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[dreamer_easy]

Voyage of the Damned is better than I remembered, too. Lightweight, as the specials tend to be, but some gorgeous images and a cracking cast (Kylie's great, and Tennant's performance gives the weaker material one hell of a boost). As with the Master trilogy, fandom made it all but impossible to enjoy the story at the time. With that taste of ashes no longer in my mouth, it was a pleasure to just watch it for itself. (Jon provided commentary in the form of reading out funny bits from Writer's Tale. :)

Mr. Copper says: "Of all the people to survive, he's not the one you would have chosen, is he? But if you could chose, Doctor, if you could decide who lives and who dies - that would make you a monster."

Ohhhhhh shit.

(Although of course I'm still waiting for the line about becoming a vengeful god to pay off.)

Comments

[cassiphone.livejournal.com]

A Writer's Tale made me so much more impressed and enamoured with Voyage of the Damned.

[jblum.livejournal.com]

The bit that astonished me was spotting just how much stuff had been rewritten from the draft in the book! Not too many wholesale plot rethinks, but lots of little nips and tucks and polishes. Made me realise just how much work goes into even the scripts that feel first-drafty...

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

We get so much behind-the-scenes stuff these days - it's as though, when they make a story, we're along for the ride, cheering them on. :)

[scarfman]

(followed the link from who_daily)

Although of course I'm still waiting for the line about becoming a vengeful god to pay off.

Did you miss the end of Family of Blood?

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I must have missed the bit where the Doctor looked into the TARDIS, yeah. (But srsly, imagine that terrible revenge thingy - only powered by the Vortex. Eek!!!)

[scarfman]

I was rather speaking of the divine vengeance visited on the Family. I'm implying that taking in the Vortex from Rose on the Game Station has turned the Doctor into a vengeful god. "No second chances," "used to have so much mercy," what he says when Rose turns up in the Detective Inspector's secret headquarters, needing Donna to stop him when he was flooding the Racnoss, what he did to the Family. Perhaps it even wormed back in time and was responsible for his final judgment of Cassandra on Platform One.

You could use this to retcon anything you thought was out of character during the Davies administration.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly!

This is my take: The Doctor at first *isn't sure* whether what he did to save Rose has, as predicted/rumoured, turned him in to a "vengeful god", and he's been quietly obsessing over it ever since... which of of course gradually turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Look at:
1. His babble of self-questioning as soon as he's regenerated & woken up;
2. How strongly he reacts when nurse Hame talks about "The Lonely God";
3. How close to the line he seems to step in "School Reunion" when offered truly god-like powers, before Sarah - seeing that he's seriously tempted, but fighting it, but maybe not going to win - snaps him out of it.
4. Fast forwarding an entire season, we get to Human Nature / Family of Blood: The whole story happens because he's trying hard *not* to be a vengeful god. As the epilogue tells us, he was being merciful to the Family. Possibly thinking: "If I *have* to become a god, I'd rather be *this* kind of god"... But it backfires, and in the end he imposes the sactions that he should have done in the first place, but magnified tenfold. Instead of simply stopping/killing them, now he makes them suffer.

Of course, I'm crediting RTD with an awful lot of fairly subtle deep-plotting here. Terribly unfashionable of me, I know... Or maybe Helen Raynor slipped it in without RTD even noticing? =;o>

[ETA:] Oh and of course, at the end of the season he gets to be Tinkerbell Jeebus, redeeming the world by the power of faith, served by a wandering disciple/evangelist - which is a god-role much more to his liking.

(Wild guesswork: The Master mentioned how terrified he was when he saw the Dalek Emperor take control of "the Cruciform". What's the betting that'll be where/how Ten finally dies?)

[scarfman]

I've written in the past of hope that this is all an incarnation-long story arc but, if that's what Davies is doing, he's doing it so subtly or so poorly that I can't tell for sure.

[lordshiva.livejournal.com]

It's so nice to be away from all those aspects of fandom that sucked all the joy out of being a fan. I'm so looking forward to Waters of Mars!

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Glee comes first. Weighty critical analysis can take place later. :D

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Or in the words of JN-T: "First, enjoy!" =:o}

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

While I still don't care all that much for VOTD in and of itself, and still think it wasn't the best choice for a Christmas special ("rocks fall, almost everyone dies" isn't very good for instilling a mood of holiday jollity), as RTD's tenure on DW continues, I'm seeing more and more that all this time he's been telling *one big* story, of vast scope, and some stories or plot elements that seem somewhat weak when taken on their own (e.g. VOTD) have actually been important building blocks in that greater story. I also think a lot of folks in fandom are too focused on the individual stories as isolated episodes to see the mosaic image that's forming, which is too bad.

I'm really crossing my fingers for the remaining specials. If they work, if RTD pulls it all off, it will be breathtaking. Either that or it'l be epic crash and burn (*winces at the thought*).

Either way, I think we'll see Tennant pulling off some performances that'll make playing Hamlet look like a walk in the park.

*Is excited nao.*

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

"rocks fall, almost everyone dies" isn't very good for instilling a mood of holiday jollity

Bwa! A blockbuster pastiche makes sense as a holiday treat, but all the misery must've caused a lot indigestion of Xmas turkeys.

too focused on the individual stories

Sometimes too focussed on individual lines. We all bring our own set of lenses through which we see the show (I'm all about the h/c, for example) but larger patterns are invisible except to the naked eye. How many times now have we mistaken a cliffhanger for a terribly sad ending?

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

H/C?

[GOES GOOGLING (http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/H%2FC)] Ah! Gottit. =:o}

[jblum.livejournal.com]

rocks fall, almost everyone dies

They used to show "The Poseidon Adventure" as a regular Christmas treat.

Britain is *weird*!

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

Hunh. Well, maybe, in light of that, I was missing a cultural reference; if everyone in Britian was already primed to consider "disaster at sea" = "fun Christmas fare," then maybe VOTD didn't strike such an odd note over there.

(Over here, we get marathons of Star Wars and Harry Potter movies on Christmas day, go figure . . .)

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Oh, I get it - because it's set on Boxing Day! And they have to climb up the Christmas tree, and all that.

... no, it's still weird. I suppose there are only so many times everyone can sit through "Jesus Christ Superstar".

Possibly the inclusion of Buckingham Palace is a cheeky wave at the Queen's Christmas Message, too. :D

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"I suppose there are only so many times everyone can sit through "Jesus Christ Superstar"."

That one's for Easter, silly! The rule at Christmas is that everybody dies *except* the sweet ickle baby Jesus. =:o} (And therefore, it's officially Not 'Ose (http://www.last.fm/music/Erica+Neely/_/Not+Everybody+Dies).)

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

idk The Ten Commandments then???

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm... Maybe on a weekday morning, sometime during the week between Christmas and New year.

On Christmas Day/Boxing Day, we're far more likely to get Pratchett's "Hogfather". =:o}

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

OK, I guess I can reveal the truth. The barrage of classic blockbuster movies on our screens every Christmas is a secret government exercise in population control. The theory is that while we're watching Ernest Borgnine drowning / Bond trashing yet another evil villain's lair / Bruce Willis lacerating his feet inside a doomed skyscraper, we can't be murdering our annoying relatives (with whom we're being forced to spend three whole days) or out crashing our cars into each other under the influence of the combined seasonal ethanol and calorie overdoses.

But don't tell anyone I told you so...

[tiggerallyn.livejournal.com]

I'm seeing more and more that all this time he's been telling *one big* story, of vast scope, and some stories or plot elements that seem somewhat weak when taken on their own (e.g. VOTD) have actually been important building blocks in that greater story. I also think a lot of folks in fandom are too focused on the individual stories as isolated episodes to see the mosaic image that's forming, which is too bad.

I got into a bit of an argument with a friend of mine over that very point about two and a half years ago; I said that I thought the Master trilogy that closed out the third season felt like The Empire Strikes Back, and that as you saw in "Utopia" how the dominoes started to fall, then it became apparent that there was a direction to the series that wouldn't unfold for another season or two, that we'd have our Return of the Jedi before RTD was done.

His argument was that television doesn't work like that; you don't know when you're going to be canceled, so it's insane to pull a JMS and plot out a massive storyline (and, even in JMS' case, he didn't quite pull it off because he didn't know if he'd get the fifth season of Babylon 5 or not).

As for where, two years ago, I thought the story was going, it's the same place I think it's going today — the reset button. RTD is passing on the box of Doctor Who toys, and there's one toy that he took out of the box and hasn't used — Gallifrey and the Time Lords. It's not RTD's toy to take out of the box permanently, though; it was in the box when RTD received the box of toys from Philip Segal, and it was in the box of toys when Segal received them from John Nathan-Turner. For Moffat to have the same box of toys to play with that he had, RTD has to put the Gallifrey/Time Lord toy back into the box. Maybe it will be overt, maybe it will be subtle (like The Gallifrey Chronicles, come to think of it), but the toy will go back in, and Moffat will inherit a toybox with all its toys intact.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting way of looking at it - it would make each producer's era sort of modular, self-contained. Though of course, Moffat isn't reliant on RTD to bring back Gallifrey if he wants to play with that particular toy!

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

RE: "Television doesn't work like that," well, heck, look at the Doctor/Rose storyline. You never have a main series character who falls in love with another character and then they ride off into the sunset together for a happily-ever-after because it'll destroy the series . . . And yet, Ten (well, Handy) and Rose ended up doing just that. It involved making some really bizarre crack!fic into canon in the process, but RTD had the cojones for *that,* so I see no reason why he wouldn't have some Master Plan (as it were) covering several seasons' worth of stories. Hell, that's a far more conservative move, really.

Yeah, the Big Red Reset button's been in my mind, too, and nothing in WoM contradicted that possibility, either (only reinforced it, to my mind). Wonder how fandom will explode if it comes to pass . . .