The meta café is back! (And no one's around. Ah well, that's life. *g*) Before we start, a little background for this particular meta:
A while ago I re-watched one of my favourite RTD-era vids of all time:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hollywoodgrrl’s Marble House. It is utterly stunning visually and the editing is incredible (the first minute is... unlike anything else), but it is also extremely hardhitting, brutal and very manipulative. I even wrote meta on it once. Now I hadn’t watched it for ages - not since before S6 - and, as I watched, the most extraordinary thing happened: I didn’t understand it. I mean, at all. It was like it was asking what direction is yellow. Or what shape is ‘up’. It completely didn’t compute. Which puzzled me immensely (because it is an AWESOME vid and I pretty much know it by heart...). So I started thinking and analysing and this meta is the result. Well - this is how it started. Since then I’ve had a lot of other thoughts and it’s all been siphoned into this. But in essence: The Moff rebooted the show so thoroughly that it is a completely different thing. And he didn’t do it just by taking every single issue that RTD left him with, addressing it, and fixing it - any showrunner taking over would have to do this, because Ten, bless his cotton Timelord socks, had more issues than I can count - but by changing the basic vocabulary of the show [back to what it used to be]. S6 was at the heart of this, and the changes this season brought cannot be overestimated. Follow me under the cut, and I’ll explain what I mean.
SPOILERS for all of New Who, including the most recent Christmas Special.
(Btw, this is NOT a ‘RTD is awful, Moffat is God’, essay. I find what RTD did v. interesting, and will look at it in detail.)
Anyway, for those who don’t fancy reading the whole thing - and as a nifty little intro - I summed up the whole thing in two images. *g* (The quote is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is used to describe Angel, her broody vampire boyfriend.)
( Spoilers for EVERYTHING, including the most recent Christmas Special )
A while ago I re-watched one of my favourite RTD-era vids of all time:
hollywoodgrrl’s Marble House. It is utterly stunning visually and the editing is incredible (the first minute is... unlike anything else), but it is also extremely hardhitting, brutal and very manipulative. I even wrote meta on it once. Now I hadn’t watched it for ages - not since before S6 - and, as I watched, the most extraordinary thing happened: I didn’t understand it. I mean, at all. It was like it was asking what direction is yellow. Or what shape is ‘up’. It completely didn’t compute. Which puzzled me immensely (because it is an AWESOME vid and I pretty much know it by heart...). So I started thinking and analysing and this meta is the result. Well - this is how it started. Since then I’ve had a lot of other thoughts and it’s all been siphoned into this. But in essence: The Moff rebooted the show so thoroughly that it is a completely different thing. And he didn’t do it just by taking every single issue that RTD left him with, addressing it, and fixing it - any showrunner taking over would have to do this, because Ten, bless his cotton Timelord socks, had more issues than I can count - but by changing the basic vocabulary of the show [back to what it used to be]. S6 was at the heart of this, and the changes this season brought cannot be overestimated. Follow me under the cut, and I’ll explain what I mean.SPOILERS for all of New Who, including the most recent Christmas Special.
(Btw, this is NOT a ‘RTD is awful, Moffat is God’, essay. I find what RTD did v. interesting, and will look at it in detail.)
Anyway, for those who don’t fancy reading the whole thing - and as a nifty little intro - I summed up the whole thing in two images. *g* (The quote is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is used to describe Angel, her broody vampire boyfriend.)
( Spoilers for EVERYTHING, including the most recent Christmas Special )
