1. Finish review book
2. Start drafting review
3. Tidy up in kitchen
4. Tidy up in bathroom
5. Start organizing office [bah...this can wait...]
6. Watch new Downton Abbey episodes

And speaking of Downton Abbey, Sir Richard

is also Father Octavian from those second Weeping Angel episodes of Doctor Who:

And apparently the actor, Iain Glen, is also in Game of Thrones, which I have yet to watch.

That’s all I got today.

Related posts:

1. Today’s agenda
2. Lazy weekend
3. Slow blog day

This is something I wrote on Tumblr earlier today, as part of an ongoing music meme. Each day presents a new theme, and anyone can post a song that relates to that theme in some way. I’ve recently gotten back into it after a couple months of non-participation, and I’m remembering how much I enjoy going through my catalog of songs and fitting each one to specific memories. Today’s theme was “The first time I saw…” which I almost interpreted personally, like the first time I saw Dan this song was playing, except I have no idea — I could have posted the first time I saw Dan sing at karaoke, which was possibly the bravest song I’ve ever heard him sing and it was fantastic, but that’s maybe a story for another time — but instead, my mind flashed to this song, which I heard for the first time when I went to see Robyn Hitchcock in concert for the first time, and so follows my post:

The Yip Song by Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

So the first time I saw Robyn Hitchcock in concert was in Chicago in early 1992. I have a vague recollection that it was Valentine’s Day, but I’m not positive on that. I was a junior in college and living alone for the first time, after I FUBAR’d my living arrangements of the previous quarter (which frankly were FUBAR’d from the beginning and I was too stubborn to admit it and too scared/broke to change it, so it became one of those tough situations one learns and grows from, or something) and I can still clearly see that efficiency studio apartment I was exceeding my work study hours in order to pay for. The kitchenette along one wall. The “closet” that the landlord never bothered to equip with a clothes rod. The three windows that overlooked an alley, over which I draped one of those faux-Indian elephant print cotton sheets. The tiny bathroom with the super-powered radiator that would warm my towel while I showered. The hand-me-down furniture from my aunt and uncle for which I was so grateful. The first centipede I killed by myself. Those were lean, lean months. I remember the panic at the end of each month when I wasn’t sure I’d have enough money to pay the rent and the phone bill, I remember many sleepless nights because of financial worries, and yet somehow I remember this time as exhilarating and free as well.

And in the midst of all that I went to see Robyn Hitchcock (and the Egyptians) for the first time, having fallen in love with him about five or six years before. I went with a friend (who would become a roommate our senior year) and we wound up at stage level, where we met other people we knew from school, and it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. He’s a tremendous performer, but I didn’t know that then, and I didn’t know the extent to which his most loyal fans participate in the show, so experiencing all that for the first time … I’ll never forget it. The theatrics with which he performs some songs, the incidental monologues which interrupt others … and then there was this song, which no one had heard before. It was silly, it was strange, and by the end of it we were all singing along: YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP, etc. I was thrilled to find it opening their next album, and whenever I hear it now I go back to that show, and that time.

Related posts:

1. Aha! I think.

In a new year resolutionish daze I started making a list of all the books I’ve finished, but I don’t know where it’s gotten to. I was curious about how many I actually read in a year, considering that I go through an average of six or seven titles a month for review, and I try to always have a little something-something on the side for me. That’s a lot of books. I think there are people who read more, but I haven’t read this much since grad school (and I’m not sure I read that much then, either, at least not consistently).

I also had this idea that I would write here occasionally about the books I’ve read, whether for review or for fun, that made me want to sing. Books I’ve read that I loved in a shout from the hilltops sort of way. Here are a few of them:

1. The Metropolis Case, by Matthew Galloway

I’ve been following Matthew Galloway on the Tumblr for a while now, since before this book was published. I loved reading his posts about that process, and part of the reason I loved this book was because it was so clearly his voice.

Some of you know that my so-called field of expertise when I was an academic was 19th-century British fiction, specifically the Victorian period (as opposed to the Romantic, though it all bleeds together, really), and more specifically the sort of books that make a lot of people — well, non-English majors, anyway — cringe and have bad high school English class flashbacks. I’m talking the 500-900 word sagas that span multiple generations and/or have an ensemble cast of characters with intricately plotted mysterious connections to each other. Middlemarch. Bleak House. The Way We Live Now.

The Metropolis Case is similar in scope (did I just compare this book to Middlemarch? Yes. Yes, I did). It follows four different characters in different times and places — New York in 2001 and 1960, Paris in the 1860s, Pittsburgh in the 1970s — and while these characters are all connected to each other in ways that are revealed as their stories progress, there’s one thing that unites them from the beginning: Music. Specifically, opera. More specifically, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

I like opera, and I love some operas, but I don’t know a whole lot about it in general, and even less about this particular one (also I have a Woody Allen-esque aversion to most Wagner, but that’s neither here nor there). But it doesn’t matter, because Galloway describes the opera, the sensations of hearing it, of singing it, with such care and detail and beauty that it both elevates and grounds the music. (Also, there is an incredibly useful music guide on the website for the novel.)

Plus, opera isn’t the only music thrumming through the novel. There’s punk and new wave music everywhere as well. But the novel itself is structured in three acts and plays out like an epic tragic opera: there’s disaster and death and despair, and yet the whole of the writing is upbeat and very funny at times and so emotionally satisfying overall. The NYT gave it a positively glowing review, and the line with which I agree the most is: “There’s hardly a lazy sentence here.” God I loved this book.

2. Among the Missing, by Morag Joss

Reviewed here.

3. A Jane Austen Education, by William Deresiewicz

Reviewed here.

4. The Astral, by Kate Christensen

Reviewed here.

Can you tell that I started writing this post months ago and now, in finishing it up, I got sort of lazy and said, “Hey Self, you’ve already written about this book. Why not just link to that instead of making up new things to say.” 2011 will henceforth be known as the Year I Became OK With My General Level Of Laziness. But seriously, you should read these books.

Related posts:

1. Slow blog day

The Daleks have been around since the very beginning, almost, of the Doctor Who series, and they’ve remained virtually unchanged since then, if not slightly updated. They were created out of the Kaled race on the planet Skaro by evil mastermind Davros; so, once humanoid, and now powered by hate and the desire to annihilate every single other species in the universe, thereby gaining supreme domination. EXTERMINATE.

They’re supposed to be the thing that scare the daylights out of everyone, but in the original series, as many have noted, they’re really just rather silly. Slow-moving, plunger-equipped salt shakers.

A Roomba is more terrifying.

So when a Dalek shows up in this eponymous episode, my first reaction is, “Well, I suppose they have to be here, given their prominent place in the Whoniverse, but . . . meh?” But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Doctor and Rose, pulled by the TARDIS responding to a distress call, turn up in the basement (and I use that term loosely, considering that they’re 53 stories below ground) of an enormous complex owned by a Mr. Henry Van Statten, multi-trillionaire or whathaveyou, the guy who owns the Internet (Rose: No one owns the Internet! Van Statten: And let’s just keep the whole world thinking that way), and collector of alien artifacts. The museum they stumble into contains an arm of a Raxacoricofallapatorian, which Rose refers to as a Slitheen even though we learned in the last episode that Slitheen is just a family name, but presumably Slitheen is just easier to remember and say, and the head of an old series Cyberman — kind of fun to see that there, I have to admit.

Turns out, Van Statten has obtained a living specimen, one which is refusing to communicate with him, and he’s having one of his minions torture the creature to get it to talk.

This creature is what sent out the distress call. It’s a Dalek.

I mean, of course it is. It’s a very good move on Russell Davies’ part, introducing the Dalek here. Fans of the old series will instantly get that the war that wiped out the Time Lords was with the Daleks, but it’s made clear here as a way of introducing new fans to this oldest of nemeses.

So there’s a showdown, sort of, between the two Time War survivors, but before the Doctor has a chance to kill this last Dalek, Van Statten intervenes. In the meantime, Rose is flirting with Adam, one of Van Statten’s flunkies and the stupidest “genius” ever, who shows off for Rose and brings her down to the Dalek, and Rose of course feels nothing but sympathy for this poor creature who’s being tortured, because she’s never seen or heard of the Daleks before. So she puts out a hand in comfort, and the Dalek absorbs her DNA and time energy and is instantly healed. Whoops!

And then we’re in another big chase scene between the humans and this one Dalek, who is WINNING because in this refashioned updated Doctor Who the Daleks are pretty badass. They look basically the same, and still have a plunger arm, but something about them is more menacing — I think the part where the Dalek plunges a man’s head to death helps.

They can also fly. I’ve learned through research that the precedent for hovering Daleks was established in “Remembrance of the Daleks,” but not having seen it I was, like most, under the assumption that the Daleks were always hindered by a simple flight of stairs.

So when Rose and Adam and one of the soldiers look back and see the Dalek stop at the foot of the stairs they’ve been climbing, and then LEVITATE up the stairs, I will admit, I yelled out “Oh shit, the Daleks can FLY.”

More than that, Rose’s touch and DNA have started to alter the Dalek, who has the chance to kill Rose but doesn’t, and gets all existential (much to my delight. An existential Dalek is pure comedy, people). But an existential Dalek isn’t really a Dalek, and it realizes that the freedom it asked for is only possible if it self-exterminates. Which it can’t do — or won’t — until Rose orders it to, which is annoying but I guess lack of free will is part of what makes Daleks Daleks. Even though they need no directive to kill. I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t be overthinking this.

It’s not my favorite episode, though whether that’s because of Dalek fatigue I couldn’t say. It’s one that I tend not to skip over, though, because it does establish the fraught symbiosis of the Doctor and the Daleks. It’s like none of the Doctor’s regular rules apply when it comes to the Daleks, and I suppose with good reason. But then, even the Doctor couldn’t kill the Dalek at the end of this episode, with Rose as its champion.

And the connection between Rose and the Daleks will come back into play at the end of this season.

But first, we’ve got more traveling to do. Rose invites Adam to join them in the TARDIS, much to the Doctor’s — and my — disappointment. At least it’s not for very long. (Spoilers!)

No related posts.

First, a big hearty cheers to anyone venturing over here from the Five O’Clock Cocktail blog, where I have a post today. *clink*

Second, hi! I’m here. Been letting the blog lie fallow for a little bit in the hopes that it will eventually yield . . . you know, I’m not a farmer. Do I want to say “bumper crop”? Because right now I’m thinking this whole metaphor is failing. “Bumper crop of blog posts”? Yeesh.

Instead of writing here I’ve been doing a fair amount of reading and writing book reviews — here’s the latest, for Eleanor Brown’s Weird Sisters. It’s a book that’s apparently been receiving a lot of positive buzz, and while I had some reservations about it, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Look for my review of Elly Griffith’s The Janus Stone tomorrow — also very, very good (or to use a review cliche, “gripping”). (I have totally used the word “gripping” in reviews, FYI. Not trying to be all “Oh I’m so great at this.” Just, you know, it’s kind of an overused word.)

And I have a slew of books to get through before my trip to Ireland next month. (OMG did I tell you I’m going to Ireland?!) And speaking of Ireland, I got it into my head a few weeks ago that I needed a new sweater for the trip, regardless of the likelihood that it won’t be done in time. But with 26 days to go, I do have a finished back:

A word about this color. Difficult color to photograph, red, and even more so when you’re kind of a crap photographer. The first photo I took of this yarn (Wild Apple Hill Farms, purchased at Rhinebeck, for all you knitters out there) made it look brown; the second made it look hot pink. I took my knitting to a friend’s over the weekend and everyone there exclaimed over how different the color looked in person. I think, based on what I’m seeing on my monitor, that this picture is pretty true to life, if a little dark, but honestly — I have no idea. It’s supposed to be a pomegranatey sort of red — like a violet red.

The pattern is Thea Coleman’s Collins. Here’s the Ravelry link.

And I’ve also been going crazy with the cross stitch. For the past couple weeks I’ve started each morning playing around with my cross stitch software, coming up with various pop culturey designs. Most of them make use of antique patterns that can all be found on this site. The charts are compatible with my program so it’s easy to cut and paste and then play around with the color schemes.

So this is what I’m working on now — this photo might give away what the finished piece will look like, for those who have the same taste in TV shows as I do:

I love the border. LOVE it. I had to tweak it a little from its original layout so that it would fit my text, but I’m pleased with how it’s turning out. And I feel no shame in telling you that I chose these colors because they match my couch.

I’ve also got a Doctor Who sampler in the works that I am very excited about.

You heard me.

Related posts:

1. I don’t know why I do this to myself.
2. Books! I read them, you know
3. The first knits to be completed in 2012

I’ve been putting off writing these recaps, even after opting to smush the episodes together, because I have very little to say about them. Not among my favorite episodes, these; in fact, pretty far removed from that list.

I think the story — aliens who look like this

The Slitheen

yet masquerade as humans in order to a) infiltrate the British government, b) arrange for a nuclear war so as to c) reduce planet Earth to slag and sell it off in parts –

is not a bad story. It’s been done before, sure, but it’s certainly an “Earth in peril” narrative kicked up a notch from the first episode’s alien villains, the Nestene Consciousness, wanting to take over the world for all its toxins. And a Doctor Who plot does not necessarily need to be original to be enjoyable, if the writing’s there.

And the writing’s not there. The story takes a backseat to one sustained fart joke. The Slitheen, in order to fit into human bodies, have some sort of compression device around their necks, but there’s something about the gas exchange involved in this compression, which leads to build up and then explusion, and this lengthy explanation for why they fart all the time not only doesn’t make it any funnier, it pretty much undercuts any attempt at it being funny in the first place. And I mean, I think farts are funny. But this is the same fart joke repeated over and over, and it never gets even halfway around the funny-not funny-funny again circuit. Never even gets out of the gate.

Anyway.

The only redeeming part of this episode is this woman:

Who is, as she introduces herself every possible chance she gets, and this IS a repeating joke that I find endearing, “Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North.” She shows up for her meeting with the Prime Minister just as all the kerfuffle is going down, and never gets the chance to introduce her proposal for cottage hospitals, inspired by her own sick mother.

Instead she gets to help the Doctor save the world. And will, we learn at the end of the episode, go on to be England’s Prime Minister for three consecutive terms and engineer Britain’s “Golden Age.” Expect to see her again.

Random obsverations:

– OK, so Mickey helps save the world as well. And I think it’s funny, considering what’s to come, that the Doctor persists in addressing him as “Ricky.”

– I feel compelled to note that in the retooled Doctor Who series, the family life and relationships of the Earthling companion are much more important than they were in the previous incarnation of the show. I’m sure there are several cultural shifts of varying degrees of interest to credit for this, but I like to think that it’s because a 21st-century audience would not be able to suspend disbelief in this area, not question how it could be that Rose just travels all over and a) never misses her family and b) her family never misses her.

– This underscores, of course, that traveling with the Doctor, even for a little bit, changes the companion so drastically that, even though there are PLENTY of people in London alone with whom Rose could talk about her adventures, she feels as though no one else will get it. It’s an idea that threads throughout the series.

– Speaking of, nice to see a bit of continuity from the old series in UNIT (Unified Intelligence Taskforce — used to be United Nations Intelligence Taskforce but apparently the UN complained), with which the Third Doctor works following his exile on Earth. (I’ve seen a number of Third Doctor episodes. I recommend them.)

– Finally, yes, that’s Naoko Mori, Toshiko Sato on Who spin-off Torchwood, as the doctor examining the fake pig alien. She’s credited as “Doctor Sato,” so this is officially her first appearance. The fact that she’s not really a doctor is explained in a Torchwood episode, so again — points for continuity, even though the explanation falls just shy of implausible.

No related posts.

I had half a mind to let today slink away without posting. I’d feel guilty about it; this resolution to post every week day would get added to the extremely long list of unfinished, petered-out resolutions, projects, and things of a general nature; which would then pad the case against my being a Person of Worth; I’d spiral into a rut of self-deprecation and lethargy and wear the same pair of pajama bottoms for a week straight and drink bourbon straight from the bottle.

In other words, it would have no effect on my daily routine whatsoever. Hello!

(Lishen. Shfine. Don’t be uptight.)

I spent the day reading and writing, same as most every day, and I was feeling as though my store of words had been depleted. But then a friend emailed me with an English Major question — were there any novelists aside from Jane Austen from the Regency Period whose works have stood the test of time? Seems she was in a heated discussion with someone else over the relative merits of Austen and The Victorians, in which the other person was dismissing Austen and her ilk as idealized and insubstantial as opposed to the later gritty realism of Dickens et al., but my friend was having difficulty thinking of other Regency novels, aside from Frankenstein, to fuel her side of the argument.

In my response I named Sir Walter Scott as another Regency novelist people still think is Important (and serious! He wrote serious historical shit!) and then went off on a completely unsolicited rant:

May I just say I dislike the idea of dismissing the entire work of a period because it’s not the work of another period? Personal preference is one thing, but quit trying to find industrial strength grit in romantic/Romantic literature and then criticizing it for not having any. AND ANOTHER THING: there were PLENTY of idealistic, silly books being written in the later part of the century. They have not stood the test of time, because they were badly written.

I sent it off with a little bit of fear that my friend would think I was yelling at her, but of course she knows me and she wrote back

DUDE this is the conversation I was having with you IN MY HEAD.

But here’s yet another thing, something she and I touched on briefly during this exchange but never outright said: you can’t take an entire period of fiction, like “The Victorians,” and compare it to one Regency period writer. It’s not like every person writing between 1837 and 1901 wrote the same way. And I love me some Dickens, but I think people tend to overlook how so completely sentimental and silly the romantic parts of his novels could be, because he also wrote about Important Social Condition Things and also, he was a dude.

In the course of this exchange I started to think about all the 19th-century books I love and keep meaning to reread, which because of the way my mind works made me think of that book list meme circulating on Facebook where you bold the books you’ve read on a list of 100 books some British institution has decided are Important. (I think The Da Vinci Code is on that list, so, you know, caveat.)

These are the bookshelves that Dan put up, which hold a fraction of the books I own, and I must admit that there are some books up here that not only have I never read, but never intend to read; I grabbed them from my grandparents’ house after my grandfather died and they’re only here as place fillers. Yes, Leo Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish, I am looking at you.

But that’s the point — I can look at these books now, whereas before most of them were at the back of my bookshelves in the bedroom. Now I glance up to give my eyes a break from the laptop or my current review book, and there’s George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda looking back at me. And on its shelf are other Eliot, Dickens, and Gaskell books that I loved dearly but have really only read once, twice at most (except for Middlemarch, of course). (Basically the whole two bottom left shelves are the editions I used in college and graduate school.)

And I would like to read Bleak House again. And Wives and Daughters. And Mill on the Floss, the book that made me an English major. Hell, I’ll even give Waverley another chance, because it’s been 12 years since I decided I didn’t like Sir Walter Scott and a lot has changed since then.

I have my review books, of course, and new (or new-to-me) books on my To Be Read list, so it feels a little strange to put re-reads on that list as well, as though I should constantly be striving for new, New, NEW! and always moving forward (strangely, this does not seem to apply to TV shows and movies). But there’s so much pleasure to be had in revisiting a book, especially when there’s a vast period of time between readings. I think I have the makings of a New Year’s resolution.

Related posts:

1. Books! I read them, you know

I think of “The Unquiet Dead” as the last installment of the retooled Doctor Who‘s introductory trilogy. We’ve met him, travelled with him far into the future and met all sorts of aliens — good, bad, and neutral — and now, we go with him to the past.

It’s Victorian England (my favorite!), and someone’s recently departed grandmother lies lifeless in her coffin . . . until some spooky blue smoky thing circles around her and brings her to life. Now she’s a zombie, much to the dismay of the undertaker, Mr. Sneed. “The stiffs are getting lively again,” he tells his servant girl, Gwyneth, as they race out into the night to track zombie grandma down.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Rose are in the TARDIS, planning to travel to Naples in 1860, only — running theme alert — the flight plan is a bit off and they wind up in 1869 Cardiff. Count me among those who believe the TARDIS plans these “diversions,” that she (all ships are she, right?) somehow senses where the Doctor will be needed and takes him there no matter how well he programs her otherwise. And sure enough, no sooner have the Doctor and Rose figured out where and when they are (the first of many “Oh god, Cardiff?” jokes) then they hear screams coming from the lodge at which Charles Dickens is giving a dramatic performance of A Christmas Carol. (Historical note: yes, he did this, quite often, and some historians think his grueling tour schedule contributed to the stroke that killed him in 1870.)

It’s Christmas, right, forgot to mention that. While special one-off Christmas Doctor Who episodes are now traditional, Christopher Eccleston never got to do one (sad face). I guess this serves as his, even though it’s Dickens, in the end, who goes meta while running through the snow shouting “Merry Christmas” to everyone. And this is also the first of several “celebrity” episodes; there’s at least one per Doctor (“celebrity” = canonical author/artist with whom children should be familiar). And actually, this may be my favorite one, though not simply because it takes place in the Victorian Era, a period with which I was once entirely too familiar.

It’s just that not only do the spooky blue smoky things fit thematically with the ghost story aspects of A Christmas Carol, thereby making Dickens the perfect secondary companion for this episode, this time period in general works extremely well for the show’s general themes and philosophy:

1. It turns out that the spooky blue smoky things are aliens that can only exist in gaseous form, known as The Gelth. The Gelth exist (or used to) elsewhere in the universe, and are using the Rift that’s opened up in Cardiff to come through to Earth. The Rift, explains the Doctor, is a weak spot in the fabric of time and space that, when wide enough, becomes a portal between places.

The Gelth tell the Doctor that they used to have corporeal form, but the Time War destroyed them and they want to use the Earth’s dead to return to their former state. Again, I wonder whether this is truth or whether they’re playing on the Doctor’s guilt and compassion to gain access through the Rift to take over the world, or whether they did indeed suffer as so many planets and species did from the War. But my point here is that they sort of live inside the gas lamps, or at least wait inside the gas lamps until they can possess a dead body, and these gas lamps are new, the latest technology. While London’s streets were lit with gas lamps in the early part of the 19th-century, they didn’t start appearing in homes until the middle of the century, and even then it was mostly the affluent who could afford them.

And while it’s hardly ever the message of Doctor Who that technology is bad, or has a bad side, it is true that the show often points out that every advancement the human race makes comes with a set of risks. Sometimes it’s simply that a scientist’s brilliance can be misunderstood or applied for insidious purposes, that something meant to benefit humankind winds up either in the wrong hands or not thoroughly tested.

Gas lamps are an important step in terms of human progress, but it’s risky, especially if you happen to live near a Rift. So what I like about this episode is that you have this technology that we consider primitive, but it was a huge deal back then, and it was just as risky for its time as something like, say, Skynet.

2. Dickens has an extremely hard time coming to terms with the idea that there are aliens, that the world is not as he thought it was. His epiphanic moment, so well played by Simon Callow, is filled with fear and self-doubt:

I’ve always railed against the fantasies. Oh, I loved an illusion as much as the next man, revelled in them — that’s what they were: illusions! The real world is something else. I dedicated myself to that. Injustices. Great social causes. I hoped that I was a force for good. Now you tell me that the real world is a realm of spectres and jack o’lanterns. In which case — have I wasted my brief span here, Doctor? Has it all been for nothing?

The 19th-century was a time of such extreme scientific discovery, each one challenging widely accepted notions of a divinely ordered universe, that I can’t help but place this fictional Dickens speech in that context.

Other things I like about this episode:

* “What the Shakespeare is going on?” (Although according to the Internet, the phrase “what the dickens” or “like the dickens” has nothing to do with Charles Dickens, “dickens” being a euphemism for “devil.”)

* The bonding scene between Rose and Gwyneth, that despite the 130-plus years of history between them, they can still talk about cutting class and boys. Also, hello, “Bad Wolf” alert, as Gwyneth sees where Rose is from and says, “The things you’ve seen . . . the darkness . . . the big bad wolf . . .”

* And that it’s Gwyneth, ultimately, who saves the day. One of the other things this show does repeatedly is champion the average person, precisely because according to the Doctor there’s nothing average at all about people. Every person is fantastic and brilliant. So while Rose is a little melancholy at the idea that Gwyneth sacrificed herself to save everyone and no one will ever know, we do get to see Gwyneth the heroine, the savior, and it’s a little like seeing the world through the Doctor’s eyes.

And then, of course, the actress playing Gwyneth, Eve Myles, plays Gwen in Torchwood, which also takes place in Cardiff, and that’s a piece of interseries continuity that I’ve always enjoyed. It’s like Gwen is a direct descendent of Gwyneth, even though that would be impossible.

No related posts.

Here’s the other Doctor Who post from June. Look for new ones early next week.

Right, so: after the introductory episode in which we establish that the Doctor is alien and has a spaceship that can travel through time and space, that he’s a bit dangerous and maybe unstable, that he seems to have a special vested interest in Earth, and he’s invited Rose, a compassionate, stubborn, savvy Londoner along for the ride; now that we’ve established all that, let’s see what this baby can DO.

In the first few minutes of this episode we get another aspect of the Doctor’s personality: he likes showing off. Rose suggests they travel 100 years into the future and the Doctor one-ups her by taking her 10,000 years into the future, to “The New Roman Empire.” She recognizes his flaunting for what it is, they have a nice banter moment, and then he pulls out all the stops (almost literally — there are stops that he pulls to make the TARDIS go) and takes her to the day the sun expands and obliterates Earth.

It’s a bit much, don’t you think? She’s just left Earth. Her experience with these sorts of things is limited to a couple lame zombie-like mannequins. And now the Doctor’s brought her to a place five billion years in the future, where she’s surrounded by myriad aliens and can watch her world — all that she’s ever known — blow up.

DOCTOR: The great and the good are gathering to watch the planet burn.
ROSE: What for?
DOCTOR: Fun.

The Doctor’s plan, spontaneous as it is, affirms that he’s drawn to disaster and destruction. Yet he doesn’t seem to perceive that Rose might witness these sorts of events — and this one in particular — in a vastly different way, from a vastly different perspective. It’s like the difference between theory and practice, the oftentimes wide gulf between studying a subject and living it. The Doctor observes things from an emotional distance, his Ivory Tower — the whole universe is both his playground and his canvas, but no matter how passionate he may be about a certain species or planet, it’s not the same as being a part of it, being in it, as Rose is. Her lived experience means that she’s going to have a deeply profound reaction while watching the Earth die, and the Doctor doesn’t seem to get that.

Then again, the Doctor’s own planet has just burned as well, we learn at the end of this episode, a casualty of the war mentioned in the last episode. There must be something subconscious but just under the surface that compels him to witness the destruction of another planet that has been so dear to him. To relive the experience, perhaps as a sort of self-punishment? To keep the pain fresh? To remind himself that “everything has its time and everything dies”?

And that’s nothing to say of the other tragic and dark moments in this episode. Jabe sacrifices herself to help the Doctor reach the override switch for the sun shields. The Doctor stands by and watches The Lady Cassandra dry up and explode. She caused people to die; she deserves to die as well. Very Old Testament. Other innocents we barely get to know are killed. In the previous episode Rose asks the Doctor if his travels are always as dangerous as battling the Autons and the Nestene Consciousness. Oh, honey. You have NO IDEA.

And yet there are lovely light moments as well, including one of my favorite moments of the entire season. It’s right after Rose has it out with the Doctor, after realizing that she knows absolutely nothing about him (she tells Raffalo “I just sort of hitched a lift with this man . . . I didn’t even think about it. I don’t even know who he is . . . “) and her questions about who he is and where he’s from go unanswered, and she gets more and more upset. After she calms down a bit, makes a couple jokes about how her cell phone can’t find a signal, the Doctor takes her phone to give it a sonic boost.

DOCTOR
: With a little bit of jiggery pokery . . .
ROSE: 
Is that a technical term, ‘jiggery pokery’?
DOCTOR: 
Yeah, I came first in jiggery pokery, what about you?
ROSE
: Nah, I failed hullabaloo.

And just like that, they’re back on good terms. The chemistry between Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston is so good. It’s light, friendly, you can see the bonds of mutual admiration and respect grow almost from the beginning. (I prefer this, frankly, to the sexually charged chemistry between David Tennant’s Doctor and a couple of his Companions, but, well, what are you gonna do. It is David Tennant, after all.)

And of course we realize later why he keeps this information from her; the wounds are still too present, he can’t give voice to them yet. It’s only after she sees HER planet die, after he sees her reaction to it (“all that history, gone”), that he can tell her about his planet.

This episode also introduces The Lady Cassandra to us. She serves both as the episode’s baddy and as counterpoint to Rose. She arrives at Platform One with all the pomp of a decaying aristocracy, touting herself as “The Last Human,” crowing, “Look how THIN I am.” In Cassandra we’re supposed to see what our excessive obsession with standards of female beauty have wrought over five billion years — standards which, in Cassandra, are tied in with notions of racial purity. Her sense of self is inflated because she “kept [herself] pure,” didn’t “mingle” with other species. Rose sees right through this:

You’re not human. You’ve had it all nipped and tucked and flattened till there’s nothing left. Anything human got chucked in the bin. You’re just skin, Cassandra. Lipstick and skin.

Ah, but don’t worry — this isn’t the last we’ve seen of the “bitchy trampoline” (one of my other favorite phrases from this episode).

Face of Boe!

It’s also not the last we’ve seen of the Face of Boe, one of my favorite alien concepts — and I’m not saying that because of the role the Face plays in later episodes. It’s because, well, he’s just a face. Just a head in a jar. And yet it’s not at all goofy, not like in Futurama. You want to know more about him. He’s sponsoring the whole Watch the Earth Burn event, so he’s clearly a Face of means. Did he used to have a body? Does he come from a planet of just Faces? Do those bulbs hanging off his head grow into other Faces and that’s how his species reproduces? Is he as serene as he appears to be? Maybe he’s some sort of diplomat.

One final note: this is the first time we hear the term “bad wolf.” It comes in a background conversation at the beginning of a scene, in which we hear the Moxx of Balhoon tell the Face of Boe that “this is the Bad Wolf scenario.” If you’re watching these episodes for the first time, just keep that in mind.

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Hey guys. I’m cheating a bit with the “blog every day” thing, but it’s been so long since I first wrote these Doctor Who posts that I thought it would be a good idea to refresh before I do the third episode of the first season. So. There it is. And here you go.

++++++++

If you’re from another planet, how come you sound like you’re from the North?
Lots of planets have a North.

'Do you want to come with me?' God, YES.

Wait, one more thing: I am totally cross stitching “lots of planets have a north” next.

Confession: Though I enjoyed the few episodes I watched, I was never a huge Doctor Who fan. If I remember correctly, in the early 80s the show came on directly after 3-2-1 Contact, and I remember getting sucked into the show because of Tom Baker, on whom I developed an enormous crush. His grin was so devilish. His manner was so dryly funny and a bit dangerous. His hair was so curly. I didn’t stand a chance. He was my first Doctor, and so enthralled was I by him that, when I realized that “regeneration” meant that someone entirely different would now be the Doctor, I completely lost interest and didn’t watch the show again.

(I realize now what I missed in Peter Davison.)

When it was announced that in 2005 BBC was bringing Doctor Who back, I was still clinging to my “No Tom Baker? No thanks!” philosophy. Silly me.

I don’t know why I turned to the SciFi Channel (as it once was known, seems like forever ago) to catch a glimpse of what Doctor Who had become — probably someone told me I should watch it — but it was the second to the last episode of the first season (yes, the one with “Ladies. Your viewing figures just went up”) and two minutes of watching Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor was enough to erase nearly all memory of Tom Baker. (Please note: this is a recurring motif.)

And fortunately SciFi was/is in the habit of running marathons, so I was able to catch up completely on the first season before the final episode. It’s possibly because I mainlined it that it remains to date my favorite season, my favorite Doctor of the new series. But I think maybe that’s not all of it. Anyway, by popular demand (OK, three people. But that’s still like 25% of my readership, and I want it to be known that I do take requests), I’m going to start writing about the new Doctor Who series starting from the beginning: with “Rose.”

It starts on Earth, in London, present day. We meet Rose first. No idea who she is, but she’s got a mom, a decent enough boyfriend, and a mundane job at a shop. Totally ordinary; she could be anybody. (Sidenote: she’s in sweats at work? At a department store? Really?) And then by chance she has to drop off the lottery money to Wilson, the store’s chief electrician who works in the basement, but he’s not answering, so she explores through plastic sheeting (listen, one thing I’ve learned about Doctor Who is that when there’s plastic sheeting around, things are not going to go well.) and then the mannequins start moving. She’s trying to pass it off as a joke but as the mannequins advance, Rose is getting more and more freaked out, and then they have her up against a door and at the last minute, someone grabs her hand and tells her to RUN. And it’s the Doctor. I love that the Doctor’s first word of this brand new series is “RUN.”

He leads her to an elevator, plastic men in pursuit, and pulls off one of their arms as the elevator doors close on it. And here’s where Rose first makes an impression on the Doctor. She thinks it could be a student prank, because it’s so many people in one place and it’s so ridiculous. I don’t know if I buy that (Improv Everywhere notwithstanding), but the Doctor likes her logical, practical mind.

And then we get to my first favorite moment of the episode, and the main reason I can watch and re-watch this episode without getting tired of it:

Doctor: I’m the Doctor, by the way. What’s your name?
Rose: Rose.
Doctor: Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!

And that’s it. He’s the Doctor. He’s so completely the Doctor. Waving the bomb in a hearty fare-thee-well.

I also love the much quieter scene where they’re walking and talking and Rose is trying to get the Doctor to tell her everything but she’s not really ready to process it, and she stops and asks, “Who ARE you?” and the camera cuts to a shot of the Doctor with the TARDIS in the background — that’s just good work there. And he takes her hand again when he tells her that he can feel the Earth revolving. And he waves goodbye to her with the plastic arm, and then the Rose theme kicks in, and you know she is NOT about to let it go. Nope. She goes straight to the nearest Internet search engine (love that Mickey’s all “Do NOT read my emails!”) and narrows down her search parameters to “Doctor blue box” and finds Clive.

Clive (a LINDA precursor, if that idea was already in Russell T. Davies‘ mind) gives us the idea that the Doctor means death. When he’s around, bad things happen. But shouldn’t it be the other way around? While most of the episodes involve the Doctor showing up somewhere just in time to see something go horribly horribly wrong, the evidence Clive shows Rose — the Kennedy assassination, the Titanic, the sketch taken just before Krakatoa erupts — indicates that the Doctor appears to enjoy traveling through time to visit historical disasters. But not to change them. To . . . watch? That’s a little dark.

But then, that’s one of the main reasons why I love the show. Yes, it is silly, sometimes immeasurably so. Yes, it’s basically sci-fi lite despite the TARDIS and outer space and freaky-deaky aliens. Yes, a lot of the time the monsters/aliens aren’t particularly scary — and the Autons in this episode are one of the least threatening monsters to appear on the show. But there’s still something menacing going on. We get glimpses of that when the Doctor pleads with the Nestene Consciousness that he couldn’t save their planet, couldn’t save any of them. Suddenly we realize that there has been a war — when the Doctor referenced it earlier, he wasn’t speaking metaphorically — and he was on the front lines, and something horrible and tragic has happened. Despite this happening during the climax of the show, it’s a little moment, one I only caught on my first re-watch.

But then he’s also so spirited, joyful, spilling over with delight at the thought of potential danger. And his love for Earth and her inhabitants is infinite — rather inexplicably, perhaps undeservedly. But even so, he is not human, and doesn’t think like a human, and his long line of companions have always helped provide that necessary element. And no matter how you feel about Rose by the end of her run, you can’t deny that she’s very good at the feelings thing. She berates the Doctor for forgetting about Mickey, for not telling her about the possibility that he’d die. And it’s Rose that swings in and saves the day, ultimately, kicking the test tube of antiplastic into the Nestene Consciousness. And defiantly demands credit from the Doctor, which he willingly gives.

Earlier, when they’re running from Plastic Mickey, Rose gets her first glimpse of the TARDIS. She freaks, runs right out again (like you do), and then returns because she’s got nowhere else to run. “It’s bigger on the inside,” she stammers. “It’s alien.” Which means the Doctor is alien. He asks if that’s all right with her and she replies without hesitation: “yeah.” She’s still FREAKED the hell out, and she has a little breakdown — “culture shock,” the Doctor sympathizes — and then she’s more or less OK. Rose’s resilience, her ability to process things quickly — makes her an ideal companion.

So of course the Doctor invites her to join him, and it’s Mickey who grabs her like a little child, physically preventing her from leaving. (I’m sure I’m not alone in really disliking Mickey at the beginning of the series.) But Rose gets a second chance and in what is probably the episode’s cheesiest moment (which still works for me, gets me every time, makes my heart skip a little) we get a slow motion shot of Rose running into the TARDIS, that huge infectious smile on her face — in this moment I defy you not to love Rose with all of your being.

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