Unsolicited Advice

People ask you all kinds of nosy personal questions when you show up out of the blue. You are not required to answer them. People get really distressed about this sometimes, but in an amazing coincidence, this is not your problem. You don't need to know anything about other people to help them. They don't need to know anything about you, either. You do kind of need to figure out what they need helping with, however, before you make the mess worse. You can fix an astonishing number of things with a screwdriver and some string, as long as you also have ingenuity. Never assume something is out to kill you unless it is, right at that exact moment, actively trying to kill you. Better to start out with greetings rather than exchange of fire if you can manage it. Unless they're Daleks. Then you run like hell until you can find a gun that gets through dalekanium. Always make sure that your overcoat has as many pockets as you think you'll need. And, whenever possible, at ...

I sat down and marathoned the Clara arc last night. That was... not bad. Particularly after Amy and Rory. A marriage made of "I love you more" vs "You couldn't possibly love me" is not one the Doctor should have been trying to save, but I guess there are some lessons even the Doctor never learns. Clara stuff under the cut, because the finale went out a month ago, there's more in the 50th Anniversary special, and I don't need the internet to throw things at my head.

One of the reasons I find it irksome when someone's main story arc is "desperately wants to make out with the Doctor" is that I have a long-running bone to pick with media in general about depicting romantic love as the only kind that counts. Finding someone to love  is excellent character development; it needs conversations, maybe some verbal sparring, glimpses into the armored bits and vulnerable places of the characters involved. It gives people motivation. It informs their decisions in a way that (ideally) furthers the plot. Deciding to have an intimate relationship with someone else explores matters of choice and experience and emotion and how they intertwine, and how blind circumstance can shape lives. Bonding with someone as a mentor, a surrogate sibling, a working partner, or a best friend is no less influential in this regard than bonding with someone as a lover. But falling in  love with someone is depicted as the sine qua non  of character development, as i...

So far, the new crew seems to be hewing to the old canon wherever possible; the books and audios don't seem to come into it yet, if ever. There've been strong hints in the expanded universe that the novels and audios take place in divergent timestreams, which seems to solve the problem quite neatly. There's a fair amount in the classic series about Time Lords and regenerations and whatnot that new fans don't always seem to be aware of, though. Clearing firstly out of the way something wot annoys my friend David a lot: Time Lords get twelve regenerations . Twelve second chances, essentially. You've got to regenerate from something the first time, which means that, assuming no jiggery-pokery, we've got room for thirteen  Doctors. It's used consistently this way throughout the classic series, and the math squares up in stuff like Mawdryn Undead  where the Doctor talks about how many lives other people are trying to steal from him. I don't recall if it...

I really ought to sit down and watch through the rest of the Eleventh Doctor stuff. I've skipped a lot of it. Karen Gillan and Matt Smith are horribly endearing to watch backstage -- they like to sit squashed together and pick on each other like they've been friends for much longer than they actually have, it's adorable -- but the whole Doctor-or-Rory-or-possibly-Doctor- and -Rory thing went on far too long and eventually got right on my last nerve. I mean, from a perspective within the fandom, I know full well why everyone wants to snog the Doctor, but for pity's sake, why  does everyone want to snog the Doctor? He's nine hundred years old, alien, and weird , you'd think that would make at least a few people go, "...oh good God, no, I never thought of it like that ." I've also skipped a lot of the Tenth Doctor, despite loving Tennant in the role. Catherine Tate irritates me. I'm not sure if it's a personal preference or a cultural diffe...

The Daleks have been a mainstay on Doctor Who  since the beginning. They're generally regarded as terrifying. Oh, there are other horrible repeat offenders -- the Cybermen are always coming back, the Ice Warriors of Mars, the Silurians, Autons, and of course the Master, who just cannot seem to keep his paws off the Doctor even when he has entire planets to occupy his time. But the Daleks are so iconic that even people who only kind of vaguely know about the show have some idea of what they are. If you've somehow managed to miss all of their appearances... congratulations? They're everywhere. Conveniently enough, almost all of their appearances have followed the tradition of having "Dalek" right in the title, so you can locate a suitable sofa to hide behind before they come into frame. Every Doctor has dealt with them, even the Eighth if you delve into audios and novels, and absolutely none  of them like the things. If you've only seen the new series, then ...

Moggie walked into the haidresser's as a blonde the other day, and walked out a redhead. Mwahahaha. ONE OF US. ONE OF US. ONE OF US. I was quite surprised when I first heard, as an adult, of redheads getting teased for their hair color. My tastes in TV notwithstanding, I'm American, and I'd never heard "ginger" as a derogatory term for a redhead until South Park  centered an entire episode around it. Since I didn't make it a habit to watch South Park  either, even that took a while. I had  heard the term "firecrotch", which I'd considered one of those things that was nominally rude unless it was coming from someone with whom you had an affectionate relationship -- off-color but not necessarily derogatory. (I also thought Lindsay Lohan was a twit for getting that angry over it.) I've never personally been called "carrot top"; I'd probably be annoyed on the grounds that it was undignified, but it's a bit old-fashioned, and n...

Further character notes on Vislor Turlough: (I'm still pretending this is in aid of Moggie's paper, shut up. Her birthday's coming up and I'm not digging out my long-forgotten tumblr password just to put it all on there for her.) The Doctor almost certainly knows that he's not really an English schoolboy within a few minutes of meeting him. Turlough does a conspicuous amount of not freaking out over things like a dimensionally-transcendental transmat capsule that teleports him up to a giant Art Nouveau-style spaceship. He doesn't even bother to pretend much -- he makes a few off-handed comments about the ship's drive well within earshot of the Doctor, and knows it -- and the Doctor also doesn't really pretend to be surprised that he's not pretending. If you follow the expanded universe stuff, the place he's from is, or at least was, a fairly wealthy trading planet; they used transmat routinely, and although they didn't develop the pocket ...

Wow. Peter Davison was not kidding when he said he was quite shy when he was younger. Sometime in 1982, the This Is Your Life  people managed to catch him, and good lord. He looks like he's sincerely trying to blush himself to death. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 For those of you who are not familiar with stage and screen makeup, like most very pale people, when Davison's in studio as he is there, they've usually got him in pretty heavy foundation and matte finishing powder. This stuff is thick and opaque and specifically meant to cover flushing, among other things -- it can get really hot under stage lights, and you don't want your actors looking as though they're about to die of heatstroke, even if they are. It's pretty effective stuff, to the point where often when an actor does go all pink on camera, you can only tell when it hits their ears, which the makeup artist will usually skip as inconvenient and unimportant. You have to turn some really inventiv...

Every so often when I go about chasing down stuff interesting actors do, I run across something I think would be useful to a totally different discussion. I mentioned a couple of entries ago that I've been watching A Very Peculiar Practice , and that Captain Awkward would be proud of the talking involved in the central romance, but the good Captain would probably also be proud of the talking in a lot of the other relationships as well. The character of Rose Marie, for example, is an intentional parody of the stereotypical view of militant feminists. She goes by just "Dr. Rose Marie" because she doesn't believe in surnames as "patronymics", and she espouses the view that sickness is something men do to women. She likes to talk about the evils of the "phallarchy". I don't mind this, actually -- this thing is part comedy, after all, and most of these people are supposed to be untenably insane. It's quite clear that she's not normal, and ...

While I'm entertaining Moggie with this, I might as well write up a profile on the fellow who played Turlough as well. Mark Strickson is really  amusing. The Doctors tend to have personalities fairly close to what they played on the show, but the companions are much more a mixed bag; some of them have a lot in common with their characters, some of them are just actors pulling things out of thin air. Strickson is playing almost entirely against type in that show. He is the very dictionary definition of voluble , in person. To say he talks with his hands is entirely too mild a phrase -- I don't know why he hasn't knocked over many more microphones, to be honest. One of the more entertaining bits I've seen is from a stage panel he did a few years ago ( part one , two , three , four ) where at one point he actually stands up and moves the chair  so that he can give a proper acting demonstration down front, on the floor, in the spot. I did wonder if conventions made him ...

I've started watching through A Very Peculiar Practice . Normally, I hate sitcoms. I find most of them very irritating. You have a protagonist, who you're informed is a nice person but who never does much of anything to prove it, because the entire framework of the show is built on them being backed repeatedly into socially untenable corners and not doing anything sensible to get out of them. You could resolve most of these plots in about five minutes if someone, anyone , just sat down and went, "Look, this is awkward and all, but here's what's going on." But of course nobody ever does that, because if your protagonist grows any kind of backbone or accidentally buds some common sense, there goes the premise of your series. Davison has a knack for picking comedy projects that I actually think are hilarious. Including about half of his sitcoms, which I think is a record. I started watching this thing figuring I'd sit through a couple of episodes, see what ...

I have, of course, been helping Moggie with her paper. I research things like I breathe, and I am desperately  amused that she's finally writing something on "Sidekick Studies", which I have been telling her she should be minoring in for years. There's a strangely small amount written on the role of the sidekick in literature, at least that I can find; the main source that most things cite seems to have been written up about a decade ago as someone's thesis and published in the popular press much more recently. I have also been trawling through YouTube looking for useful things, because that is what I do. It affords me an excuse to look through countless hours of footage of people I find highly entertaining. One of these people is Peter Davison. Moggie and I are firmly in favor of his entire career -- he does Doctor Who  things, some of the few sitcoms and drama-comedies that I've actually found amusing, and police procedural/detective series like Campion  a...

Sometimes I wonder about my influence on Moggie. I've just convinced her to do her "persuasive research paper, topic unspecified" on Doctor Who . The Fifth Doctor is her favorite as well, and Moggie has developed something of a fascination for Turlough, for whatever reason Moggie ever does anything, so I suggested that if she could find a topic somewhere in there to write her paper on, it would A) give her an excuse to go watch a lot of old TV again, and B) give her instructor something to read that wasn't yet another paper on how weed is awesome and should be legal. I don't know what thesis she's going to use, but the one I suggested involved treating the series as modern myth and dissecting the role of the Doctor's companions in the narrative from an anthropological point of view, with bonus opportunity to quote Joseph Campbell for academic brownie points. She rejected a thesis of "fuck you, Turlough is awesome" on the grounds that it was too...

I have been having One of Those Weeks, or possibly One of Those Lifetimes, and Moggie has been distracting me with nerdy pastimes. Mog will inexplicably sit there and listen attentively as I rattle on about what ever random thing has caught my magpie eye lately. She claims this is because "I learn interesting things that way," but I suspect that the actual root cause is that she is mad, if congenially so. Many of the magpie-items are her doing, which I feel is supporting evidence for her being bats. Noel Fielding is entirely her fault, and did you lot know he and Julian Barratt are doing some sort of festival in Los Angeles? I think LA overall is a large blot of hot, dry pestilence only just shy of Phoenix, Arizona, but had I the money I might agree to go there very briefly for a live Boosh show. Fielding also recently recorded an episode of QI , where one of the other panel guests was Ross Noble -- along with series regular Alan Davies, whose main job is to answer either ...

One of the first things that Doctor Who  fans ask when they meet each other is, "Who's your favorite Doctor?" It used to be the  first, but it may have been eclipsed by "Old or new?" -- an unfair question, I think, as the two are more a pair of linked projects than one continuous effort, but you could argue either way. It's very much a matter of opinion. Nobody's ever been a egregiously bad casting choice, although a couple of them were surprising, and some of the internal politics way back when kept some of the characters from really growing the way they intended. Six got pretty short shrift on television, where his tenure was interrupted by a series hiatus and then ended by a sea change in management far earlier than he was intended to go, but many of the Big Finish audios are brilliant. He acquires a companion who forces him to settle down a little, mainly because Evelyn simply will not be shouted down. Eight's only on-screen appearance was in a...

I find many things endearing about Doctor Who , both on screen and behind the scenes. Being on the show is apparently quite the experience, no less today than fifty years ago; along with the time crunch of working on weekly TV, there's also the budget crunch of working on an episodic show that needs new sets or location filming every week or two, and the technical challenges of working on effects-heavy sci-fi. Days are long, and shooting some of the scripts without any of the SFX creatures to act against can get bizarre. The show has run for so long and become such a cultural institution that the production crew has almost developed its own little society, complete with mores and customs all its own. One that is seldom if ever spoken of has to do with casting the Doctor. When selecting a new Time Lord, the production team does not generally look for an actor who has a proven track record of playing the kind of Doctor they want -- they look for an actor who in many ways is  the ki...