beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

The thing about fancying the Doctor is
there is a lot of the Doctor
and if you're into the person, rather than the outsides, there is some variation that might lose your interest, but mostly the Doctor is the Doctor, right?
like falling for book characters and then knowing you're almost certainly going to fancy *whoever* they cast, because you've got a run up.
And weird as it is to get one's fantasy love life recast every few years
it must be a bit weirder right now for straight women
or gay men.

To whoever rang the door and woke me up: when you say you want to be let and I say Why? It is not a convincing answer to hang up and dial someone else. That didn't seem like a complicated question. And the subtext was why did you wake me up, so you fail at that too.

I was dreaming about Simm!Master and Ten. The Master wasn't fobwatched, he was more like Eight that time he'd been away from the TARDIS far too long, not enough brain memory so he'd forgotten himself and defaulted to a different personality. But he was such a nice man like that. He was interested, and helpful, and he had a workshop full of stuff and things and he was making all sorts. It wasn't a lab coat workshop, more a blue overalls and split leather fireproof coats sort of thing. Ten was ever so fascinated. But this Master wouldn't have liked his usual self at all, or vice versa, making him a one man trolley problem.

To get his memories back he needed artron energy. So I, as a time traveller, was strangely attractive, time lord catnip, but didn't have enough (plus the Doctor was unimpressed with the ethics of letting amnesiacs kiss us). One kiss from the Doctor, though...

So that's a setup and a half for angst. Reasons to avoid first kiss: will from certain angles kill him, and likely all the rest of us when he realises.

But he was so cute and enthusiastic.

And the Doctor rather likes the full of memory sort anyway.

Which of course is why he didn't want to let himself.



... I'm fairly sure I've read the very thing, with fob watches involved, but making it artron deficiency means they can't even touch, so...

Well that ended exactly the way I thought it would
their get out of jail card was exactly what I thought it was
and somehow I'm still angry.

This is the problem with them yanking us around by the feels, feels inertia skids on the turns and the feels don't keep up.

The problem is exactly what spectacle they thought we'd want to see. ( Read more... )

It's the difference between story on its own and story treading on your bruised feels, you know?

Like, they fixed it, but I'm not feeling it, just at the minute.


( Read more... )

So, typing about it for like the length of the episode, I can see this episode had many good elements, and an ending that was quite shiny, and I shall probably like it later. Bits of it even a lot.

Other bits only in that 'well I'm sure we'll fix it pretty good, and canon even might later' way, but so it goes.



That episode didn't suck, last week didn't suck because they ended it this way, and I'm sure my feels will catch up to the good bits pretty soon.

I like it.

I have now listened to series one, ending with the one with Paul McGann.

Now that was fun. And twisty.

( Read more... )

All the best toys and some lovely angst. And River being both clever and criminal. What's not to love?

( Read more... )

... also all the thematic baggage of being married to the Doctor bothers me much less when she's actually interacting with the Doctor, because a, then we get the Doctor, and b, then we get it underlined that a lot of his life involves being messed around and escaping from it too. They have a lot in common, like that.


Basically my only irritation with the set is I couldn't get the volume right, the theme music was loud and other bits were mumbly, but since I'm listening on a very cheap device that's almost certainly me anyway.

Many stars, plenty good, will order more like this soonest.

I've had like two hours sleep and a really long day where I couldn't stop worrying on a trivial thing, so my focus is not the best, and my thoughts uncomplicated.

That was very much a middle.

And the entire fate of the world continues to hang on the Doctor's tech being worse than what is promised by currently available phone apps.

That was a good one. Creepy to proper scary in the middle, political, and stripped the Doctor down to basics even further than usual.

I only tentatively like the end. I have to see what they'll do. But it's already more promising than when most shows go there, because it appears to be lasting.

I didn't like the beginning so much because it was all HAVE FEELS NOW from a standing start, but okay, unsubtle but themey.

( Read more... )

That was good to watch and only made me check the time when they mentioned it was running out for them. Proper Doctor Who.




Also the iPlayer on my new huge smart tv is a bit magic. I still haven't watched anything I've been recording because the iplayer works plenty good. Coolness.

That was proper. Spectacle, compassion, anti empire anti aristo anti capitalism. Nothing not to like.

Meaning I don't have particular thoughts about it.

( Read more... )

So that was okay with some good bits
and I think I like the look of the next week bit.

cautious yaay.

Twelve and Bill Potts, and Nardole.

... I am feeling a bit slapped. I mean, we knew from the publicity she would be a lesbian, but ( Read more... )

I know it's Doctor Who and things are never simple, but I feel like this was sandpaper on the seat time. Like, if this is inviting more people in, it's a hell of a way to make them comfortable.

( Read more... )

Calling it The Pilot and then emphasising that you can start watching here is playing at being clever. Silly having a pilot for an over fifty year old show. And yet necessary to reintroduce all the basic concepts every time.



I have not been as enthusiastic about Doctor Who lately as is my lifelong habit, not the newer episodes. And this has not changed my feelings there. I am left hoping they won't do this again, and might do better.

Not a comfortable reaction to what ought to be my favourite show.




If other people are happy then I'm glad for them, but they must have a different set of filters than I do, to see only happy making bits.





ETA: I feel it's probably relevant to my reaction that ( Read more... )

has literally been a daydream of mine for decades. It's a good dream. You get to do many cool things that way. But seeing it depicted the way it was here? Well that seems much less good. Why do that?

Today I dreamt I was dancing with the 8th Doctor in a ballroom on the moon.
The lunar gravity let us glide around like floating, everything easy.
And there was kissing, but not grabby kissing with expectations, just kissing that really likes kissing, as enthusiastic as he is with every other form of communication.

There was a plot too, and Missy was there with her Doctor, and possibly some Daleks, but things started getting mysterious around when the Daleks disappeared. Like, obviously your first thought is, yaay no Daleks I get to live, but then you have to wonder, how on moon did anything manage to make no Daleks when Daleks had insisted on taking over? And whatever we did to investigate I had to be just a teensy worried that Missy would decide I was more use dead, which was more worrying personally, if not professionally. But I wasn't going to let it waste my time with 8.

There was spinning and dancing and music that's all "on days like these de dum de dum when skies are blue"
which is funny, because we're underground on the moon, and nothing is blue anywhere
and I haven't actually dreamed the dancing dream with blue skies. It's usually all stations under spin gravity with the stars wheeling around us.

I woke up in the most delightful mood.

I am quite disinclined to go check the internet, it might take the bubbles out of this mood.

But in the dream we had to figure things out, only everywhere we went we found only empty corridors and empty rooms. Still preferable to actual death by Dalek, but puzzling. And there were two clues. And one of them was the ballroom. There was artificial gravity everywhere else, and while low g made for lovely artistic choices, there was a bar in the corner with open glasses, and nobody chooses to drink in lower gravity than they're used to. So somehow the floor was broken without being broken. And we couldn't get down below to see the workings because there were no stairs. Or lifts. Which was peculiar. Because how did people get in and out at all?

So I wondered if we were looking at the wrong scale. A lift is just a room that moves. There were plenty of rooms about. What if they'd needed to move something very much bigger than us?

But the Doctor, the grey one, pointed out we'd been in almost every room already...

... except the airlocks. Only one door on them, pressure supporting airlock style, but you don't mess with airlocks until you have to. And if we wanted to go anywhere new, we had to. But we couldn't find pressure suits. So if the doors opened somewhere unexpected, we wouldn't just end up in the car park...



So I don't know where the locks went, but there was another dream earlier, and in that one humans had been excavating on the moon and finding complexly stratified black rock, in sections that looked very much artificial. But so does the giant's causeway, so they weren't that concerned... until they found the airlock.

And it turned out they'd been lifting off damaged pieces from the tiniest, tiniest corner.

And when they reactivated the thing, having scraped away the lunar regolith and exposed what they thought was a building, it lit up, started doing things to gravity, and lifted up
and up
and up
until a whole moonlet had shrugged off grey dust and lifted itself free.



Which was a surprise, as you can imagine.



It turned out to be still functional as a self contained world, with artificial gravity throughout, and room after room after room. It had enough area in its volume to function as a whole spare planet, and go a long way to getting breathing room for the billions of Earth.

But first we either have to understand precisely what it was even doing here, or I suppose choose population to inhabit it that we wouldn't mind finding out the hard way...



And if the two dreams were one dream, from other perspectives, we also have to worry what the Daleks wanted to do with it.

Experience suggests probably fly it around like a really big spaceship.

But you have to worry what could power something like that...

6 and a new companion, a Leading Wren called Constance Clark.

I have rediscovered a technique for listening to entire audios at once: do something else with my hands. Find the right something is the trick. Today I went through old magazines about home decorating and tore out the bits I want to keep. I have a nice stack of stuff to get rid of now. Also in the middle I made a meal.

I think I liked this audio. It's about smart women, which is always a good start. But it's also about world war two, and I feel weirdly bruised on that whole era today. Like it's one giant flinch.

Still, codes and codebreaking and signals and spies and enemies and having to work together and a whole lot of running around. Quite the adventure. And they fixed things with thinking, which is yaay.

I definitely like Constance. She starts off by telling off the Doctor, which is as it should be, as far as I can see.

... I'm listening to these stories about brilliant and accomplished women saving the world, and I'm sitting at home in my pyjamas, again, still. If I can't find it inspiring or really identify, then I end up a bit :( and embarrassed about it.

Don't know what I'm really looking for lately, just end up dissatisfied with everything.

But I think it was a pretty good Doctor Who story.

I am not good at listening to audios when I'm sitting at home. I nearly fell asleep in the middle. Also I ate six biscuits, which was three more than I intended to eat, but still less than a packet, so that's okay.

... as you may guess, I was not enthused by this story.

I'm feeling a bit blah about Doctor Who lately, which let me tell you is deeply weird. I mean, it's Doctor Who. It's a foundation text. There is Doctor Who for every mood and all occasions.

... but I'm not feeling it.

... weird.

So, this one was about an orbital warehouse and the planet that worships it while waiting for delivery. It could have been funnier. It did a few things, but I kept distracting myself trying to make it funnier in my head. Retail and online delivery gives so much mileage. What would a civilisation built around Loyalty Cards really be like? But it most ran around the warehouse avoiding rodents and traps until they all stumbled into their corner of the real mystery.

I can't tell if the story was a bit blah or I was. I gave it three stars out of five on librarything on the theory it was ordinary and I'm in a demanding mood.

7 and Mel is also not a team that gives me feels though.

Also, in an attempt to not fall asleep in the recliner before the adventure was over, I rearranged the drawers in the CD cabinets so there's room for the new big finish. But I very small bammed my head on the corner and made one unit top heavy and only realised when I sat down to type this that I still haven't put them in Library Thing but I have now muddled up the cataloged and uncataloged boxes.

tiny annoyances.

I know if anyone actually reads these as reviews they're not here to read about my tiny annoyances, but my point is, I think my review is more about the bumps and snoozes than about the story itself.

shall do better later, I expect.

Not only am I not impressed, I'm actually kind of angry.
There's a guy that dies first. That the Doctor hears is in danger, sees being locked in, and ignores. Someone the Doctor doesn't even try to save.
Guess the color of his skin?

in a just world you shouldn't have enough information, and yet.

( Read more... )

and there was one speaking female character, to five main men and some random lines from more.

I expect better from Doctor Who.

I require better.

What Quill did indeed. It's weird, it's good, it ties in to the whole rest of the season so far, but in lots of ways it's its own show, like Quill goes off in her own subgenre.

I'm not keen on one specific point: ( Read more... )

I like how Quill accessorises. Choker and bracelets solid metal looking. Not letting observer forget.


I don't quite know what to do with the Doctor leaving her like that in the first place, or the whole presence of freedom fighter terrorist slave in the story at all. I mean she's interesting, but she's an argument, and not one that resolves.

Though I like how school governors fit in the argument here.

I liked all the locations in this episode and the excuse to take a tour of alien thought patterns and the argument about religion or lack thereof and how freedom is just plain complicated as a concept. And how they started with the overlooked ones, dreaming of freedom. It's the power of belief, the power of stories, hope in a box again.



I have no idea how this all will wrap. I can come up with some ideas, they've left a lot of parts around, but I don't know what they'll do with them.

And now I care enough I'll be tense all week wondering which way they'll jump.