promethia

(The Eden Disorder, by Naumaxia on YouTube.)

I love everything about Good Omens, but if I had to choose one thing, one single thing, it would be that Crowley is the Serpent of Eden. The show means nothing without it.

Do you ever think about how Aziraphale is a huge fan of Crowley's work? The collective output of knowledge and creativity of the human race is the direct result of the Fall from Eden.

( On the subject of the bookshop. )

Warnings: Includes spoilers for Pyramid at the End of the World and the next time trailer for Lie of the Land. So long. So very long. Not properly edited. Seven years of accumulated symbolism is such an unwieldily thing, guys, I'm sorry.

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Bill started out on this show, I thought, remarkably devoid of symbolism. Clara and River and even Amy, to an extent, all entered the show dripping in symbolism. With names that begged to be analyzed and new veins of metaphoric imagery flowing from them.

Amy was about fairy tales and growing up. Apples and stories. She and the Doctor were lost children, running away together, learning how to grow up.

River was about life and the power of grace and the flow of time. She was associated with water and forests and music, life and death and renewal. Her appearance told us the Doctor was going to grow and heal and and again be a force for life and wellbeing.

Clara was about clarity and power and rules, and about mirroring the Doctor. She brought with her flowers and eggs and birds: symbols of fruitfulness, rebirth, and freedom. On her first appearance she symbolically healed the Time War by severing the Doctor’s connection to the Daleks.

Missy came in and co-opted all the symbolic threads the others had established and made them evil: a twisted mother figure. Queen of no natural forces, but of the undead. And her influence twisted up Twelve and Clara and spread over their whole era, as they gripped tighter and tighter to each other, unwilling to let time and nature run their course.

To see even an episode or two of any of these women was to understand, quite quickly, major things about what they would mean.

This did not happen with Bill. Bill was remarkably, intriguingly, and somewhat reassuringly . . . flat.

( Read more... )

*deep breath* Ok, if you're gonna play at guessing at Moffat Who, sooner or later you have to put your cards on the table. So here's how I see this whole thing going. It's a question of . . . aesthetics. Let me show you:

( Narrative seeking order . . . )

(If you leave a comment and I've disappeared, I'm sorry. I have today off and then life goes sideways for awhile. I will do my best.)

My descent into fandom bum-hood continues with, perhaps, the worst-explained post of all time. If you follow this, you get all the gold stars, but frankly, I won't blame you if you don't want to wade through my brain-dump. Input welcomed and desired, though.

( Spoilers through A Town Called Mercy )

Hi guys *waves* Is anybody still around? I'll apologize here for my general Not Being Here for the last I've Lost Track of How Long. You'll have to excuse me because Life and also Things Far Too Boring to Talk About and, yes, you may feel free to hate me for abandoning you /guilt

But the internet is for dissecting television in obsessive detail, so on to the Doctor Who:

I've had another thought that I'd like to contribute to the ongoing efforts to fanwank season six into some sort of emotional continuity for the Pond family. This time it's about Amy and what I think has become the accepted wisdom about her behavior in the second half of the season (?): that she was repressing her feelings about what had happened with Melody because that is Amy and how she deals with adversity. This is the girl who had never told her fiance she loved him, after all.

( Not buying it )

Just to remind myself, because it bears reminding, and because I do manage to forget it: Moffat doesn't write good and evil.  Sure, he plays with the vocabulary sometimes (generally to deconstruct and undermine it), but that's never what it's about.  The real struggle, the real dynamic, the real juxtaposition on which everything hinges is CHAOS and ORDER.  Those are the forces we're dealing with.

1) Vid rec: Land's End by cherryice (River Song, awake in the waiting sea.) OMG, guys, go watch this now. It's . . . a River vid. I mean about River, about her life (and all the rest of their lives, too--I think especially Amy). Anyone struggling with the AGMGTW reveal, I think this might . . . actually . . . help? In a cathartic sense, cause it's not really a pretty picture. At any rate, it's amazing. Go watch many, many times!

2) Question: I've been meaning to ask for awhile, but it seemed very a propos to the vid above ('let the walls cave in'): if I were to write something up comparing River to Echo from Dollhouse, would that be of any interest to anyone but me? It would basically be about both women and their boxes (Echo and the Dollhouse/ River and the TARDIS, the astronaut suit, Stormcage, the Library computer, etc. . . .) and the complicated, push-pull, quasi-symbiotic relationships they have to them. Or is bringing up Dollhouse enough to put everybody off from the get-go?

3) Observation: Watched "The Pandorica Opens" last night for the first time since AGMGTW, and ( it struck me that . . . )

Head has been entirely too full of theories and spec lately (anybody else really looking forward to the hiatus?), so here's a few strands of possibly related, possibly unrelated theories that I've had floating around and needed to write down so as to get them out and see how crazy they sound.  All of the "things are never quite what they seem" variety.

Spoilers for all aired episodes.

( Lots of stuff under the cut . . . )

ETA: Please be mindful of spoilers in the comments.

Rather O_o sort of speculation that entered my head and demanded to be shared right now . . .

So, on reflection, my favorite thing about the Space & Time episodes for Comic Relief is the way, right at the end, that the Doctor knows his future self is going to come through the door with the information he needs to resolve the loop. This is a step up in sophistication from the time loops we've seen before--like in Time Crash or the loop that gets the Doctor out of the Pandorica--where a character essentially stumbles into a time loop and has to have it explained to them so that they can carry the rest of it out. Mechanically it works out exactly the same: a piece of information that appears seemingly out of nowhere is passed back and forth in a stable loop. But the attitude, somehow, matters immensely. It's almost like the Doctor has willed the information he needs into existence--he's not a pawn going through a loop set out for him, he's creating the loop and causing it to happen.

So the question becomes, how far could you push something like that? ( This is where it gets complicated . . . )

Probably interrelated thoughts that need writing down before I can get to sleep:

( Cut for incoherency and rambling )