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“Then… we go… and kick its arse!”

I thought maybe I’d write something about the new Doctor Who trailer, but it appears I am as of yet still not capable of Being Normal about Doctor Who Being Good again,1Christ, it better be. so I’ll just leave it at the following sincerely held belief I didn’t know I felt this strongly about four hours ago:

They should let Donna drop an F-bomb.

EDIT: Okay, this is low effort microblogging even by my standards. Here’s some thoughts.

  • The line about kicking its ass really is the bit that just made me cry, but in that specific way the Matrix Resurrections trailer scored with White Rabbit made me cry? It just activated me, like the part of me that’s incapable of Being Normal about Doctor Who was somewhere inside as a sleeper agent, waiting for Donna to go kick an ass.
  • So does Kate just get things picked up by chopper all the time, or is that a service she reserves just for Dr Who.
  • In an era where the show very frequently gets ahead of leaks by just dropping a press release, it took them so long to confirm who Neil Patrick Harris is playing that I’d assumed it wasn’t the obvious character, but okay, there we go.
    • And part of why I’d assumed he was playing somebody else is that RTD has occasionally mentioned wanting the BBC to show relevant stories from ’69-’89 when they, say, bring old characters back, and this is the one story that somebody says the N-word in, so, you know, I’d assumed it wasn’t high on the list. (And also it’s mostly missing.)
  • All of this really feels like the 2008 series, Part Deux, and I continue to hope that’s the stunt to draw us all back in and not how the next full series feels.
  • I remember when UNIT’s HQs were secret offices instead of Avengers Tower.
  • Lotta people clamouring for an airdate — we never know this until about two weeks ahead of time.
  • 1
    Christ, it better be.

Sunday #2: It’s Been Edition

One week back in school. What a destructively long Monday.

A lot of info, in the classical start-of-year info dump manner, about what the school year looks like. Go here, do this, do this as soon as possible, accumulate this, write that. I’ve let it just wash over me. It’ll happen, I’ll get there. One year to go.

We share three of our four Monday classes with another class that’s in the same place on a different trajectory, which makes sense, I understand that when there’s just the six of us it doesn’t make financial sense to treat us the same as if we were 25 people, but by gum, you forget how busy 25 19-to-21-year olds can be. How can you possibly have this much to say to each other, you saw each other four days ago! I joked the weekend before that they were about 400 people strong, and was corrected that they have the energy of an additional zero. No kiddin’. I didn’t go to Teacher School to be in a room full of noisy kids, dagnabbit.

(I understand now that eventually we’ll split back up, but what a day.)

Also shot and edited my live-action directorial debut. I’ll share it here when I get permission.

Below the fold this week: Website update notes, notes on an upcoming project. TV thoughts, a YouTube recommendation. Donald Duck comics, some Big Finish.

Continue reading “Sunday #2: It’s Been Edition”

Sunday #1

I’m trying to invent blogging from scratch for myself here. This format is pretty directly inspired by the “weeknotes” a lot of people in tech do, but one, that’s a lot more “job,” and a lot more “journal,” than I’m really doing right now, and two, frankly, the relationship between my life and people in tech is the problem I’m trying to solve here, I’d rather they not be… any kind of guiding light for me in blogging.

So right now these are called “Sunday” recaps, the idea being, here’s some stuff that doesn’t entirely stand on its own but that I still feel should go here, posted some, probably not all, Sundays. When there’s Enough to post. A lot of the time it’ll likely be mostly spare bits of writing, though I’m sure as I come to think blog-first it’ll generate additional, original writing, too. Heck, I wrote this before I added a bunch of notes on updating my website. Here I am, tech-blogging anyway.

Now I just need to start thinking blog-first.

Below the fold, notes on updating my website, some bits and bobs from my Letterboxd, some media diet notes, and a podcast recommendation. Oh, that’s already quite a lot, isn’t it.

Continue reading “Sunday #1”

On second chances

This is a necropost. A version of the following was originally posted as a Reddit comment on 7 August, 2023.

For context: This was in reply to speculation that an upcoming Big Finish announcement might involve the return of actor John Barrowman to the company’s Torchwood range after he was dropped, and a big anniversary story went unreleased, by the company in light of a pattern of repeated, open, and enthusiastic sexual misconduct. Wikipedia at this time calls them “allegations,” but Barrowman and his co-stars were openly talking about this behaviour in public on stage at conventions. It wasn’t a secret then, and it’s not a secret now.

If you’re a Doctor Who fan in the places where I’m a Doctor Who fan, you may have seen calls from other fans to bring him back in some way despite all this, because some people prioritise their fondness for a character over the safety and wellbeing of the cast and crew around the actor portraying that character.

This was my response to one such call, asking for Barrowman to be given a second chance.

I’m preserving it here mostly because I’ve got a feeling this will keep coming up, and I’ll want to be able to pull it back out to repost or reference.

John Barrowman has had his second chance. He behaved the way he did throughout the 00s until he was forced to apologise for it in 2008, both behind the scenes for how he was on set and publicly for doing it on Radio 1, and then… openly kept doing it, consistently, at least as late as his time on Arrow, where he was walking around his co-stars’ trailers naked and sending them pictures of, again, him naked, that he made a crew member take.

He claims in his 2021 apology that his behaviour has changed since 2008, but that’s clearly a lie, then, isn’t it. Perhaps it didn’t include crew members who might not have felt comfortable speaking up or saying no back in 2008 and that’s what’s changed? There’s “another chance,” and then there’s, why would you ever employ this walking liability again?

So, when I say, “RTD knows better,” what I mean is, RTD is a PR-savvy showrunner whose previous run on Doctor Who was mired in controversy that he has somehow managed to escape significant public scrutiny over. Even in the best possible scenario, after a thorough redemption tour for Barrowman — which could happen, but won’t start at Doctor Who — bringing him back, even just at Big Finish, would at the very least attach controversy to the show’s brand that, surely, RTD is sensibly trying to avoid. Why do that to yourself? Why do that to the show?

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