[schultze101 @replies]

Hello all, again,

This isn’t technically my first post to “On the Sofa” but I’m not sure where to put this post.

Like I said before, and as stated in my tag, I’m here as a fan of the show and for a class focused on research of online communities. As part of the final project, I need to have interviewed three users from this site, and transcribe what I learn from them into a paper and presentation.

I’m making a double-post here entirely out of desperation. There’s barely a week left before both the paper and presentation are due and I haven’t interviewed a single person here. Though I certainly haven’t not tried to get myself out there (here, whatever).

My point is, if any of you would be willing to take some time and (thoughtfully) answer some questions I’d send over a PM, it would really, really help me out.

My apologies if double-posting here is a site faux pas, but I’m running out of time, and drastic measures are required.

 

On a related note, if you sent me an email regarding this whole interview thing, my email provider apparently considers every email connected to this site spam. So if any of you have emailed me about this and I never got back, it’s probably because my spam filter kept me from ever knowing.

[schultze101 @replies]

I realize I’m a litte late to the party here, but I watched this for the first time a few days ago and man…

Just… Man.

This was probably the most overtly humorous series finale I’ve watched yet. Doriam in particular just stole every scene his disembodied (somebody slap me for that) head was in and I do have to say that The Doctor’s solution for cheating his own death was squeal-inducingly genius. I also really loved the way everything in time was happening at once (and that little nod back to Dickens in Series 2 was very much appreciated).

I do have to say, though, I feel like The Big Bang just managed to edge this out in terms of being the best finale of Moffat’s that I’ve seen. Sure, there were a ton of awesome and satisfying moments in this (Area 52 inside the pyramids, and Madame Kovarian finally getting hers sorta-kinda) but I feel like there was less emotional impact this time around. We’d known since the start of Series 6 that The Doctor gets killed, and while Series 6 was a little less in-your-face with the big overarching plot than Series 5 was, I feel like Series 6 was somehow playing for much lesser stakes, and hit ever so slightly less harder emotionally. in Series 5, the entirety of reality was at risk, and it really felt like Earth was the only thing tenuously left in all existence. By contrast, Series 6’s play that time is unravelling was a little tougher to swallow (nothing seems to be terribly wrong with the world, besides the fact that cars are attached to dirigibles and Winston Churchill ruling the Roman Empire from Britain) and nothing ever really felt wrong where this finale was concerned. It felt a little less like the event the Series had been building up to and more like an ordinary day for The Doctor.

When Eleven strapped himself into the Pandorica to fly into his exploding TARDIS and sacrifice his existence to restart the universe, and everything that subsequently happened, I was on the utter edge of my seat and my heart was getting ripped to pieces as Eleven rewound his existence away. While something felt rather final after Eleven got shot on the beach again, the giddy hug and return of Doriam’s boxed head barely minutes later robbed it almost totally of any impact it had.

I also have to say, I’m not sure if the First Question is genius or just… incredibly stupid. I mean, it’s a clever little play on something the show has always done, but… I don’t know.

 

On a slightly related note, I watched River’s death scene in Silence of the Library a few days after, and was struck by the repetition of terms between that and River and Eleven’s conversation on the beach. When Ten and SpaceSuitRiver offer the possibility that time can be changed, Eleven and LibraryRiver shut them down with the same sentence, and in this light, maybe almost the same intent. They both know the past version of the person before them has a lot yet to experience, and won’t dare deny them what’s to come.

That may not have been intentional, or even meant to be interpreted as such, but it was something I saw that I thought was awesome.

Oh, and I absolutely LOVED the way Matt Smith looked with the Soothsayer scrubble. I kinda wish he’d kept it.

[schultze101 @replies]

Word of warning, this is a rather long post, intended to spark discussion. This is not a passing thought.

This is on a somewhat old topic (I fell of the wagon last year when I watched Ten regenerate through the magic of Netflix, and haven’t kept up with more recent events) but I have started watching again from Series 5 onwards in stops and starts (thanks, college).

I burned through Series 5 quickly (there’s really not many shows like Who that leave you constantly capable of watching more) and am two episodes into Series 6.

Something struck me after I re-watched the last fifteen or so minutes of Day of the Moon, when Eleven drops the metaphorical boot on the Silence’s collective face. Something that shocked me when I realized exactly what he’d just done.

Eleven basically facilitates genocide towards an entire species, and doesn’t bat an eyelash. He makes the Silence command humanity for the rest of time to try and kill the Silence on sight. In fact, seconds after this happens, we see two instances of it about to happen. Admittedly, the Silence did kind of set themselves up for it (y’know, by secretly ruling/manipulating humanity and killing people) but we also have to remember, this was Eleven’s entire plan. The Silence they record for this purpose goes far beyond simply saying that humanity ought to kill them all on sight, but that’s the only part of that message Eleven cares to broadcast.

He goes straight to mass murder. That’s what it is. There’s really no other word for it. The human race has been subliminally programmed by Eleven by way of the Silence to kill any member of the Silence they see, as soon as they see them. Eleven facilitates and condones what is basically genocide.

When I realized that, I was more than a little off-put, and couldn’t help but wonder why. It’s not like The Doctor hasn’t killed creatures before, or just let them die. Nine unabashedly let Lady Cassandra split apart, and even though she managed to survive, no one knew she had or could. Ten drowned a nesting ship full of Racnoss babies. Now, admittedly, in Ten’s defense, his own personal emotional state was kind of not at its best (Rose had just been sucked through a portal and trapped in a parallel world that Ten could never reach, and the Racnoss Queen tried to have her kids eat humanity maybe two hours afterwards) and he had offered the Queen an alternative option. It’s also worth noting that he would have clearly let the Queen go, and she could still continue (I assume) to have future batches of eggs if she just left. While Ten did murder a bunch of alien infants, he offered a peaceful solution that was rejected and knew that killing the kids would not render the entire species extinct.
Eleven, by contrast, defaults to murder and probably extinction. Even if the Silence are on worlds other than Earth, we’ve seen time and again that the human race is not going to just sit inside the solar system. They have at least three galaxy-wide empires over the course of the future, and have spread out so far and often that by the time the Earth is consumed by the sun, the new New York made afterwards is technically the fifteenth new New York. Humanity isn’t going to stop encountering the Silence once they’ve killed every Silence they find on Earth (which will probably be just about all of them, if not all). Any Silence they see, for the rest of their existence as a species, they will kill. There’s no logical way the Silence will survive as a species, because humanity will likely find them on planets beyond Earth and was programmed to murder them. By Eleven. Eleven defaulted to facilitating genocide. He didn’t come up with some solution that keeps an image of the Silence within the public eye, so the fact that the Silence exist is always at least partially remembered by humanity and humanity can solve the problem the Silence present in whatever manner they decide.
Now, admittedly, we’d probably just decide to kill them anyway, but that’s not the point. Even if that was the conclusion we’d probably reach, the Doctor’s intent in that hypothetical case would be to simply inform the victims. And while he may still be somewhat culpable for our actions after he informs us, he’s still far less culpable with that solution than the solution he actually uses. Because his actual solution is to make humanity murder every Silence they see. He’s actively setting up and endorsing mass murder, rather than creating a scenario where mass murder might be a potential result of his actions. I didn’t realize it that way the first time I watched the episode because I was so into the episode, so happy that the Doctor had managed to find a way to get the Silence of humanity’s back. But when I actually thought about it, and realized just what Eleven had done, I was rather appalled. The Doctor defaulting to facilitating mass murder and being completely okay with it. Eleven even jokes about coming up with a more peaceful solution to the problem the Silence represent, then happily proceeds to turn the human race into a species of overly enthusiastic attack dogs pointed squarely at the Silence.
I know a previous Doctor refused, on moral grounds, to destroy the Dahleks at the moment of their incubation. The most vile, evil race that would ever exist, and he refused the opportunity to ensure they never would. Then, on multiple occasions in various regenerations since, he had a chance to exterminate (that’s not a pun, I swear) the Dahleks for good. Yet time and time again, he never took it. He always let them go. Meta-Crisis Ten destroyed the entire rebuilt Dahlek Empire, and Proper Ten made sure he would be left in Rose’s care to set him straight. He dumped a clone of himself in a parallel universe with a good influence because he recognized that said clone was a violent being capable of/willing to commit genocide and couldn’t be left to his own devices. The Doctor, historically, does not default to mass murder. For nearly every Doctor besides Eleven (some research reveals that Four was rather fond of it as a solution), mass murder/casual extinction is the absolute, don’t-really-even-consider-it last resort. Heck, remember Ten’s definition of genocide? His picture and the words “Over my dead body.”
Actually, I think Eleven also was completely willing to destroy the last six or seven Dahleks in existence in Series 5.
Eleven is a rather violent Doctor.

Make of this what you will.

[schultze101 @replies]

Hello all,

I haven’t quite just joined (I made my introductory post in another topic thread last week) but I do have some things I feel I ought to let everyone know.

I’m a fan of Doctor Who. A major fan. I stopped just short several times last year of a buying a sonic screwdriver (and I probably won’t get any further on that front because now that I’ve started watching again, I can’t decide between Ten’s and Eleven’s sonics). Partly, I’m here as a fan who’s a bit behind on the times (I’m stalling on my first watching of Season 6 because college is taking up a lot of my free time).

But I’m also here for another reason.

I’m currently in my sophmore year at college (I’m attending DePaul University), and am taking a course focused on online/virtual communities. The overarching project of the course is a research project. Said project requires I interview three separate people about themselves and their place in the overall community/feelings on the property. My group decided on Doctor Who, since we all have watched and enjoy the show.

Now, let me be up front about some things. If any of you would be open to this, there are things I’m obligated to tell you: for one, everything I record will be used only for the course work. Any information I might get from any of you won’t go beyond a single paper and a group presentation, at which point it will either by deleted or simply sit unused forever (the ultimate fate of the information you disclose to me is yours to decide). Another thing: if you tell me anything that might be in any way personally compromising to you, I will happily change whatever details I have to so you could not be recognized if that information somehow ever got out to a less controlled environment than a college classroom, or simply omit that information at your request. You should also know that you should feel no obligation to participate in this, and if you do choose to participate, you can stop the  interview at any time and for any reason. I will do everything I can during the interview itself to ensure that I am the only one who hears what you tell me. If you would prefer me to not electronically record the interview in its entirety (by way of recording software or other such methods), I will just take notes.  The interview itself should take around 45 minutes to complete, and will likely happen over a form of long-distance communication (telephone, email, skype to name a few possibilities). I will do my best to make my method easy on you.

If you would like to know more and/or are interested in participating, send me an email or personal message through the forums. Those who aren’t 18 or older should not respond.

My email is isaacschulz@yahoo.com.

 

On a somewhat less professional note, the first set of field notes is due February 10th, so if any of you would be able to participate in a interview at any time over the weekend, that would be fantastic.

[schultze101 @replies]

I’m a fairly recent fan of Doctor Who. It was about a year ago, when I was starting my freshman year in college. I watched the first episode of the 2005 reboot season on Netflix Instantview on a whim. I watched a man in leather jacket with a time-traveling police box fight and parlay with living plastic manequins with guns in their hands.

I got sucked in so hard the series might as well have been a black hole put directly in front of my face. Or maybe a TARDIS leash, considering the thing can tug planets out of alignment.

Crazy story about me and Who: I’d been watching it for a few months (I forget exactly where I was in terms of seasons around this time (I know I’d reached the Tenth Doctor, but that’s all I remember for certain)) when I went to a small family get-together on my dad’s side. We all met up at a restaurant and just hung, ordered, and talked. My cousin, who I’ve always been very good friends with, brought his girlfriend along who most of us hadn’t met at that point. Eventually, I found myself sitting with them, and in the process of giving them minor college advice (they were still finishing up their senior year of high school at the time) I asked if either of them watched Doctor Who.

My cousin’s girlfriend turned out to be an incredibly avid fan, and the conversation quickly turned to our love and my cousin’s slight derision of the series. It was a weird, random, awesome moment. That something I had so recently discovered and so enjoyed was shared by someone who I had just met through a family member. My cousin recently remarked that she appropriated his apartment’s TV for The Day of the Doctor special.

 

Another crazy moment that featured well into my love of the show was a course I took at the end of freshman year. It was a course focused on the study of fantasy and how people define and experience and use fantasy. The professor made a rather impassioned argument that Doctor Who counted as a work of fantasy, rather than strictly science fiction. As such, a lot of references were made to Doctor Who over the course of the class. One of the required books for the class was focused on the show itself (Doctor Who and Philosophy Bigger on the Inside, a book very much worth the time of any fan).

At one point, we watched one of the between-seasons christmas charity specials in class. It was the one where Ten crosses time streams with Five. ‘Time Crash.’ It was also the episode that made me consider my personal relationship with the series. That special talks about “My Doctor.” Ten describes Four as “My Doctor.” The version of himself that has the most meaning for him. I wondered who my “My Doctor” was.

Chrsitopher Eccleston’s Nine was the first Doctor I ever saw. His big ears, his leather jacket, the way he could go from being silly to near-murder-serious. I always felt Nine got shortchanged; he got one season to himself, and one alone. I always kind of wished we all could have more than one season of time with Nine. But Nine isn’t My Doctor.

My Doctor is Ten. I hated him when he first showed up, ironically. I’d gotten used to Nine’s North accent, to Nine’s… everything. I wasn’t used to having to accept that a character I’d grown to love could completely change almost everything about himself and expect me to just be okay with it. Now that I think about it, I still haven’t. But Ten grew on me so very quickly. I loved the guy by the end of his introductory episode.  He was exuberant on a whole new level, he was inquisitive, he was silly, and when he got serious, he got serious. I was torn to pieces when Ten and Rose were pressed against the same side of a wall on parallel worlds. I wondered how he was ever going to stop the Master. I had to marvel at him when he got angry (the racnoss nursery ship at the center of the earth, the family of blood) and marvel even more at his capacity for self-restraint (the Doctor’s Daughter (I still think we all deserve a mini-series about the shenanigans Jenny is undoubtedly getting up to, by the way)). As happy as I was when the Metacrisis Ten could stay with Rose, I was bitter that Proper Ten had to keep moving on alone. Ten’s procession through time to see everyone he’d run into as he held his regeneration back broke me. I watched Nine. I lived with Ten.

When Ten regenerated into Eleven, I couldn’t keep watching. I fell off the wagon, and I still haven’t gotten back on, though I do intend to try. I feel like that was the final sign that Ten is My Doctor. I loved the guy so much, I couldn’t keep watching after he was gone.

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