#timeless children bloggin

[schmirius]

obviously I lied, here are all my Doctor Who spoilers

I’m enjoying watching this show without being emotionally involved enough to get my feelings hurt or be Truly Mad about what happens; this is a good level of investment I’m at where I mostly roll with the punches because it’s not profound enough for me to be properly invested.

Which of course also means it’s not profound enough to make me feel deeply moved, either; it’s just kind of some random tropey sci-fi show I watch that stars more than one lady every week. Which -- score.

why on earth would blowing up the Cyber Lords kill them? THEY CAN REGENERATE ok ok that’s dumb questions I was not supposed to question that bit

obviously the Master is going to show up with no explanation again after this, which is Great, but I’m disappointed the Doctor/Master showdown didn’t end in her either blowing them both up OR her blowing up the Cyber Lords and last minute escaping / dragging him along with her to escape. Like. Particularly if we’re going to open the next episode IN PRISON, it would be the easiest thing in the world to jail them both and have another episode with Dhawan where she leaves him to rot in prison a la Delgado at the very end

why did we end in prison, lol, I guess so the companions can come and rescue her in their cool new Tardis.

ummmm but for real, what else happened.

I’m pro-ideational Master.  Not necessarily planning for it, you know, just aware that all the stupid bullshit he does could and will likely end in him blowing himself up one of these days. It’s a shame we didn’t explicitly mention that about the Doctor too in this episode, because you know, they’re the same, but I’ll live with it

it’s really Koschei the Deathless ascended fanon that the line he went with was “become me. become Death.” This was about par for the course for the boring Gallifrey choices we made though, like -- oh man, mention how you were friends at the Academy explicitly AGAIN, man, I don’t think I heard that incredibly bland detail about how you skipped class together the first three times

In general I’m against going to and actually showing Gallifrey for any reason other than to detail how much what the Doctor does is a reaction against what the authority figures around her taught her to do when she was growing up.  So in a lot of ways this Gallifrey story succeeds for me, because sure, yeah, they used and lied to her, sounds about right; you’d want to live your life with more moral courage than those kinds of people, and what a wonderful story it is to be like “I’ve always acted with moral courage and I have nothing to be ashamed of based on who raised me and how.”

On the other hand, the details of her being at the center of the society, with exceptional foundational biology, being uniquely a shapechanger (thus giving her tricksterhood some sort of deterministic origins?) -- this made me roll my eyes quite a lot.  In general I dislike when canons do this to and for their protagonists, make them as Unique or Mythical as fans like to consider them, fannishly, instead of merely random individuals from a random SFF setting behaving as best as they can under weird circumstances. It’s understandable for it to happen after years of canon, and after characters reach certain levels of Doylist popularity!

But man I am not one of those fans who wants canon to write Watsonian explananations for why the narrative would, Doylistly, be centered on this extraordinary individual. You’re robbing ME of the pleasure of figuring out what they’re doing in the context of their universe that makes them interesting to focus on.  Let it be enough that she yells at fascists and oligarchs and colonizers, and the shortcuts she uses to win these battles are her magic wand and magic box and cheekiness.  Let us continue to handwave her moderate immortality in-universe, giving us another chance out-of-universe to celebrate this virtue of changibility -- “well, we’re going to renew this show again, and how cool we can reset the tone by resetting the actor.”

having said that, since we chose this story and this thing being a property of the Doctor the biological entity: lol at the Master completely losing it at being literally made from the Doctor.  lol at the Master needing to prove himself her equal by also biologically Frankensteining together a race. lol, once again, at the race he chose to put together:

Dhawan is clearly having the time of his life chewing all this scenery and I wouldn’t deny him the pleasure for anything; much as I can never deny how much fun Ainley clearly has every time he oozes up behind another Doctor in his velour.  Dhawan’s playing the Master as somehow more on edge but less emotionally intense than Simm did? I guess part of it is because, like cowards, they did not write him to match Thirteen, as Simm was written to match Ten; the Ainley comparison is apt, because Dhawan is just kind of being generically evil (read: bonkers) in the background, as Ainley was for so many stories in the 80s. Except they built Dhawan on Simm’s manic model, not on Delgado’s devilish one.  

So really my complaint is that Thirteen should be more fleshed out as a character, I guess.  But then as I said, probably it is just fine for me to not be very emotionally invested in the characters of this era, the stories of this season have been pretty solid and the tropes have been fun and THERE HAVE BEEN EVEN FOUR LADIES IN A WEEK. 

the Master literally narrated the evil backstory against a white backdrop for like. thirty minutes. he held the Doctor hostage in the Matrix for half an hour and there was no overly symbolic dreamscape shit, :(.  Needs moar cheetahs and volcanoes.

on the other hand, as I say. There’s like. FOUR LADIES, and a ton of them aren’t white. ty Gallifrey continuity fairy!

[schmirius]

I don’t know what else happened in this episode