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some casual advice: never let your housemates dye your hair

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oh yeah I graduated lol

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Listening to a podcast

"Let's take a word from our sponsor."

*Skip ahead a minute* "You can-"

*Skip ahead a minute* "Use code-"

*Skip ahead a minute* "300,000-"

*Skip ahead a minute* "300,000-"

*Skip ahead a minute* "T-shirts-"

*Skip ahead a minute* "Motherfuck-"

*Go back 15 seconds*

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"this female character did a thing i find unlikable so the author should redraft" but like she would do it. her character would do that. there's literally nothing else that she would do in that moment.

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We’re partners.

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Maybe I should just. Idk. Take the midnight train going anywhere

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lol there's no way im fixing my sleep schedule in time for grad

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everyone gets heaven sent wrong. youtube essays will describe it as “a masterpiece that explores grief,” but it doesn’t really. sure, the abstractization of the theme is there to contextualize the mood of the story, but it doesn't actually explore grief in any specific manner.

there’s little examination of emotional fallout, no real psychological depth, no attempt to reflect the social or personal dimensions of loss. the portrayal of grief is flattened into a metaphor—the doctor hitting a wall for two billion years—and that's intentional.

this common interpretation actually causes people to misread the episode. like here, fullfatvideos describe the doctor hallucinating clara encouraging him to fight and win as a beautiful testament to their love and how she's always there to pick him up.

but that's the complete opposite of the intended effect. clara specifically told the doctor not to be a warrior, to not "win," to not hurt himself over her. he’s twisting her image to have the girl he loves the most tell him what he wants her to say.

in fact, hell bent directly contrasts his imagined clara with what the real one says when she realizes what he’s done (which isn’t encouragement, but horror). the doctor doesn’t process his grief. he doesn’t get better. he gets worse. he twists her memory to betray her wishes.

he's not healing—he’s mythologizing. the story turns grief into performance, presenting the doctor as an ideal: the solitary hero who never gives up, who endures beyond human limits. but that’s not a story about processing loss. that’s a story about refusing to.

on its own, it actually lands better as a story about persistence rather than grief—the draining, repetitive effort of clawing your way forward with no clear progress. that lines up more with how it feels.

but even then, it’s stylized to the point of detachment (because that's what the doctor is doing). it’s about the concept of struggling, which is why it abstractly fits grief, but could just as easily be read autobiographically as moffat’s experience as showrunner.

and that abstraction—while effective—also makes it easy to project onto. i think that’s part of why it gets picked up as this grand, universal statement on grief. it’s vague enough to seem profound, clean enough to feel “serious”, and emotionally restrained in a way that flatters a particular kind of viewer.

the doctor doesn’t cry. he endures. he outsmarts. he wins. and for a lot of people, that feels like emotional depth—because it’s presented with enough slow motion, voiceover, and gravitas to seem like it must mean something profound.

and it’s also why a lot of fans like this one but dislike hell bent (if you love both, you’re good). because it appeals to fans who idealize “pure” sci-fi. fans who resent the show when it centers women too much, or gets too political, or dares to be camp or comedic.

for them, this is the dream: one man alone in a gothic castle, solving a puzzle, stewing in stoic, masculine pain. the woman is dead. the feelings are controlled. the story is self-contained. it’s “adult,” but not actually mature.

but that version of the doctor—the invincible, lone genius punching through time—isn’t the real doctor. it’s who he wants to be: the doctor as myth. hell bent interrupts that, pulling us back from the fantasy to someone who broke everything because he couldn’t let go.

when people call this the best episode of doctor who ever, it’s worth asking: best at what? what kind of doctor who is this? it’s broad and professional enough to feel like a perfect episode, and open enough to support whatever interpretation you want.

moffat specifically wrote it to be a crowd pleaser, with a tone that appeals to everybody. it's everyone’s favourite episode. and of course, that is what it is. it is a professional and perfect episode—that’s the appeal.

in fact, it’s probably, on a pure executional level, the best episode there’s ever been. it’s a technical showcase first and foremost. fifty-five minutes of television with everyone involved executing at the top of their game.

and that’s part of why it appeals so strongly to a certain kind of fan: the ones who want doctor who to be “serious” and “clever,” without the mess of something more difficult. it’s self-contained, self-justifying, and built to be admired rather than interrogated.

except it's not. it’s my second favourite episode of the entire show, but it doesn’t actually work without hell bent (my actually favourite episode of the entire show), which is what allows it to be interrogated.

because despite everyone loving heaven sent but not loving the follow-up as much, despite people calling it moffat’s masterpiece—it’s hell bent that’s the masterpiece. and it’s necessary. not just as a follow-up, but as a challenge.

it reframes everything the doctor does not as noble, but as obsessive. it takes the fantasy that he endured because of love and reveals it as denial. nothing about heaven sent is him overcoming or processing anything. nothing good happens and he only gets worse.

it only looked like a victory because we were watching the story he told himself. heaven sent isn’t actually about anything truly profound on its own. it only becomes meaningful because it’s the middle of a three-part story. so it only tells part of it. hell bent tells the rest.

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trying to be less "but it's not like that in the book!!" about adaptations and meet them where they're at as reimaginations. would be easier if they were less worse

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The thing, Sylvie wasn't suddenly wrong in Loki S2, she was still right about killing HWR to free the multiverse vs keeping the murderous status quo in case a war starts, but S2 seems to... if not believe she's wrong then it wants to allow us to be wrong about her being wrong. It wants to unstir the pot but the reason it adds that makes her 'wrong' is that she is not aware of a previously unmentioned device that will unhappen her decision no matter what she does.

And this is why the revisited debate/fight between Loki and Sylvie in the final episode falls flat - even before she's been literally silenced to allow the men to talk about how important they are, we're no longer having an argument about the ethics of freeing the multiverse and so making Loki continue to approach it as though they were just makes him look fucking stupid. Because 1) Sylvie was in fact right about all that and 2) this is in any case now an argument about the secret plot machine. All Loki really has to do here say "no, hang on, I've come from the future and it turns out you can't actually do this after all. We're going to have to take a moment here and brainstorm another solution. Obviously you were right otherwise. Babe."

But no. No, he and the series carry on like we're still talking about the ethics of Sylvie's choice and not whether it will work. From this weird angle Loki turning into a tree is a brave and clever sacrifice (which can handily be blamed on a woman the series has already thrown under a bus to appease Twitter) instead of just a "Look how sad this is!" solution to a problem that doesn't exist, because while Sylvie is angry about HWR's status quo she's not irrationally angry and being told "no, this won't work Because Loom" would convince her to stop because otherwise all her years of effort to bring down the TVA are wasted. Even if I did not hate the tree as a nightmare-fuel fate for a likeable character I would still think it was a stupid thing to do when Loki could just have summarised the recent plot twists to talk her down.

TL;DR Summary:

This is an argument about free will and who gets to decide the fate of the multiverse.

This is an argument about whether the technobabble machine will overload its quantum whatsit if the thingymadoodles don't perfectly align by Febutober the 17th.

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kinda frustrating seeing people treat "you see, but you do not observe" as nothing more than a cool quote when it's pivotal to the theme of the story it appears in.

then again, you could say that's quite fitting for the same reason.

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ow

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When she sings, she sings “come home” 🎶

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ok but if i change my icon how will everyone know that i'm trapped in the 2010s?