More 8th Doctor and Charley
Jan. 1st, 2015 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday I listened to Charley and 8 in Seasons of Fear, Embrace the Darkness, The Time of the Daleks, and Neverland.
Big Finish get better as they go along. but I still do not like Charley at all at all.
There was a thing Big Finish did when they got the Highlander audios to play with where they decided the mechanics were more interesting than the characters. They invented new and interesting things to do with Quickening, and in the process messed around with the characters we actually wanted to hang out with to the point they might as well have given them different names.
Big Finish really like messing around with time travel. Paradoxes and the laws of time are their happy places. So Charley's story is one long and intricate journey through made up physics, and while it's interesting to hear new laws of paradox in almost every story, it's not the variety of interesting I am there for. So again, playing with the mechanics, plenty fun, but not quite what I think of when I think of Doctor Who.
But there was plenty of good character stuff too, for the Doctor. Times to be clever and opportunities to make mistakes and times it all works out in the end by being willing to talk with anyone.
Charley though just continues to wind me up. She has the opportunity to get kidnapped or held captive by people from all over time and space. I do realise that this is a central feature of Doctor Who, getting captured and escaping fills up a lot of time in a lot of stories, but she gets captured and gets rescued and otherwise spends a lot of time tied to chairs and so forth. It's dreary.
Seasons of Fear had someone made 'immortal' by aliens and so turning into a total arsehole because everyone kept dying so he decided none of them really count. Making the good mirror for the Doctor's continued caring for mayfly lives, and how far he'll go to save someone who is technically dead and therefore doesn't have any time left at all. However long he lives he keeps caring, yaays. The story resolves with the younger version of the guy seeing what he'll become and killing the older version. With the usual laws of time he'd still be stuck going through it all, but he'd also have saved the world from himself, which is a real brain breaker. This audio copping out and deciding that actually secretly the 'laws' of time are suspended right then so it just establishes a new timeline? Way more hopeful. So I like it, but it do remove the whole consequences layer from things. Still, second chances are of win. He just up and decides not to grow up to be that guy. Well, the very pointy version of deciding. Hope is yaay.
Embrace the Darkness was pretty cool, playing with the possibilities of audio to have a whole story in the dark where some characters don't know about some aspects of their own appearance and also don't know when other characters disappear. They know they've gone silent, but that's all they or we know. Is fun. And it was proper scary in the middle. Though I'm not sure of the ableist layer of having people being driven mad by being blinded. And then they all got healed before the end. It turned into a fable about misunderstandings based on a lack of communication, and everyone just listening to each other made for pretty much a happy ending. I like it.
Time of the Daleks I have listened to relatively recently, but it don't half work better as part of a Charley arc than as a set of Dalek stories. Dalek stories get dreary fast, plus this way it's obvious there's weirdness centered on Charley and more things make more sense. I always like the time loop that the Daleks get trapped in, and the horrible yet appropriate fate of the dictator lady. Kind of not sure about them making it a lady, want to do some maths about women in power, that doesn't seem to work out real well for them very often. But the new rule of time makes actual sense for once, that being that if a young version touches an old version the loop shorts out and the older version gets killed by all that energy. Because the younger version has to survive to become the older version so they can touch. That would be a really nasty way to murder a time traveller, just line up a meeting and shove them and they'd always know it was coming.
(If the older version is holding the younger version ie keeping them alive at the time, then it must get real complicated, because the energy can't short in the same way without creating a bigger mess. Hence Father's Day.)
The messing about with Shakespeare gets even more amusing when it joins all the other messing about with Shakespeare in the Doctor Who 'verse. The dude must spend half his life ducking the Doctor's involvement.
And then there's Neverland, which feels like the focus could be tighter on the interesting bits, yet presumably thinks it was all interesting bits. I liked best the idea of a society with the ability to erase people from time always believing they'd never yet used it. That makes sense, and it does a lovely reductio ad absurdum on 'those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it'. They don't remember punishing people, so they keep doing it, even though it's a horrendously complete capital punishment. And there's hints this is why there are so many only children on Gallifrey, and people growing up without friends - the friends were there, but they get sent to the Oubliette. That's logical and fun.
Messing around with buzzy weird voices made it more difficult to follow, and was not so much fun.
And then all the bit with Zagreus was too bzuh to be very fun.
But luring Gallifreyans into a trap by baiting it with stories of Rassilon is excellent. He's such a central culture hero figure, a big story about how Gallifrey was great once and how once upon a time they became Lords of all Time, he's like dreams of empire in another dimension. People dreaming on that is really clearly a bad thing.
... except then there's that kindly voice dude that the Doctor and Romana treat with great respect, so then it's more like it's not wrong to dream on Rassilon, just some people are doing it wrong. I'm less sure I like that idea.
Neverland is pretty good, if you like Romana and messed up Time Lord politics, but the messed up voices and big emotional speeches about how kind and noble and awesome the Doctor is kind of get in the way, to me. Well, Charley's big emotional bit anyway, I guess I liked Romana's because she calls the Doctor names too. He really does need the both.
... I just don't like Charley. It's annoying. There's so much more story left with her in it. And I like 8 a lot.
Today I liked Doctor Who more than I have for a few days. I still feel I need to think up better things to do with my time, but, it seemed improved. Or my mood is.
Big Finish get better as they go along. but I still do not like Charley at all at all.
There was a thing Big Finish did when they got the Highlander audios to play with where they decided the mechanics were more interesting than the characters. They invented new and interesting things to do with Quickening, and in the process messed around with the characters we actually wanted to hang out with to the point they might as well have given them different names.
Big Finish really like messing around with time travel. Paradoxes and the laws of time are their happy places. So Charley's story is one long and intricate journey through made up physics, and while it's interesting to hear new laws of paradox in almost every story, it's not the variety of interesting I am there for. So again, playing with the mechanics, plenty fun, but not quite what I think of when I think of Doctor Who.
But there was plenty of good character stuff too, for the Doctor. Times to be clever and opportunities to make mistakes and times it all works out in the end by being willing to talk with anyone.
Charley though just continues to wind me up. She has the opportunity to get kidnapped or held captive by people from all over time and space. I do realise that this is a central feature of Doctor Who, getting captured and escaping fills up a lot of time in a lot of stories, but she gets captured and gets rescued and otherwise spends a lot of time tied to chairs and so forth. It's dreary.
Seasons of Fear had someone made 'immortal' by aliens and so turning into a total arsehole because everyone kept dying so he decided none of them really count. Making the good mirror for the Doctor's continued caring for mayfly lives, and how far he'll go to save someone who is technically dead and therefore doesn't have any time left at all. However long he lives he keeps caring, yaays. The story resolves with the younger version of the guy seeing what he'll become and killing the older version. With the usual laws of time he'd still be stuck going through it all, but he'd also have saved the world from himself, which is a real brain breaker. This audio copping out and deciding that actually secretly the 'laws' of time are suspended right then so it just establishes a new timeline? Way more hopeful. So I like it, but it do remove the whole consequences layer from things. Still, second chances are of win. He just up and decides not to grow up to be that guy. Well, the very pointy version of deciding. Hope is yaay.
Embrace the Darkness was pretty cool, playing with the possibilities of audio to have a whole story in the dark where some characters don't know about some aspects of their own appearance and also don't know when other characters disappear. They know they've gone silent, but that's all they or we know. Is fun. And it was proper scary in the middle. Though I'm not sure of the ableist layer of having people being driven mad by being blinded. And then they all got healed before the end. It turned into a fable about misunderstandings based on a lack of communication, and everyone just listening to each other made for pretty much a happy ending. I like it.
Time of the Daleks I have listened to relatively recently, but it don't half work better as part of a Charley arc than as a set of Dalek stories. Dalek stories get dreary fast, plus this way it's obvious there's weirdness centered on Charley and more things make more sense. I always like the time loop that the Daleks get trapped in, and the horrible yet appropriate fate of the dictator lady. Kind of not sure about them making it a lady, want to do some maths about women in power, that doesn't seem to work out real well for them very often. But the new rule of time makes actual sense for once, that being that if a young version touches an old version the loop shorts out and the older version gets killed by all that energy. Because the younger version has to survive to become the older version so they can touch. That would be a really nasty way to murder a time traveller, just line up a meeting and shove them and they'd always know it was coming.
(If the older version is holding the younger version ie keeping them alive at the time, then it must get real complicated, because the energy can't short in the same way without creating a bigger mess. Hence Father's Day.)
The messing about with Shakespeare gets even more amusing when it joins all the other messing about with Shakespeare in the Doctor Who 'verse. The dude must spend half his life ducking the Doctor's involvement.
And then there's Neverland, which feels like the focus could be tighter on the interesting bits, yet presumably thinks it was all interesting bits. I liked best the idea of a society with the ability to erase people from time always believing they'd never yet used it. That makes sense, and it does a lovely reductio ad absurdum on 'those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it'. They don't remember punishing people, so they keep doing it, even though it's a horrendously complete capital punishment. And there's hints this is why there are so many only children on Gallifrey, and people growing up without friends - the friends were there, but they get sent to the Oubliette. That's logical and fun.
Messing around with buzzy weird voices made it more difficult to follow, and was not so much fun.
And then all the bit with Zagreus was too bzuh to be very fun.
But luring Gallifreyans into a trap by baiting it with stories of Rassilon is excellent. He's such a central culture hero figure, a big story about how Gallifrey was great once and how once upon a time they became Lords of all Time, he's like dreams of empire in another dimension. People dreaming on that is really clearly a bad thing.
... except then there's that kindly voice dude that the Doctor and Romana treat with great respect, so then it's more like it's not wrong to dream on Rassilon, just some people are doing it wrong. I'm less sure I like that idea.
Neverland is pretty good, if you like Romana and messed up Time Lord politics, but the messed up voices and big emotional speeches about how kind and noble and awesome the Doctor is kind of get in the way, to me. Well, Charley's big emotional bit anyway, I guess I liked Romana's because she calls the Doctor names too. He really does need the both.
... I just don't like Charley. It's annoying. There's so much more story left with her in it. And I like 8 a lot.
Today I liked Doctor Who more than I have for a few days. I still feel I need to think up better things to do with my time, but, it seemed improved. Or my mood is.