“… then Superman blew out the last of the laser-vision fires and the Doctor sonic’d the wibbley lever back together. ‘So’, said the Doctor, shamefacedly, ‘Jellybaby?’”

“…’I'm the Doctor,’ shaking Superman’s hand, ‘otherwise known as the Last of the Timelords.’ ‘Cal El,’ tightening his grip slightly on the Doctor’s hand, ‘Last of the Kryptonians’.”

“…’In short, I’m an alien.” finished the Doctor ‘But you look human!’ answered Superman. ‘So do you!’ shouted the Doctor, getting a bit shirty about this now. ‘But my father chose Earth as the one place I could fit in!’ ‘Well, so did I!’

“… ‘So, do the glasses send video back for you these Daily Planet persons?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do they pick up traces of residual Rift energy?’ ‘What? No!’ ‘Do they make you look brainy even though you don’t really need them?’ ‘No – well, yes.’ ‘That is so two years ago.’

“…’Then there is Lois Lane. We’re very will-they-won’t-they at the moment; universe just got rebooted.’ ‘Nothing to do with me! Well, a little. Well, a lot.’ said the Doctor, looking worried ‘Not that my public image came out of that unscathed. And as for being confused about your wife to be … Subject change: ever been cloned?’ “

“… ‘And that is the last of the human Companions. Then there was that android that never worked right-’ ‘I know what you mean,’ interjected Superman, ‘-and then K-9. Ever have a dog as a sidekick?”

“…’The name is Alexander Luthor; scientist, executive, human. I wage war against the single most powerful being in all the universe.’ ‘Ah,’ said the Master ‘I think I might have you there.’”

“… ‘Mine doesn’t kill.’ said Lex. ‘Neither does mine,’ replied the Master, ‘Well, humans, anyway.’ he continued. ‘He has died before! He just won’t stay dead!’ ‘Lex, we’re going to be best friends.’”

“… ‘I’d be better known if, occassionally, all memory of my existence weren’t erased every so often. F’rinstance, there was that time I saved the universe.’ ‘Or that time I saved the Multiverse.’ ‘What?’”

“… ‘Time is an orange- well, not an orange, say a tangerine-’ ‘Oh, I know all about it. 31st Century Legion of Superheroes. Telling me they can’t tell me anything.’ ‘Let me tell you about River Song.’”

“… ‘Er,’ said the Doctor, watching the Master’s TARDIS begin to appear, ‘you remember what I said about being the last of the Timelords? Kind of … not.’ ‘Phantom Zone?’ ‘What?’ ‘Nothing.’”

“… ‘He was driven mad, very young, by the Untempered Schism!’ shouted the Doctor over the shaking of the TARDIS. ‘So was Luthor!’ shouted Superman, ‘Early onset male pattern baldness!’”

“… ‘I’ll leave the giant-robot-destroying to you,’ sighed the Doctor, ‘I used to be able to more action in the seventies.’ ‘Fair is fair,’ answered Superman, ‘I used to be able to fly through time in the seventies.’

“… ‘And then this will be wrapped up, simple as the Seven Keys to Doomsday!’ ‘Right, easy,’ said Superman uncomfortably. ‘At least I won’t have to erase your memory about my identity.’ ‘Yes, that is a boon.’ said the Doctor, fingering his collar.”

“… ‘Finally!’ crowed Luthor, standing over the corpse of Superman, Master-made Kryptonite rifle. ‘All life signs are absent, all-’ Luthor’s drawl continued, rising to a shriek as a de-miniaturised Superman sprang from his prone double. ‘A little trick I picked up from the Doctor.’ commented Superman, crushing the Kryptonite rifle into a lead ball around its deadly ammunition.”

“… ‘Hand the Hand of Rassilon to me, Superman, or the Doctor gets a dose of Judas Tree poison – in both hearts!’ roared the Master, holding syringe-pistol to the Doctor’s back. ‘Geronimo’ laughed the Doctor, delivering a Venusian-judo chop to the Master’s solar plexus. ‘Little something I learned from Batman.’ commented the Doctor while disarming his unconscious foe.”

“… ‘Actually, I dropped you off twenty minutes early – plenty of time to disarm the missiles and save Miss Lane. Personal Question?’ ‘Okay,’ asked a bemused Superman.’How were you able to fly around the planet repeatedly in moments, but then couldn’t cross America in minutes to catch the missiles in the first place?’ ‘Well,’ answered Superman, rising into the air, ‘America IS bigger on the inside after all…’”

But.

Occupy Wall Street. This is written because of it, but not about it. I am not going to tag this for one side or the other to find. I am just going to talk about the coverage this is getting – one very, very small part; the culture of the protest. I have read, repeatedly, about the honour and respect associated with the peaceful protest. The American Civil Rights Protests and Anti-War Protests are regardly highly as changing a culture. The protests in the histories of India, of China, of South Africa, are spoken of as world-changing. Peaceful protest, as a phrase, method and ideology, is enshrined with respect.

But, when it happens these days, it seems that the protesters are -sometimes- covered as being lazy, insane and inconsiderate. The coverage isn’t by any means all one way, nor is it entirely undeserved. Critiques of society deserve to be critiqued all the closer right back. And people have every reason to suspect the word ‘protest’ after the monsterous atrocities that ruined countless lives in London during summer. The arsons, assaults, thefts, and pure-spite-fuelled vandalism upon persons who had nothing of anything to do with anything would be reason enough to get people suspicious. But is that all the reason?

Could well be. But, hasn’t there been a jaded regard for protesting for a while now? Petrol goes up by a penny, people get angry, it is brought down again … then put again quickly on the quiet a few months later. We see something wrong and we flagellate ourselves as a society for being apathetic about or cynically jibe each other about an obvious, but unstoppable, political manoeuvring. But then, when someone does protest something, there is that impulse to count the days until it collapses, and console ourselves that it’d never have worked anyway. Its a Catch 22 of protest being respectable but impossible or the province of hippies and meaningless.

I think part of that is ‘enshrining’ past protests, which is usually something we do with things that are dead. And, unfortunately, the need to protest, to state that things aren’t fine and that they need to change. I’m not talking about this issue, and I’m not talking about this protest – we are simply are always going to be a society that requires periodic protest to temper the ruling hand with mercy. We’ll be doing it still in ten years, in a hundred years, in a thousand years, when we want the space arks to bring the dungbeetles to when we want preserve the last star in the universe from burning itself out, we’ll protest.

And, yes I know I just undercut my entire argument with sci fi references. I actually needed to; it was getting dark.

But, yes – we’re never going to be perfect, protest is always going to happen. We learn from our mistakes, and we make entirely new ones. My sister once asked me about the stock market crash in ’29, and if it had been ‘fixed’ for that to never to happen again. The specific causes of that crash might have been fixed, or policed against, or made irrelevant by the sheer passage of time – or were simply to big, too integral a part of competitive trading to ‘fix’ – but all the same, for different reasons or similar, it happened again. But the deep pervading cultural assumption was that the market was important, and so was ‘fixed’. Static. Perfect. Safe.

Do we really want to admit that things are really, really, future-crushingly bad. No. Do we want to admit that, rather than a fix by an appropriately messianic, memetic, magic minority man, our best response is a bunch of hippies grousing in tents, disrupting foot traffic and going home at night? Really no.

And on the other side of that argument, the past wasn’t perfect either. Oh, the protesters were very, very great, but there does seem to be this need to anoint, and to cast issues in black and white. History, as far as second level at least, does have a problem with praising someone, but also stressing their calculation, their desires. The War protests were, in part, done out of a moral objection … but also by people who didn’t want to be called up. The civil rights protests were also, in part, done out of moral objection, … but also by people who saw real, tangible objectives and practical methods to get them.

Rosa Parkes, for example. By the end of second-level education, the primary impression will be that of a saintly, tested figure who, one day, tired, simply chose not to give her seat. It isn’t until third level education, at least for me, that the picture of the tactical brilliance and measured assault of this move upon segregation, with the orchestration and backing of the civil rights movement, and multiple persons of action doing it, emerges. Hitting buses, which would have been economically wasteful to fully segregate, and so tax-wasteful … and then applying that to schools, hospitals, etc, was a stroke of genius. Simplified histories insert naturalism and instinct over even-more-impressive decision and strategy.

And they never were clear cut, and they never will be. When we exist in the societies they helped to create, they are, but they weren’t clear cut at the time. They were disruptive, and loud, and reaching for impossible or unspecified things. And even those that admitted the moral veracity of the issue would have to admit that the social turmoil generated over the decades of change -change still going on- had heavy costs – costs which were immeasurably outweighed by the gains, but costs which, when measured against gains which were at the time thought impossible, seemed all too costly to consider.

This is the part, usually, where I’d reference Dr Who – Day Of the Moon, lets say, where Canton has an African-American significant other, which in 1969, by virtue of saving the world from alien rulers, he’d get to marry – if that significant was not also male. And even in 2011, could he really get that right? Even now? In every state? But no. Lets engage with of the extant, popular critical discourse on this.

There is thing that a video review series called Feminist Frequency -check them out on youtube- said when talking on Sucker Punch (and remember this, it’ll be coming up next week); that Sucker Punch is constructed, textually, in a world which is a feminist utopia, and feminism is a concept of past struggles. This opposed to the very real, very necessary, very outnumbered movement, constantly required to even halt the political, cultural, employment, ideological, social and medium chauvanism, never mind actually reach parity, that Feminist Frequency, and I, know that it actually is. How I feel this statement actually relates to Sucker Punch is complicated. How I feel this relates to general society is actually pretty straightforward (because I’m really that bass-ackwards, but you knew that already).

Protests regarding racism, sexism, classism, etc aren’t over, and we can only deal with each generation. And when it is this serious, dismissing it isn’t dealing with it. The movement has no one voice, no one message, no one suggestion? Problems, yes; but if they did, we’d accuse one voice, one message, one idea hijacking the protest representing a whole world of affected persons. The disorganised nature of the protest has them actually ignoring speeches from respected individuals who have long, long campaigned for social change? Big problem. But, given how previous organised protests have been criticised for spending millions to fly in celebrities, wouldn’t we have criticised them here too?

Why is the use of the internet to orchestrate the Spring Revolutions praised, but received with suspicion in the western world? Why are people praised for standing for democracy in countries where it is shaky, but treated with a veneer of distaste when they stand up for it countries where it is strong, though not always strong? Problems elsewhere are bigger, but they are no less real.

Protests, (much the mohawk-sporting grunge fan, which, for all that the original fans are parents and grandparents by now, has been part of every fictional street gang of more than 3 people since 1981) are always going to be perceived as disruptive. And, beyond that realisation … I have no real problem with how they have been received. Specific cases of violence are worrying, but I live nowhere near where any of the protests are being held, and have no idea what the provocations or situations to these instances are. There hasn’t been any massacres, any tanks rolling over people or gunned down crowds. The response hasn’t been perfect, but it hasn’t been horrific, either.

And that is it. This isn’t coming up again, I’m sure everything I’ve just said has been said -and rebutted, eloquently- elsewhere, and I really just needed to get this out of my brain and focus on what I’m good at – over analysing why the cartoon cat hits the cartoon mouse with a mallet. And that is 1555 words.

Okay, so this keeps turning up everytime I google Stephen Moffat’s name, so I’ll deal with my frustration with it. A quote keeps swinging about:

“There’s this issue you’re not allowed to discuss: that women are needy. Men can go for longer, more happily, without women. That’s the truth. We don’t, as little boys, play at being married – we try to avoid it for as long as possible. Meanwhile women are out there hunting for husbands.”

“The world is vastly counted in favour of men at every level – except if you live in a civilised country and you’re sort of educated and middle-class, because then you’re almost certainly junior in your relationship and in a state of permanent, crippled apology. Your preferences are routinely mocked. There’s a huge, unfortunate lack of respect for anything male.”

This appears to be the central thesis to any blog post which perceives Moffat as sexist. Moffat refutes this statement, by saying the quote was taken out of context in an interview with a newspaper called The Scotsman, and that he was actually speaking about the point of view of Patrick from Coupling. Having seen Coupling, this quote seems to be spot on for Patrick’s voice. Some blogs proceed to take Coupling as a whole as evidence of sexism, some don’t mention Coupling at all.

This usually sets the lens the blog perceives the Moffat episodes in the Davies era and the Moffat through. And, of course, this usually ends with a bat being taken to Amy Pond’s and River Song’s characters.

Three things:
1) As previous blogs made clear, I myself have had serious reservations about elements of Amy’s and River’s characters, having gone back and forth on their roles and deliberating what they mean, representations of gender being part of those deliberations.
2) As previous blogs have made clear I still have issues with some of the finer points of River Song – but, also, given that her story, quite literally, is not over, I can wait to see what happens and where the character is taken.
3) As the last Who blog made clear, Amy is one of my favourite sci fi protagonists of all time. So I have given this some little thought.

The arguments of accusation fall into a few patterns:
1) Prior companions were depicted as more capable than Amy.
2) Amy’s sexuality is an inditement on female sexuality (the details are diverse on the particulars in each individual blog, owing to personal taste).
3) Amy’s interactions with the Doctor and Rory are similarly a criticism of women.

So, I’m not linking to any of these blogs. I’m not starting any fights, I’m not looking to be told I’m in the right, and I’m not angry at anyone. I really just want to say my piece without being anymore bitter-sounding than this blog is starting to come off already.

1) The argument goes that Amy, compared to Time Vortex Rose, Walk-the-Earth Martha and Doctor-Donna, got the lame ending of remembering the Doctor back into being after he’d saved the universe.

I disagree. Firstly, because, by that register, they were all ‘weak’: Rose gets someone to pull open a hatch and blanks out until kissed better, (or gets rescued, and shut in another universe, if you want to use that one) Martha told a story as she had been told to, and Donna got to be the Doctor for ten minutes. And this is the bit where I cut down the former companions to make mine seem taller. Except, no. Those are all highly simplified versions of what they do, and neglect one fact: This is Doctor Who.

This is the show where the smart, strange, wonderful way around a problem is key, and where blowing up the enemy in the millions in a flashy, celebratory manner is seen as a tragedy and where an episode where everbody lives – even the villains – is seen as a rousing success. By the above register, the Doctor kisses someone, pulls a lever, goes from Gollum to Tinkerbell, gets a hand from himself, gives the universe gene therapy and wears a Doctor suit.

Secondly; Yes Amy remembers the Doctor. That is the happy ending. Her achievement? She remembers back into existence several people she has never met, including her own parents. That is Amy’s triumph. And the others had those too. Whether it was Rose fighting for her dead Dad one season or finding his alternate-universe equivalent, or Martha’s struggle reuniting her parents and opening her heart to a nice young doctor, or Donna gaining her mother’s respect and her own respect too, they all had something that made us say: their lives, while losing much, have gained much also during their time with the Doctor.

It gave them lives outside the blue box, and made their leaving it seem a lot less like the alternate cut of Scott Pilgrim where Ramona goes off on her own to a midnight-backed door and more like the actual cut where she and Scott go off into a door backed by sunrise.

Amy was only special because of the crack in the wall? Fine – then Rose was only special because of the Time Vortex. Amy’s only job was to remember the Doctor? Fine – then Martha’s only job was to tell other people about him. Amy was only special because some aliens had a plan to kill the Doctor? Fine – then Donna was only special because an alien had a plan to destroy the Daleks.

This is Doctor Who – the show about a nameless two-hearted alien who single-handedly flies a timeship designed for six pilots and stuck as a 1960s police box. The Doctor, who will kill but sees as a gross failure to have to do so, who won’t carry a gun and, for all intents and purposes, has a magic wand and all-purpose badge. The good ship TARDIS flies on context, and all things must put in this context. If anything, arguing this only makes me realise what a marvellous follow-through there has between actors, between show runners, between writers on the ethic of this show: Killing means we’ve failed.

Besides – Amy actually got to keep her ‘remembering’ for the second season finale.

2) So: Amy’s sexuality as inditement. As stated above, the exactitudes of these arguments cover a spectrum of Amy as nymphomaniac cheater to Amy as being rebuked into a stereotypical marriage role. So I’ll just state the case as I see it.

Sexuality-wise, Amy is distinct. They all were. Rose was our first – and the first to fall in love with the Doctor. Martha was the first to fall in love with the Doctor and get over it. Donna was the first, for which I instantly loved her forever for, to skip loving the Doctor entirely and fell in love the vast universe he was offering, apart from him, and became his friend. Amy was therefore the first to fall in love with the Doctor, get over it, and then become his friend.

And it was a sexual desire in its time. The kiss Rose-Nine shippers had waited to see was a life-saving, life-ending medical procedure, and Rose-Ten shippers, for all the tension on screen, got to see little ugly-bumping. Amy? From watching the Doctor undress to kissing him after the Angels two-parter, and being very, very clear about wanting to go further was pretty shocking by comparison.

And make no mistake; at the time I hated it. Oh yes. I was a Rory-Williams fanboy through and through and I utterly dispised the idea that he was going to go down the tubes like Mickey Smith – the inadequate boyfriend playing a minor role in the first episode, getting shelved, getting undermined in later episodes, then getting a nice, impressive moment before going to an alternate universe, allowed to be a success, so long as it was offscreen.

Hell yes I wanted Rory to last, and I wanted him in the TARDIS, a male companion who wasn’t punished by being left behind, or shelved, or ditched by the TARDIS to get his own spin off. I will always support the main companion being female, and not just out of some fanservice need, but because the show has always been about this one guy being the most marvellously intelligent being in the universe.

However, I wanted a male Companion because, quite frankly, I find it very hard to put myself in the role of a wonderous alien. I have, do, and always will put myself in the role of the female Companion, but I also really wanted to see a guy be … good enough to fly with the Doctor for a prolonged period.

And … I got what I wanted. Everything I wanted. I worried during Vampires in Venice, while finding yet more to love in the Rory character, and the Amy character, and the Doctor character. There were still questions, but there was a hope of answers. And then Amy’s Choice answered a helluva a lot of them.

And then the Silurian two-parter broke our hearts – but it wasn’t Mickey in another universe. Rory’s loss was a tragedy, his return was going to happen. And though there were parallels – they both returned at the end of the first part of the two-parter finale, with a weapons upgrade and a badass backstory. And then the comparison ended. Rory was here to stay.

I had a jab of frustration at the snogging in the shrubbery … and then all that was over. And Amy’s story made a lot more sense given what, on some level, she knew happened to her parents. And she made mistakes. She was a flawed human being – like the others were, with Rose ditching her boyfriend and derailing time for her dad and ditching her family for the Doctor, or Martha getting hopelessly hung up on the Doctor or getting her family drawn into a year of hell. Yes, these are also all the preludes to the greatest triumphs of the characters that I mentioned above. Were they greater triumphs for the growth? Yes.

So yes, Amy was flawed. And she grew past those flaws. She wasn’t forced to by other persons, she was prompted by events throwing her relationship with the Doctor and with Rory.

Also, yes Amy was married and pregnant on the TARDIS. I disagree that this means she was being forced into gender roles. Instead, I think that Amy wasn’t shuffled off stage left when she made another step in her life.

So I would disagree with inditement idea. Related to this is …

3) So, the sexism argument puts forward the idea that, in her relationshps, Rory is the whipped husband and the Doctor is the morally pure superior to Amy.

First off, I think we should address the differences between this and previous seasons in terms of physicality. Yes, the Davies era Doctors never had to deal with that degree of physicality – and the one kiss was courtesy of Madame du Pompadour, via Moffat. And, given that Davies, in Torchwood, seems to be more than fine with the onscreen physical act of love, it can’t be that.

I don’t think, as has been put forward by some, that Davies thought physical romance was inappropriate for Dr Who’s timeslot and audience. Has this season been inappropriate – Some kissing, a nod to where babies come from, seems in keeping.

Instead, I think that the writers simply couldn’t have a hook up with a Companion, and if we even saw the slightest relenting in that rule, the assumption would be that there were Companion-Doctor sexy-shenanigans going on between every episode. My feelings on that rule are a blog for another day.

My idea right now is that, as I have stated before, Eleven has been by far the most alien of Doctors – the only time so separated from sexy-shenanigans that any physical attempt to change, rather than the tension of ‘I love you Rose Tyler’, instead was alien, impossible, and mildly hilarious. He was at such a remove, had such a grandfatherly air to Amelia -when he wasn’t being a kid- that it wasn’t even on the cards.

As for Rory, it was the first time we got to meet the Companion’s post-Doctor relationship; rather than as a Doctor clone, or an offscreen broken-off engagement, or a man glimpsed through a cafe window, Rory was here with us, was one of us. Having his journey with the Doctor start after hers actually gave him time and space to have his own reactions, form his own opinions, rather than his and Amy’s being lumped together by joining together.

And it was actually nice to see that, once Rory understood why Amy travelled with the Doctor, that apart from the whole jealousy thing, he was guy comfortable with his fiancee taking the lead, just so long as they were partners on that path. And then that steadfastness was turned up to eleven with a near 2000 year wait (one made off the back of a mistake of his own -killing Amy- and one which he too grew from) and we saw how the girl who waited and the boy who waited were made for each other.

I like Rory, becoming more his fanboy with every appearance, because he says what I hope would say, from suggesting they leave when things clearly turn evil, to just working from a place of empathy. Nobody has to be anybody else’s damsel, or anyone else’s bitch.

I’ve gone on, at length, about how I think the Doctor can be more alien because of two Companions, and how I appreciate the change of pace. I like Moffat’s style and ethic and so on. I do not think that his take on Doctor Who is sexist.

Could he be sexist himself? Totally could. What he creates could have no bearing on who he is or what he thinks. It would be odd that he apparently had such a giant lapse and no break outs in any other coverage anywhere else. But not impossible. That I can accept. I can enjoy the works of Chaplin or Presley and be horrified by the ages of their wives separately.

And as for River Song, the jury really is still out on her, and her story really isn’t over. I hope Amy isn’t over entirely, and I’d love her to be back next season, but I also can see that this a natural place to end her story as a regular companion. By contrast, River Song still has a great big arc to finish yet, in whatever capacity she re-appears in, and how that finishes is going to be the test of the character. But Doctor Who isn’t sexist and Amelia Jessica Pond isn’t a sexist character.

2: If not, then what?
Why would such a piece be edited to imply sexism? It could be entirely accurate. Or it could be part of a phenomeneon regarding any media coverage of literature – an injection of drama. I have been so frustrated to see stories about Terry Pratchett ‘hating’ Harry Potter, or hating Doctor Who, and so on. Briefly after the media had decided that Harry Potter gotten children to read books again (whereas, in fact, it had changed how children’s books were marketed, but anyway) it seemed to have been decided that, lacking any C-list celebrities of the book world to go on Big Brother or have a public meltdown, interviews would be topped with headlines of someone hating something.

This type of over-exaggeration happens to perfectly innocent tv and film celebrities too – Catherine Tate saying she was shy to look David Schwimmer in the eye while doing a play together became her not be able to look him in the face with HATE, while the article on Sienna Miller being disgusted at having to kiss Charlie Cox in Stardust came from the one day the reporter was on set and seeing a scene where the disgust was part of the scene.

I just hate when it happens to writers because they have such a limited forum to rebut in – and with most doing most interviews in text rather than video format, what they say is very malleable. And then comes a Stephen King / Stephenie Meyer hoo-haa every once in a while, which is way too big for me even to touch but makes everyone look bad. And while I could quip about some interviewers writing more fiction than the writers they’re interviewing, its just … sad that they need to do this.

3: Finally, I’m pretty much in love with the Inspector Spacetime meme and totally intend to watch Community now, for realsies.

Yes I’m aware that IS came from 30 seconds of video, and only recurs as a Halloween costume later, but I like what it says about the writers that a magnificent, incisive and well-produced parody of Doctor Who would be done for a thirty second joke, and I like what it says about the fans that they’d devise a whole universe called the Inspectrum, mirroring the minutiae of Who-lore, down a punny-name alternate version of every companion and the actors who played them down to present day … then straightfacedly imply the Tenth Inspector’s Rory Williams, oddly reminiscent of Donna Noble, was played by the same actor as the Eleventh Doctor’s RW, who wasn’t happy how the character turned out and went to play it again on the IS knockoff on the BBC.

They seem to be my kind of people. As does Abed for that matter, from what I hear about him.

EDIT: And they did a Downton Abbey parody!

I really like the universe.

I like the Wall. I like wargs, and the wildlings, and the wights. I like the ten-year summers and the fears of winter. I like the talking white ravens and the direwolves and the dragons. I like Valyrian swords and the dragon-bone daggers and the poison-proof bejewelled chokers. I like Winterfell and Storm’s End and the Dragonstone.

I like the maesters and the Pyromancers Guild and the improving-wizards. I like the black brotherhood, and the sers, and the Kingsguard. I like the Lord of Light and the Great Sept and the Godswood. I even like the three-eyed crow and the wolf dreams and the green dreams, and dream-centic fate-narratives can tick me off pretty quick.

I like the I like the illegitimate children, and the child-brides and the in-bred dragon dynasties – or rather I hate them, but I love that Martin has grounded and spaced his universe with real historical models, and isn’t forcing modern predicates onto it. I like the sypathetic villains and the cold decisions of the heroes.

I like the switching narratives and the timeskips between them. I like the well-trained, but still-blindspot-bearing ten year olds. I like the ongoing mysteries and the bewildering, game-changing tragedies. I like the different fears each character has and the certainties that that particular fear will end the world as it is known.

Yes, this particular volume did strike more of a Wheel of Time chord than the first – implications of former fallen civilisations, of magics long lost beginning to work again with the advent of dragons being reborn, -cool!- and some glimpses of bdsm -mmm,ok-. Overall, yes – good stuff.

I liked it. A nice juicy Vimes book, that settles down a little from previous installments’ mounting pressure. It worked, in several parts at least, as a mystery, and the change of scenery, authority, motivations and lead characters were refreshing. Vimes, on holiday in the countryside, with, a switch of emphasis onto his domestic cast and a minoring of the Watch cast, was a great change. The continuing theme of Vimes not being certain of who he is, where he came from and being afraid of who he could be become, who he knows he could have been had a few things been different, is a rich seam that bears mining again in this fresh context.

I really liked Sybil in this outing. Pratchett really gets into what character powerhouse Sybil is, being everything Vimes is in morality and everything he isn’t, generally, in social deftness. There is a real partnership there in this book that really works. And, quite frankly, an element of sexual suggestion between the two that really, em, fleshes them out. Also, I particularly like Sybil’s rants to Vimes after someone of rank assumes that Sybil, too, must be a goblin-racist. Real anger there, real rage.

Willikins too, though Pratchett laid it on a little thick. Basically, Willikins has, over the course of the last few books, been fleshed out as a butler who, when called to war, is an ear-taking, nose-biting, beserker-sergeant, and has a backstory as a street youth gang fighter, comparable to Vimes’ own. This was alluded by things like Vimes asking what Willikin’s weapon of choice was in those days – Vimes is surprised at ‘a hat with sharpened pennies sewn in the brim’ as apparently these could take out a man’s eye. Willikins replies with ‘if used with care, yes sir’ while folding laundry.

Now, on his last outing Willikins did use this past to take several dwarf assassins – yes, just yes, and it was awesome – and using a dispassionate butler’s air to humbly describe how, at one point he killed one with the ice knife he was using at the time, then took up the assassin’s flame-throwing weapon, ‘apprised myself of its functioning’ then pointed it down the hole the dwarves broke in by and fired until the ‘igniferous fluid’ was used up, incidentally setting the garden across the street on fire. The whole charm of it was the staid delivery. So, in short, it was sort of weird to see Willikins, say running around with a pocket crossbow, doing trick shots through mobs. Yes, characters can change, and be far less uptight – given that this is set six years after the events above and that Vimes works every day to make his staff relax more around him, that is believable – but did Willikins in the previous books have arm tattoos? Did Vimes constantly compliment Willikins on what a dangerous man he was? I don’t hate it, and I can ride the ride if I want to – I LOVE a battle-ready butler – but it was a little weird.

And the Summoning Dark returned! Awesome, in fact. Usually, the odder stuff Vimes encounters, like the DisOrganizer that predicted appointments and so on disappeared. This was pretty cool, and recurring theme of darkness, and it makes sense that a ‘substition’ would work for goblins too, given that it is completely without need for faith in it.

And a lot of what didn’t strike right with me was ‘weird’. And that is a matter of taste. However, I’ll put it out there:

It seemed weird that when the children’s author revealed her backstory, she was effectively backgrounded for the rest of the story. I mean, part of the story, in the end, was the popular acceptance of goblins as a people, and choosing an artistic method to do it. Why not have her publish a book about it? Even the Jane-Austen-reference character (which I loved to bits by the way) got her book shilled in the end. No reference to an enormously popular good goblin book for kids written by the lady whose mother was raised by them, who specifically went out her way to mention the beauties of the goblin language?

It seemed weird that Fred Colon had this hallucinogenic period where he saw things from a goblin’s point of view, and we never saw anything from HIS point of view, or a goblin’s for that matter, throughout the book. We’re supposed to understand this transformation he has in the end to a friendship towards goblins, but we never see what he goes through, not even an in italics paragraph between other characters’ viewpoint paragraphs. It really failed to sell that aspect to me, while simultaneously seeming to pass a perfect opportunity to do so by.

And then there were the goblins in general – similar problem to Unseen Academicals with orcs, the book where the concept of goblins in the Discworld, coincidentally, was introduced. You see, orcs and goblins are pathologically hated by the populace at large – really, really despised – odd, though not full-blown weird. Where it gets weird is that when present these species for five minutes, they’re awesome. Orcs apparently can become knowledgeable about, pretty much anything – they’re do all great guys who get a bad rap because they were created by the ‘Dark Emperor’. Some of it worked, some of it did not, and some of it could be the fact that we only see one orc who has been well-raised.

The goblins in this? Make beautiful pots out of trash. Oh, not really made pots of scrap, no – glowing, beautiful pots that are intrinsically wonderful. Show them how to play a harp, and they will make Sam Vimes cry with their music. Not even kidding. They’ve a beautiful language within their grunting, apparently, which we never hear expressed. They also have an eidetic memory, something that seemed to be thrown in with orcs too. I just felt I was being told to like something.

And they have a belief about putting their immediate effluvia in pots, to be buried with them. And there is a single murder of a goblin and an outright slaughter of goblins, and the pots never come up in regards to that. One comes up as a mystery plot ploint, the other as a MacGuffin to convert the racist Colon and as another mystery plot point. Never as the object of belief. And we get a line about how the goblins believe they’re being punished for something, but we never come back to that. The beliefs are a central plot point, but never expanded on. There is literally a guy chronicling the goblins writing for half a page at the start who mentions the belief about the pots and that he’ll bcome back to them – he doesn’t back to the pots, and neither does the book.

And you know what? It is mentioned that goblins have perfect night vision. It is also a plot point that the local barge captains have to sail by memory and timekeeping because their lights can’t always illuminate the conditions they sail in. There is a climactic scene where a barge captain has lost his place in stormy conditions, while the barge is filled with goblins. Vimes uses HIS perfect night vision to warn the captain of obstacles. Now, okay that is fair enough – Vimes bonded with the goblins with this nightvision. But still – Vimes is a hero afterwards because of this, but there is never a mention of Vimes slotting goblins-eyes-Tab-A in barge-captain-Slot-B. Or anyone else doing this. It seemed like such a legitimate way for the goblins to become beloved, but it was just unused.

And really, you didn’t have to twist my arm to sympathise with these guys. They’re hunted, enslaved, transported and worked to death. They’re instantly sympathetic, they don’t have to be marvellous harp players. But here is the problem.

It could be taste, because it isn’t just that I like Pratchett. Discworld is formative to me. I think in fantasy parody easier than fantasy-straight. Before Neil Gaiman taught me about vampires as metaphor for social leeches and Joss Whedon taught me about vampires as analogy for teenage years, Pratchett taught me about vampires as alcoholics. And werewolves as bipolar. And zombies as stuck-in-their-ways. And trolls as giant computers, and elves as sociopaths, and dwarves as 50% transvestites. And those were brilliant twists on Tolkien, on existing myth and legend. And then there are these things ‘tacked on’ to the goblins, that don’t come from … anywhere, near as I can tell, and we never see from their point of view like we did Cheery or Detritus or Angua. They’re never people to us, just something to be pitied or beloved.

How do they become beloved? Well, Sam Vimes burns some wicker in a dramatic fashion, giving out free beer, while Sybil Vimes held a concert to showcase a goblin harpist talents. Yes. Then everyone involved was arrested. Also, the guy who apparently headed everything, Gravid Rust? Never appears on page. I don’t mean ‘never appears on page with the heroes’, I mean he never appears. We see his lackeys for two scenes, and we see his henchman Stratford for the most of the book. We didn’t need to see as much, frankly, because he pretty much seems to be Andy Shanker from Unseen Academicals in a different hat – brutal thugs in a passionate relationship with violence, who are savaged/killed, just before the end, by a side character, at night. In the master palette of Discworldean evil, this was a sad duplication.

It was weird that Nobby has a goblin girlfriend. Yes, I know, its Nobby, haha, but also wuh?

Anyway, that wasn’t short, but I had a lot of problems with a book I otherwise loved. So it is hard.

Completely unrelated: A Narnia fanfic on the ‘Problem of Susan’ – really good voice:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2794699/1/The_Queens_Return

And that is 1655.

This year: time disintegrated.

Next year, and probable climax of the Silence arc: Smeg knows.

The format was both similar and distinct from last year’s finale.

On the one hand, the opener was moving creatively through time and space to achieve a specific aim. The ‘villain’ was largely just chasing the protagonists to move them from location to location, the challenge being a ‘disaster’ rather than a single ‘enemy’. The ending causes things to un-happen, and the true resolution is deferred another year. An ancient monument is put to strange use. Oh, and River pointed a gun at Cleopatra and hijacked a pyramid.

On the other hand, the fact that this isn’t a two-parter means there wasn’t that terrible place to claw oneself up from in the second part. Yes, River in the spacesuit is sad for her, but we literally know she is going to be fine. The characters know how to fix the problem from the start, and it is instantly achievable – the conflict is the cost at the loss of the Doctor – and it was so long set up that the risk wasn’t in it with, say, his being erased.

So. Effectively, we did the cliffhanger and resolution equal to last year – it was just the mid-season finale. And that is dynamic – adapting storytelling to an altered schedule. Strange, yes, but it has created what I think of as a mid-arc season finale; the first finale had to be definitive, to cap Moffat’s first season, the finale where this is all resolved will have to be moreso, but this was the middle bit. The bit where we’re armed with the who and the how of the Silence, but vagaries of why and where and when are still in the air.

This was the particularly-timey-wimey season where River was born and died and regenerated, where she hated and loved the Doctor, killed him, saved him and married him. And for those of you who really don’t like River, I feel, because this must have been hell for you, but it is over now. I don’t know if they’ll use her more or less now that it is all out in the open, but at least you’ll know, and all the speculation will calm down.

For me, as I stated, I really was worried about River being Amy and Rory’s kid. There were things that were so risky – like how she interacted with her parents previously and how that was going to fit emotionally. As you know, I hate when the magic-baby plot ‘fixes’ everything. For a while it felt, for me, and horribly, that it might go down that route. Or at least that the risk was there. Cheap risks to children and underplaying damage for a quick fix is a quick route to my anger centre. Part-timelord was tricky.

But, ultimately, it worked for me as the story continued to be told. And then I went back, and watched the Time of Angels two-parter, and everything from the priests, to River legitimately losing it when Amy is in danger both times, to even her giving Amy a booster jab. I may as well tell you now – I’m running on the theory that Rory was erased from River’s mind as well as Amy’s during last season’s finale. That is just what I think – I’d love a confirmation, like they gave to River playing dumb over the spacesuit, but ah well.

Then there was the opening two-parter, and, particularly in retrospect, the trust between River and Amy, the sweet conversation between Rory and River. Tragedy, with the River’s ‘last’ kiss with the Doctor so soon, from her perspective, possibly, after their marriage. I’m not sure there – we’ll need some sort of chart from Moffat on that scale when this is all over. And then Good Man Goes to War, with another sweet Rory talk and some more lovely tragedy. By which time, the fact that she handles such craziness makes sense, given how screwed up she was when started out. In many ways, it must be like having a parent whose recollection occassionally slips.
And when she finally can refer to her parents as parents at the very end, with Mummy and Daddy and so on, it is very, very sweet.

Now that that is out of the way …

I liked the episode. Technically it is even more low-key than last season’s finale, with the action mostly in the all-out mid-season finale. It must wallowed in the delicious anachronism stew and set to boil. I liked Winston and the Doctor – an expository device, but a fun one, with Live Chess and Dorium – and the tragedy, with the death of the Brigadier and forgiving River. I like that Amy’s memory being resistant to change is such a strong piece of the universe. Captain Rory was just lovely, with knowing what was going to happen, just waiting on the when and the how. The eye drives were very nice and made sense. Pyramid was rule of cool, though I was wondering if they were going to use the old bit about pyramids preserving things, but no, and for the best really.

I was kinda hoping to see Canton again, what with the historical figures and the Area 51 thing, but there we are. It would have been nice to see the character simply because a lot of the cool stuff he did in the opening two parter was implied and off-screen – the confrontation with the Silent (I know it isn’t their name, but Le Guin already bagged The Nameless Ones) being his only real chance to shine, and he didn’t even remember it afterwards. Ah well. Yes, the Silent really are just there to escape, as is Madame Kovarian, and they are collectively there just there to hurry the protagonists to the signal, like the dessicated Dalek in The Big Bang. They don’t even go upstairs! I’m fine wih it, though when the Doctor does get to the Academy of the Question’s roots, he really is going to have to punch something, and it is going to have to be pretty big, metaphorically speaking.

Loved Rory and the eyedrive, and it paralysing him at the worst moment, and the Silent taunting him over it, and Amy coming back for him, and ‘We should get a drink”Okay’ and ‘And married”Fine’. Many disliked this end for Kovarian, while I (a) actually felt it adressed a lot of Amy’s expected reaction (b) underlined that Kovarian is middle management and (c) she is probably still alive somewhere, and angry at the Academy, or Amy, or both. I really liked the Doctor, after being confronted at the end of mid-season, and even last season, in part, with what a terrible influence he can be on the universe, to be so convinced that ‘The Doctor is in trouble. Please Help.’ would mean nothing to anyone, and instead the replies manifest so strong as to seem to be sunspots. It is very, very sweet. River saying that her suffering would outweigh all that of the universe? Bit much. Still the fact that she’d be the one to do it does justify that reaction. But I liked the wedding well enough. Yes, it was to a Tessalecta in an aborted universe, but still – they’d never marry him off in a straight-faced fashion.

So a few points. Yes, I too would have preferred a little more on the fact that the Tessalecta could, among other things, fake regeneration. And if River was getting the minaturised Doctor’s life signs, say, then wouldn’t it have made more sense for him to leave, causing the lifesigns to stop, rather than staying around to get ‘barely singed’. They couldn’t play too close to the regeneration previously, I get that, or we’d have all guessed it, and that was a solid double-feint with the Dopple-doctor, but we really couldn’t have a 30-second re-run through from his perspective, just to get the idea? Really?

I really didn’t guess the Tessalecta until it happened. Really. Some say they knew by the appearance of it in the episode, some by the appearance of it in the ‘Previously On’ bit. It just slipped past me. And I suppose the regeneration makes sense given that he could age and change his clothes and cut his hair and fall prey to knock-out blasts – though that last one seemed a little odd, in retrospect. She hit him in the eye, maybe? And the eye drive and physically touching River works because … yeah, I’d like a lot more from his perspective, actually.

Some are saying he should have told the others he was a Tessalecta. I actually liked how this is constructed – at the lake, we have a Ganger-Amy remotely feeding all data and one last Silent wandering about. At thepyramid we had Kovarian and the Silent wandering about, who might well remember what happened there. So – one of the few instances where that worked.

And yeah, the garden was lovely, for the afforementioned relationship reasons. I liked her adapting to her daughter beautifully, and going over the fact that she can remember killing someone and dismissing River’s dismissal. Quite frankly, where this journey has taken the character of Amy has been, frankly, astounding, and a joy to watch, and she is right at the top of my favourite scifi protagonists of all time, to be honest. And the crypt really gelled with the lessons learned, again, from the last season and mid season finales: The Doctor is too big a figure. He has to go back to the shadows.

And yes, I called ‘Doctor Who?’ Quite good – providing that there is a legitimate place to with it, leading into something worth killing him over, something to do with the fields Trensollar (?) and the fall of the Eleventh (probably a bus, right?). But I’m pretty sure they’ve somewhere to go with it. And if Smith stops at three seasons, and they were all this one arc – I’d be fine with it. And that is 1675.

My book reading will, for the time being, be going up on F-book too, while I try this Game of Thrones thing out, as an astoundingly large amount of people I know really seem to like it. I even skipped the last 3 books of the Earthsea Quartet (read: only read the first -really, really good – to catch upon this) when I actually realised how many bannermen of House Stark were in my demesne.

Am I jumping on the bandwagon? In many usages of the term, God yes. I’m giving something a chance because of the buzz around it now, with its tv show, that I was vaguely aware of for years but never really looked into. I am fine with that. I’ve done it before. Even with the stuff that came out in my lifetime, Harry Potter for example, I didn’t start until Book 4 came out. True, I did buy all four solely off the back of the description of Albus Dumbledore in Book 1′s beginning, but I thought Harry Potter was the red head on the cover of book 2 (I don’t use ginger, that and the Cavan-people-are-cheap thing were memes I only encountered in college).

But I know the rules of conduct on the bandwagon. Mostly: just catching up patiently on the material and being nice to people further behind than yourself. It is cool to catch something from the beginning and be a part of that, release to release, but, honestly, realising how much of a following something you’re going into has already is pretty cool too. The first book would be worth the investment in just-knowing-what-people-are-talking-about alone. Ironically, I’ll be avoiding this network like the plague, for now – too many spoilers.

I was burned out on High Fantasy for a while there. Naming no names, but I was really tired of books 600 pages long and not being really sure how much of it was merited. Maybe that really is a taste thing, but it wasn’t for me. Reconciling this with my love of Lord of the Rings, even Silmarillion, is tricky, given all the long, detailed walking they did. The best I can say is that while Tolkien tapped into the epic fantasy by presenting us with legendary characters, who didn’t have sex, get colds or use the bathroom, aand that presenting those realities in a fantasy format is an admiral achievement, there was stuff that wore on me.

I didn’t like that at some point, some of the female cast would be in an in-story bdsm scene. I didn’t like that, while the strength and prominence of those characters was wonderful, there was some baseline ‘bitchiness’ that meant they could not trust the male characters, or other female characters, on some basic level, ever. There was always some undertone of the conniving and the deceptive, while the male characters were open about their feelings and motivations – and I felt that books bore that out, that their short-term, off the cuff rescues worked better than the female’s long-term trickery.

And yes, that is a taste thing. I’m sure I totally misread those situations, or that they weren’t as all-pervasive as I felt they were in those series.

In other series, I really hated the contrivances. I hated the all-powerful place of destiny and people being trapped on Scalextric-track of fate. Some prophecies, some predictions, they came with the territory. But some works seemed to have nothing else. I hated that there was only one person who could do anything. Only one person that could do a particular thing – okay, I can see that. But some, it felt, had a large revolving one person who did and knew everything and was fated to do so. Even that wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but the fact that this person had to be entirely unsuited and unknowing of the world they were entering enraged me. It felt like it totally dominated the books I came across for years, that skill was some sort sin.

And you know what – I’m almost certainly wrong about that. There is probably a plethora of High Fantasy books that shuck of Fate entirely, and are populated with a balance of talented, capable characters, and that the books that I’m thinking of were seperated by decades.

I hated the contrivances, with the super-intelligent god-children (mirroring my hatred of super-intelligent robot-children in space opera), with the villains who it seemed were all sociopathic hypocritical fiends and the masses being some poorly herded sheep who turned at the drop of a hat, unless they worked for the villain. I was tired that the only political system that they seemed to know was medieval feudalism, with the odd bit of Roman legislation once in a while. And I hated, hated, hated, that the books had no certain, individual resolutions, just pouring from one to the other.

And I flat out know that that it isn’t all true of all or ever a large section of High Fantasy. I know that was totally wrong. But it was all I knew for a while.

I was in Victoriana for the duration, if you must know. The latest of Rankin and Pratchett, Susanna Clarke, Gail Carringer, etc. It was fantasy, but fate was at a dull roar, the magic systems were a blend of the creative and the regimented, the books plots worked alone and as part of a series and, worst comes to worst, it was about 200 pages, maybe less.

So I’m back. Not to be sourgrapes-laden, but with any luck I’ll have plenty of time before Book 6 comes out to read the first … six. One per year, at least then. I’ll probably regret that statement in a few month’s time. I’ve got a booktoken earmarked for the new Pratchett, and the new Stephen Fry biography, and I’ve got the new Rankin, and some there’ll be some left over after that – I’ll be sure to get both of books three at the same time. And that is 1100 words. Eleven!

Possibly The Most Important Thing in Let’s Kill Hitler
I’m just going to put this out there because I’m struggling with it. And it will probably be my focus for awhile, kind of like how something being wrong with Amy stuck with me the whole of part one.

So that is what it’s like in my head right now. You’re welcome.

Found it here:

http://keithjacks.tumblr.com/post/9527202300/possibly-the-most-important-thing-in-lets-kill-hitler

And yeah – I noticed and suspected the ‘Fish Fingers and Custard’ maybe-another-Amy-there a la the coated-Doctor from Time of Angels. But the idea that tuxedo-Doctor may have spent part of his 32 minutes? On the night of River’s conception? Did he tell her to tell him that he almost knows who she is. Oh – is this going to fold into the wedding of River Song episode, particularly that bit when he asks whether she has ever been married or not and she keeps enigmatically saying Yes? Questions! Questions!!!

And when does he get the stetson?

On the prequel: The overweight member of the blue man group sells some more macabrely collected items to some really tall Jawas. But as we only see a pair of human hands on these ‘Jawas’, it could be anybody, including an incognito Doctor and Rory.