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x_losficMild *spoilers* for 4x13 Journey's End as well.
Where this serial shines, it seizes the loose threads of established canon and deftly tangles and knots them. It wiggles its way into enjoyable credibility by remembering and slyly subverting Three’s positive remark on Mao in Mind of Evil, for example, or by mentioning that Yates died in the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, apparently making up for his break-down flirt with pre-historic-themed Ultra-Ludditism by sacrificing himself in a Kamikaze effort to plant a nuclear bomb at the centre of London, offing the dinosaurs at the cost of a chunk of Greater London and his own life.
I love the darker, tired Brigadier in this—still recognizably himself, but exhausted, worn thin by a career composed largely of patchwork solutions to incomprehensible problems and failures. I like the idea that the Doctor’s role in his life enabled Lethbridge-Stewart to have someone to spar against, and thus increased his confidence in himself and his work. I especially like this portrayal after the Season Four finale, which was irritatingly insistent that people are too weak to come away from contact with the extraordinary anything but broken, warped or diminished by the encounter.*
This Brig is a character who’s not quite the loveable, immutable, none-of-your-nonsense, thoroughly capable Brig we know, yet he still, eventually, rises to the situation he’s confronted with in Sympathy. My only problem is that I think this Brig might be a touch too milquetoast. Does the Brig really not take risks at all anymore, without the Doctor having been involved in his life? Perhaps in an effort to demonstrate the contrast in Brigs they over-reached a tad.
The Doctor’s ‘nature of his game’ remark is so, so cheesy. It’s a nod to the song the title (and arguably the underlying contention of the audio) is taken from. A nod that bounded up like a puppy after fetching a ball, wanting acknowledged for its cleverness, only to end up accidentally bowling me over in its clumsy enthusiasm. SOMEONE (but who?!) put it best when she said (LINK?) that the Doctor in this is the one thing he should never be as a character in any incarnation—bland.
His sort-of-Threeness grates. But then I’m hyper-sensitive to Three’s voice because I (try to) write it all the time, admittedly with varying degrees of accuracy, but: I have learned to pay attention to its ticks in the effort. This Doctor’s occasional Pertwee-ism seems phoned in—I know Pertwee’s dead and they can’t find anyone with that ‘no I really, I went to a Public School’ accent anymore, or at least anyone who’s willing to do audio work, but it’s okay, it’s possible to get Three-ness if they just write the characterization in via dialogue. But they don’t. Really write Three or write a fully different character—not hard, team.
Doctor-issue aside, let’s talk about Gratiss!Master. First, note that Delgado!Master dying in a random plane crash, while necessary to explain the different Master, is sad and a crap death like Six’s or Seven’s. No, I’m not just biased towards my favorite—it’s possible to have written in a regeneration ANY TIME in the audio’s twenty-year ‘Master stuck on Earth’ interim and have Gratiss!Master just mention that death and regeneration, lending more poignancy to his purgatorial time trapped on Earth and his anger with the Doctor over it.
Also, it would have alleviated the problem of the Easiest Regeneration Ever. Sloughing off the Delgado!Master body, presumably his twelfth here as in other dubious!canon, for the notoriously unstable thirteenth, the Master is hale and hearty throughout the process with no complications or trauma-in-the-medical-sense whatsoever. More than a little odd, as the Doctor’s rarely done that well for himself, aside from bursts of adrenaline, and we can easily assume brand new!Simm!Master collapses after getting off Malcassario in like fashion. Though the Master giggling at Colonel Wood’s efforts to hunt him down while hiding in the bushes is great, very him.
There’s something about Gratiss!Master that feels kind of Simm!Master-ish, all creepy and silky. I love that he’s allowed in script to call the Doctor on his Mao-friendship, and bitchily moan that the Doctor’s just such a tourist. Unflattering, but not entirely untrue—which is what the Master’s commentary on the Doctor should function as, a lot of the time, to have him operate as a threatening, successful foil in a show where for plot reasons he’s not allowed to win more often.
There’s a weird detachment to the Master recognizing the Doctor as ‘my old school chum’ that really doesn’t work with the traditional close enmity between them OR the ensuing reveal that this Master’s been quite specifically waiting for the Doctor to show up all these years while he was stuck on Earth. Pick a tone for them and keep evenly to it, or you risk loosing the entire salience of their interaction. That said, there’s something wonderfully creepy about the Master recounting the things he’s lived through in the past decades. His Decades in Review highlights the dangers of being an exceptionally talented intellectual in that era. Especially vicious is when he recalls, in a heated, intimate tone, how Pol Pot ‘killed every Doctor he could find, and none of them was you.’
The Master shame-facedly, unintentionally reveals that his TARDIS is somehow inaccessible to him and that he’s been waiting twenty years not for ‘some means to get it’ or ‘some way off the planet,’ but for the Doctor specifically. This version of the Master apparently came to Earth very expressly to bother the Doctor, having found out about his exile through some means—and thanks for backing up that ‘Fuck the Autons, Just Here for the Doctor’ fanon, BF—and then expected the Doctor to be his apparently willing means of rescue out of pityor Slash.
Though if the Master just found the Keller parasites on Earth in Sympathy, it sort of retcons the conclusion one draws from Mind of Evil, i.e. that he specifically bought the parasite with him as a backup/second phase/next round before he lost his dematerialization circuit in Terror of the Autons. He might well have found an earth-bound specimen in canon proper as well, if they’re indeed around. Sympathy’s use of mind control and its temple evocation is very reminiscent of the Old-School Master Summoning Kink.
The otherworldly Buddhist chanting is further other-ed in this by making it literally connected to the alien. On an audio it sounds eerie and cool. It’s an interesting play with the pop-Buddhism of Three’s era, but I wonder how actual Buddhists would perceive the element of Orientalism and exoticization?
Brig obliquely intimates that he knows something of ‘the things Keller [the Master] did that made him need to flee the West in the first place,’ which is cool and /really/ makes me curious about specifics. But this is part of a more general issue—a lot of Dark!Earth is cool, but I kind of want more of it—the seedier Earth isn’t just there for atmospherics here, it’s important to the plot, and we could stand more illustration of how it functions.
Where they do this well, for example, is talking about how UNIT had a different business culture without the Doctor, and how it served as a sort of dumping ground rather than a team that received and well-utilized the best and the brightest.
The Brig vs. Colonel Wood thing is kind of lulzy, especially given that Wood is Tennant in a Really Scottish Accent, and the parallel fights between the two of them and the Time Lords, which the audio cuts between, are fun. But the arguments between Wood and Lethbridge-Stewart don’t really seem to have dynamism. While the two of them both have points, they kind of bicker around them and fail to reach any kind of resolution. That makes their relationship kind of meh for me rather than the stuff of thrilling drama. Wood is enjoyable to hate, but beyond that unapproachable.
The Curler brigades going nuts at the end without the parasites to absorb their memories of the atrocities they’ve committed is very cool. It’s HORRIBLY irresponsible of the Doctor to just grab the Brigadier as a new companion and leave—and yet it kind of makes sense for Three, circa Spearhead from Space. That TARDIS-repair is obscenely convenient, but I would have bought it as a Who-handwave if I hadn’t dealt with regular Three-Era, in which it was The Insurmountable Problem.
Audios generally manage to be less slashy from a Doctor/Master perspective than episodes, which shows how reliant that dynamic in any sense is on how the actors play them/the degree of screen presence and how much chemistry their interaction has. Perhaps it’s a kind of lame Doctor that kills the mmph, given that Dust Breeding has Beevers!Master and manages to be significantly more eyebrow-raising (and with Seven, of all Doctors, who generally ties with Four in people ‘hard to slash it’ books). But perhaps the problem is that this Master seems far more serious about his ‘Imma Kill Joo’ schtick than Delgado!Master ever did. Though leaving the Doctor marooned feels like specific punishment for being ‘abandoned’ on Earth himself here, and in some sense there’s a poeticism to the reversal. ‘You’re the reason I was stuck here. You’re who I’m blaming. I’m doing the same to you now. Enjoy my Curlers!’
And there’s no saying he wouldn’t have come and picked the Doctor up in twenty years (and possibly a few regenerations on the dangerous Curler!Earth), when the Doctor would be desperate to get off planet, broken enough from loosing his faith in humanity and exile to give in to whatever the Master wants, or willing to be ‘sorry’ for what the Master perceives as the wrong the Doctor’s done him (though his ‘you weren’t there to play with me’ is such an amorphous sin it’s hard to read this as anything but more of the Master’s Massive Abandonment Complex, and the way it gives the Doctor responsibility both to and for him is achingly couple-y, so slash that, dears). Or he could simply do what he did all through the Three-era and occasionally drop in to see if the Earth-bound Doctor could come out and play.
Angry Journey's EndRanting Meta Below
* That’s as much an anti-humanist statement as thinking surely Shakespeare must actually have been someone with better blood and an impeccable education, rather than a merchant’s son who used a limited education to good effect. It’s a self-defeating argument based fundamentally on a sublimated contention that the ordinary person is surely incapable of genuine brilliant achievement, of attaining lasting greatness. Similarly, apparently people who decide to take aggressive action to defend themselves against alien invaders are raped of their innocence rather than enabled to act on their genuinely noble impulses by having cultivated their own agency through an association with the Doctor and grown as characters from the experiences surrounding that association.
Normal people being extraordinary is Wrong, the privilege of positive agency is reserved for the Übermensch high-born Tinkerbell-Jesus!Doctors of the world. Thaaaanks. That was so useful. I'm so glad someone made that well-conceived, totally still-relevant point in modern television. Also I want more Social Darwinism while we're here, that seemed just clever. Aaaand back the audio.
Where this serial shines, it seizes the loose threads of established canon and deftly tangles and knots them. It wiggles its way into enjoyable credibility by remembering and slyly subverting Three’s positive remark on Mao in Mind of Evil, for example, or by mentioning that Yates died in the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, apparently making up for his break-down flirt with pre-historic-themed Ultra-Ludditism by sacrificing himself in a Kamikaze effort to plant a nuclear bomb at the centre of London, offing the dinosaurs at the cost of a chunk of Greater London and his own life.
I love the darker, tired Brigadier in this—still recognizably himself, but exhausted, worn thin by a career composed largely of patchwork solutions to incomprehensible problems and failures. I like the idea that the Doctor’s role in his life enabled Lethbridge-Stewart to have someone to spar against, and thus increased his confidence in himself and his work. I especially like this portrayal after the Season Four finale, which was irritatingly insistent that people are too weak to come away from contact with the extraordinary anything but broken, warped or diminished by the encounter.*
This Brig is a character who’s not quite the loveable, immutable, none-of-your-nonsense, thoroughly capable Brig we know, yet he still, eventually, rises to the situation he’s confronted with in Sympathy. My only problem is that I think this Brig might be a touch too milquetoast. Does the Brig really not take risks at all anymore, without the Doctor having been involved in his life? Perhaps in an effort to demonstrate the contrast in Brigs they over-reached a tad.
The Doctor’s ‘nature of his game’ remark is so, so cheesy. It’s a nod to the song the title (and arguably the underlying contention of the audio) is taken from. A nod that bounded up like a puppy after fetching a ball, wanting acknowledged for its cleverness, only to end up accidentally bowling me over in its clumsy enthusiasm. SOMEONE (but who?!) put it best when she said (LINK?) that the Doctor in this is the one thing he should never be as a character in any incarnation—bland.
His sort-of-Threeness grates. But then I’m hyper-sensitive to Three’s voice because I (try to) write it all the time, admittedly with varying degrees of accuracy, but: I have learned to pay attention to its ticks in the effort. This Doctor’s occasional Pertwee-ism seems phoned in—I know Pertwee’s dead and they can’t find anyone with that ‘no I really, I went to a Public School’ accent anymore, or at least anyone who’s willing to do audio work, but it’s okay, it’s possible to get Three-ness if they just write the characterization in via dialogue. But they don’t. Really write Three or write a fully different character—not hard, team.
Doctor-issue aside, let’s talk about Gratiss!Master. First, note that Delgado!Master dying in a random plane crash, while necessary to explain the different Master, is sad and a crap death like Six’s or Seven’s. No, I’m not just biased towards my favorite—it’s possible to have written in a regeneration ANY TIME in the audio’s twenty-year ‘Master stuck on Earth’ interim and have Gratiss!Master just mention that death and regeneration, lending more poignancy to his purgatorial time trapped on Earth and his anger with the Doctor over it.
Also, it would have alleviated the problem of the Easiest Regeneration Ever. Sloughing off the Delgado!Master body, presumably his twelfth here as in other dubious!canon, for the notoriously unstable thirteenth, the Master is hale and hearty throughout the process with no complications or trauma-in-the-medical-sense whatsoever. More than a little odd, as the Doctor’s rarely done that well for himself, aside from bursts of adrenaline, and we can easily assume brand new!Simm!Master collapses after getting off Malcassario in like fashion. Though the Master giggling at Colonel Wood’s efforts to hunt him down while hiding in the bushes is great, very him.
There’s something about Gratiss!Master that feels kind of Simm!Master-ish, all creepy and silky. I love that he’s allowed in script to call the Doctor on his Mao-friendship, and bitchily moan that the Doctor’s just such a tourist. Unflattering, but not entirely untrue—which is what the Master’s commentary on the Doctor should function as, a lot of the time, to have him operate as a threatening, successful foil in a show where for plot reasons he’s not allowed to win more often.
There’s a weird detachment to the Master recognizing the Doctor as ‘my old school chum’ that really doesn’t work with the traditional close enmity between them OR the ensuing reveal that this Master’s been quite specifically waiting for the Doctor to show up all these years while he was stuck on Earth. Pick a tone for them and keep evenly to it, or you risk loosing the entire salience of their interaction. That said, there’s something wonderfully creepy about the Master recounting the things he’s lived through in the past decades. His Decades in Review highlights the dangers of being an exceptionally talented intellectual in that era. Especially vicious is when he recalls, in a heated, intimate tone, how Pol Pot ‘killed every Doctor he could find, and none of them was you.’
The Master shame-facedly, unintentionally reveals that his TARDIS is somehow inaccessible to him and that he’s been waiting twenty years not for ‘some means to get it’ or ‘some way off the planet,’ but for the Doctor specifically. This version of the Master apparently came to Earth very expressly to bother the Doctor, having found out about his exile through some means—and thanks for backing up that ‘Fuck the Autons, Just Here for the Doctor’ fanon, BF—and then expected the Doctor to be his apparently willing means of rescue out of pity
Though if the Master just found the Keller parasites on Earth in Sympathy, it sort of retcons the conclusion one draws from Mind of Evil, i.e. that he specifically bought the parasite with him as a backup/second phase/next round before he lost his dematerialization circuit in Terror of the Autons. He might well have found an earth-bound specimen in canon proper as well, if they’re indeed around. Sympathy’s use of mind control and its temple evocation is very reminiscent of the Old-School Master Summoning Kink.
The otherworldly Buddhist chanting is further other-ed in this by making it literally connected to the alien. On an audio it sounds eerie and cool. It’s an interesting play with the pop-Buddhism of Three’s era, but I wonder how actual Buddhists would perceive the element of Orientalism and exoticization?
Brig obliquely intimates that he knows something of ‘the things Keller [the Master] did that made him need to flee the West in the first place,’ which is cool and /really/ makes me curious about specifics. But this is part of a more general issue—a lot of Dark!Earth is cool, but I kind of want more of it—the seedier Earth isn’t just there for atmospherics here, it’s important to the plot, and we could stand more illustration of how it functions.
Where they do this well, for example, is talking about how UNIT had a different business culture without the Doctor, and how it served as a sort of dumping ground rather than a team that received and well-utilized the best and the brightest.
The Brig vs. Colonel Wood thing is kind of lulzy, especially given that Wood is Tennant in a Really Scottish Accent, and the parallel fights between the two of them and the Time Lords, which the audio cuts between, are fun. But the arguments between Wood and Lethbridge-Stewart don’t really seem to have dynamism. While the two of them both have points, they kind of bicker around them and fail to reach any kind of resolution. That makes their relationship kind of meh for me rather than the stuff of thrilling drama. Wood is enjoyable to hate, but beyond that unapproachable.
The Curler brigades going nuts at the end without the parasites to absorb their memories of the atrocities they’ve committed is very cool. It’s HORRIBLY irresponsible of the Doctor to just grab the Brigadier as a new companion and leave—and yet it kind of makes sense for Three, circa Spearhead from Space. That TARDIS-repair is obscenely convenient, but I would have bought it as a Who-handwave if I hadn’t dealt with regular Three-Era, in which it was The Insurmountable Problem.
Audios generally manage to be less slashy from a Doctor/Master perspective than episodes, which shows how reliant that dynamic in any sense is on how the actors play them/the degree of screen presence and how much chemistry their interaction has. Perhaps it’s a kind of lame Doctor that kills the mmph, given that Dust Breeding has Beevers!Master and manages to be significantly more eyebrow-raising (and with Seven, of all Doctors, who generally ties with Four in people ‘hard to slash it’ books). But perhaps the problem is that this Master seems far more serious about his ‘Imma Kill Joo’ schtick than Delgado!Master ever did. Though leaving the Doctor marooned feels like specific punishment for being ‘abandoned’ on Earth himself here, and in some sense there’s a poeticism to the reversal. ‘You’re the reason I was stuck here. You’re who I’m blaming. I’m doing the same to you now. Enjoy my Curlers!’
And there’s no saying he wouldn’t have come and picked the Doctor up in twenty years (and possibly a few regenerations on the dangerous Curler!Earth), when the Doctor would be desperate to get off planet, broken enough from loosing his faith in humanity and exile to give in to whatever the Master wants, or willing to be ‘sorry’ for what the Master perceives as the wrong the Doctor’s done him (though his ‘you weren’t there to play with me’ is such an amorphous sin it’s hard to read this as anything but more of the Master’s Massive Abandonment Complex, and the way it gives the Doctor responsibility both to and for him is achingly couple-y, so slash that, dears). Or he could simply do what he did all through the Three-era and occasionally drop in to see if the Earth-bound Doctor could come out and play.
Angry Journey's End
* That’s as much an anti-humanist statement as thinking surely Shakespeare must actually have been someone with better blood and an impeccable education, rather than a merchant’s son who used a limited education to good effect. It’s a self-defeating argument based fundamentally on a sublimated contention that the ordinary person is surely incapable of genuine brilliant achievement, of attaining lasting greatness. Similarly, apparently people who decide to take aggressive action to defend themselves against alien invaders are raped of their innocence rather than enabled to act on their genuinely noble impulses by having cultivated their own agency through an association with the Doctor and grown as characters from the experiences surrounding that association.
Normal people being extraordinary is Wrong, the privilege of positive agency is reserved for the Übermensch high-born Tinkerbell-Jesus!Doctors of the world. Thaaaanks. That was so useful. I'm so glad someone made that well-conceived, totally still-relevant point in modern television. Also I want more Social Darwinism while we're here, that seemed just clever. Aaaand back the audio.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 06:50 am (UTC)I am so glad I'm not the only one to fail to connect with Wood. He was just...there and irritating and he didn't really bring any depth to the table in his arguments with the Brig.
I do still love it, though. Master! Dystopia! Buddhists! Okay, I'm easy.
JE - that is precisely why I hate that scene. Ten deserved to be called on a hell of a lot, but not inspiring and enabling people to defend their world, defend the universe, even if it isn't always pretty. I hate the running theme that normal humans just can't handle it.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 01:55 pm (UTC)What little I liked about Wood was Tennant's doing, but because I'm familiar with him and because he did a good job here--but yeah, Wood's an unappealing character fundamentally.
No, I really did enjoy it! I kind of wanted it to be workshopped--but yeah, don't let my kvetching disguise that I thought it a rocking good time!
Exactly! It's like rendering Ten blameless, to call him on stupid, beside-the-point, not-actually-that-bad things while not pointing out the actual shit he does. Who's going to yell at him for being a condescending dick who /removes/ humans' agency from them a lot of the time when apparently the show defines the problem with him as 'changing' and 'ruining' people by giving them too /much/ active agency? It's so backwards.
I hate the running theme that normal humans just can't handle it.
Tegan running away did the whole 'I can't handle it' arc better, esp. contrasted with Nyssa's mature decision to leave to forward a positive, stated goal.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 02:56 pm (UTC)Yes. It was nice to hear that accent, overdone or not. :p
XD We kvetch because we love!
I know. The show has no idea what message it wants to put across. Or the writers don't agree. Or RTD is on crack, or something. I miss the Doctor being a good influence in peoples' lives. Maybe once he's gone we'll get back to that. At least Moffat doesn't seem to have that "no one could ever leave willingly ever" thing going on.
As did Victoria - and some people just get burned out, get too horrified, can't deal with it anymore, and that's fine, but it's not everyone. (Have you ever listened to The Gathering? I quite like the older Tegan in it. Especially since she made it clear she didn't regret either going or leaving.)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 11:09 pm (UTC)Yeah, return our positivism, plz. Nine and Rose's relationship seemed good and healthy in that way, actually.
At least Moffat doesn't seem to have that "no one could ever leave willingly ever" thing going on.
Not, of course, that we miss 'aaaaaand then Peri married a warlord, bye forever,' but occasionally a companion could decide to return to their family or life or significant other or a new living situation and have that be positive, rather than 'I lubb joo too much!' or 'noez, separated by worldz!' or 'teh mindrapez,' right?
Oooh, The Gathering sounds really interesting in that respect!
no subject
Date: 2008-07-31 09:21 am (UTC)XD Quite. "She didn't really die. Or maybe she did. But really, she didn't." They weren't all brilliant, no, but most were nice! Even some of the married off ones. (Like Jo's. I like Jo's.)
It is! Sort of sinks that ship, but I didn't have it anyway, so. ;p It's really sweet. Also angsty, but hey, Five.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 09:30 pm (UTC)There is a sequel. Or there will be very soon. No Master though. The Doctor and the Brig as his traveling companion.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 11:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-31 09:22 am (UTC)Eeeee.
/squees unashamedly
(No Master makes me sad. BUT STILL.)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 09:18 am (UTC)I'm with you on wanting to know more about AU Earth in Sympathy. And I'd read a novel about the Master's grand tour of late 20th century dictatorships if there was one. (Just what went wrong? He had thirty years and didn't even conquer one lousy country or manage to flag a ride off earth with some passing aliens. Apparently the Master really, really doesn't work so well without the Doctor.)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 02:10 pm (UTC)Yeah, we get so little Seven and Master interaction, but bits of Survival are so thoroughly blatant--it'd be hard to view his whole opining to Ace about the Master's 'certain attraction' for him in a completely platonic way. Also Seven's willingness to plan intricately to kill off enemies on a large scale seems to me to be Master-cribbing, or at the least to parallel them more thoroughly than the show usually allows for.
Bu I've not considered Seven's pity in that same light before, and you're right--but what an odd juxtapsosition, that as he becomes more willing to kill on a large scale for the greater good he simultaneously gets more sympathetic to the Master, who regularly menaces the people he's now much more willing to take action to protect. By all rights Seven should be the one most likely to consider killing the Master, but with the adopting Master's grand plans he seems to also pick up his weakness to be derailed by the personal--not in the normal sense of 'won't let a companion get killed' but also in the 'oh please Master, do run to your safe TARDIS after threatening me' a la Dust Breeding.
Okay that was almost impossible to buy though. Really, he wasn't in charge of /something/ while he waited? There's little former Eastern European Communist States right there for the plucking in this period! And no one came by who would let him pay his way in trade as a mechanic of something? The only good possible explanation might be that his TARDIS was somewhere right near by and he didn't want to leave b/c he hoped to figure out some means to access it, OR he;s stupid enough to tell himself every day that the Doctor must be coming Right Away, so why bother hitchhiking? But still. Country. Get one.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 04:47 pm (UTC)But this seems to imply to me that the reason the Master is the way he is, is something that Seven at least can get behind. Something that, in that incarnation, he can understand and sympathize with. What that might be, exactly, I'm not sure. Between Six and Seven, the Doctor underwent a lot of changes. It could be due to his time as Six and the Grand Fucking-Over by the Time Lords, or because Seven has lost a certain amount of innocence and naivete about what the universe is like, and has come to accept a certain amount of getting your hands dirty to protect people. Or maybe because as Five he left the Master to die, he's learned something about what happens to you when you're pushed to your limits.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 11:14 pm (UTC)Oh man, a reason for buying the wacked out origin story from the audio Master, maybe? Say it ain't so!
Or maybe because as Five he left the Master to die, he's learned something about what happens to you when you're pushed to your limits.
That might work--Five kills him, he still comes to save Six's ass in the Matrix, Seven has more understanding and pity--the thing that might throw such an arc off it Six's cavalier dismissal of the Mater's fate at the v. end of ToTL.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-31 09:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-31 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-31 05:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-31 02:04 pm (UTC)I was thinking more from a psychological stance. After Six is confronted with the pretty much wholesale corruption of his entire race and every tenet he ever believed in, I suspect he might have a somewhat greater sympathy for the Master and his antics. At least he's honest about evil, for one thing, and in a way, turning into the Master wouldn't be an inconceivable reaction to that kind of corruption.
Besides, the Doctor's confronted with the Valeyard in TotTL, which sort of forces him to admit he's less than flawless himself on the morality front.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-31 03:56 pm (UTC)I'll give you Valeyard, but I don't know that he has a ton of faith in the TLs not being entirely worthless even as far back as War Games, periodically reinforced by things like Borusa screwing him over, so it's hard for me to see this as a fresh confrontation that would make him change as a person rather than an extension of a history of "Oh, so you guys still suck then? Right."
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 05:09 pm (UTC)Perhaps the Master is his... his "one good deed", the one villain whom he shows mercy to convince himself that's he's not all ruthless. Like a cruel despot who gives one man amnesty while having thousands of others killed. Or he needs to believe that the Master is still in some way save-able (both in Survival and in Master, Seven attempts to at least partly reform/convince/cure the Master) because Seven himself is afraid that he's too far gone.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 08:38 pm (UTC)Seven himself is afraid that he's too far gone.
I don't know, I never saw that Five-ish fear of going too far in Seven. Seven always seems too convinced of his own rightness to me to be internally conflicted about his changing role in the universe, unless one counts the conflicting, multiple narratives in Master as a sort of process of working through guilt or ambivalence about roles, given that that audio's all about roles.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-31 09:32 am (UTC)(I have an alternate Fifth Doctor he feels this way about his companions, sort of - they're the only ones he won't sacrifice, so he's not a complete monster. He's...much worse than Seven, though.)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 09:18 am (UTC)i noticed that too. it makes me sad. for some reason, they finally manage to sell me the 'master hates the doctor and wants him to die' thing that the show has never once convinced me off. this one has it's wonderful iwaswaitingforyouandyounevercame speech and gatiss!master should be brought back and to hell with lazerus (give him a beard and no one will know), but his master seems in general more competent than any we seen in proper canon.
i think this is the difference between the audios and the episodes actually. in 'master' the master is only around for about a scene, but he comes across as a genuine threat waiting in the background, rather than someone who's comical attempts to get his ex's attention often lead him into embarrassing scrapes. dust breeding... it was quite a good plan, i can't remember exactly what it was, but he also didn't do anything particularly embarrassing.
this master only makes the basic mistake of believing a pub is a tardis without any evidence and its difficult to chalk that up to his deep love for the doctor...
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 02:48 pm (UTC)but his master seems in general more competent than any we seen in proper canon.
Really? But he's just a scientist--he looses his TARDIS, sticks around 20 years without either taking over a country or hitching a ride back to a more tech-savvy world, and then at the end the scheme blows up in his face with little interference from the Doctor, leaving him stranded in a hell of his own creation That's kind of typical 'oh, Master.'
In Master he was an effective amorphous threat, in Dust Breeding he had an overcomplicated plan that was v. him, but it actually seemed interesting and HUGE and v. plausible, except for the whole 'underestimated the Warp Core' thing, but then it was going to turn into a Chronos where the thing broke harness and ate him, without Seven's help.
I do find it kind of cute/stupid that the Doctor's like 'there, that pub's my TARDIS' and the Master 1] just believes him, doesn't think he'd try anything (incidentally, does this mean he's seen the Doctor's TARDIS once or never since the demat got broken, if he doesn't know its fixed as a police box?) and 2] is like 'oh, how clever of you!' about it. The Fanboying never stops, not even in audios.
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Date: 2008-07-30 02:56 pm (UTC)having no one to look over your shoulder at work=no work done. brain dead. not good at all.
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Date: 2008-07-30 06:32 pm (UTC)...I am not v. convinced by this. I mean, true, but it's kind of one of his general m.o.s, Earth-conquering.
I fled work--turns out I can't get anything done with Lindsey in the room with me. I think I'm afraid of her mass of I Dream of Jeanie hair coming for me when I have my back turned, like Three's curls? Surely emailing it in from the coffeeplace is safer?
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Date: 2008-07-31 09:34 am (UTC)...Heeee.
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Date: 2008-07-30 08:34 pm (UTC)That Doctor as Three? See, I hadn't even made that connection. I sort of assumed he was just picking among qualities of a few Doctors and throwing them together into a different regeneration--one that might never have existed in reality. Though now you mention it, I do recall spending a bit of time trying to match him up with existing regenerations before I finally shrugged it off and assumed he was a different one entirely.
Journey's End bugged me, too. Davros bitching at him over that was nonsensical, but then Davros often is (he's a crazy scientist, probably wouldn't know a People Skill if it bit him on the ass...not that anything would want to). But it carried through the whole season, as if Rusty suddenly decided this was supposed to be the Grand Drama, and he had to plant seeds to convince us of it despite all prior evidence.
"This is what you do to people? You turn them into soldiers?!" Lines like this bother me because they don't come from the Doctor. Sure, he gets uptight about it. He's been there and he knows how much it sucks. But when everyone else parrots it, I start reading the message as hypocritical. "Oh, look at the beautiful universe! But look, it's not all nice and there're things that'll try to kill you.. But your job is to stay quiet and let people enslave you till somebody comes along to rescue you." Wow, thanks, guys. That reminds me of why I hate damsels in distress.
And on the level of characterization, it was such a waste of a great opportunity to peel the Doctor open. That whole "The Doctor's soul is bared" schtick was so embarrassing that I wanted to hide from it. I mean...really? He throws up a Troubled Profile and we're supposed to believe that's our candid look into his heart? What about addressing all of the actual problems the Doctor has had since New Who started?
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Date: 2008-07-31 02:42 am (UTC)Oh, well put. That's it exactly.
I sort of assumed he was just picking among qualities of a few Doctors and throwing them together into a different regeneration--one that might never have existed in reality.
That seems a little weird in an already au setting, like, sort of complicating the purity of 'the change results from when the Doctor shows up' by changing more than one variable in the same trial? I mean, maybe that's more what they were going for than anything else, but I kind of dislike it, as we're not given any *reason* he'd regenerate differently.
not that anything would want to)
Dalek Caan/Davros? Eh? EH?! ...no, I can't do it.
Okay, I think the phrase Grand Drama is good for illuminating what's problematic: while I'm fine with it cropping up, or being something Ten thinks about, or being a problem for some companions but not as a general rule, the sweeping characterization of this as The Problem With Ten is reductive and doesn't really /work/.
Oh, look at the beautiful universe! But look, it's not all nice and there're things that'll try to kill you.. But your job is to stay quiet and let people enslave you till somebody comes along to rescue you." Wow, thanks, guys. That reminds me of why I hate damsels in distress.
And on that note, dear show: stop in any way trivializing UNIT, kthxbai.
That whole "The Doctor's soul is bared" schtick was so embarrassing that I wanted to hide from it.
It's the new Tinkerbell Jesus Doctor!
And on the level of characterization, it was such a waste of a great opportunity to peel the Doctor open. That whole "The Doctor's soul is bared" schtick was so embarrassing that I wanted to hide from it. I mean...really? He throws up a Troubled Profile and we're supposed to believe that's our candid look into his heart? What about addressing all of the actual problems the Doctor has had since New Who started?
Oh, well put, IAWTC.