Unsolicited Advice

The First Doctor: William Hartnell First serial: 100,000 BC Last serial: The Tenth Planet Costume details: A gentleman's day wear from roughly the Victorian era, with an appropriate shoulder-length hairstyle. Frock coat with astrakhan collar and karakul hat, dark cloak, long scarf. Wears an ornate ring on one finger. Companions: Susan , Ian Chesterton , Barbara Wright , Vicki , Steven Taylor , Katarina , Dodo Chaplet , Polly , Ben Jackson At first glance, the First Doctor is egotistical and imperious. At second glance, he's egotistical, imperious, and also flubs his lines a lot. This is because the Doctor was not initially supposed to be the focus character of the show. Originally, the show that we know as Doctor Who  was conceived of as less a science-fiction serial, and more of an edutainment program -- you will notice, if you watch the very early stories, that they're rather heavy on history, and comparatively light on stuntmen in giant rubber suits. The audien...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

The audio drama, I feel, is an underrated format these days. Video killed the radio star a long time ago, I guess. I walk very nearly everywhere, and I need something to keep my brain occupied while my feet move; this is absolutely vital because, left unsupervised, I quite frequently wind up chattering to and with myself while I move. Not out loud, you understand -- I am mad, but not ostentatiously so -- but the internal monologue can go weird and suddenly depressing places without something suitable to prime the pump. There are a variety of podcasts that I use for that, and for blocking out obnoxious roommate noises when I'm trying to sleep, and the obvious assortment of audiobooks from Librivox, but there are also pieces of purpose-produced fiction that help pass the time on the train. One of the go-to collections are the various ranges of audioplays from Big Finish Productions, a British company who specializes in such. Big Finish is apparently run by nerds who are genuinely...

Hello, various other estadounidenses ! As many of you even outside the US may know, today is Thanksgiving, an American holiday where we, the descendants of European settlers, celebrate the fact that the natives were generally better human beings than we were back in the 17th century, and refused to let the colonists starve no matter how stupidly unprepared for winter they all were. I know there are still many political and cultural problems with the traditional iconography, but I would like to think that all of us, regardless of where we come from and what has happened in the past, can appreciate a day dedicated to making three times as much food as anyone could possibly eat, and then lying around digesting for the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours. I have yet to see a society in which feast days do not occur, so I feel safe in saying that pretty much everyone on the planet as at least this tiny bit of common ground. I do not attend family functions because of Reasons, and I have...