(no subject)

[doyle]

I'm ploughing my way through Divided Loyalties, AKA the Doctor Who uni!fic the BBC published, and it's hurting my brain, mostly because it's so po-faced (the single paragraph in Goth Opera about the Doctor's Academy days is several million times more worthwhile). Though it has taught me the following things:


- every single Time Lord we've ever seen in the series was at school with the Doctor. Well... okay, that's reasonable, since it's mostly renegades we see in the series and the devious, ambitious bastards who are likely to become renegades would have been in good old Prydon with the Doctor. What stretches credulity a bit is that they were all bestest friends, with their secret Deca club, and all the teachers loved them. (Never mind that TV canon has the Doctor being a bit of a crap student, to put it generously.)

- the Doctor, while he was at the Academy, was called... the Doctor. (I grudgingly concede that I think I remember this being mentioned in The Deadly Assassin.) None of his bestest friends in the Deca have told him that this makes him sound like a pretentious wanker, apparently. It smacks of the author not liking the nickname Theta. It made me want young Theta Sigma to team up with Ace and her baseball bat, since she keeps getting lumbered with 'McShane' and 'Dorothee'.

- the beautiful story Three tells in The Time Monster about the worst day of his life; when I saw that episode I assumed he was referring to the death of his mother, or something equally major and life-shattering. Here, we find that he really meant that time he got shouted at by his teacher in front of the whole class. Which possibly is OMG THE END OF THE WORLD when you're an emo teenager, but by the time you've hit the half-millennium and died twice you'd think you would've gained some perspective and thought to yourself "you know, I've had worse days. Most of the ones involving Daleks, for a start."

The Lungbarrow references are tedious, but I could have put up with them if the whole thing wasn't so plodding and dull and there was more Koschei and Ushas (the Master and the Rani). Because I'm shallow that way, and because I was getting confused having to check the back of the book to see who the hell the dozen or so Time Lord characters grow up to be, and discovering that, nah, I don't care that much about the Mad Monk and the rest. More Koschei. More Ushas. Actually, scrap the whole thing and just have more of Ruath from Goth Opera teaching Theta Sigma to hotwire TARDISes. I'd buy that book.

Comments

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

My argument for that is "the Other's children and grandchildren (and indeed Miranda from the EDAs) died before the Time War, so they can't be who the Doctor's referring to there". But yes, any reference to the Gallifreyan maternity service, his human mother, watching a meteor shower with his father - all the Other's memories, conveniently emerging only when he feels like chatting about his family and/or childhood. (I may have blocked it out, does Lungbarrow say they're loomed as babies, children or adults?)

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

But omg I reckon, thinking about it now, that they were dead before that anyway. Fenric and Tomb and all that and him not seeming to know if they're alive. And how there's never anyone to say hello to on Gallifrey. OMG THEY DED.

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

Hmm, he does seem to imply they're dead in Tomb. Maybe his son or daughter died and that's why Susan's with him and why the CIA never came after him for kidnapping?

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

And then Fenric he's like "they might be dead! because of the war!"

[doyle_sb4.livejournal.com]

The war what I definitely didn't start when I blew up Skaro!

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

Or when I failed to kill them that time, Sarah!