Just the start of it all

End of Time spec

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:02:00 GMT

Does anyone else think we're going to get a trial of the Doctor by the Timeys? It's one of the major old school tropes the new series hasn't been able to play with yet, for obvious reasons, and it would give us a coherent-ish explanation for old companion cameos if we got snippets of unseen adventures (other possibilities are that it's going to be an Androzani like sequence for the regeneration itself, or that my straw-clutching is right and it is TARDIS travel that protects you from being Master-ised and so we see them vs the Simm Army, though that wouldn't explain Rose as she's off in Pete's World, I suppose).

End of Time, pt 1

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 11:34:25 GMT

Near-pointless jumbled thoughts post on the latest Who ep:

Y'know, I was expecting to see a lot more kink meme prompts this morning than I did. I'm sure fandom will be on it soon enough, but between all the Doctor/Master stuff and the Naismiths' incest and the potential selfcest, it did feel like RTD was deliberately chucking in as much as he could.
Anyway, Donna's totally doomed. I think Rusty's in epic tragedy mode for part two, and I can't see Donna getting a good ending when Ten's "dying".
I kinda liked the Master in this, better than S3 Simm!Master tbh. His need for food was possibly a bit OTT for watching after a big Christmas dinner, but it was quite a funky idea, I thought, and possibly that's RTD being all zomgsatirical at us again. And I did sort of like the bit at the end where the Master made himself into the entire human race. They must have had John Simm in for weeks more than the rest of the cast, mustn't they? (I'm finding it hard to see how we're not headed anywhere other than a big reset switch ...)
I have chosen to believe that it's not some sort of residual DoctorDonnaishness (in Donna's case)/"heart of coincidence" thing (Wilf) that's kept them from being Master-ised, but actually everyone who's been in the TARDIS is safe and Martha, Sarah Jane, etc. are all out there in their own surrounded-by-Masters nightmare. (Batshipping fanon: Tom turned into the Master in front of Martha. OMG teh trauma.) But possibly this is what's actually happening, if we are getting all these guest spots. OTOH, the Timeys might put the Doctor on trial when he comes back and show flashbacks to adventures we didn't see.
Right, so, the drums are the Time Lords, in the Master's head. But active, not like the zipfile of the Matrix in the Doctor's head that made him lose his memories in the EDAs. (I would LOL and LOL if they went for such a direct ripoff.) And directing events (I quite like the idea that "the Narrator" has the power to make stories come true as he tells them; it would redeem the cheesy voiceover for me. I'm struggling very hard to think of a single voiceover ever that isn't lazy storytelling, with the possible exception of the Narrator in Rocky Horror. Actually, you know what? If Dalton does the time warp on New Year's Day, I will forgive Rusty everything.)
Failing that, if we really are supposed to think the drums have been around forever, they get stronger every time he brings himself back from the dead implausibly. So Delgado!Master barely noticed them at all and was basically sane-but-evil, but Crispy and particularly Ainley were getting progressively more affected. And then of course Roberts is the result of the goosnake gambit which is particularly OTT as a way to bring yourself back, and it's all downhill from there. (It is all a horrible literalisation of mental illness, though, isn't it? Ick.) This would fit in with the idea of burning up lifeforce or whatever.
I have this horrible fear that the Time Lords are going to take over the Earth via the Master (if they are in his head, and now he is everyone, maybe they can bust out) in a whole sort of vaguely Dead-Romance-y way. And then this whole rumour about S5 being in a parallel universe is actually that the Time Lords have taken this Earth off to be New Gallifrey (OOH, that would make sense of the Master's gubbins in LotTL, 'cos I never quite saw that as in character, that desire to do that; but if he was acting on subconscious signals from Timeys in his head it might make sense) and Moffat!Earth is a new cryptoformed version. But I am fairly convinced that that's me allowing the "RTD v Moff" thing that fandom does seriously when we know that they fanboy each other excessively. I do think that Moff asked for the Time Lords to come back, but evil, and RTD is setting that up for him.
Tiny minor thing: the contrived nature of hiding the crap Obama-a-like was awful, better just to do without that strand of things entirely. And magic wand to fix the recession (that's pretty much already over, in official statistics terms, everywhere but the UK)? Meh.
I am sure I have other thoughts but they haven't percolated yet.

Yaaaaaay

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 11:27:41 GMT

I got Culture fic for Yuletide. I got AWESOME Culture fic for Yuletide.

I definitely put that prompt in the mix very much as a long shot ('cos I know I deliberately didn't offer Banks out of the particularly intimidating nature of matching the source material in that case), but my author came through in spades: The Deceivers is an absolutely awesome Diziet Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw fic, written from the drone's (hilarious) POV and it ties into Use of Weapons in all sorts of clever ways while being it's own thing and it is just amazin'. \o/

New layout

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:08:21 GMT

Hrm. Still not 100% happy -- in particular I'd like the post titles to stand out a bit more -- but it was time for a change (though I'm v sad to be losing the lovely Ten/Martha pic biichan made for me). And I'm useless at thinking of words for the headery bits but also unwilling to just put in boring-but-descriptive things, hence the silly and not quite apropos quotes from Classy, but nvm.

(I have made this lovely shinyjenni icon that I have been overusing for a while now into my new default. I do like that.)

Questions meme

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:27:31 GMT

Meme from drho:

Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile" I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity. Update your journal with the answers to the questions. Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

1. If you had the power to bring back a Classic Who character or two, whom would you choose?

I probably wouldn't, to be honest. There are only two reasons to do so: to shed light on what's going on in new school (viz. SJS in School Reunion being the "this is your possible future, Rose" mirror) or to satisfy some fanwanky desire to tie up a loose end somewhere or just see them again. The former is worthwhile but not being in Moffat's head I wouldn't know who or what would be appropriate, and in the latter case it's hard to think of ones whose stories aren't more or less done within old school (witness the way SJS in School Reunion is nothing to do with anything that had been done with her before or has been done with her since, and her characterisation is completely twisted to enable her to mirror Rose). Even if there were people I could think of a strong case for bringing back from the classic-fan POV, new school is not the appropriate venue for fix it fics of Zoe and Jamie's mindwipe in The War Games or whatever. The people who it's most sensible to bring back are more Time Lords other than the Master, and I'm still really Do Not Want about that.

2. What are your favorite comics and/or comic book characters?

It turns out I really like space-y stuff. So Green Lantern in DC and all the spun-out-from-Annihilation Nova/Guardians of the Galaxy/etc. stuff from Marvel. Those are the ones that really give me a happy just to be picking them up from the shop. I also have a huge soft spot for the X-Men on account of exposure to the Fox cartoon in the '90s, and I ship Scott/Emma quite a lot. Oh, and Blue Beetle and Booster Gold in DC. I shouldn't have forgotten about them. They are awesome on toast. Their Blackest Night tie in sads me quite a bit.

Oh, and Phonogram. I'm mainly chucking this in there so I don't look like the slavish follower of the big two that I in fact am, but hey. Singles Club has been utterly amazing, though I am desperately waiting for the last one so I can read them all simultaneously and understand how they link together. Plus it made me finally listen to The Pipettes and I Get It Now.

3. Mark Darcy or Daniel Cleaver: who should Bridget Jones end up with?

Neither. I like Bridget as a portrait of singledom, so I kinda don't want her to get her happy ending. 'Cos I am MEAN.

4. I know you watched Buffy. What are your thoughts on Spike?

I really like him when he's being snarky and entertaining; he genuinely has many of the best lines in a show filled with good dialogue. His getting rid of the Annoying One at the end of School Hard was a real breath of fresh air and to my mind marks one of the last pieces of the puzzle of what makes Buffy work clicking into place with the bad guys getting to be as fun to watch as the good guys. (In my recent rewatch I've come to notice the Master's dry sense of humour a lot more, but there's a lot of tedious portentous stuff in there.) I basically enjoy him on screen almost all the time, but I really can't stand all the tedious backstory stuff about how his pre-vampire self was such a woobie and especially the implication that our opinion of vampire!Spike should be changed by that knowledge. I could happily jettison all of his flashbacks set in the 19th century without a second thought, but most especially that awful bit about siring his mother. Luckily none of it has too much of a negative impact on his characterisation, except for some chunks of S7. (Oh, god. I am taking a break on said rewatch at the moment between S6 and S7, and that stuff at the end of S6 is so annoying. The dialogue between Spike and the give-him-his-soul-back-demon is written in such an info-hidey way, it drives me up the wall.) I even mostly like him in Angel S5.

5. What question(s) did you hope someone would ask, during the last question meme? (Whether you answer that question is up to you.)

I honestly can't remember now. Wanky stuff about the details of whatever the latest Torchwood arguments were, I suspect. I did that meme because I was fed up of allowing myself to feel that modding the meme somehow bars me from expressing my opinions. I'm perfectly capable of making modding decisions based on things other than my personal biases, and I've now come to realise(/delude myself, maybe, I dunno) that the people who whine about biased mods are just incapable of imagining doing that sort of compartmentalisation when it comes to their own feelings. So I've stopped caring.

This whole "400-page pdf of batshit" thing is utterly hilarious, though.

(I'm not promising to be particularly timely with questions for you if you do go all Borg-like on me, mind. On the other hand, I am mainly doing this out of procrastination, so.)

Delta and the Bannermen

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 06:31:22 GMT

Y'know, if this had been just the tiniest bit less S24-shoestring-budget ropy, it'd be hailed as a Seven-era classic. It's very clearly one of the first products of Cartmel's commissioning, and the script has got plenty of ideas even if they don't quite gel -- I never picked up on it as a kid, but watching it now, it's almost too obvious the way it's all about metamorphosis and change (I mean, come on, Delta) linked through the ideas around insect life cycles. It's just a little bit undercooked, really -- in particular, the Billy/Delta plot doesn't get enough screen time and so we don't get enough motivation for everything that ends up happening (and it kind of leaves you wondering whether she's using Alien Insect Queen Sex Pollen Equivalent on him, which I don't think is the intended effect).

There are actually a lot of things in it that are somewhat reminiscent of Cartmel's last PDA, Atom Bomb Blues, which makes me think he possibly had quite a big influence on the script -- either that, or the script influenced him. Also, Seven's very cute in it -- the bit in the TARDIS in episode one where he rescues the bus is lovely, as is him dealing with Ray and her emotional problems despite being clearly out of his depth (fandom's always "I wish we'd had Ray instead of Ace" but you know what I want? I want AU fic of "Ray joined and then Ace joined in Dragonfire too ~~and then femslash~~" -- the thing about Ace is that she's got the same sort of issues as the Doctor himself to a large extent, so while he's still Crap At Human Emotions he understands her on some level, whereas Ray's unrequited-love problems are the sort of thing that at this stage in his life he's usually fairly oblivious to; I can see her having had an even bigger string of boy/girlfriends of the week than Ace, or being a proto-Martha, it could go either way).

Its biggest problems are the acting (though Ken Dodd isn't nearly as bad as fandom paints him, different sections of the guest cast seem to be coming at it from completely different points of view -- is this a lulsy period comedy with Hi-de-Hi overtones or a dark story about interplanetary genocide?, and the thing is it is kind of both) and that the cliffhangers are utterly, utterly contrived -- even more so than the meta-cliffhanger coming up in the next serial. Incidentally, though, Mel doesn't scream at the baby; she screams at the weird metal thing belonging to the alien woman who's been brandishing guns at her until about two seconds ago suddenly starting to open. As soon as the (cute but surely too big to fit in that egg) baby appears she stops screaming. Is this a fandom myth or a sly bit of post hoc editing on the DVD?

I watched Twin Dilemma at the weekend too, incidentally (my last ever Colin-I'd-never-seen-before) but I'm still wrapping my head around what I think of that. (Well, except that I want to know where all the Four/Azmael that-time-by-the-fountain slash is, fandom. Does everyone hate this story so much that they don't get inspired by the incredibly obvious stuff?)

I has a Strictly prediction

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:08:36 GMT

I don't think I've posted about this series yet; frankly, it hasn't been quite up to the standard of previous (in terms of who the slebs are or their dancing, tbh) and my Brucie-embarrassment-squick grows weekly (the "Bette Midler, I am your strippergram" bit was moderately lulsy, but then he took it way too seriously at the end to satisfy his ego and ugh), but I have been watching and enjoying it (though I missed a few of the middle weeks where they got rid of some of the not obviously awful but not going to make it all the way types). Also, no Camilla is a Bad Thing. I was prepared to hate Ricky (Whittle, the Ricky who's still in it) for the appalling crime of being on Hollyoaks but then he was both good at the dancing and funny in the behind the scenes bits, and he won me over to the point that he is now my favourite. But it's not a strong sort of favouriteness like I've had in some series in the past.

Anyway the reason I'm posting now is that ~~I love all the daft intricacies of the horrendously broken voting mechanisms and~~ tonight's Ricky-v-Laila dance-off can only have come about as a result of a very limited range of scenarios for what the public vote was, given that he came top with the judges. Assuming that the public breaks ties for who gets saved (which I seem to remember is the rule) then there are only four out of twenty-four possible arrangements of the order of the public vote that give us that:

Two scenarios in which Chris comes top and Ricky comes bottom (with Ali and Laila in either order in the middle)
A scenario in which Ali wins the public vote, followed by Chris, followed by Laila, with Ricky again dead on the bottom
A weird scenario where the public vote goes Chris-Ali-Ricky-Laila, so that Laila has a total of 2 and the others are all equal on 6, but the public-has-the-casting-vote thing saves Chris and Ali, putting Ricky in the dance off.

It all hinges on next week. If Chris gets in the dance off, he probably goes, but the thing is that I don't think he will be in the dance-off. (They made a big deal during the show of the fact that he hasn't been there yet all series, which is very good going for him.) Assuming that the general pattern of the judges' vote going Ricky-Ali-Chris (I think this is a fairly justifiable assumption: Ali has beaten Ricky a few times, but not nearly as often as he's beaten her; the balance of their current form is very much in Ricky's direction; and in the event of a tie I think Len'll give it to Ricky -- tbh, he seems to like him better) continues, then that's the exact inverse of the most likely public vote (only one of the four scenarios that can explain tonight has the public vote-Laila going in an order other than Chris-Ali-Ricky) and we get everyone on a total of 4, with Chris safe because of the "public trumps judges" rule. And a Chris-Ricky final almost certainly goes to Chris, as in all of those scenarios he's beating Ricky hands down in the public vote, which is the only thing that matters there.

This all assumes that nothing changes in the public voting pattern, of course, or that Ali or even Chris don't pull out a fantastic dance that completely wows the judges and beats Ricky there too. It may be that the public votes are really really close -- all we can guess about is the order, not the size of them -- and so Laila's vote is big enough that any redistribution of it drowns out the patterns we can figure out from this week, or alternatively that someone's disliked enough to get an Anyone But X effect giving support to their opponent if they get into the final, or any number of other things. But if I was the gambling sort, I would put money on Chris to win.

I am sort of surprised that Ricky's doing so badly with the public; I was sort of assuming that everyone else liked him the same as I did. It may be that he's liked but people think he's safe and don't vote, I suppose. (Seems unlikely after him being in the dance off last week.) Or it could be that the recent press coverage has turned people off. I dunno really.

Fic rec: Solace

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:40:54 GMT

So, this is that thing where I rec a fic that I beta-ed, and have no shame whatsoever about it. (Well, OK, I have a tiny amount of shame; if I didn't, I'd be reccing it on three_settings while it's still free-swim. Someone else should totally get on that.)

Solace (I'm linking to the top of the post to give you a chance to check the lengthy warnings before you continue, but none of it's stuff that I consider sufficiently extreme to warn for here in the rec) is an awesome Handy/Rose fic of awesomeness. On one level, it's an astonishingly hot kinky porn fic of astonishing hot kinkiness, but it's much much more than that: it's a brilliant exploration of Handy, building on the ways in which he is like and unlike both the Doctor and Donna, while trying in an almost tragic way to be the Doctor, because that's what everyone, Handy included, expects of him.

It's written from an utterly believable Handy POV, and the sex elements (which are many, varied, and HOT AS HELL) are used to build a fantastic portrayal of the ways in which Handy's relationship with Rose over in Pete's World is based on being like the Doctor, but gradually evolving into its own thing, just as Handy becomes a separate individual. The whole thing has a wonderful sense of reality to it in the sense of being true to how people and relationships work in real life -- the ways the characters interact, even the fantastical elements related to Handy's Doctor-and-Donna origin (remember how I said it was hot as hell? the Donna/Lee flashback bits in particular are amazing), and especially the way things are not left too-neatly resolved at the end, are all utterly convincing. It's a brilliant piece of writing, and one of those rare fics that completely convinces me that it's written by someone whose handle on what's going on with the characters is not just as good as that of the canon creators, but better.

Honest opinions meme

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:08:57 GMT

I'm disappointed; none of you asked anything really wanky, though I'd have been happy to tell the truth. I did consider cheating and adding the questions that would prompt the rants I really want to write, but that wouldn't really be in the spirit of it. (Free opinion, though: if Torchwood hadn't had a Who connection, I'd have given up on it in disgust after the first Day One.)

What possessed you to mod who_anon?

The desire to lose friends and alienate people, obviously.

Oh, OK, serious answer:

I think there are many valuable things about the meme and I'd like to help to keep the things I value about it going. It would be foolish to pretend that everything that goes on there is fantastically savoury but it would be a lie to say that one of the things I value about it isn't the way it acts as wank_report for Who fandom. I've always liked fandom_wank, since back when I genuinely was a lurker in LJ fandom. It's not the only thing I value about the meme, by any stretch of the iamgination: I genuinely think that for all the wank, it's got the best signal-to-noise ratio of any Who comm or forum out there , and it's the only place in fandom where what you say isn't instantly prejudged by your position in any one (and it cuts both ways; I also don't instantly prejudge so I get to hear opinions I usually wouldn't). I've always made it a point never to say anything on the meme that I wouldn't say under this username since long before I was modding there. But there are many things that I rather would say there, because they're too inconsequential to be worth working up into a proper post, or because I want to share them with a different cross-section of fandom than that represented by my flist, or whatever.

tl;dr version: the big comms are too full of stupid, the small comms are too narrowly focused and balkanised. who_anon fills the gap wonderfully.

Anyway, point is: I value it, and as such I would much rather the things I valued about it continued. If I can help with that in a more active way than just trying to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, then I will. I realised quite a while back that it's much better to try and actually do something to change things rather than sit about whining about the state of fandom, and pretty much everything I've done that can't be ascribed to the short-term personal pleasure of doing it can be put at the feet of my desire to make fandom be more like the sort of place I would ideally like it to be. By the terrible oppressive measure of DOING STUFF.

How do you stay calm there?

This question presupposes that I do stay calm. The great thing about the Internet is the capacity for reflection and self-editing it allows. I don't do real time chat and stuff like that for the very simple reason that I am just much better at ... well, everything, but social interaction in particular, when I've had a chance to order my thoughts even slightly, though there is a very direct correlation between sleep deprivation and how well my self-editing works.

Incidentally, though: if you think that the anon meme mods are a bunch of [insert offensive term of your choice here]s for whatever reason, then you are talking about me, and if you're on my flist I'd rather you took yourself off it. Thanks.

What is your favorite episode written by Russell T Davies?

End of the World. I sometimes persuade myself that I afford it this unwarranted mythic significance in my mind because it was the episode that really made me feel that My Show was BACK on the proper Saturday night telly and everything, but every time I watch it I realise that it is just that good. It's full of awesome on so many levels, particularly all the fantastic stuff with Jabe. "Stop wasting time, Time Lord." OMG. But stuff like burning the Earth to the strains of Britney Spears and such. Awesome fun. Smith and Jones close runner-up, because it's perfect at doing what it does, i.e. selling Martha.

What unfilled prompt on the kink meme is your favorite?

I am going to give three answers to this:

Favourite prompt that I want to write someday: Zoe/Isobel, nude photography/making porn
Favourite prompt that I wish someone else would write someday: Ten/Sapphire
Favourite prompt that I left, and won't write because I have this weird thing about writing my own prompts, except for the time I got it into my head that I really wanted the first eight pages of the first post to be completely filled and realised no one else was going to write Lolita/Compassion ever: Rose/Mickey, sex tape

What sort of things do you hope for from the next season of Who? Not your expectations of Moffat, but the sorts of things you'd like to see them tackle? And what elements of the past would you like never to see again?

What I want: I would still love to see the Earth Reptiles Done Right (current spoilery rumours do not strike me as Done Right from what I've heard, but that's mainly because it's Fucking Chibnall, though apparently it's entirely possible they're not Earth Reptiles at all). I would love an arc that actually worked in both plot and character terms -- these are both things that RTD fails at epically in my view; on the plot level he thinks key words chucked in randomly are the same as an overarching through line, and on the character level he sets the end points ahead of time and then tries to force the characters into them even when he's evolved them away from the place where that end point made sense for them (he's very good at organic evolution of his characters, but this is yet another example of his chronic failure to play to his own considerable strengths -- see also his small-scale stories working much better but constantly going for widescreen nonsense). Not quite an answer to the question, I also have this feeling in my bones that Amy's gonna die, because Moff'll want to prove that it's Srs Bsns and no one's safe and he loves Fivey's era so he remembers Adric even if he'd never ever admit to any reaction to Earthshock other than "Yay!"

What I'd be happy to leave behind: that is a hard one, because one of the things I like about Who is the sense that it's this big universe that all fits together, even if the honest truth is that it doesn't really. I like it better when it's done in such a way that the recurring things hint at it being even bigger than you thought it was, rather than closing everything down into this fanwanky rubbish where everyone was at the Academy together summoning dark forces from beyond the cosmos, but in principle I don't think there's any part of the past that should be off limits. Can I cheat and say yellow plot-resolving sparklies? Even if they change colour (like they did in SJA when Mickey used artron energy to kill the Trickster), that is fine with me. I am just sick of the yellow. If I'm not allowed to cheat, then I would be happy for the Daleks to take a long Terry-Nation-is-trying-to-sell-them-in-America style break. But that's still cheating, I suppose, because the idea of them going away forever is daft.

Oh, wait! Actually, I do know the answer to that one, but it didn't occur to me until just now because it's the very opposite of what's actually happening: Gallifrey and the Time Lords. They can stay as dead as dead can be and I won't mind in the slightest. Even if the show hadn't come back, I was that one person who was happy for the EDAs to carry on indefinitely as they were. So there you go.

Is there any particular form of fannish engagement that you just. Don't. Get?

Oh, good, an easy one. Cosplay. Nothing at all against the people who do it (at least, the ones who aren't utter lookist fuckwits, which from the sort of thing I hear is a much smaller proportion than it should be) but it's just completely at right angles to the way fandom operates for me. Mainly because I don't do in-person fandom, full stop. (Again, the need to edit myself into a decent human being, basically. I can fake it for non-fannish RL purposes 90% of the time but somehow I don't think it would work in fandom.)

Your opinion of the TARDIS team of Eight and Destrii.

They're great fun. "This isn't work, blue eyes, it's pure pleasure", and all that. It's a shame we got to see so little of them, really, though at least they got to walk off into the sunset. Most of the time I'm happy to be in this branch of reality rather than the parallel universe where the show never came back and the non-BF Eight spinoffs went on much longer, but sometimes I would like Moar Destrii and Moar Fitz and such.

What do you find most surprising about fandom (good and bad)?

Good: Cheesy as all get out, but the amazing creativity. I just love that people come up with all this stuff all the time. Also, I really like it when I get nice comments on ancient fic. That counts as a surprise, right? Sad to say it makes my week.
Bad: Somewhere in the back of my mind a long time ago I bought into the idea that fandom tended to have intelligent people in it, and I still have this heart-sinking feeling every time someone is being just completely impervious-to-evidence-or-logic-or-even-the-faintest-possibility-that-they-might-be-wrong stupid. Which goes back to what I was saying about the big comms up the way somewhere.

Let's do this meme again.

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:02:58 GMT

For various reasons, not least procrastination:

Ask me anything fandom-related and I'll answer honestly in a separate post. Comments are screened so no one needs to know it was you who asked.

The Waters of Mars

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:23:09 GMT

I have found it very hard to work out what I think of this one, and last night I felt very much as though I was being buffetted by whatever opinion I'd most recently read. But having spent a day thinking about it when I should have been working, I am currently of the belief that I liked most of the bits of it individually, but I didn't like the way the bits added together at all.

I liked the fact that we got more exploration of the limits of the Doctor's ability to change things (I was a big fan of ~~James Moran Writes Fix It Fic For The Cambridge Latin Course~~ Fires of Pompeii, and in particular the moment where Donna puts her hand on the lever with him, so the explicit references back to that were nice). I liked the exploration of the Doctor's hubris, with a couple of key exceptions. I sort of liked the lead-in to the regeneration story. But they were crammed together in a way that weakened all of them, in my opinion.

Basically, the fact that the Doctor ultimately decides to go back and save them kills stone dead the pathos of the "I'm walking away, I'm walking away" bits, which drag on for a long time while we watch a bog standard base-under-siege sci-fi-horror flick of the type I don't tend to find terribly interesting. (I mean, seriously, the main plot point in that section apart from "watch the Doctor be emo" is "WE MUST LOAD THE PROTEIN PACKS". And it lasts a good quarter of an hour or so [if it is in fact much shorter than that -- I wasn't timing or anything and I'm waiting for a repeat to tape it -- then I am going to blame the fact that it felt like forever].) Worse still, his ultimate decision to go back means that he dooms a couple of people completely unnecessarily. I find it very hard to sympathise with his deep inner struggle dooming them if it turns out he was going to lose said struggle.

I also didn't like certain elements of the losing of the struggle. Partly, it was the ranty "The Laws of Time are mine, and they will obey me!" bit which was OTT on both the writing and acting fronts (it would have been better IMO for him to say something more along the lines of "I am the Law (of Time)", but that's because I still reread the Book of the War all the time and there's a good bit in there about the oldest ~~Time Lords~~ members of the Great Houses being indistinguishable from the structure of history itself, which would pass to Ten in the Gallifreyless universe and anyway); I find it really hard to think that that delivery of that line isn't enough in and of itself to trip Ten's "gone too far" sense, however far he has gone, since it's so similar to the ranting megalomania of so many of his opponents.

But more importantly was the fact that just like the Evil Gummint in TW:CoE, hubristic Diet Coke of Evil Ten turns out to be AN IDIOT. Even more of an idiot than the Evil Gummint, in fact. Fires of Pompeii gave him direct proof that the whole "saving the people who should have died" thing can work, if you get them to start new lives so they don't interfere with the historical record. It would have been trivially easy for him to take them to a far future human colony, or even the 51st century, where they're used to time travellers (and we could have had a canon basis for River/Adelaide, ahem) but instead he wants to take them to their own homes on the very same day. It's one thing to go a bit evil, it's another thing to jettison your planet-sized brain in the process. Very annoying. (The bigger problem is that he could have done this fairly obvious solution completely non-evilly, of course.)

I did find myself hating Ten for about five or ten minutes there, which is something I've never experienced before; I've been angry with him before now, certainly, or considered some things to be OOC writing (I switch between Watsonian and Doylist depending on how well the story is engaging me, really). But I just loathed him, when he was getting his "Time Lord victorious" on.

And then Adelaide joins a surprisingly long New Who tradition of the person who makes the horrible choice for the sake of the timeline, who manages to at least glimpse the Time Lord perspective through a glass darkly, for a moment. In a way, it's really good because it gives agency to the human characters who so often get it taken away from them by the paternalistic Doctor. But unlike Pete in FD (interference caused by ultimately well-meaning if insufficiently schooled in time travel SF Rose) or alt!Donna in TL (interference caused by Evol Beetle), the interference she's correcting here by committing suicide is casued by Ten himself. And in contrast to Donna in a rather different way in Fires of Pompeii, instead of putting her hand on the lever with the Doctor, she has to do it by herself in defiance of his not-so-newly-discovered godlike self-belief. And I really couldn't stand him.

But despite really having this to be honest quite disquieting sense that I did not like the Doctor (which I've never really had before; it was a mixture of the arrogance, the fact that he could have saved more people if he'd been less mopey earlier on given that he was going to do this, and just the general way he was being) I was still finding it fairly compelling viewing in some ways, and I thought I could handle the specials being about this writ large, hubris before nemesis and so on. At least I knew that nemesis really was coming this time, I suppose; in the smaller scale versions that have preceded it Rusty's copped out and the fact that he doesn't here is I think what a lot of people like about it, and it worked by itself, but not in the overall context because all by itself, Adelaide's suicide is enough to make him realise he's gone too far and then we're suddenly meant to believe he thinks he's about to die because of it and I got whiplash from the sudden turnaround. The "is this my death?" bit in particular doesn't really make a lot of sense to me -- it's the sort of "if we shove enough random and/or doom-laden stuff in there people will mistake it for a plot arc, here do you remember this guest character from 18 months ago?" stuff that Rusty's been doing for years now, but really, at this stage every penny-ante villain out there ought to be paying mildly psychic people to go up to Ten and say stuff like "the ravens are gathering at the tower" just to throw him off his game. (Fair disclosure: I really dislike prophecy in my sci-fi, particularly prophecies that are always true and particularly particularly prophecies that are technically true but weaselled out of ("the valiant child who will die in battle so very soon", etc. etc. etc.) but it really makes no sense within the script that Ten buys all this stuff all the time. It's lazy writing.)

I would have enjoyed "the story of the Doctor finally having to walk away without saving the day even a little bit", or "the story of Ten's hubris going too far" or even "the big lead in to the regeneration story", but all three piled so quickly on top of each other (and in particular the first going on way too long before switching track) ended up less satisfying than any of them by themselves would have been. What I think I would really have liked, on reflection, is a Martian remake of The Silurians, with the water beings turning out to have a motivation that Ten sympathises with, but he's unable to persuade Adelaide and events proceed as he always knew they would. But that would be a very different kettle of fish.

(Gratuitous wanky opinion: Seven would have let events proceed according to their historical course, but would have stayed with Adelaide until the very last moment.)

And now, a random list of other things I thought:

Ha ha, you can so tell they originally thought it was going to be aired next Saturday rather than Sunday just gone. Why else make it exactly 50 years after that?
It was so Troughton Time! What with all the Ice Warriors references and stuff -- I did like Ten speaking Martian. But it was more Troughtony even than that. What little consensus I've seen has it that this fucks up the 21st century timeline Even Moar, but I spent a good chunk of the day leading up to it reading Parkin in Ahistory and Miles and Wood in About Time's thoughts on said timeline for the sake of Zoe fic (most of which I am going to ignore and go with the popular fic-fanon that Zoe is roughly our contemporary, which is entirely based on that one line in Mind Robber [because it exists and so people have seen it] about comic strips from the year 2000, because otherwise my plot doesn't work at all), and what we got here feels to me very much like one of Rusty's things when he's quietly making more effort than he needs to to fit in with things while not letting it become old school nostalgia to the max. The multinational crew is very Kit-Pedler-Cyberman-story (if those little flag things had been stuck on their uniforms instead of the side of the set ...), and it's entirely plausible that this is 2059 if we go with a late date for Wheel in Space and stick Enemy of the World in the Forty Years of Chaos (the things Salamander was fixing would fit quite neatly into the problems Adelaide describes, but obviously after the fact people would see his dictatorial ambitions as More Of The Badness). There's a bit of a problem with the vague discussion of "colonies" in the Trout stories that sometimes suggest ones in other star systems, but frankly given the shoddy science on display ("stars" within the solar system, FFS) this is entirely handwaveable as outer-solar-system stuff in the second half of the century building on Bowie Base One.
Incidentally, I'm not quite sure why Rusty had Adelaide bang on about the ozone layer. I may be overoptimistic, I dunno, but my understanding is that the hole is starting to repair itself after the CFC ban and will probably be OK again by the time of interest here. I kinda hope my understanding is correct, because it'd be nice to think that international agreement can work on global-level environmental problems, however depressing Copenhagen is looking to be.
I didn't actually much like the treatment of the "what can be changed and what can't" ideas here; it feels like waters that had been cleared up somewhat by Fires of Pompeii are now muddied again. It may be that the inevitable comparison between Adelaide and Pete reminds me of Nine's speech in Father's Day about one person dying changing the whole world (not that I normally count FD in consideration of How Time Travel Works stuff, as it's so off-kilter with everything else ever on the subject -- incidentally, I now feel sorry for Rose in FD for the first time, if it turns out she should just have waited until Ten had got hubristic enough before trying it) and unless we're meant to think Pete is a fixed point, then I'm a bit confused. But more generally than that, the level of detail at which the fixed points operate seems to give humanity permanent script immunity: I don't quite see why the time-sensitive Dalek chose not to kill young!Adelaide since it could tell her death was fixed, when if the Dalek plan in TSE/JE had succeeded all life in the universe would have been wiped out. Did the Dalek fly off back to the Vault and say "actually, guys, we can't do this whole reality bomb thing, y'know, Web of Time and all that" only to get ranted at by Davros for a bit and reassigned to latrine duty?
I didn't like the way the reaction of the two who weren't Adelaide who did get rescued (sorry, I've already forgotten their names) to the TARDIS trip was handled -- it felt very reminiscent to me of Mickey in Rose and reinforcing the general idea that some people are Speshul and companion-material and others aren't. You could handwave it as "the TARDIS rejects that which is not supposed to still be alive" and Adelaide only appears unfazed because she has ovaries of steel or whatever, but it still bothered me a bit.
Ten thinking in webpages was lazy exposition of the highest order and deeply silly, cheapening the whole idea of his weird Time Lord senses to the point of a joke. Like the opening scroll in Deadly Assassin, what it really goes to show is that the format does need the companion.
I didn't like the monster going underexplained -- it seemed to me a clear attempt to copy the thing that worked in Midnight, but there are heavy hints here that the Ice Warriors understood it, and in all fairness they're not desperately bright so the Doctor ought to be able to work out a bit more than we got given.
I was quite keen on the vague nods in the direction of vaguely realistic near-future space exploration stuff, with the lightspeed lag on the comms and the slow journey times (even if that did motivate the stupid protein packs bit). I did find it a bit implausible that they can't find space for bikes in the payload but they did take an entirely separate nuke for self-destruct purposes when the correct application of that dinky little ship would have done fine for Action Five. Makes you wonder just how paranoid Earth has become about what's out there in space by this point.
Speaking of the lightspeed-lag comms, I was very pleased that the cheesy opening paid off with the granddaughter being significant, because I was very close to writing it off as a cheap and easy way to make us like Adelaide. Which really wasn't necessary.

DYA post

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:42:18 GMT

Apparently assignments are now imminent, so:

Hello!

First of all, I really am super-grateful to you. I very firmly believe that optional details are optional, and DYA letters are even more optional than that, so feel free to just go elsewhere right now if you're that way inclined, but if you find that your recipient babbling incoherently about the fandoms they've chosen helps you come up with story ideas, then read on.

Here are my individual requests, with more notes on things I like about that fandom. I've included the original signup in italics as well, for context for anyone other than my assigned person reading this.

China Miéville - Bas Lag series

I am utterly in love with pretty much everything about this series, so anything at all would be great. One thing I'd like to see if you're so inclined would be something about Isaac and Bellis's relationship that's there in the backstory of the first two novels.

I love the worldbuilding in these, the strange locations that don't feel strange because they're so utterly lived-in, and Miéville's fascinating twists on "standard" fantasy creatures. I particularly love the way that magic is treated as something that is at least somewhat amenable to rational investigation. Oh, and the revolutionary politics.

I would genuinely love anything at all that used the setting in any way. If you wanted to delve into all the hinted-at backstory I'd love that (I mentioned Isaac and Bellis's backstory as one area you could explore, but on the other-than-character level some things I'm particularly keen on are the hints about the Ghosthead Empire [and the anti-Tolkien-ian conversion of the world from spherical to flat with their arrival], the Cactacae, the Weaver, and Armada from the Scar) or you could invent some wholly new part of Bas Lag that we've never seen before. Whatever floats your boat.

Babylon 5

Susan/Talia femslash (or just fic about the two of them) would be gorgeous. So would anything at all to do with Kosh and/or Lyta, either separately or together.

I am so full of squee that this is on the fandoms list. (I don't know whether I'm inventing the fact that it was previously disallowed; I may be, but if I'm not then I'm super-specially-happy.)

I did request specific characters for this, because there are certain B5 characters who do very little for me and I wanted to exclude them, but the restriction to only 4 is rather limiting and you should feel free to pretend I had Londo, Vir, Delenn, G'Kar and Bester in the mix as well. My favourite part of the arc is from about the middle of S2 up to Z'ha'dum; I love the constant doomy sense that things are just steadily getting worse and worse and worse, so if you were looking to set something during the period covered by canon that might be a nice thing to capture, but really anything at all would be fine. I am very keen on Ivanova-involving femslash, but you shouldn't in any way see it as the only thing I want, because it's not.

Iain Banks - Culture series

I love everything about the Culture, so I'd be delighted to read anything at all you wanted to write, but I would be particularly keen to see something about the sort of things the Minds get up to and/or Special Circumstances (I'm very keen on Diziet Sma, but any other character, or an OC, would be equally lovely).

I often pretend not to have a favourite author, but I totally do and it's totally Banks. I love that he steals shamelessly and innovates almost without thinking about it, throwing away ideas in a one-liner that lesser authors would build a trilogy from. I love that the Culture books are equal parts enormous self-indulgence to thought-out extrapolation of a techno-utopian post-scarcity society. I have absolutely no problem with his really blatant political posturing, because I agree with 90% of it. The one thing I'm not spectacularly keen on is the incest, but eh, he does tend to sell it quite well.

My very favourite Culture book is probably the ultra-widescreen exploration of the setting in Excession, but I do really adore all of them. I have an Iain Banks tag which contains my thoughts on Matter and Steep Approach to Garbadale (and depending on when you read this may or may not include my thoughts on Transition if I bother to commit them to LJ), if that's at all helpful.

Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles

The best thing on TV this decade, IMO. Write anything at all in any way connected to it and I am guaranteed to love it.

Shamingly, I initially assumed this was a cheesy cash-in, and only started watching at the beginning of S2 out of my Shirley Manson love, and it did take a little while to draw me in (I still haven't completely caught up, though I'm hopeful of receiving the complete box set soon), but looking back I was a complete fool: I really do adore everything about this series: all of the central characters and their complex relationships, the mindbending time travel stuff, the exploration of the nature of machine intelligence ... It's superb stuff and I would love anything at all that linked to it in any way. (Again, I have a tag, if you want to see the sorts of burblings it inspires from me.)

If you are looking for something more specific to go on and it's the sort of thing you might go for, I've never been able to find (or make work from the writing POV) the dark and disturbing Jesse/Riley fic of my dreams. But really, anything in any way connected to it. I meant that sincerely.

Other than that, my squicks are non-con, incest and RPF, though in the right circumstances I can be convinced by all of those if done well (I'm not at all keen on romance-novel and-then-she-loved-him-really-and-it-was-all-all-right "dub con", though).

If you want them, here are my DYAs from 2007 and 2008; everything said in them still applies, apart from the specific fandom stuff.

Thank you SO MUCH,
Lurky

That SJA with the well-spoilery title and the Doctor in it

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:35:59 GMT

Finally watched it via iPlayer. OMG so good. It bothers me a bit that the kids' spinoff tends to manage to do certain aspects of these things better than either the parent show or the supposedly grown-up spinoff.

I am sure I have read "Ten crashes companion's wedding" about twenty times in fic. It is nice to see that it is pretty much just as cracky in canon.
The second episode was all a bit Sapphire and Steel in places. I sometimes think that's a bigger influence on some of the writers than old school.
It does make me marginally grumpy when they retcon away the BF audios with all that "oh I spent so long being alone", 'cos I love Nat and Josh and such. And the next week trailer seems to suggest they're recapitulating one of the stories quite closely, so, erm. Anyway. It is obviously inevitable, much like the ignoring-Torchwood that goes on that seems to aggravate some people so intensely.
Rani is totally my favourite now, she had so many awesome moments (the way she ordered Clyde inside near the beginning of pt 1, and her squeeful reaction to the realisation that Sarah's got a bloke) though I do love that they all get stuff to do and that the creators are chucking in shippy bits for every possible pairing going. (That Luke/Rani bit where he sees in the bridesmaid dress was lovely.) This is one of those things where I think SJA >>> Who, the way it seems to be being written in a multishippy type way rather than pushing an OTP. (Except that I doubt they're thinking in ship terms, which is why it ends up that way.)
Back when I was slightly younger, Nigel Havers was all over the telly, and this made me realise that I actually kind of miss him.
I love Clyde's interaction with K9, the way he loves getting to have a robot dog. And hiding him under the table and all that sort of thing. Brilliant. AND THEN IN PART TWO HE GETS SUPERCHARGED WITH TARDIS SPARKLIES. ~~Quick rewrite of current fic to change the colour of the artron energy, excuse me for a second.~~
Not much for the awesome Gita and Haresh to do this week, but Gita's line about how grown-up Rani was was lovely. They must have cottonned on by now, mustn't they? Mustn't they? Can we have them being blase about it next week or the week after when Rani tries to come up with some really bad "light that refracted off of Venus into some swamp gas" style explanation? (I did miss the very end of Prisoner of the Judoon, was it dealt with there at all?)
She totally wanted Three to give her away really. Otherwise why mention Metebelis 3 in particular, except that that's the last place that Doctor was around? Which says interesting things about her relationships with different Doctors and such, but I can see how he'd be the one who'd work in a situation like that.
I thought it was a brilliant plotline, brilliantly handled and somehow so much more gut-wrenching than the likes of Father's Day. Maybe because they made SJS talk Peter into sacrificing himself, rather than having him cotton on by himself? Or do I have different standards for the amount of bashing over the head with what to feel I'll tolerate between explicitly-made-for-kiddies TV and kiddie-friendly TV? And what is it with the "You have lived past your time; everything has its time and everything ends; please to be sacrificing yourself now" people both being called Peter, huh? That is a bit odd, but probably unintentional. (Also, his how-I-met-the-Trickster flashback was deliberately filmed to look like an Injury Lawyers 4U ad, to subliminally suggest that ambulance chasers are as evil as the Pantheon of Discord, y/y?)
I did think the script did very well with having the Doctor come in but not having him take over -- Clyde's the one who gets to do the actual facing off against the monster (also: he takes notes! :D), Sarah Jane gets encouraged by Ten to talk Peter into his self-sacrifice (but she would have figured it out on her own), and Rani and Luke both got to be concerned about their parents rather than just worshipping him. All very well done. I could have done without the standing-by-the-console moping pose at the end, but eh.
I adored the bit with the kids in the TARDIS. Everything about it was love. It makes me want all of them as companions, but particularly Rani actually, because I like companions who have a rapport with the TARDIS and she called it beautiful.
Oh, and new crack ship: Clyde/Ace, based on mutual desire to see dinosaurs.

So someone on the meme (I really have no idea whether this is something people are making up entirely, as I don't follow spoilers religiously, I just don't go out of my way to avoid them) mentioned a possibility of a Silurian episode ... written by Chibnall. I think that is pretty much the only thing that could make me not want Silurians. But another anon reckons it's just lizard-people rather than specifically Silurians. I shall cross my fingers.

I need an SJA icon, I think.

Flist stuff

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:26:40 GMT

Just done a bit of a flist-trim. Mostly about time I have to read vs time it takes to read, but the odd bout of paranoia too. Do feel free to PM if you're perturbed in any way. And every day is Defriending Amnesty Day round these parts, in case that needed to be said.

While we're sort of on the topic, I'm conscious that I remain as useless as always at responding to people's posts in any sort of constructive way, because in the absence of telepathy actually working thinking good thoughts at you doesn't really help. *hugs* to all as need them and congratulations to everyone who's had good things and ... oh, well, you get the idea. ~~Pretend I'm better at this than I really am, is the subtext.~~

I have decided that part of my malaise at the moment is that I'm not doing enough of the sort of fannish stuff I actually enjoy (i.e. writing fic); this is allied to, but separate from, my issue with feeling oppressed by the stuff I haven't done. To combat both of these, I've joined lizbee's 666words thing [plug, plug, plug] which is a 40%-of-nano-but-the-words-can-be-on-anything thing, in the hope that it will encourage me to deal with all the stuff I haven't. I will probably do boring word-count-ish posts as I go along, but they would potentially be very spammy so here is a poll (the second option on the first question is fairly pointless, come to think of it; I will only add people who opt in):

View Poll: Filtration poll

ETA: Just remembered the other thing I was going to say. The idea that I'm going to have a month of "This is the Voice of Light City, welcome to your new workday; today is High Productivity Day"s kind of tempts me to sign up for Yuletide after all. Please to be dissuading me. ~~Or suggesting fandoms. I wanna stay away from Britcoms this year if I do do it.~~

ETA 2: Closed the poll as I've now made the filter. I'm still happy to add people, though; just shout in the comments.

From this day on I'd have to fight the forces of darkness & deal with the burden of day-to-day admin

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:56:45 GMT

Pizza and Darkplace make everything better.

It's a long time since I properly watched Darkplace, rather than mainly listening to it in the background while I do something else, occasionally glancing up at the screen. It's hilarious enough in that mode, but paying attention to the visual side of it reveals jokes that I'm sure I saw the first time around, but which I've completely missed ever since -- things like Thornton's shovel turning into a styrofoam cup with a new camera angle and the lip synch being off and ... oh, it is a work of comic genius.

October To Do List

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:34:17 GMT

I am posting this publicly because I am utterly sick of feeling like I can't get on and do shiny things A, B and C because I've been super-faily and still not done X, Y and Z that I was supposed to do ages ago. But I am still determined to do X, Y and Z 'cos dammit I want more than anything else to stop failing. October should give me a decent-ish amount of free time so I am going to get my hands on some round tuits. Basically, by putting this all out there I will have the extra motivation of avoiding the shame of not doing the things I said I would, but a slight element of feeling free to take on new things to put on the bottom of it.

That one beta that You-Know-Who-You-Are has been patiently waiting on for ... *checks* ... OMFG well over a month now. I am so sorry. Right, fuck it, I am doing that tomorrow night without fail.
Finish bluesuit_fic fic. I know how all of it works, I just have to make there be words in the right order. ~~Dammit, when did that get so difficult?~~
Answers to that Top 5 Meme from forever ago. This will be good for rebooting my squee. (It is not that I don't have squee at the moment -- I mean, FFS, Tom and Camilla did their show dance again on the first weekend of Strictly -- but it just seems to be squee with a really short half-life that leaves me back to feeling somewhere between exhausted and miserable within an hour.)
Sometime before the end of the year finish that DW S1 rewatch I was doing. (I can't put off Father's Day forever, even if The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith is distressingly full of how-it-should-be-done-ness.)
Type up my thoughts on This Town Will Never Let Us Go, seeing as how I did reread it and made notes and everything.
Keep the kink meme master lists vaguely up to date.

(OTOH, if I look like I'm even thinking about even glancing at the Yuletide fandom list, KICK ME HARD and point me back to this post, k?)

All I have to say about the US healthcare debate

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:17:54 GMT

This is a graph from New Scientist a couple of weeks ago what I have shamelessly pinched. It tracks spending on healthcare versus life-expentancy over the last 30-odd years and, well, it kind of speaks for itself, I think. ~~HEY GUESS WHAT THE MARKET IS NOT ALWAYS THE MOST EFFICIENT WAY TO ACHIEVE RESULTS.~~

(Online link to the source, though the graph is unfortunately rather buried. The comments are full of fail, surprise surprise.)

Having just taken over a week to do the responses to one meme, this is an entirely sensible idea

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:05:15 GMT

From everyone ever:

Ask me my fannish Top Five [Whatevers]. Any top fives. Doesn't matter what, really!

DVD commentary: The Game of Making

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:57:14 GMT

Last one for this go round! Requested by elliptic_eye.

This is one of the fics I'm proudest of, to be honest. (The day I got the email from kalima asking to include it in Lost Luggage -- which seems to have become cyber-squatted these days D: -- remains one of the happiest of my fannish life.) One of the things that surprises me about it. looking back, is how short it is -- I seem to have got long-winded in my old age.

There's quite a lot of backstory to the writing of this, because it is very much me getting over my squick of the power issues in Doctor/Companion. I was an asexualist by default for quite a while and when I got over that I still didn't like Doctor/anyone where there's an imbalance in time travel capacity (so, basically, I was fine with it if it all happened in one trip -- with exception for Reinette because of the Doctor's lack of control of the time windows -- or if it was someone with their own ability to time travel -- y halo thar, River), because of the capacity for him to rewrite their history until he gets them to like him. This is very Moff-influenced, as you can probably tell by the stuff I've mentioned already: his one bit of professional Who (you can't tell me he didn't write fic as a nipper, I shan't believe you) pre-new-series was a short story in Decalog 3, "Continuity Errors", where Seven constantly interferes in a librarian's history until he can persuade her to lend him a book from the reference section he needs to defeat an alien invasion (there's a very funny element to it where the librarian's perception of Benny's fashion sense changes with each iteration). And I take that red-bicycle-when-you-were-12 line quite a bit more seriously than the rest of fandom, I suspect.

So, anyway, I spent a good couple of years thinking "ooh, squicky power issues" in relation to Doctor/companion. And it only very belatedly occurred to me when I found myself shipping Martha/Ten on the basis of the Tennant/Agyeman chemistry that "power issues" = "kink". In fact, I remember a very specific conversation that prompted it, but it was behind someone else's flock so I won't go into detail.

I am very slow sometimes.

"Are you sure this is what you want?"

I would like to claim that this is commentary on certain pornfic clichés but it is actually what I think the Doctor would do, so I've never seen the objection to him doing it in fic.

He always asks her that. Sometimes they are making love tenderly and the answer comes with a smile. Sometimes they are in the throes of animalistic passion and it comes with a grunt of frustration. Sometimes they have already done all manner of other things and it comes with heavy sarcasm.

But the answer is always, always "Yes".

So here is the thing: why Martha and not Rose? Partly it's that I never found the Doctor/Rose ship particularly appealing -- mainly because canon tried to sell it so hard while at the same time being coy about it to try and walk the tightrope between attracting shippy interest and not pissing off old schoolers too much (whether RTD should care about such things is up for debate, but I don't think if you look at the treatment of any number of things in canon that there's any room for doubting that he does care, much more than his protesting about "ming mongs" would suggest) -- and so it's only when a ship of this type I was interested in came along that I had a vested interest in looking into it more detail, but there's another reason.

Which makes her wonder why he feels the need to ask every time. Perhaps he just likes to be completely sure. Perhaps he is not confident in his reading of non-verbal signals. It took him long enough to notice she was interested, after all.

Note the handwave past their non-relationship at this point in canon. (This was written in early S3, probably around the Dalek two-parter? All the S3-y bits later on are based very much on broad outline spoilers, 'cos I was avoiding finding out details.)

She decides to ask him.

"I want to be sure it's what you want," he tells her.

"Yes, yes, very New-Man-ish of you." She looks at him. "But you're not a New Man, you're an Old God."

"What are you getting at?"

"Gods need worshippers, don't they?"

"Funny, that's what Alistair said once. Well, not in so many words. He said I needed someone to pass me my test tubes and tell me how brilliant I was."

Obviously Liz said that first, but not to him on screen the way the Brig did. I could make some claim like I was deliberately using the Brig here because of his slightly more antagonistic relationship with the Doctor, thus making it not just about people who fancied him or whatever, but actually it's that I'd forgotten.

Martha laughed. "But seriously. When you wanted to prove to me that you could travel in time, you went back and took your tie off in front of me before we met from your point of view."

I am very fond of Smith and Jones in general and that bit in particular. Around the same time as this, I also wrote "Establishing Events" which is in some ways the non-porny version of exploring that scene. It's also much more explicit about the Seven/Ten parallel I set up at various points, which I do believe in. (The Martha/Ace parallels may be more in my head.)

"Yeees," said the Doctor slowly. "Where are you going with this?"

"Because it doesn't matter if I say 'Yes' or not when you ask. You're a godlike time traveller. If I said no, you could always go back in time and change my history so that I did want to. In fact, for all I know that's exactly what you've done."

This is the first point where we're really getting to my objections to Doctor/companion.

"OK. But what if I told you that I didn't need to? That there are squintillions of people between the Dawn of Time and the End of Everything, and that just by the law of large numbers some of them are going to be compatible with me without me needing to do any complicated manipulations?"

This is a good rebuttal, but it's not enough for me.

"I'd say 'Charming!' And then I'd say that 'squintillion' isn't a real number."

"So what if I told you that I didn't want to? That what makes you precious to me--" she knows this is the "you" that means her, uniquely and individually, but also encompasses all the others who have gone before and will come after "--is your independence, your different perspective?"

I like that little bit there about the specific/non-specific "you".

"What if I told you that I wanted you to?" Her heart is beating faster; even saying the words is exciting her in unexpected ways. She props herself up on an elbow and turns to him, emboldened by this sudden arousal. "What if I told you that I wanted to be yours, wanted you to make me however you wanted?"

And here is where we bring in the kink.

She reaches out a hand, stroking up and down his skinny frame. But he convulses, and wriggles away from her touch until he is almost falling out of the bed. She pursues him, reaches out, finds the hardness between his legs. "What's wrong?" she asks. "I can tell this is turning you on."

"Of course it's turning me on." He sounds irritable, almost snappish. "Exercising that sort of power is what being a Time Lord is all about. Of course it's exciting to think about it. But it would an abuse of that power." He pauses as he searches for a way to describe it that she will understand. "It's a rape fantasy, Martha."

There is silence.

Until she says: "We could always pretend ..."

I don't see any of this as particular OOC, it is explicitly a fantasy. A fantasy for the Doctor of the sort of thing he turned his back on when he left Gallifrey, and for Martha of getting close to him on a level inconceivable before she'd met him.

* * *

Here is how the game is played:

She tells him an early memory, a formative experience. He explains to her how he could manipulate it to change her personality.

They both become excited.

At the crucial moment, he asks "Are you sure this is what you want?"

And she says "Make me, Time Lord."

What I should talk about here is the double meaning of the "Make", but here's the fun part: I have never read the "Take me, Time Lord" fic, I only know of it second-hand. But I felt no compunction about riffing off it here.

* * *

"Your history is a statue, carved from a block of marble. With each intervention, I chip away at the marble -- carefully, precisely, controlled. Each time the possibilities are constrained, but the statue comes closer to perfection, closer to my vision."

I did have fun thinking these bits up, but it was bloody hard work.

* * *

Jack is very experienced. He has seen much, sinned much and, lately, forgiven much. It does not take him long to work out what they're doing. Despite his broadmindedness, it gives him concerns. When he's alone with Martha he tries to express them.

At the time of writing, all I knew was Jack was coming back towards the end. I was envisaging it as being like the end of S1, where he's another companion, so this is slightly Jossed by the fact that Utopia/Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords all run into one another.

"I know what I'm doing," she responds. "We know what we're doing."

"Really? How can you really know what he thinks? He's lived a dozen lifetimes. Humans are ... pets to him."

And here's another objection about the power issues, though of course it's also a fannish-debates-about-the-Doctor's-sexuality bingo card square (with or without exception for favoured companion X). To be honest, putting this in Jack's mouth is a bit of a cheat because it allows rebuttals like this:

"I'm not the one who spent a hundred-something years just waiting for him. How many lifetimes is that? I know which of us I think has the bigger Doctor problem."

He doesn't -- can't -- respond directly. Instead, he says simply, "Be careful, Martha."

"Go back to your pets in Cardiff, Jack."

* * *

"Your history is a river, flowing from the mountains of your birth down to the endless ocean. The river is broad and deep, difficult to divert. But if I climb up into the mountains, and put a rock in just the right place, its whole course changes. Valleys dry up and plains flood, at my merest whim."

* * *

They have defeated his oldest adversary, the devil to his god. But the victory is bittersweet, as all victories are that come at such high cost.

Again, all I knew was the Master was coming back (I didn't even know for sure that he was Mr Saxon, though there was obviously going to be some sort of link); that they'd win at a high cost seems fairly inevitable, though with the rewind switch of the Paradox Machine you can argue the toss about whether the cost was particularly high.

Their lovemaking after is part celebration, part desperate affirmation of continued life.

And it slides, as it so often does these days, into the structure of the game. But somehow it is awkward, strained. They are haunted by the spectre of one for whom the game would be serious.

This, though, resonates nicely with the Paradox Machine given that I didn't have a clue about it. I also like it for the way it has kinky people having kink-tinged sex even when they're not particularly trying to.

They stop. Their physical conversation turns into a verbal one, but becomes no less awkward.

"What's wrong?" she asks.

The green light of the TARDIS bounces harshly off the angles of his face. She has never felt his alienness more strongly. "Power, Martha. That's what it's all about."

"You mean this, or ... ?"

"That's what he wanted. What they all want in the end." He turns to her. "I'm opposed to power. Freedom is opposed to power. I shouldn't want it."

"But you do."

"But I don't want to."

She kisses him on the cheek. "It's OK. I understand." But Jack's words come back to her. Can she really understand him?

For a while, they stop playing the game.

But only for a while.

And again, with the slipping back into it.

* * *

"Your history is the manuscript of a poem, that I draft and redraft endlessly. I scribble out a word and replace it, or change a single comma, and your whole meaning changes. You are a palimpsest, overwritten with a hundred different possible versions."

* * *

The game escalates, as such things do.

He starts to weave elaborate tales around the stories she tells him, suggesting that he has already been involved in them, has already intervened to make her a more perfect acolyte.

Possibly the religious imagery side of things is slightly overdone.

He starts to take side trips, a habit he had dropped a couple of regenerations ago. (Explicit Seven ref, obviously.) He walks out onto some alien shore, waits a while and comes back inside, then pretends that he has been in her past, making minute, precise adjustments to her timeline. She pretends that she has grown more willing, more eager, more pliable. And perhaps she is; perhaps the game, by itself, has wrought the change.

* * *

"Your history is scarred skin, grown back in a new form after I have cut it. And yet I cut it, again and again, to mark you as mine. My creature, my creation."

* * *

One time, she suggests an elaboration: that she be complicit in the changing of her history, that he include her in the story of his manipulation.

His eyes grow pale and distant. He becomes colder, withdraws.

At length, he explains to her. About the other Miss Jones. Sam, who he met when she was already the end product of such a process. Whose other self -- whose real self -- had then appeared and been forced by desperate circumstances into making the choice to create her alter ego. No, not even a choice -- a leap of faith. It had not been a game then, with a world in the balance and the masked, shadowless ones waiting in the wings.

OMG, I had in fact completely forgotten this bit until just now. Of course you have to bring in Dark Sam if you're doing this ~~and are me and obsessed with the EDAs in general and Faction Paradox in particular~~.

He explains to her that a paradox is the worst thing possible. Better an eternity of tyranny than a moment of acausality. He explains that in the end, their game is inescapably about paradoxes. And then he falls silent, staring at his shadow on the wall as though it will disappear if he looks away.

And again, this fits really well with the way S3 went.

They do not play the game again.

* * *

One day, she enters the console room to find him taking off. It is the first time since the game stopped that he has been out into the universe without her. Her heart thuds with the possibility that he is resuming their play.

I don't know how well this sells the forbidden-fruit-turn-on side of things, I think possibly it relies on you assuming it.

When the noise of the engines has faded, she asks "Where have you been?" She tries to make the question sound naive, but cannot stop desire creeping into her voice.

"Changing your history," he tells her. But his tone is not the playfully masterful one of the past. It is the tone of the man that the monsters have nightmares about. "What we've been doing isn't healthy. It has to stop permanently. I've gone into the past to arrange things so that you'll want to leave."

She feels suddenly as though she has become a monster to him. "Don't you dare try and blame me. You know you wanted it."

"Good," he says sadly. "It's working."

"Bastard!" She slaps him, a sudden, shocking physicality amongst the mind games. "You utter bastard. Take me back right now. London 2008. Right now."

He starts flicking switches, turning knobs. She goes to her room, suddenly sickened by the paraphernalia of the time-travelling lifestyle. She grabs a bare minimum of belongings and stuffs them into a bag.

When she returns to the console room, the doors are open onto a London street. She is on the threshold when he calls out her name. She turns to face him.

* * *

He cannot explain to her. It will not work if he does. He needs to be rid of the temptation she poses. He knows she is right, that she is not to blame for his desires. But nonetheless she has become the nexus of them. It is not her fault, but it is still the case. To change history to suit himself would cross a line he dare not. He has not done it, even now. But he is not above manipulating her into thinking that he has. And that is enough.

Ultimately, though, this is where I get over my concerns about Doctor/Companion because despite the fact that he's a manipulative bastard, it turns out that I do trust the Doctor not to abuse his power.

He can express none of this. In the end, all he can think of to say is "Are you sure this is what you want?"

"Screw you, Time Lord."

She turns and walks back into reality.

And again, it's only a slightly more miserable version of her actual ending. I'm slightly perturbed at how well it all fits the overall arc.

And here's the other why-Martha-not-Rose thing. The thing is, you could write this fic with Rose, it just wouldn't have this particular ending. Because the one thing canon showed us again and again is that more than anything she wants to stay with the Doctor. And I really don't have any desire to write fic that dark.

DVD commentary: All's Fair

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:19:00 GMT

Requested by radiantbaby.

Warnings that were too long to put in the cut text: it's an NC-17 fic so NSFW and all that, there's some minor discussion of spoilers for the upcoming specials/S5, and there's also very vague spoilers for Time Traveller's Wife, if that's something you're worried about being spoiled for.

This was written for jadekirk in oxionensis's "Fall Fandom Free-for-All", which I thought was great. It was a sort of free-form prompt/claiming effort where you got to request whatever you wanted and see if any other people's requests took your fancy. Which several of them did, for me, and I ended up writing quite a few things I'd never have tried otherwise, which was good. And I got awesome graphicsy things out of it, like this Izzy/Fey icon doyle_sb4 made for me (see, it's not an entirely random choice of icon for talking about this story, honest), and my lovely header image from biichan.

Anyway, there are far too many <lj user> tags in that last paragraph (shamingly, I didn't get this betaed because it was so ridiculously last minute [though in the end the deadline was extended so I needn't have worried], but at least that cuts down the number of people I need to talk about slightly). The assignment here was to do a "happy ending" for Martha and Ten, and have them at the fairground (I asked for that extra bit of prompting, because it was all a bit inchoate in my head).

(The title references "All's fair in love and war", of course, and the not-quite-NA-reference isn't deliberate, exactly, but I'm pleased it's there.)

Martha clutched her phone as though it was a magical talisman, an object of power that could draw things to her across desolate wastes of space and time. Which, in a way, it was.

Obviously really everyone has new phones since the time we saw them in canon, but to be brutally honest in my head she's still phoning her old one from the end of S3, even though fandom keeps telling me it got deaded in JE. I honestly haven't noticed that on any time I've watched it, but that's still not that often, because it's a Rusty Ending.

So when it rang, the screen lighting up with blocky little letters spelling "Tom", she was able to answer it instantly. "Hi, hon. Wasn't expecting to hear from you."

"We're ... between pubs. Thing is, we were just talking about ... stuff. And it made me miss you." They'd been ribbing Neil about how awful his life was going to be once he was married, she read between the lines, and Tom had joined in when really he wanted to gush.

I have lots of Martha/Tom personal fanon. #1: Tom is a big softie, really.

"That's very sweet of you," she said.

"Sorry," he said, the sibilant slightly slurred. "I'm interrupting your date, aren't I? I'll let you go."

"He's not here yet, actually," she said.

"Typical," Tom said good-naturedly. "Anyway, have fun. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

Martha/Tom Fanon #2: They're poly. There are a number of reasons for this. Mainly it's that Martha has chemistry with everyone, and I like writing fic of her, but I also really, really like Martha/Tom. So if I want to do Martha/anyone else without the poly aspect, it either has to be set before or during S3 (and to be honest that's in a weird place of being new-ish-but-not-new-enough for me to pay much attention to at the moment, though I don't know if that statement makes any sense outside my own brain), or you have to break them up in the background, or it's cheating. (I'm conscious that that "really, really like Martha/Tom" part is something that I'm not exactly in the majority on, and that many, many people go for the break-them-up option. But the thing that sells me on them has always been Martha's abundant squee about him in Sontaran. Basically, I really like it when Freema smiles and she smiles a lot in that scene.) I first used it in that Martha/Donna fic I did and found it eminently plausible. Again, mainly because of the chemistry thing.

Making them poly seems a particularly good option for doing years-down-the-line Martha/Ten, since later-period Ten has River and is blatantly in a horrendously complicated relationship with her, and River is poly both from observation of her with everyone in the Library eps and by extension from Nine's description of 51st century mores in Doctor Dances, so there's actual vague amounts of canon support for this particular instance, not just handwaving. \o/

"Well, that gives me plenty of leeway, doesn't it?" Martha laughed. But she felt a twinge, a tiny stab of jealousy at the sort of thing Tom could get up to on a stag weekend.

It didn't matter. She trusted him -- trusted him to stay safe, trusted him to come back to her -- just like he trusted her. That was how their relationship worked: total trust. It's what they'd agreed, long ago, when they'd got back together after the bust-up caused by her telling him about the missing year. And it had stood them in very good stead ever since.

Martha/Tom Fanon #3: Martha and Tom broke up and got back together because of her not telling him about TYTNW. This has been part of my personal shipping-them fanon since the week between Sontaran Stratagem and Poison Sky, with all sorts of variations on the details. But when I came to actually write it for Meeting at Infinity, I couldn't quite make it work how it worked in my head (mainly because for overall-shape-of-the-plot/fitting-into-canon purposes it came at quite a late point, and I'm not sold on Tom giving up on her that easily by then); it's still one of the weakest bits IMO.

"Have fun," Tom said. "Love you."

"Love you too," she whispered into what turned out to be the beeping of her phone telling her he'd hung up.

As she took the phone away from her ear, a shadow fell across her, the shifting colours from across the road muted into darkness for a moment. She looked up to see the Doctor standing in front of her, a crooked smile on his face.

"You're late," she said, her own lips twitching upwards.

"What's quarter of an hour against the whole expanse of eternity?" the Doctor said airily.

"What's the point of a time machine that can't actually get you anywhere on time?" she shot back, but he just wrapped her up in his arms and spun her fully round twice before putting her back down again.

Spinny hugs are a key part of the Martha/Ten dynamic, obv. I do quite like that line of dialogue, I can imagine how Freema would say it. (I'm practically vomiting at my own self-congratulatoriness here, I shall tone it down in a minute.)

"Oh, Martha Jones, I've missed you!"

"I've missed you, too," she said, and they kissed, a peck on the lips that evolved organically into something more intense. Martha had to catch her breath when they broke apart again.

"So where are we going for our date, Doctor Jones?"

Martha nodded across the road, at the bright lights and booming basslines emanating from the park.

Terrible-taste-in-music confession time: I had "Tunnel of Love" by Dire Straits on in the background constantly while writing this fic. In fact, I'm just going to pop it on again now so I can cop to any bits that were ~~ripped off from~~ directly inspired by it.

"Ah, the fairground! Excellent choice!"

As they walked over, arm in arm, the Doctor spieled off what felt like a dissertation on the ancient traditions of the travelling show, seguing without a break into the history of sugar when he bought them both big sticks of candyfloss, carrying on talking even as he took big mouthfuls.

Lazy not-actually-writing-Ten's-motormouth-dialogue is lazy (but also possibly better for the reader).

"I used to love coming to the funfair when I was little," Martha said when he finally paused. "Tish and I were demons on the dodgems."

I have this weird thing with writing about Tish where I have no idea what I'm doing as I do it, but as soon as I need to know some specific thing about her, it's there in my mind. For someone with comparatively little screen time, my subconscious seems to have spent a lot of time working stuff out about her. I do find it interesting that she's the older sister, given that Martha is so strongly portrayed as The Sensible One, that probably ties into it a bit. (I can imagine Tish trying to broaden Martha's horizons a bit in slightly leading-her-astray ways.)

"Dodgems!" the Doctor said, haring off towards them. Martha ran to catch up, then overtook him, sticking her tongue out at him when she got to one first, their arrival coinciding perfectly with the changeover. Just another of those little synchronicities that tended to happen when you were around the Doctor.

I'd completely forgotten about this until rereading it just now, but this next bit has lots of deliberately-engineered-in-subtext. I usually don't do this sort of thing as self-consciously as I did here (and normally it tends to veer much more towards the meta side of things). But their experience on the dodgems is meant to mirror the evolution of their relationship through what we've seen on telly in the first paragraph and then beyond in the second.

They started slowly, circling anticlockwise with everyone else, but before too long Martha was catapulted forward by a violent collision. (Smith and Jones.) She glanced behind her to see the Doctor grinning manically as he tried to accelerate to crash into her again. She dodged round him, then steered into him as he pulled alongside, forcing them both round in tight circles for a couple of revolutions, sparks flying from the contacts above their heads. (Season 3 in general, with the steering into him being the up-to-the-more-than-just-a-passenger-moment part.) Then suddenly she veered out wide, leaving him spinning in circles by himself. (Voyage of the Damned.) He crashed into someone else (Donna, or some sort of hybrid Astridonna if you're particularly keen on counting Kylie.), and she guided herself back to collide with him again (Sontaran/Doctor's Daughter), and then again, bringing him to a complete standstill, trapped between several dodgems. (The companionapalooza of Journey's End.)

She lost track of him then, circling wide around the outside as he extricated himself from the pile up. But a little while later she spotted him ahead of her. She snuck up alongside him while he was looking the other way, then bumped him spectacularly. He looked over at her, a devilish glint in his eyes, and did the same in return. They carried on in the same fashion, breaking apart then crashing together again, until the music died and they coasted to a halt next to each other. (So basically she's been a recurring guest star throughout the rest of the unseen time, and gradually along the way they developed their relationship. I'm operating from the assumption/obvious truth that Ten has got a thing for Martha, didn't act on it at the time for various reasons, but now that he's got River to knock some sense into him the obstacles in their way are removed. I do see River as being good for the Doctor's ability to form relationships of all kinds, because of the complexity of their own. In some ways, I think the timey-wimey-ness of it [along with the knowing-it's-destined and already-seen-her-die-and-that's-the-worst-thing aspects] is his in to the emotional side of it and once he's got the hang of that sort of thing better because of it he can do it with his more linear relationships.)

I am talking about the characters that aren't here more than the ones that are in this commentary, aren't I?

The Doctor helped Martha out of her dodgem and dragged her across to the waltzers. Martha demurred at first, but the Doctor launched into what was clearly going to be a very long speech about how the mathematical description of the movement was analogous to something-or-other in quantum mechanics (I'm not entirely certain this is valid, but there is a bit in one of the Feynman memoirs about him discovering that he'd happened to have worked out the mathematics that applied to something going on inside atoms as a kid because he'd got interested in working out the motion of a particular spot on a plate thrown up into the air in a spinny way, which seems the same sort of thing): she never quite found out what, because she ended up dragging him onto them to shut him up, and after the first half turn around the centre, he'd stopped trying to explain it to her and was just enjoying the ride. They grinned at each other as they whirled round faster and faster, unravelling complex orbits in the waltzer's geometry. (There's a Greg Egan story I've never actually read [I think I did buy the Interzone back issue it's in, I just haven't got round to it] called "Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies" which is my favourite title for anything ever.)

"I feel dizzy," Martha said when they finally got off. She'd got used to circles within circles: the world was supposed to be spinning. Now that it wasn't, it was confusing.

The Doctor put his fingers to her temples briefly, and her balance suddenly restored itself to normal. The Doctor shook his head, as though it had somehow transferred to him and he was clearing his head.

"That's a new trick," Martha said, slightly suspiciously.

Vague hint towards Moff's more casually powerful future Doctor, which I'm not overly fond of but is canon. I'm being a bit naughty here and using Martha as voice of the author, expressing my disquiet about it.

"Nothing really." The Doctor shrugged. "Come on, let's see if I can win you something at the shooting gallery."

OK, this is actually quite a key bit of the song influence, because there's the line about "in any shooting gallery where promises are made, to walk away, walk away".

Martha gave him a look, but followed anyway, and watched as the Doctor put on a spectacular display of incompetence. He didn't hit a single target with any of his three goes.

"Oh, so this is why you don't like guns?" she said. "'Cos you're rubbish with them!"

"It's a deep-seated ethical objection," the Doctor huffed. "So deep-seated that it renders me incapable even of pretending."

This wrote itself as soon as I decided to send them to the shooting gallery.

"Go on, give me a go," Martha said. She smiled at the guy running the stall as she handed over her money. He smiled back, clearly expecting her to be just as useless as the Doctor.

A minute later, she was stuffing a gigantic cuddly toy into the Doctor's arms.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" he asked as they walked away from the stall keeper, who was stood stock still, a completely nonplussed expression on his face.

"Hug it to sleep every night?"

"He. Not it. He's called Humphrey," the Doctor said with sudden decisiveness. And he started trying to stuff it into his pocket, despite the obvious mismatch in sizes.

As soon as he decides to accept it, of course, he's given it a whole back story.

"Or you could put it -- him -- on that chair in the console room?" she suggested, as he somehow managed to complete the process, squeezing Humphrey away but somehow not affecting the enticing-as-ever line of his suit at all.

I am altogether too fond of the Doctor's pockets; I always love those scenes in canon where he empties them for minutes at a time. I have a corresponding huge downer on dull extended-canon "answers" to them.

A thought occurred to her then, and she stopped, waited for the Doctor to notice and turn round.

"What?" the Doctor said.

She almost didn't want to know. But she didn't want to not know, either. And it was important, more important than he ever let on, or possibly even realised. "Are you ... travelling with anyone at the moment?"

Looking back at this, I'm quite pleased with how it ties in to what RTD's said in some interviews or something (I get all my news second hand from the meme, sue me) about how the next specials are going to show us why the Doctor needs companions. This is one of the more bittersweet parts, because Martha's made choices that preclude her going back to full-time travel in the TARDIS, but it's not like she doesn't feel the tug.

He walked back to her. "Not as such. Seeing a lot of River, but there's no ... no, there's no one." He rubbed his hands together against the cold. "Come on, let's have a go on the big wheel. Bit of a change of pace."

There's no real evidence either way, but it seems quite obvious to me that River isn't a companion in the conventional sense, travelling in the TARDIS from one adventure to another without a break back in her own time. Maybe a (beginning-of-S3-like-if-it-had-been-Martha-saying-just-one-trip) string of two-or-three-adventures, but not a full-on companion companion. So I do have slight fear that we've already seen her in set photos, because it implies she's going to be in S5 a fair bit and possibly be a companion companion, though they probably have better communication methods than psychic paper. It ties into the squickiness of the Doctor/companion power dynamic (about which I'll have much more to say in tomorrow's commentary, though it's worth saying that while I think the no-TARDIS-travel rule Martha and Ten have here probably is mainly for Tom's benefit, it does help me buy into their relationship more) but it's mainly that I like it being complicated and out of order and the idea that River's diary is like Clare's list of dates in Time Traveller's Wife.

Speaking of, the trailer for the film version of the Niffenegger has just been on the telly again; it fills me with fear a bit. They were always going to have to do major surgery on it to make it filmable, obviously, but at least from what they've chosen to emphasise in the trailer it looks like they're turning it into something rather duller than the book (I mean, I knew they weren't going to show the teenage Henrys' selfcest or anything, but this looks very much like cookie-cutter romance film with time travel as The Complication). Also, Eric Bana isn't stocky enough for Henry-in-my-head, it turns out.

They were about a quarter of the way round, high above the bustle of the fair before either of them spoke again.

"So, saved humanity lately?" the Doctor asked.

"From everything except itself."

"Sounds about right," he said ruefully.

I really am going to have to bump Interference up my to-read list, because whenever I do this sort of thing I get flashbacks to Eight in a cell and confronting the Doctor's failure to deal with evil regimes when they happen to be on present-day Earth, but I've completely forgotten the details of Miles's argument.

"And you?" Martha said.

"I'm good, yeah. Went to the Crystal Expanse of Saxaconia last week. Minor thing with a hegemonising swarm travelling backwards in time from its point of origin -- no big deal but the paradox was philosophically interesting (where "philosophically interesting" means "stolen from the TNG finale"). Did I ever take you to the Crystal Expanse, Martha? It's beautiful. Emerald mountains and skies made of amethyst. Rivers of rubies flowing into the sapphire sea. (My attempt at a Rusty-esque description moment, not sure how successful it is; clearly very influenced by Midnight.) We should go, bring Tom along as well."

She smiled, vicariously entranced by the far away look on his face. "You know the rules, Doctor. You come to me, that's how it works."

"Worth a go," he said lightheartedly. "How is Tom, anyway?"

There's a mixture here of "now that I've got people all over spacetime I'm allowed to have relationships with, why do I need to meet new companions?" and "argh! relationships are complicated, I know how to do Doctor/companion (at least sort of), please can we go back to that?"

"Really good, yeah," Martha said. "He's just got a research fellowship. They pretty much had to make him apply for it."

This is mainly to imply the gap of time between canon and this. All incredibly likely to be Jossed by the regeneration, but eh. Also there to show that their lives are all entwined, I suppose.

"Oh, that's brilliant," the Doctor said.

"We'll have to move, but we can figure that out. It's not like UNIT don't keep shuttling me halfway across the world at a moment's notice anyway." Martha's exhaled breath misted the air in front of her as she spoke. She looked across at the Doctor: his never seemed to do that. Just another of those little things that made him different, made him special. Made her lucky to have him in her life. But all those little distancing things also made it impossible for her to be with him all the time, whether Tom would be prepared to come along or not. Maybe all this wasn't once she'd once wanted, so long ago, but it was what worked now, and she wouldn't be without it.

I sort of feel a bit like it's a lack of faith in the rest of the fic's ability to portray it to state this idea this explicitly, but there we go, I did it. I do tend towards having more stuff in my head than I've communicated properly on the page, so probably spelling it out was the right idea.

They fell silent again as they reached the top of the wheel. Martha looked out on the city lights, spread out below them like a blanket, a warm yellow reflection of the cold white of the stars, impossibly high above, but within reach for the Doctor.

"You should, you know," she told him.

"Should what?"

"Have someone. To travel with, I mean. Not as another ... well, unless you want to." She smiled at him. The way he'd talked about the Crystal Expanse ... he'd made it sound beautiful, but there was no there there. He only really saw things when he had someone to provide that other, less lofty perspective.

And he needs someone to stop him, but Martha's not going to say that right now.

"Maybe you're right," he said.

"You know I'm right."

"Well, I've got Humphrey now. Sorted."

"Humphrey's lovely, but I'm not sure he'd provide all that much in the way of stimulating conversation."

"Well ..."

"Promise me, Doctor," Martha said. "Next time you meet someone, you'll ask them?"

"I meet lots of people," the Doctor said. "All the time!"

And increasingly frequently explicitly reject the idea of travelling with them, but this was written before The Next Doctor, let alone anything else.

"You know what I mean, Doctor," she said. She took his hand in hers as she remembered: the Royal Hope, upwards falling rain, space rhinos, and Mr Smith, the mysterious patient who was so much more than he seemed, and the instant bond she'd formed with him.

"Yes," he said, putting his other hand over hers. "I do."

"So you promise?"

"I promise," he said.

On an impulse, she kissed him. He responded slowly, clearly away with his thoughts, but as she brought him back to reality, he became more and more passionate, returning the kiss fully as his hands began to roam over her back.

I was torn at the time of writing whether to make it porny or not (jadekirk had said "It can be as gen or as smutty as you like." so it wasn't like there was any specific reason to include it). In some ways, it feels somewhat tacked on, in that you could stop the story here and it'd be a complete thing, but I do feel that it emphasises the positive aspects of the "Maybe all this wasn't once she'd once wanted, so long ago, but it was what worked now, and she wouldn't be without it." elements and there's a specific bit in a minute I quite like.

They disentangled themselves temporarily to step out of the carriage when it reached the bottom, ignoring the look -- somewhere between censure and envy -- from the man who helped them out.

As they stepped away, Martha whispered in his ear, fondling his leg at the same time. He nodded with a certain amount of surprise -- she was glad she could still surprise him -- and she took his hand and guided him out of the fairground. They ducked under guy ropes, stepped over cables snaking their way from noisy, smelly generators, came out into the strange hinterland where the temporary, ephemeral nature of the fair was exposed. In a week's time all that would be left of the whole thing would be some slightly muddied and yellowed patches of grass. Martha glanced behind her for a moment, at the laughing families, the children running round after each other, then grabbed the Doctor's hand more firmly and dragged him off to the trees a little distance away.

This is the bit I like, with the impermanence of things as a metaphor for ... well, everything in general, if I can go mega-pretentious for a minute (the only always-true statement is "this too shall pass", and so on), but relationships in particular. But there's also an element here that Martha's been stripped of her illusions about the Doctor long ago (at the end of S3, really), and so that thing of everything seeming magical when he's around doesn't work on her so much any more, but that doesn't mean he isn't magical anyway, and ... well, I think I've overloaded this little bit with layers now. It's also very much inspired by the song, which has this sort of feel shot all the way through it, at least to my interpretation.

"Are you sure about this, Martha?" he said as he pressed her up against a good wide tree. "We could wait until we're back at your place ..."

"I want you," she said. "I want you now. And I can tell you want me too." She rubbed her hand along the length of his shaft; he gasped and then kissed her, hard and long. As his tongue slipped between her lips, she fumbled with his zip, freeing his hardness. He put his hands on her breasts, squeezing them gently, before moving further down to slide a hand between the waistband of her trousers and her knickers. Martha groaned into his mouth as he stroked her pussy through the fabric.

I seem to remember making a deliberate attempt to write standing-up outdoor sex, for a bit of a variety in my porning.

By unspoken agreement, they broke apart for a moment. Martha wriggled her way out of her trousers, and the Doctor extracted a condom from one pocket or another -- not, she hoped, the one that Humphrey was waiting in. When he'd put it on, he stepped towards her once more, forcing her back against the tree trunk once more. He hooked a finger into her panties, pushing them to one side before he thrust up inside her. Martha wriggled her way upwards slightly to alter the angle, sandwiched between the tree and the Doctor, wrapping her feet around his thighs. He grabbed her arse, partly to help support her, partly, she knew, because he liked the feel of it under his hands.

The way he looks at it all the damned time = trufax canon.

The duelling sets of pounding music from different parts of the fair washed over them as they began to buck back and forth in a rhythm all their own. Martha leaned in to the Doctor's neck and bit it lightly, drawing a growl that made the flesh under her teeth ripple deliciously. Then she bent upwards to his ear, licked it lasciviously and whispered, "Fuck me, Doctor, fuck me hard."

The Doctor obliged, increasing the tempo of his thrusts, until she could no longer keep up and just surrendered to the intensity of the sensations each of his movements sent trembling through her body. The tiniest change in position was enough to set her shuddering, and his motions were far from tiny. Quickly, she felt herself nearing the brink, her own desperation matched by his urgency ...

Martha came, her whole body shaking involuntarily. The Doctor moved his arms to hold her tight to him as he thrust once, twice more before she felt his own orgasm explode inside her. He stayed holding on to her as she lapsed into near-unconsciousness, breathing heavily as her thoughts drifted into nothingness.

Near simultaneous! They're near simultaneous orgasms, so it's only nearly a horrendous cliché. But then the most realistic portrayals of sex tend to be in humour fics, when you think about it.

"Thank you," she said when she finally came back to herself.

"Thank you," he replied.

"Back to my place?"

"Oh, definitely."

Quite a weak ending, really, but it needed to wrap up somehow. In retrospect I should have saved that description of the transience of the fair for the very end as they walk away from it.

DVD commentary: Ten of the Sword/Sufficiently Advanced Technology

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:33:10 GMT

Requested by livii

This is the only thing I've written -- or at least, finished -- in over a year that wasn't for a ficathon or from a prompt or something. I wrote it pretty much the day after I watched Battlefield on DVD. I had succumbed to fandom's general opinion that it was the weak link in S26 for far too long beforehand, when really there's vast amounts of awesome in there. Anyway.

Ten of the Sword

The titles for the two sections are quotes that are used within Battlefield and more or less explicitly labelled as such in the process. The scabbard being worth ten of the sword is straight out of the Morte d'Arthur, and I'm sort of kinda trying to use it here to imply that the companion is more important than the Doctor in some ways.

"What do you think of this one?" asked Shou Yuing, stroking the soft fabric of a short V-necked dress.

"It's nice," Ace said. "You should try it on."

They'd found a fancy fashion boutique tucked improbably away down a side street of this chocolate-box village that Doris had brought them to. Ace had been enjoying the driving, but the others had insisted they couldn't keep going forever, which just showed how little they knew. They'd gone first to a little tea shop; as far as Ace knew, Doris and Winifred were still there, sipping their tea and swapping hair-raising stories Doris probably didn't have the security clearance for.

Ace and Shou Yuing, on the other hand, had wolfed down their cream teas and headed out to explore the area. Ace had been surprised to find a hole in the wall machine in such an out of the way place, and more surprised still at how much money the Doctor's card had been able to extract from it, but then she supposed this was the future. The notes burning a hole in her pocket now seemed slightly eerie, familiar in overall design but different in so many details -- the King's head instead of the Queen's was only the most obvious change.

Battlefield makes a proper effort to be five-minutes-into-the-future, but it makes it horrendously difficult to reconcile with modern canon.

"Ooh, I think you'd look good in this one," Shou Yuing said, holding up something vaguely Belle-Epoque-ish.

A sudden coldness shot up Ace's spine as she imagined wearing it. "Not my style," she said quickly. She picked up something at random. "I like this, though. Come on, let's go and see what they look like on."

This is supposed to be about the picture of future Ace in Silver Nemesis; this is yet another story about Ace I've written that is completely unforgiving of people who aren't as familiar with her canon as me.

The woman at the till barely looked up from her magazine as they went into the small changing room together.

They stripped down to their underwear without self-consciousness, but then they looked at each other.

Shou Yuing was the first to avert her eyes. "Ace," she began, but then stopped again. Ace waited. "I'm sorry," Shou Yuing said eventually. "About what I said in the circle."

Back to back, clutching sword and scabbard, turned outwards to defy the hostile world.

Face to face, yelling at one another, the hostility insidiously inside them.

Cheek to cheek, clutching onto one another, giving each other strength that the discarded weapon could not hope to match.

"It's OK," Ace said, touching Shou Yuing's arm. "I know it wasn't you."

But there was a deeper truth they were evading. Whatever it was that had crept through the protection of the chalk had made them speak not their own hidden feelings, but the other's deepest fears. Both of them presented a brave face to the world, but had been forced to share the intimacy of vulnerability. Even the Doctor didn't know as much as Shou Yuing did now; or perhaps he knew everything, but was keeping that knowledge secret even from her.

This does seem like the only reasonable explanation of that scene (which does descend into acting-class-exercise in some moments, tbh) to me; they don't know each other well enough to be able to aim those barbs that well.

After a long instant, Shou Yuing moved her arm gently away, picked up the dress she'd chosen and wriggled it over her head. Ace went through the motions with the outfit she'd hurriedly grabbed, but she'd already decided it wouldn't suit her.

"You look amazing," Ace said.

"It's expensive," Shou Yuing countered.

"What else is the Doctor's money good for?"

"Well, some of it looked like it might make a nice children's toy."

The hoppy frog thing he gets out when they're trying to pay at the pub, obviously.

They both laughed. Then they bought the dress.

* * *

Dinner was delicious. Ace was mildly surprised to learn of the Doctor's cooking skills, but Alistair said that because the Doctor didn't eat very often, he made sure when he did it was an occasion. Ace wondered what sort of dinner parties they'd had, back in the mysterious past they shared.

More delicious than the food, though, was the atmosphere at the table. The air seemed charged by the unabashed joyous lust shared by Winifred and Ancelyn and the abiding affection between Alistair and Doris. Ace found Shou Yuing's hand resting on her thigh between courses, and belatedly realised that they were a part of it too.

While this is mostly me handwaving furiously to get them into bed with each other, there are lots of ships in Battlefield and the Doctor is conspicuous by his absence from most of them (it's tempting to pair him off with Morgaine, but she's clearly much more interested in her memories of Arthur).

Afterwards, she helped the Doctor wash up, distracted throughout by the implicit promise of the tight hug Shou Yuing had given her before going upstairs.

She asked the Doctor about his history with UNIT, about what Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart had been like in his prime. He answered with anecdotes that revealed less than they concealed. She asked him about how it felt to be Merlin, and he talked about ageing backwards. She asked him if he was all right, and he insisted that he was.

"Go ahead and enjoy yourself, Ace," he said as he passed her the last of the mugs to be dried. "I'll be fine."

"You sure, Professor?" she asked, touching his shoulder lightly.

He smiled and nodded, and she smiled back as she put the mug away.

This whole section (and the way it then ties into the Doctor's story) plays off the domesticity of the end of the story, which I really like, especially the sense the Brig's one of the few people who could drag the Doctor into it, if only for a short while. I bet Three never did any washing up, though.

* * *

Ace knocked tentatively on the door of Shou Yuing's bedroom, and it sprang open instantly. "Come in!" she said, smiling enthusiastically.

Shou Yuing sat on the bed, and Ace was about to join her when she heard the front door closing downstairs. She slipped over to the window and twitched the curtain aside.

Down on the driveway, the Doctor was walking over to Bessie.

"Ace ..." Shou Yuing said softly.

Ace watched the Doctor run one hand along the length of the car. She smiled, even as she was aware of Shou Yuing getting up to stand behind her.

The Doctor's lips began to move, muttering to the car as he caressed it in just the same way as he did the TARDIS console.

Shou Yuing wrapped her arms around Ace's waist, nuzzled against her neck, then kissed it gently. A boundary that had never really been there had been crossed, and Ace turned away from the window, caught Shou Yuing's face in her hands and kissed her fiercely.

As they fell onto the bed together, Ace barely heard the screech of Bessie's tyres, so consumed was she with passion as they tore at one another's clothes, the beautiful dress from earlier now merely an impediment. Ace lost herself in the excitement of mutual discovery as roaming hands and soft lips explored eager flesh, and there was no circle around them now, but a stronger circle they made of themselves, unbreakable and unending.

And then, finally, the explosions.

Cheesy! But inevitable.

Sufficiently Advanced Technology

It barely needs saying, but this is Clarke's Third Law about the indistinguishability of magic from sufficiently advanced technology.

"Go ahead and enjoy yourself, Ace, I'll be fine."

The hand on his shoulder. "You sure, Professor?"

He nodded, and added a ghost of a smile, to make it convincing, or at least to give her enough to quiet her conscience with.

As we see in the whole of the rest of the season, the Doctor does get Ace to a fair extent, so this seems fair.

The Doctor knew he wasn't good company right now, for Ace or any of the rest of them. There was something primal in the house that night, something that he wasn't a part of, or that wasn't part of him. Morgaine would have called it magic, and perhaps there was a magic in it: the unthinking urgings of selfish genes singing out to each other from one isolated body to another, transmuted into genuine connections between individual minds, however fleeting or enduring they might turn out to be.

This story is more asexualist than I am, weirdly.

The Doctor pulled out the plug and watched the water swirl away, thinking vaguely of the myth that its direction was determined by the Coriolis effect. Perhaps there was some fast-spinning world out there, a few twists sideways in time further on from Morgaine's, where it was true.

Sideways in time. Only a few short centuries ago, he'd been the first Time Lord to travel from one dimension to another, turning abstract philosophical notion into lived experience. Now it was routine, and the High Council wouldn't even dream of intervening in something so minor as Morgaine's incursion. More worrying still, things had been that way since time immemorial, and time that wasn't remembered by the Time Lords might not ever have really existed.

This is the meat of the Doctor's side of this story -- that the treatment of parallel universes in Who is, as with most other things, massively inconsistent. Just recently on the anon meme people were complaining that RTD was wrong to say he'd kept faith 100% with old school because they felt Rise of the Cybermen didn't fit with Inferno, but none of it fits together right.

It is, of course, a fool's errand to try and reconcile the vast unwieldy mass of Who canon into anything like coherency, but doing so for parallel universes in particular is a perennial obsession of mine; back in the EDA days, I remember spending a long time trying to work out how the parallel universes Sabbath arc was supposed to fit together with the rest of Who (there's a load of stuff in ... I think Time Zero, but I might be wrong ... about the multiverse allowing for free will, which runs counter to most people's perceptions of such things (that if everything happens then you just happen to be the you who made choice X and there's another you out there who did the exact opposite); I remain convinced that it was a deliberate echo of that weird bit in Inferno where pretty much Three's first statement on reaching Inferno-Earth is "then free will isn't an illusion").

So why were his memories different? Surely it was solipsistic in the extreme to declare that his own history was the true one, if it no longer coincided with that of the entire multiverse he inhabited. Occam's Razor would insist that he was simply going mad.

Not that this story really succeeds in reconciling anything, come to think of it; it just waves the problems around shouting "Argh, it's really complicated!" This is as close as it comes, with the idea that the Doctor's personal timeline is twisting through changes in reality. In some ways, this makes the most sense, as all the information we have is about the Doctor's adventures, but many of the people who play the fitting-everything-together game find that an unsatisfactory answer.

He stalked through the darkened passageways of the house and out into the driveway where Bessie was waiting. The reality of her, the knowledge that she had been there at the Inferno project, was reassuring.

He stroked her bonnet, his earlier self's affection for the machine, both its raw simplicity and the complexity he had added, flooding back into his mind. He wondered sometimes if that previous incarnation's fondness for vehicles was merely a quirk of the regenerative reshuffle, or a displacement of his frustration at being stuck on Earth. And then he wondered if it mattered.

"Ace didn't treat you too badly, did she?" he said, patting the driving wheel. "No, of course she didn't." For a moment, he saw his companion reflected in the windscreen as she looked down at him from a window, then disappeared behind the curtain.

It didn't help to think of other selves, though. This Gordian knot of changes in the very nature of the timeline grew only more complex when he considered their recent misadventure, this collision of his future with his present. Somehow, knowing that he was destined to become Merlin made his future seem more uncertain, not less. Or perhaps it was the dark suspicion that perhaps even he had alternate selves now, that only some subset of an infinite number of possible Doctors would end up as Arthur's wizard.

This is where we start to veer off into the meta side of things, with the idea that Merlin is Muldwych from the NAs, and he might not ever happen on screen now (though the "am I ginger?" line from tCI is a clear callout, so it's not like RTD forgot about it; whether Moffat cares or not is another question). Matching up in-story parallel universes with out-of-story supposed different branches of canon is becoming a bit of a fixation of mine -- it's most of the point of the big weirdy climax to my tardisbigbang story and it also came into my lgbtfest and femslash09 fics. And a bit my henriettastreet ficathon fics as well. Oh dear, I am becoming a one trick pony. Must write something different. ~~Just as soon as I've got these current fics out of the way.~~

Even supposedly impossible knots could always be untied, if you looked at them in a sufficient number of dimensions. But what if the knot was itself made of higher dimensions?

I'd just like to disclaim that I don't understand knot theory in the slightest. I can barely even tie knots.

Something was wrong with time. He knew it, and he knew he'd been avoiding the situation. Some drastic change was coming, or perhaps had already come. He could sense that he'd be facing more interdimensional issues before too long. Perhaps they would even turn out to have some bearing on the less obvious irregularities in Ace's timeline.

That last sentence is freighted with far more meta than it could possibly bear, to be honest. The "obvious irregularities" are the Fenric-related stuff that'll be sorted soon, but the "less obvious" ones are the divergences between NA Ace, PDA Ace and BF Ace, with particular reference to the stupid Perry/Tucker replace-Ace-with-another-Ace-from-a-parallel-dimension-and-then-forget-it-ever-happened thing. It's also a thing about the Paradise Towers reference cockup in Timewyrm: Genesys; Paul Cornell of course did the first of the NAs' internal-continuity-fixes with the bit in Revelation about the Doctor accidentally giving her some of Mel's memories, but I really, really don't like memory-editing (y halo thar, my hatred for the end of Journey's End). So on top of all the other stuff there is also a vague hint somewhere here that maybe some version of Ace DID go to Paradise Towers, because S24 happened in a different order or something.

The Doctor hauled himself into the driver's seat. Ace might have found a temporary still point, an inflection on her trajectory, but he needed to be in motion, away from the raw humanity at play in the house behind him. He set the controls, and sped off into the future, not quite so unknowable as it had once been.

But then, he reflected as he drove along the moonlit lanes, he had long known something of his future. His arcane knowledge of the faces of his coming bodies had been a strange comfort to him throughout his travels (this is the Eighth Man Bound bit from Christmas on a Rational Planet, because no story of mine is complete without an inclusion of Miles-canon), but now the fact that he'd only reached as far as his next life -- accomplishment though forcing the ritual so far had been, in those heady Academy days of rebellion and taboo-breaking -- filled him with an inchoate dread. How many different ninth selves might he have?

The Doctor came to a fork in the road.

The NAs, Doctor! Follow the sign to the NAs!

DVD commentary: I took the one less travelled by

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:40:26 GMT

Requested by biichan.

This was my entry in the Cliche Swap ficathon lizbee ran. It was particularly interesting because of the disconnection between the suggestions of pairings and the suggestions of clichés. I ended up picking neadods's very clever "Romana in Jack's place as head of Torchwood going through the 20th century on the slow path" prompt and doing it with Romana/Duggan. So basically, Duggan is Ianto.

Duggan looked down at the replicant lying on the tarmac with satisfaction. Its lifeless plastic face had come to rest several feet away from its head after he'd used his right hook on it. The wiring and circuitry thus exposed sputtered out a few sparks, and then was inert.

The idea is that they're clearing up the mess post-Resurrection-of-the-Daleks. In About Time 5, Miles and Wood make the very good point that the whole thing of duplicates at the highest levels of society being left behind at the end isn't a plot hook so much as a commentary on the politics of the time. But I used it for plot anyway.

Romana tutted as she came up alongside him. "Do you have to be so violent?" she said, for what was ... oh, only about the third time that week.

"He was a duplicate!" Duggan protested.

"And did you know that when you hit him?" she asked.

"Well, I couldn't say I was one hundred per cent certain then, but I am now!" He gestured at the robot. "Real people don't have clockwork and cogs or whatever just below their skin."

She gave him a look, one of those cold, unreadable ones she got sometimes. Obviously Romana's not sure she counts as a real person in Duggan's estimation given this; this is sort of trying to hint at the darker side of their City of Death interaction. Then her face softened, marginally. "We'll have to get him out of the way quickly. It makes me nervous being on One's patch."

"Well, it's not as though we've got a choice. They're not going to clear up this mess, are they?" Torchwood Three had, in fact, discussed at length how their London counterparts were probably trying to use the infiltration of the British government by alien androids for all sorts of nefarious ends. Romana was particularly concerned about mutterings about a new office building on the Isle of Dogs. He'd tried to explain to her how ridiculous that was, but it was another of those things she didn't really get. This is Canary Wharf, of course; Romana knows the rift's up there and that Torchwood One are trying to reach it.

Duggan's attention came back to the present when the commandeered ambulance screamed round the corner. Chris and Clare got out quickly, badly disguised as paramedics -- Chris's uniform was too short, while Clare's was too long, but the area was mercifully free of witnesses anyway. They fetched a stretcher from the back, while Harry bustled around them in his actual doctor's outfit. The Parsons loaded the duplicate onto the stretcher, while Harry went to fetch the robot's plastic face. When he smoothed it back over the metal skull and realised how high up in Mrs Thatcher's cabinet the duplicate had been, he let out a quiet "blimey". In the original version, this was all we got of Chris and Clare out of Shada and Harry, but then I added the middle bit.

The team exchanged looks with each other. "Let's get this thing back to Cardiff as soon as possible," Romana said. "I want to know exactly what we're dealing with here."

* * *

This whole middle section came about because it became very clear thanks to my betas that the original version relied on the reader having spent exactly as long reading up Season 17 episode guides and such as I had in preparation for writing it, so I put in more explainy stuff. And now it contains most of my favourite bits of the fic, so I'm very glad I did.

Duggan came into the lab carrying the tray of tea mugs carefully. The others were crowded round one of the many improbable bits of kit, waiting for who-knew-what to happen. Duggan's out of his depth with the technical stuff, he just likes hitting stuff. I am entirely happy to stereotype him. He passed the drinks out wordlessly; Harry and Chris murmured something that might have been thanks, but Clare picked hers up and peeled herself away, joining him in the doorway as he took a long sip from his own mug. He'd have preferred coffee, but he'd never been able to persuade the others of its qualities.

Clare glanced upwards at the entrance to Romana's office. Duggan followed her eyes and saw Romana standing, stock still, staring into the nothingness at the heart of the Hub. "She's been like that for almost an hour," Clare said, conversationally.

Duggan drank some more of his tea.

"And she seemed quite withdrawn in the ambulance on the way back here," Clare went on.

Duggan made a noncommital noise.

"I just thought ... well, maybe you might understand her better."

Duggan laughed, a short, mirthless bark. "None of us understand her, Clare. I wouldn't pretend to have any special insight."

I quite like this bit, Clare trying to be elliptical but Duggan making her come out with it. I am a bit torn over whether it's a bit stereotypical-gender-roles to make Clare-the-only-other-girl be the one who talks to him about it, rather than one of the other two.

"Well, you know ..." She dropped her voice to a whisper so that her husband wouldn't be able to hear. "I mean, I'd like to think I know everything about Chris." She smiled. "Do you remember? Three years ago today?"

Duggan did remember. He remembered emptying rather more bullets than might reasonably be thought to be required into a water-golem, while Clare wrestled hand-to-hand with another made of grass, desperately trying to keep it from staining her wedding dress. "I think the constant improbable danger is about the only thing our two relationships have in common," he said.

"I found ..." Clare stopped, started again. "The other day, I was looking through some old files. I found a picture. She was working here during World War II. She didn't look any different to how she does now. Four decades and no change at all."

"1869," Duggan said quietly. It was strangely gratifying how wide Clare's eyes became.

This is a bit borrowed from Ianto, 'cos at least in my head he's forever looking up Jack in the files.

Duggan remembered that feeling, the astonishment at each new revelation. Remembered the sense of accomplishment at finding another piece of the puzzle, whether through his own sly detective work or teasing it out of Romana herself. Not that she'd said much to him recently; Clare was right, she was more withdrawn than she'd once been. He tended to avoid thinking about it.

Clare finally found her voice again amidst her own amazement. "She was born in eighteen sixty nine?"

"Oh, no," Duggan said. "That's just the year she arrived here on Earth. I'm sure she's much older than that." Clare's eyes went wider still.

"I always thought ... I mean, we met her for the first time a few years ago, in Cambridge. And then a few months later she's back, recruiting us for Torchwood. I thought that first time had been me and Chris getting caught up in ... well, you know. Business as usual."

"It was Paris for me," Duggan said. "But that was a long time ago for her, and I imagine your time in Cambridge was the same. Was she with a curly-haired chap, called himself the Doctor?"

Clare nodded. "I ... well, actually I assumed he'd died. That he was a Torchwood operative and she needed to replace him."

Duggan smiled thinly. "When you were looking in the files, did you see him?"

Clare glanced at the ceiling, recalling what she'd seen. "No," she said, teasing the syllable out into an expression of something like wonder.

"I never have, and I suspect I've looked at a lot more files than you have. No, I think all of that happened to Romana a long time ago, from her point of view. But I think ..."

"What do you think?" Clare asked, when he hadn't spoken for a long moment.

Duggan went for another tack, trying to shed some light on why he thought what he did, as much for his own benefit as Clare's. "Back when she recruited you -- I'd been here less than a year myself, then, you realise -- she said something to me that I didn't really understand at the time. She told me that linearity was important. That there were places she shouldn't go, people she couldn't see, because she hadn't happened to them yet. And when she was going out to recruit you two, she told me that she'd had to be very strict with herself a few years earlier about not going to your graduation ceremonies."

Clare laughed. "Really? That's almost sweet."

"But of course you hadn't met her then. And even if she'd just been another face in the crowd, there's an outside chance you'd have noticed her, and recognised her again when you met her in Cambridge, even though you didn't when she experienced those events. I'm guessing at some of this, you realise," he said, when he saw her nodding a little too vigorously. "She didn't explain it quite like this."

This is the main explainy bit, because in the original version it wasn't too clear who Chris and Clare were, unless you'd just watched Shada the day before or something, and it also wasn't particularly clear why Romana doesn't just go and stop the war before it started.

"Maybe not, but it certainly makes sense with some of the higher dimensional geometries we've seen around here, if Novikov turns out to be wrong about this self-consistency thing of his."

Someone on the anon meme's very fond of Novikov's self-consistency principle. My personal opinion is that trying to apply even the most speculative real world physics to the Whoniverse is a hiding to nothing, but it's a useful bit of technobabble to pinch.

"Well, I'll take your word for that," Duggan said. He coughed. "The thing is, I think it's the same with that Doctor bloke. I think he's still out there somewhere. But she can't meet him yet."

Clare was about to say something more, but Chris called, "Clare, come and see this! It's quite extraordinary!"

"I'd better get back," she said. Duggan nodded.

After Clare had gone, he looked back up at the office door. Romana had gone back inside, but somehow her absence was as tangible as her eerily still presence had been earlier.

Duggan took another sip of his tea. It had gone stone cold.

Ooh, PORTENTOUS.

* * *

Duggan slipped into Romana's office clutching the manila folder. When she didn't respond to his entrance, he walked up to her desk and put it down. "Sullivan's report on the duplicate we recovered. The Parsons helped, it not being so much in the medical line."

Romana looked up. "They're not still here, are they? It's their anniversary tonight, I wouldn't want to think they were staying late."

"They went home an hour ago. You said goodbye to them. In fact, I think you told them to have fun."

Witness my insane heteronormativity with the canon ship. I could claim it's about paralleling Gwen/Rhys but with a Rhys on the inside, but it's actually just that I really love Chris/Clare and want them to get a saccharine happy ending.

"Did I really?" She smiled at him. "Still. Wedded bliss, eh?"

"It's not for all of us," Duggan said.

"Quite." She smiled again, this time with a twinkle in her eye that made his heart skip a beat. But then she looked down again, opening the folder. Duggan started to leave, but hovered in the doorway when he heard her breath catch.

"Sit down, Duggan," Romana said without looking up.

Duggan knew that tone in her voice, the one that said she wanted to talk. They'd had several such chats over the course of this strange relationship of theirs. Each time he came away more confused about her history, not less.

With a slight reluctance at getting dragged into this sort of thing again, he sat down on the sofa.

When Romana sat beside him, she put her hand on his knee for a moment, then withdrew it. Such indecisiveness was not common for Romana, but he'd come to recognise it as another sign associated with her opening up.

I do quite like the way I've got the relationship here, with them being a bit from-completely-different-worlds much of the time but basically complimenting each other rather than constantly at odds.

"I know where the duplicates came from," she said. "Oh, I had my suspicions, of course, but the report confirms it. Certain trace elements in their construction, non-terrestrial isotope balances, that sort of thing. Chris is very good at mass spectroscopy, isn't he?"

"Er, yes, I'm sure he is." Duggan cleared his throat slightly. "Does that help us in any way?"

"Oh, we can probably rig up some sort of detector based on it. You'll be able to be sure, next time." She looked up and smiled at him, a tiny moment before becoming lost in her own thoughts once more.

"And these ... non-terrestrials, are they a threat?"

She looked at him again, but now she wasn't smiling at all. She held his gaze, fixed him with those eyes that burned with an incomprehensible flame. "They're the worst creatures in the universe. Horrors beyond imagining. They live only to destroy everything not themselves. Once, long ago, they captured me, tortured me for decades." She looked away, hunching up on herself. "I remember the final battle. Everything burning, history itself turning to the memory of ash. And at the centre of the inferno, there he was, burning himself as he changed."

The first bit of this is deliberately intended to echo Jack's stuff about the unnamed aliens that attacked his planet and did nasty things to Gray. The torture bit is Apocalypse Element, because there are some satisfying not-quite-parallels between canon Torchwood and this version.

Duggan put his arm round her uncertainly. Her shoulders didn't relax a single iota, but nor did she flinch away. "The Doctor," he said. A statement, not a question.

Romana nodded minutely. "It was the right thing to do. I told him to do it, and I'd do it again."

I go back and forth in fanon over who manipulated who into what at the end of the Time War, but this is the version that works for Romana's story here.

Duggan wondered at that: the Doctor he'd met in Paris hadn't seemed the type to do that sort of thing, or to do Romana's dirty work in general. But time changed everyone, he supposed. Maybe it was even changing him.

Romana spoke again, very quietly. "I think ... He must have thought I'd died. My TARDIS had died, screaming with all the others as its origin was undone. Only his survived, its past obscure and convoluted enough to protect it. The last of Gallifrey, only able to survive by being so un-Gallifreyan." She shook her head. "He must have thought I'd died with it."

This is a very indirect echo of the thing about Iris's obscure origins letting her get out of The Ancestor Cell fooming.

"But you hadn't," Duggan said. "You're still alive now. Here on Earth, still doing the right thing."

"Tossed by the Time Winds like a piece of flotsam ... Do you know how I ended up here?"

"The Rift. It did something to that bracelet of yours ..." He nodded over at the desk, the inert chunk of metal that she always kept there.

"Never mind its effect on the ring! I can feel it," she told him, clutching his hand in her own, gripping it hard until her knuckles went white. "Pulsing through my body, calling to me. Every second of every day. Time can be changed, Duggan. The Rift is many things, but most of all it's potential. The potential to change everything."

"Everything?"

"Everything," she said quietly. "These androids, I don't just know where they're from, I know when. One of the opening skirmishes of the War, when the enemy's control over time was ridiculously crude. There were supposed to be duplicates of the High Council, never mind human politicians. A duplicate of me." She laughed hollowly. "But the Doctor nipped the whole thing in the bud. We're cleaning up his mess, that's all."

"But if this is all from before, then ... you could chase them back wherever they came from, stop the war at a point when it had barely started. Or warn the Doctor ..."

"I shouldn't be able to," she said. "What's done is done and can't be undone. Shouldn't be undone. This isn't just a question of preserving linearity. There ought to be an event horizon in relative time, locking off the entirety of the War from the rest of the timeline."

And this bit is directly ripped off from Lance Parkin in The Gallifrey Chronicles, where "an event horizon in relative time" is his answer to the "why can't the Doctor meet Time Lords from before?" question that annoying people on the OG had been asking for ever.

The puzzle was slotting together all too neatly in Duggan's mind. "But the Rift, its potential ..."

"Exactly. I could. There's a chink in the armour, a way to pick the lock."

Neither said anything for a while. "So?" Duggan prompted eventually.

"So nothing. I mustn't do it. But I have to actively make that choice. And the Rift sings the possibility of it to me every single moment."

He moved his hand down a fraction, resting it protectively on her shoulder blade. "I--"

She kissed him then, fiercely, climbing quickly on top of him. Did she want to drown out that Rift-song, however imperfectly, however briefly? Or were there more secrets yet unspoken, more layers of the onion left to unpeel? He didn't know, knew he could never know, and as his hands went instinctively to her sides, her back, nor did he care.

Porn. Because they're Jack/Ianto.

About ten minutes later, she whispered in his ear, "You can be more violent, you know."

Duggan allowed himself a smile. That made the fifth time in a week she'd said that.

AND THEN DUGGAN DIED POINTLESSLY DURING AN INVASION BY NOT PARTICULARLY SCARY ALIENS BECAUSE OF ROMANA'S POOR PLANNING SKILLS. Or, perhaps, not.

That meme

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:45:47 GMT

This is that meme where you do the first lines of your last 20 fics (which rather neatly takes me back to last year's bluesuit_fic, this year's version of which is what this is procrastination from writing), last seen with everyone. It is in order of posting-to-Teaspoon-ness, out of my laziness.

"You're going to need to get a job, you know."
"Pizza!" Gwen called as she kicked the door closed behind her.
The Brigadier marched into the lab in his customary good order, swagger stick tucked beneath his elbow and cap perfectly aligned.
Leela stalks through the forest with a deliberate stride. She is light years and millennia from the place of her birth, yet perfectly at home.
Donna clung onto the console for dear life as the TARDIS shuddered through its materialisation.
Martha walked through the deserted school, not entirely sure she was going in the right direction.
Tom wasn't sure which he saw first: Martha, or the sign she was holding up saying "THOMAS MILLIGAN" in neatly lettered black marker pen.
Martha clutched her phone as though it was a magical talisman, an object of power that could draw things to her across desolate wastes of space and time. Which, in a way, it was.
Martha shudders as the Doctor comes inside her.
Duggan looked down at the replicant lying on the tarmac with satisfaction.
The object sat at an impossible angle to reality, humming with subtle power.
Barbara watches Ian sleep.
The Doctor sipped the tea Ace had made for him and made a face for just long enough that she knew she'd made a mess of it.
"What do you think of this one?" asked Shou Yuing, stroking the soft fabric of a short V-necked dress.
Benny clambered into the shuttle with her bag slung over her shoulder.
When the man steps aboard, Iris is under the dashboard executing a particularly tricky piece of rerouting on my exitonic circuitry.
Compassion drifted in the Vortex, bathed in a million million signals.
Ace McShane was good at killing Daleks.
"Come on, Martha, it'll be fun. And it'll be good for us to have fun. You said that."
The motorcycle charges down the road, engine revving noisily.

Obvious observations: I write about Martha a lot, don't I? Martha and TARDISes. And increasingly about Aaaaaaace, who I used to be dead scared of Doing Wrong. All of those are written to a prompt of some description (mostly ficathons, some stuff from Fall Fandom Free For All, a few kink memes), with the exception of the Battlefield tag which was written like the very next day after I'd watched it on DVD so I think the episode itself kind of counts as the prompt there. It is not that I don't have other ideas, but I tend to need the stick of not-flaking-out or whatever to make me finish stuff. In terms of the first lines themselves, they seem to tend towards "in media res, but the reader can start making educated guesses that will almost certainly be right straight away", with occasional grand declarative statements. I think I do sometimes rely on the headers to convey information that really ought to be in the fic itself.

I have just realised that being lazy and using Teaspoon is actually wrongness, because I wrote this one fic in another fandom, no really I did. So between 15 and 16 should be:

15a. Buffy whistled quietly as she walked up the corridor to her dorm room.

but I am too lazy to go back and change it now.

(Erm, yes, I do know I haven't done any of those DVD commentaries yet, but I will do them next week. And I did get your email, biichan, and will attend to it later today. I wish I had a good excuse for being a flake this week, but the simple fact of the matter is that I reinstalled Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords on Monday and have been playing it pretty much non-stop ever since. OMGsuchanawesomegameshameabouttheendingbutnevermind)

Fic/meme

ionlylurkhere@googlemail.com — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 14:39:04 GMT

Fic: Days Like Crazy Paving, PG-rated metatastic post-Time-War Mel/Ace fic for glinda_penguin in the femslash09 ficathon.

Meme: Now that I have Free Time once more, I'm going to do another go round of the DVD commentary meme, because I am a bit in love with rambling on at length in a pretentious and self-involved way.

Request any fic of mine and I will provide you with a commentary/annotations, like a DVD extra.

(In previous iterations, I have covered Going Forward, In All Her Beliefs, The Turn of the Universe, Hardly Moving Yet and Do You Remember the First Time?)