elisi: Living in interesting times is not worth it (The Day of the Doctor)
elisi ([personal profile] elisi) wrote2013-12-08 05:57 pm

Random DotD links.

Some of these links are from a few weeks ago. Time... flies.

Meta/reviews/stuffs:

Owl's Day of the Doctor Picspam.

Review by The Unaffiliated Critic. (Esp love the use of Marcus Aurelius quotes. Although I think (s)he misunderstands the timey-wimey.)

Review by Den of Geek.


Other things, like vids:

Coming Home by [livejournal.com profile] ibishtar. (Uses footage from S1 - 4 mostly, plus a few key moments from DotD)



I'm Coming Home by Merlinian13 on youtube. (Same song, but longer vid, using footage from DotD only.)



be a doctor by iamyourpathos on youtube. Delicious DotD meta vid drawing on Eleven's era.



Doctor Who: Behind the Lens. The 'Confidential'/Making Of, by the BBC.

And finally, from Tumblr: The Doctor Games (/'Best Parody Ever LOL'). I... have no words. But come talk to me, and I might find some!


ETA: Just one little point, re. the people who are now complaining because the Doctor is no longer the murderer of 2.47 billion children - the Tenth Doctor is no longer the biggest hypocrite in the known universe:

Spoonsface

So, basically, Moffat has made RTD Who better! And Sand Shoes and Dickie Bow can be BFFs 4eva. (By the way, finding a cap for this little point took far, far too long, because Ten's FACE! Seriously, you try. Miss M and I have been nearly crying with laughter. According to Miss M his name is now 'Spoonface'. And as I wanted to make a serious point, that wasn't really what I was after... *g*)

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-08 06:26 pm (UTC)(link)
Thanks for the plug! And I'm pleased that somebody vidded the full version of the song, which I decided I didn't have the energy to do XD

I enjoyed how in-character (in a twisted way!) the Doctors were in the Hunger Games :D. And, hey, that's Inspector Spacetime as Twelve!

[identity profile] masakochan.livejournal.com 2013-12-08 07:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Eleven wins though. He's a Pond, and they're dangerous.

Same thought here. Four's scarf might be a really handy weapon, but the guy whose playing Eleven just gives Four this 'look' towards the end that says he's going to take Four down.

And then there's Five going after Twelve which just leaves me cracking up every time I watch it.

And One and Seven in the background having a sword fight with One's cane, and Seven's umbrella. xD

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-08 10:41 pm (UTC)(link)
It seemed important to me to pay tribute to the Time War arc and the Doctor's recovery from it as it was played out by RTD in Series 1-4, because for me that's where the emotion over Gallifrey comes from.

Yeah, same, I liked that Ten and Eleven instinctively paired up pretty much like they did in TDotD and tried to be the good guys (and that Four was such a LITTLE SHIT omg). I have no trouble believing that Eleven's survival instincts are better developed than Ten's either XD

Community is great. Well, sometimes. It's one of those shows that, depending on the episode, will make you go 'wtf am I watching' or 'this is the best ever why can't the rest of TV be this GENIUS'. And I don't know if you know of the Inspector Spacetime crowdfunded webseries on youtube.

Oh, I just saw your ETA. I don't believe Ten was being hypocritical there because back then the Doctor ending the Time War was portrayed as a difficult but the only right decision in order to stop the Universe from getting destroyed, further cemented by TEOT, which is very different from killing out of revenge, or proportional response, which is what had been going on with the war in TDD that he wanted to stop.
Those 2.47 billion children didn't exist until TDotD, where suddenly the last days of the Time War weren't comprised by two powerful races as bad as each other threatening to tear up the whole of creation in their conflict, but by a Dalek invasion of Gallifrey that was seemingly populated by mostly children. It was a retcon in more than one way.
Edited 2013-12-08 22:54 (UTC)

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-10 02:15 pm (UTC)(link)
Ten was essentially the bipolar Doctor.
...I don't know how serious you're being here. If you are, then I disagree. If you aren't, then, to paraphrase David Tennant's character in Takin' Over the Asylum, he doesn't have to conform to vagaries of time and space...he's a loony for god's sake!
Edited 2013-12-10 15:25 (UTC)

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-10 03:24 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, previously in the series the Time Lords were portrayed as not exactly what you'd think as a normal species. Predominantly male, their powers come from engineering rather than nature, I'm not surprised lots of fans (and expanded universe writers) thought of them as mostly infertile. I mean, the Master in The Sound of Drums was the first time we saw a Time Lord kid. I'm sure there must have been some children on Gallifrey, but LMAO @ 2.47 billion on the last day of the Time War.
Anyway, even before TEOT I had no trouble accepting that the Doctor killed innocents when he ended the Time War, if the fate of the Universe depended on it. The further developments in TEOT were perfectly congruent with what came before, since in the classic series Time Lords could be real dicks. When the Doctor said in TFoP that if he could save the Time Lords he would, I assume he was not just talking about their lives, but the whole situation of them being turned into monsters.
TEOT served to hammer home that the Doctor did the right thing and so gave him closure from the Time War so that the Eleventh Doctor would be free from that guilt and therefore be a blank slate for Moffat.
That largely worked. The Time War has only been brought up about twice in Eleven's era, clearly he had moved on from it. I had to laugh when Clara said in the special that the Doctor was "always talking about the day he did it". He'd never been shown to tell Clara anything about the Time War! And we'd reached a point where this didn't even strike as odd! There was no need to return to the Time War story only to undo it, it wasn't exactly weighing the series down in any way.

Torchwood: Children of Earth is in many ways the dilemma at the heart of the Time War examined in detail. Killing one for the sake of the many. And oh, the politicians are despicable there too...
That never occurred to me before, how interesting. One thing that strikes me is how the politicians in CoE were willing to sacrifice other people's kids but not their own. Like the Time Lords were willing to destroy the Universe as long as they get to survive as beings of pure conscience. Like the disregard in TDotD of all the other races and planets destroyed in the course of the Time War, as long as the Doctor doesn't have to suffer the personal loss of his own home planet.

Yes! The Night of the Doctor did follow the narrative of Time Lords who had become as bad as Daleks, so why did Moffat choose to ignore that in TDotD? (Then again, this is the showrunner who had the Cyberplanner say in the episode before John Hurt was introduced that the Doctor's mind had gone through ten re-jigs...) You talk of RTD not wanting to focus on the dead children because that would make it difficult for the audience to accept his actions. Well, this is clearly a case of Moffat choosing not to focus on the ugly aspects of rescuing the Time Lords so that the audience will more readily embrace his actions. At least RTD did paint the ending of the Time War as a moral dilemma. Moffat chose to paint the Doctor's actions in TDotD merely as the triumphant correction of a mistake. Pardon me if I don't quite swallow it.
I haven't read your meta yet, but I disagree with that interpretation. I saw the RTD era as the rocky but ultimately successful rehabilitation of a broken Doctor, potentially giving the Moffat era a lighter Doctor to work with, but that's not what Eleven turned out to be.

Erm, I get chatty too, as I suppose you've just seen :)

Edited 2013-12-10 15:31 (UTC)

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-10 09:41 pm (UTC)(link)
Ah, of course; I had the feeling when I was typing that that I was forgetting something XD
Yeah, I didn't want to start an argument, obviously we have different perspectives on the show and that's great, it's just the way that ETA was phrased kinda stung, which motivated me to respond.

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-10 10:53 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, but that was "forgetting something" in the way the parents in the movie Home Alone were "forgetting something" XD

Yeah, I love that Ten was such a complex character and, in my eyes, he needed no further redemption beyond stepping into that booth for Wilf and then visiting his companions and saving/helping them where he could. I have a lot of affection for his character arc and as far as I'm concerned it concluded perfectly. I don't mind if people disagree completely.
The thing is, I'm one of those people that's dissatisfied over TDotD. I get into it here (http://ibishtar.livejournal.com/26926.html), but it should suffice to say that it hit a nerve that's quite personal, and I'm still feeling a bit raw about, even if I made a fanvid to help me get past it. So for you to refer to people like me as "people who are now complaining because the Doctor is no longer the murderer of 2.47 billion children"... well. That may be wherein your disagreement with my viewpoint lies, but from my perspective that's so far away from the point, and a misrepresentation of how I feel, and it stung. I know it's your journal and you can say what you want, but it sort of hit me when I wasn't expecting it, as I had just dropped by to thank you for mentioning my vid. That's why I always aim my judgement at the writing, not other fans.

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-10 11:21 pm (UTC)(link)
It's fine, and likewise :)

[identity profile] lyricwrites.livejournal.com 2013-12-11 01:32 am (UTC)(link)
I'm sure there must have been some children on Gallifrey, but LMAO @ 2.47 billion on the last day of the Time War.

Nobody ever said they were all Time Lords, though. Remember, there's a low-tech "barbarian" civilization living in the wilderness of Gallifrey, as of the end of Leela's arc. (I don't know if was ever explicitly explained why; I think they're descended from Time Lords who walked out on their civilization for whatever reason. Possibly so that their children wouldn't be exposed to the Untempered Schism.) Maybe another Time Lord wouldn't bother to count their children, but the Doctor would. Ten would be upset that he couldn't remember all their individual names.

Personally, I think that the monstrousness of the Time Lords is a deliberately hanging plot hook. The Doctor may believe that Gallifrey is frozen in time, safely stored in some pocket dimension that he can unlock when he has the perfect plan to deal with Rassilon and Co. Any writer who lets it go down that smoothly is a bloody idiot.

Anyhow. I could have just said, "I'm mainly with elisi on this," I suppose. But that would have involved less words, and who wants that? ;)

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-11 01:57 am (UTC)(link)
I think New Who has pretty much ignored the idea of a distinction between Time Lords and Gallifreyans. In any case of course the existence of 2.47 billion children on Gallifrey can be fanwanked in a million ways. Someone even suggested that Gallifrey was full of refugees from other planets, like a kind of Helm's Deep. My point is that that's beside the point. I'm unmoved by the efforts of TDotD to paint the Time Lords as mere victims, and weary of the people who share my scepticism over the ending of TDotD being misrepresented as 'genocide apologists' that glory in the idea of the Doctor killing billions of children. The reasoning (http://ibishtar.livejournal.com/26926.html) behind the critique (http://loremipsumfandom.tumblr.com/post/68998723739/why-the-day-of-the-doctor-was-everything-i-never-wanted) is sound (http://robotmango.tumblr.com/post/69091287518/under-the-cut-a-sad-rant-about-the-day-of-the).

I agree that positioning the Time Lords as villains is something that will probably happen, it makes sense to give TDotD a happy ending (although the idea that he's always been heading home is another huge NOPE (http://surfingwavefunctions.tumblr.com/post/68762693828/brilliantfantasticgeronimo-pedanther) for me), and for the fall-out to be dealt with later. Suddenly the Omega symbol on the Cleric's uniforms is interesting...
Edited 2013-12-11 02:03 (UTC)

[identity profile] lyricwrites.livejournal.com 2013-12-11 03:24 am (UTC)(link)
I didn't think it painted the Time Lords as mere victims so much as it pointed out that there were mere victims who were Time Lords. Which, in some ways, we already knew—the Lady in White, whoever she was, didn't deserve to go down with Rassilon, and neither did any of the (dead or petrified) people who called him crazy to his face. But it's a little bit different this way, because the Lady in White had a certain amount of choice in her fate, and faced it head-on. We've never actually looked at the fact that many—most—Time Lords were never really in a position to even make that decision.

We will have to agree to disagree, because I strongly disagree that "The Day of the Doctor" cheapened the series or the arc of New Who in any way. To me, it felt more like a fulfilled promise.

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-11 06:45 pm (UTC)(link)
I've always subscribed to the idea that the Lady in White was the Doctor's mother, long since dead, but like many other Time Lords was resurrected for the war. So she's someone who wasn't really meant to be alive. In any case, the portrayal of the Time War in TDotD was done in a convenient way to try to justify the plot twist, and rather than sway me that only served to increase my annoyance with it.
I preferred the story the way it was, I dislike the concept of time-travel being used to undo past tragedies, as there's real-life resonance in the process of recovery, but none in the act of undoing. Different strokes :)

[identity profile] lyricwrites.livejournal.com 2013-12-11 10:23 pm (UTC)(link)
I dislike the concept of time-travel being used to undo past tragedies

Whereas I like the use of time travel to mitigate past tragedies, but I don't see that they're completely undone. And mitigation of tragedies is a part of recovery. Mitigation of future tragedies, in real life, but still.

Perhaps I should explain it like this. I live in a house put up by the Army Corps of Engineers, in a town that used to consist only of such houses. It is the same town my grandfather lived and worked—as a physicist. Although he is slightly too young to have been directly involved, I still have an emotional stake in the notion of wringing everything we can from past tragedies to make future ones never happen. The fact that in Doctor Who, it's more about wringing everything we have from one tragedy to lessen that same tragedy—is, admittedly, pretty weird. But it makes emotional sense to me.

I understand that it doesn't work that way for everyone.

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-12 06:08 pm (UTC)(link)
That's an interesting story, thanks for sharing it.
I actually do get what you mean, but in this case it doesn't work for me at all.

[identity profile] lyricwrites.livejournal.com 2013-12-12 09:49 pm (UTC)(link)
No worries. I'm far more interested in making sure I'm making sense than trying to get everyone to agree with me. :)

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-11 06:28 pm (UTC)(link)
Obviously, fandom noticed the Omega thing straight away from the first day of filming in 2009. But now seemed a good moment to bring it up since recent events are pointing that way.

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-11 06:52 pm (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I mean that maybe Omega was one of the Time Lords present on Gallifrey, and with the recent discovery that all this time Gallifrey has been suspended in time in a pocket dimension, Omega, who has experience with this sort of thing, could have freed himself and tried to explode the TARDIS way back in S5... because of reasons.

[identity profile] ibishtar.livejournal.com 2013-12-11 06:56 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, the insanity means that his reasons don't have to make sense, but I'd still want to know what they were!
promethia_tenk: (ten)

[personal profile] promethia_tenk 2013-12-08 08:52 pm (UTC)(link)
ETA: Just one little point, re. the people who are now complaining because the Doctor is no longer the murderer of 2.47 billion children - the Tenth Doctor is no longer the biggest hypocrite in the known universe:
. . .

I'm not sure what to do with myself if I don't have to hate that episode with every fiber of my being.
promethia_tenk: (tv girl)

[personal profile] promethia_tenk 2013-12-08 09:28 pm (UTC)(link)
>>But it's pretty much the exact wording Moffat uses in that interview - the Doctor is the man who never would. I thought it sounded familiar, and this was why.

That he does . . .

>>And you can still hate it, even if it's useful?

Oh, Ten is still a sanctimonious jerk in it and every single other thing about it is still appalling and wrong, but it no longer requires every fiber of my being.
promethia_tenk: (tv girl)

[personal profile] promethia_tenk 2013-12-09 12:47 pm (UTC)(link)
You see? RTD knew it, he just couldn't help going for the angst...
The fundamental conflict of Rusty Who.

I love it when you're angry! :)
Lucky for both of us!

[identity profile] honeynoir.livejournal.com 2013-12-08 08:55 pm (UTC)(link)
Ten makes the best faces, it's true.

That parody is the actual best thing. Eleven trying to be the voice of reason... unexpectedly!violent Five... he didn't want to go *cries with laughter*

[identity profile] honeynoir.livejournal.com 2013-12-08 09:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Ahaha I can see why!

It's possibly my favourite thing about DotD (apart from all the other things, obviously.)
I agree with that! :D

(Still watching that parody, so much stuff to laugh at. Eleven flapping his hands everywhere and running like a windmill and casually wearing handcuffs while talking to River. *cries some more*)

[identity profile] ever-neutral.livejournal.com 2013-12-09 04:18 am (UTC)(link)
\o/ Thanks for all the links. That last Eleven vid was particularly awesome and chilling.

ETA: Just one little point, re. the people who are now complaining because the Doctor is no longer the murderer of 2.47 billion children - the Tenth Doctor is no longer the biggest hypocrite in the known universe:
THANK. YOU.

Miss M and I have been nearly crying with laughter. According to Miss M his name is now 'Spoonface'.
LAUGHING TO MY GRAVE.

[identity profile] flowsoffire.livejournal.com 2013-12-10 08:46 pm (UTC)(link)
Thanks for all the links! Pretty lovely ;)