David watches Doctor Who now, pray for him
The standard misc. upfront, though with the regularity of posts going forward between the regular columns and still the occasional standalone post, these'll probably get shorter in the future.
Decided at 27 it's time to get back on the scripting grind if I'm serious about doing comics, so for starters I put together a little 3-pager recently. I'm happy to have gotten it done for the sake of doing it, but if I have any artistically-inclined subscribers (especially with styles on the exaggerated/cartoony side) who might be interested in a collaboration, reach out and I'd be happy to take a look at your work and work out appropriate compensation if you like the script in turn.
Finished David Simon's Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, an excellent book I would not recommend to anyone as an extremely unpleasant experience. On the side I've started a Hickman pre-X-Men Marvel reread - so far I've covered everything barring the odd oneshot up until Avengers - and I tried and enjoyed Benjanun Sriduangkaew's free short story And The Burned Moths Remain, so I expect I'll be trying more of her work in the future. I also tried The Uncanny Counter on a recommendation, only seen the first two episodes so far but I liked it pretty well.
Miracleman and Irredeemable both coming back, next year's gonna be a watershed for not-Supermen. The latter's formative as hell for me, and while the ending definitely doesn't demand any follow-up, there are enough lingering threads that I can imagine this squeezing out something worthwhile.
Obligated to hype up Agent of W.O.R.L.D.E. #1 written by onetime pal from back in my CBR forum days Deniz Camp, for that reason and also because it's cool as hell.
The Boxer is coming to print, get that.
Legend - A Dragon Ball Tale is just about as great as you might've heard, I actually got kind of emotional the first time I watched it from how potently it tapped into that childhood idea that if you scream hard enough you can get strong enough to knock out literally anyone.
Caught Thor: Love & Thunder and yeah, that's it, Multiverse of Madness had me borderline but I'm done with the MCU for the time being, excepting maybe Ant-Man 3 since I like Jeff Loveness. I just do not care about any of this anymore, and I cannot imagine interesting creators being able to do interesting things that would make me care in the future. Not really interested in DC's offerings either until The Batman's sequel and hopefully Coates's Superman; between Invincible, Spider-Verse 2 & 3, Batman: Caped Crusader, My Adventures With Superman, the ostensible HBO Max Legion of Super-Heroes show, and RWBY/Justice League, it's animation that has my attention for the foreseeable future with superheroes.
(RE: that last one: holy shit. Little disappointed that the comic didn't get to go character-focused in the way Bennett's talented at since it'd presumably have more room for it, but maybe that just had a mandate to set up this and this is where it gets to sink its teeth in?)
David: Never watched Doctor Who. Too much on my plate, too much of a timesink, too many voices insisting on it for some contrarian impulses to not form in my brain, and so I ended up missing out on one of the main unifying genre works of my generation. However, the sickening realization emerged: my finally diving in could be Content™ as everybody gathers around to chuckle at the newbie, or more generously bask in the glow of my searing insights as applied to such a popular topic. And so, the instigator of and guide through my journey through this circle of fandom hell, the scheming, hopefully well-intended Doctor to my befuddled companion, my longtime friend and author of One Must Imagine Scott Free Happy and The Tower Through The Trees, Sean Dillon!
Sean: MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Hello David.
David: The laugh of one who fully understands I’ve signed away the next year of my life to this.
Sean: And so much more…
David: I’d go ‘lord’, but apparently those guys got blown up by the Daleks. So Sean, before we address my limited background, I should ask, how did you get into Who yourself?
Sean: Well, as with many things from my unrepentant youth, it had its origins in That Guy With the Glasses. Back before things went to hell and a handbasket, I was a frequent viewer of a variety of their material. Mostly the big people, your Nostalgia Critics, your Linkaras, and, regrettably, your Distressed Watchers. But along the way, I had a habit of basically watching and reading every single top 10 or whatever list imaginable. Among these lists was one on the top 9 9th Doctor moments. While I had heard of Doctor Who in the past, the video got me interested in actually watching the show. So I put on some older episodes (this was back when Hulu had a bunch of Classic Who and Netflix had New Who), and I fell in love.
David: I’ve been orbiting the franchise for years; basically every nerd-adjacent friend I had in college was a fan, my high school/college best friend was obsessed and frequently showing me dramatic clips from finales to try and convince me of its charms, and it’s impossible to exist on social media in the circles I do without picking up the essentials - even my parents watch it now, albeit in whatever order it comes up in reruns. The closest I’ve come to engaging was picking up Al Ewing, Rob Williams and company’s 11th Doctor comic, and I enjoyed it, but also that doesn’t count because Al Ewing can make me like anything. I know about the Tardis’s camouflage being broken, and that the Doctor fights the Master, and that there’s an Impossible Girl, and a War Doctor, and a limited set of regenerations until there isn’t, and that they strive to be neither cruel nor cowardly, and a couple dozen nuggets besides, plus a handful of episodes. But my ability to sit down and watch TV for hours on end burned out instantly upon my 18th birthday, so the prospect of binging was always out until you pitched this to me as a feature for the newsletter.
Sean: Well, I always wanted to get back into Who after… I’ll explain later. And I thought, “Hey, maybe introducing a pal of mine to the show will bring that spark back?”
David: Here’s hoping! You set up a masterlist of the post-2005 relaunch run of the series with designated breaks for us to have discussions, with the intent of catching me up in time for the 60th anniversary special.
Sean: Just for the record, he wants to watch the Chibnall era.
David: If I’m going for the full experience, at least of the modern stuff, I’m going for the full experience. This first round constituted:
Rose
The End of the World
The Unquiet Dead
Aliens of London
World War Three
Dalek
The Long Game
Father’s Day
I’d actually seen Rose, The End of the World, and Dalek in a brief dalliance with the series years ago; everything else and the vast majority of everything coming up will be new.
Sean: Those are some sensible episodes to watch for someone getting into Doctor Who through the New Series. So let’s start with Charles Dickens and ghosts.
David: I will briefly note regarding Rose, it’s hilarious this came out a year prior to Superman Returns, because those are a ridiculous, comically pointed Goofus and Gallant comparison of a revival of a decades-slumbering iconic nerd franchise by having them introduced as coming back in-universe, reintroducing the simple joys of the touchstones while making clear there’s important stuff we haven’t seen.
Sean: Yes, though sadly neither one could avoid having a sex pest involved as a major role. At least it wasn’t the director as well (to my knowledge).
David: God, can anything?
Sean: We’ll get to him.
David: The Unquiet Dead is probably the first normal Doctor Who episode I’ve seen. There’s no onus on it to introduce or reintroduce anything, it’s not built around any formal gimmicks or mythology, it’s just the Doctor doing Doctor stuff with the companion in funny period clothes where it turns out there’s another layer of sci-fi going on. I liked it pretty well! Whatsisname who plays Dickens (Simon Callow) made me wonder for a full minute if it was Ian McKellen in a wig, which I mean as a compliment.
Sean: [Tents fingers] If I’m being completely honest, this is one of two Eccelston stories that I’ve never actually seen. The main reason being the people I ultimately connected with in my early Doctor Who days were not… keen on writer Mark Gatiss. I’ve grown somewhat fonder with the guy, especially with his later work. But… we’ll get there in the end.
David: Gasp! The foundation of the project…undermined! And I’m aware there are severe divides in fandom over the assorted creatives.
Sean: [Has a war flashback]
David: Dang, you really are The Doctor here. Let’s move on then to Aliens of London/World War III.
Sean: Plllttt!
David: This was a fun little pair of episodes about farting aliens trying to nuke the planet that delves right into the core of what I imagine we’re going to spend the next year and change discussing: The Doctor is kind of terrifying.
Sean: Oh god, yeah. We haven’t even gotten to the more horrific aspects of Doctor Who. But I never thought this episode was the one that highlighted those aspects (in this season). It might simply be that the following episode left an indelible mark on the incarnation, but my memories were of farting aliens and reading articles informing me that it’s a satire of Tony Blair. What makes Doctor Who terrifying here?
David: I’m not even talking about the broad ‘he committed (space-)war crimes’ stuff I know is coming. But after a whole pair of episodes of the consequences of him messing up and exploding Rose’s entire life because she was gone a year instead of a few minutes, following numerous episodes of him belittling and stringing her along, and her mom finally starting to just barely wrap her head around the situation, Rose invites The Doctor to dinner with the family. The Doctor doesn’t just refuse, but insists that if Rose doesn’t leave all over again right that very moment, he’ll abandon her for good. There isn’t just no screwing around about the potential consequences of the offer he makes his companions, it makes clear he’s perfectly fine with manipulating and emotionally threatening them to get what he wants and avoid what puts him off.
Sean: Yeah. It’s nice that you note it this early on considering it’s one of the core aspects of the Davies and Moffat eras of Doctor Who. The contrast between an amazing person and the danger that person brings. To quote Paul Cornell, Doctor Who is what Monsters have nightmares about.
David: I spoke recently with Asher Elbein about my watching experience, and he described the Doctor as ‘an aristocrat who’s trying not to be’, which checks out in a huge way. He comes off less like a hero a lot of the time than a capricious godling who clearly needs someone on-hand at all times to keep from falling entirely up his own ass; compassionate but possessed of little empathy, a savior who preys on those indebted to him and whose idea of ‘saving’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘living’ when divorced from history, principled but driven to spite and petty cruelty, a figure death indeed follows for reasons far beyond his chosen vocation.
Sean: Congratulations David, you have caught up to the core themes of the Davies era vision of immortal bastards. Though, considering the nature of the cosmos, one has to wonder about its devil in the basement: The Dalek. Does the plunger work for you?
David: I was perfectly fine with the Dalek; End of the World set me up for the aesthetic sensibilities and boundaries of this particular universe.
Sean: I mean, it did have that gag with “Toxic.” If that doesn’t explain things, nothing will.
David: That’s where Star Trek Beyond got it from, wasn’t it?!
Sean: Probably. There’s a lot of sci-fi history there. There’s a minor character that has implications that would consume this piece. So how does the fascist pepper pot compare to the midpoint between aristocracy and anarchism?
David: The Dalek works, at least in this context, because The Doctor is all pomp and artifice and showmanship and the Dalek is uninterested for even a second in pretending to be anything other than what it is, hence how it pulls everything kicking and screaming out of The Doctor in turn. And of course proto-Musk would do a Torment Nexus with it.
Sean: Fun fact: When talking to Dalek voice actor, Nicholas Briggs about the Doctor Who’s confrontation with the Dalek, Christopher Eccelston compared it to a Holocaust survivor confronting a Nazi.
David: JEEZ.
Sean: I mean, the Nazis are the main idea behind Terry Nation’s approach to evil. Though very much in the bland, inconsiderate approach that doesn’t reveal anything at all.
David: The Dalek also illustrates something else critical to the sensibility of the series, even beyond its willingness to go dopey and kitchen sink with its approach to sci-fi exactly as I love: that this is all completely goofy nonsense only makes it more disturbing when bodies start hitting the floor. I did not go into this expecting people to be dropping like flies.
Sean: Yeah, that’s Doctor Who for you. Half the time it’s all frocks and plastic men, the other half it’s guns and corpses.
David: The plastic men shoot the funny conspiracy theorist in front of his kids!
Sean: It’s slightly better in the novelisation, where the funny conspiracy theorist gets some depth and saves his kids from the Autons, leading his wife to swear bloody vengeance against Doctor Who!
David: …okay that does sound kind of amazing. I don’t know yet how much I want this to be a series constantly swallowing its own tail with the continuity (a subject I know to be deeply fraught with this franchise, vis a vis how much it can even be considered to exist at all) vs. new episode, new weirdness, but I would not mind that coming back around at all. I guess that’s what stuff like the novels and audioplays and whatnot are for though.
Sean: Well… Spoilers. Going off of what you’ve seen though, the Autons are from the classic series. Whereas everything other than the Dalek (and the Cyberman head) have been new creations.
David: I was wondering how much was old and how much was being dropped here for the first time! I hadn’t even guessed the Autons were an old thing, I only knew about the Daleks and Cybermen, as well as being informed that the Time War/destruction of the Time Lords was a new element to the revival.
Sean: Well… It’s complicated. The short answer is no televised Doctor Who had a Time War before this point. I’ll explain later.
David: Oh god, now that you say that I think I recall hearing there was mention of it in an old novel or comic or something. Moving on to the next surprise (and yes, we’re kinda blowing through these, but I suspect the readership here has largely seen this for themselves and is here to gawk at the new guy's perspective rather than get a full play-by-play): Simon Pegg!
Sean: Ah yes, Simon Pegg the year after Edgar Wright made him the slacker hero of a zombie comedy. And playing Rupert Murdoch in space to boot. Though, surprisingly not written by Steven Moffat.
David: While it didn’t approach the sort of emotional intensity of Dalek, The Long Game was probably the most ‘quintessential’-feeling episode of anything I’ve seen thus far. A bunch of big wild concepts anchored by an appropriately goofy-yet-spooky space monster, a big speech on human nature and morality (including the deeply unfortunate bit about describing humanity as ‘slaves’ to spur the Black employee listening in to rebellion), the day being saved through courage and cunning, and the Doctor absolutely destroying a dude’s life even if he was kinda asking for it.
Sean: Yeah, sometimes Doctor Who can be an utter prick to people who just rub them the wrong way.
David: That gets us to Father’s Day written by well-regarded genre writer Paul Cornell, the second big ‘oh, right, him!’ name thus far given my recognition of Bryan Hitch in the credits (hilarious the ultimate intricate detail guy got roped in to handle anything to do with a rubber Halloween spook of the week show, even if my understanding is he was sensibly recruited to design the new Tardis interior).
Sean: Paul Cornell, much like Dalek writer Robert Shearman, got his start writing for the Wilderness Era of Doctor Who. In-between the Classic Era and the New Series, the lunatics basically took over the asylum. A lot of New Series writers got their start in that era. Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat, and Russell T Davies. In Paul’s case, however, he was, in many regards, the defining voice of the Seventh Doctor books. Though he only wrote five of them (and one audio drama), he acted as an early bellwether for the era as a whole, including writing one of the best books of that entire era. But we’ll talk about that at another time.
David: I know the traditionally ‘ancillary’ tie-in materials carry an outsized weight with Who; my main knowledge there thanks to Andrew Hickey is the strange odyssey of Lawrence Miles, whose Eighth Doctor adventures ended up spinning out into the wholly separate cult classic series Faction Paradox.
Sean: David. There will be a time and place to talk about the Faction Paradox and the Nightmare Child, the Could-have-been King and his army of Meanwhiles and Never-weres, the year of intelligent tigers, and the various Grant Morrison fans in the mix. But now is not the time.
David: That might have to be for after we catch up on the series proper and the (thematically appropriate) ticking clock aspect of this affair is behind us, because I’ve read about half of The Book Of The War and suspect I’ll want to delve deeply.
Sean: I’m sorry, but how? How did you get a copy of that book? I had to go to England and buy it second hand for £70. It’s $4,212.99 on Amazon for fucks sake! USED! AND NOT INCLUDING SHIPPING!!!
David: My vague recollection is that at the start of the pandemic, a bunch of sites were offering temporary free reading/access to assorted archives, and one (maybe it was Internet Archive? How topical, thanks a ton Mr. Wendig) allowed me to get a free digital copy. I’ve only gone through it piecemeal, I’ll want at some point to start back at the beginning and sit down with it properly. As you said however, a whole massive subject unto itself for another time.
Sean: So… Paul Cornell wrote 80s nostalgia in 2005, and also predicted the Rick Roll.
David: So this WAS pre-Rick Roll. I felt like it had to be, but I did rewind a bit wondering ‘is…is that what I think that is playing on the radio. Is this a bit’ in the midst of this tearjerker about a woman getting to meet the dad she never knew.
Sean: Doctor Who will constantly have you asking “Is this a bit” during even the most serious of episodes.
David: I’m glad the series got the most inevitable thing you do with the premise out of the way pretty much immediately so it can move right along, but Billie Piper plays the absolute hell out of it and the absurdity of the mechanics is entirely subsidiary to the weight of the emotional reality - again, exactly my kind of adventure sci-fi.
Sean: Doctor Who will often shift the kind of nature it’s doing such that some episodes have their stakes based on what kind of story is this. Is this a grim story about hard men doing hard things or is it a farcical romance? Just when you think the show is doing something, it pulls the rug out from under you and breaks your kneecaps out of spite. And sometimes you’ll thank it for doing so.
David: Also a perfect ‘dichotomy of The Doctor’ episode, with him switching on a dime between lecturing Rose about being just another stupid ape to being almost breathless about an ordinary couple being unique in all the universe and far beyond his own centuries-spanning understanding. You wanna love and believe in this guy so much, he’s so damn likable with Eccleston’s charisma and seems to mean so deeply well in spite of his bastard tendencies, but it’s thus far a perpetual question whether he’s Peter Pan or the Pied Piper.
Sean: Well, you see… I’ll explain later.
David: That catches us up thus far, next time carrying us through the remainder of the Ninth Doctor’s escapades. I’m enjoying this! It’s solid, unashamedly bonkers adventure storytelling that packs as many punches as it needs to per episode to make it worth the time investment, and I’m curious where Rose goes from here and how The Doctor begins to shift from this mercurial, unnerving figure to…well, by my understanding still that, but one who thinks Fez’s are cool.
Sean: Are you my mummy?
Frequently Asked Questions From People in the Future:
Are you going to talk about [New Series Episode]?
Yes. The goal for this project is to introduce David to the entirety of the New Series. And yes, that does mean talking about the bad ones. And the evil ones. And the one that destroyed Sean’s love for Doctor Who.
What about [Classic Series Episode]?
For the Classic Series, we will not be taking a holistic approach. There’s simply too much of it and too much of it missing to properly hit the Davies Era. However, we will be covering some Classic Series stories in-between series of the New Series. David will not know which ones we will be covering or why. Some were picked by Sean because they will be important to what’s coming. Others were picked on a whim. One was picked as medicine to prepare David for the JSA era.
What is the JSA era of Doctor Who?
Spoilers.
Why does Sean keep calling the Doctor Doctor Who?
Sean has refused to answer this question. David notes he’s credited as Doctor Who in the credits so will not object.
What is David’s policy regarding Spoilers?
Eh. David sorta knows a few broad strokes about what’s coming, but they’d rather you not go out of your way to mention who dies or deep dark secrets and whatnot at them on Twitter.
Will anyone else appear in this chat?
Who knows, eh? Who knows?
Why is The Straight Story the best Star Trek movie?
Nice try, Frezno.
Next Time: Mister Spock? It’s not a date. Rose, before I go, I just want to tell you, you were fantastic.