I do understand that some people think that what I am doing is worthwhile but can't commit to a monthly Patreon Payment... so I've put all the recent Doctor Who essays (the ones about the Sixtieth Anniversary, and the extended piece on An Unearthly Child) into a little PDF book. It's available on the Ko Fi page.
Patreon would have paid around £6 for these pieces, but I've set it to "pay what you like".
Much thanks for your ongoing interest. (The Tom Baker retrospective will go into a different book, at some stage.)
4 comments:
(Part 1)
Well, I bought it and enjoyed it!
Do take this under advisement — and I don't mean for this to be emotional blackmail in any way, particularly as finances are tight and a "might" is not a promise as far as I am personally concerned — but I might feel more compelled to subscribe to the Patreon if it came with some guarantee of dialogue (and for all I know that might already be the case, but if so you haven't advertised it, which I think perhaps you should). Half the fun of a stimulating web essay is picking the author's brain about it in the comments afterwards in real time; without taking you to task for any individual instance I get the sense that you haven't been particularly inclined to get into dialogue in the comments of your “Who”-related posts around here lately. (Bit moreso the political ones when they don't devolve too much.) Which might be because of the whole matter of your posting them on Patreon first, and it all having gone a bit cold to you by the time you put them up over here? I don't know. Sorry to psychoanalyse.
(In other meta concerns, is there no bespoke “Wild Blue Yonder” essay? As the most classical "TARDIS lands someplace mysterious" of the three, I might have found your perspective interesting in light of how little RTD seems to think of this sort of thing as what "Doctor Who" is for.)
We come to all of this from such different places — the Capaldi era is some of my favourite “Who”, a spot it shares with the Eighth Doctor novels at their best and, mind you, much of the Classic Series, but probably not the same bits as you: ‘my’ Classic Doctor is Troughton and McCoy before all. Much of the Tom Baker era is wonderful (and your essays always give me a new appreciation of a given story) but the Doctor With The Scarf isn't quite my guy. He's too knowable, however eccentric; too much “an alien with a time machine” instead of an ageless space-Gandalf — and I mean space-Gandalf in the full sense of "really a minor deity in human disguise". Death Comes to Time overplays its hand and has slightly too little plot for its runtime, but its Time Lords are far closer to what The Doctor's Kind are in my head than the bozos in Arc of Infinity, which is also probably why I would name Faction Paradox as some of my favourite Doctor Who, were it not an outrageous disservice to FP to act like it is simply a subset of Doctor Who. I suppose this is why RTD's overt use of magic doesn't bother me so much. The godlike Toymaker is very much the sort of thing which exists as a fundamental part of my view of the Doctor Who mythology, alongside misc. Fenrics and Sutekhs and Rassilons. Indeed, although Davies's dialogue doesn't quite play ball with that, I am much taken with the notion that the Toymaker is also a Time Lord, albeit one of considerably greater power and seniority than the Doctor. (The Mairon to his Olorin?)
All of which to say that it really is a testament to your command of essay-writing that I always find myself compelled to read every line you have to say about this stuff (and indeed, occasionally, about stuff I otherwise have no interest in, and not just a different perspective upon; I've read your Dave Sim essays without ever glancing at “Cerebus”). Witty, cutting, even moving at times. And oh, I am sorry for you, with regards to NuNuWho having ship-of-Theseussed out all the bits that made your “Doctor Who”. RTD's Who isn't quite my ideal Who but it's still got the right bones to be mine, and I can quite imagine what it would feel like for it not to (given that Chibnall's Who got dangerously close with alarming frequency), so I sympathise very deeply.
(Part 2)
I do object even on solo-Classic Series grounds to including "the Doctor doesn't know how to drive the TARDIS and thus lands in random places" as part of the essential formula that NuWho has largely failed to match up to. That was part of the original Hartnell premise to be sure, but I seem to recall most colour Doctors steering their Ship perfectly well most of the time, albeit not necessarily with "materialise precisely around a particular person" accuracy. (And that much, think, is more of a matter of differing opinions about how the TARDIS fundamentally works than how good the Doctor is at steering it.)
In other meaningless quibbles, the Doctor of the extremely childish TV Comics was mainly a vague approximation of William Hartnell and later Patrick Troughton; I think there may have been a short interregnum, but Pertwee mostly starred in the TV Action and Countdown comics, which, although they don't quite match the TV series, have I think a better claim to being very good adventure comics in their own right rather than historical curios. (In this it is like much of the Doctor Who Magazine strip; famously Lawrence Miles thinks that the golden age of Tom Baker DWM comics was a much superior continuation of Doctor Who than the Graham Williams era, contrasting "Iron Legion" with "The Horns of Nimon". Many Who comics and books are better comics and books than many Who TV serials are as television… though this is not often the case for modern Big Finish, so although there are good ones in there, I really would caution against "reconverting to Big Finish" as you joke you might. Truly, even for someone with your proclivity, little exists there but hollow reenactment.)
(Part 3)
I was surprised that you took it as read that the object of the Forever Tennant was endless crossovers; there might be crossovers to be sure, but it seemed clear to me that the avowed primary object was to make the 60th Anniversary Specials the Finale Of NuWho so that NuNuWho can get to feel like an actual new beginning. I think *that* is what motivated his choice not to simply have David Tennant get shot and turn into Ncuti Gatwa. He wanted a breaking of the chain that's been going on since Eccleston turned into Tennant. He wanted there to be an Ending to the ever-angsty NuWho Doctor (just as Moffat wanted us to retroactively take it on faith that the idealistic, pacifist Classic Doctor had definitively died on the planet Karn, before another bit of regenerative muggery with magic potions and an extra Doctor ushered in the first, prequel iteration of the war-torn Doctor 2.0).
Of course, it worked perfectly well last time for Sylvester McCoy to fly off into the Time Vortex and Paul McGann to walk into the sunset with Sophie Aldred, but so it goes.
It also seems to me that a non-fannish reason to bring back "The Toymaker" might simply be that it's a good name. If you've got a hankering to do a story about a mad godlike puppeteer, and you're working in an established universe that already has one of those mouldering in a drawer who's got a catchy name, why insist on making him Lord Zorbulon or The Puppetmaster? Early Who's occasional attempts to replace the Daleks were notoriously pathetic. And I think it was generally agreed to be silly that "Flux" has a sinister, well-dressed alien time-traveller using aliases to gum up UNIT's operations and allying with an unrelated alien race, as played by the 21st century's answer to Roger Delgado, but he was for some reason called The Grand Serpent instead of being the Master. (Well, the reason is that NuWho has made the Master into something so un-Delgado-like that Sacha Dhawan actually couldn't substitute for the Serpent in that plot function anymore, but you get the gist; no such problem existed with the Toymaker.)
But speaking as someone who doesn't mind the sentiment of ordinary NuWho melodrama, nor the pacing of the average episode, I'll absolutely agree with you that the cloyingness of "Tales" was largely insufferable, and that "Star Beast" really did feel like a lot of sound and fury to very little characterisation… So hey, it's not all disagreements. And again, I don't reply at length to just *any* random essay which repeatedly disagrees with me about Doctor Who.
Thank you very much. Points being mulled over.
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