, then it’s the fate of Donna. She gets given some of the Doctor’s mind, becomes even more brilliant, but then comes the turn: this will kill her. She can’t be this brilliant, she can’t have any more adventures with the Doctor. As she shouts “No” the Doctor wipes her memories of their time together.

33. Lady Christina de Souza

Flying off in a knackered double-decker bus to further adventures is a really good way to go. This would rank higher if it weren’t for the fact that the character is hard to warm to. Unlike Donna Noble’s first appearance in the show, Christina’s role in ‘Planet of the Dead’ doesn’t allow for much pathos or depth, and the character never returned on television to show these. As it is we’re left with a bored member of the aristocracy flying away in some very British iconography, but without the promise of a Barbara Wright figure puncturing their ego.

Doctor Who: Why Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor Needs an ‘Everybody Lives!’ Moment

By Andrew Blair

Doctor Who: how Ace set the template for modern companions

By Andrew Younger

32. Mel

It’s worth stressing that any critique of Mel as a character has to firmly centre on the inadequacy of her creation. She was devised as a computer programmer from Pease Pottage who was into keep-fit, and that’s her entire character. It seems churlish to criticise Bonnie Langford for playing the part as “Bonnie Langford in Doctor Who” because there was nothing else for her to go on.

Mel leaves the series because she decides to travel with Glitz, a mercenary. Does this follow on logically from her character? All we know about Mel is that she’s wholesome and enthusiastic and seems extremely unlikely to go off with a violent intergalactic Del Boy.

However, she gets another leaving scene that would be wonderful if it reflected a recognisable character. We get a sense of the Doctor’s affection for Mel and a series of wonderful melancholy moments: the Doctor shutting the conversation down so he doesn’t have to deal with human emotion, his obvious sadness at another friend leaving because that’s what his life is. Mel’s last line about putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into space (“It’ll reach you. In time”) is brilliant.

This scene bears comparison with Sarah Jane’s leaving scene, specifically because it wasn’t in the original script but the lead actor insisted it be added in its place. It was the scene Sylvester McCoy read when he auditioned for the role.

31. Adam Mitchell

Adam joins at the end of ‘Dalek’ and leaves at the end of ‘The Long Game’, the next story, and has a piece of future technology in his forehead so whenever someone clicks their fingers a little door opens up and you can see his brain.

Yes, in the grand scheme of things this is unfair. Other companions have done stupid things and the Doctor has helped them. The Brigadier flat out murdered people. But Adam was deliberately rubbish and this is reminder that the Ninth Doctor is a damaged man who lashes out. When he says ‘I only take the best’ it seems more like an excuse to get rid of Adam than anything factual, but then the Doctor starts acting like it’s true.

30. Vicki

Vicki left the series because producer John Wiles heard actress Maureen O’Brien complain about her dialogue in ‘Galaxy 4’, so decided to let her go when her contract expired one story later. This led to her being paired off with Troilus at the end of ‘The Myth Makers’, set during the fall of Troy. A late decision requiring rewrites, this is quite an enigmatic fate. We see Vicki fleeing Troy after its fall with Troilus, the Doctor hopeful that she’s safe, but we never see her again. Given the TARDIS’ translation gifts, one imagines she suddenly has to learn Luwian.

29. Nyssa

Nyssa, a scientist/fairy princess mash-up whose entire family and planet was destroyed by the Master (who took over her father’s body) could be a great character. Her innately calm, generous and curious nature contrasted with all the horrors of her past is full of potential, and indeed her choice to stay behind at what is essentially a space leper colony is consistent with this. However, because none of this is ever seriously addressed in the show, the potential pathos of her leaving is greatly reduced. As is often the case we have to make do with a sad leaving scene, where Tegan flat out says to her “You’ll die here” to which she replies “Not easily. Like you I’m indestructible.”

As with Adric’s death, there’s the vague shape of something weighty and dramatic there but without the substance to fill it. John Nathan-Turner hated soaps, but actually using their techniques might have given us a stronger sense of Nyssa and Tegan’s relationship, meaning the audience wasn’t left to fill the gaps.

28. Jackson Lake

Considering during the course of ‘The Next Doctor’ Jackson Lake is in a fugue state, has a breakdown, remembers the death of his wife and the abduction of his child… he seems quite well adjusted by the end of the story. Reunited with his son and suggesting a Christmas dinner honouring the people they’ve lost, Lake seems to be in a better place than the Doctor.

27. Steven Taylor

Steven went through a lot: Wounded in Troy, witnessing the deaths of Katarina, Sara, and the Huguenots of Paris. Initially conceived as a replacement for Ian, meaning he took on most of the action sequences, he leaves in ‘The Savages’ to mediate between two societal factions after a story designed as a more cerebral alternative to biffing. It’s a good place to leave for a character who had stagnated (which, as you can see, happened a lot).

26. Graham and 25. Ryan

Ryan didn’t get killed or converted by Cybermen, so that’s progress. What did happen is that the Doctor accidentally returned to Sheffield ten months late. Yaz is hurt and Ryan returns more comfortably to his old life. Graham is also there.

The returning character of Robertson, an American tycoon with interests in becoming President functions as both a Doctor Who villain and a Donald Trump analogue (in a story universe containing Donald Trump) and this version of Doctor Who isn’t currently capable of dealing with that. Ryan watches Robertson on telly, unpunished by the Doctor and resolves to do something. This is a good reason to go, especially given the concerns of the Chibnall era (at its best focussing on the impact on well-drawn individuals, at its worst expositing over abstractions and sketches).

Graham decides that he will stay with his grandson after Ryan’s sudden announcement. This pays off their development in Series 11, where they had the main character arc of that series.

So far so good, but we also see Graham and Ryan deciding that, actually no, they’re not going to deal with real world problems, just Doctor Who-style adventures instead. It’s a useful microcosm of the era: good ideas present but not followed through on, being not shown Ryan’s reasons for leaving, and not successfully tethering the characters to either the forced whimsy of Doctor Who or the contemporary societal issues it wants to highlight.

And a final issue, which may be resolved: why is this the break-up of The Fam?

This ending doesn’t preclude the Doctor coming back to visit them in any way. In this respect it’s a classic companion departure: practically speaking actors aren’t always free for a cameo or a return visit (for example William Russell wasn’t ultimately available to play Ian Chesterton for ‘Mawdryn Undead’, so the Brigadier was written into the role of a school teacher instead), which means the Doctor not returning for their friends becomes a feature of the character. So while Ryan and Graham are choosing to leave, rather than being drastically and permanently separated, is the Doctor is still making the decision to cut them out of her life?

24. Mickey Smith

Mickey is given, in ‘The Age of Steel’, a proper old-fashioned companion exit, by which I mean some plot points are introduced at the start of his final story and by the end they’ve caused him to leave. Here it’s based on the Doctor and Rose’s behaviour and Mickey’s worth being dismissed until he does something heroic. He’s finally able to say to Rose that she doesn’t need him anymore and move on. Broad brushstrokes stuff in a busy episode, but it continues the idea that the Doctor makes people better that was emphasised from 2005 onwards.

Sure, he does it by being a bit of a prick here but the point stands.

23. The Brigadier

What is the Brigadier’s final story? I’m looking for a story that is written as a final departure, ideally after sustained involvement in the show. For the Brigadier that means ‘Terror of the Zygons’ doesn’t quite work, it wasn’t meant to be his final story (he was unavailable for ‘The Android Invasion’). ‘Battlefield’might have been his final bow, but writer Ben Aaronovitch set up the Brigadier’s death then found he simply couldn’t kill him off. The episode the Brigadier is initially written out of the show in is ‘The Wedding of River Song’ – where the Doctor receives news of his death by phone – and this is swiftly retconned with the divisive Cyber-Brig from ‘Death in Heaven’.

These two were written after Nicholas Courtney’s death, and the first one is used for dramatic weight but is over with too quickly. The latter does show the Brigadier, even in death and converted, saving the life of his daughter and helping the Doctor before going on to possibly eternal life – as seems right and proper – but as it involves the Brigadier’s buried body being reanimated there’s an invasive element connected to a beloved figure. As with many of Steven Moffat’s ideas, just because it didn’t fully work here doesn’t mean it won’t crop up again later.

22. Turlough

Peter Grimwade deserves credit again. Given the job of writing out Turlough, Kamelion and potentially the Master while also writing in the new companion Peri, Grimwade actually makes the brief for ‘Planet of Fire’ work. Here Turlough realises early on that his home planet is involved, and by involving his family Grimwade makes the stakes personal. Turlough also gets to use his brains here, rather than just wander around with a gun looking scared.

Turlough’s departure is developed through this story, and the farewell scene is a low-key goodbye as he admits that travelling with the Doctor has made him a better person. Again, it doesn’t follow from previous episodes, as Turlough isn’t developed as a character after ‘Enlightenment’, but in the context of this story it works well.

21. Mike Yates

An example of Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks addressing how being a regular Doctor Who character might make you feel, Captain Mike Yates is shaken by his hypnosis when undercover at a petrochemical company and becomes concerned about the environment. He falls in with a plot to reduce overpopulation and restore Earth to a golden age by time scooping dinosaurs into central London, because Doctor Who, and is discharged from UNIT. He goes to a meditation centre to recover, and uncovers a sinister plot – because Doctor Who– and ultimately gets better. Yates gets an arc and closure, especially in comparison to his fellow UNIT soldiers.

20. Nardole

Nardole, chiefly a comic relief character with moments of depth, is entrusted with the task of evading the Cybermen for as long as possible while keeping a group of humans alive (a continuation from his assigned role of monitoring the Doctor). It seems likely they will eventually fall, and though this is de-emphasised to stop an already tragic episode from overloading, it’s quietly harrowing. Adric’s death shook up the children watching, Nardole’s affects the parents: the feeling of being a guardian to children in an uncertain, dangerous world is all too familiar right now.

19. Sarah Jane Smith

Sarah Jane’s departure in ‘The Hand of Fear’(written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin) comes out of the blue. An early outline for the story involved the Brigadier’s death, sacrificing himself to save the world. This was lost in development, and the story delayed while it was simplified. In the meantime Elisabeth Sladen asked to leave and for Sarah not to be the focus, married or killed off. Sarah was going to be killed off though, in a story called ‘The Lost Legion’. Script Editor Robert Holmes disliked the story, so a simplified version of ‘The Hand of Fear’returned to replace it with Holmes writing Sarah’s leaving scene. This was rewritten by Sladen and Tom Baker, with Holmes unavailable to do further rewrites. This is why Sarah’s departure is sudden. There’s no huge focus on her and then unrelated to the rest of the story the Doctor receives a summons to Gallifey where humans are not allowed (and given what happened last time he went he probably doesn’t want to take Sarah). What the scene does have is a strong sense of the unsaid to it, a sense of wistfulness akin to seeing someone else living in your childhood home.

Doctor Who Series 13: What To Expect

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18. Wilf

Essentially, if Bernard Cribbins is crying then I’m going to cry. It’s Bernard Cribbins, for god’s sake. He’s so lovable its actually weaponised against the audience, and while ‘The End of Time’ might not be to everyone’s tastes, Cribbins makes every scene he’s in work, so you’re thoroughly invested in Wilf and his responses. However, this is harks back to Susan’s departure. It’s undeniably moving that the Doctor is making this man cry with happiness… after lying to him (no mention of the safeguards he put in Donna’s mind, or that Donna didn’t want her memories wiped anyway) and who he emphasises is “not remotely important” before saying it would “be my honour” to save him. It’s said of the Doctor “words are his weapons” in ‘Hell Bent’, and the pattern emerging here is that they’re weapons he uses on his friends; when the Doctor says “I only take the best” this is not only another weapon, it’s asking the question: the best for what?

17. Bill Potts

Potentially eternal life you say? A walking dead person? Maybe keep the dead body aspect of it and this idea has legs. Bill follows the Brigadier in becoming a Cyberman, and Clara in returning from the dead to travel the universe. The images of Cyber-Bill carrying the Doctor, the reaffirmation of who Bill is, the arrival of Heather: all of these are great.

Steven Moffat was right that the show hadn’t been diverse enough in its casting, but presumably no one behind the scenes understood that there are unintended connotations to a white man telling a black woman that she can’t be angry if she wants to be accepted – as happens to Bill in ‘The Doctor Falls’ – or that Clara got a gore-free death compared to the lingering shots of Bill’s gunshot wound. There’s also ambiguity in ‘Twice Upon a Time’as to when Bill dies – in that episode she is represented by an avatar taken from a moment near death, but given everything that’s happened to Bill this could be tomorrow or in a million years’ time – so overall this one has some extreme highs and lows.

16. Romana and K9

After Mary Tamm left the show, feeling similarly to Louise Jameson that despite a strong start her character was reverting to the stock companion figure (a damsel in distress, tripping ankles, screaming for help to advance the plot that’s being explained to them) Romana regenerated with Lalla Ward taking over the role. Ward left the show as new producer John Nathan-Turner came on board, and while Romana’s departure was foreshadowed well in advance, Nathan-Turner didn’t want any soap opera elements creeping into Doctor Who, and so Romana’s farewell scene was understated and rushed against Ward’s wishes. Otherwise it’s a good exit for Romana, who refuses a summons to Gallifrey and, finding herself in another dimension, decides to go off on her own journey after her travels with the Doctor.

K9 goes with her because John Nathan-Turner hated K9. Compared to ‘School Reunion’ this is just completely dismissive, but there is at least a coda: another scene at the end of ‘Warriors’ Gate’ where K9 and Romana face their future together with optimism, and Adric asks the Doctor if Romana will be alright: “Alright? She’ll be superb.”

15. Susan Foreman

The first companion departure, and something of a template. Susan falls in love and stays behind. Actress Carole Ann Ford left as she was unsatisfied by Susan’s lack of development.

It’s the Doctor’s decision to leave Susan, his granddaughter, behind. He locks the doors on her, believing that she stands a better chance of happiness staying on Earth rebuilding after a Dalek invasion. William Hartnell didn’t want Ford to leave and channels that into his performance. A clip of this scene was used to represent Hartnell at the beginning of the twentieth anniversary special ‘The Five Doctors’, and with Susan’s fate unconfirmed after The Time War his line ‘One day I shall come back’ lands even heavier: we know he never did.

No wonder he never comes back for anybody else.

14. Captain Jack

‘The Parting of the Ways’ is Jack’s departure story as it’s his last as a regular companion before moving to Torchwood.

Torchwood was not announced until after Series 1 of Doctor Who, and so when it became clear that Jack – with his cheesy grin and action hero posturing – was going to die, it was unexpected. There’s a sense of inevitability about the Daleks killing him when everyone else is dead but, because this was a new series, it was never clear how far it would go. Maybe there’d be a last-minute reprieve. Ultimately there was, but as far as self-contained character arcs go Jack’s journey from con-man to sacrificial hero works, and if it had ended there, it’d have been on a high.

13. Adelaide Brooke

In Base Under Siege stories we have the stock character of a distrusting commander who doesn’t get along with the Doctor. A fun idea in ‘The Waters of Mars’ is ‘Hey, what if they were the companion for one episode?’

One of the less fun but still powerful ideas is also that the Doctor’s behaviour be so unnerving that this stock character would kill themselves in response. So here we have someone standing up to the Doctor as he states the laws of time “are mine, and they will obey me!” What’s interesting is that this is not dissimilar to the standard companion departure, but operating in the epic register rather than a more intimate one. The Doctor has previous on saying that companions have to leave and not giving them a choice, but here the controlling behaviour is scaled upwards to time itself. Possibly the show was not ready to explore this explicitly in a smaller scale just yet.

12. Grace Holloway

Sneaking in unnoticed is the fact that Grace Holloway, the one-off companion for the 1996 TV Movie, ends the film by kissing the Doctor at midnight under the fireworks but refusing to go with him because her experiences have given her renewed self-confidence. Grace is that rarest of things – a Doctor Who companion who gets to leave on her own terms without the Doctor being a dick about it.

11. Ian Chesterton

Ian and Barbara are the first humans in Doctor Who to explore the universe in the TARDIS, taken away by force when the Doctor kidnaps them. Initially they want to return home, but this desire fades. However, when they’re presented with a chance they take it. As a contrast to Susan’s departure, Ian and Barbara’s departure is joyful as it turns out that you cantravel with the Doctor and leave on your own terms as richer, fuller people.

10. Rose Tyler

Rose and the Doctor. The Doctor and Rose. It’s easy to lose track – amidst the melodrama, epic gestures and various tensions – of the way Series 2 sets up Rose and the Doctor being torn apart almost straight away. They’re so wrapped up in how much fun they’re having that it stops them from noticing other people’s feelings. It becomes clear that had the Doctor and Rose done this, the Torchwood Institute wouldn’t exist, so Harriet Jones wouldn’t have had a weapon to fire at the Sycorax in the preceding Christmas episode. However, the show is also telling you that Rose and the Doctor being split up is a colossal tragedy; performances, visuals and music tell you this is incredibly sad while the stories are reminding you they’ve contributed to their own downfall.

This is a companion departure with the heartbreak turned up to 11, to the point where the pretty loud “Brought this on themselves” track can get lost in the mix. Here’s the beginnings of companions burning out rather than fading away.

There’s also the unfortunate business where Rose Tyler, the beloved character who helped bring Doctor Who back as a critical and popular success, rips holes in the universe to find the man she loves.

Said man takes her back to the place she had the worst time of her life, gives her a genocidal sex clone and then quietly leaves when she’s making out with it.

9. Ace

Bearing in mind that Ace has left Doctor Who in so many different canons over the years, it’s specifically her departure in ‘Survival’ that I’m taking as her final story. I’m heavily indebted to Una McCormack’s book on ‘The Curse of Fenric’ here, as it makes the very good point that for everything that could happen to Ace – whatever fates spin-off media has in store for her – there’s nothing quite as perfect for where Ace has reached at the end of Season 26 as the promise of further adventures, the possibility of joy rather than darkness, an ellipsis rather than a full stop.

8. Barbara

Why is Barbara’s departure better than Ian’s? Because:

In ‘An Unearthly Child’ the Doctor asks them “What is going to happen to you?”, the single most important question in the entire series. Firstly because that is half the format of Doctor Who, and secondly because the other half is the same question in reverse. If Barbara Wright doesn’t happen to Doctor Who, then Doctor Who is a short lived 1960s sci-fi show about a cantankerous old git who kidnapped some school teachers (Missing presumed wiped).

7. Zoe and 6. Jamie

Zoe and Jamie both leave suddenly at the end of ‘The War Games’. Patrick Troughton was leaving and the actors decided to go with him, and that sense of an era ending bled into the fiction.

At the end of ‘The War Games’ the Time Lords are named and appear for the first time, represented by a group of solemn men in robes who wield immense and ineffable power. The Doctor is put on trial for stealing the TARDIS and interfering on other worlds. His companions are returned to a time after their first meeting with the Doctor, their memories of their travels erased. This isn’t built up to, but there’s a general sense of unease in the final few episodes and the Time Lords seem aloof enough to mete out this sort of punishment.

Jamie and Zoe try to escape with the Doctor, but when they’re recaptured he gives up. With Patrick Troughton’s Doctor this is especially shocking, and it’s only his melancholy resignation that convinces them to give up too. Zoe ends up back on a space station, and knows there’s something she can’t quite remember, but with Jamie – who has been with the Second Doctor for almost the entire incarnation – he ends up back at the aftermath of Culloden, charging a redcoat. In a kind touch, the redcoat turns and flees, suggesting Jamie might be alright in the aftermath of the battle.

Doctor Who wasn’t really huge on tearjerkers until 2005, but it was very, very good at quiet melancholy.

5. Martha Jones

Martha is in love with the Doctor. The Doctor spends the entire series pining for Rose and being oblivious to this fact.

Martha Jones puts up with a lot, looking after the Doctor while in his human John Smith guise and having to restrain herself while being continually patronised, racially abused and treated like an idiot. She then spends a year travelling the Earth avoiding capture as the Master enslaves and murders the population, holding Martha’s family captive while she does this.

So frankly when Martha says she’s leaving and the Doctor still doesn’t understand why (“Is this going anywhere?”) it’s hugely cathartic for the audience and for someone who deserved better. Some people do get to choose when being with the Doctor stops, and it’s usually great when they do.

4. Jo Grant

However muddled the reasoning behind Jo Grant’s existence, the casting was inspired. Essentially a remix of Jamie (which suggests that Jo and Liz could have worked if Jamie and Zoe did), Jo Grant wasn’t the brightest but wasn’t stupid, and was incredibly loyal and brave.

With the Doctor’s paternal streak fully activated, the production team decided that Jo falling in love and telling the Doctor “he reminds me of a sort of younger you” would be exactly what the Doctor didn’t want to hear. In contrast to Victoria’s departure and the Doctor’s selflessness there, the Doctor doesn’t do what Mike Yates does when marriage is announced (looks upset and does his best to mask it) but instead quietly slips out and drives away by himself. The fact that he leaves in a way that suggests jealousy or loneliness is a huge change; now we see the Doctor closer to Susan’s position and he does not like it.

3. Tegan

Coming at the end of ‘Resurrection of the Daleks’, where she’s seen a lot of people killed and the Doctor pick up a gun and announce that he’s going to kill Davros (who Tegan presumably hasn’t heard of), Tegan’s leaving scene is very close to being perfect.

Firstly there’s the line “It’s stopped being fun”, which begs the question of when it started being fun for her, but that’s ignorable. Secondly, and this is more about personal taste than an inconsistency in characterisation, there’s a case to be made for Less is More here. Tegan runs from the Doctor and Turlough as he begs her not to leave “like this”, which causes the Doctor to consider his actions before he and Turlough leave in the TARDIS. As it’s dematerialising, Tegan runs back in has one final line. For me it’s just a line too far, and Tegan being unable to say anything at all would have been more powerful, especially for the self-described “mouth on legs”.

However, that’s more window dressing rather than substance: the reasons for Tegan leaving are excellent: it’s a commentary on the stories and Doctor we’ve seen recently, and a plausible emotional response to them. It sets the Doctor on his way to ‘The Caves of Androzani’ where the show comes even closer than ever to paying off a sustained period of grimdark storytelling. Adric’s death might be more famous, but Tegan’s departure is much better writing from Eric Saward and deserves more plaudits for it.

2. Victoria

Actor Deborah Watling wanted to leave, and so Victoria goes in ‘Fury from the Deep’. Here the character has a plausible response to screaming at monsters and getting into trouble: she leaves. She says that she’s having a miserable time screaming and getting into trouble, but isn’t sure if she can go: her father died saving the Doctor, she’s an orphan out of her own time. The Doctor intervenes and suggests a family she can stay with.

Most importantly, the Doctor and Jamie stay an extra day to give her time to think it over, and the Doctor stresses that it must be her decision. On top of this, the final scene of the episode is the Doctor quietly trying to make Jamie feel better about her leaving. Rather than the usual one scene and gone deal we have something drawn out, stemming from character, full of warmth and empathy.

1. Clara Oswald

Potentially eternal life you say? A walking dead person? Maybe lose the dead body aspect of it and this idea has legs. ‘Hell Bent’ is a divisive episode (referential meta-commentary on Doctor Who isn’t what everyone was looking for from a season finale) and the ideas in it are incredibly pointed: the grieving Doctor overthrows Rassilon, shooting a potential ally to retrieve Clara from a moment before her death, and tries to wipe her mind to save her life, addressing the long-term trends of companion departures head on.

Rather than a Gallifreyan epic, this is focussed on one relationship and the shade it casts on the Doctor’s behaviour, all the while dancing in and around threads from other plotlines. The Doctor wanted Gallifrey back so badly, but now it’s simply a means to an end for him to bring Clara back.

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Clara’s final story is often compared to Donna’s departure because of the mindwipe element and the idea of Clara being a Doctor-like figure in her own right – here realised rather than excised – but looking at this list you can see how it harks back all the way to Susan: the Doctor thinks he knows what is best and often gets it wrong, and what seems like extreme behaviour in this story is actually pretty standard. Here he gets properly called out on this behaviour, the show finally able to address this in an intimate rather than epic setting.

The post Doctor Who: Ranking Every Single Companion Departure appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Kisekae Insights #2: The Doctors, Protags and Prototypes

These are the characters who form the core of the Kisekae Project. Of course, being a Doctor Who-inspired project, there is always the Doctor, but this Doctor is different from the Doctor you know on what I like to call BBC Doctor Who.

Introduction and origin story

Being the egotist I am, the other protagonist of the project is a character based on myself. He’s been through many incarnations under the same name, but in his final incarnation (shown above on the left), he prefers to be known as Hiroki Ichigo. He has a twin brother (on the right), who used to be known as Zhuge Liang, but for the latest revision of the Kisekae Project, prefers to be known as Parker Zhou. Imagine him as Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII, but with black hair.

In my reviews of Resolution and The Timeless Children, I outlined my origin story for the Doctor and here, I will expand and elaborate on it. No, of course he’s not the Timeless Child.

During the Time War, the Time Lords were desperate for more soldiers and resurrecting their dead wasn’t enough for them. As such, Lord President Rassilon invented a virus, suspended in Mako energy, and spread it on Earth at some points in history. While the virus would have no effect on the infected, it would sometimes result in the souls of their offspring being harvested and transported to Gallifrey, where they would become new Time Lords. The human “shells” would be left with corrupted chromosomes and/or brain activity as a result. Other humans documented these genetic and neurodevelopmental disorders over the years, resulting in what we know today as disorders like Down syndrome and autism (though I should note that the Time Lords probably didn’t cause every disorder known to mankind).

At essentially the same time, the Shinra Electric Power Company worked on the Jenova Project, injecting a number of people with Jenova cells in the process. By chance, one of those people had a child with someone who was infected with Rassilon’s virus and also a twin that they were unaware about until its birth. Unfortunately, in the present-day view of the project, Shinra had already fallen and there are no plans for a “reunion theory”.

After the twins were born, they had to be taken to another hospital due to complications. In the middle of the night, the Time Lords were extracting the child’s soul (the other babies in the nursery were chanting an angelic prayer in the process) when the twin suddenly emitted a blast of Mako energy, causing everything to go silent. In reality, that soul was knocked out of the Time Vortex and landed on Gallifrey long before the Time War. That soul became the Time Lord who would be known as the Doctor. My backstory is that he was found by Omega and raised like any other Gallifreyan.

The child would later be diagnosed with autism. Uniquely, due to the Time Lord and Jenova DNA in him coupled with whatever remnant Mako energy there was (I dunno), the child also had the ability to regenerate, but it would create another body in the process and he was also susceptible to regenerating following emotional distress (like a broken heart or something, think Takotsubo cardiomyopathy). The child would keep on living as the “archetype”, while the new body created would take on a separate identity and live as a “prototype”. The process varies each time; either the child would regenerate into the prototype and the archetype (or real self) would manifest sometime later, or the child would regenerate into his next incarnation and the prototype would manifest later. As for the twin, well, everyone forgot about him because of the Time War, so he was put up for adoption as if he were an orphan. However, he did not share his brother’s regeneration abilities. In the story, they meet each other again and basically, all is well.

So now, let’s look at the different incarnations for the Doctor and the child. Now, both of them are subject to the 12-regeneration limit, but there are some points where more than one regeneration was used. There are a couple of exceptional circumstances regarding certain regenerations, which I will elaborate when I get to them.

The different incarnations of the Doctor

Remember that the Doctor in the Kisekae Project version of Doctor Who is different to the one you know from BBC Doctor Who. In this version, there are only five numbered incarnations of the Doctor, but by this point in time, he has used up all of his regenerations. The image of the five Doctors at the top of the page is only representative of each incarnation’s main counterparts; some Doctors may have influences from other Doctors. It should be noted that these versions of the Doctor look like children because they are played by children, with the exception of the Fifth as time passed.

First Doctor (1999-2003): Based off the BBC First, Third, Fourth and Seventh (for good measure) Doctors. This is interesting as I had two actors playing him due to “child labour laws” and as such, there are two stages to this Doctor. The first one played from the start of the series, showing his first adventure off Gallifrey, to his sentencing by the Time Lords for breaking their non-interference laws. The Doctor managed to escape his trial to farewell his companions, then had his TARDIS blown up. A regeneration was used up as a result. The second actor played the following episode to the end of this Doctor’s tenure. For most of that time, he was in exile on Earth and working for UNIT. He could technically be the 1.5 Doctor, but I prefer to just refer to him as the First Doctor, like his previous incarnation. The Doctor managed to fix his TARDIS and broke the terms of his exile, which led the Time Lords to search for him again. However, after the Doctor killed the Time Lords chasing him by tricking them into destroying a city, the Time Lords annulled his sentence and they left him alone. The First Doctor would regenerate into the Second Doctor either in his final story (which has now been retconned) or in his next story, the Doctor Who TV Movie.

Second Doctor (2003-2007): Based off the BBC Second, Fourth (for good measure), Sixth and Eighth Doctors. Originally, the Second Doctor directly regenerated into the Third Doctor, but because of the 50th Anniversary, it was retconned and he regenerated into the War Doctor.

War Doctor: Literally the same as the BBC War Doctor, down to the “played by John Hurt” bit. The War Doctor regenerated into the Third Doctor at the end of The Day of the Doctor and would forget what he did to end the Time War.

Third Doctor (2008-2009): Based off the BBC Ninth Doctor because we never skip Nine. Again, there were two actors playing the Doctor, but that was because the series changed stations (it’s a thing in my version). The second actor is the more commonly-known version of the Third Doctor, though the first actor did get to play him for a season, with influences from the Seventh and Eighth (for good measure) Doctors. This is the first Doctor where the series started spinning-on other franchises and implementing characters from them, with companions such as Fifi Forget-me-not and Angelina Mouseling (from Angelina Ballerina, in case you didn’t know). Like his counterpart with Rose Tyler, the Third Doctor regenerated into the Fourth Doctor after he took the Time Vortex into himself to save Fifi.

Fourth Doctor (2010-2012): Based off the BBC Tenth Doctor. This Doctor saw the start of the anime spin-ons as characters from Lucky Star, namely Konata, Minami, Misao, Kagami and Tsukasa, were featured as companions. Reimu Hakurei, along with Sonic, Tails and Amy Rose, were also companions of the Fourth Doctor. Towards the end of this Doctor’s tenure, a second actor had to come in and take over because the original actor was unavailable, though he managed to come back and film his regeneration scene. Oh yeah, the series changed back to its previous station. The second actor like playing this Doctor so much that he wanted to do it again, so he got a spin-off series to do so. That actor also played the next and final incarnation of the Doctor along with multiple other characters, including the other protagonist and his prototypes. If you haven’t got it already, that was basically me, and I was also the showrunner and main writer.

Fifth Doctor (2012-present): Based off the BBC Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors, along with influences from the BBC Fifth and Tenth Doctors. This is, of course, the current incarnation of the Doctor and there are no further incarnations, not even a female incarnation. Eventually, this incarnation became cemented as the Infinity Doctor, though I still prefer to call him the Fifth Doctor. When the Fourth Doctor regenerated into the Fifth Doctor in The End of Time, it also created two pony versions of himself, a pony version of the other protagonist (my self-insert if you didn’t know) and separated two or three people’s souls from him. This was due to some machinations from Yuki Nagato which the Fifth Doctor later cemented as timeline splits.

You know, funnily enough, Zhuge Liang would become the Doctor in an earlier prototype of my project. It’s just as well that I like making retcons here and there, despite what I preach about artistic integrity.

The three new ponies created as a result of the Fourth Doctor’s regeneration are as follows (images to be revealed later):

Jee Gun, an Earth pony counterpart of the other protagonist. After ending up on Equestria and living a pony’s life there, he would later regenerate into Storm Dasher, a Pegasus.

Doctor Whooves, based on the Fourth (BBC Tenth) Doctor. In his final adventure he would have a meta-crisis regeneration (leading to the Doctor Whooves/Time Turner living in Equestria) before regenerating into another incarnation based on the Fifth (BBC Eleventh) Doctor.

The Pony Doctor, based on the Fifth Doctor. Though left unmentioned in the story, the one regeneration he could have used was sacrificed to facilitate Doctor Whooves’ regeneration.

The different incarnations of the child

Now let’s take a look into the incarnations of the child, the other protagonist. Instead of whatever I just did up there, I can describe some aspects of each incarnation’s personality (not that it would really matter most of the time), adventures and love life (it’s a theme in my project). Oh, by the way, each incarnation looks the same most of the time; there have been some instances where an incarnation looks different to the norm.

First incarnation: Curious, yet impatient and had difficulty socialising due to his autism. If he found something he liked, he would play with it for a long time. He had a tendency to push or hurt people in his way, which his later incarnations would generalise as “he liked to kill people”. Macabre indeed. This incarnation regenerated on a trip to Hong Kong. His father wanted to take a photo of him and his mother with the Beatles wax figures at Madame Tussauds, but he, being the curious boy he was, was too busy playing with Paul McCartney’s hair to even look at the camera. His mother slapped him and threatened to leave him there. He became heartbroken and regenerated for the first time.

Second incarnation: Similar to his first incarnation, but he had a flirty side. He had crushes on a couple of girls; the first never resulted in a relationship because she became repulsed after hearing of his insubordination, while the second only resulted in a short marriage. He was also easily-manipulated by others, which was how he first learnt how to swear. This incarnation regenerated when the two girls he loved plotted to kill him and he was forced to commit suicide at Honnōji to avoid being captured.

Third (2.5) incarnation: Following his regeneration, he managed to metamorphosise his remaining regeneration energy into ice, making him into a being similar to Elsa from Frozen, calling himself the Ice King. This incarnation was vengeful and strategic, with his only purpose being to take his revenge on the girls who plotted to kill him. He almost succeeded, but he died before he could fully exact his revenge. The ice powers changed back into regeneration energy, allowing him to regenerate again without using another regeneration.

Fourth incarnation: Though he was feisty, destructive and brooding, he began to mellow upon meeting Fifi Forget-me-not, who would later become his wife. He fought in a resistance army, but in a manner similar to The Night of the Doctor, he died after he failed to save someone from a missile attack. He was revived by the Sisterhood of Karn (might get into that sometime), who convinced him to regenerate into a warrior.

Fifth incarnation: One of the longer-lasting incarnations. Despite his warrior’s nature, he had a friendly and romantic side with him as he lived with Fifi for a number of years. When she and her friends had to go back to Flowertot Garden (as it was being assimilated into Never Land), the two parted ways. He later fell in love with another girl who would later become Akari Ichigo, but it would be some time before they got married. After having his heart broken by another girl, he regenerated into his next incarnation.

Sixth incarnation: Mellow and romantic, yet assertive when he needed to be. This was the incarnation where he started a relationship with Akari, but it would lead to his demise at the hands of her cousins who opposed the relationship. After using up a regeneration in a meta-crisis to save himself, Akari helped him regenerate into his next incarnation with a kiss (this was the proposal as well). This would mix up their DNA, resulting in subsequent prototypes being considered the offspring of the two rather than his siblings.

Eighth incarnation (skipped one because meta-crisis): Cheery and spirited with a case of wanderlust and a sense of nostalgia. He took Akari to visit people and places, both old and new in his life. His demise came at the hands of his parents, who were tipped off about his relationship with Akari. Following a Christmas Carol-esque nostalgia trip, he gets locked up in his room where he regenerates. There isn’t a lot to his ninth incarnation because he uses up three more of his regenerations trying to save his twin brother, Zhuge Liang, from the Voidstation. We’re up to 10 regenerations used up at this point. Oh, and he became a magical boy as well and scattered himself through his timeline. It’s complicated. I’ll explain later.

Twelfth incarnation (see previous): Similar to his eighth incarnation, but with a wanderlust for time travel. The Pony Doctor lent him his TARDIS for a while, but he stopped upon hearing that one of his old friends had died. He married Akari, but they barely got to start their new life when he was killed by Girl Power. He would regenerate into a female incarnation after accepting a deal from Walpurgisnacht.

Thirteenth incarnation: This was a female incarnation, played by Tavia Yeung and based on her character, Apple Lam Chung-yan (林頌恩) from the 2013 TVB drama A Great Way to Care II (仁心解碼II). This was the first incarnation who would have a different name from the original, having taken up the name of Momoka Mizutani (水谷桃花/ももか) to avoid suspicion from her enemies. Like the Ice King, Momoka was bent on revenge. With Akari being taken from her previous incarnation, brainwashed and placed in a family with his prototype and a Progenitor-created child, Momoka manipulated the family into visiting her restaurant so she can get closer to them. Unfortunately, her plans were sabotaged and she was killed in the process. To be honest, casting Tavia Yeung was a bit meh on my part because of her English skills. I was going to replace her with Dodo Cheng as an older Momoka, but I decided that it wasn’t worth it.

Fourteenth incarnation: Same as the thirteenth incarnation, but with Walpurgisnacht taking further control of Momoka. She became more vengeful to the point of killing people who had wronged her in her previous incarnations. This causes her to suffer from a traumatic post-regeneration crisis, where she became somewhat psychotic. After being convinced by Zhuge Liang and Violet to give hope to others in need, she commits suicide after coming to peace with the fact that she wouldn’t have a chance with Akari. Little did she know what fate would have in store for her. Momoka would survive a shot in the head for a while and join her previous incarnations (except the Ice King) in freeing Akari from her brainwashing. The original version of the story has Momoka regenerate directly into her next incarnation, but the final version (having been revised some time after The Time of the Doctor premiered) has Momoka reset to her previous male incarnation to see Akari for the final time before regenerating to his next and final incarnation.

Fifteenth incarnation: This is the incarnation that cemented Hiroki and Akari’s names into the story as they would be known by those names from that point on. Hiroki also gave himself a makeover as part of this, leading to him basically cosplaying Hanbei Takenaka from Samurai Warriors 3 and 4, at least for the Next Gen Series. During that series, Hiroki shared some personality traits from all his previous incarnations, making him a happy-go-lucky boy with a dark side that sometimes overcomes him and makes him irrational. He is also attached to Akari because she is the only person who can control his dark side (actually, she acts as more of a crutch). In the Moushouden Series, where he becomes Kamen Rider Decade, Hiroki learns to accept and control his dark side, becoming a calmer and more enlightened, yet still enigmatic person. At this point, he’s essentially like Tsukasa Kadoya.

The different prototypes

As I stated, with each of the other protagonist’s regenerations comes a new prototype. A couple of them are based off the incarnations from which they regenerated and a few of them are literally anime characters. Some of them may have had different names in the past, but the names listed here are the names they are now known by. You might also recognise those names from the Waifu Network Tumblr.

Prototypes are listed in order of regeneration.

Richard Yang (楊子深)

Zhuge Qiao (諸葛喬)/Hayato Kisaichi (私市颯人)

Natsuki Takara (高良夏希)

Kyōko Izumi (泉京��)

Takumi Kamijō (上条拓海)

Kumiko Hayashi (林久美子)

Yamato Kurosawa (黒沢大和)

Daichi Kurosawa (黒沢大地)/Nagi Kurosawa (黒沢凪)/Marco Wong (黃翔希)

Kyōya Shinomiya (四ノ宮京夜)

Momoka Mizutani (水谷桃花)

With the exception of the Kurosawa siblings, who went off and did their own thing, the prototypes formed a family with the two protagonists, thereby known as the Zhuge family. There were also others in the family who became members not by virtue of regeneration, but by the privilege of being close friends to them.

Zhuge Shu (諸葛虪)

Katsuki Hiiragi (柊克樹)

Kai Hirasawa (平沢海)

Terry Mizukoshi (水越テリー)

Kasumi Shinomiya (四ノ宮霞)

#kisekae insights #doctor who

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johannesviii · 8 years ago

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Eater of Wasps

Some highlights of the last EDA I’ve read (Eater of Wasps).

I took these screens while reading, along with my reactions. As usual, this is full of spoilers.

O-kay, so this cover is pretty gruesome, I wonder if this is a-

OH SHIT OH NO

Well, that was unexpectedly great.

The problems keep piling up in this story and the action never really stops. It’s pretty straightforward and I wish some characters were given a bit more to do, but the regulars are still well written. Eight hasn’t been this alien since The Burning (which makes sense since it’s the same kind of story, with a basic plot but written like a thriller), Fitz is his usual loyal self, even when he’s scared shitless by the events, and Anji has some of the most interesting moments.

It’s also a real page-turner, with some gloriously horrible body horror left and right and more than a few laughs among all the stress. Unlike the previous book, this one doesn’t really try to make a point, it has a very traditional structure (if you forget the ton of gore thrown at us), and it’s just a gripping adventure with no other goal in mind. Definitely refreshing. 8/10

Okay this is a Baxendale book, so... how long have we got before the body horror and/or the killing starts

THAT WAS LITERALLY THE FIRST LINE

The TARDIS sounds like “a rather poorly cow”, according to this lady.

I laughed out loudly

Get back in the police box, Fitz, you unshaven untrustworthy criminal

Still laughing but I hope this old bigot dies in this story tbh

This description of our current Eight is simultaneously delightful and sad.

Miss “Old-bat-on-a-bike” Havers sounds exactly like a certain person who’s currently running for president in my country and who I hope to see crash and burn in the near future with all my heart

How many racist bigots are there in Miss “I-speak-for-the-whole-village” Havers’ shoes exactly

WELP TIME FOR FUN HEADCANONS ABOUT DANY PINK’S FAMILY TREE

“MISS HAVERS APPEARED READY TO COLLAPSE UNDER THIS ONSLAUGHT OF FOREIGN-SOUNDING NAMES”

Nope. Nope.

Eight wants to drive a tractor.

Also wasn’t he travelling far away from England in the thirties? I recall he said something like that in The Turing Test.

I’m smiling through the sadness this is confusing

Eight geeking about vintage cars, everyone

I really like the Pink brothers so far, so I’m pretty sure at least one of them is going to suffer horribly in this story

Well that’s also what Lawrence Miles claims and his books are roughly 50% politics so I don’t know about this

Eh eh

Eight playing Paranoid on a piano is my new aesthetic

Also I wondered how it would sound like on a piano and holy shit look at this video this person is so talented, like, damn

I don’t know who Kala is but her haircut made me laugh

So Rigby’s possessed by the wasps in some way?

Anji saying “bloody” impresses Hilary Pink and I find this endearing, somehow

We know, Eight, we know

The descriptions of the TARDIS team are great in this book.

I love this scene??

“There was something wrong” = understatement of the month

This creeps me out way more than the wasps themselves, to be honest, because I don’t particularly hate them. I have no idea how painful a wasp sting is because I’ve never been attacked by any of them ever. Granted, I don’t like them, but still.

Wait a second, is the old bigot contaminated too now?

“PITY ABOUT THE PLUMS”

COULD YOU PRETEND TO BE SAD ABOUT THE DEAD GUY FOR TWO CONSECUTIVE SECONDS YOU WALNUT

Extremely relatable

Run away. Run. Away.

Anji no

Good description cut, like, 10/10 would cut again

Can I breathe now? Cause I’d really enjoy that

Apparently I can’t

OH NOT MY HEART HE KEPT THE LETTER FOR 90 YEARS

I’m laughing like an idiot, that never gets old

Still laughing by the way

Well you did ask

Always the best course of action

I love this scene so much oh my god

Well that’s completely different, then

Have I already told you I loved this new TARDIS team with all my heart

[Unexpected sadness]

1) Eight was a sailor during the thirties, why isn’t there a book about that

2) Is that a reference to Pertwee’s tattoo?

3) If Eight really has a tattoo, wouldn’t that be a first (Three’s tattoo was there for real life reasons so it doesn’t really count)?

4) A tattoo of what

5) Where

6) If he hasn’t one and that’s all a lie… is… is he flirting with Fitz

I have no words

My hair is standing on end on my arms I’m not even joking at all holy f█cking shit that’s so f█cking creepy

OH. THAT’S EASY THEN. JUST IGNORE THE HUMAN WASP HIVE STANDING ABSOLUTELY STILL IN COMPLETE DARKNESS WITH HIS MOUTH OPEN TWO METERS AWAY FROM YOU. JUST IGNORE HIM. BECAUSE THAT’S VERY EASY, RIGHT

This shouldn’t be that funny but I’m half laughing half cringing

This scene is terrifying and hilarious at the same time, which results in me cringing like there’s no tomorrow

F█CK I KNEW IT

Holy shit Doctor

Good job, Kala, 10/10

Don’t we all

Oh god please try to explain the context to the police, Eight, I really want you to explain how you arrived in a police box and how Wasp Man is menacing that village because somebody dropped an alien thingie there

Nevermind

Funnier in hindsight

Fitz Kreiner, prison cells connaisseur

Of course he wouldn’t, but that’s still concerning.

Wait Miss “Old-bat-on-a-bike” Havers isn’t dead yet? Is there no justice in the world? (don’t answer that)

“I’m not sure what he is”

Oh that's perfectly normal then

Hey isn’t that the cover of the book?

Eight this is an autopsy for crying out loud don’t act like it’s an unboxing video

Oh. Oh wait. Oh f█ck. Is this book “SCP-439, but with wasps and the victims are mobile"? Oh shit that’s suddenly ten times worse

KILL IT WITH FIRE

FOR THE LULZ For the Vine no idea

Okay book I like you very much but there’s only so many times I can say "nope" in this liveblog and I’m going to run out of nopes soon

EXTREMELY RELATABLE??

I know the feeling, Eight, but please try to focus

That’s… that’s not exactly what she meant, Fitz. I do adore the fact that you had prepared an answer to that question, though

Hehe of course he would offer mint humbugs instead of jelly babies just to troll everyone about the wasps thing – also I want one, I’ve never tasted one before

Oh no cute

[Takes references for future drawings]

Honestly I love this description

SCREAMING

THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF GREAT SCENES IN THIS BOOK ALREADY BUT THAT’S IN THE TOP THREE FOR SURE

Eight you nerd

...........of course you did

implying things aren’t messy already

"overtactile"

Also I still can’t get this out of my head, wasn’t she attacked earlier ?

Ignore me I’m just dying a little bit over there

10/10 would fraud again

This book is almost non-stop action AND funny AND scary and honestly it would be a top-grade perfect Doctor Who book if the writing was slightly better and if the plot was a bit more original

Eight this is a bad idea and you know it

Anji is channelling my exact reaction

Eight every time you end up fighting someone it doesn’t end well for you

That quote is wonderful, I’m gonna memorise it for future D&D games

“It always looks easier in the movies”

This f█cking dialogue oh my god

Or perhaps you could blast the fire extinguisher right in his face before he hurts anyone else, just an idea

“Mad? I’m absolutely furious"

Nobody No-One’s on the phone & he wants his quote back

That’s always been one of my favorite things with Eight, his tendency to take one look at trolley problems and be like "nah". People die accidentally all the time but most of the time he refuses to be the person who decides who lives and who dies. Of course it’s highly debatable, but that’s what makes it interesting in the first place.

"Hope this is not Chris's blood"

Friendly reminder that the Doctor can detect blood types

I don’t know why but that particular sentence makes me laugh, the mental picture is irresistible

Fitz is that guy who always gets killed in slasher movies

And Eight can finally drive a tractor eeeeeee

That’s it that’s the book

Still in love with the descriptions from Rigby’s point of view, by the way.

GREAT EXACTLY WHAT WE NEEDED

GREAT EXACTLY WHAT WE NEEDED 2: THE QUICKENING

Also a defining trait of Eight in all his stories: his refusal to give up. Which is why the beginning of Dark Eyes was so great. And also Ship in a Bottle, because sometimes people need to remind him there’s always hope.

And that’s also what makes Night of the Doctor so heartwrenching ; it’s the Doctor who “never ever gives up” finally giving up, for good.

1) Anji is still channelling my thoughts 2) Honestly I’m glad Rigby’s now an actual monster because the human hive thing standing motionless in complete darkness was infinitely more creepy to me

Still loving these descriptions so I’m still screening them.

The fact that there’s still a part of him which knows this is a f█cking nightmare is the cherry on top, actually.

ASDFGHJHGHJK I FUCKING KNEW IT

“AND TO THINK I HUGGED YOU”

That’s your only reaction?

Ummm sorry I know the situation is extremely tense but look at this sweet little moment?? Thank you

Wasp Man

DOCTOR YOU LITTLE SHIT

Damn that was brutal

I shouldn’t be laughing so hard

Great just what we needed

Why is this still so funny

Can I breathe now

I don’t know why this is so cute to me but it really is

Friendly reminder that I love Anji

Everyone’s safe and nothing hurts, goodbye

Honestly I don’t even know which part of this I prefer.

Maybe "what deadline?".

#Eighth Doctor Adventures #Eater of Wasps #Eighth Doctor #Fitz Kreiner #Anji Kapoor #doctor who #An EDA liveblog full of useless comments #long post #gif #caps lock #body horror tw #insects tw #gore tw

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iwantasecretgarden · 8 years ago

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Taggetytagtag

DoBrought up by the freaking awesome and strong @nachodiablo

Rules: Answer all questions, add one question of your own and tag as many people as there are questions.

1. Coke or Pepsi: Diet Coke in a glass of ice or a can or a bottle or a fountain or anywhere, always. “Is Pepsi okay?” is probably the worst sentence in all of human history.

2. Disney or Dreamworks: Disney Renaissance (90s kid)

3. Coffee or tea: Coffee. I want to like tea, but it’s leaf water. And drinking it tastes like hot leaves. I try and I try and yet still...clogged pool filter in a cup.

4. Books or movies: Books. Books, I’ve never seen so many books in all my life. Best weapons in the world. But seriously in 2016 I read 42 books - didn’t quite get to my 52 I had hoped for as my upper goal, but far surpassed the 25 I had planned.

5. Windows or mac: Mac since birth. Born with my dad getting me a tiny apple jumper as he used the old timey rainbows apple with the startup OS face.

6. DC or Marvel: Marvel characters are deeper and more interesting, especially because I WANT to like Wonder Woman but every single writer just changes her backstory and nothing is consistent and I hate that. X-Men are my favorite because it’s embracing difference in an exclusive, bigoted world.

7. X-box or Playstation: I wasn’t allowed to play video games because my parents thought they would make me violent so now I’m WOEFULLY AWFUL at them. But does Wii Lego games count? Because I really like Wii Lego Harry Potter. I know. I know. But it’s actually adorable. I also play Wii Lego LOTR and Batman and Star Wars (but SW one sucks).

8. Dragon age or Mass effect: Er...what.

9. Night owl or early riser: I do better working at night because I like to have an hour or so to wake up. So if I leave at 9 I get up at 6:30 so I can drink coffee and blink awake and watch a tv show before doing chores and getting ready.

10. Cards or chess: Cards - more for the memories that accompany them and because I’m hellishly impatient for Chess.

11. Chocolate or vanilla: Vanilla not because I’m vanilla but because chocolate can either be overwhelming or when in ice cream doesn’t taste like chocolate? Like why? It tastes like mystery brown flavor and I’m not into that.

12. Vans or converse: Converse for life. Black. With doodles on the white parts. Quotes and drawings. Being a cool kid way past the age I could pull it off (since I never could). I also have a blue pair that I drew the TARDIS on during the DW fanvolution but now don’t wear because they don’t match.

13. Lavellan, Trevelyan, Cadash, or Adaar: I feel dumb. I don’t know what these are.

14. Fluff or angst: Angsty fluff. Like when the angst drenches your soul and in the darkest moment someone says the right thing that no one in real life has ever said to you and it’s like a sweet sweet salve.

15. Beach or forest: Forest. I hate sand. I’m stupid annakin. And deep in my heart of hearts I’m still the wolf girl I was at 13 where I wore braces and boys jeans and tie dyed wolf t-shirts and braids in my hair with a bunch of friendship bracelets and wanted to be a psychic dragon rider or be raised by sentient wolves. So in the end...it’d be untrue to my nature (and to my secret shame wolf patronus) to not say forest where I used to dream of running away and finding my true pack.

16. Dogs or cats: I have two greyhounds (Fred & George), and a cat - Gandalf. That way I can introduce the bunch as Gandalf (and) the Greyhounds. Yeah. I’m serious. PM me for picture proof or check out insta @greyhoundgeorge

17. Clear skies or rain: Rain when I have nowhere to BE. If I can stay home and eat hot popcorn and drink cold water and snuggle on a couch under the blankets and put on an old movie or quiet film scores and pick up a book I want to read all in one go. That’s a little corner of heaven right there. But clear skies if I am going out to do something - if I’m doing something stressful and knowing I can go outside after to let the sun drench into the skin of my face and smile and take a breath and get a cold diet coke and congratulate myself on being brave and finishing out.

18. Cooking or eating out: Depends. Depends on how lazy I am and how broke I am and how hungry I am. I like cooking when I’m really hungry because then I can personalize everything to my own tastes and having leftovers I know will be yummy later. When I eat out/order take out I’m eating it all. Don’t be foolish.

19. Spicy food or mild food: Spicy food. Make my nose rain. I once drank a bowl of salsa in a Mexican restaurant. Like in Beauty & the Beast. Bowl to my mouth. Drank it down. My sisters hissed at me to stop. It was so good. So I drank theirs too.

20. Halloween/samhain or solstice/yule/christmas: Solstice, Yule, ***Christmas*** I am so into Christmas. I’m the dumbass that starts listening to carols too early in November. I’m wearing sweaters and sweating. I’m getting my peppermint hot chocolate. I’m the one viciously stalking that Christmas feeling that seems to get farther and farther away the older you get. Because I want it to last forever. I want to make sure my little sisters never lose it.

21. Would you rather forever be a little too cold or a little too hot: Too cold. I’m already hot all the time. It’s hell. And I sweat through my clothes and that’s embarrassing and uncomfortable. At least when I’m cold people feel pity for you. When you’re hot all the time everyone looks at you like a freak.

22. If you could have a superpower, what would it be: Hallucination/Projection. I’d be called “Storyteller” or “Story” and if I wanted you to think you were on a beach in Aruba, you would really see and feel it. I would be able to travel for free, protect myself through a veneer, and never have to harm anyone. And I could taste all food however I wanted even if it was just celery. I could look how I want to look, dress how I want to dress, make my world the reality I want.

23. Animation or live action: Live action. I think the nuances of character actors and their expressions bring something to a film that evokes a sympathetic response in the brain that cannot (currently) be copied in animation.

24. Paragon or renegade: Again. I’m a silly person who has no idea what this is.

25. Baths or showers: SHOWERS. Hot showers. Baths - like tea - are just stewing in dirt. In your own dirt. In a tub where you get to look at your knees and rest your wet head against the hard tile. Ew.

26. Team cap or team ironman: Captain America forever. Stucky and Steggy forever.

27. Fantasy or sci-fi: Fantasy at my heart of hearts. It appeals to my wolfgirl nature. But I’m an equal opportunist and love Sci Fi. Just watch out for those weird 1950s fantasy/sci fi crossovers about colonizing planets cuz those get WEIRD.

28. Do you have three or four favourite quotes, if so what are they:

"Do small things with great love.” - Mother Teresa

“Courage, dearheart.” - C.S. Lewis

“Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Look up at the ceiling and breathe with those curiously fragile lungs and remind yourself don’t worry. All as it was meant to be. It was meant to be lonely, and terrifying, and unfair, and fleeting. Don’t worry.” - Welcome to Nightvale

29. Youtube or netflix: Netflix or Amazon Video yo

30. Harry Potter or Percy Jackson: Yeahhhh see I was too old when PJ came out. My youngest sister was reading it and even she thought it was under her age level. So HARRY POTTER FOREVER FOOLS. I mean, I cannot stress how much our family loves HP. We had a year when my youngest sister turned 11 she had a welcome to Hogwarts party in March, my family surprised me with a Horcrux Hunt 17th birthday Coming of Age in April, and my other sister turned 14 and got a Triwizard Cup party in May. My Mom listens to HP on Audible every night before bed. She can literally quote the first book word for word. We went to HP Wizarding World in FL before it opened on special passes when I was 19. If my mother wouldn’t murder us, our entire family would have matching HP tattoos. I write Marauders book fanfiction for my entire family to read and critique. We have sorted ourselves and own everything in our respective houses (a split R/G family). It’s our dream to go to Leaky Con together. We all have complete uniforms. Not just the robes. All of it. We know all the spells, have played all the dumb computer 2001 games and Wii games and Pottermore before it was lame and basically omg. HP FOR LIFE. (or LOTR).

31. When you feel accomplished: When someone acknowledges I saw the problem and solution immediately but everyone else tried a bunch of things first and eventually realized I was right. #INTJ

32. Star Wars or Star Trek: I am very into both, and both my sisters have hard core taken a position on each camp. But if I had to choose, I would say Star Trek because of the massive cultural shift it caused, especially in featuring multi-racial characters and women in positions of science and power.

33. Paperback books or hardback books: Paperback if I’m reading it the first time and Idk if i’ll like it but then I want hardback (leatherbound tbh) of everything I’ve ever loved and read for my library I want to own like in B&B.

34. Horror or rom-com: Ughhhhhhhh both suck. But I only like cerebral horror (like Sixth Sense) or intellectual horror (like Hannibal) because physical horror (torture), gross horror (teeth losing and pus), jump horror (basic) really aren’t interesting to me so I GUESS I’ll say rom-com.

35. TV shows or movies: TV shows streaming so I can binge them. Yep.

36. Favorite animal: Tigers! I’m so into tigers and know so much about them. The ONLY tiger fact I’ll bore you with right now is that lion roars are much shallower due to being lighter weight with less lung capacity so for the Lion King whenever the lions roar, it’s actually tiger roars to sound more macho.

37. Favorite genre of music: Alt rock or indie - coldplay, mumford, snow patrol, frank turner, damien rice, the wonder years, etc.

38. Least favorite book: I know people are really into it now, but when I read it A Separate Peace sucked balls and everyone agreed. Also I once read this terribly written horror book Neverwhere. Actually I’ve read several such poorly written books that it honestly gives me hope that I can be an author if these dingbats can.

39. Favourite season: Winter before Christmas

40. Song that’s currently stuck in your head: Help by the Beatles

41. What kind of pyjama’s do you wear: Old t shirt (usually huge) and pj pants or shorts

42. How many existential crisis do you have on an average day: Lol so many. Depends on the day. More like “my life is confusing and I have no idea what’s happening and everything is a chain reaction that hasn’t begun and I’m holding my breath praying for a fallout that’s marginally okay.”

43. If you can only choose one song to be played at your funeral, what would it be: “Penny Lane,” by the Beatles

44. Favourite theme song to a TV show: Buffy the Vampire Slayer or (honestly) Magic School Bus or Jimmy Neutron

45. Harry Potter movies or books: Books, where the inaccuracies aren’t too many to count

46. Favorite traditional food from your family: Tamales

47. Favorite decade from 1900-now: 1990s. But only 90s kids remember the 90s.

48. Worst habit? Thinking I can do it all.

49. Teach an old person to use the internet or stay for a week with a kid stuck in the “why” phase?: Kids. I love kids. Why phases are great. Sometimes I never outgrew mine, and adults always brush them off without actually taking time to explain why satisfactorily. 50. Who’s your favorite painter?: Claude Monet.

51. Favourite flower?: Roses (trite) or bluebonnets.

52. Boots or sneakers?: Sneakers now - boots in fall.

53. Abroad or at home?: Home if I could magically go back in time when “home” was everything I wanted and not a place to visit my mom in my old room with no clothes or friends.

54. Planning or spontaneity? Planning! But occasional spontaneity.

55. Boxers or briefs? Boxers so that I can wear them as pajama shorts.

56. Hogwarts house? Better be...Gryffindor!

I’m not tagging 56 people, so if you’d like to do this, tag me so I can read them! If you don’t want to, then just enjoy learning more about me. If it’s more than you wanted to know (and it probably is) feel free to ignore.

#about me

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jaouad2d · 7 years ago

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9 adventures in England's Heartland

You haven’t seen England until you’ve seen its Heartland. This is a region that’ll keep you busy sipping gin in dark parlors, trodding down cobblestones in the land of Shakespeare, and finding nature — both above ground and below — in England’s first national park. It’s where visitors can walk in the footsteps of gangsters, stumble on ancient burial grounds, and wander castle ruins. Just a matter of minutes beyond Birmingham Airport — your gateway to the Heartland — are dozens of adventures that will surprise you. Here’s nine to get you started.

BIRMINGHAM

Photo: Pawl Libera / VisitBritain

As England’s second-largest city, Birmingham is busy and buzzing no matter where you look. Art, music, architecture, food, nightlife — the obvious necessities are all there, but the more interesting things to see in town aren’t always as immediately visible, nor are they in most guidebooks. This is the unexpected side of Birmingham.

1. Uncovering the truth behind Peaky Blinders

Photo: West Midlands Police

Sure, you probably know that the BBC’s Peaky Blinders tells the story of a gang in post-WWI Birmingham, but what might be news to you is that it’s all based on reality. The Peaky Blinders were a criminal gang that ruled the city’s streets around the turn of the century, back in Birmingham’s rougher days. Even if you’ve never seen the show, you can bet touring the real-life sites of their crimes makes for one hell of a fascinating afternoon.

The 3.5-hour tour is conducted by Professor Carl Chinn MBE, who also happens to be the city historian. He’ll take you around what was the underbelly of the city, pointing out the similarities and departures between the series and real life. To top things off, the tour ends with a traditional Victorian meal at The Old Crown — the oldest building in Birmingham, dating back to 1368.

2. Sipping cocktails at a Victorian gin parlor

Photo: The Jekyll & Hyde

The Jekyll & Hyde (80 types of gin, hello) is a five-minute walk from Cathedral Square on an inconspicuous street. The building is purple — which you’d think would help it stand out — but is slim and tiny and easily missed. Keep your eyes peeled.

The brightness of the exterior totally contrasts with what lies inside, where it’s ornate and elegantly furnished in ultra-Victorian, Dickensian style — especially upstairs, in the proper gin parlor. You’ll find sections with dark wood, blood-red draperies, and purple cushions along the walls. And glowing bottles of liquor, of course.

They have an intimate courtyard in the back, too. It’s irregular in shape and enclosed on four sides by walls bearing graffiti inspired by Alice in Wonderland. The gin menu here might be rivaled only by the cocktail list, featuring drinks like “Fifty Shades” and “Lemon Bon Bon.” And if you’re feeling out of your league, they have afternoon tea and cocktail classes to boot.

3. Strolling along the canal until you run into a Dalek

Photo: Richard Weston

…Kind of. Start at Brindleyplace, right on the water, and start early. There’s a week’s worth of things to do just right here: Ikon Gallery (internationally renowned and free), the National SEA LIFE Centre, and The Crescent Theatre are the anchors, while you’ll also find tons of shops and restaurants, along with Symphony Hall next door.

But then wander to the end of the canal and over to The Mailbox. It’s the old sorting office of the Royal Mail, populated now with designer hotels and boutiques and red-carpet restaurants (check out Marco Pierre White’s Steakhouse Bar & Grill on the 25th floor of “The Cube”). But even if your wallet is empty, make your way to level three and the BBC Birmingham’s Visitor Centre. Tours are available, but the best stuff is free — wander into their prop room (no need to call in advance), choose your costume, and get your picture taken with Doctor Who‘s TARDIS or a Dalek. They’ll also hook you up with the chance to take on a news or weather broadcast. Record it, and go home telling everyone you’re Birmingham Famous.

Pro tip: Stop at Canalside Cafe — in an 18th-century cottage — for a cup, a pint, or a warm glass of cider come wintertime. (Take a few minutes to watch the narrow boats float by, too.)

THE PEAK DISTRICT NATIONAL PARK, DERBYSHIRE

Photo: British Tourist Authority / East Midlands Tourism

Less than two hours from Birmingham, the Peak District is the United Kingdom’s first national park, established in 1951. Although you’re not going to find sharp-edged peaks here, as the name might suggest, you’ll definitely find diversity — the landscape changes drastically as river valleys narrow into limestone gorges before spilling out into green plains. The wind fluctuates greatly too, which can seem to create completely different views out of the same terrain. And the adventures? Just as varied as the landscape.

4. Trekking to the top of Hope Valley

Photo: Andrew

The Ladybower Wood, in the Hope Valley, is a great spot to hike in the center-north of the district — it runs through one of the few remaining original upland oak woodlands in the area. Start from the bottom of the hills at the south end of Ladybower Reservoir and zigzag your way north. The best spots are up on top of the hills, overlooking the narrow reservoir running below, the woodland, and, farther toward the horizon, endless green fields. In spring, you’ll hear a regular orchestra of birdsong (quite a few species call the area home — look for cormorants and grey herons around the reservoir).

In the late spring sun, this scenery takes on the best colors — watery gray, greens of every shade, and golden yellows and oranges. Enjoying the water itself (kayaking, canoeing, or boating) is definitely recommended, but since the waterways are private, you’ll need to contact a local outfitter for access.

5. Being Cillian Murphy for a night

Photo: Graham Hogg

Okay, so you took the Peaky Blinders tour in Birmingham — are you ready for your next assignment? Head north out of the city for about and hour and a half (or less than an hour northwest from Derby) to the valley of Dovedale in the Peak District, and check out Casterne Hall. Recognize it? If you’re a fan of the show, you should know this location serves as the Shelby country house on screen. And though it doesn’t have gangster history, the story it does have is just as remarkable.

For starters, it’s been in the current family for more than 500 years, and it stands on the remains of a Roman villa. There’s 21 rooms and a Georgian facade, making it practically a castle by American terms. On one of the outside walls, there’s a Roman arch. You know, just there. No big deal. Oh, England.

You don’t have to surreptitiously wander around when no one’s home, either. The owners have turned the place into a B&B (yes, you can stay here), and they also offer tours, teas, lunches, dinners, and holiday events — but definitely book in advance, as these sell out regularly.

6. Seeing the Peak District from below

Photo: Dun.can

You’ve seen nature from above — now it’s time to see nature from below. Turns out the Peak District is dotted with caves and caverns, some showing crystalline stalactites and the area’s famous semi-precious mineral, Blue John.

For the most epic of formations, check out Treak Cliff Cavern and Blue John Cavern, both sitting just west of the Hope Valley. These two are the best for spotting interesting structures and tons of minerals — you’ll wander through rooms like “The Vortex” and “Aladdin’s Cave” — and they’re widely regarded as among the finest caverns in Western Europe. What’s more, this is definitely a view of England your friends back home haven’t seen.

SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND

Photo: Nick Rowland

This is Shakespeare country. Just south of Birmingham and not far from Oxford and Bristol, the West Midlands’ county of Warwickshire is rich in culture, dotted with medieval castles, and home to the birthplace of the Bard: Stratford-upon-Avon. Look a little deeper, however, and you’ll find plenty more to keep you occupied once you’re done hitting all the Shakespeare-centric attractions. For example…

7. Walking in the footsteps of knights

Photo: Jules & Jenny

The thick and ancient Forest of Arden used to cover the area from the River Avon to the River Tame. While most of it is now gone — cut to fuel the engines of the Industrial Revolution — this famous forest setting for Shakespeare’s As You Like It is getting a second chance. The Heart of England Forest charity is busy replanting 30,000 acres with trees native to the area.

The go-to spot here is the tiny Balsall Preceptory, established in the 12th century for the Knights Templar (after their work during the Crusades). The manor includes a chapel, the Church of St. Mary, and is still in use today. For a building that dates back nearly a millennium, the interior is surprisingly elegant, ornate, and colorful — with plenty of tiles and stained-glass windows. The church is in Temple Balsall, one of the oldest hamlets in the area.

8. Making your way down a medieval high street

Photo: Roland Turner

Don’t Google Henley-In-Arden — it won’t help you. Somehow this little spot roughly 20 miles south of Birmingham has avoided the limelight, even though its one-mile-long high street is totally medieval (and Henley ice cream is the stuff of legends).

The 1,000-year-old thoroughfare is now lined with shops, boutiques, cafes, and restaurants — stop at The Nags Head for a pint or at Henley Ice Cream Parlour to break up your trip through time. The Market Cross (in the Old Market Place), the Guild Hall, St. John’s Church, and the Joseph Hardy House are a few of the best-known medieval spots, though around 150 buildings along High Street are protected due to their historical value.

9. Wandering castle grounds

Photo: Tyler Brenot

Imagine what it’s like standing somewhere for 1,100 years — that’s what Warwick Castle is busy doing. Widely regarded as one of the most well-preserved castles in the UK, it’s seen sieges, war, and fire, and withstood it all.

The castle — minutes from Stratford-upon-Avon — regularly makes it onto lists that include the Tower of London and Stonehenge, so you know we’re talking serious business in the realm of English attractions. Tours will take you into the medieval vaults, and you’re also welcome to climb to the tip-top of the towers. The views over the River Avon and beyond are fantastic, but the exterior of the castle framed against and reflected on the water might be even better.

If you come in summer, be sure to check out a jousting tournament, and definitely don’t leave before you’ve seen the world’s largest trebuchet launching a fireball. (Yes, that’s the technical term — it’s a giant catapult.) All this just goes to show, in England’s Heartland, you never know what to expect. Travel 9 adventures in England's Heartland http://ift.tt/2rx1NUp via Matador Network http://ift.tt/2hQ222I

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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How Doctor Who Was Quietly Revolutionised By Its Least Popular Season

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In 2014, when Doctor Who Magazine asked its readers to rank the show’s first 50 years, out of 241 options, Season 24 stories ‘Time and the Rani’ came 239th, ‘Paradise Towers’ 230th, ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ 217th, with ‘Dragonfire’ thought best of in 215th place. This was largely a repeat of its 2009 poll, although then readers rated ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ above ‘Dragonfire’. Season 24 was also ranked bottom in a GQ article ranking every series of Doctor Who – a combination of words I never thought I’d write.

Season 24 of Doctor Who went into production just as its 23rd season, the 14-episode ‘The Trial of a Time-Lord’ was finishing up on TV. By late 1986, producer John Nathan-Turner was expecting to be moved onto another show and had lost both his script-editor and the show’s most prolific writer (the former quitting after long-simmering tensions erupted behind the scenes, and the latter passing away during the making of the series).

A surprised Nathan-Turner was given 13 months to hire a new script editor and produce 14 episodes under a BBC edict that Doctor Who had to become lighter and funnier (not dissimilar to the instructions producer Graham Williams found himself under in the Seventies). He also ended up having to cast a new Doctor, after Colin Baker was sacked and didn’t want to return for one story just to regenerate. Sylvester McCoy was formally cast at the end of February and started filming ‘Time and the Rani’ in April.

‘Time in the Rani’ was written by husband-and-wife duo Pip and Jane Baker (UK readers may remember their early-Nineties CBBC show Watt on Earth), who were given the job because there were no scripts either ready to go or in development. Nathan-Turner knew they could write quickly after they’d completed the final episode of ‘Trial of a Time Lord’ at extremely short notice earlier in the year.

The Bakers’ writing style was to produce frothy and campy nonsense and then act as if they’d just written The Seventh Seal. ‘Time and the Rani’ contains continuity references such as costume shout outs to past Doctors, a returning villain and references to the Lord President of Gallifrey. It’s set on an alien planet and makes no attempt to engage with contemporary life either directly or allegorically, and is happy to be adventure for adventure’s sake. It’s not a last hurrah for that style of story, but is a strong argument for why it had to be stop being the House Style after five years (though, to be fair to it, it has some nice ideas in it and the scene with the Doctor chatting away to the universe’s geniuses is great).

New Script Editor Andrew Cartmel wasn’t a fan of ‘Time and the Rani’ but arrived too late in the day to have much impact on it. He was able to influence writer Stephen Wyatt away from a story steeped in continuity and towards what became ‘Paradise Towers’. This was based on a combination of the novel High Rise by J.G. Ballard, Wyatt’s real-life experience in London’s East End, and Cartmel’s fondness for Alan Moore comics. Not only is it the first story for years to not refer to other Doctor Who stories and doesn’t feature the TARDIS interior but it is, in stark contrast to ‘Time and the Rani’, clearly about something real.

What ‘Paradise Towers’ did, which few Doctor Who stories had done before, was sympathetically reflect a working class setting by depicting people trapped in a block of flats by the whims of an aloof architect. In doing so, it didn’t go for realism. The show has rarely been in a position to, and here the budget and imposed tone meant it couldn’t. What it does have is a coherent approach: everything is big, be it the cleaning robots, the performances or the costuming.

So we have a Doctor Who story that isn’t aiming at its usual audience (Considering it had lost viewers this is clearly sensible) and is trying to overcome its restrictions by putting on a pantomime about social structures featuring cannibals and killer robots. Criticising it for lacking a realism it could never achieve is harsh.

Doctor Who: revisiting Sylvester McCoy’s first season 30 years on

By Jamie Andrew

Doctor Who: the Historical Places the Show Has Never Visited (But Should)

By Chris Farnell

Season 24 follows ‘Paradise Towers’ with a story set in a holiday camp and then in a shopping centre. Being Doctor Who, the shopping centre is in space and run by an intergalactic criminal, and the holiday camp becomes the battleground for an attempted genocide (“Now, let me try and get this right. Are you telling me that you are not the Happy Hearts Holiday Club from Bolton, but instead are spacemen in fear of an attack from some other spacemen?”) set to the backdrop of the space race and the coming of rock and roll. Again, it seems to be courting an audience other than organised fandom for the first time in five years, using recognisable aspects of contemporary life and mashing them up with fresh takes on Doctor Who staples.

While the tone is cartoonish, the satire of a building, designed by a celebrated architect, that actively harms its residents is clearly pointed. In fact, because the tone is cartoonish, it gets away with more. Over the past few series Doctor Who had been very ‘LOOK how NASTY this is. LOOK. It’s HORRIBLE’, whereas Season 24 knowingly presented things that were both silly and horrible simultaneously, revelling in the dissonance. This is one of the many ways in which the Seventh Doctor era prefigures Russell T. Davies’ approach. The survivors of ‘Paradise Towers’ coming together to fight their attackers feels very RTD.

In fact, given that ‘Survival’ is often heralded as a mirror image of ‘Rose’, it’s worth noting how Season 24 combines the recognisable with the fantastical in the same way we’d see Autons in shopping centres or plumbers and burger vans in space during Series 1. The Doctor was part of this too. McCoy was instructed to play the role like Patrick Troughton, but specifically Troughton’s lighter moments. Ultimately McCoy would gravitate towards how Troughton fully played the Doctor in the Sixties, but here he’s mostly being silly and avuncular. Indeed McCoy was clowning more than the role demanded.

What this allows, though, is for the Doctor to engage more with the people in these stories. In an extremely Troughton-esque move, the Doctor happily mixes and enthuses with the tourists in ‘Delta and the Bannermen’. In one scene he’s following an alien princess but stops to check on the sound of someone crying. He leaves a Doctor Who story to step into the real world, sitting in people’s bedrooms holding a guitar and making wistful observations about love. And he belongs. This Doctor fits in this world, and this version of the Seventh Doctor lingers even amidst the Winging-It-Chess-Playing manipulations of later series. It expands what the character is capable of in a positive way.

I’m not going to claim here that Season 24 as a whole should be thought of amongst the very best of Doctor Who, but it’s important to address how much it achieved in difficult circumstances. Despite the rushed production it managed to take Doctor Who from the lows of cancellation and its flawed return and point it in the direction of Seasons 25 and 26. Beyond this we have the New Adventures and the show’s return in 2005, all going further with ideas brought into the show in the late Eighties. I am going to claim that ‘Paradise Towers’ is great and ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ is charming in a delirious way. ‘Dragonfire’ is the only real dud of the new approach, being somewhat plodding and incoherent. What Season 24’s unpopularity demonstrates is that fans are far more willing to overlook a poverty of ideas over a poverty of appearance.

Once I’ve put my flameproof hat on, I’m going to say ‘Terror of the Zygons’ is a great example of a very well-made story that is ultimately just a fun yarn with some particularly egregious examples of ‘Activate the Unnecessarily Slow Dipping Mechanism’ type monsters. It’s not about anything. It’s just a blast. ‘Paradise Towers’ is furious and inventive, witty and (in Doctor Who terms) novel. It just looks like someone asked CBBC to adapt a 2000AD strip, and this is too much for some fans.

The show’s reach exceeded its grasp, however. Doctor Who had been temporarily cancelled and then returned diminished. It had become harder to disguise the lack of budget. This was a period of recovery and transition, and so the ambitions of the scripts (the caretakers being older men and Pex being a Stallone-esque slab of a man) were beyond Doctor Who in the late Eighties. If ‘Paradise Towers’ had been made in 2007, Richard Briers would certainly have taken it more seriously. Equally, given his influences, Cartmel’s Doctor Who would make a great series of comics.

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You don’t have to enjoy it, but you should acknowledge that without Season 24 Doctor Who would be a much duller place.

The Doctor Who Season 24 Blu-ray box set is released on June 21st.

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