[ichabod @replies]

@lisa — People who are desperate to control things are, in my experience, mainly motivated by fear of being fatally out of control, or controlled by others, at least at the outset; once established, the appetite for power feeds on itself and the connection to personal fear becomes obscured.  That’s why I am unconvinced by everybody calling Clara a “control freak”.  She’s not.  She has goals of her own (in Series 8, anyway) and tries to shape events to get her there (keeping two very different lives going simultaneously, for example), just as we all do if we want something badly (“Think about what you want most in the universe — “).

On the other hand, she *does* try to control the Doctor’s behavior, some of the time — but that’s just another way of putting the notion that the companions are there to help curb the kinds of excesses and neuroses he’s inclined to when he’s on his own for too long with a bit of a wobble-wobble developing in his own moral compass as a result.  That’s not really being a “control freak” either — it’s a strictly situational behavior, so far as I can see, so I don’t accept Moffat’s thinking about Clara on this score at all, at least not in terms of her being a “control freak”.  The concept doesn’t fit her behavior, really.

MissMaster now, *yes*, she’s my idea of the real thing — and she wants the Doctor to join her in being that, which is the purpose of handing him a whole army of dead/alive machines to control any way he sees fit rather than let them destroy the Earth he so prizes.  She’s a Master of indirect control, control by manipulation on a huge scale (suitable to a TL, of course).  And it’s far more typical of Moffat’s creative team to “solve” a problem by having the enemy’s weapon turn and cut him than to have love conquer all (although that’s not a bad pair of lessons to be teaching, when you think about it).

 

[ichabod @replies]

@tenthdoctorftw  Yes, I agree, individual taste as well as fashions in public taste have a lot to do with which artists are honored way past their deaths (well, during their lifetimes too, in the cases of prominent artists rather than the ones who are obscure until after death).  Even Shakespeare went through a period of comparative neglect and rough handling, with everybody writing new and “better” (more optimistic, to appeal to public taste) last scenes to their productions of his plays.

I had a lot of artists in my family, all types, all commercial (cartoons, animation, book illustration, advertising art, textile design) with attempts at fine arts on the side (except for my father, who took off to live in a garret on Canal Street south of the Village in NYC and paint while supporting himself as a kitchen man in a pub — no success, alas).  Messing around with drawing and painting was a large part of childhood play for me and my sisters, one of whom is a painter now; the other, when her final cataract surgery gets done at the end of this month, will return to painting in hopes of landing a gallery to show her work.

I was expected to go a similar route, was sent as an art student to a secondary school in New York called “Music and Art” as an art student and took a lot of art history in college, but I loved stories too much, read myself almost blind, and ended up writing fiction instead, and teaching.  So part of what I know comes out of my family background, but more comes out of having had a quarter century to wander around looking at all kinds of art and reading about it.  I’m pretty healthy, so in all probability I’ll live long enough to forget all of it, so it’s nice to take chat about it now while I’ve still got most of it!

Easy come, easy go, eh?

 

[ichabod @replies]

@Phantom Tollbooth  Well, the Doctor certainly took Rusty’s judgment seriously — although the epiphany in DiH proved Rusty, at least, wrong.  MixMaster now, she really is pretty awful — maybe she’s the more-than-just-potential dalek!

Maybe Rusty’s judgment (that the Doctor now IS a good dale) was based on the chilly way the Doctor used his military escort inside Rusty, with no feelings for the doomed soldiers evident on the surface — and, it would seem, none inside either, since it was inside the Doctor’s mind that Rusty was looking.

[ichabod @replies]

@Barbara Lefty  Nix on 4th dimension here — I’m already up to six, doing my tax-prep!  (Finally . . . now I know why I kept putting off completing the job.)

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus  Yes, Series 8 struck me as a very daring sort of story arc, actually — more like a tree, with a branch about mythic heroes, a branch about neurotic fears, a branch about the environment healing itself (and human helplessness and the destructiveness it can drive us to), and so on, all leading up to an open clash of ancient enemies and revelations.  I think a lot of the fans who hated the Series hated it because they’d become used to more conventional structure and this confused them, and confusion where the comfort of the familiar was hoped for can upset people a *lot* (another point about art and its functions, now that I think about it, in fact the function of cutting edge art although open warfare is not usually intended but does sometimes happen — see Charlie Hebdo in Paris).

 

[ichabod @replies]

@tenthdoctorftw  Mmm, now I have to go refresh my memory re Lady Cassandra; thank you!

The thing about art, for me, is that it’s the strongest sort of gift we can give to each other, and also the oddest because it’s only partly a gift at all.  Mozart composed for money, and made some, but wouldn’t the music have poured out of him anyway?  Van Gogh also was painting for money — his brother Theo tried to sell the paintings for years — but even without payment, Vincent kept painting.  The action is compulsory: it’s in the artist’s DNA, somehow, even if it doesn’t get activated until late in life, or starts off at a cracking pace and then stops (Rimbaud, I think).  People do this stuff as (IMO) a way of presenting their own life’s lessons, their perceptions of the world, to the rest of us, hoping we’ll pay them back with usable gratitude.  This often doesn’t happen until it’s too late, so those who profit are dealers and collectors, not the artists themselves; if it happens at all.  Imagine all the artists whose work falls by the wayside, for one reason or another, never to be recognized, let alone admired, except maybe by their moms!  I’ve observed this close up, in my own family, and it’s not a pretty picture — as it were.

I wish we’d see a bit more about art and artists of other species and worlds in DW, but art doesn’t often lead to external adventures (other than the adventure of survival when hardly anyone values what you do, or when everybody does).  Lacking further exploration, Vincent and the Doctor will certainly do for the time being.  But this is why I wish very hard that Rigsy, from “Flatline”, would show up later, maybe as a companion: an artist before he is known to be one, waking up to himself.  I’d like to see that, and it’s certainly got to be familiar ground to just about everyone on the creative team of DW, doesn’t it?

[ichabod @replies]

@tenthdoctorftw  It’s a beautiful episode, and having Bill Nighy on hand at the museum was a stroke of genius: an actor with a gawky, fragile look (it’s the way he’s built and how he moves) talking about works of genius that outlast their human makers by generations (with a bit of circumstantial luck) because great art is so much tougher than the human individuals who create it.  We who come after give it that toughness, by keeping it alive because it still “speaks” to us.

Amazing, isn’t it.

[ichabod @replies]

@Barbara Lefty  I love a smile in the morning (well, my morning here, anyway); thanks!

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion   Looking at your reply to JanetteB, I’m thinking I sort of don’t have a favorite episode in Season 8.  If I re-watch one, I end up re-watching all, because they all have elements to admire (and maybe learn from), and puzzles I haven’t solved yet and don’t care whether I do or not because just thinking about them us pleasurable (like thinking about silk, or really good chocolate), and occasionally, even now, surprises.  There are *scenes* that I like best, like “there’s only a bed’n it!”, and the whole restaurant sequence in Deep Breath, and lots of MotOE but mostly the conversation on the stony beach, and of course the volcano + back in the Tardis in Dark Water, and the quarrels in KiM, and the Cafe of Lies, the tenderness and revelation of Old Clara, and . . . well.  Like that.

For me, the Season flows like a very good novel written by a very smart, very cooperative committee of talented composers and somehow acted out by a chamber group of excellent players who are operating on a pick-up basis and so still learning each others strengths and weaknesses, as opposed to, say, the Guarneri or the Emerson etc.

Irresistible; flexible and varied art structures can entrance me, which is maybe why I’d rather look at Leonardo sketches than Leonardo finished paintings, same with Rembrandt.  So much *room* in there.  With DW, all that room is where our discussions spring from, like what the Master was like as a boy, or possible forms of Gallifreyan marriage.

[ichabod @replies]

@lisa  “Orlando”, that works for MissMaster, but I don’t recall the story in that story . . . I’m not up on Hardy at all, only read a novel or two way back in school; too damn depressing for my taste, I think.

I googled “asexuality” to see what came up — the topic has surfaced recently in a noticeable way in SF now that some of the feminist viewpoints have become assimilated into the genres (incompletely, and often badly, but it’s no longer got much shock value).  I saw a panel on asexuality on the program at an SF convention I attended last year, went to see why that idea was an issue, and discovered a bunch of people talking vehemently about being not only bombarded by massive amounts of sexual material in TV programming, fiction in general, and advertising of course, but feeling “disappeared” and in fact actively cancelled from the dominant western culture at almost all levels.  It had never occurred to me that asexuals might feel oppressed, invaded, and obliterated as individuals as well as members of a class, but some very real pain was expressed around “coming out” as asexual, to responses like, “Oh, you just haven’t met the right person yet”, or “You’re just a prude”, or “You must have been sexually abused as a child.”

My point in bringing this up, though, is that this was the first time I’d heard what we’re calling “love as a promise” discussed, in terms that we’ve been using here, but put more bluntly: “People just won’t accept that some of us have long love relationships that don’t include sexual attraction, let alone sexual behavior.”  To which, they said, the general response was, “Well, if you’re talking about marriage-type commitment, if there’s no sexual part to it that’s not real love.”  Which leads me to think of all the frenzy in the AARP magazine about how sex can be so nifty in your seventies — when that’s well past the time that some seniors will admit to being relieved at being shut of the whole damn thing.

But I’m thinking now of a few voices raised in DW fandom  protesting that the Doctor has always been asexual, and they resent the whole “sex thing” suddenly taking over the show in NuWho.  I thought maybe that was from the younger contingent, the kids who go “Eeeeww!” when there’s kissing in an action movie (well, they used to; not sure about nowadays).  Now I’m thinking, no, not just them . . . and the complicated [no-flirting rule + mighty smoldering though + “care for you so little” and love is a promise] thing in Season 8 must be baffling, to say the least.  Hell, it’s kinda baffling me while I’m typing this!

[ichabod @replies]

@bluesqueakpip  And more applause re the banana conundrum!  Point, er, taken — ah — hang on a minute —

I like your psycho stalker boy/girlfriend theory too, plus very likely a long and bumpy lifetime ride for the Doctor over there in the fast lane of sex; where at the moment CapDoc is not even driving on the tarmac but pretending there is no lane, not even a dirt  shoulder as far as he is concerned.  Yet (somehow or other) “not your boyfriend” just didn’t come anywhere near actually quenching the natural sexiness of the current incarnation (yeah to whoever said Capaldi’s “old” is light years from “too old”).  The resultant smolder is pretty epic (see, MotOE), given the cultural meme of the exponentially squared pulling-power of an attractive guy who is either playing hard to get or who really *is* hard to get, for whatever reasons.  Add the “see me” level of soul-mate status now established between him and a more grown up (but not old) Clara, and the show cooks along like an industrial grade furnace, as background or foreground, depending (“. . . find yourself alone with a — strangely compelling — masculine . . . figure — MAEBH!” Why am I still laughing over this?).

@lisa — what would you say to that script team about MissMaster and the Doctor?  Inquiring minds . . . rich veins of ore exist there, all right, but can only be sneakily and obliquely explored, I think, because the show is “Family viewing” or “Youth Oriented”.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@IAmNotAFishIAmAFreeMan  — Applause.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@craig  I’d recommend looking for one of McCall-Smith’s series about the philosophy prof who edits a journal on ethics; those have more of a grip on reality, IMO, and I prefer that to the more spun-sugary ones that I’ve read, though YMMV of course.  It’s good to hear that with M-S, what you see (charming author photos) is what you get in this case.

Pratchett’s death was no surprise — it’s 7-8 years now, isn’t it, since the announcement of his illness? — but boy it does hurt.  I think I really went under his spell with the book about the Golems — Ankh-Morpork’s slaves of all work — committing suicide . . . this man had a seriously wild and brilliant mind, powerfully tempered by compassion and goofiness.  He’s being missed, and will be for some time.  We’re just lucky that he wrote fast — lots of books to re-read.

[ichabod @replies]

@lisa  You know, I can’t tell whether she’s *really* turned on by the Doctor (at this point, anyway), or just messing with him for fun — or both at the same time!  Bananas, you know.  (What’s so crazy about bananas, anyway?)

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus  Yes!  That’s it.  I’d picked up a mystery novel called “The Stone Wife” that recounts the tale.  Smart guy, Chaucer.  Thanks.

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus  on TL long term relationships/marriages — it seems to vary quite a bit.  River/Doctor has some seeing-beneath-the-surface, which would qualify maybe as what we think of as a relationship of — soul mates?  Something that persists because the surface details have become just trimmings, so they see each other clear?  I confess that I found River very irritating a lot of the time, so I didn’t really pay enough attention to remember the details.  And Doctor/Master is obscured by one of them being bananas, as it were, so how can we generalize from that?

Ha, yes, Series 8 really was a two-hander, wasn’t it?  *Both* of them figuring out who the Hell he was, and Clara being opened out into the person she never really got around to being with earlier Docs (becaus, the writers weren’t interested?  With the romance route being firmly shut down, the only feasible option in terms of the life and success of the show — not to mention give the relationship enough depth for Capaldi to play with it — was to grow her).  Now the trick will be to keep her real — not that easy, for a team of male writers with one female included for this very purpose, I should think.

I remember Fiddler — a story of that way of life in which arranged marriage is the norm and is seen as a promise, with or without love (which is still supposed to “happen” just from rubbing along together for decades, and sometimes does, by all accounts).

I read someplace where Moffat says CapDoc not being “a hugging person now” at Hug A was written as a throwaway line, but Capaldi really got his teeth into it and made it a thing.  As I see it, he’s not that person at that point *because* he knows Clara doesn’t really “see” him, 12 + all the others, yet, so that hug is only provisional, not an expression of any serious level of truth between them, and what good is a provisional hug?  By the Hug Cafe, he’ll give the provisional hug a try because looks like that’s as far as they’re ever gonna get and there are those lies between them.  In the sleigh, maybe it’s still a one-sided, fantasy hug — it’s a dream, and he’s conflated with Santa in her dreaming mind, for goodness’ sake, and she’s more than half willing to stay with it like that and die of it.  We only get to the real thing in Old Clara’s bedroom, where a wiser woman hugs the whole, complicated man, and finally gets hugged back for real.  She *gets* it, she’s lived 62 yrs of human life to compare her life-with-her-alien to, and she can see him without even looking.  Her hug says, “I’m home!”  So he comes, and becomes, home too, and the hug is complete.

Just gorgeous, and no taking-for-granted, either: he doesn’t just grab her hand.  He invites her; and you’re right, it’s not forever because she’s only human, this is our universe in which even mountains change and fall, and it will all end in tears because it must, but meanwhile — Geronimo!  How else can we actually live a life, however long or short it turns out to be?

Come on, guys, what’s that tale of courtly love in which the knight learns that the secret to loving a woman is to give her control?  It’s not the “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, it’s another one, I just came across it recently but can’t  think where — he’s been *trying* to give her control all season long, and finally, he’s confident enough to really do it, and she’s fit to take it — ?

Gotta go make that fridge magnet now; we gotta make our fortunes somehow . . .

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

@bluesqueakpip  I agree, Moffat seems to be leaning hard in that direction — long love, in some form, as the rock of (relative) stability in a constantly changing universe, vs. the “thrillingly” chaotic lives of The Stars (or “celebs” now) to which so many youngsters seem to aspire . . . I’ll take “the promise”, myself, for all kinds of reasons, even in stories.  All that shuffling around, or zooming from one string of fireworks to another — exhausting even to think about.  And yes, the promise saves the world . . . that makes all kinds of sense to me.  Love your point about crappy health tech among TLs — though you’d want to be a bit careful, if you’ve only got so many regens to use to get better.  I expect they do it all at the outset via genetic manipulation, so you don’t catch cold in the first place, and after that you’re on your own.

And yeah, long term love sure doesn’t match up with consumerism very well!  Even with our smaller lifespans, there are reasons that most advertising doesn’t target older people in general — I look at my stuff these days and think either “Time to clear out some of this g.d. STUFF and no need to replace it, either,” or “Hmm, that carpet is pretty beat up, but it’ll see me out”.

I dunno, I don’t think all that much thought has gone into how TLs *as a society* work — their psychology, economy, and sociology all seem hastily cobbled up, full of holes, and boringly familiar (from human societies) to me.  What we get instead is a long, close study of the Doctor, who’s an outlier by definition anyway, having fled his home world in a stolen vehicle.  Suits me — if we never get to Gallifrey, I won’t mind.

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion  I like your coming back to Danny’s closure — beautifully done, enough to overcome the very sketchy build-up for him (sketchy by reason of being too one-note and repetitious, that is).  The whole question of how *long* can people maintain a solid and recognizable form of that long love is one of those unanswerable things, I guess — and there would have to be fluctuations inside of that, of course.  The idea of adding another 50 yrs or more to the human lifespan (for the privileged, at any rate) brings that question up in SF on the question, and the answers are usually some form of “marriage” contracted on a periodically renewable basis, or an assumption of serial partnerships either in couples or as some sort of openwork groups.  Even Jim Jarmusch, in his vampire movie “Only Lovers Left Alive” supposes long separations as a given, followed by fairly casual-seeming teaming up again for a while.  Personally, I have doubts that I could stand being with my own self for more than maybe a century and a quarter, even in good health, and this is a me that I like pretty well!

If TL’s are so like us in their emotional lives, I suspect there wouldn’t be a lot of long-term pairings, and the Doctor would perhaps be unusual even among his own kind for his constancy, just as humans like that seem to be (but his case is special, given the crazy-making effects of centuries of solo travel — he really *needs* companionship because of the way he lives).  Change (in TLs’ case, radical change via regeneration) could work for and/or against such length.

[ichabod @replies]

Long ago and far away now, but I just fell across this, thought it might be interesting to look at after we’ve done some re-watches and discussions.

http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/doctor-who/238587/doctor-who-deep-breath-identity-and-furious-mirrors

 

[ichabod @replies]

@barbaralefty  *(clinks glasses all round)*  We are all very lucky on this friendly site.  Another toast to Craig and the other mods, for keeping it a good playground for wandering minds . . . Well, mine wanders, anyway.  Some of you guys are really good at the focus thing.

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion  Och, no excuses now, and no, you are not forgiven as there’s not one damn little thing to forgive.  That’s a great, good gust of thought, and thanks for it.  Yes, it’s crucial to keep in mind that regardless of people’s official titles, a show (unlike, say, most novels) is a group endeavor, no matter who appears to steer it or for how long.  And, yes, on this particular site, doing the homework is required, mainly because discussions here tend to be ripened over many rounds, and people seem to like them that way and so aren’t interested in being yanked off onto a comparatively crude spur-line (do I mix my metaphors?  Very well then, I mix my metaphors — and old writers’ game, I think).

The marriage metaphor is tricky.  When I said that more easily obtainable divorce might be a factor in a modern inclination to go for chemical, explosive love and ignore the whole idea of love as long-term promise, I’m not saying that society needs to ban divorce to maintain personal standards.  My own family of origin was the first on my block to disintegrate into divorce, back when couples routinely lied to establish legal grounds.  As it happened, my parents still loved each other and us kids, but they simply could not live together and, IMO, were better off apart.  I’ll take Margaret Meade’s definition of what makes one culture more progressive or “developed” than another: the number of choices that each member of it has open to him or her.  Rigid social roles, in this view, are more “primitive” because while they help to shape individual character, they also limit growth by limiting the opportunities to grow and learn presented by taking risks that lie outside of general cultural norms.  Flexibility is better for us.  So no, I’m not a social conservative, although the easy acceptance of truly atrocious character and behavior that takes the place of ideas of personal honor and integrity makes me wanna tear my damn hair out.  That’s how you come out with “romantic love” being taken these days as nearly the only form of love we recognize, when beyond its initial flare-up, it’s the least important, IMO.

And that seems to me to be part of the problem: long love, the love that’s a promise, *is* enactment, or it’s nothing.  The fireworks version is more like “a thing”, a flash in the pan instead, but given the social weight of something vast and significant (which it *can* be, see the Prince of Wales & Mrs. Simpson, maybe, and Nelson and Lady Hamilton).  Love enacted over time is what we hope for in our intimates — our good friends, our family, our partners.  It’s not made out of orgasms; those you can have with anybody, or by yourself.

I’m rather surprised that the TLs of DW even *have* formal marriage.  But then, they’re not presented as superior in anything much but technological capabilities (extended life, Tardis transport, weapons, etc.).  They’re pretty damn human emotionally, from what we’re shown (as missed opportunity, I think, or a whole bunch of them).  Your questions about possible TL marriage customs go to the heart of the thing.

Yes, the Doctor is a gift: a wonderful, rambling, discursive opportunity to think about and discuss such matters, outside of an article in the NYRB or the New Yorker etc. — more freely, more happily.  That Heaven you speak of, though — it does’t die, because it can always be revived by people willing to risk true intimacy.  This, I believe, is what everyone is looking for (although most look for it in a place where it’s seldom found, the chemical/hormonal love): the huge relief of stepping past your social restraints and daring to reveal your true, core self to another who reciprocates the same way.  That’s what “See me” really means, and it’s what the Doctor offers (and what “Do you think I care so little” is founded in)(yeah, I said something else before about this, but this is more true and at another level) and what Clara doesn’t even know exists.

True intimacy seems like a huge risk, and we don’t often take it.  Clara gives Twelve a hug in DB, but she’s hugging the Eleven she recognizes in him, not the raw and terrified Twelve at all.  He’ll take it — it’s better than rejection! — but what he *gives* is not “Do what I demand or I’ll take away the Tardis”, but “Do you think I care for you so little”.  Worlds of depth apart.  That’s why “the hugging” in Last Xmas is different: it’s hugging with such open acceptance and welcome that they don’t actually *need* to see each other’s faces.  We see Old Clara’s face, and it’s all there, for her “stupid old man” and for us to see.

Crikey, I’m not qualified to write a bloody *textbook* on this!  Stopping now.  But I knew we’d get to Hug B (which is actually Hug B1 — in the sleigh — and B2, in Old Clara’s bedroom).  See footnote xj.  NO.  Good damn NIGHT.

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus  Those are kind words, and I thank you for them.  I have my moments . . . like everyone; and dreams sometimes, that show me how this thing is just how events play out (this, or something worse, or something better, but it all goes to the same place).  Good luck with your own obstacle course — seems to me that no matter what we do we learn, so yep, you’ll be wise.  For me, it helps that I do think we reincarnate, having dreamed of other lives with my Disappearing Man, so I’m as sure as anyone can be that we’ll be seeing each other again, though never exactly the same as now.  That’s good enough for me.  I’m too impatient to do things just one way for more than most of a lifetime, or identically over and over again, so a change is all right.  The actual process is still rough on everyone all the same.

Thinking about this division between love as a promise and love as a chemical explosion of hormonal systems, I’m looking at Dark Water and DiH in that light.  The Doctor and Clara are in an unequal relationship of “promise” with each other: he would never hurt her, snarky remarks aside; but she definitely hurts him, from selfish motives, with the Tardis keys scene, but by the end of DiH knows better, and trades protective lies with him.  With Last Xmas, they get to the bottom of their true feelings, which look to me as if they’ve finally reached the level of love as promise, which is based on mutual trust.

But what the heck is the Doctor’s relationship with MissMaster?  Once, apparently, *he* thought it was that kind of promise, at least until the Master looked into the thingie and went cuckoo.  But some attraction is still alive between them — it’s what keeps MissMaster coming back to him, snapping at him, trying to ensnare him and bind them together again forever.  It’s what twists him up with grief just before he makes up his mind to be her executioner in Clara’s place and kill her for her crimes.

So what is that?  Does Missy want what Clara now has with the Doctor, only without having to earn it by actually *being* trustworthy?  Does she just want to dominate him as her submissive in some form of popular culture’s quarter-inch thick version of BDSM?  What?  Maybe that’s a question for Series 9 to answer?  The latter would be bit hard on kiddie viewers, though, no?  Or rather, on their horrified parents?  So not that, then, exactly . . . Is a puzzlement, and probably a product of overthinking it.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion  Thanks, puro.  Things could be a lot worse, but for the moment it’s not so bad . . . you just don’t expect a 45 year marriage to turn into something so different from what it’s been throughout.  I remember a quote, not so many years ago, from David Cronenberg (I think — it was about his remake of “The Fly”, as I recall); he said that long love stories become monster stories in the end, when one partner turns into a sort of twisted stranger under the stresses of old age and its illness.  It struck me as very hyperbolic at the time, but some of the Dementia stories you find on sites like Caring.com have made me re-think that opinion.  I’m sorry to hear that your own family has had one of these drawn-out losses; it’s frightening, how common it’s becoming.  On the other hand, so many lives are touched by dementia deaths nowadays that immediate sympathy and understanding are also common, and that is a help to those who trying to hold things together while the inevitable decline occurs.

@bluesqueakpip  I remember a time when “love as a promise” was actually commonly assumed to be exactly what held families together — the promise of mutual support and protection between parents and the promise of a secure home for children to grow up in.  The promises of marriage ceremonies are, after all, basically about that, not about the “chemical high” — which, after all, isn’t under rational control by the mind, so no mere promise can maintain it beyond its natural life-span.  Maybe that understanding of/about love has been melted away by the prevalence of divorce?  And the nearly total disappearance of any concept of personal honor and integrity, without which why bother keeping your promises anyway?

Funny, I’m thinking about how in so much of NuWho, the Doctor bonds with his companion and clearly wants to travel with them forever — but of course his “forever” is vast, compared to a normal human lifespan.  By his nature, he’s not designed to grow old in loving company with anybody but another Time Lord — another person capable of turning dying into regenerating — but when you go through that, you don’t (normally) emerge as the “same” person emotionally, so it would be even harder (logically speaking) for a Time Lord to keep the *promise* of love than for humans because so much time and potential for growth — including growing apart — is likely to be involved.

Emotionally, the mismatched human/Time Lord time scales matter enormously.  Even if, say, the existence of a second heart signifies a capacity for enduring emotional love of the hot-burning passionate type, humans very rarely have that kind of emotional staying power to offer in return even over 50 or 60 yrs, so . . . “growing old with”, even in human terms, generally either becomes “growing fed up with”, or else turns back into love as a promise — which is much closer to the kind of rooted, unwavering, passionate bond that Twelve shows for Clara: “we have each other’s backs”, regardless of who is or is not sleeping with or lusting after whom.

Whoo; what a tangled web . . . well, shallow talk about love isn’t really talk about love, in my book.  But that’s just me . . . ?

 

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion Yeah, the curve of bile is predictable.  As for this odd “love” of Capaldi while dissing Moffat, IMO the haters know that Capaldi has been a huge success, so they cut Capaldi loose and concentrate on Moffat, out of envy, spite, and whatever other venom spikes their disgusting punch.  I’m feeling a tad fragile right now, having got the news of Terry Pratchett’s death at the meager age (these days) at 66. This news inevitably loops back to my last visit to my husband whom I visited on Tuesday in a fine dementia facility half an hour from here, where the same horror of a disease is slowly (well, more rapidly recently) shutting down his beautiful, gentle, clever mind.

So I replied to FTW as my guy might have, with courtesy and truth, at least as I see it.  But only that once.  Luckily, I know this group now well enough that I trust that this hateful jackal will soon be seen off, his (or her) load of poison harmlessly discharged; so he’ll have nothing more from me (as in, of course, Do Not Feed The Troll).

Let me end with something just found in the latest issue of the New Yorker Magazine, the end of a short review of a book called “Why Acting Matters”, by David Thomson; though what the reviewer says goes equally for all the creative of crew of DW: “. . . our lives are filled with repetition as we play the same roles day after day, but watching [extraordinary actors] perform lets us imagine that another life is possible.”  It isn’t, always; the the reminder is always welcome, and soothing, and healing.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@bluesqueakpip — Hell.  I am trying to think about the conversation Terry has been having with Death on the plain of after-life, no doubt both enjoying some leisurely reminiscence and wise-cracking . . . but also, just hell, hell, hell . . .

[ichabod @replies]

@tenthdoctorftw  I couldn’t disagree more strongly.  The Doctor equates “love” here with the implicit promise of the lover to protect the beloved, and CyberDan’s gesture in the next shot is to enclose Clara in an armored, one-armed hug, to drive the point home.  “He will never hurt her,” the Doctor says, in case someone missed the point of what that “promise” is.  MissyMaster says, “It can’t be!” or some such, because she’s created her Cyber army to turn the dead against the living and make them into unstoppable destroyers.  But even if CyberDan can’t feel his full range of human feelings any more, since they’ve been turned off, he was actually a real-life soldier — and as such, he remains determined to keep to his promise to protect and defend those he values.

I don’t see a plot hole.  I see a well-designed climactic moment in the story, followed up by CyberDan’s speech before launching his army into the sky, about “the promise of a soldier”.  He knows what he’s talking about, and he’s carrying out that promise.

It’s the writers’ and actors’ job to choose the “point of the series” (usually, as in this case, more complex than just one “point”) and then actualize it onscreen.  I thought they did that brilliantly, and am very pleased with the direction that Steven Moffat, as writer and show runner, took the show.  Looking forward to more of that high quality in Series 9.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@janetteb  Well, yes, when you add an intense enthusiasm about things (ideas, mostly), plus occasional unintentionally cruel or off-putting remarks made largely out of awkwardness in connecting with others.  Hmmmm; Bill, are you listening?  I expect he’s long since gone now, but he made a very strong impression as a master teacher back in the mid-sixties.

[ichabod @replies]

Not sure where to put this, but if people haven’t seen it somewhere back in time, it might be of general interest. It’s an interview with Armando Ianucci, the director (and producer?) of “In the Loop”, the movie about Anglo-American politics during the run up to the Iraq War, which was itself (the movie, not the war) an outgrowth of the political comedy series that gave us Malcolm Tucker, the King of Cussing, “The Thick of It”.   It’s all well before the DW hoo-hah started, before “The Musketeers” even, and I doubt that the way of working described here is much like what goes on in Cardiff (or Tenerife) these days, but it’s an interesting look into a working actor’s life and the way indie films are probably still made:

 

[ichabod @replies]

@janetteb  That does make sense — and the “forgetting to eat” thing is built into the “absent-minded professor” image, the guy (it’s always a guy) who is so busy thinking important abstract thoughts that he forgets about food, or can’t focus his piano-sized mind on a mere plate of steak long enough to notice whether it’s good meat or not . . . but there’s a kind of truth to it, or rather a grounding in reality.  There’s a famous (supposedly true) story about Einstein riding the train between NY and Princeton, and asking the conductor, “Can you tell me where I’m going?”  His destination was printed on his ticket stub, of course, but who can remember to check a ticket stub when E might = Mc2?  Or maybe by that time, he rode without a ticket and was allowed to do so because he was a great man and everybody knew it.

Come to think of it, though, I did know a guy like this — he was teaching Moby Dick to 9th graders, and notoriously forgot to eat lunch much of the time; looked it, too — skinny guy, all nerves and huge eyes sparky with intellect.  And he was just human (and somebody must have been remembering to feed him, or he’d have been in the hospital).  I imagine being a Time Lord could be even more disconnecting from “mere” cooking (“menial” workaday work) and eating (Drat these bodies, they’re all alike, grumbling away for *food* all the time when there are puzzles to solve and Daleks to fight!).

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion — Yes, he left the moon problem to them, and nobody melted down into a puddle or went off to cry in a corner, and that *alone* is (still!) major.  Somehow commentors avoid pointing this out — it’s all “Oh, he’s so mean”!  Good (Time) Lord.  Kinderf**kinggarten on line, sometimes.  CapDoc is impatient and impulsive himself, and he was getting tired of waiting for her to take the initiative in a substantial way, I think — so he threw her into the deep end of the pool.  And by damn she swam, outrage and all, so when Flatline came along later —   I don’t think I really got it, myself, until this minute: his “teaching” style was crude and offensive, but the decision to push her so fast and so far was sound.  Clumsy and unkind, but *right* in the end.  Drives the fans crazy; they want their huggy-wuggy bunny back . . .

Glad I missed the phony science outrage about KtM here — I don’t think I was on board then, but might well have shied off if I’d seen those boobies making their smugly stupid messes from on high all over the place.  The “Sorry for living” thing is *so* difficult to shake — women learn it as their default setting in every culture I know of, and it doesn’t matter how many women are included in government, either.  At the default level, looks like this is going to take *forever* to go away.  And yes, Moffat is doing his part, and more — again, not always perfectly or brilliantly, but the man does try, and sometimes he gets if very right.

@lisa   The super-insistent science types merely expose their own terror of being without rules and having to rely on one’s own wits, courage, and emotional sensitivity to get things right.  That does seem to be more men than women, although we do get crossovers.  But to me, it’s a matter of *nerve* (like so much else).  It’s like the extremist fringe of atheism, the Materialists, who can’t bear to consider that stuff they don’t know how to perceive, let alone measure with numbers, yet, might nevertheless turn out to be real — like, um, germs?  Atomic particles?  Whole bloody star systems and planets?  You can be a closed-minded science believer as well as a closed-minded fundy in other ways, like attributing human virtue and achievement to “God”, but human evil only comes from “men/the Devil”.  Ay-yuh.

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus — No, I don’t remember that, but it sounds like fun.  And yes on Seven — going for chips, I mean.  That’s what makes Twelve’s line about going for chips, or coffee, or chips and coffee, at the end of Deep Breath both funny and poignant: coffee, yeah, that fits, but chips?  In that outfit?  Eleven was dressed for it, and so were Nine and Ten, but you don’t dress in a power suit to go eat chips and drip grease down your front!  But then again, nobody can think of everything when laying out their wardrobe . . . the jumper with the holes, now, that’s another story . . .

[ichabod @replies]

Yeah, Tom Baker was my doc, until Capaldi came along.  On Season 8, I can’t decide among Listen, MotOE, Flatline — oh, they all had great stuff in them, sometimes per episode, sometimes as contributing to character arcs throughout the series.  Good, good stuff, and good places to talk about it on line — what could be nicer?!

[ichabod @replies]

RL for me right now: damntaxes.  Well, no, taxes pay for civilization, but damn *paperwork* for taxes.  Grrrr.

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion  Just so.  The 3 Fates are worth a bit of egg-nonsense, IMO.  And isn’t it amazing to see (or at least I see) an imprint of the influence of modern feminism on the development of the companions in recent years?  Despite the backlash, and it is horrendous and by no means crested yet, minds have been pried open a bit, and the culture shows it.

[ichabod @replies]

Oh — ya think?!  Did Missy tell him *because* she knew he’d go looking and it would’t be there yet?  Arrghh!

[ichabod @replies]

@lisa  Yikes!  That brain!  That is an amazing story, but they do come thick and fast these days from what looks like a sort of Golden Age of archaeology.  Well, it had better be, because there are those who are busy trying to either destroy the ancient past as fast as possible, or sell it off piece by piece before the professionals get to it.  The pressure must be immense, at least when you stop cleaning some old fellow’s brain and think about how easily it could have been overlooked or lost or looted or whatever.

@arbutus  Thanks for the compliment — I re-draft a lot before I post; call it deformation professionelle.  Any eloquence is all in the re-writes . . . on the other than, the re-writes are why I haven’t finished preparing my 2014 tax material yet.  And yes, as some one else said here recently, traveling with the Doctor is like a Gap Year — you can do it because you’re between other strong commitments, the kind that you get into more as part of your maturation process after childhood and formal education.

Anxiety — “Don’t be lasagna — be marijuana!”  Okay, I’ll try, though it’s a bit late in the day.  Jeez — if I’d just smoked a little weed (like everybody else) back then, I might have been able to run a little cooler?  On the other hand, what with the grass munchies, I probably would have also had to run a lot slower, given that my appetite is already more robust than it should be.  And thanks of the Cardiff dinner — I think I missed that one altogether.  As for twelve, maybe you could say that when he’s being grown up, it’s pretty grown up; he even seems to think of his difficult decision making as his job (for which he does not get paid, but if nobody pays you, you get to decide for yourself what’s your job and what isn’t, which suits a rebel, um, working man).

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

@scaryb

Thank you!  It took me a while to figure out what was so *right* about KtM that I just didn’t give a flying flip about the nonsensical moon hatch thingie.  But her “You scared me, now f**k off” in KtM vs. a big Old Clara’s huge, open-hearted hug for her “stupid old man” (and this time it’s for him, not SmithDoc any more, and without the taint of sadness and falsehood of the Sad Cafe) is perfect, but subtle enough to miss first time through.  The eps in between that make you forget — while your subconscious keeps elbowing you in the ribs with “Wait, wait, look *again*, there’s something else there . . . ”

But I missed your three Fates etc., glad you pointed that out.  That’s the thing that makes this show unique, IMO — it’s so well written (on most levels most of the time) that you end up with the kind of layering that rewards re-watching and following the quiet trails of those details that you’re intended to miss the first time round, when it’s all story! story! story!  This thing isn’t f**king Gatorade; it’s actually got legs, like a good, sturdy, rich wine.  How many tv shows can claim that distinction?  (Well, Buffy of course, and . . . do people re-watch The Wire, for example?  It was too depressing for me the first time.  Hill Street Blues?  Lots more, I’m sure, but I only recently learned to use the new DVD player so I’m hardly an authority).

[ichabod @replies]

@mudlark  Okay, I was with you until “residual sludge”.  Now I’m lost in a nightmare fantasy of fish gut sludge jarred like mustard, to slather on your fat and offal sausages . . . grrrkkk.  Can’t help but think of Whuzzizname, the sausage seller hawking filth in good old Ankh-Morpork . . .

[ichabod @replies]

Thanks!

[ichabod @replies]

@mudlark  They had to have absolutely fresh fish to make totally rotten fish goo — I guess that would be about bacteria spoiling the raw materials before you got to spoiling them your own way . . . so they used it as a condiment, maybe a bit the way we use vinegar, mustard, soy sauce?  Was it a luxury, more valuable than salt, say?

Nordic countries and hardscrabble life — I *did* get that from historical novels, trying to recall titles — older books, so maybe from a time when that was the theory.  And, yes, I admit it, this was backed up recently by the early episodes of “Vikings” on TV, where there was some talk of poverty at home driving raiding parties, and the substitution of wanting “better” farming soil found in England and so being moved to settle rather than just snatch-and-grab portable booty and enslaving captives (though my reading didn’t suggest slave trading but the acquisition of human property for home use).  But also a hangover from reading Braudel, on the Mediterranean, and his comments on mountain populations.  That’s where the impression came from, but no excuse, since now you mention it, yes, I’ve also come across the far-flung trading network thing.  Eh, lazy and outdated thinking; thanks for the correction.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@janetteb — Forgot about the spoon!  Looked like ice cream to me (and CapDoc does seem to have a sweet tooth, with all that sugar in his coffee as President).  More likely a call back to custard, just no fish that day.

Yes, bling was probably a pretty common destination for the stolen gold; still is, for that matter, although the modern rich get to have that *and* extra houses, servants, cars, yachts, and the occasional private submarine.  And yes on the thyroid!  I think women in middle age tend to get these thyroid imbalances — I’m off to see someone later this month about mine, poss. minor surgery with who knows what rebalancing necessities after.  Sorry if I came off as snarky about research — that’s not me at all, as I enjoy research myself and have done quite a lot of it to support some of my fiction.  I meant that since there’s not tons of info on the period in question, you might find that fiction set in that period would sieve out some of it for you that you might have difficulty finding on your own.

@bluesqueakpip  — Time Heist takeaway, forgot all about that!  And yes, I noticed that little by-play about payment, got a little chuckle out of it.  CapDoc is at least aware of economics, as gods and supermen tend not to bother to be (because they don’t have to).  Maybe the Tardis can print good money if he needs it to pay someone — or he can steal it per sonic, but wouldn’t that make him no better than — ulp — Robin Hood?  At any rate, I like a Doctor to whom payment occurs as an idea — more connection with human life (and probably every other kind, since other life forms will have some sort of economics too).  And it’s nice to see the idea of being aware of money and payment for work presented not as stereotypical Scottish stinginess, but as fairness.

@barbaralefty  Cucuteni-Trypillian was a culture located, where?  That’s a new one on me, and sounds — odd indeed.  The whole satiety hormone thing is pretty new, isn’t it?  I’ve been coming across mention of research in that area only in recent years.  Hadn’t heard about the gut-weirdness, but no doubt we’ll hear more as time goes on.

[ichabod @replies]

They’re running Series 8 on BBCA tonight — the first four eps.  I caught a snippet of the end of “Into the Dalek”, and it was startling to go from wet-behind-the-years PC to CapDoc at 56.  The change in the voice is dramatic — the addition of the bass register, which is now in fact the ruling register, makes a whole different man.  Decisive gestures, decisive and cleanly timed attack on lines, and the face of experience replacing the (relatively) blank face of the boy that man was.  It’s like the story and surround of “The Love Child” was pulled out of the developer bath, but the actor was left in there for a long time, taking shape, darkening, deepening, and — peculiarly — growing a little — taller?  What year was this movie made?  Maybe it’s the Loakes?  A good inch and a half in those soles, I think.

I’ve got weird double vision . . . I feel like digging out a photo of myself at 20 or so, and comparing it with the one I’ve got now, looking in the mirror.  See what longer in the the developer bath has done around here.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion  That pastry and ham — that’s you, right (not the Doctor!), eating on the run?  Yes!

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion   Yes, on the constant motion thing — come to think of it, PC sure squirms a lot when he has to sit through an interview — something tells me it’s really hard to find a comfortable chair when you’re long-limbed like that, and mebbe a little bony about the rump, not packing much natural padding on you as it were.  And that interview with the swivel chair a-swiveling obsessively right and left — I think maybe the “hot” metabolism might well be a lesser part of the equation than a whole lot of nervous energy that keeps legs jiggling and lots of small action going all the time.

Hey, I was like that as a kid, and I was a skinny kid, too.  Lately, not so much . . . ou sont les neiges d’autretemps?  Back there with my skinny self, that’s where.  I hope auto spell doesn’t make utter hash of my French, assuming it’s not hash to begin with.

Ah, end of Deep Breath, they go off together for coffee, or chips, or coffee and chips; though we don’t see anybody actually eating, that or anything else.  Coffee, yes — stolen coffee in Listen.  Well, if he lives on coffee and chips — crap.  You wouldn’t see *me* getting on board as a companion.

Paris, oh yes; a bit like New York, in modern times.  There are great restaurants, and wonderful neighborhood hang-outs, but a visitor can’t afford the first or identify the second, and there are tons of over-priced dives with terrible food to trap the unwary, not to mention the good places of yesterday that have become the third-rate tourist-traps of today.  You need a good (and up to date) guide book more for food than for the sights these days.

[ichabod @replies]

Well, that was charming — good looking lad, nice little story, just as promised.  “Edith” was wonderful and kept it going, and what the heck if it’s a fairy tale!  I’m glad to see that while our man’s hair is tamed with a nice cut, the eyebrows are already flourishing.  So this is sort of Forsyth’s genre, then — a sweet, low-key story with a splash of grit holding it together . . . but I wish the print had been kept in the developer bath a bit longer, though then there’d need to be more work on the connections among the disparate elements.

The more I see, the more I get the impression that PC did a fair amount of floundering around for a while — no sudden stardom, that’s for sure, but there does seem to have been a lively and productive knot of people in Glasgow doing small work, mostly TV series, for him to get some experience under his belt.  Sort of a typical working actor’s start, nothing break-out until The Thick of It, but that was a hell of a break out when it came, a perfect channel for all the fury that that kind of stop-go-stop-stop-go frustration can build, plus license to swear; ah, life in the arts!  It must have felt like heaven, to have landed a role like the Doctor.

We’re lucky that by all accounts he’s survived and matured into a good-natured, highly skilled actor that people like to work with, just as DW climbs such a high wave of popularity.  I’m glad to see, though, that he’s also doing smaller jobs too (presumably when DW filming stops), like Mr. Curry in “Paddington” and Whazzisname in “5th Estate”, to get refreshed with other projects.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion  Myths maybe, but I’ve known two skinny people who ate like industrial vacuum cleaners and both have told the same story — generally healthy but high-strung, running very hot almost all the time, gobble gobble gobble just to keep up.  My next door tenant was like that; I was envious.  He said, Don’t be, it’s a pain in the ass.

Well, he wasn’t a medical man and neither am I, but . . . I have a heavy bias towards the reality of personal experience, no matter how anecdotal.  As a general rule for everybody, though, there must be studies that show that your Doctor is right.

With Capaldi I was thinking of Coleman’s story of how they were shooting KtM, I think, and he wandered off looking for “a pasty” because he was hungry between meals, and a pasty, as I’ve experienced it anyway, can be substantial fare, being a sort of stew sandwich with the edges sealed up and the whole thing fried (or baked?), right?  I figured, well, gone for a little fill-in food, good for him.  She says, he found a “big red button” and, of course, pressed it, and turned out he was in a shower in this abandoned factory they were shooting in, so he came back wringing wet and had to get changed and blow-dried in a few minutes so they could wind up the day’s shooting while still on the clock; which is why he shows up at the end in a polkadot shirt with his hair all fluffy, resembling my grade school teacher, Miss Brookfield, only she looked more like a bus in *her* polkadot blouse.

Of course, I could be completely mistaken about all that . . . except Miss Brookfield

So the Doc says that food eaten on the Tardis contains no calories (haha), but when the hell does anybody eat any food there?  The Tardis as an actually livable space capable of sustaining a reasonable sort of life, with food and baths and clean clothes to wear and toothbrushes, does nag at me.  It shouldn’t; this is science *fantasy*, after all, with monsters, not NASA footage of the space station.  But.  It bothers me.  Even little squads of adventurers in big fantasy novels drop in at the local inn for a hunk of bread and cheese or a bowl of stew (all they ever seem to eat, but it’s food).  We did see CapDoc and Clara at The Restaurant in Deep Breath, but – – no food was served, let alone consumed.

Clara never walks into the Tardis, sniffs the air, and says, “Smells great — what’s for dinner?”  Not even a glass of water to be seen — the only drink I recall is CapDoc’s glass of — Scotch? — offered to Half-Face, and so far as we can tell, gone to waste.  ??

[ichabod @replies]

@lisa — Oh, of course, I’m a dolt!  It’s a space/time SHIP, right?  The Tardis undoubtedly keeps a ship’s log, though apparently nobody since TomDoc seems to have bothered to ever look at it.

[ichabod @replies]

And it’s odd too that neither the Doctor nor his companions ever seem to think about keeping any sorts of records, of their adventures or what they find/see out there in space.  Well, that’s me speaking — I write stuff down so I won’t lose it all in a blur of confused memories.  I suppose the brain as big as a piano, figuratively speaking, would have all the necessary storage space right there — but, 2,000 yrs?  Does the Doctor wish *not* to keep records?  Clara’s a teacher — you’d think she’d maybe try making some notes some time?  Though as noted, time spent writing notes would not be time spent having adventures . . .

[ichabod @replies]

@mudlark  Thanks for updating my lagging info on all this — been lazy about that lately!  “Early Medieval” sound fine to me.  I picked up a book not long ago supposedly clarifying some of the obscurity of the “Dark Ages”, but it was so weak on real info that nothing remains in my head about it.  Do you know of any historical mysteries set in that period?  Probably not, if there’s so little known about it.  I agree about “adventures” — I’m strictly an armchair adventurer, certainly these days.  I do recall reading somewhere about a modern effort to make garum — it seemed to involve stuffing a barrel (waterproofed how, in Roman times?) with whole small fish (maybe it was anchovies) and water and salt and letting it rot down to juices (though you’d have to sieve out the bones, wouldn’t you?) = garum.  The stench was hellacious, and I don’t know that the experiment was ever completed.  I’d hate to have been a Roman poor enough to have to live near the garum works . . . which were probably next to the tanneries and the dye pits . . .

I always wondered what the heck the Vikings spent their stolen gold on, given that those northern nations had very rough economies, particularly crap soils to farm, and not much (that I know of) in the way of manufacture that wasn’t weapons and jewelry for the upper class.  I’ve always thought of them as something like the highland Scots, or most mountain peoples — mountains are pretty, but tend to have harsh climates, poor soils, and small (but tough) populations.  This makes for excellent brigands, who raid the richer lowlands for a living as the Vikings raided the European coasts and islands.

@bluesqueakpip  Good grief, unGodly hijinks in the bathhouse!  Who’d a thunk it!  I forgot about the baths.  We toured some Roman ruins along Hadrian’s Wall some years ago, and there was always a bathhouse; those Romans, again.  Lacking a well-appointed Roman structure with slaves in the basement (?) heating the stuff, hot water didn’t come out of a tap; a lot of fuel was used to heat it, and water in general had to be lugged around, so what the heck, use more perfume.  Or not . . .

Easy to lose sight of all the grim and grubby work to do in pre-industrial society.  It tends not to show up in Doctor Who, I think — nice to have the Tardis somehow do your laundry (*and* dry cleaning) and the cooking and washing up.  There should at least be some version of one of those robots we already have that putters around cleaning the floors.  Have we ever seen anybody having a meal inside the Tardis (a snack of fish fingers and custard isn’t what I have in mind)?  At least in Star Trek, there was a sort of dining hall/cafeteria.

No wonder the Doctor gets lonely without companions; nobody to talk to over a nice plate of hot something.  Of course CapDoc doesn’t look as if he eats at all, skinny man — though with the metabolism that goes with that, he’d probably be burning up calories like mad, so he should be hungry a lot, shouldn’t he?  But never seems to be . . .

What I’ve seen of Gallifrey looked pretty pre-industrial to me (the Barn) (which is odd, for people whose Lords, at least, can travel by Tardis), so you’d think there’d be regular cooking in the Doctor’s background.  ??

[ichabod @replies]

@lisa   Heck, I’d skip the Dark Ages altogether, if I were invited there, or almost anywhere else, in realty.  Plague; typhus and typhoid fever; bad water, so lots of beer instead (and if you had chronic pain from an injury, beer was about it for that, and pretty much everybody in the workaday world had injuries all the time, from lots of work with heavy animals — horses, oxen); everybody had lice and fleas and didn’t bathe because the Church looked down on pampering the beastly body and besides there was no heat in the house except fireplaces if you were lucky and somebody had to schlep the water; no public plumbing to speak of, nor private either; urban cemeteries already bursting their bounds and being overused, so phew . . .

And so it goes, the whole concept of “comfort” and being “comfortable” having been invented somewhere around the Renaissance (you can tell by the chairs: cushioning, or no cushioning).  So let me close with one last caveat: no dentists!

You’d actually be a bit better off in Ancient Greece or Rome, if you could manage not to be a slave (though even slaves had a Bill of Rights in Rome at one point, and could sue their masters for maltreatment, says my friend who writes very well-researched historical fiction — about a vampire, but still — ).  The Romans were quite advanced (they seem to have invented the idea of eyeglasses, but they also — probably — invented *garum* — ick — and their tenement buildings for housing the poor tended to collapse, due to corruption in the concrete building trade, kind of like in Mexico today — oh, and they invented the best cement ever, and much else that was let go to ruin during the Dark Ages because Barbarians didn’t know how to even maintain serious engineering and tech so they don’t).  Me, I’m okay with modernity, thanks, awful as it may be and frequently is.

Isn’t the Brother Cadfael mystery series set in the Dark Ages?  There are quite a few really good historical mystery series by writers who have done massive amounts of research on your behalf.  There’s also a TV series called The Vikings that’s supposed to be good  with accuracy, probably about 9th c, as I recall.  Maybe you’re already into all this and more?  Some of it is *almost* as good as a real visit . . . !

 

[Author]

Posts