Doctor Who 7x01

Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!
Here be SPOILERS for Doctor bloody Who series 7 episode 1!


First off, I’m confused. I thought Seven had a bit of a to do with the daleks and they accidentally destroyed Skaro. As in, destroyed. Maybe I got the wrong end of the eyestalk, but that had me under the false (?) impression that there had been some time travel involved.

And then the daleks - not the bright shiny ‘new’ ones that the Doctor made by accident with his jammy dodgers? Oh. So… no time travel? These aren’t previous daleks, but current ones? Someone tell me. I was a bit lost.

Amy’s only annoying bit was the “Who’s scared? Geronimo” moment. Not Karen’s fault, that cheesy line, but I just felt it was a little overdone.

Talking of overdone - Oswain was pretty funny until it grated. It felt to me that she was forcing herself to over-achieve and be quirky and crazy and cool and amazing. The first thing that came to me was Mary Sue. She hacks things the Doctor can’t hack; she’s holed up like Newt from Aliens; she’s just so fucking amazing she sweats awesome!sauce. Her amazingness was as overdone as her soufflé. Making a point to the audience or a little too much character-love?

Mary Sue. She really was her own Mary Sue. Given her circumstances, can’t blame her for that. Then the character wasn’t so annoying - in fact, I felt bad for intruding on her private space by having seen inside her head (no pun intended). But then - here we go. She’s so BAMF and goddamn brilliant that she manages to purge her dalek programming and makes the Doctor leave her behind to save himself and the others. And as she knows she’s about to get obliterated? She’s smiling and carrying on as normal. I mean, I know she’s pretty fucking made up with the fact that she’s beaten the daleks because they made her into one but they couldn’t make her into one, but that was a bit weird for me. For me it didn’t come off as ‘VICTORY GRIN! TAKE THAT, DALEK BASTARDS!’, but was more like ‘wheeeeeeeeee! I’m going to die! Huzzah!’ This probably wasn’t as Moffat intended, but that’s how it felt to me. Millions of children around the world are now going ‘Mummy, is she really dead then?’ I’m still wondering about her face just then, and her ‘last words’, myself.

Which brings me to... Dear Moffat. I swear to the god who is Stephen Fry, if you repeat yourself with seeing-how-the-Companion-dies-on-first-meeting-and-meeting-them-earlier-in-their-life, we are done. If this character comes back at some point (and I haven’t read spoilers or cast lists or pretty much anything at all to do with DW) then it’d better be in a way you haven’t done before. Time travel: great. But you’ve done this before. I don’t want the character back, unless Oswain hacked into the TARDIS (ouch!) and uploaded herself by virtue of her amazing programming skills. If she’s not a continuance of where she left off, I’m going to be upset. —That’s if she ever does come back. She doesn’t need to unless someone hits her over the head with a hammer to knock all the trying-too-hard-to-be-ace (ace? Ace? Baseball bat? We don’t need another Ace - who already wins over Amy in my book) out of her. That is one Tigger that really does need un-bouncing.

Overall, a good episode. Twisty and mostly fun. Matt Smith continues to deliver and I’m still waiting for him to get the writing he deserves. Rory was brilliant as usual. Amy wasn’t as annoying as normal, but she was made to look two-dimensional in this ep, as if the single problem they ever had was kids. I’m sure that triggered a million other proper grown-up problems, but they’re not going to go into that in a ‘kids’ show, so I’m guessing they condensed that whole mess into that single scene as an excuse to get them back together.

Think that’s about it. Except to say: bring back Donna. There. Done.

2 fics for the price of... none

Yeah. So being off work forever means I’ve been challenged by two different fan fiction fandoms, sharing a tenuous but oh-so-important connection. The first came about mainly because I bemoaned the fact that there weren’t enough non-slash William Brandt (Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol) fanfics up anywhere. I got challenged to write one. So I did. That means it’s not slash. That’s just who I am and there’s nothing you can do about it.


Title: Three Times William Brandt Needed a Tissue

Rating: Rated T (for part 4).
Summary:
Sometimes even William Brandt needs a tissue. Includes Jane Carter, Benji Dunn and William Brandt. Lots and lots of William Brandt. No slash, nearly no Hunt. And I'm not even sorry. Cos there was this time, and then there was this time…
Disclaimer:
I do not own anyone or anything but the things in my flat which have receipts.
Linky-link-link: HERE at An Archive of Our Own (because they don’t re-edit your stuff later) and HERE at Fanfiction dot net (because some people still use that place).


Then there was this one: an Avengers fic. Don’t judge me, it was a result of someone thinking I couldn’t do it. So I did.


Title: Enough Rope

Rating: Rated T (for blood and injuries - in the background).
Summary:
Clint and Natasha and an easy exit from an assignment. Kind of. Some Hurt/Comfort (if Natasha would call it that), past missions, bows and shirts. Any Clintasha feels are all down to how you read it.
Disclaimer:
I do not own anyone or anything but the things in my flat which have receipts.
Linky-link-link: HERE at An Archive of Our Own (because they don’t re-edit your stuff later) and HERE at Fanfiction dot net (because some people still use that place).


That’s pretty much it. Read or don’t; it’s up to you. But if you do, leave a mark.
snerk

Summer holiday

Well that was unexpected. I found myself with three weeks off. More than that, actually. About twenty-seven days. I knew it was coming up, but I knew I was trying to find work to bridge the gap and keep me in money. So how did that work out?

In short: a complete failure.

Work visa: still processing, so no way to get around that by working on the sly. Also? Privates never materialised like the parents promised. No word from Immigration re: my transfer of sponsor, and whether I can actually start with my new employer on (technically) 1st September or not. If not? Bam! There goes my rent.

Tax ‘settlement’: my old boss, being as annoying as she possibly can using parts of irrelevant law to back her up, is making my change of taxable employer a fucking nightmare. Still not fixed.

Submitted a short story to a website for paid publication: returned as ‘too similar to a lot of material we’ve already purchased’. I’m fine with that, it’s a reasonable response, so I don’t mind - until the next eight days of flash fiction delivered to the world via their inboxes is eight different authors’ takes on what could have been the same apocalypse. (Just by the by, mine was nothing to do with an apocalypse.)

Rejection letter by latest agent for my first novel, taking the total to six rejections: A very nice letter though - very nice indeed. I like these people. Pity they couldn’t place my work. I’m beginning to think sci-fi is a rude word in publishing these days (and yes, I only send it to agents who specifically say they want sci-fi. I’m not that much of a muppet).

But hey, it’s not all been doom and gloom, despite the fact that I’m going to struggle to pay the rent next month and eat at the same time. I’ve seen a shitload of movies, including my fourth viewing of The Avengers, so that made up for a helluva lot. Metropolis, Singin’ in the Rain, Lockout (three times), Total Recall (2012 - good!), The Pourne Legacy --sorry, the Bourne Legacy, The Dark Knight Rises, Scott Pilgrim, the entire first season of Longmire, and entire first season of The Finder, and successfully got my flatmate addicted to Franklin & Bash, which means we can watch an episode a day until we run out. (But then, the fact that they’ve not been renewed for a season three means, one, I officially hate TNT as a network for choosing Falling Skies over Franklin & Bash, and, two, we’re down to only twenty episodes in all the worlds. Bastards.)

I’ve written a short story to answer a challenge from someone on tumblr, and then started a new one just yesterday, as an answer to a challenge-cum-story-prompt, from someone who thinks I’ve missed an important fandom. Thanks to The Avengers’ deleted scenes, I know have enough to go on, so I can get to work. You can’t write someone’s personality when they deliberately didn’t have one for most of the twelve minutes and forty-four seconds they were actually on screen.

It looks like I’ve kept a little busy, then. But that’s a lie. I’ve had approximately ten days, non-consecutive, of wondering if it’s worth getting out of bed. There have been more than five days, here and there, where I’ve had to force myself to have a shower and actually join the grown-up world by not slouching round in pyjamas for the week. Everything I’ve read has shown me how I should never bother writing anything again, until suddenly everything I read makes me say out loud: ‘I could write better than that - on a hangover. You know what? I think I already have.’ And then I do some writing. I did spend two days planning and making a mock-up of a city, so that when I get round to writing book six it’ll already be there in the back of my head, and all the details will already have been sorted. So there’s that.

I think there have been about four whisky bottles in the recycle bin in three weeks. That’s not too bad, right? Four litres (whatever that is in real money) in three weeks? Whatever.

That’s about it. I’m actually writing this because I’m trying to work out where the last twenty-two days have gone. Typical that I get nearly a month off and can’t afford to go anywhere - I could have slept on my wee sister’s floor for a few weeks in Blighty. I could have gone to Macau and stayed in one of them really peaceful villa things, overlooking the resort’s pool, writing or reading or just getting a tan for a change. Ah well.