what about barbara, the doctor wanted to yell

[chicafrom3]

There are some really good things about my current job, including regular paychecks, three-day weekends, and paid sick leave/vacation time (which I haven't used yet but it's nice to know it's there). On the other hand, the flip side of those three-day weekends is a forty-hour work week packed into four days combined with a half-hour one-way commute, which doesn't leave me a lot of time during those four days for...anything not work-related.

That was a mildly long-winded way of saying that this post is a collection of reactions to Doctor Who-related things that everyone else has already had a chance to react to.

First of all, the new series Target novelizations were finally released in dead-tree format in the US, hallelujah, and before I share my Feelings I feel obligated to state that I am still working my way through the classic series Target novelizations. It's been slowed down a lot by a) the aforementioned job and b) an influx of books I've felt like I needed to read immediately, but progress is being made. I'm about halfway through Leela's run right now. Next reaction post coming when I finish Four's era.

But anyway the new ones.

She thought of the body dissolving, the last vestige of her boyfriend, and she felt a surge of horror in her heart, the enormity of it. Mickey. Lovely Mickey Smith, with his smile and his mates and his daft yellow Beetle, the only boy who'd buy a car because it was funny, not because it was cool. And it hurt so much, to see the chain of his family across the decades, Odessa, Jackson, Rita-Anne, now Mickey, all gone.

The novelization is a lot kinder to Mickey than the actual episode. I love Mickey, so this is a big bonus for me. Thanks, RTD!

It's also a lot kinder to the plot. Like all the best Target novelizations, it has realized that it is free of budgetary restrictions and can do a lot more with the bare bones of the story. A lot of characters get fleshed out, from Bernie Wilson the Henrik's caretaker to Mickey himself (he even gets a band who are similarly fleshed out!) to Clyde and his family (possibly the best moment in the book is Clyde's wife Caroline vowing revenge on the Doctor). The Auton impersonation of Mickey is a little less ridiculous (still kind of ridiculous). The Auton plan in general is more complex and the Doctor's confrontation with the Nestene Consciousness is more complicated -- there's a second impersonation of Mickey that works really well.

Rose, unsurprisingly, is the main viewpoint character, as in the episode itself, and she comes off really well. I always forget how likeable she was to begin with, because I freely admit I got really soured on her by the end of her tenure, but she gets off to a really good start. And actually getting inside her head helps, too -- it's easy to get frustrated by her belief that she deserves better than the people around her, but then you get it filtered through "the people around me don't think I'm capable of much" and "I always thought I would be good in a crisis but look at me I just froze and did nothing" (not direct quotes) and it helps.

And then there's the Doctor.

To her surprise, he stopped and looked at her with genuine alarm. 'Oh no, no, no,' he said. 'You don't understand. Those people, asking questions. I loved them. Oh my God, I loved them all.' It was the strangest thing, he looked as though he could cry. Then he turned and walked away.

Ouch. :/

The Doctor is off-screen for much of the book; he intersects with Rose only intermittently until the end, when they defeat the Nestene Consciousness together. But in the moments he shows up he's fantastic. I love Nine, and he's realized beautifully on the page -- the moments when the grief just hits like a brick, the moments he's just so very alien, one particular moment when Rose realizes the leather jacket and the tough-guy posture is just an act... it all works. I miss you, Nine. I wish things between Chris Eccleston and the behind-the-scenes team hadn't been so awful that it soured him on doing DW apparently ever again, because he was fantastic.

And I would, of course, be remiss if I didn't geek out about the Thirteenth Doctor shoutout, followed by a collection of potential future Doctors, all of whom sound awesome. ♥♥♥ I want all of them, but most of all I want Thirteen. Now. Pls.

'One time we had to hop. Do you remember? Hopping for our lives?'
He started hopping. Rose did not remember and stared at him. He slowed down.
'Yeah? All that hopping? Remember hopping for your life? Yeah? Hop? With the... no?'

I'll be upfront here: This was my least favorite of the four. Probably not coincidentally, this is also my least favorite episode of the four that were adapted. Possibly coincidentally, this is also the only one of the four that doesn't give a nod to the Thirteenth Doctor.

This isn't to say it's bad. It isn't. It even improves on the episode in a few ways, including the relationship between Daniel Llewellyn and Sally Jacobs (♥). There's some very sweet moments between Rose and Mickey and between Rose and Jackie and between Jackie and Mickey, and Rose's freakout over the Doctor's regeneration is beautifully done (she calls Ten 'it' for the first several pages!). During the wardrobe scene, the narration points out that the Doctor wrongly considers himself not a vain main and I laughed aloud. The Hitchhiker's Guide shoutout is even better than the screen version.

But overall it's just a fairly faithful adaptation of an episode mostly memorable for David Tennant staggering around in Chris Eccleston's clothes and an infuriating ending that is no less infuriating on the page. A good read but not one I'll be going back to very often.

All that matters is this: Osgood lives--and so long as the fangirls stand guard on the gates of humanity, so will we.

This one is so obviously written by Steven Moffat I'm a little surprised they felt the need to put his name on the cover.

Since it is Moffat, it's possibly unsurprising that this is the one that takes the most liberties with the material it's adapting. Oh, the plot's the same, the broad strokes are the same, even some of the lines are the same, but he clearly just took the spirit of things and ran with it, and it's all the better for it. There's a non-linear structure (it starts with Chapter 8, to begin with, and as for Chapter 9...well.) and unreliable narrators galore (combined with some really interesting musings on how the Doctor perceives himself, especially when there's more than one of him around) and I thought I had Feelings about Cass before, I knew nothing (the stupid clown therapy bot I can't).

I kind of ship Osgood/McGillop but her reasoning for not getting romantically involved with him is inarguable.

I also kind of ship Clara/Kate.

The whole thing is tied together by notes from the Curator, who also reveals a few other things relevant to events -- most notably that the Doctor visited the Brigadier many, many times over the last few years of his life, I may have cried a bit. Don't judge me.

One of my favorite things was the approach to the three Doctors in the Tower of London. It's told three times, first from the War Doctor's perspective, then from the Tenth's, then from the Eleventh's, each of them bringing to it their own unique biases and thoughts, each of them getting judgmental at each other, each of them horrified by themselves. This is what the Doctor's like when he's alone.

I'll admit I was also deeply endeared by the War Doctor's initial conviction that Ten and Eleven were identical twelve-year-old boys. And the Moment is an absolute delight, especially when she pops up long after the events of this story are over. River turns up multiple times and gives me all kinds of feelings (the Doctor can never stop thinking about her death when he's with her, which is awful and exactly right) and there's a little nod to Listen (aka one of my favorite episodes ever) that make me cheer.

And there was this:

I have four centuries of memories about that dungeon; the time I spent inside it, and the many years I travelled in its shadow. But I think the most vivid one of all--and the most important because it felt like the final lesson of those four hundred years of my life--was Clara Oswald looking at me puzzled, and saying: 'It wasn't locked.'

And, of course, the Thirteenth Doctor and all my feelings about her:

Well, anyway, enough brooding, I decided. The day of the Doctor was over at last, and it was time to get my head back in the game. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea is getting cold. Come on, Doctor, work to do.
So it was me who set off across the muddy battlefield towards the TARDIS, but it was the Doctor who opened the door, stepped inside, and slammed it shut behind her.

Probably my favorite of the four, an absolute joy to read.

The First Doctor was looking at the setting sun, at the long shadows it cast. '"Oh, look, it's dark,"' he quoted. '"My day is done".'
The Doctor recognized the poem. "'The moon so cold was once the sun".'
'"Each longed-for day that comes at last ..."'
'"Becomes, too soon, the longed-for past."'
They clinked their mugs together. 'Borusa,' sighed the First Doctor.
'Worst poet ever.'
'Absolutely the worst.'

This is the one that most reminded me of the classic series novelizations, stylistically speaking, and probably intentionally.

Generally a pretty faithful adaptation, but the additions are excellent. It tackles the one real problem I have with the episode (One's OTT sexism -- he absolutely could be sexist, but Twice Upon A Time goes overboard with it) and tries to amend it as best as possible without completely dropping that angle (as per my subject line, Twelve points out (well, in the narration, at least) that Barbara would never have put up with being talked about that way, and One's reaction to Bill saying she also has 'loads' of experience with 'the fairer sex' is dropped, and it's heavily implied that One is playing it up to get under Twelve's skin). There's also some really sweet moments about Heather (and CATS and the SEA and:

She'd recalled the last kiss, and the whisper of water against her face, and that she had never seen Heather leave, because Heather had waited until after hope.

ignore me I'm having OTP feelings for a moment).

The return of Twelve's memories of Clara Oswald is also really well done, too:

Because this person looking at him was so utterly in charge of her own safety, and also, obviously, gone now too, into the same useful afterlife as Bill. She had faced her raven, in the end and doubtless in a surprising way, with style. She'd probably defeated that raven and found an entirely different one.

He wanted to let her inside his head and show her how much of her was in here now. It was like she was dancing through his neurons. The sound of her voice and the things they'd done together were in so many associations, so many connections to other things that he'd been shying away from lately, because they'd seemed so ... dull. They had been dull because they had been without her. To see her again was to see hope. Because, after all, wasn't the lesson of her story, the story he had been without, that there was always hope?

...ignore me, I'm having Clara Oswald feelings for a moment.

And the entire regeneration is done beautifully, from the brief moment we spend with One as he lets go and moves on to Twelve's despair evolving into acceptance, this little aside:

There were a few things he wanted to say to whatever old or young pale-skinned man took his place. Because he was one of those stuck-in-a-rut Time Lords who always got basically the same model of body. He wouldn't be ginger, either, with his rotten luck.

leading into his lovely goodbye speech (I love this speech so much), his moment of realizing who is coming next, and then the debut of Thirteen and her immediate joy at, well, everything. EVERYTHING. 'Oh,' she said, 'brilliant!'

BRILLIANT.


I'm so glad they did this. I do wonder how they picked which episodes would be novelized -- I assume RTD and Moffat got to pick which episodes they adapted, but while each book on its own makes perfect sense it's just a little odd to me that for the RTD era we got each Doctor's first episode and for the Moffat era we got each Doctor's big multi-Doctor episode? Admittedly RTD didn't have a chance to do the big multi-Doctor episodes. But still.

Are they going to be doing more of these? Please? My vote is for ALL the episodes, but if I can only pick one additional story per Doctor, please adapt Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways, The Doctor's Daughter, The Eleventh Hour, and Face The Raven/Heaven Sent/Hell Bent. I don't think I'm asking for too much, thank you.

And then, you know, all of Thirteen's episodes, as they air.

There's a lot of reasons I love the novelizations. I love seeing what the writers do when they are freed of the constraints of budgets and time limits and what you can show before the watershed. To an extent I love how they bring the benefit of hindsight to each script. (Look, I can't explain why I'm still not okay with the First Doctor talking about the Time Lords in the original novelizations but I'm delighted by the War Doctor referencing Listen and Thirteen showing up in 3/4 books, but we all have our own biases.) I love that we get to see into characters' heads in a way that television simply does not permit. Look, I love TV, but I'm a bookworm at heart, and books afford a whole range of options that television doesn't.

Please do more of these, BBC. Please?



In semi-related news, some Thirteen-related stuff leaked earlier this week, and like a bad fan I immediately hunted it down to see for myself.

And I love her. This is not a surprise, but, oh man, I love her so much. "Sorry, half an hour ago I was a white-haired Scotsman." And I love Officer Khan Yaz to her friends. And Ryan got to say about three words and I don't care I love him. TONGUE! Clever boy. Biology.

I'm serious, here, instant infatuation with all three of them, and "Shame, I'm looking for a Doctor."

I'm not as sold on the new sonic screwdriver design yet, but maybe it'll look better in action -- and Jodie in those goggles is possibly both the cutest and the most Doctor-y thing I've seen in a while.

I assume all of this was meant to be released as SDCC? I feel bad for TPTB that it got leaked early, but not bad enough to not check it out. It's glorious. I want full episodes nowwww./whine



And I guess the last thing to include here is that I just received my copy of Twice Upon A Time on Blu-Ray! But aside from being mildly disappointed in the lackluster bonus features, I don't have a whole lot to say about that. It's an episode I enjoy a lot and I'm glad to have it on Blu-Ray now. ♥