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Salon post: March 9
I mentioned in a lock post, there was no post last week because I was still getting over being miserably sick.
Welcome to this week's salon post!
Topic of the week
Getting conversations going is something that I think about a lot, between online spaces like this, being staff on a Pagan forum, and just generally.
I've mentioned in a locked post that I've noticed a significant drop off in comments on the salon posts, and I'm wondering if there are things I (or other people who were interested) could do to help.
Is it timing? Starting discussions a bit differently? Something else?
What I've been up to:
Having finished the Classic Doctor Who rewatch, I am now a season into New Who. (With a bit of skipping episodes, since I've seen the first couple of seasons several times in the not too distant past.)
House rules:
This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.
* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.
* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)
* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.
Welcome to this week's salon post!
Topic of the week
Getting conversations going is something that I think about a lot, between online spaces like this, being staff on a Pagan forum, and just generally.
I've mentioned in a locked post that I've noticed a significant drop off in comments on the salon posts, and I'm wondering if there are things I (or other people who were interested) could do to help.
Is it timing? Starting discussions a bit differently? Something else?
What I've been up to:
Having finished the Classic Doctor Who rewatch, I am now a season into New Who. (With a bit of skipping episodes, since I've seen the first couple of seasons several times in the not too distant past.)
House rules:
This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.
* Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to.
* If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)
* If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.
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Query for you? Which Classic Who stories clicked well for you? No need to list all, just some highlights?
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My own practice is to hit notification on anything I want to keep an eye out for comments. I discovered when I hit the notification limit a few months back (I have a paid premium account for Reasons, which include liking feeding D's cats) that it's very easy to disable them or delete them en masse, unlike the LJ version last time I looked at it. I'd put off cleaning them up for ages because of that, so it was a pleasant surprise.
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And ooh. Good question. I am going at this from 'specific serials I just liked or found interesting', not a 'these are the highlights anyone else should watch' or anything conclusive about the series.
Structurally, I've found I tend to prefer the shorter lengths (so New Who, which runs about 45 minutes, or the 2-3 parters in Classic Who. Four parters were okay, but a lot of the six parters felt like they dragged a lot, because of a certain amount of repetition due to the original airing timing. (And I don't blame them for that, but it made them a bit tedious to rewatch in a binge.) I'm also a little tired of both Daleks and Cybermen.
I like a lot of Hartnell in all his crotchety glory, and I liked seeing the development of how they structured stories (and how they played around with things) in that era - the historicals like The Aztecs or The Gunfighters compared to the much more SFnal Planet of Giants or the quest structure of Keys of Marinus.
In general, I liked Troughton a lot more than I remembered doing in earlier watches (which in his case might have been just once, actually). I didn't dislike him based on that, but I just liked his approach. (Also, I pretty much always would like more Jamie. Jamie is fun.)
I particularly liked The Enemy of the World both because it's set in 2017 (so that was a fun comparison!) and because Troughton plays both the Doctor and a look alike evil dictator. And then The Web of Fear which introduces Lethbridge-Stewart, who I've always had a fondness for. (I mean, he has his moments where you want to throw things at the TV, but.)
I like Pertwee's approach to being stuck on Earth, and his insistence on being reasonable and figuring out what the other parties want, in as much as that's feasible (which, Doctor Who being Doctor Who, sometimes it isn't. You just can't reason with Autons.)
I also found some of the 'let us look at this society' fascinating, even if they were often more minimally developed than might be ideal - the two Peladon serials, or Carnival of Monsters.
And on the rewatch, I found The Daemons hilarious on a 'let me geek the ritual theory and magical folklore applied to this episode' front.
For Tom Baker, I have a lasting fondness for Pyramids of Mars - on my trip to London a couple of years ago, I got to go to a lecture at the Petrie for its 40th anniversary by a grad student at University College London who analysed how accurate the Egyptology was (short version: really quite good for when it was made, with bonus references to "If you look at that case there in the break, you can see an example of X item that is not a prop.")
I also really liked The Masque of Mandragora (If you have noticed a "I have a soft spot for people doing ritual magic" serials, you would not be wrong. Either I find them theoretically intriguing and like geeking where the details came from, or I find them hilarious. Often both.)
I am also generally a fan of anything that involves Sarah Jane or Romana.
Davison remains one of my most fav Doctors, for a variety of reasons. I still love Black Orchid for the awesome concentrated Gothic horror aspect of it. I'd remembered not liking Turlough and the serials he was in much, but liked them a lot more this time around.
I have a fondness for The Awakening, and it's also one of the only serials I watched from the canonical position of 'behind my grandmother's sofa because it was terrifying'. (We would not have been visiting her in England when it first aired, so it must have been a repeat later that summer, but I hadn't seen it in the US yet.)
For Colin Baker, I found Trial of a Time Lord structurally really interesting, and The Two Doctors was just a lot of fun if utterly ridiculous in places.
For McCoy, I really like Delta and the Bannermen for the 1950s holiday camp setting and the bees! Plot-important bees! And Ghost Light was just as creepy as I remembered.
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I also spent six weeks flat on my back with no functioning brain cells...I never had a fever, so it can't have been the flu, but I felt hit by a truck anyway. Mono? I don't know. So I got back in the habit of reading a book or two a day, which has been very nice. My mother had never read any Heyer at all! So we've been doing that. Bless the BPL and its enormous collection.
My booklog posts have become very terse for some reason, but if anybody wants to read them, there they are.
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As for what I've been up to, a lot of reading for pleasure and a lot of socializing w/the neighbors. I've also been working out once a week at the local YMCA, and it feels so good. Believe it or not, I haven't read any of the Dr. Who series. But my high school had a Dr. Who Club. I'm not sure if they still do though. The guy who was in charge of it at the time was a teacher of mine.
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Other than that, I've been spending a lot of time and energy on PT for my hips. It's helping, but it's time-consuming, and seems to be using up spoons as well.
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I found watching with the Wiki open for that serial really rewarding, since it sometimes gave useful background. (There are some spoilers for future things, so if that bothers you, it might be frustrating. But also references to stuff in the audio and books that I am not going to be completist about.)
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(And I am glad the flat on your back at least allowed for reading, and also was not in your busy season.)
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Also, I did not realize until reading this entry that you could turn on per-post whole-post comment notifications!
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Doctor Who! Wow, you watched all the old who? I need to do that again.
I wasn't so keen on Clara, so I've skipped a few episodes with her and Matt. I'm hoping with the new doctor and the new show runner it'll be better.
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Is there an etiquette for joining threaded conversations? For example, I would have like to have popped in where you're talking to Asp about your favourite Classic Who serials.
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(And I totally understand that individual people will get swamped with stuff - it was when we went from a good conversation to about three people that I peered at it and went "This is not optimal for the intended goal.")
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I will also make that more explicit in the welcome stuff.
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I'd seen pretty close to all of them growing up, but it was a really different experience watching them in sequnce (since I'd seen a lot of Baker and Davison and some of Pertwee, and then scattered stuff as the local PBS station decided to air it otherwise.)
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And it's a fascinating thing because you can see changes in approaches to storytelling and structure, over time, since the series has been going so long, without necessarily getting stuck in the same mode (because different actors as the Doctor, screenwriters, and show-runners.) There are definitely things I don't like in each era of the show, but there are also a lot of things I do like.
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definitely a spoon-suck :(
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(Ugh. Yes. It could have been worse...and I didn't lose my voice this time. I ALWAYS lose my voice. I think getting a voice therapist was a good move.)
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But yes, I think you'd like Ace. She's younger than the others (sixteenish when she shows up) but she is decidedly opinionated about how things ought to go. Also the power of explosives.
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I don't know that I would want to pay $6.99 a month on top of what else I pay for cable and Netflix, but they do have a lot of interesting shows.
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(I have cancelled for the moment, and will probably resubscribe for a few months in six months or so, depending on what else turns up.)
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Will you be at Paganicon?
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(Being a fiscally responsible adult is tedious, sometimes, though it also turns out that being gone for enough time this month would have been tricky for other reasons, so I suppose it works out.)
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I definitely made the mistake of consuming serials as a single complete movie. Some of the Pertwee especially is intolerable watched that way. Now, I try and watch them as originally aired - 20 minutes, and then a break of at least one day. It helps you understand the context in which they were watched, and most of them feel a lot less repetitive and a lot better structured viewed as they were designed to be.
Have you seen Enlightenment? That's my favourite. Very spooky.
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The modern episodes are all about feelings, characters, interpersonal drama - it's the modern way of making compelling television. Even though these things are also there in older episodes, it's usually there accidentally - because these exceptional actors have taken the material and given it an inner emotional life, not because it was the scriptwriter's focus.
Whereas the Ace episodes are the first time where episodes really begin to focus on the companion-Doctor relationship, on the companion as a character in her own right, and on the emotional impact of the Doctor's life and choices. You also see them making "modern" choices, like going out of their way to cast actors of colour, and writing queer subplots.
They're definitely worth watching when you get the chance :)
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(One of the lasting things of the major health crash I had in 2010-2011 is that managing huge complex plot lines/casts of characters is still a lot of work for me sometimes, a lot more than it used to be. One of the good things about the Who rewatch was that I could pull up the relevant wiki page and get a "Wait, what happened last episode with that again?" if I needed. But putting too much space there can often make it more work than pleasure, which is not the point. It's a lot easier for me to manage stuff that's in recent memory, or that I've got good notes for.)
Enlightenment is great fun! I'd meant to mention that as one of the Turlough era ones I'd particularly liked, since the secondary characters are rather better developed (while still being very alien) than many.
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Enlightenment is the only Classic Who episode to both be written and directed by women - which is to say, it's something special. Not because women are inherently better or worse at the things, but to make it in the 80s you had to be the best you were at what you did (and then some) to overcome the hiring bias of the day. For a long time, it was the only episode of any Who to be so - but I think a couple of episodes now have that distinction. I definitely think that's why it stands out so much, as being something unusual and different, and putting a lot more thought into how it explores the world than most episodes.
Are you a Blake's 7 person? Fiona Cumming directs all the best episodes of that show too. She's a real hero of mine, capable of taking all sorts of lousy scripts and cheap shows to another level of excellence.
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