Many more Big Finish Audios
Feb. 6th, 2014 01:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethHave been playing Fate and listening to Doctor Who audios.
Have been a bit bored, actually.
It's not that the Doctor Who was bad, mostly, it just wasn't especially good. Possibly I am bored of all the things again? I do like Turlough though, when he gets to do anything.
Last one I wrote about was 159 The Emerald Tiger. After that there was 160 The Jupiter Conjunction, which I think again took advantage of that thing they've done to Nyssa where we no longer know how she ends up and put her in jeopardy a lot? I don't much remember. I think she nearly got left behind and then didn't? It's interesting, that they can now treat her like a Big Finish companion where they can do anything they want to her, but it's not interesting if it's the only trick. There was lots of running around and politics and misinformed aliens and suchlike. Also the Doctor and Turlough got arrested, and Turlough was very himself. I liked those bits. First claiming the girls weren't accomplices, just girls they'd picked up somewhere and didn't know the names of, and then offering to testify against the Doctor about the crimes they were falsely accused of. He's a twisty tricksy darling and anyone can believe the worst of him at the drop of a hat and that's ever so much fun to story with.
161 The Butcher of Brisbane was also fun for Turlough. He and Nyssa got stranded in a politically turbulent bit of history, and spent a few years waiting for the Doctor and Tegan to catch up. This can be done to aliens because lalala aging patterns. Also they youthed Nyssa in 159 anyway, which seems odd in an audio but *shrugs*. ANYways, I wasn't impressed with Nyssa, because she got engaged to the bad guy she was spying on and went around having feelings about the conditions of the workers while sitting pretty in the palace, which seems like an odd story for a companion, especially a married one. But I did like that Turlough was her secretary. He was carrying messages and doing spy stuff, but he also seemed to be fitting right in politically. A well timed bribe kept the plot rolling right along. So again, he gets the most interesting stuff to do, and the stuff you really can't do with many other companions. Jack probably would know how to bribe someone, but he'd try flirting first. Also, if accused of secretly shagging Nyssa, he'd not deny it in quite the same tone of voice. I was LOL because it was yet another of the moments where it's very, very hard to read Turlough as at all heterosexual, as he seemed so surprised at the idea anyone would imagine him with a girl.
I was thinking that in terms of D&D alignments Turlough is very likely the only Companion who is arguably chaotic evil. I mean, how many other companions would find a corpse in the wilderness and immediately start stripping them for useful warm clothes? It's practical, intelligent, and yet not at all nice. Laws are for dancing around and his own best interests are of course immediately important. But, like everyone else who travels with the Doctor, he does tend to risk his neck a lot to try and help random civilisations he has only just met. He ends up spying for countries he has no connection to. So he's really a good is not the same as nice guy. Which gives him a whole different set of stories to basically anyone else in DW.
Tegan in these stories also did things. Like, having feelings about Australia, which they landed in in the far future and found all wrecked. The far enough future I'm surprised she could recognise any of it, but *shrugs* I have trouble remembering the details though.
In conclusion, Turlough is best. ... this is not a surprising conclusion and is an opinion I have held since he was first on TV.
So when the next few stories had not only no Turlough but no regular companions, it lost like 60% of my interest at once. The Burning Prince, The Acheron Pulse, and The Shadow Heart. 5, 6 and 7 successively sort out the same empire, and same prince. ... they don't do it very well, obviously. I kind of liked that 5 failed to save anyone, as far as he knew, but that was also the worst bit, because the Doctor has a tendency to do better than that. I didn't like that the evil princess was such a cackling two dimensional evil. She agrees to marry the prince but only so she can get his DNA so she can kill everyone he's even vaguely related to. ... except that includes her and her uncle and her family? Because she's that stupid? I don't know, by the end of The Burning Prince everyone was dying a lot and I was mostly bored.
The problem with all three is the consistent character, The Burning Prince guy, is actually kind of stupid, foolish, and can't seem to fit more than one idea in his head. So in the first one he gets angry and sets things on fire with his brain, but he has been told all his life this is because he's a crazy person and he must take his meds or he'll spontaneously combust like his ancestor. He thinks the princess loves him powers and all, but she turns out to be all backstabby and kicks him out an airlock. So what's the Doctor Who type character arc for such a person? Learning to accept yourself and deal with your power? Learning that just possibly women aren't all backstabby and evil and you should maybe not keep killing them? Perhaps noticing that what one calls love as a teenager was only infatuation and really there's better ways to treat women than putting them on a pedestal? Learning ... anything? Nope, he just turns into a bad guy out for REVENGE against EVERYONE in the ENTIRE GALAXY!!! So he was the middle of three stories, and he just wasn't very interesting. Like, there was a thread about being turned into monsters when oppressors do bad things, and then you'd hope that all them 'monsters' could just turn into nice people again and stop doing vengeance, but no, they just stayed the same killing machines for three stories.
5, 6 and 7 all had a go at the problem, and didn't change anything for the better. 5 and 6 each made it substantially worse. And then 7 went around cleaning up by setting up some convoluted time travel thing so all the bad guys got dead.
... that's... not exactly the kind of thing I look forward to the Doctor doing, really.
6 got a whole race of ex oppressed monsters to stop doing vengeance and accept that life was quite nice really and possibly they should stop wiping it out. Yaay! Then he reprogrammed them based on the best model available... himself. *facepalm* Hubris! So of course they turned into galaxy destroying justice machines, because then they're the dark mirror. But what does 7 do to them? I thought for a while he'd fix it so they paired up with more empathetic species to temper justice with mercy, like he does with his companions, but no, as far as I could tell they just got destroyed.
SO. I liked a lot of the running around problem solving in the middle of the stories. I liked that the Doctor's worst qualities were untempered while travelling alone. I liked that they stored up trouble for his personal future.
But that's also what I didn't like.
And when there's no companions around and I don't like the recurring bad guy because boring, it's less fun than it could be.
So I decide on balance they were just okay. Not bad, not good, not... likely to be re-listened-to any time soon.
Today's listening was 168, 1001 Nights. 5 and Nyssa. And... some of it was actually bad. Nobody was very interesting. Screechy voice sound effects were boring. And I know the beginning bit is supposed to be Nyssa telling a story badly, but it kind of seems like the simplest explanation for some of the later bits too. So now I'm bored and grumpy. I did like the idea of a monster trying to become the Doctor from knowing his stories, and then epic failing at it, but that was only the last bit of the story and dealt with very swiftly. Also for that bit the Doctor had lost his memory and Nyssa was fooled by psychic powers so she was being more boring than usual even. I kind of want to take the idea and redo it though. Like, start with the Doctor and Nyssa travelling together but there seems to be something off about him... oh, they did that story with 6 and a new companion... but, if the story is noticing that the Doctor is not the Doctor but instead acting like a specific stereotype of the Doctor, trying to be the story of him rather than just being him, then that could be interesting. We didn't get to see precisely how the imitation failed, he just chickened out. Boring. Could be more interesting.
The sub stories were a bit about the power of stories? The first one was about a prisoner who the Doctor told a lie in the hopes it would fix his brain, which seems to me unlikely, since multiple personality disorder strong enough to manifest as multiple psychic creation bodies is unlikely to just fix itself on a hope. But it's a nice hope, so, okay. The next one was an alien thing pretending to be a demon and getting kicked out by an exorcism. ... no, nope, that was boring, I can't find a good bit there. And there was the framing story, with the Doctor trying to break out of prison and meeting a fellow prisoner who was trapped in the story of actually being in opulent quarters up a tower. And Nyssa was trying to tell enough stories to show someone the Doctor is awesome and therefore shouldn't be executed, but it made them decide to take the Doctor's place instead. Like, being inspired by the Doctor, that would be a good thing, but needing to empty him out to prove how awesome you are, that's just creepy. So the alien thing couldn't be the Doctor because it started out by stealing? Er, the Doctor stole the TARDIS... the alien stole a life though. Can't set out to be heroic generous guy by sneaky stealing his life.
So now I'm trying to take the parts and make them better and more interesting. Like, the possessing demon could be MUCH more interesting, if it was like a train where each person it hopped into got to come along to the next, so it started out as only one person and then ended up 'legion'. And they'd be being very rude, to be taking over other people's lives, but they'd be thinking they were helping, because they'd get to live for ages that way. The reference to Tremas getting possessed was all very well, but it didn't add anything to that story, just echoed.
The prisoner that was secretly torturing himself because of guilt could have been done much better without the lalala multiple personalities lalala fixed bit. Because mental illness is a sloppy storytelling shortcut more often than it's an actual mental illness. Or, possibly, it could be two prisoners who swap whenever one dies, and they've long since forgotten why it started, they're just getting back at each other for last time. Futility of vengeance, sort of thing. Guilt or vengeance or some mix of it.
It's boring if it's not about the Doctor. You can't really do it to 5 and have many echoes. Do the same thing to 10 and you've got something epic to play with.
Actually he's there with Nyssa and the next one mentions Tremas, start playing with that Doctor and the Master fighting across time thing, wring the guilt out of that one. That could work.
The thing where I'm sitting here trying to disassemble the stories for parts does kind of show how I felt about them. One big 'could do better'.
So now I'm wondering if I'm in a bad mood, if I've stopped liking Doctor Who, or if I just wasn't impressed with this handful of stories.
... I was very impressed with the Ace and Hex stories, so I guess it's either my mood for some days now or just these few stories.
Also, possibly, it might help to mix my media consumption a bit more. Listening to so much Doctor Who in a row might not be the best way.
But most of the TV channels are too weak to actually receive, something is busted, probably not something in my flat because it has done this before and swapping things didn't help but it did fix itself eventually, so now I'm wondering how the TV gets to my flat and if that bit is busted. But, it makes things boring. More boring.
There is quite a lot of boring lately.
Also I was grumpy because I didn't go to Norwich for the science fiction group, again, because... well this time it was less because going out is hard and getting home is harder, though that does still always apply, it was more that I started doing paperworks things and didn't catch the bus. I should probably have tried anyway. I been annoyed about it all since.
... but it still would be quite hard going out in the dark cold rain to catch a bus and phone for a taxi home when the pubs close and all that stuff as usually defeats me.
I need to start doing things. Interesting things. Almost anythings.
Have been a bit bored, actually.
It's not that the Doctor Who was bad, mostly, it just wasn't especially good. Possibly I am bored of all the things again? I do like Turlough though, when he gets to do anything.
Last one I wrote about was 159 The Emerald Tiger. After that there was 160 The Jupiter Conjunction, which I think again took advantage of that thing they've done to Nyssa where we no longer know how she ends up and put her in jeopardy a lot? I don't much remember. I think she nearly got left behind and then didn't? It's interesting, that they can now treat her like a Big Finish companion where they can do anything they want to her, but it's not interesting if it's the only trick. There was lots of running around and politics and misinformed aliens and suchlike. Also the Doctor and Turlough got arrested, and Turlough was very himself. I liked those bits. First claiming the girls weren't accomplices, just girls they'd picked up somewhere and didn't know the names of, and then offering to testify against the Doctor about the crimes they were falsely accused of. He's a twisty tricksy darling and anyone can believe the worst of him at the drop of a hat and that's ever so much fun to story with.
161 The Butcher of Brisbane was also fun for Turlough. He and Nyssa got stranded in a politically turbulent bit of history, and spent a few years waiting for the Doctor and Tegan to catch up. This can be done to aliens because lalala aging patterns. Also they youthed Nyssa in 159 anyway, which seems odd in an audio but *shrugs*. ANYways, I wasn't impressed with Nyssa, because she got engaged to the bad guy she was spying on and went around having feelings about the conditions of the workers while sitting pretty in the palace, which seems like an odd story for a companion, especially a married one. But I did like that Turlough was her secretary. He was carrying messages and doing spy stuff, but he also seemed to be fitting right in politically. A well timed bribe kept the plot rolling right along. So again, he gets the most interesting stuff to do, and the stuff you really can't do with many other companions. Jack probably would know how to bribe someone, but he'd try flirting first. Also, if accused of secretly shagging Nyssa, he'd not deny it in quite the same tone of voice. I was LOL because it was yet another of the moments where it's very, very hard to read Turlough as at all heterosexual, as he seemed so surprised at the idea anyone would imagine him with a girl.
I was thinking that in terms of D&D alignments Turlough is very likely the only Companion who is arguably chaotic evil. I mean, how many other companions would find a corpse in the wilderness and immediately start stripping them for useful warm clothes? It's practical, intelligent, and yet not at all nice. Laws are for dancing around and his own best interests are of course immediately important. But, like everyone else who travels with the Doctor, he does tend to risk his neck a lot to try and help random civilisations he has only just met. He ends up spying for countries he has no connection to. So he's really a good is not the same as nice guy. Which gives him a whole different set of stories to basically anyone else in DW.
Tegan in these stories also did things. Like, having feelings about Australia, which they landed in in the far future and found all wrecked. The far enough future I'm surprised she could recognise any of it, but *shrugs* I have trouble remembering the details though.
In conclusion, Turlough is best. ... this is not a surprising conclusion and is an opinion I have held since he was first on TV.
So when the next few stories had not only no Turlough but no regular companions, it lost like 60% of my interest at once. The Burning Prince, The Acheron Pulse, and The Shadow Heart. 5, 6 and 7 successively sort out the same empire, and same prince. ... they don't do it very well, obviously. I kind of liked that 5 failed to save anyone, as far as he knew, but that was also the worst bit, because the Doctor has a tendency to do better than that. I didn't like that the evil princess was such a cackling two dimensional evil. She agrees to marry the prince but only so she can get his DNA so she can kill everyone he's even vaguely related to. ... except that includes her and her uncle and her family? Because she's that stupid? I don't know, by the end of The Burning Prince everyone was dying a lot and I was mostly bored.
The problem with all three is the consistent character, The Burning Prince guy, is actually kind of stupid, foolish, and can't seem to fit more than one idea in his head. So in the first one he gets angry and sets things on fire with his brain, but he has been told all his life this is because he's a crazy person and he must take his meds or he'll spontaneously combust like his ancestor. He thinks the princess loves him powers and all, but she turns out to be all backstabby and kicks him out an airlock. So what's the Doctor Who type character arc for such a person? Learning to accept yourself and deal with your power? Learning that just possibly women aren't all backstabby and evil and you should maybe not keep killing them? Perhaps noticing that what one calls love as a teenager was only infatuation and really there's better ways to treat women than putting them on a pedestal? Learning ... anything? Nope, he just turns into a bad guy out for REVENGE against EVERYONE in the ENTIRE GALAXY!!! So he was the middle of three stories, and he just wasn't very interesting. Like, there was a thread about being turned into monsters when oppressors do bad things, and then you'd hope that all them 'monsters' could just turn into nice people again and stop doing vengeance, but no, they just stayed the same killing machines for three stories.
5, 6 and 7 all had a go at the problem, and didn't change anything for the better. 5 and 6 each made it substantially worse. And then 7 went around cleaning up by setting up some convoluted time travel thing so all the bad guys got dead.
... that's... not exactly the kind of thing I look forward to the Doctor doing, really.
6 got a whole race of ex oppressed monsters to stop doing vengeance and accept that life was quite nice really and possibly they should stop wiping it out. Yaay! Then he reprogrammed them based on the best model available... himself. *facepalm* Hubris! So of course they turned into galaxy destroying justice machines, because then they're the dark mirror. But what does 7 do to them? I thought for a while he'd fix it so they paired up with more empathetic species to temper justice with mercy, like he does with his companions, but no, as far as I could tell they just got destroyed.
SO. I liked a lot of the running around problem solving in the middle of the stories. I liked that the Doctor's worst qualities were untempered while travelling alone. I liked that they stored up trouble for his personal future.
But that's also what I didn't like.
And when there's no companions around and I don't like the recurring bad guy because boring, it's less fun than it could be.
So I decide on balance they were just okay. Not bad, not good, not... likely to be re-listened-to any time soon.
Today's listening was 168, 1001 Nights. 5 and Nyssa. And... some of it was actually bad. Nobody was very interesting. Screechy voice sound effects were boring. And I know the beginning bit is supposed to be Nyssa telling a story badly, but it kind of seems like the simplest explanation for some of the later bits too. So now I'm bored and grumpy. I did like the idea of a monster trying to become the Doctor from knowing his stories, and then epic failing at it, but that was only the last bit of the story and dealt with very swiftly. Also for that bit the Doctor had lost his memory and Nyssa was fooled by psychic powers so she was being more boring than usual even. I kind of want to take the idea and redo it though. Like, start with the Doctor and Nyssa travelling together but there seems to be something off about him... oh, they did that story with 6 and a new companion... but, if the story is noticing that the Doctor is not the Doctor but instead acting like a specific stereotype of the Doctor, trying to be the story of him rather than just being him, then that could be interesting. We didn't get to see precisely how the imitation failed, he just chickened out. Boring. Could be more interesting.
The sub stories were a bit about the power of stories? The first one was about a prisoner who the Doctor told a lie in the hopes it would fix his brain, which seems to me unlikely, since multiple personality disorder strong enough to manifest as multiple psychic creation bodies is unlikely to just fix itself on a hope. But it's a nice hope, so, okay. The next one was an alien thing pretending to be a demon and getting kicked out by an exorcism. ... no, nope, that was boring, I can't find a good bit there. And there was the framing story, with the Doctor trying to break out of prison and meeting a fellow prisoner who was trapped in the story of actually being in opulent quarters up a tower. And Nyssa was trying to tell enough stories to show someone the Doctor is awesome and therefore shouldn't be executed, but it made them decide to take the Doctor's place instead. Like, being inspired by the Doctor, that would be a good thing, but needing to empty him out to prove how awesome you are, that's just creepy. So the alien thing couldn't be the Doctor because it started out by stealing? Er, the Doctor stole the TARDIS... the alien stole a life though. Can't set out to be heroic generous guy by sneaky stealing his life.
So now I'm trying to take the parts and make them better and more interesting. Like, the possessing demon could be MUCH more interesting, if it was like a train where each person it hopped into got to come along to the next, so it started out as only one person and then ended up 'legion'. And they'd be being very rude, to be taking over other people's lives, but they'd be thinking they were helping, because they'd get to live for ages that way. The reference to Tremas getting possessed was all very well, but it didn't add anything to that story, just echoed.
The prisoner that was secretly torturing himself because of guilt could have been done much better without the lalala multiple personalities lalala fixed bit. Because mental illness is a sloppy storytelling shortcut more often than it's an actual mental illness. Or, possibly, it could be two prisoners who swap whenever one dies, and they've long since forgotten why it started, they're just getting back at each other for last time. Futility of vengeance, sort of thing. Guilt or vengeance or some mix of it.
It's boring if it's not about the Doctor. You can't really do it to 5 and have many echoes. Do the same thing to 10 and you've got something epic to play with.
Actually he's there with Nyssa and the next one mentions Tremas, start playing with that Doctor and the Master fighting across time thing, wring the guilt out of that one. That could work.
The thing where I'm sitting here trying to disassemble the stories for parts does kind of show how I felt about them. One big 'could do better'.
So now I'm wondering if I'm in a bad mood, if I've stopped liking Doctor Who, or if I just wasn't impressed with this handful of stories.
... I was very impressed with the Ace and Hex stories, so I guess it's either my mood for some days now or just these few stories.
Also, possibly, it might help to mix my media consumption a bit more. Listening to so much Doctor Who in a row might not be the best way.
But most of the TV channels are too weak to actually receive, something is busted, probably not something in my flat because it has done this before and swapping things didn't help but it did fix itself eventually, so now I'm wondering how the TV gets to my flat and if that bit is busted. But, it makes things boring. More boring.
There is quite a lot of boring lately.
Also I was grumpy because I didn't go to Norwich for the science fiction group, again, because... well this time it was less because going out is hard and getting home is harder, though that does still always apply, it was more that I started doing paperworks things and didn't catch the bus. I should probably have tried anyway. I been annoyed about it all since.
... but it still would be quite hard going out in the dark cold rain to catch a bus and phone for a taxi home when the pubs close and all that stuff as usually defeats me.
I need to start doing things. Interesting things. Almost anythings.
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Date: 2014-02-08 06:05 pm (UTC)Even your inside things are interesting, but I hope you are able to do more things that make you happy.
Did you know there's a Dungeons and Dragons version of Clue/Cluedo?