It really is Tristan in Space: you keep expecting him to get drunk and stick his hand up a cow's arse.

You could have left the review at that and still killed it dead :D

*left eye starts to twitch*

And don't get me started on the whole "I can't explode in space, I'm not human!" debacle...

Mind you, Minister of Persuasion is decidedly slashable methinks...

see, you say it like it's a bad thing! On the opposite side of the die we have the amazingly posey camp persuasion, Adric's previously unsuspected amphibian kink, and panting pete! You can't go wrong with those ingredients!

:P

The mental image of you throwing a shoe at a computer monitor kept me giggling for about ten minutes.

Anyway... Tegan's Amazing Drawing Skills (tm) left me seething. I was wondering if my drawing skills would get any better if I got more obnoxious.

...Oh, jesus. I forgot the Mayans were in this one. I better watch this again.

oh, btw...know how you were wondering why there was no post-Warriors of the Deep fic?

working working working..

well it's got scary!Doc in it...email me if you'd like to do me a brutal beta :D

also, I can't be arsed digging out my tape - was tegan still limping at the end of that story?

Just hope you get my reply...long story short, arsehole spammerbots + buttmonkey staff not doing as I say to contain it = SORBS listing

otential boatload of angst re Turlough's horrible badly-written unusual about-face re abandoning/rescuing/abandoning the Doctor.

Yes... that one's had me puzzling, I suspect it may have been as:
a) the first time, it looked like the Doctor had drowned (knock on head + water generally not good) and guards were coming in, really the only thing they'd have got out of hanging around was being captured, ergo actually quite a logical decision
b) the second time, they were clearly still alive and there was something direct and immediate he could do... without necessarily putting himself in direct danger as opposed to...
c) where not only was he working with many unknowns as to whether the doctor was even alive, whether when he got there there would have been anything he could do other than getting himself also caught/killed (as he says quite loudly)... and of course it would put him in considerable personal danger

And so wraps up the psychoanalysis of Doctor Who motivations... of course it could also just have been crap writting

along with the seven thousand bits where Fivey shouts at them for being so rubbish

And that is why I still enjoy this story. Because Five is amazingly *pissy* in it and there is nothing I enjoy more than a thoroughly-irritated Five. For four episodes straight. Woooo.

Also, your "debauched choirboy" icon is making me think unspeakable things.

Oooh, a Who review on my flist I can actually read without being spoiled. Unfortunately all I can say about this one is even though it has glimmerings of the Five we know and love - the hair is just too wrong (which probably makes me as shallow as a saucer of water).

Okay, maybe you're right: rating episodes by hair swishyness isn't shallow - they clearly spent a lot of the filming budget doing Davison's hair. Rating them by the number of Turlough's porn star moments on the other hand...

Still haven't seen it (was suffering the embarassment of family videos when it was on) will do so tonight. I'm missing Eccles and his angst a bit though, Ten's coming across as a bit of a slapper - not like the lovely Fivey at all :P.

Seen it now.
Resent being hit repeatedly over the head with the non-subtle shippyness.
Did enjoy all bits involving the use of the word chav though.
(am glad not to be the only person who didn't enjoy it - lovely as Tennant is he doesn't seem to be able to make an off episode passable like Davison, Strickson or McGann can)

They're annoyingly in your face there - and shockingly over cocky. I'd put good money on something awful happening because of their over-confidence.

I must admit Cassandra!Billie was so much more fun, and Cassandra's assistant was just too sweet, especially when he started bouncing in tandem with his mistress. The zombie hoards were effective too - if only they hadn't gone for the "everyone lives!" ending again. The Doctor can't win all the time - it's why the Master never worked as a villain and why Davros was never a threat, you can't have villains who pose no threat. The best episodes are often the ones where the Doctor doesn't win: Earthshock. any regeneration episode. The overwhelming shippyness also makes me wonder exactly how they're going to get rid off Rose in the end - how'd you replace Doctor/Rose and their twu luv and keep a large part of the audience happy.

The whole Boe thing is odd - I read about it when I was flicking through the monster's book for last series and wasn't really sure - it could work but I don't really like the whole mystical prophecy aspect edging into my Who - the Doctor and Master as two flawed individuals who used to be friends but went on to follow their own beliefs is much more compelling than the Master and Doctor who were destined to become Time's Champion and Death's Champion and had no choice about the matter. Also any mysticalness is sort of spoiled by the knowledge that the fores of Light and Darkness are personified by two blokes with ducks on their heads. The Face of Boe set up was just clumsy though, and was quite blatantly taking the piss.

And I concur with the Tennant unfanciablity, I prefer Eccles even with his weird features and terrifying levels of angst (they should have made him (Eccleston) the Master though, which was my first thought when I heard he'd got the part, he's have been so good and would terrify small children wonderfully)

I included Stricko but forgot Ainley! And Delgado! Oops.

Is next week the one with Tony Head and Sarah Jane? Personally I can't wait until episode four and the stratospheric level of fan-bitchery that will precede and follow it.

Oooh, Angel parallel, now we just need someone evil who also fits the prophecy to hear it instead - can't you just see Cassandra/Dave Lister/the Master/Spike/Whoever else fits the thing dancing around Ten chanting "nyah I know the prophecy and you don't".

I don't dislike Ten. I'm just not overly keen on him (and he's reminding me a scarey amount of Seven), I feel the same way about Tom Baker too for some reason. He needs to be made less shallow and more dark and I'm, sure it'll happen (just not in a RTD episode XD).

Considering they're apparently not supposed to choose to take their first regeneration before they're five hundred, that puts a natural lifespan at at least that, meaning One must have been five hundred or so when he regenerated of natural causes and Seven says he's 951, the same age as the Rani he is clearly having a mid-lives crisis and is lying about his age (aging the incarnations is so much fun - once read a timeline that had Five's lifetime as ten years, poor bugger).

The puns have to go. Except for the Doctor who? one as that still makes me giggle like a small child.

Watch Delgado - he's not overtly slashy but he's charmingly evil (rather than all out bonkers like later versions), has more luck with the ladies than campy Three, has his own set of blindingly obvious fake names and gets into amusing contests of one-upmanship with the Doctor. You should watch Shalka!Master too if you haven't, and spend many productive hours trying to come up with a non-slashy reason for building a replica of you old enemy and confining him to your ship.

Well we did have last season becoming the final season of Buffy, who knows what series we'll go through next (X-files, Casualty, Richard and Judy...).

Five's ten years does make sense if you look at the series, he's with Tegan most of the time and she doesn't age more than a few years and there clearly wasn't much time with just Five and Nyssa. Same with Peri, CoA must happen soon after PoF. This only leaves the Turlough gap and no-one seems to want to suggest that that was many years of "hot gay sex, crumpets, and being glomped by werewolves". Add in the spin offs and he lasts a bit longer (esp. if you add in the comics (with scary, butch Five) where he's dumped the companions and gone off on his own). Definitely a mid-lives crisis though, next thing you know he'll be souping up the dull white control room and running off with a young, blond bird.

Al three episodes are like that though, it's the little bits like the Master turning the sound on his viewscreen off because he's fed up of listening to the Doctor giving one of his speeches (it takes an minute for Three to realise this fact, much to everyone's amusement) or the campness of UNIT who only ever have to defend a small part of the English countryside from the alien menace

I've always worked on the basis that Turlough had been at Brendon for less than a year. And he could feasibly have been a Junior Ensign Commander in the Trion war at a pretty early age, in a 'Richard III leading armies at 15' kind of way. So even if he was only meant to be 18 or so, that would work. He doesn't come off as that young though, either physically or mentally, let's face it.

WE must make Stricko be more available. In all senses:)

Team mentality, no: but I can see him having certain leadership skills. Officer class and all that. He's quick to order people about in Planet of Fire, and it's not all just an act. It's a stretch, I agree, but the way he takes up the gun in Warriors of the Deep, and puts himself in danger suggests a bit of familiarity, even as he's also being a hige coward elsewhere in the ep (although to be honest that's a poor example, since his behaviour is all over the shop in that one). I can imagine his professed cowardice being in part learned behaviour, his self-protective streak the result of his war experiences, not evidence of their non-existence. The smarmy charmy thing is the best he can do as an exile, with no other resources to hand.

Hm. Not that any of the canon or spinoff canon matches up well enough to clarify things. Am reading Earthlink Dilemma and struggling to make it all fit. Ow.

*nods*

Yup. The running away business in Resurrection is self-preservation more than cowardice: he does, after all, go nosing about through the Time Corridor and into the Dalek ship before anyone else, when he could've just hung back and kept his head down. He'll do reckless, stupid, even brave things if they're likely to get him what he wants. And, of course, he gradually gets a touch less selfish under the Doctor's influence - so we get the wonderful 'two corpira piece' scene in Frontios.

Turlough must be significantly over 21 in human years, he's had time to learn a significant amount, be trained as a soldier, gone to war and been captured and exiled. He certainly doesn't look schoolboy age (why didn't they just put him in the sixth form? They wear uniforms too) but then again he doesn't act like someone who's gone through war, he's often immature and whiney and far too self serving to ever achieve the level of team participation that he'd have needed as part of an army. If only they'd though his character through better on the show, though all the wonderful fanfic writers do sterling work doing the character justice.

I think what I'm supposed to be saying is he doesn't seem to have grown much as a character between Tegan leaving and PoF - he completed his arc much earlier which does give poor Five only ten years or so (though there's no reason why he couldn't leave the companions, go off on his own, live a whole lifetime and come back as if he never left). The large number of Peri audios is rather annoying, not only because Strickson audios would have been so much better but because Androzani has a Peri who clearly hasn't been with the Doctor long or really settled into the time-travel thing so large ofscreen stories just don't fit with the tv canon.

I'd go along absolutely with all of that. His behaviour is entirely adapted to every situation: he can be charming or snotty, utterly callous or really quite sentimental, whiny and pathetic or actually borderline noble. It's testament to Stricko's performance that it never comes off as a big mess - just evidence of his contradictory, adaptable personality. There's something wonderfully angsty at the core of it all too: the fact that he really doesn't like the way that he is, but knows it's all that's keeping him alive. *hugs him*

I er may have some of the comics that could be pushed your way if you so require...

Fivey may be butch but he does gets his shirt off and plays some cricket (though not at the same time).

Even better, I have them in some sort of magical electronic form that can be displayed on those newfangled computational devices (i.e. you can print them out, put grubby finger prints all over them and drool as much as you like, if that's your thing). Will upload some for you when I get back from the office.

'kay. Can you decompress .rar files or I can e-mail you the jpegs if you want.

His god complex is a bit worrying as he could very well go the way Koschei went in the book canon, doing what he thinks is right and best no matter what everyone else thinks and I don't want a hero who does that. I don't think he'll go that far though, I'm hoping they'll let him have his fall rather than just ignore that avenue as it would work amazingly well.

The Doctor/Rose relationship always seemed far to obvious for my tastes (I much prefer the more subtle ships). It may be sticking out to me as I find the relationship a little creepy - it's just so unequal, I'd rather see the Doctor paired with someone who is on/near to a level playing field with him

I do think it'll get better, I didn't dislike it, my feelings were also sort of meh, good Saturday night entertainment but not really a classic episode. Ninja!monks do look good however, as does the return of Sarah Jane.