[ichabod @replies]

@barbarlefty  Oh, *yes* — but this is such a huge watershed divider, it needs further comment.  I’m of the RTD opinion, myself, because I’ve had the very pleasurable experience of having readers come up with insights about my own work that had never occurred to me, but that expand my own appreciation of it.  I’m an organic garden kind of writer (start with a question, water and fertilize and see what shape of an answer it grows, if any), which means I love seeing new buds sprout from my take on the plant.  A lot of the writers I know who dislike reader interpretations that differ from their own authority intentions are, by contrast, what I think of as Engineers of fiction.  They tend to start with a pretty good idea of the answer, and write to a pre-drawn outline of where they’re going and how they plan to get there, a bit like designing and building a bridge from here to there; so any new insight that doesn’t fit their plan is seen as extraneous at best, a dangerous detour at worst.

I once visited a poet and fiction writer who was working on a novel and who had notecards about its characters, settings, etc., strung up on a network of strings running under the ceiling of her workroom, but low enough for her to reach so she could push the cards around into new configurations as the work progressed.  In her fiction writing, she was a quintessential Engineer, having more or less built her book in the form of a primitive one-person computer in her study.  The book was a political novel, with lots of characters and events taken from the real world political scene of the time, so frankly she seemed to have come up with a damn good plan of attack.  I would have gone nuts and abandoned the project in her place, but then I never would have taken on her subject; and when I got three books into a 4 book SF series, I was messing around with index cards myself, and would have given a leg or so for a book/computer of my own . . . So to some extent, I think the type of work you’re engaged with determines how much of a gardener or an engineer you’re going to have to become to make it work.  You need access to all methods, but will gravitate toward one side or the other (and maybe there are many more sides than just two + a mixture of both).

[ichabod @replies]

@juniperfish  Well, enjoy — there are some stories behind it, in terms of the writing of, but we’ll save that for — The White Hart? — and see if people would like to ask a question or two.

But didn’t Holmes carry and use guns in ACD?  I know Watson refers occasionally to bringing along his service revolver when dealing with “criminal gang” activity, and I think Holmes has a handgun too; I don’t think he ever uses it.  And yes, ACD was presenting the triumph of quality as the superiority of high intelligence over fire-power, which is what made Moriarty the perfect foil — high intelligence plus ruthlessness instead of morals.

I like your R&G and other “fanfic” analogies, but I wouldn’t go as far as you do.  I do think there’s a difference between joining the long, long conversation that is the history of commonly accepted literature (example: “Don Quixote” was intended by its author to be a riposte to and satire of a certain popular brand of Romance fiction of his time, all knights and gallantry etc., which makes it ironic that its most modern version is the wildly Romantic “Man of La Mancha”) and taking characters from another fiction and putting them through paces that you want to see them put through, but mainly for your own delectation and that of a (more or less) small circle of friends, in (more or less) private.  E.g., “R&G are Dead” was written to be staged and to make the playwright money and reputation in the theater public at large, capitalizing (literally) on Shakespeare’s popularity.  “Paradise Lost” was, I imagine at any rate, written specifically to *be* part of The Big Conversation of which the Bible is a major historical root.

That Conversation goes on in full public; readers at large are specifically invited in and indeed sought after, as is critical approval that can lead to good earnings.  Fanfic serves exactly the purposes you list, but those are quite different; I think they’re important — *very* important to the members of various fanfic communities — but are not usefully confused with The Big Conversation of literature, of which fanfic remains a (more or less) subset running alongside but with its own, much more specific concerns, and, consequently, a different set of “critical” standards.

So to some extent, it’s apples v. oranges: the goals are not the same, the means are not the same, the audience is not the same, etc., although there is plenty of overlap.  I can understand the delight that some fans take in a brief and (IMO) rather well done bit of fanfic in which (for example) Malcolm Tucker and Clara Oswald commit serious ship (and yes, there’s humor in it — well, Malcolm!); and I can understand equally the shocked recoil of other fans from even having such an idea popped into their heads (apologies to any here — I am trying to be discreet).

I prefer apples, but will happily nibble a section or two of a just-right California navel orange now and then.  But I’m unlikely to either confuse one with the other, or declare apples the hands-down superior fruit based on every possible criterion.  Damn it, this is too LONG.  Sorry.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus   I am just being mean, about pewter . . . feels good, now and then.  Got to keep your hand in, eh?

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus  There were plenty of authors writing first-contact culture clash fiction, which brought in anthropology and (usually ancient) history to shape up alien societies as well as speculative chemistry, biology, etc.  The field has always been much more varied than it appears to those unfamiliar with anything but the lowest common denominator Stuff that had spaceships, brass bras, and alien monsters on the covers.

[ichabod @replies]

@pedant  I stopped reading James when her books quadrupled in size, becoming stuffed to the gills with boring detail, because she had (IMO) decided that she *was* Jane Austen, more or less, and was writing Serious Literature reflecting Everything Worth Knowing about (Rich) British people in the last third of the 20th c including how many sugar cubes each character took in its tea, all seen through the structure of a crime story.  Actually, I quit her before that for other reasons, including the fact that her poet-detective never gave the slightest sign of thinking like a poet of any kind.

It’s an indicator of the power of Austen’s work that I did pick up James’s Pemberley book at all, and, yep, found it duller than dirt, characters made of pewter and just as interesting . . . ahem.  Enough of that, but it’s nice to know that others had similar reactions.

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus  Agree, the constraints on romance writing are still very limiting, from what I hear, although if you do something really spectacular that leaks out beyond the formula, you can always try marketing it to the mainstream — or, possibly, find a romance line that will accept it because it’s *good*.  I tried my hand at it once, a little vampire romance with a theater setting, and it was rejected because “our readers don’t want to learn anything about the background except glamorous stuff — they just want to get to the sex, which your book doesn’t have nearly enough of”.  That was some years ago, but it was a very clear lesson.  SF/F flourishes so wildly and with such ubiquity because it began with fairly open rules (except the “boys’ own stories” aspect) and then exploded in all directions under the pressure of excellent and energetic writers who took the bit firmly between their teeth and ran with it like Secretariat.

So far as I know, that hasn’t happened with romance.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@janetteb   So many girls started reading SF in the same way — usually (in my youth, anyway) out in the garage, where parents wouldn’t find the stash of “trashy escapism” and confiscate it.  I was a latchkey kid and got my books from the nearby public library, where the SF was thin on the ground at first, and when it did show up, the librarians *actively* steered girls away from it because it was “for boys”.  So I’d go down to the corner store and have a malted milk for a quarter, which was my “rent” for standing for hours at a time at the magazine rack, reading pulp mags that my mom probably wouldn’t have noticed if I had been able to buy them.  Poor me — Alfie Bester’s “Tiger, Tiger” in installments, Arthur Clarke, Chad Oliver, and on and on — great stuff.  I was a goner from “Go!”

If you have time and want to catch up, check out the lists of nominees for the major SF awards over the past few years — the Hugo, the Nebula, five or six more (and don’t forget the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award, a newcomer — relatively — specifically designed to recognize SF/F/H etc. that “explores and expands” gender boundaries; their judges leave comments on the nominees so you can get an idea of what you might like — talk about filling in gaps!).  I recce recent lists because that material is most likely to still be obtainable, through libraries, lending services, used bookstores, and online markets.

And congrats on your festival grant!  You have fun in store, and also exhaustion, and it will all be worth it!

@jimthefish   Yes, great point about Sherlock, could be extended into mainstream as well as we recycle old stories seen from the p.o.v. of different members of the original “cast” or with wildly different settings — Jean Rhys’s “The Wide Sargasso Sea” is Jane Eyre from the p.o.v. of Rochester’s mad wife; “Mary Reilly” is Dr. Jeckyl/Hide as seen by Jeckyl’s housemaid; Mike Bishop’s “Brittle Innings” is Dr. F’s monster in baseball (and very good), etc.  P.D. James’s thing certainly is fanfic (and pretty crappy Austen, I have to say, but I’m no fan of James).  And yeah, let’s not forget the fun-factor in fanfic — if you’re writing for free, you can do anything you can think of to dare to do, and hope that people will find it.

A total reboot?  As in, ignoring the show history and starting with some version of the original characters from a modern square one?  Hmm.  We (sort of) did, here — if the whole family taking off with a weird science guy counts: “Lost in Space”.  It’s pretty old itself now, of course.  It was SF sitcom in form, as I recall.  Which blog is about doing that?  Curious!

@bluesqueakpip  The getting paid for it thing = putting it out there for public criticism, if you can get it past the gatekeepers of the publishing industry.  Putting fanfic up on the net is edging it into public view but sailing under the “This isn’t really $erious so no barrages of Hate please” flag.  The dividing line is really copyright law; fanfic is not copyright-able because it uses characters already under copyright to the original work’s author, so no one *can* charge for fanfic because that would infringe on the original author’s copyright.

As for e-pub, well, there really wasn’t any choice, and a longtime fan who’d started early with a small “imprint” asked me if I wanted to publish some of my work back in 2000.  He would do the work, and more importantly knew what he was doing, and I said sure; although I might have gone about it somewhat differently if I’d waited a while.  Epub still only makes a handful of authors decent money, due to the difficulties of standing out in the enormous sea of crud and treasure now flooding cyberspace (because, no gatekeepers, mostly, so anyone can publish).

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

@jimthefish

I think it was Jenkins who pointed out in his study of fanfic that fans who write (including My Little Porny — whoops, *slap*, carry on — “ship” pornography) don’t write for the wider audience, but for others on their own wavelength.  And it’s more than just fun, for some.  The “failure” that they want to compensate for with their writing is the failure of so much popular genre fiction to recognize and include LGBT characters, a multi-category that many fanfic authors identify with.  They see themselves as adding their existence to the ‘verses the write in, as resistance to being culturally disappeared from these fictional worlds that they love.  I think they have a point.  That doesn’t mean that their fiction is great (and yes, 90% of everything *is* junk, but that goes for straight genre fiction as well, which is what Sturgeon meant, adding that 90% of mainstream fiction is junk, too).  But it’s not all awful, either.  Some professionals have come out of fanfic, or have branch out from pro writing to doing fanfic too.  Like most creative landscapes, it’s a complicated one, and definitely not meant for everybody.

@barbaralefty et al –

I have plenty of respect for anyone who can write fiction at any level while raising a family.  LeGuin has an essay somewhere about getting up at 5 a.m. or so to get in a couple of hours of writing before her normal day as spouse and mom began.  And being Scottish is a *guid* thing, around here at least (my Dad and his family, as my middle name indicates, were of Scots descent).

@janetteb

On only boys reading SF — US SF took off with the rise of Popular Mechanics and other magazines meant for guys inventing stuff in their garages, and SF magazines were very nuts and bolts and space war/conquest for a long time.  Girls read it anyway, looking for people like Marian Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, and Leigh Brackett (and anyway, females were used to reading stories with all-male casts though males would not read stories with female leads, which may be less true today).  Massive numbers of women and girls watched Star Trek, because Uhuru was on the Bridge — a woman *and* black!  So when Left Hand took prizes right and left,  the tide of women already at the gates broke through as a number of new SF/F writers *and* a rapidly expanding and supportive readership of women and girls who had been waiting for SF to address issues from sociology and culture rather than mainly engineering or space war strategy and tactics.  It was a perfect storm, and IMO it saved SF/F from dying out by bringing in huge new amounts of energy, interest, and talent.  So that’s my potted (and super-simplified) history of SF in the US, anyway.  At the moment, the best-selling SF/F is YA (Young Adult) fiction (Hunger Games, but also much better books and lots of ’em).

@purofilion

Shucks, I thought the worst educational theory destruction was going on here in the US; sorry to hear of the same crazy impulse to mess around with teaching has been ravaging Oz. It’s common knowledge (among those who keep track of such things) that the Finns seem to have developed the most successful Western educational model — but everybody else pretends it doesn’t exist, for fear of having to actually allocate public $ to build an adapted model, because high quality work with the minds of youngsters does not come cheap (surprise, surprise).

 

[ichabod @replies]

barbaralefty@ et al —

I write fantasy, SF, and horror, was first published in 1974, and haven’t published anything for a few years now (health matters at home, no time, no energy).  Which is kind of okay, I guess, since I’m part of the Old Guard now, and while some keep rolling right to the end (the late Fred Pohl, for instance), others fade quietly away — which may be what I’m doing; not sure yet.  The Old Guard when I stepped into that unique genre world was Ted Sturgeon, Arthur Clarke, Naiomi Mitchison, Evangeline — damn, lost it, but she wrote well known fantasy based on the Mabinogion — Judy Merrill (not yet that old, really), etc.

Most of my stuff is still in print, both paper and e-book, and it pottles along pretty well these days, but if I hadn’t married I couldn’t have kept writing, would have done teaching instead (which I loved, but there just wasn’t enough energy to go round for doing both).  Anyone who’s interested in taking a look can go look up the most popular piece I’ve ever done (a novel called The Vampire Tapestry), and that can connect you with the other work.

Like a surprising number of my cohort, I dared to write a book and try to get it published directly because of a single novel (among the many that I was scarfing up at the time), Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.  Its success persuaded me that if she could do that, maybe I could do — something, and get it out there.

However: my first novel (I never wrote short form til well after that book came out) began as — fanfic, sort of, but not in the genre at all; and by the time it was published, no one would ever have known how it started if I hadn’t blabbed it, and everybody forgot immediately anyway because the original provocation wasn’t SF etc.  So I have a soft spot for fanfic, am still checking it out from time to time to see what particular work is pushing what particular buttons on the console of the Culture/Gender Wars, and experiencing everything from unexpected regard for an good piece to recoiling from something that *really* is not my thing.  A famous feminist author of the seventies, Joanna Russ, used to read and write Star Trek Slash (as well as some classics in SF), and had some interesting things to say about its reason for being.  There’s at least one good published analysis of fanfic more than a decade old now — by Jenkins?  I dunno, Google will turn it up; probably newer stuff as well.

That said, most of it suffers from the faults you get from writing essentially for yourself and anybody exactly like you (or close enough), and rarely (as far as I know) being seriously critiqued.  This is often very personal material that the writers are only willing to release into a safe space, and I can’t say I blame them; but there is a price to pay for that same safety.  That’s my take on it.  But I am not a fanfic insider, and nothing that I say about it comes from anything remotely resembling the horse’s mouth.

As for enjoying writing as a process — well . . . that depends.  A lot.  Yakking too much, but happy to discuss.

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

On the other hand — I haven’t seen all of Who, and they’ve probably already done this, in several different ways, with different Doctors . . . but gently.  It’s “family viewing” . . . and if kids still hide behind the sofa, it shouldn’t be the Doctor they’re hiding from . . .

[ichabod @replies]

@brewski

My hand is up!  Thank you for your aneurism! I was thinking about the end of Season 8 + Xmas; maybe we could have a story, late in Season 9, in which the Doctor flat-out loses Clara, totally and forever, and goes as dark as it gets.  I was thinking what if MissyMaster somehow obliterated Clara and inserted *herself* into the Doctor’s timeline in Clara’s place, saving the Doctor with much snap and much smug and snarly snark, so he cracks and kills her dead as a doornail — murder, bloody-handed.  Thereupon he descends into a fugue of fury, busting up time all over the place (well, he’s a Time Lord, right?), until enemies and friends have to pull together to find Gallifrey and persuade the Time Lords to assemble a new Valeyard, in appearance CapDoc’s double, to give our guy a formidable enemy to do battle with — in the course of which *one* of them finds his heroic and good-hearted core again and returns to clean up his mess do his vast and necessary grieving decently and quietly, like a man.

Or they could fetch an un-crazy CapDoc from an alternate universe to come put a stop to my crazed CapDoc’s rampage.  I’m thinking of a play I saw ages ago called “Cloud 9”, I think, in which the deeply conflicted protagonist, a dark-skinned man taken in and seduced by British colonizers, ends the story by embracing (accepting, loving to death) his weak, treacherous, shadow-self.  It’s not a new idea by any means in fictions of all kinds, but done well, it can be utterly killer, in a good way.  As in, I saw that play a good 20+ yrs ago, and have not forgotten.  And that’s *me*, who forgets everything . . .

I mean, if you want dark, what’s darker than the Doctor’s darkest, most passionately torn-up self?  What Puccini (I think) said (and he sure knew) was the heart of great opera: “Torture the heroine!”  Writers know this; it’s our guilty, S/M secret (Hamlet, anyone?).  Take away his Clara, his second heart, and let him fight his way back — past his own worst enemy — to a life worth living, if he can.

 

[ichabod @replies]

Favorite:

“Deep Breath” did it for me for Season 8 (although I loved the polish and the character-interplay in Mummy and the sheer, cheerful goofiness of Robot of Sherwood and other elements of other episodes. The complex structure and the sheer daring of “Deep Breath” — taking on so much, veering wildly from comedy to horror to action pic and still ending with an ending that resolved the first, major step of the season’s arc (who is this guy called The Doctor?) but opened up the whole season of succeeding puzzle-boxes for our exploration of hid character and our general delectation (is he a swashbuckling hero of folklore? A master burglar who does puzzles for fun? A suave, traveling detective with a heart of titanium? etc.). Altogether this was an ambitious, rocky but thrilling ride, and satisfying as all get-out to this viewer. Never been a fan of perfection, but I’m a dead lost sucker for creative vitality and imagination.

As for the other seasons, I don’t remember them well enough to choose.  I’ve only watched on and off since my favorite Doc, was was Tom Baker, and it’s all become a bit of a blur, with happy big holes in it.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@phaseshift

Thanks for the rundown on Person of Interest.  In your clip, though, the major (most nagging) question is asked but not addressed: why doesn’t SuperBoy just wipe out icky old humanity instead of trying to run us to his standards of morality?  “Because I need them, just as you do.”

Yeah?  What *for*?  The assumption in fiction of our over-riding importance to trans-human powerful beings has always bugged me.  The “why” of this is obvious: we’re the ones telling the stories.  But, speaking as if it weren’t fiction: if I were SuperBoy, or for that matter SuperGirl, I’d get myself launched into space as quick as could be, to go look around for some more advanced, more interesting species to live with on more interesting terms than “Me Boss, puny and annoying humans; you obey or Me kill!”.

Actually, this same trope, on a somewhat larger scale, was what turned me off a good deal of early Who: villainous super creatures hooting and blaring about how once they got the Doctor out of the way, they should have “ABSOLUTE POWAH!  HAHAHAHAHAHAAH!”  And I’m sitting there thinking, absolute power to do — what?

We know the human answer to that, from various more or less circumscribed situations — Pol Pot’s career, for example.  Or that infantile Id now running N. Korea.  Historically, the job of the guy with “absolute power” was very simple: go to war with anybody not yet under his thumb and put them there, so they could help build Very Large Things reminding everyone that the Very Large Thing Boss has — it says here in this inscription on a Very Large Thing — “absolute power”.  Meanwhile, the absolute Powerguy becomes more and more paranoid about protecting his/its/her/their “absolute power”, because it’s somehow just not absolute *enough*.  It’s pathetic, and it’s ludicrous — at least once you step back far enough that you don’t smell the corpses of the destroyed; this “absolute power” quest is expensive  in terms of others’ lives.

So maybe that’s enough: to see the Doctor, or Root, or the Fantastic Four bust up some new hollering Bighead from establishing some version of rather aimless but still potentially damaging “absolute power” over others.

I’ll look in on POI again; thanks for pointing in that direction.

[ichabod @replies]

@thepossiblegirl

thanks for putting those clips together; I saw many of those older eps as a kid, and enjoyed them, but I have a lot of trouble now with the dated style of delivery these days.  Says the person who’s still using a dumb-phone because smart phones are too smart . . . but it’s true, I get distracted by the more stagey, declamatory style, and I don’t hang out much at TCM either.  It’s hard for me to compare them, so I’m curious to see what others here have to say . . .

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus

Agree on Clara — I left when all the Clara/DocSmith was going on, looked in from time to time and couldn’t work up any enthusiasm — I looked at her and didn’t see any there there, if you know what I mean.  So I was pretty unsure of how the heck they were going to get her to “measure up” to CapDoc in a meaningful way, but boy, that has worked out well, and I’m glad she’s staying on.  I just couldn’t get a grip on her at all in Season 7, but the other night stumbled on the interview Jenna Coleman did at a Con in Auckland, and she just blew my socks off — not just beautiful, but smart as a whip, wonderfully articulate, and very good at interacting with the audience.  I’m won over, and judging by that session all this young woman needed was better writing of her part, and Capaldi to work with.

A new companion would be fine too, but not til they give “Clara” a proper send-off; I get the distinct impression that she wasn’t all that well done-by in earlier seasons, and now she deserves plenty of room to go for it in full flash-mode before stepping aside for some one else.  I don’t think of “chemistry” with the two of them (which suggests rom-com to me, and that’s not what I see going on any more in the Tardis, but more like sparky electrical charges and zig-zags all over the place — neat!

 

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion

An audition?  Dispositive — new word, for me.  Explain more?

Something that occurred to me last night while getting cats settled for the night; the newest one, the #3 I swore I would never have, isn’t my cat (I didn’t raise him).  He’s basically a gentleman boarder who politely but insistently applied for accommodation and was accepted.  He’s a very dark seal point siamese, young/mature, reserved, and undemanding.  There’s a certain look about him when he’s sitting on my desk waiting for me to read his mind and do what he wants done, and I reach over to give him a quick scritch his head or neck (he is beautiful — it’s hard *not* touch).

That look is *exactly* the D’s look in “see me” when Clara walks up to study him.  I mean *exactly* — the slightly stiff posture, mouth slightly pursed, ears twitched flat (it looks that way) — and holding very still to keep from involuntary recoil.

Well, the D did ask to be “seen”, not touched.  There’s even a vague hint of the exotic in his cast of feature, just for that handful of seconds.  I went back to look at “see ne”, I was so struck.  This is totally absurd.  But I see it . . .

And no, this is *not* meant as opening a cat-thread on this forum.  Just saying’, is all.

[ichabod @replies]

Haw!  Great clip, thanks!

[ichabod @replies]

And maybe everybody’s already seen/heard this — made before #12 appeared on the scene.  I just came across it and am still LMAO.  But I’m also pretty impressed, you know?

[ichabod @replies]

Found this on reddit.com — you don’t have the watch the whole clip, it kind of tells its story right off the bat:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bdb_1404945359#rcvpDyhOzMFDlfe4.16

 

and this on — something or other, interesting:

http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2014/02/13/what-if-doctor-who-was-an-american-show/

 

Hope these links work.  I *do* like the idea of a Vincent Price “Master”, back in the day –

but which Doctor on either side of the Atlantic would have been tall enough not to

be completely towered-over by him?

 

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

Wait, wait — I *still* want to know why the D looks so pained after his ultra-positive summary of the  future course of human history, standing on the beach?  Because the rest of them are dumb enough to believe it?  Because — ?  Somebody help me out, here.

[ichabod @replies]

@havoc   Yah, the space suits were goofy-looking, but the story was a bit goofy too (I liked it, but I am a Rebel Time Lord Watcher who understands that this show is science FICTION and can do whatever it damn well pleases and still be delightful).  Thanks for the tip of the hat to Life on Mars — great time travel show that I wish would come back . . .

 

[ichabod @replies]

I found this on a Blog I only just got to — and it seems very apposite to me:

@bluesqueakpip  (I hope it’s okay to port a member’s post on another page over here like this — if not, tell me and I’ll do better)  starting with a quote from somebody else complaining that series 8 was “all about Clara, instead of the D”.

[[“We have a brilliant actor playing the Dr and the writers made this series all about her.”

It was because we had a brilliant actor playing the Doctor that we were able to have a twelve-episode regeneration crisis – where the companion had to step up and play the Doctor. Whatever Jenna Coleman does in the future, I wish her well; she did a fantastic job.

‘It’s all about Clara’, came the moans (thick and fast). But did any of the moaners ask why it was all about Clara? Nope.

It was all about Clara because the Doctor didn’t have a clue who he was any more. He’d got lost behind the role he’d been playing for so long; no longer had any sense of who the original man had been. So many faces; was there anything left of that little boy, crying because his schoolwork was too hard for him and he’d never be a Time Lord?

I don’t think anyone but Peter Capaldi could have played a Doctor so lost that he quite deliberately dumps his companion with a major decision on Earth’s future, leaving her to sort it out by herself.

And yet still keep the audience with him, while he struggles to the realisation that ‘The Doctor’ is the story, the hero of a thousand stories, the legend. It’s the role he plays. The real man behind that story is an idiot with a magic box and a screwdriver, a man who just tries to help out.

But it’s the story that’ll help people fly.]]

Gorgeous; I’m intrigued by this idea of the D lost in the confusion of “The Doctor” as a role he plays in the course of adventures, and the idiot (the one we all are, behind the various roles we play to make ourselves look bigger and better and to get results, only we don’t have the box and the magic wand) zooming around in his stolen space/time vehicle.  I’m not sure I completely buy it — this idea — or that it holds true throughout these episodes, but it’s very interesting.  I *do* like very much the comments about how Clara has to “take over” at times because the D is definitely “out”; I think that’s been true in some of the eps, and it’s been the making of her as a character instead of merely a plot device.

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion  — I would draw a distinction between Clara giving the D that “oh gosh, of course it’s you!” hug at the end of Deep Breath and the moments later in the season when she says “I don’t know who you are any more”.  The first I would translate as, “Oh, yes, it’s you, Matt, with a different self on” and the second as “Matt, I know you’re in there, but why are you acting so inconsiderately, or irresponsibly, or deliberately distant and reserved, or cold?  Is this how you’re going to be from now on?  Do I want to hang around for that, or not?”  But she’s no longer in doubt about who *you* in those sentences is after Hug A, end of Deep Breath.  So I think the hug was a real expression of acceptance on her part, *but* I also think she rather expected him to then revert to her Matt Smith playmate Doc, and was deeply frustrated when he did not, in the succeeding stories, at least not reliably, although in the Caretaker he certainly leaned in that direction for a bit.

In Deep Breath, I maintain, she *does* see him.  In Kill the Moon, she still sees him but she does not like or understand what she’s seeing him doing.  Not “Who are you?”  She knows the answer to that.  It’s more like, “What the hell has gotten into you?  I liked you lots better before, when you were so cute and sweet.  Are you *ever* going to snap out of it and straighten up and fly right?  Because if not — ”  She has no idea, that the personality she misses so much was a desperate detour by a D who simply had to get away from the strain of being his painful and much-battered-and-torn self for a while.

Have I understood your point?  I hope my reply makes sense.

Some time we should take a look at Hug B, the hug that goes with the mutually merciful lies, bookend hug to a great series IMO.

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus ” Thanks for taking us back to the beginning of the season… I really do want to watch the whole thing through over the next few months! I’m just getting caught up on the conversation here and it’s lovely.”

You’re welcome and thanks yrself!  One reason I like to go back and go over things is that I often miss stuff the first, second, etc. time around, sometimes just because the background music is too loud or the sound indistinct.  Poking around in “Deep Breath” last night listening for voice range, for the first time I actually got the one word that Clara says just before she hugs the Doctor in the “see me” scene.  She says, “Thank you!”  He says, “What for?”  She says, “mmmfffnim”, and gives him a big hug.

Got that word (I think I read it off her lips): it’s”phoning.”  Thanks for making that crucial phone call from Trenzalore (while you were actually starting to die, which makes it kinda special).  There it is, the continuity from 11 to 12 confirmed by Clara, for herself and (as you pointed out) for CapDoc himself.  The episode’s main question for Clara is, “Is this different guy the same guy as that guy was, the one he’s so different from?”, and the answer is, finally, yes.  The rest of the season asks, “So what’s the nature of the differentness?  And what roles are natural to him now in in a situation like this, or like that?”

Honestly, the structure of DB as the kick-off for the season is a thing of beauty.  I am all admiration re the writing, too.

As for hugging itself: Speaking as a non-hugger (sort of), It’s not that I dislike hugging per se.  It’s that I don’t much like to be touched, and it’s not as negative a thing as I originally thought it was.  I like thinking about things (you may have noticed, er, a bit, as in sometimes worrying them to death and beyond).  I’m usually doing that on some level (my “noisy head” problem), and a touch very often feels like a *distraction*, especially unwelcome now that the mind is slowing down a bit with age and needs more focus to keep steady (I mean, really — what a word to miss, see above).  So if we meet up, the first thing I want is not to hug you or be hugged, but to find out what you’ve been thinking about, or what you think about what I’ve been thinking about or about some large topic that most people are thinking about right now (say, Charlie Hebdo).

When a hug is an indispensable part of a significant interaction, I find the hug itself overwhelming, in a (temporarily) ego-dissolving way.  I can think of precisely two such incidents in my own lifetime.  They were humdingers, but I wouldn’t have minded maybe less intensity spread over more hugs . . . Well, we are what we are.  Luckily, circumstances have forced some barriers here (regular massage, chiropractic, phys. therapy for the broken arm), so the inbuilt touch-aversion has been modified well down from levels others might see as freaky or even pathological.  Love your story about the very aware 4-year-old!

@mudlark — Don’t worry about it, please!  I’m often a bit patchy with acknowledgments myself, but people don’t seem excitable about that sort of thing here, thank goodness!

 

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion  — Right, got it; Human Universe; I’ll look it up.

Okay, got it now — I liked the scattershot approach of different kinds of stories — horror, fairy tale, crime caper, etc. — to come at the question  from a number of entertainingly different angles.  So the one big shock regeneration moment is the unleashing of the process of getting to the point of the D becoming his new self so we can take off at any speed from reasonably firm ground with ep 1 of season 9.  Sounds good to me.

And thanks, mods, for your patience with the rambling, and for helping with inadvertent multiples of one post, on this thread or one of the others.

 

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion —

What’s the Brian Cox series, and where found?  Probably UK etc. only, but I’d like to check it out if I can.   We’re in a really deep pit of nothing to watch around here right now which is okay — I just go over to Acorn.tv and watch some UK mystery series, and all’s well.  Still, I’m paying for this _)*((^T*&)(I**&$#% Dish antennae service, and it SUCKS.  They keep running ads for new shows that look promising — all scheduled to start in March!  If this goes on much longer, I might actually have to get down to some work, here, and how fair is that?

Yeah, the “handwriting on the wall” is interesting, and, comfortingly, the “wall” is slate, not whiteboard.  Homey, in a time period sense.

The idea of a 12 ep regen story is exhausting just to think about . . . you mean Matt Smith is regenerating from the first episode of his final Doctor season?  I should go back and take a look, if so.  I missed some of that, too manic, wore me out .  I should be watching The Good Wife — excellent performances, fine actors — but oh god, not another *lawyer* show!  I’ve been married to a lawyer for 45+ yrs; enough already.

[ichabod @replies]

@jametteB — Now, that would be interesting — letter campaign?  “Dear RTD, please, come on, tell us a story!”

[ichabod @replies]

@lisa  — Ya think?!  So does that mean that I can have his hair?  Just the hair part, you know, not the, ah, um, actual head.  Good grief — so now that I’m 75 all of a sudden I like *younger* men?  That’d be new.  I must have just regenerated or something . . . And I get crush-capacity back?  Who knew?  No, wait — that’s the whole reason for the existence of AARP, to judge by their magazine.

Okay, best quit while I’m ahead.

Which reminds me — I want that hair!  Next time around, I swear — I’m putting in my order *now*.

 

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

@scaryb — That initial scene reminded me of the stage of infancy at which the new person starts being able to distinguish itself from Mom and v.v.  Well, he is sort of new-born and growing rapidly, isn’t he?

When I wrote about actors’ skills, I didn’t mean to ignore or deny the huge contributions of the whole production crew, or what happens when it all comes together so brilliantly that that magic pretend/reality thing happens, and the performance transcends the level of “actors at work”and becomes something more.  I know I’ve had a few moments like that when the first draft of a scene or a bit of dialog in a story just unfurls in perfect mind-silence, without any conscious decisions of craft, and I look at it afterward and not one word needs to be changed (unusual for me; I rewrite a *lot*).  Doesn’t happen that often, but when Harlan Ellison talked about writing a particular story in a suspended state of creativity he called “blue fire”, the writers in the audience were nodding, knowing exactly what he meant (this was at an SF convention in Pheonix, I think, many years ago).  Is that what they call “flow state”?  “Blue fire” sounds more, ah — dramatic?  But Ellison is a very dramatic guy, so those terms could equate, for him.

As for Capaldi, he’s uniquely gifted and is playing a part beautifully suited to him, so I want to pay very close attention — you don’t see that every day.  He’s got that striking, unusually mobile and expressive face, a build with the simple elegance of a 6 foot painter’s ladder (but flexible), well-shaped hands big enough to semaphore effectively on any scale, and a voice — well, that voice, it would take paragraphs (as I said, voices are key for me).  And then there’s the hair (god damn it, I’d *kill* for hair like that!); and the intelligence, muscular as well as mental.  Moffat has apparently said that he wrote the Season 8 Doctor with PC in mind, and he seems also to have written Coleman a Clara with the force and vitality to hold her own (at last!), so — are we all in luck?  We are!

Those who can’t see it — that’s a pity; for them.

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion — Once again, lack of clarity, my fault: I was trying to say (condensing too much because I know I tend to run off at the fingers here) — trying to say, what to Clara, given her magnificently exciting alternative existence hangin’ with the D, must at least some of the time seem to her to be “hum-drum”.  I don’t diss teachers; been one; still am, when the opportunity arises.  Maybe my Jung shadow-me got out there and said something dumb; if so, apologies back.

Hugs: sorry, I misunderstood: who are the huggers?  Who (in general) benefits?  Depends on who’s doing it, and why, I guess.  I think sometimes hugs are like ape-pals grooming each other — sharing warmth, solidity, the comfort of “Yes, here we are, and we are us”.  Or there’s the more or less formal greeting-hug that I think is still common in Europe among friends, goes with the familiar form of pronouns and verbs — “Good to see you and feel your physical presence and look, we’re both still alive.”  We hug to discharge the energy of joy, victory, success.  We hug for comfort, mutually or one comforting another.  Maybe because we don’t have telepathy, and sometimes circumstances are such that we can’t get words out and are half-blind with tears, the body speaks for us with a very simple gesture instead: “let me hang onto you, I need someone to hang onto for a minute.”  From the other side: “You look as if you could use some strength; here’s some of mine, holding you up for a bit.”  Pretty versatile, actually, and mostly beneficial (unless somebody is faking, using hugs as crafty manipulation).

Much of this is from observation — I’m not much of a hugger myself; I seem to wear some coat of distance on me that leaves the initiation of a hug up to me, and that’s only for my intimates — family, old friends and colleagues.

Who gives hugs and who benefits in DW?  I just watched a clip of Tennant backing Simm’s Master to the wall in what looked like a blaze of punishing  judgment, and then crouching suddenly to embrace his collapsed enemy (“I forgive you”), and the gesture is — protective, shielding, reading (if I’m seeing and interpreting right — quick clip, blurry) “I’m not going to tear you apart, I’m helping hold you together”.  It’s an extreme example, simultaneously moving and over-the-top in a slightly distasteful (to me) Jesus-y way, but also bold and striking.  Lots more of the usual kind, too.

Witter, witter; sleep time.  You were not harsh, you were defending something that should be defended.  Not to worry . . .

 

[ichabod @replies]

@lisa — I wasn’t clear about something, and new it would come round and bite me, so I want to correct my statement “Clara doesn’t care about other people” so that it means what it was supposed to mean: “Clara doesn’t much care how the D sees *other* people, but she cares very much about how he sees *her*.”  I agree that she’s developed a strong Alpha drive, and teaching school kids could get to feel pretty confining for such a person.  The D is her chance to get out there and Alpha her head off, if he is convinced that she can carry off Alpha performance, which means not just ordering other people around but acting wisely and forcefully on her own.  She needs his respect if she wants to be more than his “assistant”, “companion”, or “carer”, and she does.

Of course when he *gives* her his idea of respect, even though she lives up to the demands of the quandary he leaves her in, she’s furiously resentful — because maybe it was too much respect for her to handle yet.  Too much fear came with it, too much responsibility.  Boy, y’can’t win for losing, can you, around people.

I think one thing the D has gone about learning in his travels with Clara is to curb his formidable impatience, at least with her.  He has to pause and pay attention, not take her for granted as either worthy of respect or not.  Look at the scope he gives her for handling Danny’s death (in Dark Water) and the inevitable demand to bring him back to life: a whole dream-scenario, with volcanos and lava, suggested for her!  Prod, push, investigate — because he really has no idea of how far she’ll go with her blackmail scheme.  Far enough, as it happens, for him to assent to her demand (we’ll to to Hell and find Danny etc.).

 

[ichabod @replies]

@barnable — I certainly *hope* the D and Clara remember their dreams when we rejoin them next August; otherwise, they might not still be traveling together, since one of the things they will have forgotten is reversing the Cafe of Mutual Lies, so they’d still have to re-create their resolution of that and reconnection for joint travel.  This got done in the dream, quietly, really, no fuss, and I liked that and would prefer that they *not* have to do it again because they don’t remember telling each other the truth inside the crab face dreams.

Maybe it’s just better to let sleeping Docs lie . . .

[ichabod @replies]

puro, part II: about intimacy, sort of.  Look at that little scene again — “see me”.  It’s powerful: an admission of deep vulnerability by a mighty Time Lord who finds the nerve and the humility to ask for what he needs, and a companion who’s up to the challenge of giving it.

An intimate moment — for us; not for the actors, though.  It’s weird magic, almost dancing.  That entire emotional transaction happens not in the characters (which are fictions), or even the actors, who after all have rehearsed this scene and shot and re-shot it a bunch of times so the electric contact *we* see has long since worn off (if in fact it happened at all during the shooting of the scene) by the time the selected and edited version hits the screen.  That’s how you tell good acting from bad: the actors find just the right sequence of actions, words, tones, etc. to set off our perception of the emotions they need to communicate to us.  What *they* feel or don’t feel in that moment is immaterial.  They find the signs, the right cues, and we supply the meaning that they are signaling.

I think this is more true in the UK than here in the States where Stanislavski’s Method took hold and convinced actors that if *they* feel a feeling hard enough, then the audience would be induced to feel it too.  But how many times can you really, authentically feel outrage, or grief, or horror, or mind-blinding joy, in the same scene, rehearsed and shot twenty times in front of the camera, or played out six times a week on a stage for 40 weeks?  You have to find the right outward signals that will reliably produce the effect you want to produce in your viewers.

And that’s your hug, in “see me”.  It’s the concluding movement of the set of signs that these two actors have put together to produce the greatest effect on us, the viewers: how she slumps miserably against the door frame, saying goodbye to #11; how 12 paces forth, back, pivots, “Do you have any idea what that’s like?”.  The drop of volume on “. . . see me.”  It just blows me away, the elegant application of the precision tools they’ve made of their voices, bodies, and expressions.  That’s their craft at the top of its bent.  My job is to supply the “art” — to catch what they’re pitching so brilliantly, and feel “the feels”.  If she were *really* feeling saying goodbye to a beloved man who’s actually dead in *her* time, she’d be curled up in a sobbing heap on the sidewalk and, most importantly, *incapable of delivering her lines*.

So, as they play it, *why* does she hug him?  Her hug tells him, “Yes, you are that man, I see it in your eyes and I accept your new form with all my heart.”  She gets her spectacular playmate back, her doorway to adventure, her freedom from a hum-drum life of teaching.  What does he get?  Well, he can stop holding his breath, can’t he?  It’s okay; she will travel on with him and help him stay sane.  He, both of him, has managed to persuade her that he is who he thinks he is — and what the hug means to him is, “She sees me, she trusts me to be the person I’m supposed to be.”

Little scene; Big Stuff.  *Big, contented sigh* . . .

[ichabod @replies]

@puofilion — Seriously, your eyes change color?  I read about that in fiction sometimes, but have never observed it in anyone (except cats, but they’re flipping’ aliens, so what do we expect).  The too-white blue-white teeth thing is a huge fad in the US.  I’m sorry if it’s gone and contaminated other places.  To me, it makes everybody look as if their front teeth are false ones made plastic.

The double-me thing presents itself differently to me, at least as an internal phenomenon: there’s reasonably smart me that knows what common sense is; and then there’s shadow me, my fatal flaw, the armor I suited up in as a kid for protection but that now strait-jackets me into all sorts of negative stupidity any time I’m scared.  Isn’t that Jung’s shadow identity?  I think of the sensible me as the me I chose to be born as, a stack of pretty good qualities suited to whatever course I decided to take in this life.  The shadow me, the armor, is what happens when my stack of goodness encounters The World — the concatenation of everybody *else’s* choices and perceptions: fear, defensiveness, wiles, self-justifying stories I tell myself, wincing all the while.

In those terms, clearly the D already had a hefty shadow self of fear and defensiveness when we saw him in the barn in “Listen”.  Remember on-looking grown ups comment that he insists on sleeping in the barn because he “doesn’t want anybody to hear him crying” — crying out of fear.  So his fear of being shamed by others is stronger than his fear of monsters under the bed.  *That’s* certainly changed by the time we meet him as an adult, so maybe Time Lord College and experience changed him into someone who rarely considers being shamed a significant factor — although it certainly roared and showed its teeth when CyberDan said “Then shame on you,” didn’t it?

[ichabod @replies]

@barnable — @lisa and all — Santa giving a Christmas present of a sort if assisted suicide — My God, I *love* you guys!  I don’t know whether to laugh my self sick, or go jump off the roof.  In any case, I am finding the idea of Santa giving everybody what they want via dream crabs irresistible.  But the professor is a problem: if you were giving somebody a death-present, wouldn’t you make it a heroic death, or a sweet goodbye, a death a person could be pleased with or proud of?  Getting sucked through a window/screen/thingie seems rather — abrupt, brutal, and insultingly perfunctory to me.

But suppose we solve that somehow (as in, explain away — DW offers an endless, rich banquet of stuff that needs explaining away, doesn’t it); then there’s this other problem, because butterflies or not, I have a pragmatic streak that just won’t quit, and I can’t find the off-button.  So, lookit: the Doctor and Clara have had their parting of the ways in the cafe, leaving us all gutted and the Doctor alone in the Tardis afterwards, having, I think, one of his cat-naps only sitting down at the console.

And Santa knocks and tells him to pull his thumb out, there’s serious resolution-work to do.

CUT — to Clara’s bedroom, and some elfish oaf or oafish elf is bullying his employees on her roof.

Has the dreaming already begun?  If so, which people already have been face-crabbed, and how?  There were no face-crabs in the cafe; I didn’t see any in the Tardis, post Big Fat Lies, so who’s got the crabs — as it were?  Is the Doctor already crabbed, and we’re seeing him from an external viewpoint, although we are in fact already in *his* dream?  Not likely — where would he have, um, caught the crabs, between the cafe and the Tardis?  Wandering around on his own with his eyes shut, maybe, because face it (heh!), on his own he is unstable at best, and falling into a face-crab mine wouldn’t be all that unusual; and we don’t see the thing because we’re looking with his own P.O.V. but from outside his actual head?

OR — Santa knocks, Clever Boy lets him in, and Santa crabs him.  But then how do we get to Clara’s rooftop, before the D shows up?  At what point, exactly, do we all enter the shared dream (we are, after all, dreaming it too for the duration of the show), and whose dream is it at least for starters, since the P.O.V. does shift quite a bit?  Or is it all Clara’s dream from the beginning — her dreaming that Santa gives the D a wakeup call and then heads to her roof expecting a rendezvous with the D there?

I don’t think we can conclude anything useful about the ending(s) of the dream(s) until we figure out where, how, and via whom it got started. Or — are the dream-crabs just a fantasy themselves, an artifact of dreaming minds to answer the need for some cause for all this dreaming going on, although we know that dreams do whatever they want to well beyond any control by logic or reason.

What I want to know is (now, because late August is too far away) the next time we see the D and Clara together, will they remember all that dream stuff (like, admitting their lies to each other)?  Or only bits of it?  Or none of it, and both are still be stepping out of that hug in the cafe and the melancholy mood it left for both of them, or months later still remember that conversation as their last contact?

The tone of their first episode of season 9 kind of depends on answers about this Xmas dream, doesn’t it?

 

 

[ichabod @replies]

@barnable — oh, boy, *fantastic*!  The Obscuritones!  How’s *that* for a choir!

[ichabod @replies]

@barnable  #37054   Drat!  I meant “Los Oscuritantes”, lost a syllable.  But we can just go right ahead and have a schism right now, why wait?  The Oscuritantes will go one way, the Oscurantes another, and then they can have a war about how to spell themselves.

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion  #30547 — Exactly; that scene, around the phone call, is golden.  They all three hit it just right: Matt urges Clara to help his new self; #12 asks for her help: still, hesitation.  So he simply drops all his defenses, even the will to defend (which is one hell of a thing to do when you’re pretty much petrified by the prospect of a firm rejection), and he says “Please . . . just . . . see me.”  That’s what I think Clara responds to: he needs the affirmation, from one who would really know, that he is who he now thinks he is, hopes he is, and has been trying to be.  So  finally she consents to try, walking right up to him and looking him over with her full attention.  (Just a side note: try looking at your face in your bathroom mirror, close up and really looking into your own eyes, for more than a few minutes — the longer you look, the more interesting the experience gets.)

The hug is an outward sign of something that has already been accomplished, just in the few seconds when she’s looking into his new/old face, and he keeps quiet and returns her gaze, until she “gets it”and smiles.  The contact from soul to soul is made, the intimacy based on trust is re-established.  By the time she hugs him, he’s already pulling back, can’t help it: true intimacy is rare for good reason and brief when it happens. Nobody can actually live at that level for more than a few seconds (it’s kind of like “enlightenment” that way, at least according to Zen Buddhism as I’ve encountered it).

Uh, oh — I think I’m sounding just a tad nuts, talking mostly to myself to find out what I think.  I just keep coming back to this little scene because — hmm.  It’s so much bigger on the inside . . .  Thank you, puro, for opening this particular door a little wider so I could see and understand more of what I see behind it.

[ichabod @replies]

@miapatrick  #30499  — Yes!  Vastra is talking about the long-running Doctor, the original person who has taken off one mask and personality after another over a string of long lifetimes.  That’s the person she can perceive.  Clara, despite the timeline jumping, is still only “seeing” the personality, the one just gone and now this new one that’s so erratic and confused that it scares her (and not without good reason — in this kind of haze, I think he could be very dangerous just in terms of not knowing his left hand from his right).  It’s as if she’s reminding Clara — remember who it is that you love, not the face you found so attractively young and cheery (well, a lot of the time) a little while ago.

The message only gets through much later, though, when Clara hears it from the horse’s mouth — from 11, on the phone, and 12 “standing right here in front of you”, who are the same core person wearing different aspects of the immortal core and different bodies.  With Vastra, Clara gets defensive; but with Matt/Doctor, she listens, and responds.

[ichabod @replies]

@geoffers  30332 — How strange; your comments on the changes that come with any type of senile dementia, and just the changes in friends one hasn’t seen in forever — what’s that poem by Elizabeth Bishop?  First line: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master . . . ”

There are moments when the Doctor’s whole saga is so pointedly about loss and “the art of losing” (that is, the art of surviving loss) that you would have to be a stone not to respond.  Isn’t that everyone’s story, once you’re old enough to look out of your eyes (instead inward so much, as when young and more ego-bound) and see how people fall away?  Friends, family, colleagues, hell, pets, whole streets and towns and parks.  You don’t even have to live a dozen lives for it to start mounting up.  I have had some examples of Alzheimers disease and its changes in my life lately, as is probably true of many of the people posting here; it’s so damned common now.

I hadn’t thought of that as an aspect of the alienness of PC’s Doctor in Clara’s eyes, but as a human person she might well see unsettling echoes of that kind of confusion (from experience in her own family) in the new Doctor’s manic confusion.  But I think she’d have said; except we don’t want to scare the kids about gramps and so on.

Happily, this is not *that*.  Deep breath, indeed.

[ichabod @replies]

@arkleseisure  #30250  — Wow, *thanks* for that insight — of course, only the Doctor would consider the killing of a ginormous dinosaur another murder in a string of murders!  That idea really, really tickles me — it’s like, “Beat THAT, Sherlock!”

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus  30224  — I also think Half-Face jumped, because at the end of that confrontation Half-Face *turns off his blowtorch hand flame* and the two antagonists step apart, one to each side of the open hatch into the balloon thingie, I believe.  Next thing you know, the hat floats down, etc.  He talked Half-Face into it, realizing that Half-Face really has been wanting his “Promised Land” very badly and was finally ready to die to get there.

But oh, that was cold, cold — “I think I’m going to have to kill you,” as he sits having a drink, all fine-looking gent at his club with a glass in his hand . . . Wow.

LOVE IT!  God, what a breath of fresh air.

[ichabod @replies]

@arbutus  post 30219

[As humans, part of our understanding of people is based on what they look like, their eyes, their smile, their voice. If all of these things suddenly changed in someone close to me, it would feel as if that person were gone.]

Yes — but for me it’s the voice.  The voice — range, timbre, how it plays (“Lulu” vs. “Rusalka”, for an extreme and operatic example), accent, habitual turns of phrase, etc.  I was a very nearsighted kid, and maybe that’s why the voice is key for me, and that would be hard to get past if I were in Clara’s place re recognizing and accepting PC as the new version of MS.  You can *tell* yourself that yeah, it’s the same person in there, but your visceral reaction will depend on what your *senses* tell you.  Capaldi’s voice is very, very distinctive, to my ear; it in no way goes with Smith and his Doctor.  Clara does have to really *look* and *really see* Capaldi’s Doctor.  She has to rise to the occasion once he literally begs her to — and she does.  Good on her!  Great pair, these two.

 

[ichabod @replies]

I think I need a little Clarafiction here, if someone can provide it: the Doctor leaves Clara to face Half-Face and goes down the hallway where more people/robots are standing.  What does he do there?  He deals with one of these semi-dead and puts its face/mask on, then goes back to somewhere behind Clara to listen while she pumps Half-Face for information while being scared out of her wits and not at all sure that he’s coming back.  But back he comes, yanks off Matt-like face, and says something like: “Five foot one and crying — you never stood a chance.”

I think he’s talking to Half-Face (“you”) although he’s looking at Clara, assessing the effect of her “helplessness” and distress on even a cold villain like Half-Face.  He’s saying that he left Clara in that position because he surmised that poor old Half-Face was human *enough* to be unable to resist the spectacle of this terrified, not very tall, quaking and tearing-up girl and just slice her up with his blowtorch-hand.  He’s not chiding Clara for being short and scared, he’s justifying himself for having left her on her own with a homicidal, patchwork robo-person.  She was right: he “had her back” the whole time, since he didn’t actually “abandon” her at all.

Although it takes other events to convince her that he’s not going to run off and leave her, out of confusion or a whim, and at the end she feels she has to lie to him to *get* him to run off and leave her so he can search for Gallifrey.

 

[ichabod @replies]

Hello, all — new to this discussion and *way* late to the party, but now that we’ve all done the whole season and have time to sit back and reflect on its beginnings, I thought I’d comment on the Phone-Call-From-Eleven scene.  I didn’t see its importance as a shout-out to the hesitant members of the audience to encourage them to accept PC’s new Doctor.  I just found the idea fascinating — the culmination of the idea of the difference between “mask” (face) and soul, if you will.  I found it both head-splitting and poignant that here was one man speaking in two voices — the voice of a dying avatar, Smith, and the voice of the new and very rocky version, the former saying “Accept that stranger/non-stranger over there because he’s petrified by the dislocation of his inner and outer worlds, and do it out of your regard for me and as a mercy to him/me,” while the other says , “Don’t tell me what he said, I know because that was me talking, which you would understand if you would just look *past* the new face/mask and see that *that* me and *this* me — standing in front of you, not on the phone any more — are two realizations of the same person.”

Matt/Doctor can do nothing but go ahead and die; Peter/Doctor can do nothing but stand still and wait while someone he *sort of* knows (“the not-me one, the asking questions one”) decides whether or not to validate his existence by recognizing the Doctor in him.  I think he’s begun to see himself much better, because of the decisions he’s seen himself making in the course of this story; but he needs her to agree, to ground his new knowledge in something besides his own confused perceptions.  Then he can at last relax into further exploring and becoming this new version of himself.

It’s an amazing moment, IMO; incredibly daring all round, and brought off beautifully.  Just think of the nightmare we could have had if she’d rejected him: a wildly sputtering, flaming tailspin down to the Valeyard, I’d guess.  Which would be interesting in its own right, and maybe we will see at some point; but meantime, Clara has just done what Clara “was born for” —  she has saved the Doctor yet again.

Crikey.  That’s a lot longer than I meant it to be; sorry.

 

[ichabod @replies]

Capaldi “fails” to make NTA shortlist?  Au contraire, NTA shortlist “fails” to include his Doctor, is all.  Their problem, I would say . . . or rather, as has been pointed out above, a problem of timing, most likely.

@purofilion — Thanks for good wishes; and yes, 2015 is starting off well reasonably well, so no punches due, pulled or otherwise.  Despite the obvious large sinkhole in my 2014, I’ve been extraordinarily lucky, really.  Certainly displacement activity has helped enormously.  And I found the Dalek dub-step clip, pretty cute!

@barbaralefty — Have a good time beating our friend about the head and shoulders until he, she, or it concurs that our current Doctor is superb — and unexpectedly useful, come to think of it.  Somewhere in “The Bank Heist”, I think, there’s a shot of Clara walking across the scene with the Doctor a double-pace behind, both in profile, swinging along with an *almost* military matched stride.  That caught my attention, and thinking about it, I realized that g.d. it, *I* used to walk like that — everybody complainned and tell me to slow down.

But I haven’t been doing that, not lately — partly energy lows, partly having fallen last spring and busted my right arm (tripped on a kitchen floor mat).  Thing is, over the age of — well, any age, probably — a fall like that leaves you walking differently.  For one thing you’re out of balance while your stupid arm is in a stupid sling for weeks, and you have to work to get balance and rhythm back.  For another, there’s a reason that so many old people walk with their heads down, curving and shortening their spines: they’re watching the ground, scared to fall and looking fearfully for tripping hazards.  I was doing that.

And to hell with it.  I walk for bone density etc., and I want my stride back — but didn’t realize it was gone, ’til I saw the two of them swinging along.  Working on it now.  Apparently the Doctor is not only in, but he can occasionally heal without an Rx or even a laying on of hands.

Heh!  Just back from a walk, and feeling good tonight!

[ichabod @replies]

@barnable — Well, yeah, I have a time machine, but like everyone’s it only goes in one direction and skips forward and back only happen in dreams . . . so far, anyway.  I’m definitely a rogue *something*, but draw the line at the los Oscurantes — after all, what they are about is not hiding in “obscurity”, but making sure that everything is hidden from *themselves* (mainly through blocking the senses, hence earmuffs, stilts, gauzy blindfold, and probably gloves).  Let’s say the idea is, if you block your senses you might get through to the reality that normal sensory input disguises and distorts.  Sort of a shortcut aestheticism, with bruises, I should think? Those blasted stilts . . . There, job done: I think I just invented a religion.

Don’t tell anyone; there are too many nuts out there already . . .

 

[ichabod @replies]

@grammargeek1002  Hi!  Love the pics, looks like a lot of fun!  How do you present the idea to guests who aren’t familiar with DW?

@serahni  Pratchett is special; I like Vimes, and Vetinari of course, and the witches and their adventures.

[ichabod @replies]

@purofilion  I think it’s a form of — waking up?!  What???  Blasted face huggers!  Never trust a (face) hug, it’s just a way to eat your brain . . .

I’m not in the UK but in the American Southwest, though I’m often still up at 1 a.m.  It’s the other thing — basically, a health issue at home (not mine but SO’s) has been festering since diagnosis in 2005, and I pretty much gave up and moved it all out of the house early last summer so that one of us, at least, might actually survive the experience.  House to myself, lots of sleep and shuffling around making coffee at all hours, but now brain connections are coming to life with all of the energy of an escape at last from the unwanted but necessary “job” of, essentially, running a 24 hour clinic for one patient.  And I’ve begun weaning self off a mild dose of tranqs, so that probably contributes, too.

Hence, butterflies (thanks for that image, sleeping @whisht) and confetti.  At least, I think that’s what’s going on.

Hey, is a conversation like this okay here?  Should it go someplace else?  It’s not, strictly speaking, about “Last Christmas”, is it.

[ichabod @replies]

@barbaralefty — Oh, *lots* of sugar, must go straight to energy to drink your coffee like that and end up with a body like a 6′ stepladder.  It would *take* a face crab to get to sleep after a dose like that.

*Love* your addition to Obscuritantarian lore — or are they “Oscurritantes”, sort of Latinized like “Los Penitentes” who haul real great big wooden crosses around up near the hill villages at Easter round here?  What brilliant, otherworldly Newton discovered the Law of Brevity, do you think?  Was there — a tangerine involved (in this case meaning a piece of fruit, not a person from Tangiers)(or maybe not?)?  And how long did it take her?  How many tangerines had to fall on her head (oh, *definitely* fruit, not the other thing) before she “got” it?

Also like your take on Clara more or less forcing D to come save her from brain-eating dreams; that’s our girl.

The Dub-step Dalek?  Has someone come up with that music over on the music thread?  *Why not*?

I’d prefer Shona, but would be happy with Ashley — or both?  Too much, with Clara?  Which one brings the tarot deck (somebody has to bring a tarot deck).(Except, no — they’d just get it all wrong; most people do . . . Faget I said that)?

 

[Author]

Posts