#time dragons

[the-submissive-samurai]

Dungeons & Dragons: Time Dragons

[fableworld]

Justice versus Mercy

battle of Anuvina’s Gods

[fableworld]

the three main Time dragons. (these pics are a bit old, but meh) 

Kantas. the son of the Solor Kitas. the daughter of the Stella  and Darkna. the son of the Luna

they are all siblings and ‘ruler’ of Anuvina

[shannananan]

Steampunk Dragonologist 2014

If you've noticed the string of updates I've been posting in the last few weeks, I've been in the process of putting this costume together with a huge amount of detail and obsession.

Our 4th Annual Steampunk Festival was today with an underlying Fantasy theme. Originally this process started out as Dragon Whisperer, and turned more into a Dragonologist character. One who goes and lives and studies amongst the dragons in their colony. I could quite literally talk for hours about the details, philosophy and story that goes along with this costume and character. It's great when things like HTTYD, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and The Hobbit count as resources.

[inkedmoth]

Space/Time Dragon Design Examples

Undocumented. Nothing is known about them. (Hell all I know is they're BIG and powerful. No wonder they hide.)

[drhuh-blog]

Season 1, Episode 8: "Father's Day"

My plot summary:

Doctor Who risks the life of every being on Earth (or possibly in the entire universe), by taking Rose to see her own father's death, without telling her that paradoxes result in time dragons coming into the universe and eating everything in reverse chronological order.  Then he tries to blame it on Rose.  Oh, also, no one writing for the show knows what a paradox is, apparently.

Notes/Questions/Gripes:

I will start by saying something nice about the episode: the plotline involved Rose learning much that was disheartening about her father, and about her father and mother's relationship, compared to the fantasy image she had built in her head.  I think today's episode did a decent job of realizing the way in which people can allow memory and optimism to paint a happier picture than reality was, while also recognizing that our positive feelings often persist, even when the myths they were built on are shattered.  So, yay for some narrative nuance!

Mostly, though, I am going to complain.

The show opens on what has to be the worst photograph ever taken of Peter Allen Tyler.  And it stays on that picture, for a while.

Doctor Who doesn't understand these strange human emotions you humans call "emotions":

ROSE

So, I was thinking... could we? Could we go and see my dad when he was still alive? 

DOCTOR WHO

Where's this come from, all of a sudden? 

Rose and Doctor Who go back to Rose's Mom and Dad's wedding.  Rose's dad screws up his wife's name during the vows, and Rose's mom makes a joke about Princess Di. I had to look that up to figure it out, but it turns out Princess Di flubbed Prince Charles's name during the wedding. More interestingly (and more awesomely), she dropped the "and obey" part of promising to "honor and obey" her husband.

We leave the wedding, and go to the scene of Rose's father's death. Rose and Doctor Who watch as Pete (her father) gets out of a car, fumbles with a vase, and is hit by a car that continues driving off. Rose wanted to go be with her father in his last moments, but can't handle the shock of seeing it, and doesn't.  But wait, they have a time machine, so they go back again, and this time, watch themselves watching Rose's dad.  Doctor Who says this:

DOCTOR WHO Right. That's the first you and me. It's a very bad idea, two sets of us being here at the same time. Just be careful they don't see us. Wait 'til she runs off and he follows, then go to your dad. 

Note that he does not say, "if you behave the wrong way, time dragons will emerge from the sky and eat everyone."  Interestingly, as we see in this episode, that is precisely what happens if you behave wrong as a time traveler.

Rose, motivated by fairly ordinary and predictable human emotions, decides to stop her father from being killed by a hit and run driver.

WOW. Doctor Who looks really mad.  Rose seems to have no sense of the negative consequences of her behavior. Perhaps because Doctor Who hasn't mentioned them.

Doctor Who and Rose have a fight, and are extraordinarily mean to each other.

DOCTOR WHO

I did it again. I picked another STUPID ape. I should've known. It's not about showing you the universe - it never is. It's about the universe doing something for you. 

ROSE

So it's okay when YOU go to other times, and YOU save people's lives - but not when it's me saving my dad. 

DOCTOR WHO

I know what I'm doing, you don't. Two sets of us being there made that a vulnerable point. 

First off: Right on Rose for pointing out that, from her evidence, Doctor Who seems to be a-ok with mucking about with the past.  Secondly: Doctor Who is being a real jerk here.  Thirdly, as to the "vulnerable point" line, WTF?  Why is there no rhyme or reason to anything on this show.  There was already a perfectly good explanation for why saving her dad would be a problem: if she saves him, then she doesn't grow up with good reason to go back and save him, so he'd die.  That's a pretty ordinary sense of paradox.  But apparently the problem here is that she was in too close of proximity to another instance of herself? Maybe? I don't know. I do know that it made me angry.

It must have made Rose angry too:

DOCTOR WHO

Rose - there's a man alive in the world who wasn't alive before. An ordinary man, that's the most important thing in creation. The whole world's different because he's alive. 

ROSE

What, would you rather him dead?

DOCTOR WHO

(exasperated)

I'm not SAYING that--

ROSE 

No, I get it! For once, YOU'RE not the most important man in my life. 

I feel like they must have a really intense off-screen relationship, because their on-screen relationship just hasn't built up to this sort of fight yet.

Oh, so, at this point in the episode, we don't know about the monsters, except that we switch to "monster vision" every so often, for a sense of foreboding.  However, instead of being worried, my first thought was, "why on earth would a paradox summon monsters?"  Don't worry, though, the episode doesn't even really try to answer that.

At one point, Rose's dad is maybe hitting on her (this interpretation is later made more likely when we find out later that he fooled around with women outside his marriage a fair bit), and Rose spends a lot of time talking about her and her dad getting together, in a misguided attempt to get him to stop talking about the two of them getting together.  It was in the running for most painful quote of the episode, but it lost out to a line that wounded me much deeper.

So, the paradox monsters, or "time dragons" as I will be calling them, apparently just swoop around silently eating people.  They are sort of like the Langoliers, from the made for tv movie, "The Langoliers" except they look like dragons, rather than chainsaw-mouthed-pac-men, and they mostly eat people, instead of eating away everything from yesterday to make room for tomorrow.

Actual note that I took during the episode: "HAHAHA the TARDIS is the same size on the inside!  Take that TARDIS!"  Apparently, Rose's shenanigans ruined their time machine.  It is almost as if the person who knows how the hell time travel works should have warned her about what could happen if she mucked about with the past.

When Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" came on in the car, though, I seriously considered the possibility that Doctor Who was trolling me.

Rose is just really bad at being inconspicuous in the past. She keeps making statements that reveal she knows about the future, she forgets that 1987 cell phones were not tiny handheld mobiles, she calls her dad, "Dad", etc.

I'll admit I thought it was clever that her cell-phone would only relay the audio of the first ever phone call.  Ahoy ahoy!

Rose's parents are pretty awful to each other.  I feel like this episode does not really require time dragons.  We could have learned the whole lesson about messing around with time without bringing time dragons into this.

And, at around the halfway point of the episode, the Time Dragons start making noise with their killings!  Why?  Why were they quiet before? and noisy now. And this isn't like, twenty minutes apart, even. They were quiet on the playground killings, and then like, half a scene later, they are noisy giant time dragons, just flying around!

Speaking of the playground, the boy who isn't killed in the playground attacks runs to the wedding and shouts the best line ever:

Monsters! Coming to eat us!

And do you know who says that line? It is young-Mickey!  Can I just say, that this show would be markedly improved if Doctor Who's companion was young-Mickey?

Actual note that I took, when the visual reveal of the monsters first occurred: "Those monsters are just ridiculous looking."

Remember how I usually complain that people are far too willing to just follow random orders that Doctor Who barks at them? This episode somehow features the opposite problem. Giant time dragons are flying around literally eating people, Doctor Who yells "everyone inside the Church", and at first NO ONE LISTENS TO HIM! Seriously?  Ugh.

Rose's Dad alternates, throughout the episode, between being pretty dim, and being not quite so stupid as I thought.  For instance, he figures out that Rose is his daughter, but not that, when she saved his life earlier today, that would mean he had, prior to her intervention, died that day.

PETE (CONT'D) How did you get here? 

ROSE Do you really wanna know?

PETE Yeah! 

ROSE A time machine. 

PETE (after a stunned pause) Time machine.

I guess this technically counts as an answer to the question, but like, once you have figured out the person is from the future, "time machine" is pretty much a given, no?  More to the point, his last line there is delivered skeptically. As though he doesn't believe that she got here in a time machine. But he already concluded that she is his daughter from the future, so like, time machine is not the hard pill to swallow in that situation.

At one point, things are looking up for the people trapped inside the church, because the TARDIS key starts glowing.  I don't know why, and I am not sure there is any real reason to listen if they start to explain it.

Oh, it lets Doctor Who remote summon the TARDIS. So long as he has a battery.  

Fortunately, someone has a giant 80's cell phone!

HAHAH, Rose's dad even messes up the plan, when the plan is "sit still and wait for Doctor Who to save you," because he shoves baby Rose into adult Rose's arms, creating, what this show calls a "paradox" but which in reality, is just "a girl with big eyebrows holding a baby".

Except it allows in one of the Time Dragons!

Actual note I took while watching the episode: "Time dragons are still ridiculous."

Doctor Who just got eaten by a time dragon, and the Time Dragon also ruined the TARDIS (which was midway through being summoned, at that moment).

Rose's Dad then figures out that he can save the day by dying like he was supposed to, and when Rose objects, he says, "[Doctor Who]'s not in charge anymore. I am."

This lead me to try and work out the order of succession. It is somewhat hard to extrapolate to a third entry, though:

1. Doctor Who

2. Pete Tyler

3. ???

The Many Uses of the Sonic Screwdriver:

Scanning a wooden door.

I am pretty sure this falls more under the category, "allowing Doctor Who to look busy, even when he isn't really doing anything, because he doesn't know how to fix things, and is trying to make sure no one can figure that out."

Top Gripe:

DOCTOR WHO

No. Don't touch the baby.

You're both the same person and that's a paradox, and we don't want a paradox happening. Not with these things outside. Anything new - any disturbance in time makes them stronger. The paradox might let them in. 

I know that Back to the Future set a bad precedent on this, but, interacting with your past self is not automatically a paradox (it actually set a fine precedent, in that nothing bad really happens when people meet their past selves, but Doc Brown claims that bad stuff could happen, so that's why I say it set the bad precedent).  Changing a past event can be, especially if doing so would result in you not having any reason to go ahead and change the past in the way that you changed the past.  So, Future Rose touching baby Rose should not really be a problem, all by itself, but, say, changing the history of your father's death so that he didn't die alone, and you weren't raised believing he died alone, and so, when you are thinking of things to do when you go back in time, you don't think, "oh I could be with my dad, so that he is not alone when he dies", that would be a paradox.  What's worse, the episode suggests a sort of "Final Destination" style issue, where Rose's dad was fated to die from getting hit by a car that day, and things will continue going wrong unless he dies the way he was meant to. But that's not about paradoxes at all, that's just about some events being fated to happen.  Anyway, everything said in this episode about paradoxes was just atrocious, and the show should be ashamed of itself.  Seriously, the main actual paradox that was introduced in the episode was a result of the thing the show claimed "resolved" the "paradox" of future Rose being too close to one of the past Roses.

Most Painful Dialogue:

ROSE All right then, if we can't, if it goes against the laws of times or something, then never mind, we'll just leave it. 

DOCTOR WHO No, I can do anything. I'm just more worried about you. 

This is the most painful dialogue because it drives home the extent to which there are not any "laws of time" at play. This is a rules-free universe.  There is no logic to it. You can't predict what would happen if someone messes with time in a certain way. No. The writers of Doctor Who are playing a big game of Calvinball with the internal logic of their universe, and they aren't even playing it particularly well.  It makes me sad. What was wrong with Rose saving her father? It's not that changing the past is bad all by itself.  We're obviously not worried about the butterfly effect, because if so, they'd have to be lots more careful when they go around galavanting in different times and places.  Its not even that she has to leave the past the way it was in terms of its impact on her own personal life, because this episode is resolved with her changing history in a way that directly impacts her own personal history in significant ways.  Ugh.  Trying to make sense of this is like playing 20 questions in a language you don't speak against someone who is cheating.  So, thanks for being up front about that, I guess?

Cheesiness Rating:

Brie

Inscrutability Rating:

Merry Platypusmas, everyone!