promethia

The Baby-Sitter's Club ten-episode series on Netflix tomorrow. (Link is Washington Post, in case you're conserving your articles for the month.) TL;DR: apparently it's great.

Plz to reply with your favorite character and what portion of your 10-year-old life was spent reading BSC books. (My answers are Claudia, and about 80%)

Hello, lovely people. I exist! I hope you all still exist as well; I have not read my flist in literal weeks. (December is the most horrid time of the entire year at my job; brain is not brain-ing. Petition to move Christmas to late January when I can enjoy it.) But a happy December to you all.

ANYWAYS. In the meantime, here is Chris Chibnall, out to give me hope for the future of Doctor Who in the form of James Bond tropes, omg:



I have important questions:

1) When did the production crew suddenly realize that being forthcoming with information about upcoming episodes is a strategy that can successfully entice people to watch?

2) Why do I feel so massively hopeful about the exciting James Bond-y-ness of this episode when Time Heist was such an appalling disappointment of a heist episode?

3) Are we actually getting a series after this New Year's special, and if so, when? The next week? Later in January? March? (Dear production crew: being forthcoming with details about the scheduling of upcoming episodes can also be a successful strategy to entice people to watch. Make note.)

I've polished off the Third Doctor era. A weirdly black and white era, for me: so much to love, so much to barely survive watching.

Winners:

1) Earth-based episodes. It's shocking how neatly my list of favorite and least favorite episodes in this era is sorted by the ones set on earth vs. the ones set in space.

2) The UNIT family. Two genres I am super easy for are spy families and campy humor, so this was basically the Doctor Who as workplace sitcom era of my heart. And I've always liked the Brig, but god, the Brig is fabulous, isn't he?

3) The Master. Delgado was the last chance for somebody to make me a fan of the Master and not just Michelle Gomez/Missy, and . . . well, he failed. But I had a great time watching him do it.

4) Liz Shaw. Queen. Though we deserved so much more of Spearhead from Space Liz and not the watered down, be-wigged version they gave us for the rest of the season.

5) Pertwee's costumes, especially the late-stage ones. Surely one of the best-dressed Doctors ever. I want to do obscene things to the plum velvet blazer from Planet of the Daleks. Not to Pertwee in the blazer. Just to the blazer.

6) Sarah Jane. Confession: I do like Sarah more towards the end of her time with the Doctor, which fandom informs me is the wrong opinion. But her sheer tenacity and savvy in season 11 is undeniably great.

7) Spearhead from Space, Ambassadors of Death, Mind of Evil, The Daemons, The Sea Devils, The Green Death, The Time Warrior. And special shout out to both Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The Time Monster, omgomgomg for being the best things ever. Just the best. All the hearts.


Losers:

1) Space. Space, why are you so stupid? Why are you so full of boring things I care so little about? Why do you always take the Doctor away from the UNIT family where he belongs and mire him in a really inferior Tom Baker story without Tom Baker and therefore 1000% less interesting to watch? By the last seasons I was hard tuning out as soon as they left earth.

2) Three, kinda. Now, I don't hate Three and I enjoyed watching him quite a lot almost always when he was on earth where he belonged. But . . . are we sure he's actually the Doctor? Because I'm not really convinced. This is a surprising outcome for me because back when I was trying random Classic Who serials as suggested by popular opinion instead of watching whole eras in order like I should have, Three was the only Doctor who really grabbed me. And now he's my least favorite Doctor I've seen. Sorry, Three. You should have just been your own character.

3) Jo, kinda. I want to like Jo far more than I do. I liked her best when they did the best job of playing up the dichotomy between her slightly ditzy, sweet persona and her actually quite impressive spy skillz. I basically just rode a slightly confused rolled coaster with her for her whole three seasons. And her writing was obviously horribly uneven: a story that really knows how to use her followed by one that reduces her to all her most annoying and feeble qualities. Bleah, she goes way down the totem pole of favored companions.

4) Six and seven-parters. No. Just. No.

5) Season seven. I actually made an attempt, several years ago now, at watching the Pertwee era through, and back then I rather liked season seven and got turned off by season eight. This time it was basically the opposite. There are aspects of the season I really like but, man, it is a real concentrated dose of boring people in grey control rooms, isn't it?

6) Doctor Who and the Silurians (though points for the title), Colony in Space, Peladon and Peladon, The Mutants . . . god I can't even be bothered. If it was in space, it was bad.

--------------------

And now I only have two Doctors left, eep!

Finished all of the Sixth Doctor.

( Thoughts . . . )

I'm gonna take a diversion back to the Fifth Doctor for awhile, but I'm looking for suggestions for how to tackle One, Two, and Three. I've dramatically preferred watching whole Doctors' eras straight through (as far as that's possible) as opposed to picking and choosing episodes, but I'm open to doing them in any order.

Because I'm a fan, dammit!

So, the new season of Doctor Who has not been doing it for me. Bless Jodie Whittaker and her Doctor, they are blameless in this. She's delightful and perfectly cast.

And, hey, the plots have mostly been middling to rubbish, the dialogue is dull and frequently clunky, and the writing in general is uninspiring. But if you were unprepared for any of this then you didn't do your homework.

What's really getting to me, though, and the thing that I was definitely not prepared for is how little emotional investment I feel in any of it. If Chibbs can do anything, surely he does characters and their relationships, right?!?! I've been batting around reasons for why things aren't clicking. Do we just need more time? (Torchwood was solid dreck for a season and a half before erupting into brilliance.) Is three TARDIS companions one too many? (Quite possibly yes, I'm thinking.) Am I just bitter that somebody thought we still needed a white dude on the cast? (Yes.) But I recently read a review somewhere that really snapped things into perspective for me, which noted that Ryan and Graham are now the heart of the show. And, frickety-frak, the reviewer is right. Ryan and Graham's relationship has been the major emotional through-line of the whole thing, has born most of the emotional weight. And it has been rather nice to watch, for what it is. I don't have a problem with their relationship in and of itself. I rather love Ryan, who is so my favorite. (Graham is fine.) But in the meantime Yaz is still underdeveloped and the Doctor hasn't really established a meaningful bond with any of them yet.

So let me ask you: how is it that, in getting a female Doctor, the show has somehow become more male-centric?

1) Where is Dr. Crusher?

. . .

. . .

. . .

.

That's all.

As the official last person on earth watching Agents of SHIELD, I feel it is my duty to let you know that season five continues to be EPIC.

EPIC.

I also need to repeat this regularly to myself because otherwise I don't actually believe it.