Everything Appears Beautiful to Me

[wizard0rb]

silent protagonist meetup

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Neverland

Recommended? Yes!

Huh. I thought this one was pretty interesting, it moved quickly, and it had a curious premise (which I shan’t spoil until below the break). But the ending kind of overshadows all of that!

At a base level, I like the idea of the Timelords persecuting the Doctor for interventionism. Obviously, Charley not dying has caused a lot of time breaches, so it makes sense that they would step in.

But it’s odd that that doesn’t turn out to be the Timelords’ core motivation — instead they’re using Charley to pursue Zagreus?? Weird. Also, not sure I understand how Charley can act as a gateway to the Anti-time dimension and also appear in the Anti-time dimension.

Okay, but, I love the revelation of who the Never-people are! The idea that the Timelords essentially used a crueler form of the death penalty, and all the supposedly-erased ghosts have come back to haunt them? That’s interesting. And it doesn’t make much sense time-travel-wise, but I loved that Centriss erased herself after checking the tapes and seeing just how many people she’d forgotten she erased. To me, it’s like a literalization of the way that institutions use distance and bureaucracy to blind perpetrators to their own violence.

However, the story doesn’t make “unpacking all that” the goal. Instead, the myth of Zagreus turns out to simply be a trap laid by the Never-people to lure the Timelords into a terrorist attack. And they don’t care about the casualties across time and space because they’re fucked up and evil and that’s it…. :/ ok

It’s kinda like the Interstellar Song Contest where a real offence is handwaved by making the backlash to the offence so ridiculously outsized.

Anyway, The Doctor defeats them by materializing his TARDIS around theirs (clever). But this infects him with anti-time, and this new (fucked up and evil) Doctor adopts the name Zagreus to be scary.

…I’ve heard people talk about Zagreus but I actually had no idea who he was! I assumed he was the deep voice heard in previous audio dramas, but I guess that turned out to be Rassilon’s consciousness in the Timelord matrix.

I don’t know what Zagreus’s motivation could possibly be. Is it the same as Centriss’s? To get revenge on Galifrey’s bigoted institutions? If so, that’s cool in theory; though, he doesn’t have the personal connection to it that Centriss did.

Is he just the Evil Eight? Probably. We’ll see.

8/10

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The Time of the Daleks

Recommend? …………Yes?

This story has some ideas I love, but it's so confusing I had trouble getting through it.

There are numerous characters and Daleks in a palace with a confusing layout and time travel shenanigans involving clocks and mirror portals and teleportation. And sometimes there are plot twists about the time travel shenanigans not working the way you expect them to... it got a touch too granular for me to follow. I feel like they did their best to make it comprehensible given the material, but I kept having to jump back 30 seconds to relisten to parts and it took me several days to finish.

I think the idea of Shakespeare being erased from history is a good hook. The scene of Charley listing less popular Elizabethan playwrights like Kit Marlow (to prove she’s not the crazy one lol) was great. And I’m sure that Shakespeare fans loved hearing so many quotes coming from the Daleks. It didn’t do much for me.

(Spoiler:) I also didn’t figure out the little boy in the library was Shakespeare until the last second, because I'm stupid :) but when it was revealed I was like “…oh okay? cool. does that, like, impact the story?” and the answer was no.

There were also several inexplicable bootstrap paradoxes, which make it even harder to follow the story’s cause and effect because some things happened via choice and some things happened because they happened.

For instance, we learn after the fact that Viola went back in time and kidnapped Shakespeare to protect him from whatever event erases him from history. But that WAS the event that erased Shakespeare from history. So her attempt to protect him from his disappearance caused it. I feel like that could’ve been a more interesting beat if we’d learned about the disappearance of Shakespeare and then seen Viola choose to kidnap him. At least then you could follow the character’s POV through the paradox, instead of dropping the whole paradox as one big wibbly wobbly timey wimey ball. Plus, it would have given the characters something more interesting to do than run from Daleks for 2 straight hours.

Don't get me wrong, I think the Doctor using kitchen foil to create a makeshift mirror portal is brilliant as far as "running from Daleks" goes, but there's little else of substance here. Too much plot, not enough character.

Anyway, I know that’s a lot of complaints, but I still feel strangely charitable toward the writers, like they shouldn’t be faulted for ambition. So...

7/10

(Maybe I'm crazy but I think if this story were adapted for television it could be much improved.)

(Also, it's getting a little predictable that Charley's always the time anomaly.)

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Embrace The Darkness

Recommended? It's lightweight, so sure, I guess!

This one is interesting. It seems like it's going to be a horror story about people's eyes being stolen, but -- through a series of left-turns -- actually arrives at being a very neutral story with no bad guys.

Basically, The Doctor and Charley arrive on a base under siege by aliens (Cimmerians) who hate light; in fact, the base's residents have had their eyes burned out by painful light-destroying particles. The Doctor uses the base's equipment to generate a ring of artificial suns to fend off the Cimmerians!

BUT. It turns out the Cimmerians burned out people's eyes on accident, and they're actually healers who desire to heal everyone's eyes (so badly that they will compulsively kill themselves to do so), and they only hate light because it attracts their enemies -- and sure enough, their enemies (the Solarians), arrive. Facing down this new threat, the Doctor surrenders.

BUT. It turns out their ancient enemies are just... plague victims? Cimmerian plague victims who've evolved into a separate race? Apparently they were forced off the planet because the healers couldn't handle the strain.

...So, like, the Cimmerians are the bad guys then? But... but not really, because they would have compulsively killed themselves. So they had no choice. One Cimmerian does express guilt for turning away their compatriots thousands of years ago -- not knowing that the Solarians are the same compatriots -- but that is just about the only thing of consequence in this story, other than the noble Cimmerian who kills themself to save Ferras.

The moral of the story is practically stated outright by a Cimmerian:

"It is the tragedy of misunderstanding between cultures."

5/10

[meddlingmaesy]

i say this as a 12/clara enthusiast and a friend to clara stans… but I personally think every episode featuring clara would be better if river was there instead 😬

imagine the ‘be a doctor’ moment in day of the doctor with river in clara’s place, imagine more kingston + capaldi, imagine river and missy’s rapport, luna university instead of coal hill, the singing towers leading into heaven sent, river’s portrait in the confession dial, river on gallifrey.

again, I do like clara!!✌🏻much love clara stans!!!! ❤️ i just personally care about river and what a thorough completion to her arch could have looked like more than I care about clara. i feel river’s arc is a cekhov’s gun set up with no execution. the story sets up her future adventures with the doctor, reveals who she is, then suddenly drops her except for three guest appearances to wrap up loose plot threads.

if anything, this is another layer to add to your butch lesbian 12 au’s :)

[meddlingmaesy]

and and and if river were the one to jump into the doctor’s timeline on trenzalore in place of clara, then this could provide an in-universe explanation as to why river and the doctor happen to meet in almost exclusively the opposite order besides the doylist explanation of ‘for the time travelers wife vibes’

after the great intelligence starts tearing the doctor’s timeline apart from the inside and the doctor prepares to jump in after him, river decides to incapacitate the doctor and jump in his stead. she succeeds in knocking him out and handcuffing him to a rail but before she can enter the time stream, the doctor comes to and begs her not to go through with it. she explains that she knows if he enters his own time stream he’ll die and also that if she goes in, her own timeline will tangle with his, thus explaining why they meet in an unusually convoluted order even for time travelers.

bonus points if they get married in this moment instead of on the pyramid at the end of s6.

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I AM ALWAYS SAYING THIS 💯👆🔥

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Seasons of Fear

Recommended? Oh yeah!!

This story is so sprawling that it's impressive how well it works. In fact, this is the kind of thing modern Doctor Who TV probably could never pull off, despite how badly they want to.

The Doctor meets an immortal man -- Sebastian Grail -- who claims to have already won against him and conquered this timeline, in a battle the Doctor has yet to experience. So the Doctor traces Grail's timeline back to 305 AD, to the Roman occupation. What follows is a convincing rivalry over 1500 years!

The Doctor and Grail clash at first because Grail is merely greedy, and easily manipulated by extraterrestrial invaders. However, the Doctor starts to resent Grail as they reunite over the centuries and the man grows crueler and more detached. I particularly liked the scene when the Doctor talked about how important decay and change are -- that even he does it -- but not Grail, he's stagnant, so time piles up on him and steals everything good.

I also LOVED the resolution. Grail finally succeeds in summoning his extraterrestrial masters, but the Doctor changes the timeline this time by simply hitting the fast return switch three times (I_understood_that_reference.gif) and arriving back in Ancient Rome, and taking a different tack with Grail this time. He uses everything he's learned about Grail to convince the younger version of the man to give up his ways.

But then the older Grail arrives, and the younger Grail is so horrified by this dark version of himself that he kills him. Surprisingly, this all tracks perfectly. There's so much setup and payoff that makes this whole thing work and that finale is the cherry on top.

My man Paul Cornell.

10/10

Actually very interested in where the cliffhanger is going, also.

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Chimes of Midnight

Recommended? Oh my god yes!!!

This story is brilliant. It’s thematically rich, moving, gripping from start to finish, and super original. And [spoilers] it manages to do a lot with Charley’s backstory — unexpectedly wringing so much meaning out of The Doctor’s simple choice to let her live in Storm Warning.

I have so much respect for the kind of writer who can thread together all of these narrative strands into a tapestry this coherent — seamless, even!

10/10

Edit: ROBERT SHEARMAN WROTE THIS?? OF NINTH DOCTOR “KILL YOURSELF” FAME? NO WONDER IT WAS SO GOOD! WHY DON’T THEY LET THIS GUY WRITE DW ALL THE TIME??

[fairymousse]

Might be a hot take, but idk, Empire of Death is worse than the Reality War, because it was chosen to be written that way.

Cause, Reality War is awkward, anti climactic, and low-key misogynistic towards Belinda, but I mostly feel all of that was unintended. There's too much set-up without pay-off, and pay-off without set-up, and we already know there were reshoots. Ncuti wanted out, most likely due to delays, and the episode has to pivot on itself and it breaks. It's a bad episode, but you can understand why.

Empire of Death on the other hand, no one forced them to make that. No one held a gun to their head. No one made them make an episode largely compromised of sitting around doing fa in a wasteland, and bungling a mystery. It wastes it's villain even more than they say the Rani was wasted, but at least the Rani did something. And there's no behind the scenes drama really, it's just poorly executed.

Also, Space Babies is overhated but that's another story

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Invaders From Mars

Eighth Doctor audio drama #5

Recommended? Nah… 🥲

I have loved audio dramas since I was a child. My father burned old Buck Rogers serials to CD for me, and I wore those suckers out.

On paper, this should be one of my favorite Doctor Who stories. It’s practically a love letter to radio drama history and 1930s pulp, camp and cheese, mixing together gangster, noir, sci-fi and WW2 tropes. But the mix doesn’t cohere.

Some things I loved:

It’s called Invaders From Mars very cheekily

Orson Welles being a character in a Doctor Who story

References to The Shadow and Welles’ Hamlet

Setting a Doctor Who story on the day that Welles’ War of the Worlds radio drama incited panic — what a genius idea!

The idea that the invading aliens are just running a planetary protection racket, like gangsters. lol

The idea that the end of the story takes place moments before this photo of Welles was taken makes me so happy:

Orson Welles explaining to reporters that he had not intended to cause panic (October 31, 1938)

Something I didn’t love: Every character is 1-dimensional.

It was almost impossible to keep track of all the gangsters because they all sound like cartoon goons.

Don Cheney could have been interesting (I can’t believe he was voiced by Simon Pegg) because he was self-conscious about his facial disfigurement, but they didn’t do anything with it.

Glory Bee could have been interesting since she was a Russian spy, but aside from the twist they didn’t do much with it (frankly, bringing a Russian spy trope into this made me realize the writers weren’t trying to tell a coherent story so much as cram in tropes).

And don’t get me STARTED on Cosmo Devine. The gay man who loves Nazis???? What are we doing here? They made Simon Pegg use the f-slur on him???

The plot moves at a halting pace throughout. And the ending is insane. The Doctor's clever plan to scare away the aliens with Orson's performance fails because he forgets to turn off the broadcaster while shit-talking the aliens. Well, that's a little unsatisfying. But then, coincidentally, Stepashin the Russian scientist invents the first atomic bomb in recorded history?? and detonates it within the alien ship, within the earth's atmosphere??? And this is okay??

5/10

UPDATE: FUCK ME. MARK GATISS WROTE THIS?? THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING. WHAT THE FUCK? WHY DO THEY KEEP LETTING THIS MAN WRITE DOCTOR WHO STORIES??? Okay, sorry, maybe Mark Gatiss is a nice guy. But he is a consistently bad writer for Doctor Who.

[thenugking]

Predictions for the future of Doctor Who

disney backs out

2027 gives us a special that explains whatever the fuck's going on with billie piper. It makes everyone very angry but it ends with us getting a new doctor and the promise of a full new series in 2029!

the 2029 series has less budget and is only six episodes long. The producers try to explain this is actually a Good Thing because they can make a really tight epic story arc that's going to be Doctor Who Like You've Never Seen It Before!

It's followed by another 6 episode series on 2031. These series are generally agreed to be Shit, with a couple of absolutely amazing completely bizarre episodes that will be remembered forever.

The BBC do not cancel Doctor Who. It's just going on a little bit of a hiatus. Don't worry about it.

Wilderness Years 2 Electric Boogaloo begins.

Big Finish gets a big boost in popularity as people go there for new Doctor Who content. They produce more and more adventures with no more plot than, "And we have this Fan Favourite Character back to team up with this other Fan Favourite, and fight this Classic Monster!!" as quality goes steadily downhill. By 2035 they're releasing a new audio every day and using AI write their scripts.

The BBC licences a new series of novels that they don't really care about, which are generally agreed to be some of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time.

In 2050 or so Doctor Who is brought back as a hard reboot, using a lot of ideas from the 2005 series (the Doctor is the Last of the Time Lords, there's a large focus on the companion's home life). This makes a lot of Doctor Who fans extremely angry but also genuinely refreshes the franchise and makes for an extremely good series. David Tennant makes a guest appearance as the Master.

In the 2062 season finale, there's a surprise appearance from Jodie Whitaker, who comes out in costume and frantically explains to the current Doctor that the Division have Done It Again and erased a whole lot of their past.

This leads into next year's 100 year anniversary special, which retroactively reconises all of original Doctor Who. It's bad.

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My only hope is that the dismal reception to the past two seasons humbles RTD in the same way that that dismal reception to seasons 6 and 7 humbled Moffat.

To this day, I think the fact that we got so many mature, thematically-rich stories in the Capaldi era — written by the man who wrote The Wedding of River Song — is miraculous.

I just hope that RTD has the introspective capability needed to focus up his scripts, stop going for the “maddest” ideas just because they’re mad, and deliver some real payoff. That’s all people really want.

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Just found out a bunch of the Eighth Doctor audio dramas are adapted from old FAN PROJECTS??? from the 80s

Minuet in Hell and Sword of Orion both!!

A long time ago, I was involved in a fan project writing unofficial audio dramas. It didn’t go very far (and I was never very good at it) but it was always a lot of fun and I’ve cannibalized many of my unused concepts for other projects.

The idea that the founders of Big Finish were cannibalizing their unlicensed fan stories into licensed, official ones is deeply heartwarming to me. Never let your dreams be dreams.

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Wish World

was a much, much better "alternate reality" episode than The Wedding of River Song -- at least there was a meager point to the alternateness of the reality -- however, that's an incredibly low bar. I kinda hate The Wedding of River Song. I always complain about this, but why is Doctor Who so allergic to straightforward finales? Why do we need to shift to an alternate reality (which will be forgotten after next week's episode) when the Rani could do a million interesting things in our reality? I know they want to raise the stakes, but it's actually not that hard to raise the stakes without doing stupid reality-breaking shit (see World Enough And Time, or any Brandon Sanderson finale). Empire of Death would be SO much more interesting if the people Sutekh was threatening were the ~12 characters we care about in UNIT headquarters instead of 12 trillion lifeforms all across the universe. There's so much interesting drama you could get out of those 12 characters facing down death, but they're blipped out effortlessly, just as Sutekh later is.

I don't foresee a satisfying wrap-up next week. I could be wrong about The Reality War, but that title alone makes me think I'm right.

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Minuet in Hell

The fourth eighth doctor audio drama.

Recommended? Yeah!!

This one is super interesting, lots going on.

The tone is a little darker than typical Doctor Who — it opens with nearly two minutes of frightening noise and frantic mumbling before chants of “HELLFIRE.” And the subject matter is obviously not the type of thing mainstream Doctor Who would touch: corrupt evangelicals, abuse of the mentally ill… uh, human trafficking?? Bold choices. Surprisingly, I think it all works, though it doesn’t get past surface-level criticism of these topics.

It does however, manage to balance the tone with some great comic relief, in the forms of:

A hilariously cavalier, wise-cracking demon from Hell

The aging Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart

Listening to the Brigadier use a dial-up modem to slowly type emails one letter at a time like an old man was a particularly inspired choice. LOVE it.

I also loved the inclusion of Gideon Crane, a man who believes himself to be The Doctor (a whole 7 years before The Next Doctor Christmas Special) and who repeatedly gaslights the Eighth Doctor into believing he’s schizophrenic. The only part of his character I found skeptical was the idea that Gideon got his Doctory memories from the TARDIS, but then, conveniently, gets his original memories back from the PSI brain machine. Seems like quite a coincidence. And, as is mentioned, the Brigadier being here at all is also a massive coincidence.

The only other things I didn’t like were:

The way Dr. Dayle was tormented by her fear of younger, sexier women. Really? :/

Becky Lee being a demon hunter descended from Saint Peter?? There’s nothing INHERENTLY wrong with this, it’s just a BIG pill to swallow for something that never really pays off?

Otherwise I loved it!

8/10

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The Stones of Venice

Recommended? Mmm, nah, unless you like something surreal.

The Stones of Venice is the inverse of Sword of Orion: Starts messy buts ends strong.

The premise is surreal and confusing right away. Venice is sinking into the ocean but there are thousands of people here to party? Weird. Venice is now populated in part by a underclass of fish people? Wh- where did they come from?? When? A cult is worshipping a duchess who died 100 years ago? …Why? Charley takes a drug that makes her act like the duchess even though she doesn’t know anything about the duchess? ???

You just have to accept these oddities because they are not satisfactorily explained.

This story also takes the prize for most predictable twist. The Law of Economy of Characters clearly states that the Mysterious Old Woman who keeps appearing but has no apparent plot involvement must be the legendary duchess.

I also think the moral about how we shouldn’t turn real events into myths is pretty asinine, since I was thinking the whole time “what a weird thing to mythologize.” I feel like, either I’m missing some crucial context — like perhaps a real-world parallel — or the person who wrote this story just didn’t understand myths or cults but wanted to criticize them nonetheless.

All that being said, things wrap up nicely. The duchess proves an interesting, bitter character. And while I did not find the duke’s sudden change-of-heart-sacrifice emotionally convincing, it was plot-ly convincing thanks to all the setup!

6/10

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Sword of Orion

Sword of Orion: The second eighth doctor audio drama.

Recommended? Nah

This one wasn’t very good! Fortunately, I’d been warned of that.

The introduction was promising and the setting was interesting. I liked the grimy side of humanity’s future. The scrappers were fun characters for the most part and I liked the idea of an android uprising happening in the background — though more detail would have been nice.

The pacing unfortunately, gets extremely muddy and confusing very quickly once the cybermen appear, and never recovers. There’s not even much of a satisfying ending either. The twist at the end was particularly predictable — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing — but there was actually a bit of a disconnect when the Doctor assumed the Captain’s secret identity was that of a soldier fighting the androids. I had already long since deduced she was an android by that point, so it was strange for the Doctor to not even consider it.

4/10

Oh well! Onwards and upwards!

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Storm Warning

So I started listening to some Doctor Who audio dramas because they have them on Spotify

(he's preemptively coping with the idea that the Season 2 Rani finale is going to be bad)

Storm Warning: the first ever Eighth Doctor Big Finish story in 2001.

Recommended? Yes!

Some slightly clumsy stuff but fuck me if that's not par for the course with this franchise — on the whole I thought it was super gripping! It was kind of electrifying to hear Paul McGann (the guy from the shitty Doctor Who TV movie) getting a chance to crush it with some good long-form material for a change.

The R-101 dirigible was a pitch perfect Dr Who setting — I’d never heard of the thing prior but I loved learning about it — and I loved the finale where Rathbone attacked the Doctor with an axe because neither of them could fire the tresquillion(?) gun near the ship’s hydrogen gas bags. The part where the Doctor went into detail about the R-101’s crash was pretty chilling. And the very last beat, where the Doctor realized he shouldn’t have saved Charley, but then quietly decided to let her live, was really sweet and rather… cinematic? Atm I’ve no idea if that ever comes up again.

Anyway, it was so refreshing to experience a straightforward, solid Doctor Who story with no gimmicks, just competent setup and payoff.

Solid 8/10!

I've been hearing about Paul McGann's audio dramas from hardcore fans for a long time, so I'm really happy to have them on streaming so l don't need to buy CDs from 2001 or $5 MP3s from Big Finish’s website :)