#twentieth anniversary of doctor who

[reachingforthevoid]

Doctor Who: Arc of Infinity

I rewatched this serial on 21 April 2023. The story marks the first serial of the twentieth anniversary season, and was the first time Doctor Who celebrated such a milestone purposefully. I recall the excitement of looking forward to returning monsters and friends throughout this season. As for this tale, the best bits are those in Amsterdam, one of my favourite cities and one where I have family connections.

We begin in a dark place that is quickly revealed to be Gallifrey, which continues to look like that we first saw during The Deadly Assassin and then The Invasion of Time. Once again, dark times are afoot with traitors and plots. In the TARDIS, the Doctor and Nyssa are making repairs… until they come under threat from some astro-bobbins. They go to Gallifrey where the plotting becomes complicated until the monster is revealed.

Meanwhile in Amsterdam, two young backpackers — a Brit and an Aussie — look to find a place to doss down for the night. The Brit, Robin Stuart, is concerned about the Dutch police deporting him because he’s lost his passport… a plot line that’s once more credible with Brexit. The Aussie, Colin Frazer, becomes embroiled in the overarching plot and disappears… and then his cousin arrives, dressed as though it’s a summer holiday she’s heading to… Yes, it’s Tegan! 

It is amusing that Colin Baker plays the guard commander who really wants to kill the Doctor. It’s also neat that it’s Omega who returns in this story, since he appeared in what’s often referred to as the tenth anniversary special, The Three Doctors.

[pers-books]

Four new trips to Gallifrey

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the Gallifrey range, Big Finish Productions presents Echoes Through Eternity, a brand-new collection of short story readings, due November 2024.

Gallifrey. Ancestral home of the Time Lords. Some have lived there all their lives, some have adopted it as their own. Allies, thrown together by circumstance and strife, have forged lasting friendships in the furnace of politics, alternate realities, and the Last Great Time War. 

Gallifrey is constant, but its inhabitants must change to survive. Perhaps none more so than Narvin... 

Gallifrey has watched over the universe since the dawn of time – and, at Big Finish Productions, since 2004. The audio drama range following intrigue and adventure on the Doctor’s homeworld is now twenty years old. 

Marking the occasion is Echoes Through Eternity, a collection of four brand-new stories, in the style of Big Finish’s Short Trips. These tales are set across the timeline of the Gallifrey range and feature some of its most iconic characters. 

The set includes two stories by Gary Russell, the range’s original creator. Both follow Celestial Intervention Agency Coordinator Narvin and are read by Seán Carlsen. The other two stories focus on the characters of Braxiatel and Ace, with their original voice actors Miles Richardson and Sophie Aldred reading. 

The Worlds of Doctor Who – Gallifrey: Echoes Through Eternity is now available to pre-order (as a digital download only) for just £11.99, exclusively here.

The four stories are: 

Damned If You Do by Gary Russell, read by Seán Carlsen 

CIA Coordinator Narvin is unwillingly called upon to find some lost students – aliens admitted to the hallowed Academy. But when Narvin and Cadet Kransa enter the Catacombs, nothing will be the same... 

The Questing Beast by Fio Trethewey & Georgia Cook, read by Miles Richardson 

Battling the Lord Burner, Braxiatel is separated from his friends as they fall through a multitude of alternative Gallifreys. He arrives in a realm where science is magic and there is a Dragon to be slain... 

In Search of Lost Time by Una McCormack, read by Sophie Aldred

Old Time Agents never die – they just lose their memories. Back on Earth after her involvement in the Time War, Ace is having trouble fitting in – and coincidence seems to be following her... 

Damned If You Don’t by Gary Russell, read by Seán Carlsen 

As the Time War rages, Narvin is at the heart of the action – but he has lost so much, he may not have the will to carry on. Until his past returns to haunt him... 

Producer Heather Challands said: “One thing that was very apparent when I came on to the Gallifrey range was how well-loved it is by the listeners. 

“Gallifrey has introduced us to so many different characters, timelines, conflicts and so much creativity over the years that it only felt right to celebrate the 20th anniversary by revisiting some old favourites. A small slice of a very storied history, explored by four brand new stories set from the earliest days in the Citadel to deep in the heart of the Time War.” 

The Worlds of Doctor Who – Gallifrey: Echoes Through Eternity is now available to pre-order (as a digital download only) for just £11.99, exclusively here.

All the above prices include the special pre-order discount and are subject to change after general release. 

[dramioneasks]

HP FESTS: D.I.L.F. Fest

D.I.L.F. Fest 2023:

Doctor's Orders by Wanderingfair - E, one-shot - “You ignored me,” he whispered, dropping his mouth to her ear. “I noticed it.” She was incensed by his ability to slow them down. “It wasn’t because I never thought of you,” she sighed, dropping her head back as he continued to kiss around her ear. “It was because I thought about you so much, Draco.” “I can’t take this,” He lifted her up until she was mounted on the kitchen island. OR The story of how gray sweatpants tortured Hermione Granger for over a decade.]

Begin again by Goldenbucky - M, one-shot - Hermione Granger attends her twentieth anniversary reunion at Hogwarts. In the presence of her ex-husband and his new wife, she can’t wait to leave. But then, Draco Malfoy shows up. And boy, has he grown.

Double the Trouble by nissasxnotes - G, WIP - Lyra Malfoy was raised in England by her single father, Draco Malfoy. Aurora Granger was raised in New York City by her single mother, Hermione Granger. Unbeknownst to the girls, they are twins who were separated when their parents divorced. Draco and Hermione are hoping the girls don't find out the truth when they both board the Hogwarts Express on September 1, 2014. However, when the Sorting Ceremony does not go as anyone anticipates, the secrets may be harder to keep than either of them thought possible.

All Bark, No Bite by aplacetostart - E, one-shot - “You know exactly how I feel about the Auror Office, Malfoy.” “That’s Captain Malfoy to you.” “I’d rather call you daddy.”

"To the Parents of..." by SiriuslyDemented - E, one-shot - Scorpius Malfoy is failing Professor Granger's class, which means she has to send a letter home informing his parents. The meeting with his very hot, very single father, goes anything but as planned. "Is this for me, Professor?" He purred. "Yes." Hermione sighed. "Thank Salazar."

Good Girls Get Rewarded by spicyxpisces - E, one-shot - After a long day, Draco takes care of Hermione in more ways then one.

Welcome to Diagon Alley by TeslaMalfoy - E, one-shot - Hermione knew that Draco had bought the Leaky Cauldron. It had been announced on the front page of the Prophet when Tom sold it to retire—she had assumed that he bought it as an investment. Never did she think he would be working the bar, let alone, wiping down the bar at a quarter till midnight with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, showing off his tattoo-covered arms.

Parent/Teacher Tryst by What_The_Fawkes - not rated, one-shot - After a rough period, post-divorce, Hermione is called to Hogwarts to discuss her daughter's behavior. She gets far more than she expects when a familiar face greets her...

The Baby is Crying - ruminations (tannacious) - M, one-shot - In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the DILF_Fest collection. Prompt: “She/he won’t stop crying. I hate it when he/she’s crying”

This fest is onging.

[contentment-of-cats]

On bed rotting, a day of rest, and an anniversary.

I can't remember the last time I voluntarily spent the day in bed. My grandmother, born in 1906 spoke of 'taking to bed' - something the energetic but sickly child I was could not understand unless one was ill. As I grew older, weekends became productive time - to study, do homework, write papers, maintain my living space, run errands. The cup of life ran over and drowned the calendar. No rest, or precious little of it even as my body began to fail under a diagnosis of fibromyalgia in 2007. I'd had viral meningitis in 2004, and my immune system never turned off.

Then there came the time when all I could do was rest, but it was miserable instead of restorative. Sickness, growing debility that I tried to deny and rationalize and bring to a doctor. Then hospitalization, tests and scans, diagnosis, preparation, and Stage 4a aggressive treatment. I came home and would sleep until I had to wake up and take Zofran, or in the really bad cases Ativan, or Clonazipine in order not to vomit myself into dehydration. After surgery, nothing but bed. Unable to lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk from November to April.

Today is second Monday in November, the anniversary of my big surgery, the removal of six feet of colon and intestines followed by a resection that literally gave me a new asshole. They removed my uterus and ovaries where the cancer had begun to spread. They re-sectioned my left ureter and bladder because the cancer was spreading there, too. They placed a uretal stent while I healed. I had an ileostomy done so my stitched-together innards could close. Finally, they removed 22 lymph nodes of which seven were found to be precancerous or cancerous. They say you forget the pain, and to an extent that is true. You forget the physical sensation, but you never forget waking up screaming, passing out, waking up again, and begging to die.

I know what a ten on the pain scale is like now. It's been revised up and up. Just when I thought I knew ten, I found out differently. My torso is marked by scars that look as if they were drawn in black Sharpie. I'm in remission, and far from wanting to be the busy, productive person I used to be, I find that I don't want to be anything. With my mother's death in the spring, the burden of daughterhood to a cluster b disordered woman, of shepherding her through dementia as I shepherded myself through cancer was lifted. I grieved the mother I wished for and she could sometimes be, but I was relieved that this stranger who came to wear my mother's body was finally gone. She could rest, and now so can I now that her energy has returned to the universe.

I am still working, but I am selfish now. My weekends are just for me. Despite being in remission, I don't know how many more I will have. That makes them precious. I cook, make jewelry, and 'watch telly' as Gran used to say. It was while I was rotting in bed on Sunday - my pre-Recession habit revived - that I came upon this interview in the Washington Post. Susan Gubar was a formative writer of my teen years, a time when the ERA failed because the male-dominated worldview (with a pushback spearheaded by 'traditional' women) didn't think we needed more rights than we already had, if anything they thought we had too many.

The Madwoman in the Attic, For Adult Users Only: The Dilemma of Violent Pornography, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century : The War of the Words all ended up in my mother's shelves - she laid claim to my library when I moved out. With her death, I now get them back, plus more. My ten boxes of books donated in the first spate of Swedish Death Cleaning are nothing compared to my mother's hoard of books over her 80+ years of life. On top of that there are the books that she borrowed from me, that somehow also became hers.

Susan Gubar is a cancer patient in remission, and I have downloaded her two books on cancer and survivorship. Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, and Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal. I plan to rot in bed this pre-Thanksgiving weekend, and read. Also of note, her recent book Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination. I'm delighted to find her all over again, a writer whose 1979 work spoke to me as much as Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own.'

Hey. Mom had my copy of that, too, dangit.

Perhaps I can get my library back. A snapshot of myself circa 1991. I know she borrowed my Bell Hooks and Audre Lorde. Angela Davis was someone Mom knew somehow and bought her books on principle. I read a lot of Second and Third Wave feminism, queer theory, psychology, sci-fi, fantasy, and comic books. My first copy of 'Our Bodies: Ourselves' - Mom had to buy that one for me, the bookstore owner refused to sell it to me despite my being female I was not a woman. My old D&D guides.

Perhaps my remission Sundays need to be spent rotting in bed, rediscovering the voracious reader I was all those years, before the busy-ness of life nibbled my time away.

It's a resolution, voted, and carried.

[drwhosoundtrackshowdown]

Doctor Who Theme: Round 4

Before The Flood

"A one-off modification to the theme was made in Before the Flood, with the Doctor playing his electric guitar over the normal theme tune."

The Five Doctors

"[...] a variation created especially for the twentieth anniversary story The Five Doctors, which used the original Derbyshire arrangement transposed up to the F-sharp minor key, and having the 1980 version fade in at the "middle eight". The extended theme also contains a section which Howell himself refers to the Howell Trombone. This section comes after the middle eight plays for the second time and the triads change chords up to the next octave."

[moved-to-satoruswaifu]

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ 𝒎𝒂𝒊𝒏 𝒇𝒊𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓⋆.satoru gojo. jujutsu kaisen. ship name infinitetime. have been with him for three years. anniversary on the twentieth of november. kindly don’t interact and block me if you ship yourself with him or post about canon character ships that involve him.

𝒔𝒆𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒅𝒂𝒓𝒚 𝒇𝒊𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒔 that i don’t post about often but still need to list here⋆.the tenth & fourteenth doctor. doctor who. ship name bluemoon. i am rather attached to him as he is quite similar to me in some aspects. sharing with current mutuals is ok, but i won’t interact with ship—content.

astarion ancunín. baldur’s gate 3. ship name stormynights. i don’t quite ship him with myself, but more with an oc that has certain personality traits of mine. sharing with current mutuals is ok, but i won’t interact with ship—content.

[kosmos2999]

Star Trek: The Animted Series 50th Anniversary Episode Review

Episode: Yesteryear

Season: 1

Episode: 2

Stardate: 5373.4

Original airdate: September 15, 1973

Written by: D.C. Fontana

Directed by: Hal Sutherland

Music by: Yvette Blais and Jeff Michaels

Executive producers: Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott

Studio: Filmation Associates

Network: NBC

Series created by: Gene Roddenberry

Cast:

Captain James T. Kirk (voice by William Shatner)

Mr. Spock (voice by Leonard Nimoy)

Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (voice by DeForest Kelly)

Lt. Uhura (voice by Nichelle Nichols)

Lt. Hikaru Sulu (voice by George Takei)

Eng. Montgomery Scott, Guardian Voice, Thelin, Erickson, Bates, Aleek-Om, Vulcan healer (voices by James Doohan)

Amanda Grayson, Grey (voices by Majel Barrett)

Guest stars:

Sarek (voice by Mark Lenard)

Young Spock (voice by Billy Simpson)

Sepek (voice by Keith Sutherland)

Synopsis:

The Enterprise is in orbit around the planet of the time vortex, where the Guardian of Forever is located. They are in a mission of assisting a group of historians in the investigation of Federation history. Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and historian Erickson and return from a time travel to observe the dawn of the Orion civilization while Doctor McCoy alogside historians Grey and Aleek-Om and they notice something strange. It seems that they does not know who Spock is.

Aboard the Enterprise, thet are received by Engineer Scott and he also does not recognize who Spock is. The First Officer's position is occupied by an Andorian named Thelin instead of Spock. After consulting the memory banks from the Enterprise's library computer, they learn that Mr. Spock was killed at the age of seven and his mother died in a shuttle accident.

Kirk and Spock are beamed down again to the planet. They asked Grey and Aleek-Om if they used the Guardian while Spock was in Orion's past. They have found that both historians were 30 years in the past of planet Vulcan where Spock died on his maturity test.

He remembers that a mysterious cousin named Selek saved him from death at that age. Spock assumes the role of that cousin and travels to his native planet Vulcan back in time using the Guardian of Forever.

Spock arrives to his hometown, the city of ShiKar, close to the twentieth day of the month of Tasmeen, shortly before his younger self was ready to enter the Kahs-Wan maturity test. As Selek, adult Spock met his father, Sarek, his mother, Amanda and his pet shelat, I-Chaya.

Young Spock enters the maturity test followed by I-Chaya and secretly followed by adult Spock. In the journey thru the desert, the young Spock face the attack of a ferocious creature, le-matya. During the ordeal, adult Spock saves the life of his younger self by applying the nerve pinch to the creature. During the battle, I-Chaya was hurt by the poison of the le-matya. Young Spock has to run across the desert to find a healer to cure I-Chaya. He has to choose between to give his pet a longer but painful life, or release him from his suffering. With the advice from his adult self, young Spock choose to put to sleep I-Chaya. Then, the young Spock decides to follow the Vulcan ways of his father, Sarek.

As the life his his younger self and his mother were saved, the timeline was restored and Spock returns to the present thru the Guardian of Forever.

Fascinating Facts:

This is the only story written by D.C. Fontana for The Animated series. Fontana's main duties on this series were Story Editor and Associate Producer. At The Original Series, Dorothy Fontana served as Writer and Story Consultant. She wrote four stories, co-wrote three stories and scripted four stories.

D. C. Fontana wrote this story to look back her experience on The Original Series. Spock was her favorite main character and she made her focus on two stories he wrote on him, “Journey to Babel” and “This Side of Paradise”. She wanted to explore on Spock's formative years, specially on his early relationship with his family.

The shelat pet, I-Chaya was mentioned first in the TOS episode “Journey to Babel” as “a fat teddy bear” with six-inch fangs.

In addition to the mention of Spock's pet in “Journey to Babel”, another source of inspiration Fontana used for I-Chaya, was her cat named Bobby McGee. His name is inspred by a song from Janis Joplin.

The Guardian of Forever appeared for the first time in the first season episode of TOS, “City on the Edge of Forever. In TOS, it was voiced by Bartell La Rue but in this episode was voiced by James Doohan.

Jane Wyatt was not available at the time for recording for the character of Amanda Grayson. Mark Lenard was one of three guest stars to voice their characters on both TOS and TAS. The other two were Roger C. Carmel as Harry Mudd and Stanley Adams as Cyrano Jones.

[explainlaterpod]

The Five Doctors

We bring the curtain down on Doctor Who's sixtieth anniversary year with a look back at the show's twentieth anniversary epic - 1983's The Five Doctors. Along the way we consider the malleability of the First Doctor, whether any directorial notes were given for THAT High Council scene, and what we actually want from an anniversary anyway.

Read Dave Owen's review of The Five Doctors from 2003 here.

  Watch this episode on Youtube Send us an email Follow us on Bluesky, Instagram and X For everything else, head to illexplainlater.com.

  Download this month's episode

[philaet0s]

One Letter, One Book

I have this obsessive need to track everything I do, so I have (several) Excel sheets with information about the books I’ve read this year. I thought I could use all this nonsense to create a list of recommendations, with one challenge: I have to give one author for every letter of the alphabet -if I can. When I didn’t have an author whose name began with a certain letter, I checked book titles. If I couldn’t find a name or a title with a certain letter, I had to leave it blank.

A: Maya Angelou

Letter to My Daughter

(4 stars)

Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays. Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.

B: Philippe Besson

Arrête avec tes mensonges (English: Lie With Me)

(5 stars) 

Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe, a famous writer, chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back to Philippe's teenage years, to a winter morning in 1984, a small French high school, and a carefully timed encounter between two seventeen-year-olds. It's the start of a secret, intensely passionate, world-altering love affair between Philippe and his classmate, Thomas.

Honourable mention to James Baldwin because I read three of his books this year (Giovanni’s Room, Another Country and Go Tell It On the Mountain) and they were all brilliant, but Besson’s novel is the one I gave five stars to.

C: Albert Camus

L’étranger (English: The Stranger/The Outsider)

(4 stars)

With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach.

D: Patricia Duncker

Hallucinating Foucault

(5 stars)

In this ravishing tale of sexual and textual obsession, the young unnamed narrator sets forth from Cambridge on a quest. He is to rescue the subject of his doctoral research, Paul Michel, the brilliant but mad writer, from incarceration in a mental institution in France. What ensues is a drama of terrible intimacy and tenderness played out one hot and humid summer in Paris and in the south of France.

E: Annie Ernaux

Les années 

(4,5 stars)

Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and collective, and a new genre – the collective autobiography – in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is ‘a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism’ (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.

F: The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White

(3,5 stars)

This is the story of a man who has outlived most of his friends. Having reached the six-month anniversary of his lover's death, he embarks on a journey of remembrance that will recount his struggle to become a writer and his discovery of what it means to be a gay man. His witty, conversational narrative transports us from the 1960s to the near present, from starkly erotic scenes in the back rooms of New York clubs to episodes of rarefied hilarity in the salons of Paris to moments of family truth in the American Midwest.

G: Romain Gary (Emile Ajar)

La vie devant soi (English: Life Before Us)

(5 stars)

Momo has been one of the ever-changing ragbag of whores' children at Madame Rosa's boarding house in Paris ever since he can remember. But when the check that pays for his keep no longer arrives and as Madame Rosa becomes too ill to climb the stairs to their apartment, he determines to support her any way he can. This sensitive, slightly macabre love story between Momo and Madame Rosa has a supporting cast of transvestites, pimps, and witch doctors from Paris's immigrant slum, Belleville.

H: Victor Hugo

Claude Gueux

(5 stars)

Written by Victor Hugo in 1834, "Claude Gueux" is a short story considered to be an example of early 'true crime' fiction. Within it, Hugo presents his still-developing ideas concerning societal injustice three decades before he would imbue them into his seminal novel "Les Miserables".

I: Christopher Isherwood

A Single Man

(4 stars)

Welcome to sunny suburban 1960s Southern California. George is a gay middle-aged English professor, adjusting to solitude after the tragic death of his young partner. He is determined to persist in the routines of his former life. A Single Man follows him over the course of an ordinary twenty-four hours. Behind his British reserve, tides of grief, rage, and loneliness surge – but what is revealed is a man who loves being alive despite all the everyday injustices.

J: Le dernier jour d’un condamné, Victor Hugo

(English: The Last Day of a Condemned Man)

(4 stars)

This novella by Victor Hugo recounts the thoughts of a man condemned to die. A novel advocating for the abolition of the death penalty.

K: Tony Kushner

Angels in America

(3,5 stars)

New York City in the 1980s. A gay man is abandoned by his lover when he contracts the AIDS virus, and a closeted Mormon lawyer's marriage to his pill-popping wife stalls. Other characters include the infamous McCarthy-ite lawyer Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, a former drag queen who works as a nurse, and an angel.

L: Edouard Louis

Histoire de la violence (English: History of Violence)

(4,5 stars)

I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment. He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had come to France, having fled Algeria. We spent the rest of the night together, talking, laughing. At around 6 o'clock, he pulled out a gun and said he was going to kill me. He insulted me, strangled and raped me. The next day, the medical and legal proceedings began. History of Violence retraces the story of that night, and looks at immigration, class, racism, desire and the effects of trauma in an attempt to understand a history of violence, its origins, its reasons and its causes.

M: Toni Morrison

Beloved

(4 stars)

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present.

N: Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita

(4 stars)

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Dolores Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.

O: George Orwell

Animal Farm

(4 stars)

A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned –a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.

P: Phèdre, Jean Racine

(English: Phaedra)

(3,5 stars)

Jean Racine’s last and greatest tragedy is based on a legend that has intrigued dramatists as far back as Euripides and Seneca. Phaedra, the second wife of Theseus, the heroic king of Athens, is consumed with an illicit passion for Hippolytus, her stepson.

Q: "Being Queer in America: A Journal of Disintegration"

From David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

(4,5 stars)

In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays — a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the “Fear of Diversity in America.” From the author’s violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation — Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives — politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

R: Sally Rooney

Normal People

(4 stars)

Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation--awkward but electrifying--something life changing begins. A year later, they're both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

S: Neige Sinno

Triste tigre

(4 stars)

Entre 7 et 14 ans, la petite Neige est violée régulièrement par son beau-père. La famille recomposée vit dans les Alpes, dans les années 90, et mène une vie de bohème un peu marginale. En 2000, Neige et sa mère portent plainte et l’homme est condamné, au terme d’un procès, à neuf ans de réclusion. Des années plus tard, Neige Sinno livre un récit déchirant sur ce qui lui est arrivé. Sans pathos, sans plainte. Elle tente de dégoupiller littéralement ce qu’elle appelle sa « petite bombe ».

T: Donna Tartt

The Secret History

(5 stars)

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

U: "Unfinished Duet"

From Richard Silken's Crush

(4 stars)

Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as the 2004 winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by panic and obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking.

V: Ocean Vuong

Night Sky with Exit Wounds

(4 stars)

Ocean Vuong's first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial "big"—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.

W: Jeanette Winterson

Written on the Body

(5 stars)

Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman.

X:

Y: Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, John Weir

(4,5 stars)

John Weir, author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, a defining novel of 1980s New York in its response to the global AIDS crisis, has written a story collection that chronicles the long aftermath of epidemic death, as recorded in the tragicomic voice of a gay man who survived high school in the 1970s, the AIDS death of his best friend in the 1990s, and his complicated relationship with his mother, "a movie star without a movie to star in," whose life is winding to a close in a retirement community where she lives alone with her last dog.

Z: Stefan Zweig

The Chess Player

(3,5 stars)

Stefan Zweig's acclaimed novella Chess is a disturbing, intensely dramatic depiction of obsession and the price of genius.

[readingforsanity]

The Girl From Widow Hills | Megan Miranda | Published 2020 | *SPOILERS*

Everyone knows the story of the girl from Widow Hills. 

Arden Maynor was just a child when she was swept away while sleepwalking during a terrifying rainstorm and went missing for days. Strangers and friends, neighbors and rescue workers, set up search parties and held vigils, praying for her safe return. Against all odds, she was found, alive, clinging to a storm drain. The girl from Widow Hills was a living miracle. Arden’s mother wrote a book. Fame followed. Fans and fan letters, creeps and stalkers. And every year, the anniversary. It all became too much. As soon as she was old enough, Arden changed her name and disappeared from the public eye. 

Now a young woman living hundreds of miles away, Arden goes by Olivia. She’s managed to stay off the radar for the last few years. But with the twentieth anniversary of her rescue approaching, the media will inevitably renew its interest in Arden. Where is she now? Soon Olivia feels like she’s being watched and begins sleepwalking again, like she did long ago, even waking outside her home. Until late one night she jolts awake in her yard. At her feet is the corpse of a man she knows - from her previous life, as Arden Maynor. 

And now, the girl from Widow Hills is about to become the center of the story, once again, in this propulsive page-turner from suspense master Megan Miranda. 

Olivia Meyer has spent her entire adult life running from her past. Not particularly a bad past, but one that had left her traumatized. 

She was known as The Girl from Widow Hills. At 6 years old, she had been swept away by flood waters in her town of Widow Hills, Kentucky. Missing for three days, she was found in a tunnel, holding onto a grate. She had injured her arm, which required multiple surgeries and still to this day gives her problems. Her name was Arden Olivia Maynor. Prior to college, she legally changed her name in hopes that interest would peter off. Her mother had spent a lot of the time getting money off of their story: she sold a book about what happened, did interviews and whatever else she could do to gain fame off of the story. 

Now, Olivia is in her mid-twenties. She works as a hospital care administrator in a small town of Valley Central, North Carolina. While many people don’t stick around the town, she fell in love with it. With the money she had inherited as a child, she purchased a home on the shared property of a man named Rick, who becomes much like a father figure to her, the two of them always looking out for each other. 

As a child, Olivia found herself with sleepwalking episodes, and now it is happening again. She chalks it up to the 20 year anniversary of the incident quickly approaching, and her bodies way of dealing with it. Rick finds her outside of her home one day, and helps her back inside after she comes too. As anyone would be, he is worried about her and he isn’t sure how to handle it. But Olivia assures him that everything is fine. 

On her way to work one day, she stops in a convenience store to make some purchases. She runs into an ER doctor there and after a brief conversation, she notices a man watching her, making it painfully obvious and not doing a great job of hiding it. He even calls her by her name, and she assumes that the media has found out about her name change and is wanting her to do an interview. 

After work, she arranges to meet with her friends Bennett and Elyse, who both work at the hospital as well. However, after hearing that someone was asking for her in the bar, Olivia decides to return home, assuming that this person was her ex-boyfriend, a professor she had while in grad school. At home, she drinks a small glass of wine and turns in for the night. When she awakes, she finds herself disoriented and outside, her hands covered in blood. When she notices a mans body on the ground, she runs for Rick’s house, the only place, other than her own, that she feels safe. 

Rick brings her inside, and while she cleans herself up, Rick goes to check out the scene outside. He returns, and calls the police. A young detective arrives, who had known Rick and his family, as she grew up in the town. Her name is Nina Rigby. She had known Rick’s son, Jarred, as her brother was friends with him. Though Olivia is not considered a suspect at first, Nina does share that she thinks it would be wise if Olivia left Rick alone, as there were rumors that he was involved in his wife’s death a decade ago. 

Olivia is taken to the hopsital for stitches on her knee that she gained in a fall. She is treated by the same ER doctor she had run into that morning, and Elyse arrives to help her back home after she is taken care of. Elyse helps her, provides her with the medicine she was prescribed, giving her food and promises to sit with her for a while. When Olivia awakes, Elyse is gone and Bennett has arrived. 

Nina returns, this time with information on the person found in her yard. He is Sean Coleman. Initially, Olivia doesn’t react to this until she realizes why he looked so familiar to her, though she hasn’t seen him for almost two decades. Sean was the man who had found her hanging onto the grate for dear life as a child. Not much had been known about him at the time, as he gave one initial interview and then he was never heard from again. Olivia then has to confess to Nina about her past, who she really is and in doing so, Bennett finds out as well. 

He’s initially peeved at this, wondering why in the two years of their friendship had she never said anything. But, he quickly comes around and realizes that she had a good reason for it. 

The investigation continues, and she later meets Sean’s son, Nathan. He is in town, though they weren’t close, but wanting to find out answers as to what has happened to his father. He and Olivia strike up a sort of friendship, an understanding. He remembers what happened to her well, though he himself was only 9 when it had happened. 

Olivia eventually finds the murder weapon, a box cutter that was in her home, in Rick’s house underneath the sink where he normally kept cleaning supplies. He confesses that he found it outside near where Sean’s body was lying. Olivia, who has a hard time trusting people, is wondering if Rick had found her with this man OR if Rick had seen him outside and did something to protect her, like he was always trying to do. 

This greatly upsets Olivia, who is not only dealing with everything that’s been going on surrounding Sean’s murder but with the sudden disappearance of Elyse as well. She didn’t show up to work that night, and sent in an email with her resignation. Bennett and Olivia can’t think of why this would be, but after a while, she stops trying to contact Elyse as she believes that she may be avoiding her after learning the truth about her past. 

Olivia goes to the hotel where Sean was staying in hopes of gathering information, but instead finds Nathan, also staying at the hotel. The two of them chat, having something in common. When Olivia begins falling for his charms, she realizes that she needs a moment and goes into the bedroom where the bathroom is. Inside his suitcase, she sees a manila folder and inside it are copies of articles from her disappearance and being found, 911 transcripts, interviews, anything he could possibly get his hands on. 

Unsure of why he has this, she then realizes what was happening: Nathan could be responsible for his father’s death, and he has been stalking her for years, and even worse, he knew who she was before she herself confessed to him. She quickly leaves, and decides to head to Widow Hills in search of answers. Due to the trauma she experienced, she doesn’t remember anything about her time underground, only to cold and the wet. 

She meets with a woman who had been investigating the disappearance. She is older now, but remembers quite clearly and the case set her career in motion as she had been on camera live with Olivia’s mother at the moment she was discovered. The video is replayed constantly. They talk, and Emma shares conspiracies that Nathan believes, that she hadn’t been found at the grate for three days, even though it was checked quite a bit and that he believed that she was put there to be found. But nothing ever added up, so nothing ever came of it. 

Olivia is beginning to understand that Sean was there to warn her about Nathan, who she now knows was blackmailing her and her mother for money beginning a decade ago when they began getting threatening letters. Nathan was obsessed, wishing his father would do an interview so they could get a taste of the money that Olivia and her mother were receiving for their cooperation. 

Nathan follows her to Widow Hills and assaults her. He is taken in custody, and Olivia presses charges. When she returns home, she gets her arm looked at it in order to help further the case against Nathan. Bennett gives her a ride home, though she is sickened to discover that a woman named Erin Mills has been reporting her and there is an incident report in Bennett’s bag. He explains that he wasn’t going to do anything with it, even allowing her to remove it from his bag and take it inside with her to destroy it. 

He leaves her after helping her poor a glass of wine, and when she tastes it, realizes that it tastes off. Noticing that the bottle likely had been opened prior to her doing so now, though it was a new bottle, she knows what’s happening. She goes to her bedroom and hears noises outside of her home. She calls 911, reporting a home invasion, though she knows exactly what is about to happen. 

The woman named Erin Mills is her mother, who changed her mind just like she had. She was working in the hospital near her daughter every day, sometimes only steps away in the nurses lounge that was right down from Olivia’s office. Olivia puts two and two together: her mother was the one who injured her arm, and in order to make it look like an accident, she set up the entire ruse of her daughter’s disappearance, hiding her in a cellar in the basement. It was only meant to be for a few hours, but it turned into a whole ordeal after she tried to put her outside near the woods, only for Olivia to go off on her own and getting stuck in the storm grate. She profited off the story, and her drug problem that she was battling only got worse from there. She faked her death 7 months ago, only calling Olivia near the beginning of the story to inform her of what had happened, allegedly. 

All that time, the sleepwalking was brought on being drugged by her mother. She gets her to confess, even as her mother is trying to get her to drink her special drug infused hot chocolate, but Olivia is smarter now, never taking a drink and smashing the cup on the ground. She pushes her mother out the window, where she lands on a balcony that is only for show, eventually pushing her to her death below. 

Olivia is taken to the hopsital once again and is found to be okay. She realizes now that everything about her life had been a lie, and a man had to die to try to protect her. She is tahnkful that Rick wasn’t home during this time, as he had gone to visit his son, who had accidentally shot and killed his own mother and Rick covered for him. Olivia will likely never be the same. 

This one was good. Megan Miranda either surprises me or she doesn’t. For a minute, I thought for sure she killed Sean; then the next I thought it was Elyse and now she was on the run; then I thought it was Bennett who was working with Nathan in order to catch her up in her lies, even though she wasn’t even aware she was lying. I never once thought that her mother was responsible for all of this. Gosh, what a whirlwind of a story. Well done, MM, well done! 5/5 stars! 

[reachingforthevoid]

Doctor Who: Snakedance

I rewatched this serial on 22 April 2023. It’s the second of the twentieth anniversary season stories, and this time we mark the return of a recent monster, the Mara. The serial is notable for introducing Martin Clunes to TV audiences.

We begin with an old bloke sat in the desert. In total contrast, Nyssa shows off an entirely new outfit to the Doctor, who refuses to notice. Tegan’s asleep in her and Nyssa’s bedroom (if one can trust the clothes hung up). One ponders if Tegan’s inspired Nyssa’s new sense of fashion… Meanwhile, on Manussa, which vibes like BBC-drama ancient Rome, Lon and his mother discuss the Mara and whether or not they are gone. It can’t be a spoiler to say that Lon is wrong, and it’s not long before the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan are caught in the drama. It’s interesting how the Mara affected so many societies, and Manussa is very different from that of the Kinda.

[castrovulcant]

[Image description: a screenshot of what's trending on tumblr showing Doctor Who as number 1 and the tag #David Tennant. The next is the, "Shut up about the sun" meme from The Office. Gabe looks annoyed as he says "Shut up about David Tennant. Shut up about David Tennant." /end image description]

i have to say i don't like this. i'm absolutely a david tennant lover but i hate how his thirty seconds of screentime have overshadowed both jodie whittaker's departure and ncuti gatwa

and apparently he's being called the fourteenth doctor, which i like even less. he's already the tenth, three episodes with whatever explanation they're using shouldn't make him number 14 as well. no one calls the war doctor the ninth, or the metacrisis doctor the eleventh, or the fugitive doctor the first– this shouldn't be any different. just think up a nickname it's not that hard

[koutaroulogy]

time lapses . miya osamu

genre: angst and fluff, domesticity

warnings: :)) , mentions of a panic attack

details: growing old with osamu has never been so blissful.

notes: dedicated to my nine month old cousin baby marigold, who lived and died with the brightest galaxy in her dull eyes. i will love you and miss you always. burn bright out there starshine ♡

word count: 👁👄👁

mayday masterlist

osamu miya did not remember the first time when he knew that he loved you. he only knew the fact that he spiralled into it at a three-sixty no-scope, at a pace of five hundred miles per hour. although he plummeted into the caress of love at a bullet train's speed, he settled slowly- refusing to give his straining feelings the time of the day until he was sure you reciprocated his feelings.

you returning his feelings must've been a one in a million chance granted for him because you did. you loved him just as he loved you.

seconds. minutes. hours. days. months. years. your wedding passed. so did your honeymoon. yet time slowed as you bore the sad news of your newborn daughter.

"my baby... is blind?"

you began to cry. osamu couldn't help himself either as he hugged the both of you into his chest.

"we'll get through it baby," osamu whispers in reassurance though it wasn't only for you. "we'll do this together like always."

on your twentieth anniversary- he told you he fell for the stars in your eyes, and you laughed.

"what stars?" you grinned bitterly, feeling for his hand and cupping it to your cheek, "i can't even see them at all."

his heart cracked a little, and he gazed on sadly as you opened your eyes to reveal dull irises, darker than the sky they were underneath in, darker than the day the doctor asked you what you could see.

"blurry," you told him, "eveything is all blurry."

oftentimes, your baby girl ask him a lot of questions and he answers them patiently, slowly and clearly as he was teaching a child how to read the abc's for the first time.

you watched your baby feel through her palms and laugher a little as she squealed when she touched the plush onigiri her father gave her. osamu watched for a split second as your eyes brightened a bit and faded back to dark.

but you pulled through memorizing the braille, the bullying neighbors who didn't mind their own business, breaking down sessions and the panic attacks- standing up strong with his help and the both of you making it to where you were now.

"i used to remember the color of the sky," your fingers traced magic circles and stars onto his withered palms, "but i forgot about it now."

he laughs and grasped your hand tightly in his, wise old eyes looking through the children who resembled a bit of them and a bit of their own children.

"you'll remember it someday."

his tone was reassuring even though you weren't at all worried, and your smiling face buried itself into his neck.

yet he'll always accept you for what you are and what you wanted to be.

always, always.

even as osamu stood at the grave, his daughter crying silently by his side- he had learned to accept it.

"dad?"

"yes?"

"was..." the woman in her thirties hesitated. she had been too scared to ask you that question as if it would hurt your feelings when you were alive.

"was mom born blind?"

"she hasn't told you yet? even when you're thirty four and your daddy's become an old man?"

"i- i've wanted to..."

he stares at the sky for a moment, the letters of condolences all neatly picked and shuffled like a deck of cards in pale withered hands.

"your mom wasn't born blind," he continues as he stared, graymetal eyes looking into the same e/c eyes he had fallen in love with- almost every day, every minute, and every second of this lifetime.

"you were born blind, and so mom-" osamu crinkled the letters and smoothed them over as if his palms didn't just dig into the crisp paper.

"y/n wanted you to see the world as she had. so- your mom gave you her eyes."

always, always.

till death do us part.

the assumption that what blind people who can open their eyes and see black is not all correct. it depends on the situation their eyes have experienced. some people see black, some people cannot see color, and others can only see total blurriness and fleeting lights.

[drwhosoundtrackshowdown]

Doctor Who Theme: Round 1

The Five Doctors

"[...] a variation created especially for the twentieth anniversary story The Five Doctors, which used the original Derbyshire arrangement transposed up to the F-sharp minor key, and having the 1980 version fade in at the "middle eight". The extended theme also contains a section which Howell himself refers to the Howell Trombone. This section comes after the middle eight plays for the second time and the triads change chords up to the next octave."

The Light at the End

"[Jamie] Robertson also created a new theme arrangement for the fiftieth anniversary special The Light at the End which incorporated many different elements from previous arrangements, but kept the same style as his previous arrangement."

The Day of the Doctor

"Yet another Murray Gold arrangement of the theme was introduced over the closing credits of TV: The Day of the Doctor. This version uses an electric guitar-driven entry sequence, and enters into the middle eight much earlier than some previous versions. A vocal choir element remains, but is more subtle than previous versions."

[carllisle]

Hi Ellie. Would you kindly share some of your lesbian Carine and bisexual Esme headcanons with us?🥺 Thank you very much, please, thank you to you ma'am.

miss ma’am!! thank you!

Lesbian Carine

The history of lesbianism in England in the early modern period is very interesting, as much of the anti-gay rhetoric put out by the Catholic (and later, more local) Church was focused on male/male homosexual activity. There was some preaching against female/female homosexuality but it was something that was talked about even less than the already-taboo male/male activity. Because of this, I think that Carine didn’t even know what love and sex between two women even was, it was just a concept that didn’t exist to her during her human life. During her time as a human, she never felt attracted to men, although she had a few superficial crushes that never amounted to much (thanks to the compulsive heterosexuality of it all smh). 

I think her first introduction to same-sex love was during her time in Italy with the Volturi. Athenodora and Sulpicia were a mated pair, and the bond between them hit Carine like a train. Because some of the Volturi’s lifestyle was not something that Carine could get on board with (primarily feeding on humans), this same-sex love and bond was not something Carine was comfortable with. I think her initial realisation that perhaps she wanted that too was very difficult for her to understand, and it manifested itself as discomfort and resentment, which she in turn interpreted as disapproval. So, yes, at this time Carine was a homophobic homosexual who was so deep in the closet she was in Cair Paravel. I think also that Carine was of the mindset that she was a monster and fundamentally unlovable - it’s like my mother always tells me, it doesn’t matter what your sexuality is if you’re ugly enough (i.e. gay or straight or bi, if you ugly NO ONE wants you thanks mum lmfaoo) 

Because of her own self-loathing, I don’t think Carine ever wanted to consciously pursue a romantic relationship, much like her Carlisle counterpart. She just wanted a companion, not a mate. I like to think that she posed as a man in order to study medicine (as there are examples of exceptional individuals throughout history doing this it’s not an especially outlandish idea). While posing as a male doctor, she first began noticing the attention of women. Women she treated saw a beautiful man and some would develop crushes on her without realising she was a woman. Perhaps even one or two saw through the ruse and knew Dr Cullen was secretly a woman - of course, not wanting to put her at risk, they never said anything except to Carine herself. Carine found the advances and interests of women exciting but disconcerting. At first she hated them because of her internalised prejudice, but as time went by with the decades she became more comfortable with it. She read the histories of women in Ancient Rome and Egypt and Greece, and in the 1910s the Sappho fragments were found and they were the final piece in Carine’s puzzle - to love a woman was not a sin, to love a woman was to love oneself and to love the world, to love God. It was around this time that she first met Esme. 

Bisexual Esme

Esme had a much less complicated relationship with her sexuality. When she met the strange and beautiful Dr Carine Cullen when she was 16, Esme had already kissed girls in her father’s fields of corn, and she had already kissed boys. She liked both, they both made her feel as light as air. As a teenager, the fantasy of an older lady, grown and radiant and kind, was wonderful and gave her butterflies. When she was 17 she first knew physical love with the daughter of one of her father’s seasonal workers. They had a season under the summer sun but when the harvest was brought in and the fields were empty, both girls knew it was over. The worker moved on and took his daughter with him and Esme cried for weeks. Still, it was the way of the world, Esme knew that, and the sadness disappeared and she looked back on the memory with fondness more than anything. 

She knew she would have to marry a man one day, and she just hoped for a kind one. Ch*rles seemed kind at first - he was polite to her mother and sisters, he was friendly to her brothers, and he was respectful to her father. He was a good enough choice as any, and Esme agreed to the arrangement. 

Come 1921 and Carine found her in the morgue. She remembered Esme’s sweet face although it was swollen and bruised and broken from the fall, and she had to change her because this bright girl, this shining woman couldn’t die, she had to live, she had to! Esme opened her eyes once the transformation was complete and she saw the face of God in Carine. She remembered that face, she dreamed of that face, and she had never truly let her go, not like she had been able to let the others go. 

Esme’s crush quickly turned to love and after two hundred and fifty years, Carine was finally secure in her faith and her sexuality. But she had never known romance or love like Esme had, and she was nervous and didn’t know what to do. She knew more about the act of love between a man and a woman than she did two women, and she still believed that love must be consummated in marriage alone. Of course, legally they could not marry but Carine so desperately wanted to be wed in the eyes of God. They snuck into a church with Edward as their witness and they pledged their love to one another, their devotion, and they exchanged rings as a symbol of their love. They called each other wife in the chapel in 1921, and they never looked back. 

When the first same-sex marriage was allowed in the Netherlands in 2001, Carine and Esme booked their flight (civil partnership was not a label they wanted - they wanted to be, in the eyes of the law, married) and got married in Rotterdam. Already wed in the eyes of God, they did not have a religious ceremony. The whole family came with them, including their Denali cousins. They have their wedding certificate framed and hanging in their bedroom. Carine has copies of their wedding photos in her purse and wears her wedding ring on a thin chain around her neck. Esme wears her wedding ring on her finger and on the twentieth anniversary of their legal marriage (which took place 80 years to the day that they first said their vows in an empty church, making it their 100th religious anniversary) they renewed their vows and exchanged eternity rings in church. 

[heroofthreefaces]

Today, right now, 20:00 EDT 5/14/21, is the twentieth anniversary of the Doctor Who tv movie.

I wrote on Tumblr once, in a discussion of how brief and perhaps insignificant can be the time of this entire life of the Doctor in the eyes of 21st century fans,

I didn’t realize this perspective was a thing. I mean, it’s obvious now that someone’e elaborated on it, that this would be the experience of those who started watching with Season 2005 or later, especially who are young enough that they can’t’ve started earlier; even the ones whom twenty-first century Doctor Who has led to twentieth century Doctor Who. But at our house at the time the eighth Doctor was never a slighted incarnation despite the paucity of screentime, even though we never had much money for the novels or the audios (we had Storm Warning, Vampire Science, some Short Trips, and the Dalek novel with Susan Foreman in); because between 1996 and 2005 there was all the fanfiction posted to alt.drwho.creative and the PMEB and PMEB-EF mailing lists to keep him going. Not to mention my own cartoons.

For some of us the eighth Doctor was the current Doctor for nine years.

And shortly after that I wrote, about categorizing the movie as “new” Who or as “classic” Who,

Also, in-text, Doctor Eight is on the same side as other twentieth century Doctors of the great divide that is the Time War. We didn’t even know what his part was in it till we learned he refused to take part, except finally he ageed, but then he became someone else we’d never heard of.

But he is in the middle, and only a hundred minutes of screentime, the whole eighth life a no-man’s-land (no-Doctor’s-land?), a shelf of volumes we know only from the bookends, where we’ll never know what happened so we decide for ourselves with Big Finish and/or with the novel line and/or with our own fanfiction and others’ and/or with our own headcanons we never share. He’s the odd one out smack in the middle. He’s difficult because he’s Schrodinger’s Doctor in the blue box. Okay now I’m getting too clever.

The point is Season 1996 is only a tie-in and also official continuity, neither fish nor fowl but also both. Like the Doctor, but even in Doctor Who, it fits in nowhere and everywhere. No wonder everyone’s confused.

Probably no official (whatever that may mean) incarnation of the Doctor is as many different things to every Doctor Who fan as Doctor Eight is. I think we’re better off for his being there, though.