gallifreyrises

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Behind the scenes shot of 'Flux' (which I haven't seen yet; I stumbled across this while looking for something else). The Sontarans aren't the scariest thing here. One of my horses would be off like a rocket at the sight of the umbrella.

In fairness, he'd probably try to leg it when he saw the guys in weird helmets too, but he might think about it a more....but umbrella, and he's just gone.

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Yeah. Me too. That’s why I went through the faff of joining Tumblr. I was annoying husband and Facebook friends, and I wanted to find some people who’d give a vague shit about Doctor Who ramblings.

Ya know, I started this tumblr mostly so I’d stop annoying my friends with my endless Doctor Who thoughts. What I didn’t plan on—though I’ve been absolutely delighted by—is that it ended up becoming a place where I met people who actually wanted to hear all those thoughts. Like, instead of the pity nods and “uh-huhs” I used to get, now I’m surrounded by folks who light up at the same nonsense I do. It's delightful.

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Spyfall Part II: I thought it was brilliant. I was delighted that they brought in some bootstrap shenanigans, since I felt Chibnall's first series had been seriously short in that department.

Most of all, I enjoyed the interactions between the Doctor and the Master. Dhawan's Master has a kind of pathos about him, even when he's being a deranged, psychotic lunatic. Conversely, the Saxon Master was utterly joyous when he was being deranged and nuts; you could see that John Simm was having more fun than anyone else in that room. And Missy was just complicated, casually killing people and getting off on it, but also desperate to be the Doctor's friend again (nothing says 'lets kiss and make up' like giving someone you've fallen out with a whole army of Cybermen). SpyMaster was done with the Doctor, done with that friendship, wanting her dead (as per heartshaven's info, he's one regeneration away from Missy, and some EU stuff happened?), and he was gleefully being murderous, but there was a kind of underlying pain in him as well. Like an addict who knows he should stop and can't, so he's just resigned, saying 'fuck it' about the whole thing. 'Destroying whole civilisations for shits and giggles is a problem, but what am I gonna do about it? Might as well make it fun.' Or someone who knows his relationship with his old pal is irretrievably broken and is trying hard to not give a shit.

But the best part was that the Doctor was royally *pissed* at him. I renege on my earlier complaint that it felt like 'The Doctor Falls' never happened. It totally did. No one said much outright, but I felt the deep-seated anger at being betrayed on that colony ship infusing every facet of Jodie's performance whenever they did a scene together. Ten knew the Master wasn't a good guy, but you could still see all his love and affection for his old friend, and his tears when he died, and Twelve.....well, goes without saying, doesn't it? But Thirteen is over this arsehole; there's no affinity, no fondness, just pure rage.

Obviously the Twelfth Doctor had no idea that Missy double-crossed the Saxon Master and was going to help him. His last conversation with her had been an impassioned speech, but then her saying, 'fuck you, nevermind being good,' then running off with her previous incarnation, taking the Master's TARDIS, their only way out. The Doctor and Nardole were completely fucked after that. Sentenced to death on the colony ship, and it wasn't like the Doctor knew Heather would come to the rescue with his TARDIS, albeit a wee bit too late, so when he thought he'd die there, he was fairly sure he'd stay dead. Occasionally invading Earth and other planets is forgivable, but cold betrayal, leading to a hopeless situation and his death/regeneration, after he saved her life on Carnathon and thought their relationship was healing? Not cool. That hurts. And the way Jodie played it, so good. You could see how Thirteen had been holding a fearsome grudge ever since.

Setting SpyMaster up to be taken prisoner by Nazis was well hard. Ouch. At some level, she probably figured he would be fine in the end, because he's the Master, but it wouldn't be nice for him. And Gallifrey appears to be on fire. Probably not ideal.

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Oh, god, house centipedes gave me nightmares when I lived in Western MA. Proper little Doctor Who aliens. Yous must live in the US. :) My approach was to squeal and run from the room, then make someone else deal with them. My flatmate would smash them with a shoe.

I don't mind most arthropods, with the exception of craneflies, the Tipula family. Totally harmless, but they waft about with their legs dangling in a creepy way and divebomb you.

I generally consider myself chill around bugs, I’m really not all that scared of most of them, but house centipedes…

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Who doesn't love River.

But it always entertains me when the camera pans to 'The Time Traveller's Wife' when Clara's hunting down all the hidden TARDIS keys. I was given aforesaid book a very long time ago by a guy who was breaking up with me, and I wasn't happy about it (who is). Sounding very heartfelt, my soon-to-be ex proclaimed, "This book explains a lot about me."

Yeah, okay. Read the book. Still don't know what he meant by that.

River Song moodboard because I’m in love with her (who isn’t tbh)

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Getting a handle on this Tumblr thing. The blog is for writing utter shite about Doctor Who, mostly, and occasionally for plugging my fiction writing, which is hopefully not shite.

Doctor Who fics:

Long scary novel about broken TARDISes:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63713713/chapters/163389127

Short story that started life as something else:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/68184016

Original published novels:

This is about horses, veterinarians, wild places, and mental health. Think Black Beauty meets an Irvine Welsh novel:

https://amzn.eu/d/dtE2NeP

This one is about miscarriages of justice in New York City (I beat you to it, 'Criminal Record,' but if you liked that, you'll like my book):

https://amzn.eu/d/b2Qh0JM

This is about a New York police detective with PTSD, a prequal to 'Overturned,' the above one.

https://amzn.eu/d/a2m3MWf

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Jesus.

I will spend three months writing a thing and two years editing it. Well, novels anyway. That includes the 150k word fanfic. How do you not edit? My first drafts are pure shite.

But I am a great copyeditor. Send stuff my way if you want all your commas in the right places.

people who edit their fics scare me. what do you mean you don't just get possessed by a writing spirit and then throw it to the wolves (the freaks on the internet)

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Isn't that basically the plot of The Office? Both American and UK versions.

A UNIT spinoff but it's in the style of The Thick of It. The sci-fi elements are kept at an absolute minimum. It's literally just the most stress inducing office environment you've ever seen. Broken printers. Massive irretrievable data losses. Peter Capaldi cameos as actual Malcolm Tucker and it's never acknowledged or explained. Someone get Kate a fucking Fanta.

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The real question, though, is can I keep my horses on it? Can it make me a track system?

Obsessed with this TARDIS content. There are an infinite number of rooms, and one of them is where the doctor keeps Amy's model tardis. Another is the swimming pool. She's powered by a mechanical tree of life that lets her mold her architecture to its whim. It protects the people it loves even when it's in danger, and traps the ones it doesn't inside itself. She taps into the heart of space and time and is subject to the laws of thermodynamics. It's powered by a whole entire dying star. She also plays host to a couple of zombie critters. The zombie critters are her doctor and his companion. It's doing everything it can, even as it's actively dying, to protect her doctor. Just this once it wants to be saved. Truly the character of all time.

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I like answers. Cheers for that. :) I saw presidentdisaster's post earlier the day, before heartshaven's, and then went on a whole thing in my head, wondering if SpyMaster was indeed some other pre-Missy regeneration, because the only Master regeneration we've actually seen in NuWho was Yana into Saxon Master. But all these people have TARDISes, so anyone can show up, at any point in space or time. Not necessarily in the order that we see them, stuck as we are in our sad little 3D space where time only goes one way. Indeed, we only know Nine regenerated into Ten, Ten regenated into Twelve, Twelve into Thirteen. and so on, because we saw it. If SpyMaster had never been Missy, then that would explain why he was still a mad raving sociopath.

Alternatively, he could be a nihilistic mad raving sociopath, because his/her attempt to 'turn good' obviously ended in an epic of a clusterfuck. So if he came after Missy, as per heartshaven's EU info, then you can see how he could have a lot of pain and rage and self-loathing, coming from his/her hefty contribution to aforesaid clusterfuck: all her waffling over whether she'd betray the Doctor or betray her previous incarnation (if Missy had waffled less, then the Twelfth Doctor and Nardole might have survived that shitshow), and maybe all that fried their brain, and when he became the SpyMaster, he was like, "Oh, well, fuck it."

Just seen 'Spyfall' last night (the first part). I wasn't surprised to find out that O was the Master, because I knew he was played by Sacha Dhawan, so when Sacha appeared on screen, I knew who he was long before he revealed himself to the Doctor and co.

But I have questions.

(1) After the 'The Doctor Falls,' the bootstraps are more like a tangle. Who regenerated into the O Master? Missy or the Saxon Master? Up until the end of 'The Doctor Falls,' we assumed that the Saxon Master had regenerated into Missy, but after both incarnations killed one another, who fucking knows.

(2) If Time Lords can identify one another psionically, and the Master generally knows what the Doctor looks like, even when they've regenerated, why the fuck does the Doctor never see straightaway that the Master is a Time Lord? Ten didn't know Professor Yana was a Time Lord until he more or less regenerated; Twelve thought Missy was an AI interface when he first met her; and Thirteen was all pally with this guy who she thought was an MI6 spy, and it sounded as though he'd run this con on her for a wee while.

Does the Master/Missy use some kind of telepathic block to stop the Doctor from realising he/she is Gallifreyan?

And *when* did Thirteen become friends with him? Not when she looked like Peter Capaldi, because the Master looked like Michelle Gomez and spent a lot of time in a vault in Bristol.

(3) He seems rather unrepentant, doesn't he? Like all of season 10 never happened. It was like Missy regenerated into him, then he came to and thought, "Oh, well, fuck trying to be good. That was pointless. I'll just go back to being a sociopathic megalomaniac."

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Just seen 'Spyfall' last night (the first part). I wasn't surprised to find out that O was the Master, because I knew he was played by Sacha Dhawan, so when Sacha appeared on screen, I knew who he was long before he revealed himself to the Doctor and co.

But I have questions.

(1) After the 'The Doctor Falls,' the bootstraps are more like a tangle. Who regenerated into the O Master? Missy or the Saxon Master? Up until the end of 'The Doctor Falls,' we assumed that the Saxon Master had regenerated into Missy, but after both incarnations killed one another, who fucking knows.

(2) If Time Lords can identify one another psionically, and the Master generally knows what the Doctor looks like, even when they've regenerated, why the fuck does the Doctor never see straightaway that the Master is a Time Lord? Ten didn't know Professor Yana was a Time Lord until he more or less regenerated; Twelve thought Missy was an AI interface when he first met her; and Thirteen was all pally with this guy who she thought was an MI6 spy, and it sounded as though he'd run this con on her for a wee while.

Does the Master/Missy use some kind of telepathic block to stop the Doctor from realising he/she is Gallifreyan?

And *when* did Thirteen become friends with him? Not when she looked like Peter Capaldi, because the Master looked like Michelle Gomez and spent a lot of time in a vault in Bristol.

(3) He seems rather unrepentant, doesn't he? Like all of season 10 never happened. It was like Missy regenerated into him, then he came to and thought, "Oh, well, fuck trying to be good. That was pointless. I'll just go back to being a sociopathic megalomaniac."

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I've finished 11, Jodie Whittaker's first series as the Doctor. My very first impression of it is, 'pleasant surprise.' Jodie's three series have gotten so much negative PR that I feared that every episode would be as incoherent as the end of series fifteen, and none of them were, so that's good. Some of them were excellent, most were fine, and as with every series, there were one or two which were a wee bit weak, but not awful.

Whittaker herself is very much the Doctor, doing Doctory things like talking a lot, being a bit weird, thinking faster than everyone else and owning any room she was in. To make a very controversial claim, I might suggest that misogyny runs so deep in society that a lot of the hostility she recieved comes from the fact that she was acting like 'the Doctor' and not behaving in a particularly 'feminised' way. Quite the opposite. Just ask any female politician. I think she strongly channelled parts of Eleven and Nine. but was her own Doctor as well. Less so Ten and Twelve - she didn't bring as much surliness and the massively inflated ego into the character.

The pacing of the series made for quite a change from Moffat. It didn't have as many series-long story arcs and no two/three parters. Every episode was basically a monster-of-the-week, much like very early RTD series. I don't think that's good or bad; it's just a different way of organising a season, and I think it worked fine. He had the chutzpah to kill off likeable guest characters, so when Ryan's dad was about to be sucked out of the TARDIS in the last one, I thought, "well, he might!" But I guess it was a Christmas special, and they don't like to make those too dark. I think if it had taken place elsewhere in the season, that guy would have had it. That episode got queasily saccharine, but would not be the first Christmas special to go down that road. Looks some weird stuff happens in the next series. I'm switched on enough to the Doctor Who zeitgeist to have heard things. We'll see how we get on with them. Is it just me, or are Daleks a wee bit cute, in an exterminatey way?

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How long is the statute of limitations on this? Hopefully not too long!

When it happened in 'The Giggle,' I was reminded of some slightly ropey fanfics I've read (sorry, guys) where the author didn't want [insert favourite Doctor here] to die/regenerate, so they invented an AU where the Doctor split like an amoeba and their Doctor lived happily ever after with his love interest. Seems like RTD read those and wanted to have his cake and eat it too. But imagine how powerful and tragic the story would have been if Donna got 'her' Doctor and her memories back, only for shit to go down and for him to regenerate, then for the Fifteenth Doctor to take off in the TARDIS like 'cheery bye' and Donna just has to get on with life on Earth. Of course, RTD has shied away from landing his gut-punches in his first run, like giving Rose 'metacrisis Doctor' in her wee parallel universe.

There's a lot of incarnations of David Tennant running around! The man's like a planaria. When the Rani bigenerated, I thought, "For fuck's sake." Then wrote a long post on my Facebook page whinging that it takes all the terror and the dread and the weight out of regeneration. I had a line in my Doctor Who novel like, "Nobody wants to regenerate. It's just better than being dead." Or to quote Steven Moffat, far more of a Doctor Who authority than I will ever be:

"And anyway, did he want to go through it all again? To be torn down and rebuilt into someone else, just to see more of the universe burn. He remembered his old tutor, lecturing at the academy, telling them all about the change they dreaded so much. 'You will walk into a storm,' Borusa had said, 'and a stranger will walk back out. And that stranger will be you.' A stranger to himself, yet again. Why? What was the point any more?" (Moffat, The Day of the Doctor, 14).

how many years until we can tell people bigeneration isn’t canon or do we need a change of showrunner for that

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First draft mantra: it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be there.

You can write utter shite; you know you'll rewrite later, so those sentences can completely suck. Just put your foot down and go.

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How do you prolific fic writers do it? I started one that I was hoping would be a couple thousand words, but now I'm on 5k, not halfway through, and it's just a sketchy first draft so a lot of things require more expounding. I'm gonna spend the next six months editing the damned thing before it ever sees the light on AO3. Oh, well. On we go. Short stories? I'm clearly useless. But if you want a 200,000 word novel, that I can do.

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My nerdy car.

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My knowledge of maths and theoretical physics is pure rubbish, but as I understand it, the theory of general relativity adds time as a fourth dimension because of relativistic effects - how different observers percieve where and when an event occurs, relative to where they are to aforesaid event. The universe basically curves, like those big parachutes we played with as kids; your perception of time will be different than that of someone on Mendax Dellora, or at the other end of that spaceship that's halfway in a black hole. Large objects, like planets, distort space/time, like a bowling ball on the parachute. So the observed rate at which time passes depends on an object's velocity, relative the observer. Your 4.5 billion years in a confession dial is like two weeks on Earth. Things will move differently depending on your proximity to the distortion in space/time caused by the 'bowling balls.' I think that's the general idea, anyway.

Maybe we can make sense out of this, at least in the context of Doctor Who (the Journal of Theoretical Physics doesn't care what I think, thank god). We've been told that Gallifreyan dimensional engineering is basically folding space/time in on itself. So let's imagine that confession dial as a part of that parachute that's been wadded up into a big giant ball, all folded and skooshed up and mashed together. If you're the poor bugger in the middle of that giant wad of space/time fabric, everything around you (including time) will be moving at a different speed than it will be for people who are in parts of the parachute that are open or gently folded or compressed or whatever.

Classical mechanics, conversely, assumes time is a universal constant, moving at the same speed, regardless of the observer's position.

Quantum mechanics has made it all even harder to understand, cause some of it doesn't fit into Einstein's theories.

Never quite understood time being the fourth dimension. Shouldn’t it be the first? The most math education I have is high school calculus but speculating about things I know nothing about is fun. I can imagine time as an abstract concept apart from space, but I can’t imagine space without time. If I imagine a spherical sphere in an otherwise empty void, or a one dimensional dot, time is still assumed. The moment of my imagining is the moment of its existence, and its existence being a moment requires time. Start with one dimension, add one, you have two dimensions. Add another to make three. But I can’t add time because what, was it timeless before? So it can’t be the fourth, in order, it would have to be first, because to add a spatial dimension requires the foundation of time. I know this messes with the imagery of “higher dimensional” eldritch beings, but I, mere human, cannot imagine the absence of time. I can imagine paused time, all its distortions and translations, but not the absence. And since “what you can imagine” is often considered valid philosophy, I’m afraid I cannot exclude this from my interpretations of scifi