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@missy  I think JW will be fine, though probably more limited in scope by the scripts given her; I just a fascinating documentary on PBS about working artists who are also mothers, and how their art explores areas of experience pretty much utterly ignored til now, unless seen through the eyes of male artists.  I found some of it kinda urpy, to tell the truth, but the central argument — that there are stories for women artists to tell from their own personal perspectives that have simply not been told in that way before, shutting a whole huge span of human experience out of the arts except as seen and told by the half of humanity that *doesn’t ever have and never has had that experience* — quite compelling.

Not that DW could or should go as far as some of these artists have gone; not a show with a young kid audience.  But, as I expect we’ve all noticed, our cultures are thrashing around like clothes in the drying machine.  I came home from a few days in San Francisco (wedding matters) to find that some Right Wing Nut has gotten a proposal on the ballot in that state to split it into three states — Northern, Central, and Southern California (clearly, as a way of blunting the power of liberal San Francisco to control their delegates to the Electoral College and Congress; there is no bottom to the depths of reactionary sliminess and dirty pool, IMO).  Fer instance . . .

In a way, Capaldi’s Doctor stood up for age as opposed to youth in our hero — speaking of depths, of character this time.  Now Whittaker; and no one knows what’s next, but I am for damn sure not making any predictions!  Except that all hell’s gonna break loose among various portions of fandom every week while her first season is on.  Hot time in the old town tonight, I think.

But I gotta say, I don’t care for Kris Marshal in general.  He’s just to goofy and clownish for me, at least from what I’ve seen — a lightweight, in my no doubt blinkered estimation.  But it’s okay; we have Jodi Whittaker instead, whom I’ve thought rather narrow in range, but that could be because I don’t think I’ve seen her in anything but Broadchurch, so I’m ready to be educated.

But not ready to let PC go.  That guy is still my Doctor.  Maybe for good.

 

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@winston   I am sure there are kids and adults out there who will one day claim her as their Doctor.

Oh, I don’t doubt it!  It’ll be a bumpy ride, but why not?  We live in bumpy times.  I expect a lot of youthful energy and enthusiasm from JW for, as you say, a whole new take on Doctoring, with maybe an occasional island of sadness and darker memories in a sea of exuberance.  Someday, students of gender relations and social history will be writing studies on how this beloved serial made this highly contentious shift, and what came of it, and how it all played out.  In some respects, making this change in an iconic male hero after 50 yrs is going to be hard to beat for other shows that people like to think of as bold and progressive (eg, “Jessica Jones” and others).

I have to say, I don’t think anyone in American TV would have had to guts to do something like this.  What’s being lauded here now is “The Handmaid’s Tale”, a grim descent into a future death of current hopes, or “Westworld” about an android uprising.  But to actually pick up your established hero of a half-century and literally turn him into a pretty young woman (in horrible trousers) — well, it’s looking a lot more revolutionary to me now than it did back when the decision was actually made.  I see better now why there was such vitriolic opposition from some fans to a female Doctor: it really is a culturally significant change, in a way that the recent efflorescence of, say, female cops and detectives in crime thriller-dom hasn’t been: visible and in your face, a flag planted, in one bold, very public stroke backed by a massive and distinguished institution, the BBC.  Wow!

Which carries lot of expectations with it, so good luck to Chibnall — he’s going to need it.

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@bluesqueakpip  Ha!  Thanks.  A charity shop in the nineties, maybe, someone having a closet clear-ou!  Why not?  Did they have on-seam pockets?  One thing I *really* can’t imagine is the Doctor choosing clothes with No Pockets.  But that’s partly because I myself refuse to have or wear such things — and I’ve been keenly aware for years in the US, at least, many women choose pants with no pockets as part of seeking smooth and tight silhouette to look sexier, and what they heck, they carry purses and pocketbooks for their keys . . .

So, how *is* 13 going to deal with fashion and “dress codes” now, with all the fuss about looking — or choosing *not* to look — “sexy” to appeal to one’s chosen gender of partner?  SO easy to offend — somebody, anybody, *everybody*, with how that’s handled!  Hell, I’m offended already, although I did, in fact, back in whatever day was “the day” as they say, make reprehensible “fashion” choices of my own, for reasons that seemed very important at the time.  So I’ll be wanting to cut 13 plenty of slack on the matter . . . and it’s going to be like that with so much else as well.  Chibnall could go for the kind of casual look that says, “I really don’t care about this bit” and just ignore it all except for some side-quips when 13’s attention is momentarily snagged by, say, somebody sporting false eyelashes as long as window drapes; but where’s the fun in that?  I mean, there *is* another side (at least one!) to the matter.

What female models does 13 have in her copious memory (assuming she pushes through the effects of a pretty traumatic regeneration reasonably quickly and *can* remember) to draw upon in terms of looks and habits and modes of action and self-presentation?  Is this getting too complicated, too grown-up for the “target audience” with questions like this?  Chibnall better be prepared to consider that too, since the DW fandom in Moffat’s hands drew in a whole cohort of grown-up female fans.  Some sophisticated thinking will be needed, along with the longed-for slapstick and comic-book action-hero stuff (“I just want it to be *fun* again” is a lot of people’s code for “Surface and fast action, please don’t make me think”), to hold those people’s interest — unless the new admin decide those folks are expendable, aim for the kids.

13 is young (post-adolescent, at any rate) and female, and young, female fans are themselves experimenting with their “look” as part of being young, female, and feeling their oats (hormones).  Play too hard with all of that, and many of those fans may shrug off the whole enterprise.  Ignore it as an issue, and — ditto: “my life-eating and agonizing style concerns aren’t important to DW?!  That’s not a girl [like me, or my sister, or my school friends], that’s a fake!”  And of course it *is* — triple-fake, in fact: the Doctor is a) not a typical “girl” or “boy”, and b) not even a human being, and what’s more c) a fictional person rather than a “real” one.  And sometimes you want to be reminded of these things, but sometimes not.

I think the sanest, most productive course would NOT be to ignore the whole “but she’s a Woman now!” thing, which, IMO, is what would best please the fans who really didn’t want this change in the first place, to degrees of not-wanting that vary from dubious frowns to screaming tantrums complete with the throwing of DW merch out of the window.  It *could* be, “Let’s pretend this never happened”, plus the odd quirk-browed dig at weird girly-things that 13 can’t be bothered with because, well, this never happened and (s)he’s the same old, default gender-setting the male Doctor’s always (mostly) been no matter what (s)he wore.

Instead, what I hope for is that Chibnall will dig in and and encourage his co-writers to do the same, and write 13 as having to confront and make personal decisions (or postponing them) about those “girlie” things as they come up, with revisits to those decisions as needed (high heels for dress up, even though Cybermen will be among the guests — but high heels can be fun?  What to do when someone repellent is attracted to you, and you don’t want to be a tease but you don’t want to be nasty — or get attacked, since that does happen sometimes — either; or maybe you’re attracted back?  And perhaps most tricky *and most important of all*, how do you relate to and treat *other* female characters, now that you’re seeing them, maybe a little more sharply, from the inside of the default (in adventure stories) Not-Okay Corral?  And so on).

I expect a mix of approaches, which I think I’d like best of all.  Sometimes being female is an issue in some way, large or small — constraining, exploitable, extra-dangerous to self and/or others, a nuisance, a joke, painful, unexpectedly jarring or powerful, and so on; sometimes not.  The fans would be in a constant uproar of quarrels about approval, disapproval, moaning about “consistency” and how “realistically” an issue has been handled, whether it *is* an issue (they will lose the outright misogynists straight away anyhow, just for acknowledging that yes, there really are common problems for women that men don’t usually encounter), how everybody *else* would have dealt with it much better instead of what Chibnall’s crew did, etc., etc. forever.

In other words — the usual, really, for DW fandom only louder: but, most importantly, alive and kicking.

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Let’s see if this works — found it on the Fansided site:

Peter Capaldi thinks the big appeal to Doctor Who is death, but is that true?

Not exactly what he said, but I find the phrase, “which I’m not encouraged to say” because it might damage “the brand” to point out this morbid but undeniably present aspect of the show — interesting, to say the least.  I’ve wondered about that — that whole pressure element that goes with playing that part in these times: all the secrets to keep from the fans, everything you can’t say because of the children, or because it will be taken the wrong way by x or y or persons as yet unknown, or, or, or . . . Nothing like that when Capaldi played Richelieu, right?  It must get a bit oppressive when you land your dream part, thinking of it as it must have been put together with scotch tape and prayers back when you loved it as a kid, and then you find that you’ve become a big cog in a huge commercialized machine with a thousand moving parts and patches of quicksand and the time pressure, and the physical wear and tear, and — and — and!  During that last year, maybe even before then, he talked about the studios in Cardiff as “a factory”.  Must have had some part in the reasons that he wound it up after three series, aside from tradition, and Moffat (among others) going too.

Oh, and those ugly pants that Whittaker-doc will be wearing — I don’t know whether this is some new fashion horror born in the UK, or maybe somebody taking a fashion cue from DW-to-come, but I’ve seen ads on my computer for pants with that weird cut being marketed as “UK jeans”.  Really?  Are young women dressing like this over there?

I guess I’m just an old stick in the woods, but I hope she changes them out for something better ASAP.   They look to me (in the publicity shots we’ve seen so far) like clown pants, and I’m not finding that encouraging.

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Yikes!  I remember 60.  Well, sort of.  Intimidating, that’s what it was.  Back then.  Eighty, now . . . a year and a half away, and “intimidating” doesn’t begin to describe it.

Back to the gym tomorrow; you can always try to outrun — well, out-*walk* it, I guess.  But no doubt Peter C will be too busy with new possibilities to give it much of a thought.  I doubt that anything on offer will include the kind of athletics that DW demands from its stars!

I hope Jodie Whittaker has good, strong knees — !

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@geoffers   Wow!  Thank you for that — I can die happy; or something along those lines, but a bit less extreme.

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@thane16 or rather his dad and @missy and others: what’s happening has surely happened before, in the way that climate change has always been a “thing” — *slowly*.  Now it’s happening with (geologically speaking) at lightning speed, as I understand it, and that speed is the human contribution: we’ve forced something very quickly that might have gone quite slowly (if at all) without our input — and what that means for us is that we don’t have the time we normally would have had (without, that is, the speed-up of the Industrial Revolution et al) to adapt to a slow change.

The question isn’t what caused this climate tsunami that’s hard upon us now, but whether or not we can recognize our own part in it soon enough to abate the speed and give us a little extra time to make up for all the time we’ve wasted *arguing* about the damn thing, long after the great majority of scientists knew and accepted the reality of what’s been happening, and continues to happen, right now in the form of rapidly occurring extreme weather events and changes in sea life in particular.

This is not a test: or rather, this *is* a test — or how smart we *really* are, and is that smart enough to get us out of this rapid and increasingly violent fluctuation in climate, alive and still more or less civilized.  Look at the US, at one end of the spectrum, in the grip of lethally Reactionary forces, and rolling back the rather pitiable advances we’d managed to make under relatively sane governance; and, who, maybe the Dutch, who *must* invent and refine things like sea gates and floating towns or disappear entirely as the rising seas encroach.  This stuff has head-spinning effects on things like which countries take leadership rolls in riding out the storm(s) and which, like the US right now, fall back into the category of childish nuisance yanking on the grown-ups’ coat skirts.

That’s why “it’s just Nature doing its thing” is so dangerous: it distorts the truth so that places where human effort can be leveraged to slow things down and try to catch up with adaptations become invisible, or derided as beside the point, when they’re all we have going for us so we have to make the most of them instead of denying that we bear any responsibility, or have any  meaningful action to contribute, at all.

 

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@pedant — Oh, that made my day!  What a sight!  All is well, for the moment anyway, in Ichi-land tonight.

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@pedant  It has been established that Doctors lose memories of future Doctors (ref: Day of the Doctor) and that even future doctors can bury the memory of entire regenerations (ref: War Doctor). This is canon.

So, when he says things like, “I remember every single thing!” he’s, ah, lying, or boasting, or trying to convince himself that it’s not true that he sometimes forgets significantly large chunks of stuff, or even deliberately jettisons bits to make room for more new stuff and less confusion.  Which makes a whole lot more sense, in a traveler who’s 900-2,000 yrs old, than remembering *everything* that’s happened to him or that he’s done in his very, very, very long past.

Poetic license, I think, and necessary to being able to write a current story that isn’t strangled at birth in its own past complications and hanging chads.  As it were.

This is one of those reasons that, normally, I avoid time travel stories.  A reasonable assessment of the weight of past memories for *anybody*, TL or not, would make freshness and a freedom to play with plot pretty impossible.  Kind of like, suppose reincarnation is real, but every single one of us suddenly can remember every single detail of every single one of her past lifetimes, in including the ones that only lasted until age 8 or less.  Result: universal paralysis, I think, brains seizing up right and left with the effort to deal with it all, and lots and lots of anti-psychotic drugs prescribed, not to mention self-medication.

 

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@xadr4   She was amazing, and served as a powerful stimulus to numbers of American women who’d been SF fans for decades in secret — trashy space adventure for boys, as we were all told by librarians (poor things) who tried to steer us away.  Ursula did this incredible thing of get a book out there that crossed the SF ghetto walls and won admiration and recognition on *both* sides.  And she was clearly not writing for “boys” but for adults.  All of ’em.  I’m not the only one who read “Left Hand” and thought, hmm, this story I’ve been recasting unsuccessfully for years — what if I try it as SF?

So I did, and became (in 1974) one of a wave of women writers who crashed the SF boys’ club and found a sea of eager readers — all the women who’d fallen for SF as kids and grown up on “Star Trek” worshiping Uhura as “my god, a space woman and on the bridge!”  Ursula’s work gave us the nerve to do that.  We have never forgotten, and we will never let the rest of the world forget either (given that women tend somehow fall through the cracks in the “canon” after a decade or three, because how else to make room for more “deserving” men?).  And she had the natural nerve and intuition to do a writer’s life really, really well.  Maybe even perfectly . . . a beautiful job.  Julie Philips, who wrote a fine biography of “James Tiptree Jr.”, alias Ali Sheldon, signed on some time ago to do a bio of Ursula.  The job couldn’t be in better hands.  Julie knew Ursula well enough not to scant on the writer’s humor and disinclination to suffer fools.  At all.  It’ll be fun, as well as “awesome”.

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@mudlark  What is today in the open, challenged and fought over was then, in the 1950s and early 60s, largely unacknowledged and accepted,

Exactly; I think they tried get sense of the way the cultural background was not only steeped in racist and sexist beliefs and behaviors but had been so over generations by having D1 share a joke about the weakness of women  with the Captain.  They did what they could in the time given, but I wish the touch had been a bit lighter.

I wasn’t sufficiently aware of the social pressures and constraints on the majority of the girls of my generation and those following; I suppose that I assumed, in my privileged ignorance, that they were aware of the options and had made their choice.

1939 here, growing up in the forties and fifties; no kidding.  This is part of the criticism leveled at White feminists in the US by POC, speaking of privilege, because privilege makes us stupid.  It really does, like that unutterable moron in the House (a Republican, of course) who commented that the “extra” thousand or so dollars that a working family might keep this year under the new Tax Scam was great because they could use it to buy a new car.  Clearly, unlike most of us the moron has a personal shopper on staff.

@pedant  Great picture!

 

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@mudlark   . . . Leela, who may have been an ignorant ‘savage’, but was depicted as intelligent, a quick learner, and very resourceful, if sometimes a bit too aggressive for the Doctor’s liking.

Yes!  Leela was the one I recall as definitely stepping past the usual boundaries, as an assertive, comattive warrior woman whom no one would dare to call “my child”, except perhaps her mother.  Romana was a TL herself, so that was an exceptional case.

The highlighting of how things have changed in that background hum of normalized and accepted sexism of the sixties required adding an explicit dimension to D1’s character that nobody remembers having been there originally.  It wasn’t; wasn’t explicit, I mean, but was implicit in the ubiquitous scream/rescue trope for the women.  For a witty exposure of just how pervasive that sexist hum was, I recommend an essay called “The Grand Coolie Damn” that first appeared in “Sisterhood is Powerful”, a collection of feminist essay published in the ’60s I believe.  It’s about the ways in which even the anti-war, anti-Establishment movement of the time was just as blind to its own sexism as the Establishment it opposed.

Moffat punched it up pretty hard and made it jokey to appease those who might be offended.  I think the heavy load of showing both how the Doctor and his times have changed, and how Moffat himself has changed, accounts for the heavy-handedness in this aspect of “Twice”.

What is different between the 1960’s and now is, I think, that among people who hold such attitudes, the sexist bias tends now to be much more in the open and aggressively expressed, amplified no doubt by social media, because it is a back-lash response to the increasingly more active, widespread and outspoken feminist movements of the past four or five decades.

Yup; being bombarded with an explicitly sexist backlash now makes it even more difficult for people who weren’t there to recognize the implicit sexism of “then”, since they weren’t there to experience it.  D1’s 60s attitudes had to be underlined to make that connection with the rabid machismo of now.  The emphasis was also needed to provide a good firm springboard for 13’s “Oh, brilliant!” to leap from, into triumphant life.

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@thane16  Thanks for those comments, particularly your observations on persistent sexist attitudes at your school; too true in too many places, and changing very slowly, so yes, it really *was* important for Moffat to strike those notes, IMO.

@countscarlioni  You’re welcome of course.  I’m grateful that we’ve come (however sadly) to a place in our cultures where we can talk about these kinds of losses, without resorting to evasions, distortions, and euphemisms if we so choose.  Agree enthusiastic about Talalay — grand stuff, for grand themes, intimate moments for that.  Beautiful job, IMO.

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@blenkinsopthebrave  the truly brilliant 1945 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger “A Matter of Life and Death”

I saw it here — way more than once! — under the American release title “Stairway to Heaven” — a beauty!

@mudlark  . . . the recovery of the Doctor’s memory of Clara; my reasoning all along being that the memory was simply blocked (neural block), not erased, and remained latent.

We all get to be right on this one — Yes, the memories remained in his mind — but so firmly blocked that they might as well not have been, so for all intents and purposes he *did* forget (except for those little twitches at the odd prompt now and then).  Who better to unblock them than Testimony?  Talk about being kind!  On the other hand, 12 is going to “die”, so Testimony will want his memories complete, so that’s in their interest, too.

So is that where the successive Doctor personalities go when they “die”?  I’d guess not, since he’s not human but Gallifreyan, so he’s exempt — but wait, he doesn’t have his Confession Dial handy, so how’s he (or any other Doctor) going to get stored away in the TL Matrix?  Maybe not til The Doctor dies for good, as whoever the 50th one is at the time?

@mudlark  I can remember the treatment of the female companions throughout most of the BG era being a constant source of irritation to me. Lip service may have been paid to the intelligence of many of them, but they were not often given a chance to apply it, and even when they were given a proactive role it usually got them into trouble so that they were reduced to screaming a lot and having to be rescued.

YES; so much, yes!  I remember getting really fed up with the screaming and being lectured at with much later Doctors than #1.  It’s been a thread of the series forever, despite the more autonomous companions of AG DW, mirroring the gender-conservative dominant attitudes of their times.  Moffat had to stress these easy assumptions in #1 because otherwise such “little details” tend to be overlooked or brushed off as unimportant.  And I think he was also pointing out to the teeth-gnashing Mary Sues out there that progress on female characters (and social expectations) *has* been made, and that he himself has heard their criticism and learned from it.

As for pears, boscs are green-brown-to-gold, with elongated necks, more like apples than the gushy green pears (which, in fact, I don’t eat) but with a subtle flavor of their own.  Mangos, though, are in a class by themselves . . .

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@mudlark  ** I refuse to accept his prohibition on pears, though, and ate one at breakfast this morning – without dribbling any of the juice down my chin.

Depends on the pears, doesn’t it?  Boscs are my favorite, and not “mushy” unless you leet them get over-ripe, in which case, don’t eat ’em, as you have, by neglect, forfeited the right to their deliciousness.

@wolfweed  Thanks for the music — and happy new year to all!

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@missy  Yep; purely ridiculous.  Yet here we are . . .

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@puro  Despite their youth (and I certainly don’t speak for all) they’re not always equipped for subtlety and in their wish for youthful easy action they’re stolid, conservatively prurient and just a bit-behind-the-times. They miss the magical enactment of two Doctors making a decision, one creating the other; all moderated by Bill Potts. The 1st Doctor is in thrall with his later iteration and the plot or mechanism is love, sometimes wordless, a thing of arcane or mysterious comprehension. To be bored by the creation of life and personality, that disordered and terrifying thing? Surely no!

Yes; and thanks for that.  Young minds tend to believe that chases and fights are action, and only that kind of action matters, not words (“So that’s what it means, to be the Doctor of War”) or gestures of acceptance and affection  (“Cuddle.”).  Older minds often understand that in significant ways, it’s just the other way round . . .

@pedant  Although the overall casualty rate in WW1 was about 5%, the rate among junior officers was horrific.

Clearing the second son undergrowth, I suppose — one of those unintended consequences?

@scaryb  Hugs to you both.

Thanks, scary.  You know, I think I can say this here; I wouldn’t, anywhere else.  There’s a lot of pain involved in losing your parents or your spouse of many years or your siblings or cousins to dementia, and of course to cancer.  It occurs to me that as a person familiar for the past decade and more with the particular pain of such an ongoing loss, it seems to me now that without realizing it at the time I used the Twelfth Doctor to help keep my emtopma; bearings.  Capaldi’s willingness to throw himself into the portrayal of pain like that, and Moffat’s to write it, gave me a place to see my own feelings expressed eloquently — but at a remove, more accessible and more dealable-with than my internal experience was at the time, exactly because of that distance (“catharsis”, I guess; and/or maybe it’s just a way of sitting with pain instead of finishing the bottle and going to sleep to get away from it).

That’s the underlying reason, I believe, that 13 has been so important to me.  A fictional character offered to me on television helped me to save my own life (something more common, I think, than people who don’t read fiction could imagine or would credit).  And some say art is useless!  I doubt that I’m the only one, especially among older viewers, who found this Doctor so emotionally compelling even when the plot was wonky and false notes were struck, for reasons akin to this.  Just a thought, didn’t arrive til yesterday; but there it is.

@wolfweed  Thanks for the clip!  Isn’t social media a sort of un-sentient Testimony?  Social media often seems to me to be un-sentient humans blabbing at each other.  (Says an inveterate babbler on a social media site . . . o well.)

Thanks for the transcript link too — it clears up (to my mind) the reason that the Tardis ejects 13 — the Cloister bell is still tolling, which means that although 12 has “died”, 13 is also in danger of dying unless she’s moved somewhere else before everything catches fire.  So, out with her, and best of British Luck!

@hiker  — the S9 music, at long last (almost)?  Good news!  Now that Gold is leaving, these great scores are more important than ever, good cues for memory.

 

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@blenkinsopthebrave   The ferry went up and down over each wave at an angle of about 45 degrees. All three of us remained silent.

Funny effect, that; I was once on a teeny tour boat heading out from Juneau for an exploration of Tracy Arm, I think it was, and the stretch of open water that we had to cross was absolutely horrendous (well, to my eyes), just like that, with great heavy cloaks of water slashing across the windscreen of the captain’s — well, station, boat was too small for a separate cabin).  Captain, an old guy with hearing aids in both ears (those engines!), seemed unconcerned, remarking this was nothing, but that if the glass up front broke under the weight of the waves, he would have to turn back.  I remember looking back at the shoreline and thinking, we’re really going to die out here within sight of land?  What a filthy trick!

But nobody else — we were about a dozen tourists — said a word, til we hit smooth water again.  Nobody threw up, which was amazing, although there were outbursts of suppressed panic when we got close to the Glacier up there, surrounded by icebergs, and the captain kept stepping away from the wheel to take photos with a massive and very expensive looking camera.  We all knew that he was taking us *way* too close in — one sizable calving off the face of that glacier and we’d have been flipped like pancake — but hey, he was the captain.  And it was a great trip.

 

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@thane16  Moffat was holding these characters: the new Doctor, the present Doctor, the first Doctor and the soldier, very gently in his hands, shaping and highlighting, forming and processing. It was a sight to see.

It was; and you’ve put it very well.  A labor of love if ever I saw one, on everyone’s part.

@missy  Yes, I read that Murray Gold is leaving too.  I hope we get more of his music collected and offered to us — it’s grand stuff, very evocative and strong.  I have to wonder what on earth he’ll do next — after this?  But that goes for all of them, of course.  They’re already launched in new directions of course — Chibnal has already said someplace that he’s got directors of his own he want to use, so there goes Talalay, on to other things (but ye gods, the enduring thrill of having directed so much of DW — “Heaven Sent”, and this last episode among them, IMO).  I’ve read that Moffat and Gatiss have something new they’re working on already — a modern treatment of “Dracula”, maybe?  As for Capaldi, he’s back in Glasgow, according to Moffat, maybe cruising for new work among his old friends and contacts there (though, like the other Doctors, he’ll never forget when the Doctor was him — wonder if he’s cut his hair, a possible gesture of both mourning and liberation?) — or maybe just loafing about (I hope so!).  Mackie would be sorting through job possibilities too . . . Funny to think of everybody’s life just going on, like our own lives, after all the fireworks and deep burning fires, the tumult and the shouting.

Somebody on Fansided wrote an article pointing out that what changes Doctor One’s mind about his regeneration is the evidence of 13’s effectiveness in saving at least one life — the Captain’s.  Somehow I didn’t connect that demonstration of deftness (the timing set for the Truce) by 13 with Doctor One’s “I think I’m ready now.”  Dumbkopf, me.  Must have been thinking of something else at that moment, like “hahaha, I *knew* it the moment they showed those early stills with Gatiss in uniform — it’s an Xmas episode, WWI — GOT to involve the famous Christmas Truce!”

So, “Doctor — I let you go.”  Great image of reincarnation for me: the “I” in that sentence is the current personality and look, the costume and make-up, the particular slant on things — this version, this ego?  And the “Doctor” is 13, the next up,the next life after the bardo, except that of course as a distinctly non-TL human, I wouldn’t expect to reincarnate as a full-grown adult wearing my former self’s clothes.

And something else from “Twice” that I wouldn’t want give up (if they’d done the regen at the end of “The Doctor Falls”, as originally planned) is 12 flapping his arms in surrender and saying to the Glass woman, “So there was no evil plot!  I don’t know what to do, if there is no evil plot.  Tell me what to do.  Bill would tell me what to do.”  Just like a guy just retired from his job and at loose ends, turning to his spouse for help with the nothing that there is to do, for someone who always needs to be doing somehing — preferably saving planets and people.

 

 

 

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@missrori  Weirdest theory I’ve seen about the First Doctor’s sexism as running gag — a commenter at The Mary Sue genre discussion site argued that it’s actually Moffat’s way of clandestinely expressing how much he hates women, couched as a joke.

Gods, they can be idiots over there sometimes!  Moffat doesn’t hate women, just came with the standard attitudes, but I think he’s learned a tremendous amount since he began writing DW, even though he sometimes backslides, or misses a big miss-step.  In fact, if anything, 12’s admonishments to 1 may be Moffat’s plea that his more savage feminist critics notice that he’s grown himself up quite a bit (with the “help” of his feminist critics as well), while growing 12 up, in regard to gender politics.  He’s been learning to see better, and he’s asking to be seen in return, flaws and all, but not a pig.

@jimthefish  (Moffat) deliberately ramped up the sexism as a pointed comment against the old stick-in-the-mud contingent of fans to point out how ridiculous and un-Doctorly a lot of the rather toxicity they’ve been generating since July. It was something of a dig at them but also an appeal for them to cultivate an open mind, to ‘let the Doctor go’ and to welcome the new one.

That too, quite clearly I thought.  “Growing up” means giving up stale and harmful prejudices that came with your childhood, and that goes for all of us, Doctors and fans included.

@cathanabel   . . . re the sexism of the First Doc. . . . It could perhaps also be a bit meta, acknowledging that the Doctor is a creation of the time the series was written, and thus not immune to the prejudices and stereotypical assumptions of the day.

Agreed; and it serves as a reminder, I think, to not over-romanticize D1, since he was (looking back from out perspective now, if we’re still flexible of mind) a product of his time as well as a time traveler; and that he, too, did need to go.  Even as a brief visitor, he no longer fits.  Many modern kids would point out without prompting that a medical woman is not necessarily a nurse, while a man might well be.

we have this sense of MiL as being an echo of herself. There are fragments of memories which randomly or arbitrarily surface, but can’t be retrieved at will, and barely any new memories have been formed for several years now. 

With my husband, it’s been more of a process of retreating deeper and deeper from internal chaos to what I think of as his “real” self — a core of sweet-natured (if sporadic now) engagement with others and quiet persistence of purpose (even if the purpose these days is confused or illusory).  The “outer” mind, what remains of it, is a whirl of those fragments you mention, generating a few words of sentences that die off halfway-uttered.  The self is something I see (or, sometimes, don’t see) in his eyes, rather than in words.  It’s the interface between us, where we both see through his confusion for a short time; that living light in the eyes when they “light on” something real, familiar, and loved.

So I guess that for me, the self is feeling, more than thought.  Feeling + immediacy.  I guess it comes back to Time — the moment.  Pearl Mackie got that, IMO; she projected it (whereas 12 stepped back, wary, even a touch hostile (he doesn’t like being fooled, and yes, as @bluesqueakpip put it so well, he’s in a raw enough state to not believe in the miracle of her survival.  She keeps protesting because he’s denying her this intimacy of the eyes: see me.

 

 

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@lamontcranston  @missy  The show is a “gimmick” show.  The gimmick is its flexibility (starting with the shape-shifting self-renewing hero in the police box), which allows it to respond to changes in our surrounding culture in a conscious way.  How weirdly stuffy and reactionary would DW look now, next to even superhero shows that just fold contemporary hot button issues into their stories to maintain a foothold in relevance?  Even “Stranger Things”, set back in the Cold War era in America, has characters that would never have shown up in such a show back then, and it’s appreciated by audiences for that.  DW doesn’t exist in a vacuum; there’s most of the rest of TV to compete with for young viewers’ attention.  I think the BBC’s doing its job, which is why it’s staying alive.

Thanks, BBC, for so much.

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I hope everyone had a warm and happy Christmas — mine was quiet and relaxing, good company and good food (except for an oddly congealed spinach thing — but the lemon squares made up for that).  It’s weirdly warm here in the US Southwest, for this time of year; dry as a bone.

My sister’s dog has shown a talent for tool-using: the yard is full of goat-heads, horrible little thorny things that inject a bit of venom along with normal pain when you step on them (everything in the high desert grows thorns or poison etc., so hungry critturs won’t graze or eat them). Little four-spined goat heads stick, naturally, in the pads of the dog’s feet, so she’s is forever coming in and biting out the goat heads (which she spits on the floor, naturally)(the dog does, not my sister; she steps on them).  A couple of days ago, hearing an odd noise (we both inherited annoyingly sensitive hearing from our father), my sister looked outside and saw Phoebe, the dog, scraping the goat heads off her pads by dragging her feet across the wire of the half-high chain link fence bordering the yard.

I knew Phoebe was unusually smart, but I’m impressed.

 

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@jimthefish — Aargghh!  Lime green?  I hope someone was put in the stocks for that.

@missy   I never was good at writing down my emotional response to anything. I simply feel.

Well, that’s what us hyper-verbals do in the world: put it out there for people to recognize as their own; or, just as importantly, not, or not quite.

For those who thought it would have ended better if Moffat had let “The Doctor Falls” be the regeneration episode: itimight have, but then we’d have never gotten “Another life won’t kill anyone — except me”: and “So that’s what it means — being the Doctor of War”; “I AM younger!”; an empty battlefield; “Doctor — I let you go” and other delights.  Gatiss was excellent.  Everybody was excellent.  That’s why I feel as if I’ve been run over by a pretty excellent truck.

@hiker  I also hope the reason to regenerate is interesting/compelling.

It struck me as fine — just remembering that he’s not just a child-like adult, and a worn-out elder, but a mature person who knows at least as much as the Captain does — that it’s right and necessary that the children replace the parents (which makes Whittaker into Capaldi’s daughter in a regeneration sort of way — yipes!).

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Some bits and bobs from radiotimes.com:

Episode writer and departing showrunner, Steven Moffat said that getting Capaldi’s send off right “took whatever emotions we were both having about leaving and put them on screen where they belong”. Moffat added: “By the time we got to that part of filming I think Peter and I were probably the least emotional on set because we’d put it all in the show!” “But I’m delighted to report he’s in Glasgow and texting me pictures of Tardises he finds in the street – just as you think he’s left it all behind entirely. He found a red one – he wasn’t please at all…” It just goes to show, you can take the Doctor out of the Tardis but you can’t take the Tardis out of the Doctor… — radiotimes interview, 25 Dec.

Interesting, about using emotions about being in the situation (endings, departures, changing of the guard, etc.) in the story and how useful that was.  Moffat says, in that info piece that began the screening of Twice where they’re all sitting at those long tables having a reading of the script, “If we cry, they won’t.”

Definition of the *opposite* of “method acting” as I’ve always understood it (although these categories can’t be hard and fast).  I think the “Dear boy, I pretend” style works best for me — all that concentration on acting emotions effectively instead of indulging in them up on screen creates a particularly laser-like intensity that I can appreciate more.

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@missrori  I did appreciate that Twelve wasn’t quite so alone in the end, choosing to be alone when he regenerated notwithstanding.

Well, he’d just had a big, all-together-now group hug (“I don’t think I’m a hugging person now . . “) with people he loved but couldn’t “lose” any more because they were already dead, except as memories — they were, in fact, safe at last, as part of the Testimony: job done.  So he went off to be alone — *with himself*, the emerging successor to whom he addressed his final comments.  Not really alone; into the gestalt and so into the future, as a bunch of memories himself.

I’ve watched it twice; found it satisfying and nourishing, and largely sufficient to its purposes.  Hell.  I think I loved it.

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@bluesqueakpip  The ring was the only part of the Capaldi Doctor’s costume that stayed throughout. It’s a symbol that this Doctor’s time had finished – the one thing he has constantly worn – no longer fits.

Ah!  Perfectly put.  Thank you.

@jimthefish  I agree that they pushed D1’s out-of-date attitudes a bit too hard, and it grated to have 12 tell him “You can’t say that!”  It’s playing into the grubby paws of the anti-social justice brigade who insist that “political correctness” is really just censorship.  They could have done that bit just with “almost everyone you meet from now on.”  That was great: not “shut up” but “you’re making yourself look bad, and me with you”.

And the grins, and the jokes — great.  Fun’s necessary to put some sparkle on the coal face . . . and

. . . It’s interesting for a Doctor who was initially quite forbidding how 12 became (I think) the most genuinely open-hearted, empathic and compassionate of the modern Doctors.

Yes.  I think this ties up with comments that 12 has had a rough time of it in his stories, so coming up warm and kind toward the end means more: if life treats you badly, you still have the choice of learning to be more compassionate toward others having tough times, instead of letting the badness turn you cynical and selfish; which is kind of how you find out whether you’re a “good man” or not (though you’ll still backslide sometimes, if you’re merely human — or a TL).

Yes on that muddle around just how much of 12’s memory was blocked by the neural blocker: damn near all, and it wasn’t a ruse or a kindly-meant manipulation of Clara, and no, he didn’t know who the woman painted on his Tardis was at the end of S9.

The whole memory-is-identity thing, though; I’ve got more thinking to do about that, outside of the framework and needs of this story.  It does seem that way — but there’s more to it than that.  There’s that documentary about the Englishman, a musician, who came out of some form of meningitis unable to form new memories or remember old ones (but he did always recognize his wife).  You can see something of his character — the same glimpse, each time — when he tells the interviewer that he’s never in his life (that he remembers) talked with anyone or met another human being (even the wife he knows when he sees her, always with the same burst of joyful recognition): a sharp mind, impatient, baffled and hating being baffled, eager for a way out — he’s still there, even without his memories.  Like the people I see at the dementia facility when I visit my husband.

I’ll never forget, though, a woman I saw there early this year, walking restlessly about the place and saying aloud to herself, over and over, “I’m still me.  I’m still me.  I’m still me.”  Is she?  What was she holding onto as “me”?  Something that memories had been stripped from, layer by layer, but that persisted.

Maybe that’s why I choked up a bit when 12 was telling the glass avatars about being alone on the battlefield because everyone else (including them) had “fallen”, and that all the memories he carries from a 2000 year life-span would be too much even for the Testimony; “they would shatter you.”  And they’ve shattered him, more than once, and he’s tired to death of it.

So Whittaker’s bright face felt so fresh and eager by contrast — a good start, and maybe just what’s needed to make all those accumulated losses easier to carry while she travels on, making new ones.  That takes balls, whatever your gender.

 

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@miapatrick  Regeneration feels like death to the Doctor sometimes, the end of that personality.

So here’s Moffat insisting all over the place (as he’s been wont to do) that of course the Doctor doesn’t actually DIE, he just steps onto a different moving sidewalk, after a dramatic light-show.  And yet — the Capaldi seasons have been all about death, and this finale was repeatedly reminding us that we were watching two versions of the same man acquiescing to their own deaths *as themselves*.  So what’s so special about 12’s personality, that he doesn’t want to shut it down (not obliterate, but shut down any further progress of that personality with a full stop)?

Seems to me, it’s that the personality that that particular life has developed is what 12 is trying to defend and preserve, as both a place to rest from ceaseless change, and a way of honoring the life that’s brought him to this point.  Absurd on the face of it — can the Doctor settle for becoming a sort of stone monument to his current self?  For that matter, we *know* it drives him almost literally crazy to actually stop and just live quietly with himself.  I don’t think it’s even in him.  He wants to be what his travels have made of him, not some old guy in a rocking chair on the porch thinking about his memories of having been that man.  He wants peace?  He wants rest?  In a pig’s eye, he does, or rather, only until he *gets* some of that.  Shane in a frock coat, but with less self-knowledge?  [Not you, Shane!  Shane from the Western movie!]

I think there’s a tension there, though, that keeps a character piece like this going.  It isn’t what we all know beforehand he will decide to do; more like how does the Doctor argue it out with himself (literally, in this story); what pushes the buttons that lead him to accept the rightness of calling a halt for just the latest version of himself and letting the rest go on and be — some other bloke, walking away (in this case, whatever the female version of “bloke” is).

But Bill says, her glass-self is still her real self because she has her memories (only, apparently, not of what the heck happened to Heather or how she got to the Chamber of the Dead), and they are what makes her herself, whatever vessel they’re poured into.  And Clara shows up to cause the filling in of the blanks in 12’s memory of his time with her, completing his identity, his this-self, right before he gives being that self?  Well, they’ve got that covered; if Bill’s memories are Bill and Clara’s memories of Clara are Clara, and 13 carries in her *all* of the memories of her previous self, then all of those previous selves are still alive.  So it’s not death; it’s growth and preservation at the same time, and Moffat is off the hook on the subject.

That “letting go” theme — and how hard that is to do often when it’s not even your own life you’re clinging to — resonated like hell for me.  I’ve started trying to clear out some of the stuff that we accumulated over the past 5 decades (because it’s true, our kids and grandkids really don’t want our junk — they’re collecting their own), and I can barely let *that* go.  But the urge is getting stronger, lately.

 

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Just saw the film tonight in a freezing cold cinema, came home, and watched it again on Amazon Prime.  God damn it, those people — the actors I mean — were excellent!  And Capaldi was superb.  Now 12 is over, and I’m feeling both sated and bereft.  He projected such a pervasive sense of steadfastness in the midst of doubt, vulnerability, and a never-absent awareness, re the universe, of how “The more I save it, the more it needs saving” — the ultimate tragedy of losing to Entropy no matter what you do.

But then there’s that other thing, that wild card, which I understand as the uneven-ness of Entropy — that even while everything inevitably winds and breaks down, there are “islands” of positive re-organization popping up (like the Christmas Armistice of 1914), and although they’re irreparably impermanent, we do get chances to recognize them, shore them up, and keep them going as long as possible, by positive actions.  Which is what the Doctor tries to do despite everything, because he can.  Maybe I’m reading things into what I’ve been seeing, but I think not — that damn bell is always ringing somewhere in the back of this Doctor’s mind.

And that’s what I think goes on in the minds of all of us in middle-age and beyond, regardless of moments of joy and giggles and insight and connection.  It’s just so — familiar, and so hard to read that awareness beating like a third heart, a shadow heart, even with the comedy of “they took out all the jokes”.  Hard to miss it, in that long Scots-Italian face.

Great face for this particular Doctor; I’m going to miss it like blazes.

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@missy  I’m just — sad, I guess.  The show is resilient; whatever happens in S11, I trust it will endure, bounce back if needs be, and go on to thrive, with Whittaker/Chibnal or others.

The question for me is whether *I* will bounce back from losing the writers and actors who have made me an enthusiastic DW fan again: will it remain “appointment” television, or will I descend to “casual” viewing.  These last three series spoke to me and friends around my age with particular power.  To be fair, though, as an older viewer I’m hardly part of the show’s “target demographic”.  When my cohort dies off, DW will need lots of youngsters and their parents already well hooked, in order to keep the show afloat.

Whittaker looks good for that; Chibnal and a couple of writers he’s comfortable working with — not so much.  But I’m not the one who needs to be pleased.  And I suppose it’s unbecoming to be greedy for more when you’ve already been served such fine fare.

 

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@craig  OOOoooohhh, wow!  We’re on the map of international Trollery, are we?  What an honor!  Prepare to repel boarders . . .

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@gamergirlavatar  @missy  @janetteb   Yes; Moffat and Capaldi used S9 and S10 in particular to push the Doctor as far into the dark as they could — without turning the show into something that younger viewers would no longer be comfortable with or understand.  Not that kids don’t experience loss, pain, heroism, and despair, on the scale of their own comprehension; but this went to extremes that I think really pushed the boundaries of the show’s remit, and for that matter the expectations of its audiences.

A re-set does seem to be in order, and I do wonder how that will be handled — how *complete* that re-set will be.

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Loved The Big Sick — very strong sense of people maturing right before our eyes.

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@missy  Why does it have to be a female? No one has come up with an adequate answer

I think it’s the wrong question; that’s why.  “It” doesn’t *have* to be “a female”.  But IMO it *is* a good idea to find new ways to vary the recipe (ways that speak to the culture that’s happening at the time) in order for the cake not to become flat, stale, and dismissable for everyone concerned.  Whether it turns out to be a good and tasty cake or not remains to be seen.  Personally, I’d be a lot more upset if we were offered another floppy-haired, appealing young guy or a muscled superhero or Steven Fry or Idris Elba, after the run of guys we’ve had with New Who.  Sometimes it really is Time for a Change.

Whether or not this is one of those times we can’t yet know, although some fans are sure they have the answer already — speaking of answers.  I’m sure I don’t have that answer, yet; but meantime I do applaud the courage shown by Chibnall and others in making such a leap in no firm assurance that it will be successful enough to been seen as successful by enough DW followers.

I love artistic courage, and I’m easily bored — to my cost, sometimes.  I hope for good things to come.

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@gamergirlavatar  I’m a lot more nervous about Chibnall than I am about Whittaker, myself, but that’s because Moffat is the kind of writer whose work I enjoy — for its energy, its daring, and its intelligence — and I’ve found what I’ve seen of Chibnall’s work flatfooted and draggy.  But maybe the DW challenge will bring out some spark in him that will make me appreciate him more.

@missy  True, not everyone wanted a female Doctor — but I think the show *did* need a solid blast-off in some new directions after so much of Moffat (who said in an interview about leaving the show, “I’ve written a ridiculous amount of Doctor Who”, and apparently really meant it).  What better way than to go for a *different* kind of audacity from his successor, which is what I think Whittaker represents.  I’m very curious to see how it goes.  In a way, I think it’s a good and healthy sign that in times as edgy and tumultuous as these, DW is going through its own ructions and must tackle the challenges of new conditions and territory to engage with.

Personally, I think we’re way beyond considerations of the negative interpretation of “political correctness” here (and the positive ones — like, arrest the Johns along with or instead of the prostitutes — as well).  We as a species face existential threats not seen before, in the unintended and dangerous consequences of Globalization of the economy + massive climate shifting which will require enormous, damned uncomfortable, and costly shifts in how we cope.  New and risky ideas are going to be tried (and some dangerous Reactionary ones, like the revival of Robber Barons and Nazism), and we’ll be making our way among them for a while.  The new-minted 13th Doctor fits the revolutionary times we live in now, like ’em or not, IMO.

 

 

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@bluesqueakpip  Hurray for the bones of novel!  Congratulations!

@thane16  my hair is turning curly and I’m taller.

Thank goodness!  It would be a problem if your hair were taller and you were turning curly.

I am feeling frisky today because a) my asthma is letting up, and turns out to be the cause of all this g.d. sleeping I’ve been doing for this past year (at all hours, and resistance is futile).  And last night I was invited to do a lecture in an English lit class as a visiting local writer (they’d been reading vampire stories, my own among them), and had a great time provocateur-ing and showing off (well, a bit), gave (and got) some good advice, and went back this a.m. for the jacket I’d left behind and it was still there!  Phew.  Lucky.

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@missy   Thanks for the reminder — Happy birthday, Thane!

And thanks for the 5 Meet as well — I can get BBC Radio four on my computer!  I think I did once, anyway.

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@bluesqueakpip  David Tennant was born in Bathgate, but brought up in Paisley.

Thanks!

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@janetteb  I found Tennant’s accent in Broadchurch nearly impenetrable (never had a problem with Capaldi’s).  Tannant’s isn’t Glasgow, is it?

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@mudlark   . . . the realisation of how much individual insight and historical knowledge is lost when any individual dies, but a Time Lord has the advantage of at least being able to carry that forward through successive regenerations

I know that feeling (we do seem to be on a wavelength here, and happy birthday to you too!).  It’s so frustrating — every time I asked my maternal grandmother about her early life in Vienna, she’d say, “That doesn’t matter, I’m just so happy to be here in America and watching Milton Berle!”  My Dad would say, “That was a long time ago; I don’t remember.”  But then you see older people sometimes on TV talking about memories from their lives, and it’s absolutely mesmerizing, and you’re thinking, “Thank gods somebody got this down on film!”  Because for is, it’s all gone.

Maybe not, though, any more?  For those of us with computer access, a lot more about us may linger to be “excavated” electronically than most people ever left behind in letters and diaries . . . in such profusion, in fact, that most such “voices” will probably be lost forever in the Niagara of data (not just the real stuff but all the damned advertising and propaganda etc) that will face future students of — well, us.  If there are some; and if the whole thing doesn’t crash, taking all that information with it . . . If we’re lucky (?), the internet will serve as the repository of our life experiences, the way the TLs do when they die and get popped into the Matrix (or is it something else?), only in complete chaos, in our case.  Wow.

Actually, though, if automation continues to wipe out jobs, indeed entire professions while medicine makes greater gains in life extension, there will be a lot of people standing around with endless amounts of time on their hands and nothing to do, so . . . maybe they can be historians?  Huh.  There’s a story in there.  Maybe I’ll start it tomorrow, if I’m not sleeping all over the place.

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@pertweetroughton  So really, if you average it out, the era is mediocre, but for some reason, it doesn’t feel like that.

IMO, the reason is that it isn’t mediocre but so much better than that, that the “lows” can’t hold the rest down.  And I think that Moffat-Capaldi-and-all achieved so much *despite* the lapses and flat bits etc. that it’s the intimations of depth that grab you even in stories that are spinning out of control.

I’m very curious to see how people look back on this particular DW period from a few years down the line.  I think it’s going to be interesting — but maybe that’s because I can’t help anticipating much more conventional, if more even, work with Chibnall at the helm (judging by my own reactions to other Chibnall work).

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Had a birthday Sunday (I slept through it, actually, an aftereffect of a bout of food-poisoning), woke up today thinking about CapDoc and “I don’t want to go!”  And the rest of it — I can’t keep on becoming someone else, someone else walks away as me, etc.  I thought I’d like to hear him say — this Doctor more than any of the others, because of the struggle over his own identity early on, and what happened in the Confession Dial — I want to hear him say something like this: “This is me, this is my self.  I’ve fought and I’ve died to achieve this self, warts and self-knowledge and all, and that’s what I won’t give up!”

Well, that’s about me too, or me *really*, of course.  I’m 78, with a patchy memory, this and that physical ding getting more troublesome, a future more uncertain than it’s ever been in nearly every way possible, and my damned impatience and judgmental tendencies still erupting into my saner moments — but that’s all me, the good along with the bad and the absurd.  This is what I’ve made of myself; and at this age, I suddenly feel that I am, in fact, crossing a threshold that divides me, now, from me, tomorrow — the me-to-come, that forgets some crucial act, the me that just doesn’t ever fully recover from some minor illness, the me that weirdly (joyfully/guiltily/ridiculously) blossoms into a Merry Widow when that time comes, the me that manages to write a last masterpiece/decent/bad book or story, the me that outlives her younger sister, the me that  —

It’s all waiting up there, possibilities and probabilities and of course the final certainty.

And I don’t want to go.

Not that I’ve stopped thinking in terms of reincarnation — but I see it as a bit like the Doctor’s regenerations, only on a (so far) much wide spectrum of future possibilities.  And those successors of me-just-now will still be me — but not me, regardless of what they remember or don’t remember.  They’ll each be “some other bloke” . . . walking away.

Well, change is the rule, and stopping time, even just personal time, looks like a crappy idea.  I know all that.  It’s not that I’m terrified of change — we all do it, all our lives, so many times.  It’s that I don’t want to give me, my self, up.  It’s a decent self; it’s taken a lot of work, and growth, and failures that endure and even repeat themselves in new forms.  I like this self.  And it’s leaving even as I type these words, increment by increment, so all right, accept.

And yet, it’s got to be right to recognize fully the previous, receding self; to thank it for having existed; and to resist letting it go.  I want to see 13 refuse to go, to fight his regeneration hard, to reject what he knows is both inevitable and necessary — before coming around, just as inevitably, to accepting it.  I feel that that fight, that resistance, is honorable and true.  And Capaldi’s Doc would be the guy to make that case with the power it deserves, before going gentle into that good night (with the power that deserves).

I’ve always disliked that poem; it seemed so — melodramatic!!  Still does.  *sigh*  It’s just like how the stuff my parents told me keeps turning out to be right . . . embarrassing, that.  And funny.  Apologies, by the way, if my post  comes across as this somewhat blurry me being self, as it were, indulgent.

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@bluesqueakpip  Wow — That sure makes sense, once it’s pointed out.  Soaps ain’t Shakespeare, but they ain’t chopped liver, either.  Skills and talent (and a little luck, as always) can shine out, given half a chance.  But gawd, the Hate PC crowd will plotz over this.  Or maybe their tired out, at long last, having spent their bile and resentment on the choice of Whittaker?  Please, Lordy . . . !

 

 

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@mjr1107  Me too; I liked her very much, and I’ll miss her — pretty good, considering she was only on board for one series.

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@wolfweed  The pic of Dr. 13 and her companions — oh, holy moly, the people who gnash their teeth about “PC ruining” their show will go absolutely apeshit-mad over this!

Good.  (No more Mr. Nice-Me, I guess).

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Damn it.  I think I need a new mouse.  That last sentence was supposed to end with “with”.

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@bluesqueakpip   I wonder whether, given Chibnall’s interest in female characters, whether a female Doctor will be seen encountering more adventures involving women in major roles — which would likely lead to at least a more in-depth look at factors like the Sisterhood of Karn, maybe the lives of women masquerading as men to be able to go to war, female pirates — women, that is, instigating or caught up in action.  Where there’s large scale violence, women are always affected in ways that definitely involve the possibility of rape; wouldn’t a female Doctor be, or perhaps become in time, more sensitive to this, and to preventing it where possible?  So it needn’t be the Doctor herself who is at such high risk, but a heightened awareness of the vulnerability of female people (aliens too, sometimes) in this regard.  I’m thinking back to the days of “Xena, Warrior Princess”, and how Xena herself was never (that I recall) in believable danger of rape — she was far too formidable.

But she was a warrior by definition; the Doctor we know struggles to “be a Doctor” first . . . and being a warrior instead often brings a grievous aftertaste for him.

It’s going to be fascinating to see how the new crew handles the ins and outs of this change, with a possible re-setting of all kinds of balances around what’s okay to deal with that just wasn’t very visible .

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@wolfweed  Ha ha ha!  Mel Ferrer!  Sza Sza Gabor!  All those super-saturated color film bios of famous artists — now *I* feel 600 yrs old (or — maybe 2,000?).

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Yeh.  That great big hole burnt right through poor Bill — feels kinda like that, but first, the last Hurrah!  Damn.

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@missy  Oh, I’d go for it!  New universes to be conquered by . . .

 

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@missrori   I think “The Lie of the Land” comes off as a bit rough, even half-baked, which in fact the script was — that’s the one Moffat apologized for in an interview because he was still working on it when his mother got sick and died.  He lamented the fact that he never got to do a final revision or go over the draft that he turned in with Capald before shooting.  Moffat apologized for that, too (saying he’d felt bad about leaving the cast in the lurch, a bit, on that one).

I think viewers picked up on that lack of polished resolution, which is why the episode ranks so low.  Expectations had been raised by “Extremis”, and they weren’t met, for good reasons — which get forgotten anyway, and how much do the reasons for the shortfall matter, after all?  Not much, when you’ve ranking the observable result, not the process that produced it.

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