#the way leela loses everyone she loves LMAO

[sircarolyn]

i'm just like. thinking. the way that leela isn't even allowed to say goodbye to veega. she's not allowed to bury her. romana walks away from her and veega's just lying dead in their bed and then narvin bombs the place. veega's dead. for all they know so is romana. and leela isn't allowed to bury anyone except for the handful of raiders she's killed over the years. veega's lying dead in their bed and leela never gets to see it and then the farm gets destroyed. argh

[whifferdills]

i forgot that this season has four episodes whoops o.k. where were we

GALLIFREY: TIME WAR: DESPERATE MEASURES:

YMMV but I love how incredibly on the nose this is, great companion to Chibnall Who wearing a sandwich board that says I Am About Imperialism: Ask Me How.

My children....how will my war be won? Project Revenant, the occlusion. The wheels of Gallifrey keep turning. Narvin finding an out for Livia via taxes, lmao, nerd. The presumption of the inevitability of Romana being president again (regeneration on election isn't just a loophole, it's suicide by politics). (Narvin's not jingoistic, Romana, he's desperate and you are all the eggs in his single basket. The last time he was like this, he accidentally started the Time War 🚩🚩). Valerian the soldier, who can trace his lineage to Rassilon, from a noble and ancient house. If you know what I mean. Draining the swamp, making Gallifrey great again, etc.

Romana, of course, doing this alone, her last friend and ally conscripted and tossed into the Death Zone. Be careful where you step - remember who writes those histories. Romana trying to make a deal with the Daleks; the continuing specter of Etra Prime. Narvin and Carla and the ongoing interpretation of loyalty. The threat of Time Lords regenerating into Daleks (what was I saying about Time War paralleling the Chibnall Master Plan...the Master's deal with the Cybermen in s12 feels a little pointed in this context). Brax swooping in at the last minute again, Romana refusing to concede gracefully. Everyone's favorite daddy despot coming home as the occlusion collapses.

I forget what the consensus is on this season but I honestly kind of love it? The middle is a better experiment in form than "Intervention Earth"/"Enemy Lines", the set-up for the arc is solid, it's cynical w/o being grim and while frontloading the "deaths" leaves the rest of the series unbalanced it doesn't like...not work. I like the grinding go-nowhere bookending it, Romana clinging on to the idea of Gallifrey and Narvin unspooling his tether, the place where it frays and then breaks already noted down. You can't change the system from within, you can't fix this by using the tools of the empire that broke it. Neither the Time Lords or the Daleks will win this war, we know that, the story knows that. Onwards, inexorably, inevitably.

& I like the hole in the narrative that the Dr is, how their relationships with Ace and Leela are warped into these horrible fascinating mirrors, how neither Brax nor the Master can bring themselves to finish twisting the knife, how it all makes so much sense in their heads but they are not ever gonna tell you exactly why. & how all of that works against Romana and Leela and Ace being partially defined by the Dr, built up around the shape of him and then put into a story where he emphatically isn't.

That said. Inviting the Master's brand of psychosexual weirdness into the greater Gallifrey polycule doesn't quite work and is like..part of why I don't love what Time War does with Leela is that this huge life-altering hinge point happens in an episode dominated by a character who is doing this as a side bit for his main story. Being sidelined in the story about how she wound up sidelined....no. I think they missed a trick by not giving her the upper hand (at least up until the narrative demands she lose it) as a grown-ass woman who has done this before, in contrast to Ace's still-coltish twenty-something who is just steamrollered by Brax until she finally snaps back. Then again I feel like they always miss a trick by not doing much with Ace and Leela, so 🤷🏻

(I was gonna say they could have given him Narvin but aside from that fucking what does work in the episode, Dr Who just does not care about or for Narvin in any way, 100% pure disdain, and imo that would outweigh any of the weird spy-coded frisson that might arise. Altho it'd be funny to witness the Master simply not bothering while Narvin descends into his slime pit of homophobic homoeroticism)