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Gallifrey One – Station 27: Day One

Welcome to the madness of Gallifrey One posts for the year!

By Saturday morning, I’ve already been here in LA for three days. Arriving earlier than ever before (Wednesday morning) has proven to be a good idea. It gave me time to begin adjusting to the time change, just hang out in the lobby, and connect with a few people I’d met in passing previously. On the down—or possibly just strange—side, by the time the con actually started on Friday, I felt almost as if the weekend ought to winding down instead of just ramping up.

In part, that feeling of being well into the con is probably due to the fact that one of the big social interactions of Gally was already in full swing by mid-afternoon on Thursday: ribbon trading. Even before badges were available at the registration table downstairs, people were in the lobby feverishly trading (even hotel staff had a ribbon to trade!). And it wasn’t just ribbons. This year, I saw the largest variety of non-ribbon tradables I’ve ever witnessed. There were Girl Scout cookies, candy spoons, hand-crochet adipose babies, tiny wooden TARDISes (this last being one I didn’t see in person, but saw posted on Facebook), and plenty more I probably didn’t even hear about.

Since I wasn’t able to get my ribbons from my supplier until about 8pm, that meant I was already hours behind on trading. Time will tell whether or not I’ll give them all out now, though the key seems to be making one’s stash visible. Without that visual cue, people don’t approach you to ask for ribbons; it seems to be an expectation that has grown along with Gally’s ribbon culture. Were I a cultural anthropologist/sociologist, I’d totally do a study on the development and evolution of the culture of various conventions.

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Confession #98: I’m Wary of Change

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Moffat’s out; Chibnall’s in.

The news is now weeks old, and every podcaster and other blogger seems already to have offered their thoughts in some shape or form. Having spent these weeks taking in others’ opinions, I can’t say for sure that giving myself time to stew on it all has allowed my own views to mature, but they have at least solidified.

My initial reaction was twofold. On the one hand, I was ecstatic to hear Moffat’s time was finally coming to an end. Regular readers will know I have long since tired of Moffat’s style of arc storytelling, though I have still enjoyed individual stories (or pieces of them) and one-liners, so this should come as no surprise.

On the other hand, I was none too thrilled with the choice of Chibnall as heir to the throne, despite having been braced for it for months based on speculation in various corners of the Internet. Why did I feel that way? Let’s review Chibnall’s writing credits.

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Absurdly Entertaining

Review of The One Doctor (#27)
Big Finish Release Date: Dec 2001
Doctor/Companion: Six and Mel
Stars: Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford
Preceding Story: Primeval (Five, Nyssa)
Succeeding Story: Invaders from Mars (Eight, Charley)

Big Finish (BF) has been really good for characters much maligned for their televised appearances. While Ol’ Sixie was the last incarnation to which I warmed (even before BF), Mel is one I’ve never quite managed to appreciate. Until now.

Last year I got my first taste of BF Mel, and while she didn’t instantaneously win me over, I found her a heck of a lot less grating than I’d ever found her on television. This time around, I actually quite liked her. Not only was she clever without being shrill, the dialogue even had her poking a bit of fun at herself: “Believe me, when I’m scared, I’ll scream the paint off the walls.”

Similarly, Ol’ Sixie was always the cleverest person in the room without being pompous or abrasive (as he often was in his televised adventures). He, too, was the butt of a gentle joke from time to time (references to his expanding girth, exercise regimen, and consumption of carrot juice all cropped up), but none of it ever felt mean-spirited or overdone.

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Changes, and a Giveaway!

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This post officially marks the beginning of my sixth year of blogging. Two days ago (11 Jan 2016) was the fifth anniversary of the publication of my very first post and, thereby, the launching of the blog. Over the years I’ve posted ninety-seven Confessions, twenty Nu-Views, fifteen Retro-Views, and nearly one hundred fifty (!) reviews of new episodes, DVDs, and audio adventures (with a couple of books thrown in for good measure). I’ve also written a smattering of miscellaneous posts describing my experiences at conventions and such.

For the past five years, I have posted at least once a week, every Wednesday and then some. I’ve made something like three hundred entries on Confessions of a Neowhovian, and I don’t have any plans to stop. However, as I stated at the beginning of my not-tongue-in-cheek-enough April Fool’s post last year, that has become wearing. Unless I’m writing a review or a Nu-View, the seeds that turn into posts are ever harder to come by.

In order not to burn myself out completely, then, I’ve decided to make some changes to my blogging practices that I hope will keep both me and you, my readers, engaged. Specifically, I’m going to change the frequency of my posts to allow myself more time both to devise interesting topics and to focus on my other (fiction) writing projects.

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Reader Poll Roundup: Series Nine Edition

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When I drew my comparisons last year between Series Seven and Series Eight, I had to do a little handwaving because of the difference in the lengths of those series (thirteen and twelve episodes, respectively). For similar reasons, the switch between Doctors was difficult to quantify. This time I can draw more direct parallels as both the number of episodes and the current Doctor are the same between S8 and S9; S7 will also get a look-in.

Beginning with the average (mean) ratings of episodes, we see the usual ups and downs over the course of the series. To get the average rating for any given episode, each star rating (e.g., 5 stars) was multiplied by the number of votes it got, the results added, and the sum divided by the total number of votes. For Series Nine, we get the following:

Although there are some peaks and valleys (more on that later), we see that the ratings were fairly consistent throughout the series. Fully half of them fall within less than a third of a star of each other (from 3.45 to 3.75 stars).

If we rearrange the data to show how the episodes scored from highest to lowest, we can see the trend more clearly (note that the episodes are different colors between the above and below charts; apologies for the vagaries of my visualization software):

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A Song of Comfort

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Review of The Husbands of River Song
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Christmas episodes are unusual creatures, trying to be all things to all viewers. There is the expectation that a large number of families, including those who don’t regularly watch the show, will be tuning in. Thus, the episode should be easy to follow for those with little or no knowledge of the characters and ongoing storyline(s), and fun and cheerful for those making it part of their holiday celebrations.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2015 BBC

At the same time, it has to be satisfying for those of us who follow the show regularly. If it’s a complete toss-off, the production team risks alienating its core audience, which is also bad. Thus a Christmas special is a weird hybrid (see what I did there?) of fluff and substance that can be very difficult to execute.

As one might expect, then, there were parts of The Husbands of River Song (THORS—Ha! What an acronym!) that made me really happy and others that made me cringe a little. It’s difficult even to generalize which was which. Most of the interpersonal bits were good, though some were not; most of the guest artist bits were pants, though some were not; most of the plot points were eyeroll-y, though some were not. You get the idea: par for the course.

On first viewing, though, I found the good bits outweighed the bad. Moffat’s dialog was mostly rich in quotable one-liners, with the occasional battle-of-the-sexes comments that he seems to think are funny (but as far as I’m concerned almost never are). I took the lighthearted feel of a “romp” at face value that first time through, too, which meant that the guest cast (Greg Davies as King Hydroflax, Matt Lucas as Nardole (whom I kept mentally calling Unstoffe at first), and Phillip Rhys as Ramone) were all played at a just-right-for-the-occasion “panto” level of off-the-wall.

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Confession #97: I Love Being Fannish

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With the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens this past weekend, there’s been a frenzy of Star Wars fannishness around the Internet, with calls to avoid revealing spoilers interspersed with endless memes, think pieces, and quizzes. I consider myself a Star Wars fan (among many other fandoms), so all this felt normal to me.

Then I saw someone say something about how overwhelming it all was. Is this, the person wondered, how everyone else feels when we get all in a tizzy about the latest Doctor Who news du jour? The very idea turned them off so much they felt chagrined about participating in the hoopla in the past and talked of turning off all their social media accounts to avoid subjecting the rest of the world to such nonsense in the future.

I think this startled Who fan has taken the wrong lesson from the experience. There are two major classes of reactions one can have when presented with this sort of behavioral mirror: recoil or embrace. The former is the route my unfortunate acquaintance took, and springs from an exterior perspective. When seen from the outside, fannish behavior can appear irrational, overzealous, and occasionally even militant—in short: fanatical.

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Series Nine Retrospective

All through Series Nine, it felt like we were missing key elements of the overall story and wouldn’t understand until it all wrapped up in the final episode. That often happens under Moffat’s leadership, but this year—to me, anyway—felt particularly arc-heavy. Now that we’ve got that broader perspective, I wanted to go back and look more carefully at how it might influence our reading of earlier episodes.

The Magician’s Apprentice and The Witch’s Familiar

We began on Skaro, bringing Davros, Daleks, and Missy all back on board. As the opening gambit, the first two-parter of the series had to introduce all sorts of ideas without letting on how many of them would come back later. In some cases the recurring elements were glaringly obvious (e.g., the Hybrid); in others it was more subtle (the way the Doctor can come up with a way to “win” and make complex calculations in a tiny fraction of a second). In still others, we got the sense that something might come back, but didn’t get hammered over the head with it (the Confession Dial).

Already, too, we got the sense that Clara was nearly ready to fly solo. She’s truly “taken the stabilizers off her bike” and acts like a Doctor substitute at UNIT. Rather than the beginning, this is the middle of her arc. Though she will continue to get ever more reckless, she’s already short some reck here. Clara is more mature and self-sufficient even than last series, and the fact that her boyfriend is “still dead” (thanks for that, Missy) further reduces her need to give any fucks for her own safety.

Then there’s Missy. We’ve been trained by her previous incarnations to think she would show up again later in any series she crops up in once. Yet after this, she scarpers and only returns in passing mention as the perpetrator of the Doctor/Clara pairing in the first place. (It’s so very the Master/Missy’s style to try to bring about an apocalypse just to get the Doctor to be her bestie again.) I’m counting that as a pleasant trope subversion.

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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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Review of Hell Bent
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Moffat couldn’t kill a character to save his own goddamn life.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2015 BBC

He likes to pretend he’s ruthless. He tugs heartstrings with near misses and kills off minor or supporting characters, but when it comes down to it, he’s simply unable to commit, even when the narrative demands it.

I had to wonder whether he was trolling himself or just trying to cut off naysayers at the pass when he wrote Ashildr’s words pointing out the way that the Doctor’s actions earlier in the episode had completely undermined the emotional impact of the previous two episodes. “She died for who she was and for who she loved. She fell where she stood. It was sad. And it was beautiful. And it is over. We have no right to change who she was.” And yet that’s exactly what Moffat does.

It has become something of an in-joke in fandom that you don’t have to worry when a character seems to die, because they’ll just come back at some point (I still haven’t ruled out a Danny Pink return). I don’t think anyone was completely destroyed by Clara’s death in Face the Raven because (a) we’ve become inured to Companion death (hers, even! Versions of her have already died in Asylum of the Daleks and The Snowmen!) and (b) we were all waiting for the end of the series for exactly this reason. There’s no “just this once” to Moffat’s “everybody lives!“

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