#which I largely found quite fun (and obvs no matter what ends up happening I'm glad we're getting Carol back on the show one last time)

[gen-is-gone]

This is perhaps bitchy and uncharitable and certainly almost a year late to really be complaining about but fuck it, we complain anyway.

Yes, I am still unreasonably upset about Sutekh clinging to the side of the TARDIS since The Pyramids of Mars, and upset because I was sort of foolishly hoping we might get some actual characterization fallout from that addressed properly this series, which of course isn't going to happen. And the reason I'm upset about it while it seems fairly few people care all that much is because it's a litmus test for the degree to which any given person sees the TARDIS as a character in her own right. And it's fairly obvious now that rtd doesn't, or at least, only does when it suits him.

Because the thing is, if the TARDIS is a character, is a person, then the manner in which Sutekh uses and usurps her, and the ambiguity in whether it was consensual ('seduction' vs 'coercion') becomes extremely important to the Doctor and the TARDIS's relationship, and the TARDIS's characterization as a whole, both going forward and echoing back. Like bearing in mind that what actually happened is so ambiguous, what Sutekh being 'there the whole time' even fucking means, that trying to pull a point out of it is almost an exercise in futility from the jump, but to borrow some wildly inadequate or perhaps even inappropriate language, it's the difference between whether the TARDIS has been cheating on the Doctor for more than half the length of their entire relationship, or whether she'd been being (sorry) raped that whole time and the Doctor just hadn't noticed.

And yeah, evidently it was too much for me to hope that there would ever be any kind of real emotional or plot-relevant followup about that, because, again, that requires you to see the TARDIS as a character whose choices and emotions and relationships matter beyond their immediate relevance to the plot. And this isn't new by any goddamn means. This isn't actually the usual split between the traditionalist and the avant-garde camps. The TARDIS's sapience and autonomy do not begin with The Doctor's Wife; this is established (more or less) in The Edge of Destruction, the third ever serial in the history of the show, all the way back in nineteen sixty-fucking-four.

And y'know, yes, it would still be a big deal if Sutekh jumped on in Wild Blue Yonder (as would make way more logical sense) rather than Pyramids; the ambiguity of consent that the show either doesn't care or lacks the stomach to address would still be a blow, but it wouldn't have the unutilized capacity to fundamentally alter the relationship between the two longest-running characters in the franchise if it was the span of a season, rather than thousands of years in-universe and nearly five decades in real life. And not to be conspiratorial or assume categorical bad faith on rtd's part, but yeah, it's hard not see that particular unnecessary detail as a petty response to Moffat and Chibnall's own continuity-and-paradigm-altering retcons, and an attempt to get his own shot in.

And it's just. Never gonna get talked about, huh. 'Cause it doesn't actually matter, right? 'Cause it's not like the TARDIS is really a person, right?