beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I have been finishing things and then going on to the next thing without writing them up, which today bothered me enough to go fetch the stack back here and write about them.

Doctor Who: Origin Stories
Difficult to give a rating. I think I decided on 3.5/5 stars in the end. The stories vary a lot.
The one about Vastra was very good indeed and I would give it a 5 as a short stand alone.
Same for the one about Kate and her mother and relationship with her father. Covered a lot of significant stuff for the page count.
The rest suffer rather from having to tidy up before they go. ( Read more... )

Glad I read it, not sure I'm happy how much shelf space it will take vs how many pages of it I actually liked.



Doctor Who: The Legends of River Song
I gave this one 5/5. It was going to be 4.5 but when I asked myself what more I would want from River Song published fiction I didn't think of much so I gave it a 5.
It's five shorter stories in one book, and among the Doctor Who running around saving things it manages to hit some strong emotional bits. River and children, or River and predestination paradox. A character that believes they've got a hard deadline. More than one character not recognised as a person by others, just shaped to someone else's design. And where the last story leaves her is also mean, but in a way that underlines canon and how rough it was on her.
I love stories with River, she's such an interesting character, and this set were great.


Big Finish Audio: The Diary of River Song: The Orphan Quartet
Another 5/5
Having said I love River, I am a bit behind on listening to her Big Finish stories. I think to start with I didn't want to run out, and this is the last under this series name. But there's more now with a different name so still some to listen.
These stories had a lot about love and loss and being left behind, not just by the Doctor, but by family, mothers and their children, trying to balance letting go and feeling lost.
I'd have more detail to say if I'd written this right after I listened.
I don't remember much about the Excise Men. I feel like it did a clever plot about forgetting so this might be thematic on my part. It hit me in the feels the least, but it was good plot.
Harvest of the Krotons really worked. I remember loving everything with Jackie and River together. A friendship I would not have thought of but they work, and River has a perspective that's helpful for empty nest Jackie Tyler.
oh hey, free excerpt on Big Finish is this ep https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/the-diary-of-river-song-harvest-of-the-krotons-excerpt-2925
It seemed to strike a balance between having fun with gossip magazine characters and valuing Jackie's perspective. She's so distinctive for DW she goes great with a lot of characters now I think about it.
Dead Man Talking was powerful stuff, made more so because I didn't guess when it was set until it told me, and then a lot of things clicked like cold water. Strong story.
The Wife of River Song is an excellent story. I particularly liked ( Read more... ) The story covered a lot of strong emotional ground, leaving and being left, not leaving and being called in like River calls the Doctor, lots of echoes and issues and feelings. I do recommend it. Trigger warning though, ( Read more... ).



UNIT Incursions
I listened to this one for the story The Power of River Song. There was not as much River Song in it as I was in the mood for, and I didn't feel like I knew the UNIT characters well enough to get any layers of meaning going.
Picking up the 8th box set in a series as your first listen will do that though.
I gave it 3.5 stars at the time, but it has some good ideas and I'd probably like it better if I was here for the main characters.


The last one I was going to review I can't right now remember if I reviewed it before, and the journal search isn't working for me at the minute. Also I don't think the bit where I fell asleep in the middle was the story's fault. So I'll leave it be. It's more fun telling about the good ones.

Many good ones exist and here are several.

The third in the Ianthology by Gareth David Lloyd, this one is about Ianto and his dad.

It's a strong story. Part of me wants to reject the plausibility because it's like the nightmare scenario, but, that is part of how it kicks you in the feels. And you spend most of the story not knowing 'Disco's' name and wondering why that's built up to be a big deal, but then when it lands, boom, it definitely hits.
( Read more... )

Going to rate this one 5/5, but it isnt exactly uplifting to listen to, so I may not relisten as much.

This leads on from something mentioned in the previous audio and does give Jack the chance to charge to the rescue about it but in a way that leaves Gwen completely out of her own story so that's boring.

I can't think of much to say about this one.
It sort of happens around Jack and to everyone else, and I cant see much to do with character or theme in there.
It didnt feel much like a Torchwood or Doctor Who story, ( Read more... )

At best I feel this could be rewritten with the same ingredients to have actual story in it.

But I like it less the more I think about it.

Which is a bit sad for the last one in a box set.

Read by Tom Price and featuring Andy Davidson, this one has a solid mission statement, that Torchwood is gone and the regular people are left coping with the fallout.
But it kind of didnt work for me. Like, it was not, in fact, fallout from Torchwood's actions that kicked off the first half of the story, or even specifically the rift. And the second half was... ( Read more... )
It wasnt very satisfying. I'd keep a lot of the people bits but swap out everything after they left Cardiff I think.

But it wasnt like it was bad either. Just... left me with that niggly rewrite feeling.

I liked this one. Read by Kai Owen, and also by Rhys Williams, a lot (a lot a lot) of the Torchwood stuff in this is happening around the edges of what Rhys really notices. So huge great alien invasion stuff and entire buildings doing time shifty things are happening, and mostly Rhys notices because it messes with the routes for his lorries.

I liked when the satnav started talking to people, and Rhys hears about it because the drivers say they dont like what it's telling them to do, so you Imagine a lot of stuff, but then later Rhys hears it. ( Read more... )

So you get these big swings in emotion, and if the story was following anyone other than Rhys it would be a very different story emotionally, but because of his angle it's very grounded and keeps dropping funny in the middle of the end of the world.

It's very well told.

Written by Joseph Lidster, whose work you may recall
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Joseph_Lidster
this one was very good indeed, if horror is what you're looking for.

I own this audio, I gave it a five star rating in 2009, and yet somehow I had forgotten the contents entirely
and it is a very intense one.

You know one entire entry ago I was all wishing for character stuff, insight into Jack, and more Ianto?
This delivers. Big time.

( Read more... )

Spoilers above under the cut, in some detail because I'm sitting here with my eyes all big.

So yeah, I recommend this audiobook, and I recommend listening this one without spoilers, which I managed to do twice by forgetting about it for about fifteen years.

But it is A Lot.

Like, I'm glad I'm not planning to go to sleep for a few hours, A Lot.



The only bit that doesn't quite work now I've thought about it for five minutes is the framing story where Gwen is telling the middle story, because there's no way she could know some to most of it. But it does add something; another layer of things to worry about mostly.


Good writing.

Today I listened to the BBC audio Submission, the last radio play before House of the Dead.
It has a lot going on about loneliness and guilt, and a thing that makes me want to have a theological discussion with Jack where Jack says he can have no redemption because he doesnt get to die, and I'm fairly sure it doesnt work like that.
Also Ianto being all "I love him but he'll never be mine" also does not work like that, but, that is the tragedy of janto, they never get on the same page about that.
There's a lady in this that was interested in Ianto once, though he seems awkward about that so it seems one sided, but we get a good moment where Jack thinks she is dead and Ianto wont give up on her and this time that saves her. Good for him.

Seriously though, its bothering me that Jack can say/think "Maybe we never get forgiven, and we have to spend all these long years getting used to that fact, 'cause I realised a long time ago, that's the price of immortality. No final act, no redemption, no absolution."

I mean, where is that even coming from? He thinks theres Nothing after. What does redemption and absolution mean to him, that he thinks he could only get it by dying but he also thinks death is the big nothing?

It's not that it's not plausible, after Abaddon its obviously plausible, it's more that Jack lives in a very dark place, and that bit keeps looking worse whenever I think about it.

It was a good adventure.

The only drawback is, as usual with these BBC ones, I have heard them working in audio more recently and they all got so much better the old ones seem... stiff.

But still pretty good.

Said I should probably do something else, didn't.
Listened to Dead Line.
It is still good.
Ianto's speech is sad but good.
And Jack tells him he'll never be just a blip in time.

Thing is though I saw on tumblr someone calling Jack/Ianto an example of a healthy relationship, and I have to wonder about their criteria. I mean Ianto canonically and sadly spent their whole relationship thinking Jack would kite off to see the universe without him and Ianto's one mortal life would never be enough time to really matter. And Jack gets a relationship made of immortality angst, survivor guilt, and stacks of guilt over doing his duty in ways that hurt people. And they're still compelling and beautiful, but, you just want to shake canon until you can get them one day of actually understanding what they mean to each other *and* both being alive at the time.

I mean, there's words I'd pick for them, but...

I do keep reading fixits.

So much audio and so little chance it'll ever change the status on that one.




Also having listened to Jack in the something Among Us audios from Big Finish I feel like he needs a long conversation and a good cry, and possibly a talking to. Like, I get the impression he's genuinely grieving, but he's also rejecting new relationships because they're not from the get go what it was like on the best days of a relationship that lasted years, so, that's a bit not good.

But he's like that because audios have to put the toys back the way they found them, and they found them very sad.



I like the ones where they're both alive but
I know where it's going.

I listened two Torchwood radio dramas, the not Big Finish ones so I had them on a different app.

I have a headache so I do not have big thoughts
but
they're set after Owen and Toshiko die, and the team are down to Jack, Ianto and Gwen.

... my first thought on Lost Souls is that everyone has got so much better at audio acting since then, but they were given a lot of technobabble to get through, so, fair enough.

I dont much relisten to Lost Souls so I hadnt lately thought of how it makes House of the Dead look.
There's some bits about grief and guilt and how the whole team are putting on a brave face for the whole team.
I feel like it doesnt fit well with the monster of the week though. Like there's something about grief draining you and making you vulnerable, yeah, but a tragedy of false hope just sort of sits there.
Until HotD I guess.


Asylum has a good speech from Andy about alienation, how it's part of feeling human to feel alien sometimes. I remembered that, that was good.
I hadnt remembered this seems to be when he finds out what Torchwood is about.
Like, Gwen is trying to hide it from him, but tada, aliens.

Not sure that fits with Big Finish writing a friendship between him and Owen... unless someone retconned Andy after it, which was threatened often enough in Asylum.

Alternatives are that Andy lies convincingly (really?) or that he'd been through all that spooky with Owen and just still remained surprised by aliens.

The Owen and Andy audios are great btw, I'm just turning the stories around in my head a bit and not sure the edges match.




I'll do more thinking when the headache makes space.



Had a nice day.

Today I am relistening Torchwood Outbreak.
I remember not liking it, it was mean, ( Read more... )

ETA: having finished it, I still think it is mean, and otherwise pointless.
But I am much more angry than I used to be about every plot where the vaccine is A Sneaky Plan, so I am pretty much seething about this one.

Hates it.

After I finished reading the first part of the Mummy's Mask adventure I listened again to the Big Finish Pathfinder Legends adaptation.

I like it much less well now I know more about Pathfinder.
That isn't how a wizard would act, or a follower of Nethys.

The audio has the problem that it needs to introduce the possibilities before it uses them. So a spell is used once for a low stakes thing, or mentioned by the character that later uses it, before it is used in a life and death fight. But that ends up limiting the characters far more than their on paper counterparts would be. It establishes which guns are on the mantelpiece, but even a lowly wizard would have a much larger armoury.

Also the thief doesnt find or disarm the traps. At all. In this whole adventure.

I'm not saying the reason is sexism, but they did choose a 3 to 1 men to women group.

The iconics in the pictures in the adventure are rather the other way around.

Plus they brought divine magic users to an undead fight.
Big Finish stuck with the established characters from their first set of six adventures, and they would be rather short of relevant skills, so they keep using irrelevant ones instead.

I liked the audios well enough to go look at Pathfinder, but as adaptations they trip up rather.
It's hard putting game characters, who always have so many tricks up their sleeves, into a linear drama, where you want them in difficulties in a hurry.

oh well.

I have had a frustrating day. Couldn't settle to anything, until this evening I got caught up trying to add consistent tags to my fic recs on tumblr.
... they should all be under https://www.tumblr.com/beccaelizabeth315/tagged/fic%20rec now but what I found most of all is earlier me had phases in what tag seemed obvious, and the further back I went the less obvious now me finds them.

I finished listening to Torchwood One: Nightmares
and then deleted it because my iphone wanted the space to do an update.

Lola, the middle audio, had good bits. Memories that help shape people, so there's good character bits going on. I think I liked that one.

But it turns out I greatly dislike farce, which seems to me to make the story operate at a different reality level to usual and the characters suddenly lose all competence, so I disliked the last audio rather a lot. They were chatty about their genre influences at the end but I know none of them. I dont think I want to either.
So it could be a great example of a thing, but it is not for me.

So then I was annoyed already so I relistened to that one audio that has cdrip in the long title, just to make sure I hadn't missed something the first time, and nope, I still dont like that one at all. It gets to play with the form a lot and rearranges clips and uses musical cues against the grain and on the whole just winds me up. Also it keeps telling you to not listen or you'll die, so either you dont suspend disbelief or you stop listening when it tells you to.
Distancing and annoying, with some little interesting Toshiko bits in there, but not interesting enough to listen again.

I started listening to Doctor Who: Redacted on BBC Sounds but it hasn't grabbed me yet.

I think I rely a lot on familiar formats to make me comfy with listening new things, and when instead it makes the listener as confused as the characters, I get unfairly grumpy about it. Don't know what shape this story is going to be at all so I am going to have to sneak a bit of it at a time.



I also tried to read fic and got through like a paragraph at a time before checking the news again.

And I finished reading the last few rooms in 2 of 6 of Return of the Runelords, which is very exciting but works better if you invest in imagining it properly, or, of course, actually ever play it. Which, not today, nope.


So only tagging things had my focus today, which was not what I expected, and could not be planned for.

Honestly if this brain could steer I'd rule the world by now.

... or just have done something with my degree. One of those.