#phonetic drift

[justassorted]

Details: Ithadel

It’s always interesting to me to think of some of the changes Ithadel has lived through over the course of his 700-year life.

I’ve talked about medical developments and the shift in average heights before, but here’s one more — language! English is only one example, since Ithadel is a bit of a polyglot, but even just since the 1300s, accent/pronunciation, sentence construction, and many words have all shifted noticeably.

[ilikedoctorwhoproject]

Why I like State of Decay

Since Bug week was so much fun, let’s do Vampire Week! Everybody loves Vampires! And Doctor Who has, by my count, five six different sets of vampires we can talk about (if you count the Ogri. I mean, they’re rocks, but they drink blood, so close enough?)

Of these, the only ones that are actually legit vampires are the ones in “State of Decay,” the second installment of the E-space trilogy. Despite being set in an entirely different universe, the episode is textbook vampire schtick, complete with medieval castle, terrified peasants, excessive eye makeup, and bats. Lots and lots of bats. This is not sloppiness on the part of the writers, however, and, as usual, nothing is quite what it appears. Except possibly the bats.

What I like most about this episode, I think, is the expert interlacing of futuristic and archaic themes. The castle that is actually a space ship, the low-tech peasants hiding a high-tech resistance, the gross misapplication of Grimm’s Law*… it’s all extremely cool and works surprisingly well. There’s something a little post-apocalyptic about it - all the technology is very old and decaying, and the people have rebuilt something completely different and rather more primitive. I’m kind of a sucker for plots where future and past are inverted in this way, the modern and ancient reversed.

The costuming in this episode is also pretty incredible. Really over-the-top gothicy renaissancy stuff. Black lace and bright stripes, all burnt oranges and burgundies. You have to hand it to them, the vampires really look like vampires. Camilla and Zargo even have long black draping sleeves or something that give a very batlike look to them. This contrasts with the homespun of the peasants and the mix and match outfits of the resistance. Even Adric and Romana get their own vampire outfits, both of which are actually really very flattering. The whole look of the episode is just neat.

This episode is also interesting from the perspective of Gallifreyan history. It is one of the only episodes that makes use of Rassilon as anything other than a Mystical Artifact Generator, and casts light on the days before Gallifrey’s vaunted non-interference policies. It is the Doctor’s duty as a Time Lord to step in and destroy the vampires by whatever means necessary, and for once he actually seems to be on the same page as the rest of them. It’s more than a little disconcerting, to be quite honest.

I should also mention just how much I love the resistance group. This is another episode where the Doctor’s main role is to galvanize existing groups into getting stuff done their own selves, which tends to be my preferred role for the Doctor. In this case it the group in question is this technological resistance. They collect up old tech in an underground cave and try to get it working again. They’re not very good at it, but their whole society has been under a system of technological repression for dozens of generations, so you can’t really blame them. They are hard-working and patient - but they might be too patient. They are unwilling to risk the advances they have made in a direct attack on the castle, until the Doctor lights a bit of a fire under them. And the thing is…they’re not wrong. Without the Doctor’s expertise and K-9’s superior firepower, it would not have worked. On the other hand, without the hard work and preparation, not to mention manpower, of the resistance, the Doctor’s plans would not have been able to succeed either.

Speaking of K-9’s superior firepower, this is a great episode for K-9 being generally snarky to everyone. He and Adric get to make friends over the issue of Adric’s stowing away, and he gets to sulk like nobody’s business while insisting that he is in fact incapable of sulking. This is also Adric’s second episode and we get to see him interacting with the team - it’s sort of his trial by fire. And the neat thing is, when he joins forces with the vampires, we don’t know enough about him yet to be able to judge if it’s genuine or not, especially when he starts bringing up Varsh’s death from the previous episode. (And, as I said, the vampire getup looks really good on him).

Also there’s that one scene where all the bats come out of the cave. It’s incredible - they blacken the sky. And I’m pretty sure they just found some bats and filmed them, because bats actually do that. In any event, it’s super cool.

So I like the look of the episode, I like the feel of the episode, I like its continuity and its character development. I like the way Camilla is obviously much much smarter than Zargo. And I like how straight the vampires are played. It’s like “yep. These are vampires.” (Also, the Hydrax! What a cool name for a ship!) It’s everything a vampire episode should be.

(did we mention what a wonderful stake the castle makes?)

* Okay, so, brief digression into pedantry. I have such mixed feelings about that scene. They correctly describe Grimm’s Law as the set of consonant shifts (b>p, d>t, g>k, p>f, t>th, k>h)** that distinguish the Germanic branch of Indo-European (compare pisces vs. fish). Which is awesome. Talking about Grimm’s Law in Doctor Who? Very yes! And in the same context as a plot that could be a Grimm fairy tale? Even cooler! But then they talk about the shifts that happened in the names of the Three Who Rule. First off, Grimm’s Law refers to a specific historical event, that happened once in a specific time and place. Attributing developments on this planet to Grimm’s Law is equivalent to attributing them to the French Revolution. It doesn’t actually make sense. On top of that, the changes they’re talking about are idiosyncratic and only affected the names, not the language as a whole. This isn’t even (neogrammarian) Sound Change (which is by definition regular and exceptionless), let alone Grimm’s Law. And thirdly, the mutations that Romana puts the names through don’t even involve the set of sounds affected by Grimm’s Law. It’s mostly deletions and metathesis (MacMillan > Camilla, etc). It’s just so wrong on so many levels. On the other hand, what’s actually going on with the names and the natural mutation of sounds, while definitely not Grimm’s Law, is still incredibly cool. Linking the vampires with the crew of the Hydrax via phonetic shift is just awesome. Seeing historical linguistics used at all in a show like this is absurdly awesome. So this scene always makes me really conflicted, the two sides of my geekdom at war with one another. Yes, it is a gross misapplication of Grimm’s Law, but the result is cool enough that I can overlook it. Sometimes.

** This is also an oversimplification of Grimm’s Law (for one thing, I left out about a third of it) but it’s close enough for you to get the general idea.