Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

A Fan-Made trailer for Doctor Who's Fiftieth Anniversary. Folks in my circles who are Doctor Who Fans have perhaps already seen this. But whether they have or not, I suspect it would be cheering (also, for folks who don't really know much about D.W., it might be a good intro to the whole ethos... or, it might be utterly confusing. Either one)

So, apparently, I gather, from reading access-friends-list reviews of the latest Doctor Who episode (For the Record: "A good man goes to war"), The Moff has written that ( Spoilers, darlings! )

.

When my understanding of that detail was confirmed by lizbee, I commenced with Happy!Flailing, because I wrote up a remarkably similiar theory way, way back on June 23, 2005.

And while I remember writing it, I couldn't remember exactly where I posted it, so I had to search via Google. And that search brought up "10 things in my personal Doctor Who Canon" meme (November 3, 2007), and of those ten, three have been supported by stories in this televised season...

Um, should I be worried that the Moff and I think so much alike?

The comment I left:

Nicholas Courtney: Marvelous chap -- all of him.

On January 6, Craig Ferguson Interviewed Alex Kingston. And, as part of that episode, he finally got a chance to air his Ode to the Legacy that is Doctor Who legally (yay!).

On January 8, I woke up wanting to write up my thoughts about the episode, and thoughts I've had about that ode since it aired in November.

But then, I got hit with the news of the violence and death and cynicism in Tucson, and it sucked all the squee out of my heart.

Today, I woke up and decided that this would be the day I made this post. So, here's a close approximation of what I would have written a week ago, colored by the fact that I am (actually) a week, and (legally) a year, older:

1. ( He had Gary Sinise on first (this is a ranty-McRant-rant tangeant). )

Now, onto that "Summary of Doctor Who set to the Orbital Theme Remix" (We can't really call it "The lost cold open" anymore, can we?):

2. I disagree with the lyric: "He is a force for good
   in an otherwise uncertain universe."
   
   The Doctor is not a "force." He's an individual, endowed (blessed, cursed, what-have-you) with an immense intellect, an equal capacity for imagination, and a profoundly strong moral compass (and a kindness that he has grown into). But he is also flawed, and often mistaken, and that moral compass and intellect can sometimes get in the way, and his actions, as often as not, have unforseen consequences that unleash evil as well as good.
   
   He's not a superhero, to my mind, but he is a hero -- in the Joseph Campbell sense of the word. And if you're looking for a fictional character to be your role model, it would be hard to find a better one.
   
   
3. More lyrics: "One thing is consistent, though, / And this is why the show / Remains beloved by geeks and nerds: / It's all about the triumph of Intellect and Romance / Over Brute force and Cynicism."
   
   Yes. THIS. ...And, sadly, I think this is one reason why Doctor Who has never really caught on in America, and remains a relatively small fandom even among the geeks (compared to Star Trek, mainly): there's always been a part of American culture that has embraced Brute Force and Cynicism, and looked askance at Intellect and Romance as "sissy."
   
   If you want to get an idea of how far back into our culture this goes, just take a look at how Benjamin Franklin was treated, at the end of his life, and how low he is in the hierarchy of Heroic Founding Fathers, compared to the soldiers and generals.
   
   
4. I guessed right! re: which River Song clip they'd show before she came out, to introduce the character to first timers (It was the Fez killing scene on the rooftop). It was a brilliant choice: it showed all the main characters in a single shot (Amy, Rory, River and the Doctor), and it hinted at the wit of the dialog and the relationships between them. And it had a big shooty-gun bit, too (see above).
   
   I think they made a really bad choice for a clip for Matt Smith's interview, btw (The one where he first encounters the vampire ladies in Venice). That's a great scene for those who already know the essence of the Doctor. But it's kind of hard to sell him as a main character-Hero, if your first impression of him is gleefully running away (I'd have loved it if they'd shown the clip of him riding a galloping horse, or [but it's too spoilery] when he introduces himself to the "Deathy aliens... of Death!" at the end of "Eleventh Hour").
   
   
5. I was bemused / amused when Alex Kingston compared American Who fans to the Zombie!Apocolypse. Do you think American fans really are more that much crazier than their British counterparts, or is it just that much harder to camouflage a television shoot in the open plains than it is in the hidey-holes and alleyways of Cardiff?
   
   
6. I've seen (via "Confidential" clips on YouTube) that this next season will reveal who River Song is. Do you think, if RTD were still in charge, he'd have the same answer as Stephen Moffat is dreaming (or has dreamt) up?

Okay, I think that just about covers all the rambling thoughts that have been rambling through my brain these last couple of weeks...

So, yesterday, I got into a discussion with vilakins in kerravonsen's reaction post to the recent Doctor Who Christmas Special, especially the line: "Christmas is always in winter."

ORLY?! asked all those Who fans who watched the Christmas Special after a Summertime Christmas celebration, for reals, right here on Earth. And vilikins and I launched into a long, tangential, conversation about what sort of planetary factors go into what sorts of festivals the intelligent beings might celebrate, and what happens when you superimpose histories and politics on top of that.

And what about planets without any axial tilt?

---

And that's the reason I love the show, and the fans it attracts. The very premise and the format of the show prompts these sorts of questions, and gets all sort of juicy conversations going. My brain feeds on Juicy Conversations (and chocolate).

And late last night, that discussion reawakened a set of memories in my brain about two very real, nonfiction exoplanets that have been discovered just within the five years, both orbiting the same red dwarf star 20.5 lightyears from us: Gliese 581c and Gliese 581g (two wikipedia articles).

Both planets appear to be Earth-like, and to have conditions suitable to sustain the presence of liquid water and thick atmospheres that would moderate the extreme variations in the planets' surface temperatures. Therefore, these planets are more likely then not to support the presence of life as we'd recognize it.

Both planets are probably also without much, if any axial tilt. And both (like our own moon) are very likely tidally locked, so that the length of a day equals the length of a year. So: yeah -- right in our own galatic backyard, two planets that have both a "north" and a "south" but also planets where "north and south" probably wouldn't mean much, culturally speaking, if any cultures live there (but "Light, Dark and In-Between" would).

What I take away from all this:

Doods!! I mean Dooooods!!! We've only started our search for exoplanets fifteen years ago, and just four years in, we already found a planet that looks comfortable. And just three years after that, we find another one in the same system.

And our sample size is really small: just 420 out of the billions of stars in our galaxy. And we only picked those because they're close to us, and relatively easy for us to observe.

As Stephen Vogt, et alia (the authors of the paper in which discovery of Gliese 581g was announced) put it:

(Quote)
This detection, coupled with statistics of the incompleteness of present-day precision RV surveys for volume-limited samples of stars in the immediate solar neighborhood suggests that eta_Earth could well be on the order of a few tens of percent.
(unquote)

Dooods!!!eleventy!!!one!!

Eleventy!

(squee)

And also: If, in our own solar system, if Mars also fostered life at some point in our planets' mutual history (even if it no longer does), than maybe two life-supporting planets per star system is also relatively common.

What sort of implications would that have in science fiction stories?

An interview with Steve Vogt, about the (unconfirmed, yet) discovery of planet "Gliese 581g" on YouTube (in September of this year)

His conclusion: "Learn to wrap your mind around the incredibleness of the Universe, and it will make you happy if you do that."

All together now (with the hand motions & dance, if you want):

"Intellect and Romance over brute force and cynicism!"

It was snowing this morning. It's dropping a cold rain down, now. And I can't decide if the dripping I'm hearing is falling inside the house, or outside (no matter where I go in the house, the sound seems to be coming from "over there," which is worrying. OTOH, I can't see any wet spots or puddles, inside, so... maybe I'm hearing rain dripping from one of the eaves, just outside a window).

Anyway, if I catalog my woes, I'll only be giving them more power.

So that means it's Doctor Who Tiem, Boys and Girls!

Ever since I posted this clip, from An Unearthly Child, to commemorate Doctor Who's 47th, it's been rattling around in my brain.

The only other time (I know of) where the Doctor explicitely mentions his past or his family, the way he did in the first ep., was when he consoled Victoria in Tomb of the Cybermen when she worries that she'll never get the image of her father being killed by the daleks out of her mind.

[insert a long passage of time, where I try to find a clip of that scene, on YouTube, fail, and get sucked into watching long stretches of the whole story via someone's playlist, realize I'm hungry, and my feet are cold, so I go eat some reheated pizza, and heat water for tea, and come back to finish this entry while the tea is steeping]

(My icon is cut from that scene, anyway).

Anyway, from that first clip, (viewed through the instant hindsight of watching it after seeing later stories first, which is, I admit, probably unfair. Except that All's Fair in Love, War and Fanon) I got the impression that at that point in time, (From the Doctor's P.O.V.), he and Susan were newly on the run, and that he still feared that those who were the cause of their exile were still hot on their trail. Of course, what may be a short time to a grandfather could very well be a lifetime to the granddaughter, and she's tired of running and hiding with only him for companionship, so she pressures him to let her go to school there when they land on Earth, etc.. And in that first serial, he's willing to kill a wounded man, just to prevent their getting captured -- in that story (and for several others to follow?) it's Ian who represents the powers of Intellect and Romance over Brute Force and Cynicism, rather than the Doctor. The Doctor is just a bundle of mistrust and anger in that story. That's what makes me think the Exile he speaks of is relatively recent in his personal timeline.

Replaying those two scenes in my memory, superimposed over one another the way you can with memory, and I can't help but wonder what happened that drove him into exile -- especially when he says he has to "really want to" in order to remember them. Did his family turn against him, or did they, like Victoria's father, die horribly, and that's why the Doctor lets their memory sleep?

[aha! I just remembered a different set of keywords to use, to search for the second Doctor's scene. here it is.]

I know the Doctor's family and their fate is a subject for a metric buttload of fan speculation and bickering. But pondering his family's fate has got me wondering more about the wider society the Doctor comes from. You can't be exiled without a wider society to be exiled from.

Also, I'm sticking with my private fanon that Susan is the reason Earth is his favorite planet. It was the planet she chose to make home, and for the Doctor, "Home is Wherever Susan Is (or was)".

*nods*

Also, after seeing some of the clips of Eleven, it's really easy for me to go from Two straight to Eleven, and skip all the in between steps (maybe it's the whole Hobo-Raggedy vibe). So if all of his companions are surrogates for his granddaughter (more or less), it puts a whole new spin on that scene from the season 5 dvd people have been posting -- the extra scene between "Beast Below" and "Vampires of Venice."

Oh, and while I was searching for that Tomb of the Cybermen clip, I found this Patrick Troughton Interview on NJN (NJN was the local pbs station that aired Doctor Who when I lived back in New York).

Enjoy!

I've long wanted a Matt Smith icon. I've also longed for a "Yes! This!" icon. The recent "Lost Cold Open" on Craig Ferguson's Doctor Who Night gave me material for both.

But it's more of an opening gambit of a discussion than a fact-check question about Doctor Who canon.

(Begin cross posted bit)

In honor of Doctor Who's 47th anniversary, yesterday, I went on to YouTube and watched the scene where Ian and Barbara stumble into the TARDIS for the first time; in that episode, and at least as far as The Reign of Terror, the Doctor is more an antagonist than hero-- someone from whom Ian and Barbara are trying to escape.


And I was struck when the Doctor said: "Susan and I are cut off from our own planet, without friends or protection. But one day, we will go back, yes... One day."

It reminded me of the Doctor's farewell speech to Susan, when he forces her to stay behind on Earth, so that she'll be free to grow up, and not be his caretaker for the rest of his (their) lives (As if, now that Susan lived there, he considered Earth to be his home, rather than the planet from which he'd been exiled [not yet named as Gallifrey]).

And that got me thinking about the first post-Susan companion to join the TARDIS team: Vickie.

(quote)
"And if you like adventure, my Dear, I can promise you an abundance of it! Apart from all that, well. Well, you'll be amongst friends."
(unquote)

Was this the real beginning of the Doctor becoming the jolly adventure leader and friend to his companions, that we know and love today? Or did his character and attitude toward humanity and Earth start softening before then?

(Thanks to calapine for the link to BBC's First Trailer for the Doctor Who Christmas Special, 2010)

You know, that recent Nova episode "The Secrets of Stonehenge" has got me thinking. Here's a three-sentence synopsis of the hour-long program (As I've come away from it, anyway), for those who can't watch the whole:

1. Stonehenge is just one half of a ritual space alongside the river Avon, a burial ground for royal families; the other half is the "Woodhenge" of Durrington Walls.
   
   
2. Stone, in many cultures, belongs to the realm of the ancestors, while wood belongs to the realm of the living.
   
   
3. On the winter solstice, the sun rises over one of the main avenues of Durrington Walls, and sets over one of the main avenues of Stonehenge (And the timing is reversed for the summer solstice, rising over Stonehenge, and setting over Woodhenge).

So the day of the winter solstice, it would seem (to me), was dedicated to starting out in "this world" and spending the day making a pilgrimage to visit the Otherworld, and bringing the blessings of the ancestors back with you.

So the "Little ghost story of Christmas" that Dickins wrote, where Ebenezer is redeemed by reconnecting to his past, and his past blessings, and then bringing that back to the future, by ensuring the survival of Tiny Tim, has far older roots than the Christian Charity that Dickens explicitely writes about in his prose.

... ... ...

I do so wish Christianity didn't have such a death grip on the Winter Gift-Giver (Also trickster and psychopomp, if you trace his roots back far enough). Makes it impossible to invoke him as a universal figure (Which is why I never bothered to do anything with my NaNo Novel of 2006-- I'm not Christian, and neither were about 3/4 of the people I wanted to give the story to, but I couldn't write a "Santa Claus Story" without making the whole thing seem like "Yay for Christianity-- the default religion!")

Sigh.

[Begin Quote]

"Anyone that reads intelligently knows that some of our old ideas are up a tree, and that traditions are scurrying away before the advance of their everlasting enemy, the questioning mind of a new age."

[End Quote]

Helen Keller -- Why Men need Woman Suffrage The New York Call: October 17th, 1913

Sadly, her prediction that there would be less war and more socialism if women got the vote hasn't held up as strongly as one would have hoped. I think that's because she's falling into the assumption of confusing "innate nature" with "Culturally accquired nature."

Give women the vote and you change society. But change the society, and the women change, too.

I imagine that we are more peaceful and egalitarian, on the whole, than we would have been if women never had won the right to the vote and to education (And worldwide statistics tend to bear this out: societies with a high level of gender equality are more prosperous and peaceful than those without). But we're hardly living in the peaceful, socialist utopia she was envisioning.

Still, the Grown-Up Helen sure could bring the snark. And I want to see her in fic outside the Miracle-Worker trope. Maybe something with the Doctor (I think it's the image of the Questioning Mind as advancing enemy that brings the Doctor Who Ethic to mind -- somehow, I can see her waving Seven's Question-Mark brolly around with glee)