TV stuffs

[kingandy]

I've now watched this week's Doctor Who (Father's Day) - it's an excellent story, as long as you don't get hung up on the temporal mechanics.

I've been looking forward to Paul Cornell's episode since I heard he was on the list, so I saw the ending from a reasonable way off.  Cornell is an unapologetically soppy writer (which comes through in elements such as Mr Tyler instinctively trusting his future daughter, giving her his car keys without a moment's thought) and doesn't much care for letting the underlying science get in the way of a thumping good story.  And a thumping good story it is too, with very real and human emotions flying back and forth.  I have not a word of complaint on the subject of dialogue and character, it was all good.

As to the mechanics of it though.  Oh, where to begin.  I don't think it's possible to do a really thorough analysis of the whole shebang at this time of night, and anyway to do so would be to miss the point.  (My main problem is that I don't see why people would forget the preceding events when Pete died.  I have issue that changing history would cause monsters to appear and eat people, but the Doctor did mention that their double presence had complicated things, so I will allow it.)

Despite the somewhat confused nature of the whole timeline thing - and it is the sort of thing my Mum would pick apart and frown at, as we used to do with Quantum Leap - Cornell has somewhat artfully skirted the issue.  No time is wasted on clumsy technobabble exposition, spelling out exactly what happened and why; instead of making excuses, the dialogue simply lays out the way things are, demonstrating what has changed through flashbacks to Rose's youth.  Fans can argue the exact whys and wherefores until the cows come home, and I'm sure they will.

For stsquad's reference: The Chronovores I mentioned were from The Time Monster.  They have been featured in Cornell's Who work before; previously they've appeared in humanoid form.  If this is a reappearance they've certainly undergone some cosmetic changes, or at least stopped bothering to pretend, but they're certainly "time eaters that would swallow a life as quickly as a boa constrictor can swallow a rabbit."  Again, I'm sure there are fans out there already speculating.

And, lo!  There are.


We (stsquad and myself) also watched the penultimate Enterprise episode.  Between the heartfelt wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-everyone-was-nice speech at the end, and the scene where further drama only occurred because the starfleet personnell suddenly forgot they were holding magic space guns that can instantly and harmlessly render somebody unconscious (leading to a tense standoff where they had guns and the bad men didn't and the situation could only have been improved by the bad men being knocked out), I remain utterly unbothered that there is only one more episode before cancellation.

Comments

[kermix.livejournal.com]

I agree wholeheartedly with the Father's Day sentiment; it was one of the more tragic (in the classical sense of the word) stories I've seen to date, but very well done. I could easily argue the whys and wherefores as making sense (if only enough sense for TV writing), but I'll save it for the message boards.

Though I value the stories above all else, I still want to know what exactly the Doctor did to jury-rig the TARDIS' power source. If the stories were still broken up into 4-6-part serials, I imagine they'd have some extra time to waste explaining it. :)

[kingandy]

Something that recurs in Cornell's Who work is his notion that anything that is of the TARDIS retains a connection to it; in No Future the Doctor escapes imprisonment by way of origami (he happens to have with him some stationery from the desk of his opponent, which happens to be his opponent's TARDIS - the paper was created as part of its disguise, so the Doctor is able to reshape that TARDIS fragment into a back door), and then in Scream of the Shalka he does something similar using his own mobile phone. The TARDIS key likely retains a similar link.

It may be reasoned that, since losing contact with its plasmic shell during the initial spacio-temporal disruption, the TARDIS had been struggling for a foothold in (for want of a better word) physical space. Presumably the craft could use its physical elements (the key and police box shell) as a beacon to orient itself, but was having trouble getting a good "fix"^[1] - some power input was required to boost the key's signal. So the battery was never powering the TARDIS itself, only the homing signal.

Admittedly much of this is speculation.

As an aside, the Doctor made some mention of "charging" the battery; quite how you'd do that with a sonic screwdriver I don't know, though I suppose "sonic" has always been something of an oversimplification for the benefit of the stupid apes.

[1] The thought occurs that the distance between the police box and key may have muddied the issue, creating two separate signals that the TARDIS may have had trouble differentiating in the turbulence.

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

Tardis is linked to the Gallifreyans and those who travel in it. The plot of Two Doctors basically hinges on this, and it's the edge the timelords have over other time travelling races. Their work is patented to the very essence of their beings.

Also, the roar of the winged-beastie and the TARDIS are disturbingly similar, no?

[kingandy]

Yes, at one point I thought I heard a materialisation when it was actually just another beastie coming in for attack.

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

You see, my No-prize skills tell me that it's the same sound because that's the sound of something tearing through space/time.

Paradox wise, I can suspend my disbelieve. I don't know how space/time physics work, if you have a time machine. I don't know the actual temporal mechanics of the TARDIS, nor does anyone. For all I know, time/space has set patterns it wants to go into, and settles at these points when it can.

[kingandy]

I kept telling myself here that in the Who universe there is a thing called Biodata which may or may not be "the biological link between a living organism and the Time Vortex, which maps out an individual’s effect on history", so tampering with events may have extreme consequences (and temporally duplicating yourself, as the Doctor and Rose did at the start, could easily exacerbate things by tangling the biodata or something).

So yeah, basically, good story, don't think about the mechanics.

[kermix.livejournal.com]

On second thought, I'll take a stab at one aspect of the thing, just because I think it's interesting.

Robert Anton Wilson posed the idea that if a person was looking at something they couldn't figure out how exactly to perceive correctly, their brains might translate it to a best-fit (he cites, as examples, UFO encounters for agnostics versus Virgin Mary sightings for devout theists). The Chronovore could be one of these timelss extradimensional events; since it represents raw chaos and destruction, most humans might visualize them as the dragon-gargoyle-monster things that eat people, when they're actually just patching a rift by closing up around all the little holes (humans) in the area. (The car would probably be caught in the original "hole", which inadvertently became some kind of program "loop" that I would bore myself trying to further explain.)

[kingandy]

As I say, I have less trouble with that aspect of it than the memory thing.

I am constructing a theory that involves Rose, Pete, the car and possibly the Doctor being shunted laterally into an alternate timeline that rejoins mainstream time at the point of Pete's demise - an alternative created due to the universe haemorrhaging time at the point of paradox. The Chronovores (or Reapers) were feeding on this unproductive offshoot universe while the mainstream history continued unaltered; all Pete really saved when he gave his life was Rose (and the driver of the car). This theory fits everything except why the Doctor was in the church in the real universe, including the earlier Doctor and Rose's disappearance - they aren't present in the alternate history, since with Pete's survival they had no reason to visit that particular date.

I mostly came up with this because I like the phrase "haemorrhaging time". Now I'm going to bed!

[kermix.livejournal.com]

I thought maybe it was in homage to Donnie Darko's "tangent universe".

The Chronoreapers would have had an easier time getting into the church if a jet engine had fallen through the roof.

[r-dragonsbain.livejournal.com]

Speaking of the fabulos Donnie Darko... I found this :-

http://donniedarko.com/

[kingandy]

Ah yes - I think visiting that site before watching the movie helped immensely with my understanding of it.