Sketchbook drawing: These two have such a Second Doctor/Third Doctor vibe about them.

The actual sketchbook page…

queen-of-meows:

Doctor Who: Origins #1 Preview

After last week’s episode, I joked on Facebook that Chris Chibnall must have read my letters. I said this because it seemed as though “War of the Sontarans,” was a concerted effort to address a lot of the problems people like myself have been writing about for the past three years. You wouldn’t know it by reading the reviews, but a lot of fans had a positive reaction to the episode, which, in my circle at least, was the predominant response. One friend of mine asked where this Chris Chibnall had been hiding for the last two series. Most of us were in agreement that despite any reservations or Wish.com masks, the story felt like a proper episode of Doctor Who. So how did “Once, Upon Time,” fare with the same audience? Not great, friends. Not great. 

It may be slightly ironic for me to imply that I go by the reactions of my friends over those of a critic as I write a review of Doctor Who. You and your friend group may have a positive reaction, and that’s fine. In my friend group, I have at least three friends whom I can talk to about Doctor Who on the same level as I think about Doctor Who. My pal Taryn and I joke that there is no one else in our lives with whom we could have a conversation about “…ish,” the Big Finish audio with a funny title. But it’s not just about people who know the show, it’s people who know the show, and aren’t also shitty about it. I started this blog to talk about Doctor Who in a positive manner. So many videos on YouTube just look like a cesspool of gatekeeping reactionaries that I often don’t find the good ones because I dare not go there. Understand then, that three years of writing about disappointment is not fun. I don’t relish this. 

Reading this introduction may lead you to believe that I’m about to lay into the episode, but I’m not disappointed. I’m frustrated. I stayed up until 4 a.m. last night watching YouTube videos or talking to Taryn on the phone. My mind gets a lot of cross-chatter because I have ADHD, which is also a source of hyper focus in my life. My fixation last night that left my mind overclocked was “Once, Upon Time.” I find the episode absolutely perplexing, but not at all for the right reasons. For starters, that title? Woof. I thought I was having a stroke. It’s like one of those memes where they write “the the,” and you don’t pick up on it because your monkey brains aren’t reliable. I get that it’s a very Moffaty pun, and Chibnall loves him some puns, but it hit the part of my monkey brain that senses a typo more than the part of me that groans at puns. And to think, I thought Chibnall was getting better at naming stuff.

Puns aren’t the only things on which Chris Chibnall seems fixated. If you watch any showrunner’s era long enough you’ll start to see recurrences of their proclivities. Moffat is to women dressed like a Mary Poppins dominatrix as Tarantino is to women’s feet. But after last night, I believe I’ve pinpointed one of Chibnall’s own hyper fixations- swarms. It’s like when Bender said, “You guys like swarms of things, right?” So far in Flux, I’ve counted four different swarms. There are the weird little blue things that turn people into little purple things, there’s the Flux itself, there’s the time storm, and there’s even a dude named Swarm. If that fourth one doesn’t count enough for you, then perhaps consider the way in which he and his sister kill by turning people into little swarms of dust. Maybe Chibnall thinks swarms are cool. Maybe swarms are easier to animate on a COVID-19 budget. Maybe Chris Chibnall has a bee beard fetish. We’ll never know the true reason.

As you recall, last week ended on a cliffhanger. In wack ass fashion, it picks up just in time for the Doctor to do something. Instead of rendering Yaz into a sexy swarm of dust, Chibnall reigns in his base instincts and has the Doctor fall into a big ol’ time storm, complete with giant stompy gold ladies. Chibnall is the man who introduced both furries and vore into Doctor Who, so of course, he gave the giantess fans something to glom onto. For a guy who doesn’t understand youth culture much, Chibbers is all about that fursona. Clearly, I’m joking but it does amuse the hell out of me. Speaking of furries though, we’re given a bit of a Beauty and the Beast story in the form of Bel and Vinder. The whole thing plays out like a fairy tale, which is most likely the influence behind the episode’s title. Think about it. Vinder is exiled in a prison of his own making, represented metaphorically as a rose. Bel’s name is like Belle, and she spends the majority of her story talking to an anthropomorphic appliance. That works, I guess. Bit of a stretch?

It’s been an itching sensation at the back of my mind for the past three weeks that Chibnall wasn’t writing two companions, but rather three including Vinder. Perhaps Vinder’s role was originally supposed to go to John Barrowman before all of that sex pest business. That would require the audience to fall in love with a new guy right away. I can’t think of a single character who could maybe have benefitted from a bit of that screen time. Nope. Nobody at all. We get about 20 minutes of Vinder’s backstory that tells us more about him than Yaz has gotten in three seasons. If Chibnall really has read my letters, then he definitely heard me say “Show, don’t tell.” I’m big on that concept. But did we really need an entire backstory devoted to learning about why Vinder was exiled to the Rose space station? Does anyone even really care? This is one of the few times I would have thought to say “Tell, don’t show.” The payoff for Vinder had better be worth it because the introduction of Bel throws out Yaz’s hopes of shagging. Or maybe it doesn’t. You, and Yaz, and baby, and me makes four. That’s how it goes, right?

Vinder’s whole deal is that he’s part of some freakishly loyal military on his home planet. He holds allegiance to a guy who goes by the Serpent. The Serpent’s whole deal is looking like David S Pumpkins if he went through an Ed Hardy phase. He hangs out with a couple of people who look like Sun Ra but don’t get any dialogue. During a meeting, the Serpent orders Vinder to turn off a recording device so that he may speak candidly about murder. Vinder carries a lot of guilt for having turned off the recorder, thus aiding in destroying evidence of murder. This is part of his and the other companions’ greatest hits being played out in the time storm. The Doctor protects her friends by hiding them from the Ravagers within their own lives. During this, she keeps popping into their realities to scream exposition at them while she fixes things. Seeing her floating there like a disembodied ghost made me laugh because she reminded me of Stuey Gluck from “Freaked.” 

There’s a weird cartoonishness about the Doctor in this episode. At times it’s amusing, such as seeing her as a policewoman talking to Yaz. Seeing Jodie’s Doctor in a uniform of authority is like a Vincent Adultman “two kids in a trenchcoat,” vibe. And while she does momentarily, if not metaphorically, don a cool darker coat, a lot of the intensity from last week gets undercut. For starters, we lose a bit of her enigmatic nature when we hear her inner thoughts as a voiceover. The thoughts that did leave her mouth, with equal amounts of intensity were mostly exposition. You could easily have turned this story into a Big Finish audio based on how the Doctor is constantly explaining what’s in front of us. But why so much explanation when you are simultaneously showing it? It all leads back to the writing. There are too many ideas going on at the moment that none of them has any time to breathe. We need to be told what we’re seeing because it doesn’t make any sense otherwise. The best way I can think to describe it is an absolute clusterfuck.

Already we’ve seen people on social media defending the episode by attacking people’s intelligence. There’s a flippant implication that if anyone left this episode feeling confused, that it is some sort of failing on their behalf. It reeks of “Was Poop Dragon supposed to be hard? I beat him on the first try.” And like ProZD also said- “Siri, how do I delete all of Twitter?” You see, sometimes stuff is confusing on purpose, like a David Lynch movie. Or Ingmar Bergman. Or Andrei Tarkovsky. Maya Deren. Derek Jarman. Alejandro Jodorowsky. Chris Chibnall. Wait, how did he get in here? Because other times, it’s confusing on a structural level. I was able to give a decent plot synopsis above. I’m not confused by the story. It’s the pacing, the editing, the directing, and, of course, the writing.

One of the points I made in my review for “The Halloween Apocalypse,” is that Chris Chibnall seems to never know when to divulge information and to what degree. He keeps long-running plot threads looming over his entire run as showrunner which do more to frustrate than tantalise. He likes to stop the action dead in its tracks so that characters can sit and talk about their feelings. There’s a herky-jerky start-stop rhythm to his work as if he is never quite sure how far he wants to take a concept. Take the Ruth Doctor, or “Fugitive Doctor,” for instance. We really needed to see more of her at the end of “The Timeless Children,” so last night was the perfect opportunity to showcase her more. We could have finally gotten some much needed screentime from Jo Martin. While we get some decent dialogue between her and the Doctor, we missed a great opportunity to give a Doctory speech to the Ravagers. What should have happened is we see the speech start as Jodie and end as Jo. Instead, the bulk of the monologue is delivered by Jodie with flashes of Jo to remind us this is one of her memories. What should have been the best scene in the episode is undercut by the fact that they gave the bulk of the dialogue to the wrong actor.

You could argue that this is the Thirteenth Doctor’s era and that she takes precedent. But she’s not really is she?  It’s a symptom of the Doctor being saddled with another Doctor. Hell, she doesn’t even get her own comics. She shares that honour with the Tenth Doctor. What’s worse is the Fugitive Doctor is currently the more compelling of the two, due to her air of mystery. She embodies the Who of Doctor Who far more than Whittaker. The sad part is that it’s all leading toward solving that mystery. Leaving no question left unanswered. No room to dream. No room to wonder. The Timeless Child. If Chibnall wanted to show some real swagger, he would never fully explain her. Let us bunch of nerds argue about it as he walks away, not looking back at the explosion. 

One thing we learn about the Ravagers is that they have a rather blasé attitude toward genocide. While killing one person and killing one person full of millions of people is exactly the same, visually, it does up the ante a bit. Learning that those big beefy Wish mask dudes weren’t actually security muscle, but rather walking prisons, was actually pretty cool. I joked last week that Chibnall was ripping off Faction Paradox stories, but now we’ve got people who are bigger on the inside. The reason I like this is that it was a fun idea. It’s a quick and easy way to demonstrate the cruelty of the Ravagers. Swarm and Azure get described as a sort of virus of existence. Sadly, explaining them has also defanged them a bit. As they left defeated, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had hissed and swatted like kitty cats as they backed away. But that’s fine. That egg had to crack sooner or later. 

After talking the gold ladies into joining up to defeat the Ravagers, the Doctor is able to repair the triangle’s little machine that… I dunno, tempers the time storm? Is the time storm the same thing as the time vortex? Is it the same thing as the Flux? It’s hard to say. These questions have yet to be answered. Or maybe they have and audio mixing has been that bad. Seriously, I have missed at least 30% of the dialogue this season due to muddy sound design. The Doctor saves time and her companions. She very reliably pilots her unreliable TARDIS to drop Vinder off on his homeworld which was also hit by the flux. This explains why Bel experienced time fluctuations in her story, and why she was running away from Cybermen and bad CGI Daleks. What it doesn’t explain is why they tried to sell this episode as a Cyberman story. The Cybermen are so inconsequential to the story that I forgot them as I forgot about Joseph Williamson or the weird floating house. Remember the lady watering plants? She’s new! There’s just too much going on.

Mr Williamson’s addition is a rambling incoherent mess, which tracks with the rest of this story. What wasn’t drowned out by the poor sound mixing was nonsense as far as I was concerned. Also mostly forgotten are the companions. We get a bit of interest as Dan’s relationship with Diane gets explored, but it’s all a bit of a smokescreen as it’s all happening within the time storm. Even the scene we get with Yaz isn’t real, which explains why her sister claims nobody calls video games “video games.” What the hell else would you call them, Chris? Televised interactive computer programs? Or is it just “games,” now? Did you learn that from your kids, Chris? Did you come in like “Are you winning son?” while your kid is into hour 800 of Roblox and they looked at you and said “They’re called games, dad. Jeez!” He then did a kickflip and skated away. As I said, this episode is perplexing for all of the wrong reasons.

Not to go unforgotten is the TARDIS, which has mostly gone forgotten. I get that due to the cliffhangery nature of this series, the Doctor hasn’t really had the time to tend to her time machine, but yeah, it’s due. The reason for this probably has something to do with the fact that Chibnall probably wants to save this for episode six. Judging by the preview of next week’s episode, it’s going to be a monster of the week story like last week. I’m sensing a pattern. One episode is a sort of bridge episode to a normal episode. You go from a mess, to a story, to a mess, to a story. I get it, really I do. Some episodes are setups for the next episode. While “Dune,” is a great book, its follow-up “Dune Messiah,” acts as more of a bridge to get to the third book “Children of Dune.” Perhaps the Weeping Angels are to blame for what’s happening to the TARDIS. They seem to have infected Yaz’s life, why not the TARDIS as well?

These are small questions I have leading into chapter four. But unlike last week, where my interest in the story stemmed from investment, my interest now stems from confusion. I’m now watching on autopilot. I’ve lost interest in the overarching storyline and am only really interested in the possibility of the spooky Halloween episode I originally wanted from the actual Halloween episode. An episode with the Weeping Angels in a big creepy house sounds a damn sight more interesting than watching the Doctor float around and scream at everyone. The scary thought is that the Weeping Angels may have as much to do with that story as the Cybermen did with this one. I no longer trust Chris Chibnall to deliver any kind of closure in any kind of timely manner. We’re either going to learn about the Fugitive Doctor in chapter six, or we’re going to have to wait until Jodie Whittaker’s final episode. Neither would surprise me at this point.

With just three episodes left, it’s easy to think we’re in the homestretch with Chibnall, but then you remember the holiday specials and that we’re only a third of the way there. I’m assuming the BBC ordered an episode of Doctor Who for their 100 year anniversary, which means we might not even see an ending to this era until October of next year. Ideally, I would like to see “Flux,” resolve not just the Ravagers storyline, but also the Fugitive Doctor. It would be really nice to be able to put a lid on this Timeless Child malarky. To borrow from John Mulaney, having Chris Chibnall in charge of Doctor Who is a lot like having a horse in the hospital. It’s hard to rest or feel confident when there’s a horse in the hospital! While it’s still ongoing, every new episode is a potentially ruinous story that could undermine the integrity of Doctor Who. Last week I would have been a little more generous. But after watching Chris Chibnall backslide into bad habits so spectacularly, I’m no longer cautiously optimistic. I’m just cautious.

tea and telepathy

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image description: dolls of dhawan!master and ruth doctor sit down to have a traditional afternoon tea, with small sandwiches and cakes.

they’re chatting pleasantly, but M suddenly feels ill (headache/etc). dr is like what’s wrong but he turns away ashamed, because she had said she wasn’t going to take care of him.

she’s like, it’s okay, these things happen, what if you have some dessert and see if you feel better?

he eats a cake and has some more strong tea, maybe it does help.

he thanks her telepathically. he takes her hand.

she’s like KOSCHEI IF YOU BITE ME I SWEAR TO OMEGA but then

he kisses her hand!!

some time later, they’re leaving. she helps him up (he’s got a bad ankle) and he makes sure she doesn’t forget her muffler.

they share a telepathic moment of closeness at the end also (forehead touch).

in ruth!doctor’s tardis

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image description:

this is not the tardis console room that we saw in the fugitive of the judoon, all pale and minimalist. well, it’s still a bit minimalist but it’s much more cheerful and homey, and the interior is mostly a dark orange color with lots of retro looking control panels and viewing screens. a couple of armchairs, a toolbox, a lamp, and a carpet are visible. the console is silvery, hexagonal, and has a rainbow shaded time rotor.

ruth!doctor’s outfit is as close as i could get to her tv outfit, but a few things are missing, like the waistcoat. she’s added a scarf in a similar print to her blouse.

in the first picture, dhawan!m and ruth!dr are meeting up to go on a date (afternoon tea seen in other post). they’re both wearing top hats. dhawan!m has on a mostly purple outfit including a satin skirt in multicolor stripes, and purple metallic chunky heels. (and a cane because of his ankle). ruth dr is like “i suppose one of us had to wear a skirt… and after the day i’ve had it wasn’t going to be me!”

in the 2nd picture (a different day), they’re sitting talking (telepathically, because their hands are linked) near the tardis console. this time m is using a blue manual wheelchair, and is dressed casually with striped leggings, crocs, a turtleneck, and a hoodie (all purple). he’s also wearing glasses that he didn’t have in the other picture.

official and custom funko rock candy figures

(only 13 is official)

wanted to have this style figures of my favourite new s12 timelords… so i put together Ruth Doctor and Dhawan Master from various funko parts plus lots of heatmold plastic, paint and swearing.

dm me if you want process pics or ideas how to make your own.

from the back you can really notice I used the same torso twice

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