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beccaelizabethThings I have listened to recently:
Doctor Who: The Fourth Wall. 6 and the latest audio companion, Flip is it? She spends much of the story dead, so I don't feel I've really got to know her just yet. Which was one problem. When she dies, it's hard to care about her more than about the random characters we've just been introduced to, but the Doctor gets more upset about her because he brought her along. It sort of underlines how possibly random murder should have more impact.
The other problem is that the set up of the story is there's a new TV show using new technology to make it more realistic, only it's tipped over into being actually real and the invented invaders decide our universe looks like it's worth stomping around in. Fair enough setup, but the fiction within a fiction is deliberately bad. So you're listening to deliberately bad characters. Blergh. They can hear their own theme music and they know if they're the star so they can't die and so on and so forth. Supposed to be funny? But the rule of satire/parody/comedy is Always Punch Up. Aim at something at least as powerful/popular as you are, right? Since this is Doctor Who, that leaves Star Trek, Stargate, DC and Marvel, yesno? ... given that Big Finish do Stargate audios I'd find the xover possibilities irresistable. But instead it's more like a cliche SF action movie, with a dashing hero and a love interest who screams a lot and a bad guy who just wants to destroy everything because his wife is dead. Also some pig looking eeeeeeevil stormtrooper types, who aren't translated, and Flip figures out that's because they're not actually saying anything. So she decides everything is fictional and they're like LARPers or something and challenges them to do their worst and then gets killed. Which seems like a reach, but if they were going to go there, it seems like it would be more interesting to do without the thing where it is, in fact, fiction within the fiction. Like, the most obvious target of mockery at this point in Doctor Who is DW itself, seeing as it has 50 years to focus on and the Doctor is in some place-times famous. Doing like Stargate did and having the Wormhole Extreme version is the obvious way to go if you've got to have fiction within fiction. But even without that, take an ordinary human extraordinary places and maybe their sense of reality is challenged. But why bother doing that by pouring them into a fiction?
I'm not being very coherent, sorry, it's just basically I didn't find this one emotionally involving at all, but there's all these setups for more interesting stories peeking out around the edges, so I may have spent some time thinking about those instead.
There was also some bit with the fictional character confronting their creator and pointing out writers are arseholes to their creations, killing them, and sort of deciding that if they're going to be two dimensional villains with an ill defined tragic backstory and an utterly irrational need for destruction they're just going to be very good at it, so they invade their writer's universe. Lots of duplicates, lots of actors pretending to be actors pretending to be their characters to fool their characters, probably seemed fun to the writer. I just... there's a lot to be said about the quest for realism in fiction that blurs uncomfortably into treating appalling events as entertainment, and there's plenty to be told about unrealistic genre conventions, it's a little bit interesting to point out the good guy gets to do a ton of killing and never get a scratch on him (except actually action movie guys tend to go through hell to prove they can, so they should actually scratch extensively) (and if they're going to parody this is why they need to pick something specific, to get it accurate). But taking a machine that makes a fiction so real the characters are as alive as we are, and then using it to tell a story about running around pretending to be pretend people, seems to be missing all the juicy bits.
So, I listened to this one, but I keep wanting to turn it into a dozen other stories. Unsatisfying.
Doctor Who, the Lost Stories: Valley of Death
4 and Leela and a lot of running around and some android duplicates, I think. I thought there were android duplicates in the other 4th Doctor thing too so I was just poking my brain to be sure, but yeah, android duplicate shenanigans. Aside from the fun of listening to actors sound like robots trying to sound like their characters that's not the most exciting twist. But I listened to the adventure and there were giant animals, lost civilisations (which weren't translated even though the TARDIS translation works by telepathy and anyone having a thought should be translated, which dehumanises tribal societies, so blergh), time dilation, alien invasion where the invaders kept hitting fast forward to get to the next interesting bit, and some flying a plane around the world. I like Leela and had no complaints about the plot, I just didn't immediately write about it so have few details to comment on. Nice enough story.
4th Doctor adventures season 2. All of them. 4 and Romana I.
It gets weird, sometimes, listening to ghosts. I feel like I should be having real world feelings, and the story gets muddled. Only I only know these people because stories. Stories and conventions and signings. So it's weird, the feels and the feelings and this slightly off balance ghosty effect.
Also, it gets awkward saying I didn't like a story.
But I didn't like 2-01 the Auntie Matter at all. If I could be sure it was a parody it still wouldn't be a good parody. I was quite a lot bored. Plus the Auntie in question is a female alien who prolongs her life by possessing human bodies, but they have to be women, because they have to match her original body. In other words, gender is more important than species. Bored isn't quite the word.
2-02 The Sands of Life spent a lot of time repeating the title. Also, a lot of female time travelling aliens talked primarily to Romana because she's a female time travelling alien. Also they talked to other women. Because women only communicate with women? And then it was all about giving birth, so listened to in a row it's all Women Marriage Women Babies Women. :eyeroll:
Romana is a female Time Lord, but personally I'd rather use that to have her be good at Time Lord stuff, not, you know, women stuff.
But 2-02 & 2-03 had a female Earth President have a little story arc where she decides to ignore the military and make a nicer decision and try talking to people. So that's good.
2-04 has a creepy stalker dude who finds a justice machine and uses it to follow some random woman around and kill people who might be bothering her. Then the justice machine decides she's just as guilty as the others, and creepy stalker dude jumps in to push her out of the way and die. She ends the story all upset and asking why he couldn't just talk to her. ... personally I wouldn't want someone whose idea of help is quite a lot of murder to strike up a conversation with me, but since she probably meant instead, that's a pretty okay story. Like, it wasn't noble or anything, him following her around and leaving her money and hurting people in her name. He was a screw up. And then he died. No cookies for stalking.
It was a bit crowded because there's also Jago and Litefoot, and Romana and the Doctor split up, and they each solve the mystery and meet in the middle. Romana gets kidnapped and then rescues herself and another woman and then the Doctor turning up messes up her actually working until then plan. That was funny.
Also the justice machine reads minds to detect guilt, so people only get convicted out of their own heads, which is meant to be infallible. But the Doctor leads the machine away because he feels more guilty than anyone else. And remember this is 4, so it's not horrible Gallifrey guilt of having done something. He's guilty because of all the things he hasn't done. So that's a good bit of character dropped in, made more interesting by 4's usually ebullient presentation. He's running around saving stuff and Romana at this point thinks it's because he just generally likes heading towards the danger but he's having a big guilty feelings instead.
Then there's Phantoms of the Deep, which I rather liked in terms of atmosphere and random super intelligent sentient squid, but I'm right now having trouble remembering what they actually did. Used their superior time lord brains to save the day by thinking very hard? Eh. It was pretty good spooking, but *shrugs*. Also, K9 got possessed. He's in the stories but only a bit and he didn't do anything that made him best favourite until this one. Here he did good communicating and saved the Doctor. Good dog.
Then 2-06 and 2-07 revisit the setting from 2-02-03 and add Daleks. I only just finished listening to these two but I don't have much to say about them, because Daleks. There's only so many Dalek stories, and they have a pattern. Human teams up with Daleks thinking he's on their side, in this case thinking he's the boss of them. Two sides on the planet below are having big argues, just like the ones the Daleks were born out of, as the Doctor points out in so many words. Two sides team up and decide not to be Dalek-y. Happy ending.
Except the creepy human boss dude gets away at the end, presumably setting up other stories. That's unusual. He has good voice actor. so.
He's a 'self made man' and it turns out he means something with time paradoxes, so that's interesting.
... it's hard to have opinions on something that declares itself a middle.
Nope, having no opinions on the plot, seems like perfectly reasonable Daleks story with hubris and shouting and a moral.
Romana got given a little mini character arc where she ends up declaring she actually quite likes the Doctor after all, she just never stopped to think about it until then.
... sometimes I wonder why she liked the Doctor, given moments like the one here where the TARDIS is in danger only because he undid her repairs, but, that's her conclusion. The Doctor also ends up trusting her to do TARDIS things, so he starts off trying not to tell her stuff and going off on his own but ends up liking/trusting her more too. Arc.
All the stories in a row seemed to connect up a lot, and Romana kept on having to complain the Doctor stopped using the randomiser, so I don't know why they did that instead of having random stories.
I don't know, I'd like to have liked them more, but they were plenty interesting enough.
... I'd really like to have better quality reviews of them, but as usual, I listened while playing computer games and this is as much as I've got in my head.
Doctor Who: The Fourth Wall. 6 and the latest audio companion, Flip is it? She spends much of the story dead, so I don't feel I've really got to know her just yet. Which was one problem. When she dies, it's hard to care about her more than about the random characters we've just been introduced to, but the Doctor gets more upset about her because he brought her along. It sort of underlines how possibly random murder should have more impact.
The other problem is that the set up of the story is there's a new TV show using new technology to make it more realistic, only it's tipped over into being actually real and the invented invaders decide our universe looks like it's worth stomping around in. Fair enough setup, but the fiction within a fiction is deliberately bad. So you're listening to deliberately bad characters. Blergh. They can hear their own theme music and they know if they're the star so they can't die and so on and so forth. Supposed to be funny? But the rule of satire/parody/comedy is Always Punch Up. Aim at something at least as powerful/popular as you are, right? Since this is Doctor Who, that leaves Star Trek, Stargate, DC and Marvel, yesno? ... given that Big Finish do Stargate audios I'd find the xover possibilities irresistable. But instead it's more like a cliche SF action movie, with a dashing hero and a love interest who screams a lot and a bad guy who just wants to destroy everything because his wife is dead. Also some pig looking eeeeeeevil stormtrooper types, who aren't translated, and Flip figures out that's because they're not actually saying anything. So she decides everything is fictional and they're like LARPers or something and challenges them to do their worst and then gets killed. Which seems like a reach, but if they were going to go there, it seems like it would be more interesting to do without the thing where it is, in fact, fiction within the fiction. Like, the most obvious target of mockery at this point in Doctor Who is DW itself, seeing as it has 50 years to focus on and the Doctor is in some place-times famous. Doing like Stargate did and having the Wormhole Extreme version is the obvious way to go if you've got to have fiction within fiction. But even without that, take an ordinary human extraordinary places and maybe their sense of reality is challenged. But why bother doing that by pouring them into a fiction?
I'm not being very coherent, sorry, it's just basically I didn't find this one emotionally involving at all, but there's all these setups for more interesting stories peeking out around the edges, so I may have spent some time thinking about those instead.
There was also some bit with the fictional character confronting their creator and pointing out writers are arseholes to their creations, killing them, and sort of deciding that if they're going to be two dimensional villains with an ill defined tragic backstory and an utterly irrational need for destruction they're just going to be very good at it, so they invade their writer's universe. Lots of duplicates, lots of actors pretending to be actors pretending to be their characters to fool their characters, probably seemed fun to the writer. I just... there's a lot to be said about the quest for realism in fiction that blurs uncomfortably into treating appalling events as entertainment, and there's plenty to be told about unrealistic genre conventions, it's a little bit interesting to point out the good guy gets to do a ton of killing and never get a scratch on him (except actually action movie guys tend to go through hell to prove they can, so they should actually scratch extensively) (and if they're going to parody this is why they need to pick something specific, to get it accurate). But taking a machine that makes a fiction so real the characters are as alive as we are, and then using it to tell a story about running around pretending to be pretend people, seems to be missing all the juicy bits.
So, I listened to this one, but I keep wanting to turn it into a dozen other stories. Unsatisfying.
Doctor Who, the Lost Stories: Valley of Death
4 and Leela and a lot of running around and some android duplicates, I think. I thought there were android duplicates in the other 4th Doctor thing too so I was just poking my brain to be sure, but yeah, android duplicate shenanigans. Aside from the fun of listening to actors sound like robots trying to sound like their characters that's not the most exciting twist. But I listened to the adventure and there were giant animals, lost civilisations (which weren't translated even though the TARDIS translation works by telepathy and anyone having a thought should be translated, which dehumanises tribal societies, so blergh), time dilation, alien invasion where the invaders kept hitting fast forward to get to the next interesting bit, and some flying a plane around the world. I like Leela and had no complaints about the plot, I just didn't immediately write about it so have few details to comment on. Nice enough story.
4th Doctor adventures season 2. All of them. 4 and Romana I.
It gets weird, sometimes, listening to ghosts. I feel like I should be having real world feelings, and the story gets muddled. Only I only know these people because stories. Stories and conventions and signings. So it's weird, the feels and the feelings and this slightly off balance ghosty effect.
Also, it gets awkward saying I didn't like a story.
But I didn't like 2-01 the Auntie Matter at all. If I could be sure it was a parody it still wouldn't be a good parody. I was quite a lot bored. Plus the Auntie in question is a female alien who prolongs her life by possessing human bodies, but they have to be women, because they have to match her original body. In other words, gender is more important than species. Bored isn't quite the word.
2-02 The Sands of Life spent a lot of time repeating the title. Also, a lot of female time travelling aliens talked primarily to Romana because she's a female time travelling alien. Also they talked to other women. Because women only communicate with women? And then it was all about giving birth, so listened to in a row it's all Women Marriage Women Babies Women. :eyeroll:
Romana is a female Time Lord, but personally I'd rather use that to have her be good at Time Lord stuff, not, you know, women stuff.
But 2-02 & 2-03 had a female Earth President have a little story arc where she decides to ignore the military and make a nicer decision and try talking to people. So that's good.
2-04 has a creepy stalker dude who finds a justice machine and uses it to follow some random woman around and kill people who might be bothering her. Then the justice machine decides she's just as guilty as the others, and creepy stalker dude jumps in to push her out of the way and die. She ends the story all upset and asking why he couldn't just talk to her. ... personally I wouldn't want someone whose idea of help is quite a lot of murder to strike up a conversation with me, but since she probably meant instead, that's a pretty okay story. Like, it wasn't noble or anything, him following her around and leaving her money and hurting people in her name. He was a screw up. And then he died. No cookies for stalking.
It was a bit crowded because there's also Jago and Litefoot, and Romana and the Doctor split up, and they each solve the mystery and meet in the middle. Romana gets kidnapped and then rescues herself and another woman and then the Doctor turning up messes up her actually working until then plan. That was funny.
Also the justice machine reads minds to detect guilt, so people only get convicted out of their own heads, which is meant to be infallible. But the Doctor leads the machine away because he feels more guilty than anyone else. And remember this is 4, so it's not horrible Gallifrey guilt of having done something. He's guilty because of all the things he hasn't done. So that's a good bit of character dropped in, made more interesting by 4's usually ebullient presentation. He's running around saving stuff and Romana at this point thinks it's because he just generally likes heading towards the danger but he's having a big guilty feelings instead.
Then there's Phantoms of the Deep, which I rather liked in terms of atmosphere and random super intelligent sentient squid, but I'm right now having trouble remembering what they actually did. Used their superior time lord brains to save the day by thinking very hard? Eh. It was pretty good spooking, but *shrugs*. Also, K9 got possessed. He's in the stories but only a bit and he didn't do anything that made him best favourite until this one. Here he did good communicating and saved the Doctor. Good dog.
Then 2-06 and 2-07 revisit the setting from 2-02-03 and add Daleks. I only just finished listening to these two but I don't have much to say about them, because Daleks. There's only so many Dalek stories, and they have a pattern. Human teams up with Daleks thinking he's on their side, in this case thinking he's the boss of them. Two sides on the planet below are having big argues, just like the ones the Daleks were born out of, as the Doctor points out in so many words. Two sides team up and decide not to be Dalek-y. Happy ending.
Except the creepy human boss dude gets away at the end, presumably setting up other stories. That's unusual. He has good voice actor. so.
He's a 'self made man' and it turns out he means something with time paradoxes, so that's interesting.
... it's hard to have opinions on something that declares itself a middle.
Nope, having no opinions on the plot, seems like perfectly reasonable Daleks story with hubris and shouting and a moral.
Romana got given a little mini character arc where she ends up declaring she actually quite likes the Doctor after all, she just never stopped to think about it until then.
... sometimes I wonder why she liked the Doctor, given moments like the one here where the TARDIS is in danger only because he undid her repairs, but, that's her conclusion. The Doctor also ends up trusting her to do TARDIS things, so he starts off trying not to tell her stuff and going off on his own but ends up liking/trusting her more too. Arc.
All the stories in a row seemed to connect up a lot, and Romana kept on having to complain the Doctor stopped using the randomiser, so I don't know why they did that instead of having random stories.
I don't know, I'd like to have liked them more, but they were plenty interesting enough.
... I'd really like to have better quality reviews of them, but as usual, I listened while playing computer games and this is as much as I've got in my head.