Today is Thanksgiving in the US, and we’ve been enjoying the first day of our long weekend with lots of good food and a mini-marathon of Doctor Who.
I’ve always been a huge Doctor Who fan, dating back to when I was a kid. My room looked like a Doctor Who museum gift shop exploded in it. I watched every episode, read every book, and bought every poster and collectable I could get my hands on. Doctor Who fandom in the 1980s was a pretty small group in the US, but we were die-hard.
When the show relaunched in 2005, I was elated, and it once again became appointment television. Up until the middle of season six or so, at least. But something about the tenor of the developing storyline with Amy, Rory, and River was bothering me. It just didn’t feel right;1 I still can’t really articulate it, the whole story that was developing over the beginning of season 6 just didn’t sit well with me.
There wasn’t a breaking point; there wasn’t a moment where I threw down the remote and said “That’s it, I’m done!”2 But something was corrupted in my download of the subsequent episode, and I needed to go and re-download it3 and then we got distracted with this thing and that thing and….the next thing I knew, time had passed and we still hadn’t gone back to pick it up. The things I was hearing about the developing storylines didn’t actually make me feel like I wanted to come back to it, either. I did watch “Asylum of the Daleks” with runnerwolf, and the Christmas special “The Snowmen”, because those were setting up the new companion. The first just refreshed my annoyance with the Rory/Amy storyline, and the second I liked well enough to say I wanted to watch the series again, but not so much that I immediately made room in my schedule for it.
Then, this last week, they aired the 50th Anniversary episode.
I had been keeping an eye on the lead up to the festivities, but I figured I’d wait and see what they actually did with it before committing to watching it. Multi-Doctor stories are tricky at the best of times, and I was a bit wary of what they might do with it. But after it aired I heard nothing but good things4, so I pulled it down and we settled in to watch it on Monday night.
To say I loved it would be an understatement. I’d been intending all week to write a more detailed reaction to it, but this was an episode that felt so perfectly right to me, with the right balance in tone between funny and serious, paid the right nods of respect to the classic series, and managed to hit a big reset button on some of the recent continuity in such a way that preserved the effect while lifting the staggering burden from the Doctor’s shoulders so that he can move on without being blithe and simply deciding to ignore the monumental consequences of his actions.5
The net result of this has been a revitalisation of my interest in the adventures of the good Doctor, so today we settled down over our Thanksgiving dinner to start watching again. We’re not going back to where we left off — I’m still not entirely ready to watch the rest of the Ponds’s saga — but we did pick up with “The Bells of Saint John”, which was the first proper episode featuring Clara as a companion. We got through four of them today, which is rather a lot in one stretch for us any more, and I’m finding myself quite engaged. Some of this is due to Clara herself. She really reminds me more of an old-school companion in her relationship to the Doctor, and she’s smart and very capable. The details of her unfolding mystery are interesting enough, but mostly I just like her personality.
We expect to watch the remaining four episodes we’re behind on over the weekend. I hope everyone had a wonderful day, and that, regardless of whether you are in the US or not, that you spent it enjoying life with people you love.
I expressed this to my friend Jeff, who has been my best friend since we were twelve and is also a devoted fan of the show. He said, “I’m sorry you don’t like them.” and I explained that it wasn’t that I disliked them. I loved Amy and Rory to death, and what I didn’t like was what was being DONE to them. ↩
In fact, the last episode we watched was “The Doctor’s Wife” by Neil Gaiman, which I loved to bits. ↩
I still download the episodes off the underwebs. I don’t trust BBCA not to make a dog’s breakfast out of the episodes cutting them down for time, after the travesty of their edits on “The Eleventh Hour”. ↩
Even Zander Nyrond, who has been a bitter critic of the new series, wrote “that actually wasn’t bad. I shall probably watch it again, and who knows, it might even make “rather good.”" ↩
Doctor Who has never been the world’s most continuity-conscious shows in the best of times, but there are some elements you really do have to resolve on screen. ↩
Mirrored from Home of the Autographed Cat.
Whew! Another long fun day at OryCon.
Last night at 11pm was the Polyamory panel, which was in a smallish room absolutely packed with people. There was a lot of discussion about different ways to approach non-monogamy, and a couple of people there were dealing with particular issues in their own relationships that they asked the room for advice on. There was a great deal of advice handed out both generally and specifically. I got a good laugh when I noted that 95% of relationship advice for how to have a good poly relationship also applies as to how to have a good monogamous relationship, “and the 5% that doesn’t mostly involves calendars”.
I had hoped to make it to open filk last night, but after this panel was over, I was exhausted so I went back to the room and went to sleep instead.
We got up and out in time to get breakfast at the hotel buffet before I had to be at an 11am panel titled “Social Media: Revolution or Time Sink”. It was a spirited discussion about the various ways not only that we all use social media, but the way that marketers use the information they collect from our engagement on social media for various purposes.1 We got a lot of good questions from the audience, and it was thought provoking.
I had a couple of hours off after that before moderating three panels in a row. The first was titled “Putting the Play Back Into Role-Playing”, and had a neat group of RPG vets. We talked a great deal about storytelling, collaboration, and how role-paying is ultimately what you bring to the table as a player more than the mechanics of the given game you are playing. I was left at the end of it with a desire to get into a really crunchy character-driven RPG again.2
Immediately afterwards3, we convened a packed, standing-room-only hour titled “Fifty Years With the Doctor”, celebrating everyone’s favourite Time Lord. The audience (and the panel) was a pretty even split between old-time fans of the show like myself and folks who had only gotten into Doctor Who with the new series. Two of the panelists even said that they got into the show because of their kids, which was a neat sort of reverse-generational story that you don’t run across too often. After a few opening remarks, we pretty much threw this one open to the audience, and had a rollicking good time rockin’ the TARDIS.4
The third panel of the afternoon was titled “The Positive Influence of Video Games”, and was just me and one other panelist. He had a lot of notes on scientific studies on the topic, and some background as a developer, so there was a lot of interesting data. But aside from those studies, we also talked about the aesthetics of gaming and whether or not video games could be art, the sorts of skills and social connections that gaming can help develop, and stories about games that had changed our thoughts about things or made a positive impact on our lives. We got a lot of good audience participation on this one, too, and I felt pretty good about it.
I met up with kitanzi in time to hear the very tail end of Callie Hills’s concert, which was unfortunately scheduled against my panel, and then we went back up to the room and ordered some food for dinner, after which I took a short nap before my final event of the day, which was being part of a “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” game. If you’ve never seen the TV show, it’s improv theatre games, with the twist here being that a lot of the topics and scenarios were tailored towards a science-fiction con crowd. My favourite game was one where we each took on the persona of a fameous author, and then discussed our approach to a book. The topic was “Romance Self-Help book”, and the authors were HP Lovecraft, Terry Pratchett, Dr. Suess, and George RR Martin. The lady who had Dr. Suess went on a sad monologue about trying to gain the affections of Sam-I-Am, turning to me at the end and saying “He won’t try my green eggs and ham. What should I do?” and I, as GRR Martin, stepped forward and said “It was at this point in the story that Sam-I-Am suddenly and tragically died.”, which good a good laugh. When it died down, I said “But love must go on, so I am introducing 743 new characters in the next chapter.” which got an even bigger laugh. We also had a lot of fun with traditional bits like Party Guests and Dating Game.
Once again, I find myself too tired for open filk. But I have my concert tomorrow at 1pm, so i’ll get to do at least a little bit of filking at this con. But for now….sleep.
Which is ultimately, in my view, not really as sinister as we tend to treat it. 95% of the people collecting data are doing it to more efficiently sell us things we might actually want, which means less time wadding through advertisements that you don’t care about. Since they’re going to put ads in front of us anyway, they may as well be for things we want to see. ↩
Aside to the old Defensive Perimeter folks: I miss you all so much. ↩
luckily, all three of these were in the same room ↩
If the TARDIS is a’rockin’, don’t bother clockin. ↩
Mirrored from Home of the Autographed Cat.
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aiela , via madlori , the 30-Day TV Meme.redaxe noted, if a show is your favourite, there's not likely to be one single episode that stands head and shoulders above the rest. In my case, having declared my favourite show to be Doctor Who, I have over 30 years worth of episodes to choose from. I think it would be hard to nail down my favourite episode from each Doctor, but I'll try...
Possibly the eyepatch is a reference to the 1970 Dr. Who episode "Inferno"?
Or am I overthinking this?
You're definitely not overthinking this. I'm amazed that anyone caught that.
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momijizukamorikrja
