life without a plot

Um. I didn't mean to disappear off the face of the Earth livejournal so completely, but life got a bit hectic since January. (In an extremely boring and uninspiring way, I should probably hasten to add.) Apart from work there's the bookkeeping class I'm still not very sure about, but have to do homework and study a bit for nonetheless, A. is keeping me busy with Russian and Russian homework and we're working on vocabulary at the moment, which is something I actually am sure about and enjoy doing, so I try to make more than a half-assed, just-scraping-by effort, and L. has been sending me texts to translate that I keep agreeing to do even if before I'd already have said that I don't have time, not even so much because of the money, but because I'm still hoping the experience might come in useful eventually. And although the weather is doing its best to sabotage me at the moment, I'm at least trying to squeeze the occasional hiking tour into the schedule to keep me sane, because the last couple of times I went out with G., alcoholism suddenly started to look quite tempting. (Kidding. There's absolutely no chance I'm going there, but, tempting.)

Oh, and the Meta from Hell (tm), which surprisingly is actually still going somewhere and there isn't even a 'RTD meta draft 5' yet, so, go me.

[Rewatch-status: DW S1: even better than I remembered. S2... a bit meh-ish maybe, because I'm not really into the more blatantly romantic Doctor/Rose angle. School Reunion is still lovely though, the Cybermen two-parter is also very good, The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit has some interesting ideas, and in my admittedly unpopular opinion 90% of Love & Monsters is among the best things RTD has written for DW overall and the best episode he wrote for S2. (The remaining 10% being the actual physical realisation of the Abzorbaloff, and the 'sex life' joke, which personally I still don't find all that horribly offensive, but I hate having to feel defensive all the time for loving the episode, so.) I don't much care for the Cybermen vs. Daleks extravaganza of the S2 finale, and I can't even say I found the Doctor/Rose part particularly touching after the first time I watched it, but Love & Monsters kills me every time, even before the final reveal of Elton's mother's death. You see these people connecting, and maybe it isn't much, maybe it isn't special in the greater scheme of things, but it says so much about how amazing it is that these connections can happen at all when they are so inherently fragile and there is so much that can go wrong, and how important they are. It's starts out as such a light, funny episode on the surface, but it has this strong dark undercurrent that makes it actually quite brutal, and really,'love and monsters' is TW in a nutshell. Human connections in an environment that is fundamentally hostile to them in every sense. There is a thematic connection there IMO, and it's not just structural similarities like Gwen and the Weevil, which is reminiscent of Elton and whatever the monster at the beginning of the episode is called, as well as the forgetting/remembering theme, or Gwen, like Elton, stumbling into something that opens a whole new world up to her in the best and the worst sense, triggering a sort of existentialist crisis. Not to mention that in Cyberwoman 'love' and 'monster' are actually thematic keywords of a sort. I'm not saying it's deliberate, but themes do carry over.

I'm in the middle of TW S1 now, and it's funny, because I always said, and I still do think that's true, that thematically TW never changed as radically as people sometimes claim, but going back, there is at least a bit of a sense of 'aw, they're all still so young and innocent' about it, especially in the first few episodes. Also realised that I have, like, sub-sub-zero interest in pre-Cyberwoman Ianto, although admittedly that might be because the whole coffee-(boy)-angle has been too thoroughly tainted by the post-CoE wank as far as I'm concerned. The character only becomes interesting when you see what goes on beneath the surface, and it's a brilliant set-up that in the long run gives Jack/Ianto some depth, although I have no idea if that was even deliberate, since I seem to remember reading that originally Ianto wasn't meant to survive the episode? Speaking of shipping, though, JB and EM have the kind of off-the-scale chemistry in Ghost Mashine that makes me wonder every time about what Jack/Gwen could have been like if they'd really gone for that angle, and I still don't understand what happened afterwards that led to all those painfully awkward UST-or-whatever-that-was scenes later on...)]

(Also, not that this is particularly relevant, since I'll still be primarily posting here, but since the AO3 officially allows meta now, I got myself an account and am going to upload at least the longer, more coherent pieces eventually...)

 

(Tue - Sat) Five songs by Сплин/Splean, picked at random: Молоко и мёд (Milk and Honey), Терпсихора (Terpsichore), Романс (Pomace), Тебе это снится (You're Dreaming This), and Совсем другой (Completely Different).


( music & lyrics )

Also stumbled across a DW Rose vid using Совсем другой (Completely Different) which fits the lyrics amazingly well... (Lyrics under the cut above the video.)

I don't really want to write about MD before I've rewatched the whole of it, but this isn't going to happen for a few weeks since I'm busy learning for the ECDL exam and really don't have the time to spend 10 hrs+ (very much + probably, taking notes and everything) watching.

On the other hand, sadly I don't have the patience to sit on ideas for a month either. So... a warning for slapdashness, I guess?

I don't think any amount of rewatching will make parts of the story less clunky, but what I realised during my walk on Sunday is that once everything fell into place with the last episode and the structure became apparent, things... changed, and it definitely made me look differently at the story and see its merits.

# ( Jack's arc is really well done in hindsight. )


# Once one puts MD in the wider context of RTD's writing, a lot of things fall into place, too. I think in some ways he started to tell a story in 2003 with The Second Coming and has been working on it ever since, and that's the story of how we deal with death.

( Vague ramblings about mortality and the religious themes. )

 

I wasn't really planning on getting into this discussion, in fact I was planning to keep out of discussions about SM's DW entirely, but. (Why does there always seems to be a 'but'?) IMO it's not so much what happened, it's how it happened. I don't think anyone is seriously trying to argue that Nine or Ten never killed anyone, considering that the fact that they did was a huge leitmotif during both their arcs.

But as I see it RTD tried to make a point of giving every death a certain weight, even if it was the death of the villain. Ten especially almost always had a moment where he found something beautiful even in the monsters trying to kill him. You were always aware that what ended was a life with all its possibilities and complexities, even if it was a life with a lot of wrong choices and few chances to get it right to begin with. Margaret Blaine was probably the best example of that, and going by The Writer's Tale he originally tried to put more of Davros's backstory in Journey's End, making the parallel between him and Ten, the war background in both their lives, more obvious. Almost every death was accompanied by the regret that things hadn't gone differently. Even with enemies like the Daleks, who don't have free will or individual thought, and no purpose but to hate and to kill, killing was never entirely off-hand or without consequences. Of course Nine and Ten killed. But they also both struggled with the consequences of that throughout their arcs. Nine in some ways recalls Stephen Bannerman from RTD's The Grand, coming back from the trenches of WW1, struggling with what he'd seen, the guilt of what he'd done, the guilt of having survived, and how killing had changed him; incapable of just picking up the life he'd known before the war, incapable of leaving the war behind. Dalek was all about the danger of becoming what you're fighting, and so was Boom Town and The Parting of Ways. Ten, and this, I think, comes out strongly especially towards the end of his arc, was so extremely distrustful of guns and violence because he didn't trust himself. He'd seen what the Time War had done to the Time Lords, how it perverted them so much that he had to kill them all along with the Daleks, and consequently he saw the seeds of that everywhere, especially within himself.

Sometimes there was no other solution, but it was very obvious that killing should not ever become something one should get used to or desensitised to. As far as I remember it was never portrayed as cool or stylish, or used as the butt of a joke, and I don't think that over the run of RTD's DW it was ever treated this... casually. If anything, RTD took it to the other extreme. The Doctor kept getting pitched against creatures like the Racnoss, the Carrionites, the Sycorax, the Daleks, or the Sontarans, who were determined to destroy or enslave the entire human race, had basically no individuality, very little complexity and very obviously absolutely no interest in the Doctor's offer. But even so, even then, there was a moment when you pitied them, when you were supposed to pity them, where you were supposed to realise that this might have been necessary, but was nothing to be applauded. It's probably no coincidence that even on the less family-orientated TW in CoE Jack, for whom killing had become something of a non-issue over all that time, is confronted with what exactly it means to take a life when it isn't someone nameless or faceless.

Which I think is a good thing. The older I get, the less fond I am of the casual, aestheticised violence we get in movies and on TV all the time, and the occasional break from that was nice.


( Spoilers for 6.01 & 6.02 )

I actually wanted to write/post this last week, but most of the time I was so tired that I was happy if I managed to reply to comments in a semi-coherent fashion instead of just sitting there and blinking at the screen cross-eyed and brain-dead. There was a very interesting discussion about Ten and death, what kind of an impact John Smith's death in The Family of Blood had on him, etc. in elisi's journal here and here and sensiblecat's journal, here, and it got me thinking about other things too, because what also came up was the persistent and deliberate ambiguity of RTD's writing, his equally intriguing and frustrating refusal to deliver neatly tied up, immediately satisfying endings.

I keep coming back to Elton's speech at the end of Love and Monsters, which I think in many ways sums up the quintessence of RTD's DW. The brilliant and the terrible, painful things, how they're mixed up until they can't be separated any longer, all part of the same thing—life—, and the question of whether it's worth it in the end. (The end of the Casanova mini series is much the same: 'the seducer and the monster' and 'that stupid daft man and all his adventures', and of course it's both true, both are part of the same person, the same life.)

Which brings me to the (apparently slightly paraphrased) Stephen King quote about how 'salvation and damnation are the same thing.' Now I stopped reading Stephen King a long time ago (the last novels I read were Needful Things and Gerald's Game), so my perspective might be skewed because of that, but somehow this is not a motto I associate with King's writing. King tortured his characters too relentlessly for my taste, and was too busy scaring his readers. I eventually quit reading him because his brand of horror felt ultimately sterile to me; it didn't open any doors in my imagination. When I think of Stephen King, 'salvation' isn't a word that immediately comes to mind.

On the other hand the damnation/salvation equation is something that very much reminds me of Clive Barker's novels, where the lines between humans and monsters, good and evil, reality and imagination, so often blur, and the world really turns out to be a place that is 'so much stranger than that', 'so much darker', 'so much madder', but in the end also better, or at least richer, than it was before. There are a lot of differences, of course. Clive Barker is much more spiritually inclined, whereas RTD is much more realistic, and ultimately concerned with writing stories about humanity, rather than venturing into the truely alien and fantastic—which incidentally I think is the reason why Ten always was so very human; I'm not sure RTD could have written a truly alien Doctor, or would even have been interested in writing one. But there are some similarities, although I can't quite put my finger on it. I think. Which isn't saying much, because my brain still refuses to think very clearly and isn't actually going anywhere with all this, except hopping from one tangent to the other.



Lastly, on a still somewhat related note, I bought this small book with a couple of short stories by Anton Chekhov a while ago, at the end of which there is an appendix with excerpts from some of Chekhov's letters where he talks about writing, and there's one that I liked particularly: You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent (*) attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist. In 'Anna Kareninа' and 'Evgeny Onyegin' not a single problem is solved, but they satisfy you completely because all the problems are correctly stated in them. It is the business of the judge to put the right questions, but the answers must be given by the jury according to their own lights.

(*) The German translation says 'bewusst' ('conscious', 'aware'); the Russian word can mean both.

# Merlin 3.06 wasn't just repetitive, but also insultingly stupid, and infantile even on the standards of this show. Also, if Lord Whatshisname is that forgiving of Arthur basically standing his daughter up at the altar before the entire court of Camelot, that alliance didn't need strengthening through marriage in the first place, unless the idea was snapping her up before someone politically inconvenient might.

Elena's story wasn't as bad as it could have been, what with her amazing riding skills, but Grunhilda chasing after Gaius and he being OMG!horrified at that, was cringeworthy. There were a couple of Arthur/Merlin moments that might have been cute if the whole episode hadn't annoyed me so much (the intimacy of the pillow throwing, the destiny speech), but OTOH the Arthur/Gwen scenes were too weak, especially for such an episode. I have absolutely no problem with Arthur/Gwen. But make it count. Make it an important part of the story. Make me care. Write it consistently, don't just stick the odd scene in here and there. Don't make her and Arthur's relationship secondary to Arthur and Merlin's.


# 3.07 was slightly better, I guess, at least in some respects. In others, not so much. I've always hated how Morgana's character and arc were handled this season, but before this episode I also had quite a bit of sympathy for her situation, annoying evil smirks notwithstanding. ( Now, though... )


# SJA: Death of the Doctor

I don't actually watch this show, or maybe more precisely, I tried and watched a few episodes back in S1, and it's cute and everything, but really a bit too children-orientated for my taste. I guess I was secretly hoping that RTD would make me like Eleven, but that didn't really work either. There were a couple of scenes I vaguely enjoyed, but in the end it wasn't enough.

And what I found really... unsatisfying, plot-wise, is how there are these intergalactic undertaker vultures-aliens who have presided over so many funerals and seen so much death and pain and suffering that they want to use the Tardis to stop death ('to halt the endless, endless weeping'), which is the kind of storyline that would have fit right into Ten's arc, but there's no connection at all to the Doctor, no acknowledgement that this is exactly the thing that made Ten stumble in the end, or that Eleven might see things differently. Odd. There's also the strong implication that the UNIT lady lost someone (or several someones), the way she says, there's nothing left for me here on Earth, not any more'. But that's never clarified either, unless I missed something. The whole thing felt a bit like a left-over idea that didn't quite make it into Ten's arc...

New Merlin, and not only a) do I still have a (probably irrational) soft spot for that show even after S2 ('In a land of myth...', and there suddenly was a stupid grin on my face that I couldn't quite wipe off), but b) the first episode was, minor quibbles notwithstanding, rather impressive.

( Merlin 3.01: The Tears of Uther Pendragon pt. 1 )



Switching fandoms for a moment, on the whole I'm trying to stay away from all TW S4 related interviews and discussions because I want to get spoiled as little as possible, but I read this interview with John Fay yesterday, and leaving aside the whole killing-of-Ianto issue, there's something he says about Jack that I found interesting:

In my mind, I was always aware that Jack had gone through this situation many times before, and that was really interesting to me. How do you have a relationship and fall in love with someone when you know – absolutely know – you will be around to see them die? That’s a real tragedy that Jack has to carry around with him, as well as a fascinating weight to hang around a character’s shoulders.

Becasue, really, this. And not only because it's always nice to get a bit of (unintentional) validation.

Obviously authors are dead, there is no right or wrong way to read a story, &tc., & so forth, but the acceptance of mortality is the central struggle in (RTD's) DW, especially for Ten, and although TW approaches this from the other side where death is a already a given, and the problem is to find meaning in life, the issue of mortality is equally important there and it's absolutely central to every aspect of Jack's story. Without this, nothing makes sense. S2 was maybe a bit deceptive in this respect, since Jack came back from LotTL so very determined to be as human as possible, but CoE picks up again right where S1 left off.

*sigh* Question, because I'm really stuck here - in Journey's End, assuming what Dalek Caan says about the Doctor's soul being revealed isn't just insane gibberish, what exactly is being revealed?

Because I don't believe that it's all about the Doctor manipulating people into getting killed or killing themselves, not at the end of a season that is all about humanity's agency, decisions, free will, etc. Especially not after Midnight, where the Doctor can't even save himself. It simply doesn't make sense, and for the moment I'm going to pretend it's supposed to makes sense on some level. Jenny's death was about her choices, River's about her wanting to keep her future, Luke Rattigan was trying to redeem himself rather than let someone else die for his arrogance, and the LINDA people were an unfortunate case of life being just not fair. The rest, though? Jabe, the Controller, Lynda, Sir Robert, Mrs. Moore, Jack/The Face of Boe, Chanto, Astrid, the hostess, and there are others not shown in the flashback, all died as heroically as possible, trying to save other people, just like Harriet Jones, and if you take that away, if you reduce all that, including Martha, Jack and Sarah Jane's actions in the finale, to the Doctor turning people into weapons, the whole thing becomes really rather dark and depressing.

Davros says, referring to Harriet Jones's death: "Already, I have seen them sacrifice today for their beloved Doctor." In Harriet's own words this sound rather different: "But I stand by my actions to this day, because I knew - I knew that one day, the Earth would be in danger and the Doctor would fail to appear. I told him so myself, and he didn't listen." and "But my life doesn't matter. Not if it saves the Earth."

Davros is an unreliable narrator with an obvious agenda, who isn't even seeing what is happening under his very eyes. He's obviously pushing the Doctor's survivor's guilt buttons very effectively and with lasting impact, but in the end there really is no reason to take his accusations at face value. Why should one trust him, rather than (e.g.) Rose, who two episodes earlier talked about the Doctor making 'everyone he touches' realise how brilliant they are or can be? At the very least the truth has to be somewhere between these two statements.

Dalek Caan is insane, but OTOH he is, sort of, the voice of truth in this, the most he does is call the Doctor 'Dark Lord' in the beginning; he never judges and condemns him along with Davros or the Daleks. He has recognised the truth of what the Daleks are and betrayed them and Davros. When a Dalek can do that, does it make sense to assume the Doctor's companions are without a mind or will of their own?


So, what is being revealed?


I think in the end it once more comes down to what is the red thread running through Ten's arc, that he simply can't accept that death is a part of life that even a Time Lord has no control over, that life is painful, messy and complicated and will force you to occasionally compromise your lofty principles, that in the end you just have to live with that, and the fact that he just can't, which would be a good transition to the specials, where he decides to travel alone, and the conclusion of Ten's story, but this isn't much of a reveal, is it?


The only other option I see is that Davros's perception is so distorted that he is missing the point entirely, just like he completely misinterpreted the rest of Dalek Caan's predictions, and we're really supposed to go with Rose's statement in Turn Left, which would make the reveal simply about the Doctor inspiring people to be heroes and saving others and being a force for the good, even if it's unavoidable that they sometimes do get killed. After all, before they stepped out of the Tardis he was still telling them, "It's been good, though, hasn't it? All of us, all of it. Everything we did," telling them how brilliant they all were. It's just that every time the subject of death comes up, it automatically eclipses everything else in his mind.