S e n t e n t i o l a

Frances de la Doctour

sententiola:

ensou:

Doctor Who’s creator wanted to regenerate the Time Lord into a Time Lady in the 1980s

I still want this to happen. I want it more than I can express.

Also I want it to be Emma Thompson because I am MADLY IN LOVE WITH HER. But. You know. Whoever’s available (and awesome).

FRANCES DE LA TOUR!

Frances de la Tour

                              would be the best

                                                           Doctor

                                                                       ever.

Srsly.

Look at her on the right of this picture:

With this scarf:

And her companion would be some clueless teenage boy and she’d be constantly exasperated with him and make this face:

And sometimes for a laugh she’d dress up at the Fourth Doctor:

But mostly she’d just save the universe in this very matter-of-fact and slightly off-hand way and people would be amazed and at first she wouldn’t quite understand why because it was all surely just a matter of common sense, but then after a while they’d keep saying ‘You’re awesome’ and she wouldn’t say anything but she’d do this face as if to say, ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

And she’d be right.

(Can you tell I’ve given this some thought before?)

I just heard on the radio that de la Tour was actually considered for the part of the seventh Doctor and now I feel vindicated but also deeply bereft.  :(

(Also another candidate was Elaine Stritch OMG.)

(Source: twitter.com)

nuditea:

frankenstein’s monster just lifted up and threw down a dalek

why hasn’t that happened in the reboot series

martha totally could have kicked one over onto its side

This is kind of the problem with the Daleks, though, isn’t it?  They just aren’t very inherently threatening.  They’re made of metal and they have guns and they want to kill you.  That’s it. You can still blow them up or hit them with things or push them off cliffs or whatever.  Or at least run away from them, because they move really slowly.

I get why the Doctor finds them especially scary: he knows that there are zillions of them and they’ll never stop, and most of all it’s impossible to sympathize with them, which is his main way of dealing with everything and everyone (except his companions).  But the actual nature of their scariness isn’t well suited to the way Doctor Who works as a television programme.

Individually, they aren’t a threat that the viewer can take seriously.  In a massed attack they’re a serious threat but also unstoppable.  To be a convincing threat that the Doctor can still ultimately defeat, there has to be an imminent danger that they will attack in overwhelming numbers, but that attack has to be contingent on some sort of complicated plan that the Doctor and his companion(s) can personally thwart.

And there’s no problem with that in itself: obviously writers can and do come up with such scenarios.  The problem is that there’s no reason why the aliens in those scenarios should be Daleks.  Any plot that goes ‘quickly we must do XYZ or else a huge unstoppable army of Daleks will attack’ would work equally well if you replaced the Daleks with any other aliens, because there is nothing that an army of oversized salt-shakers with guns can do that an army of Cybermen, Sontarans, Judoon, Sycorax, Ice Warriors, or even Adipose couldn’t do.  And, unlike the Daleks, they would probably do it in a more interesting way than ‘trundle towards you while shooting’ and for a more interesting purpose than ‘we are evil and want to kill everything’.

I sort of wish they’d just forget about the Daleks for at least a few series.  New Who has had some great monsters of the week but it’s been pretty lousy on creating good re-usable alien cultures, especially threatening ones.  Moffat tried to re-use the Weeping Angels and it just made them rubbish.  I suppose the Silence could work if they were brought back at some point, but their shtick is so unusual and specific that they aren’t eminently re-usable.  But otherwise, it’s been, what the Judoon?  And… I actually can’t think of any others.  Someone needs to get working on that.

Then we can stop bringing the Daleks back, and after a few years someone can ask the Doctor what happened to them and he can say ‘Oh, they’re all gone now, Martha kicked them into a big hole’.

nuditea replied to your post:

!! spoilers, sweetie

perseidbadger replied to your post: 

Spoilers :(

Eek, I’m really sorry!  I hope it didn’t matter too much in the end.

Turned into a doll?  Seriously?

Image is an alot (from Hyperbole and a half) wearing a crescent-shaped Time Lord collar thing behind its head and a round Gallifreyan medallion around its neck.  The caption reads ‘ALOT OF TIME’.

(Source: fathomed-into-constellations, via brandebouc)

Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency does a nice summary of the ‘mystical / alien pregnancy’ trope in screen sci-fi and fantasy.  (Some cissexism and US-centrism though.)  Doesn’t mention the recent Doctor Who plot but one can see easily how it fits in.

I’ll try to do a transcript tomorrow if I have time.

(Hat-tip Chloe Angyal.)

theunscientificmethod:

sententiola:

[Spoilers for new Doctor Who up to the latest episode, especially series 6.]

So I’ve heard a few people saying they find River Song’s relationship with the Doctor icky following the revelation that she’s the future version of Amy’s and Rory’s baby daughter and I’m now wondering whether I’m some…

I think that you make a lot of good points. I have no problem with the Doctor/River relationship as said relationship currently exists/has been presented (ie he’s only met her once as an infant and then the entirety of their relationship occurs while she’s an adult). What worries me is the idea of the relationship going, not Breaking Dawn-, but Time Traveller’s Wife-style, where the Doctor appears throughout River’s childhood with the knowledge of their future relationship (since their timelines seem to be running roughly opposite), thus removing some element of free will from River’s future decision to be with the Doctor. Now, I’m not saying this is what’s going to happen, but it is a potential development that I worry about. I hope this makes sense, I’m really tired and dehydrated. 

Hello!  Nice to tumblmeet you, and thanks for responding.

I definitely agree that there are many ways it could go wrong, and it may well do.  I haven’t seen or read The time traveller’s wife but yes, it might well become unpleasant if it turns out that River’s attachment to the Doctor began (will begin?) in her early childhood or something like that.  I mean, even there I don’t know whether that’s necessarily a problem in itself, but it would have a lot of potential for inequality and unhealthiness in the relationship.  (And it would also uncomfortably mirror Amy’s infatuation with him that resulted from her childhood encounter with him.)

I don’t know whether you’re using ‘free will’ in that sense — that her choice of the Doctor as a lover might be strongly influenced by encountering him when she’s a child — or whether you mean that River’s relationship with the Doctor might become literally predetermined.  If the latter, I’m not sure that’s how time-travel works in Who.  Which may not be very logically rigorous, but my reading has always been that nothing is ever predetermined, no matter how much you muck about with time (to the point where the Doctor could change major historical events like the destruction of Pompeii, he just doesn’t allow himself to do so because if he did the universe might break).

And actually, as long as the uncomfortable-childhood-influence thing doesn’t happen, the mere fact that he will encounter her with knowledge of their relationship that she hasn’t got is of course no more troubling than the fact that in the episodes we’ve seen so far she’s been encountering him with knowledge of their relationship that he hasn’t got.  (And in between there seems to be (going to be) a period of approximate equilibrium where they’ve both got the hang of it and each have a diary and can compare notes, as we saw River and future-Doctor doing in The impossible astronaut.)  And the opposite-timelines relationship has the potential to be extremely interesting because it lets each one seduce the other.  We’ve seen River courting the Doctor from her position of greater confidence and familiarity, and at the other end it could be the same, which is a nice sort of equality-by-averages.

Having said all that, yes, it does appear that River is going to be encountering the Doctor while she is still a child (and probably killing him, assuming it’s her in the space-suit emerging from the sea).  And that could be skeevy.  Although if at that stage she’s mostly trying to kill him, possibly not.  Who knows?  We shall see!  :)

Doctor / River: what’s the problem?

[Spoilers for new Doctor Who up to the latest episode, especially series 6.]

So I’ve heard a few people saying they find River Song’s relationship with the Doctor icky following the revelation that she’s the future version of Amy’s and Rory’s baby daughter and I’m now wondering whether I’m some kind of horrible person for not seeing the problem. Like… is it that he met her while she was a baby? That she slept in the cot he slept in when he was a baby? That she’s his friends’ daughter? I genuinely don’t understand.

Is it the age-gap? But, first of all, what’s wrong with age-gap relationships if they’re non-exploitative, consensual, mutually respectful, and the partners are on an equal footing (all of which is clearly true of the relationship between adult River and the Doctor)? And secondly, we always knew there was an age-gap: the Doctor is nearly a thousand years old and River, as far as anyone ever knew, is human and therefore probably quite a lot younger. Plus Alex Kingston is a fair bit older than Matt Smith, so just going by appearances there’s a gap the other way. Thirdly, they’re both time-travellers and their relationship is non-chronological so even applying the concept of an age-gap to them makes no sense. They’re each different ages every time they meet. Now that we know River is some kind of Time Lord, it’s quite possible that at some of their previous meetings she’s been several millennia older than the Doctor. And the fact that she was born at a certain point in absolute chronological time and he at another is completely irrelevant to everything because they move through time in a non-chronological way. I mean, unless some bit of Who canon that I don’t know about says otherwise, we don’t even know when, in absolute time, the Doctor was born. He may not be born until millennia after River is.

If the icky thing is that he’s met her when she was a baby and held her and stuff, well, okay, if the idea of that makes you feel uncomfortable then they’re your feelings and good luck with them, but objectively, what, again, is wrong with that? If you went back in time and met your lover’s baby self, and picked up and cradled the baby, would you expect people to say ‘ew’? Would you find it icky to hold the baby? That just seems weird to me. I mean, we’ve all been babies. Even the people we have sex with. If you go out with someone for a while there’s a good chance you’ll see photos of them being a baby. If you sleep with someone, go back in time and meet them when they’re a baby, and then go forward in time again and sleep with their adult self again, I don’t see how that’s any less okay than if you sleep with someone, look at baby-pictures of them, and then sleep with them again.

Some people have compared it to Breaking dawn. [Spoilers ahead for Breaking dawn.] They seem to me completely different in every important way. The icky thing is that Jacob falls in love with what’s-her-name when she is a baby. He is in love with a baby. There is, as far as I can recall, no indication whatsoever in A good man goes to war that the Doctor is in love with, fancies, or wants to have sexytimes with baby River. He relates to her like she’s his friends’ baby and that’s all. He doesn’t even know she’s going to be River until after she gets abducted so his interaction with her is in no way affected by the fact that he wants to snog her future self.

So. Help me out here. What is the problem with this relationship?

There’s a gif in circulation that’s a short clip from a recent episode of Doctor Who showing [warning: spoilers for current series] a TARDIS pregnancy scan on Amy that fluctuates between positive and negative, and the gif has the caption ‘SCHRÖDINGER’S BABY’.

It’s a good joke!  I like jokes about quantum physics.  I even made the same joke myself at the time, so I’m glad someone’s put a bit more work into it and got it the wide geeky audience it deserves.

But

[warning: I am about the spoil all your fun because I am mean]

I wish it had said ‘SCHRÖDINGER’S FOETUS’.  I really do.  I know people start talking about them as babies before they’re born, and ‘baby’ isn’t a scientific term with a specific definition, but seriously.  Amy’s quantum-foetus is probably no more than five or six months old.°  In the UK, Canada, or many states of the US she could still have a safe and legal abortion.  Calling the organism that may or may not be in her uterus a baby plays into anti-abortion rhetoric.

People do pick up on these little variations in how we express ourselves and words do matter.  Even words in geeky jokes about fun television sci-fi.

· • ·

° Here’s my maths:  In The impossible astronaut she’d just started having morning sickness, which probably puts her around week six or seven.  Three months pass between then and Day of the moon so that’s five months at most.  We don’t know how much time passes between that episode and The curse of the black spot but probably not much: note that she’s very slim and not showing at all, and I’m willing to bet that’ll continue to be the case for at least the next couple of episodes.

Okay, that was epic.  I even missed Doctor Who.  Thank goodness for the BBC iplayer.  See you in an hour or so.

Picture is a fake advertisement based on a still from the most recent episode of Doctor Who.  The presidential desk in the Oval Office in 1969.  Behind it sits the Doctor (played by Matt Smith), hands folded, looking straight at us like ‘let’s get down to business’.  On the left, sitting on the desk and holding the receiver of a red telephone to her ear, is Amy (played by Karen Gillan); on the right, walking behind the desk and making notes on a paper file, is Rory (played by Arthur Darvill).  I’ve just noticed each of these actors has a double-letter in their name.  Anyway, sorry, yes.  The image has blocky business-like sans-serif capitals at the top saying: ATTACKED BY MONSTERS?  ERASED FROM HISTORY?  TURNED INTO A ROMAN?  WE CAN HELP.  And then at the bottom it says: SPACE-TIME LAWYERS and in big blue letters TEAM TARDIS and then smaller again CALL 1-800-DOCTOR NOW.  OUR OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY TO TAKE YOUR CALLS.  NO WIN, NO FEZ.

(via ladysaviours)

I just saw my ticket to ‘Passion’ lying on the bed and thought it said ‘Rassilon’

I really needn’t say any more, need I?

Frances de la Doctour

ensou:

Doctor Who’s creator wanted to regenerate the Time Lord into a Time Lady in the 1980s

I still want this to happen. I want it more than I can express.

Also I want it to be Emma Thompson because I am MADLY IN LOVE WITH HER. But. You know. Whoever’s available (and awesome).

FRANCES DE LA TOUR!

Frances de la Tour

                              would be the best

                                                           Doctor

                                                                       ever.

Srsly.

Look at her on the right of this picture:

With this scarf:

And her companion would be some clueless teenage boy and she’d be constantly exasperated with him and make this face:

And sometimes for a laugh she’d dress up at the Fourth Doctor:

But mostly she’d just save the universe in this very matter-of-fact and slightly off-hand way and people would be amazed and at first she wouldn’t quite understand why because it was all surely just a matter of common sense, but then after a while they’d keep saying ‘You’re awesome’ and she wouldn’t say anything but she’d do this face as if to say, ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’

And she’d be right.

(Can you tell I’ve given this some thought before?)

(Source: twitter.com, via junkmanchoir)

genderbitch:

thedisreputabledog:

tardisadventures:

cardiganenmity:

(via danarudenko)

Oh my god. What is this from?

Dalek Sex says: COPULATE!

I lol’d till it hurt.

Oh, I remember this from when it was on ye olde television!  It was a Doctor Who special edition of a flippant British quiz programme about pop music called Never Mind The Buzzcocks.  Aired just after Tennant’s last episode as the Doctor, if I remember rightly.  Also one of the contestants (they’re all celebrities, more or less) is Catherine Tate, who turns out to know hilariously little about Doctor Who.  The whole thing is on YouTube.

So once again it’s taken me several hours to read all the posts by all the people I follow — people, you are all wonderful, but you’re so prolific it’s killing me! — and consequently it’s now nearly two hours into Wednesday.

And apparently there’s this Gratuitous Picture Of Yourself Wednesday thing that happens on Wednesdays?  Which is fortunate, I guess, what with the name.  (Which day is Highly Necessary Picture Of Yourself day?)

Anyway, far be it from me to refrain from these local Tumblr customs.  My camera is in one of these many many boxes, though, and the connecty thing that plugs it into the computer is in another of these many many boxes, so here’s a picture from January this year from a ‘futures of the past’ themed fancy-dress party.  It’s me in fancy dress (or ‘cosplaying’, as all the cool kids seem to be calling it these days) as the Tenth Doctor (the David Tennant one), smiling and brandishing a sonic screwdriver.

(Notice the clever way I appear to be helpfully describing the photograph for any readers who can’t see it, but actually I’m just using that as a cover for saying what what my costume was meant to be in case it isn’t clear.)