Blah, ill. Got a permission not to go to work today.

During my extended sleep, I had a dream I was Amy Pond, reliving completely different versions of the first four series 5 episodes.

Three thoughts. Well… four thoughts. Well… four thoughts and a lizard.

• Trainwreckdeusexmachinaresetbuttonhowdoesthatwork blah blah blah. Those fans squeeing over how Moffat is soooo much better than Davies have no ground to stand on. River constantly complaining to the Doctor about how his plans make no sense sounded to me like the writer throwing his arms up and exclaiming, “Look, I’ve written myself into a corner! I know this makes no sense! I’m sorry! We just needed a spectacular cliffhanger to boost the ratings!”
• I told you so. Of course, the Moffat-gushing fans will invent some excuse to like it anyway.
• The entirety of season 6 can now be summed up as “The one where we find out that River is a future Amy and the man she killed was Rory.” Maybe. My speculation has been wrong many times before. (Edit: Disregard this, really. There are too many things with this theory that don’t match up. Some writers would be eager to discard the lack of logic because “it would be cool”, but I don’t think even Moffat can sink that low.)
• So, I’m out. No more talking about Moffat Who. I gave him a chance to redeem himself with the finale. Now all that’s left for me is to wait for a new head writer. That’s what the RTD haters did in the first five years, didn’t they? Now I guess it’s my turn.

And since I’m not going to be talking about this subject myself anymore, let someone else say the closing words.

Doctor Who is now more awful than at any point in its prior history, not because the chief-writer-stroke-producer is vastly more inept than any of his predecessors (he clearly isn’t), but because he’s vastly more cynical. I, for one, would rather have a bad programme that’s attempting something – anything – than a programme designed specifically for BAFTA judges and fans of superhero movies.

~ Lawrence Miles

Forget that we’re talking about Doctor Who, a programme which means something slightly different to every single one of us, a programme so varied in its format and its history that it sparks more arguments about what it “should be” than any other series ever made.

~ Lawrence Miles

I remember how, back in the olden days (read: 2005–2009), actions in Doctor Who used to have consequences.

If a flying saucer damages the Big Ben, then it’s going to have scaffolding around it in the coming seasons. If the Doctor brings down a dystopia without staying and making sure that society recovers from it properly, then it’s going to bite him later. If London suffers from alien invasions two Christmases in a row, then it’s going to evacuate on the third. If the Doctor is forced to wipe a companion’s memory and reset all her character development, then he’s going to spend the next year traveling alone, ridden with guilt.

Then came 2010. The Doctor returned to the screens—but not my Doctor. (Which really has nothing to do with who portrayed the Doctor better, David T. or Matt S.: they are both just actors and work with the lines they’re given.) In this New and Improved season, bad things aren’t treated as bad things. Amy sexually assaults the Doctor, and while he’s initially horrified, he soon shakes it off and keeps traveling with her. Then in The Two With The Silurians…

Rory dies. Worse yet, he’s unpersoned. And it happens, ultimately, because the Doctor takes him and Amy to the wrong place. This would be a good moment for the Doctor to realize that his reckless actions put people around him in danger, perhaps remembering Donna or, heck, Lynda-with-a-Y.

What does the Doctor do? He takes Amy to an art gallery, then to a monster chase in Van Gogh’s time. Of course.

Head, meet desk.

Standard Russell T Davies episode: Earth or an alien planet is threatened by goofy CGI monsters. After a lot of running, fast-talking, and sonic-screwdriver-waving, the Doctor finds a way to stop them that comes completely out of the blue.

Standard Steven Moffat episode: Earth or an alien planet is threatened by a mysterious and deadly force. After experiencing a lot of timey-wimey weirdness, the Doctor asks it to please stop. So it does.

There was an old Doctor from Gallifrey…

Ahem.

There was an old show named Doctor Who on the BBC. It was watched by whole families and loved—it had witty dialogue, engaging stories and original aliens. And everyone was glad. But over time it deteriorated, and fell prey to repetitiveness and turning on itself, and fell in ratings, and was canceled.

Then there was a new show, under the same name. It was more of a reimagining than a straight continuation—a show that was noticeably different in tone, more self-aware, that just happened to be in continuity with the old one. As envisioned by head writer Russell T Davies, it challenged the implicit assumptions of the Doctor Who story framework, and grounded the Doctor and his adventures firmly in the real world, with real people, their real problems and real relatives. Admittedly there was a practical reason for this direction: it had to once again become a show for the general audience, rather than for the Doctor Who fandom.

Then Davies left, and there came a new head writer. In the past he wrote a few episodes for the new series that were near-universally pronounced “not bad at all”. So naturally the fandom regarded him as a savior. Unlike Davies the improviser, who wrote by gut instincts rather than careful planning, this new clever™ writer thought Doctor Who was supposed to be a fairy tale, and forgetting the principle of “don’t fix what isn’t broken”, retooled the show accordingly.

New Doctor Who: born March 26, 2005; died April 10, 2010.

I wrote the date for “The Beast Below”, but I actually kept watching after that, hoping it would improve. But that spirit of verisimilute from the Davies era, retained in the season opener, was irrevocably gone from the second episode and beyond. Later findings confirmed that this was all part of Steven Moffat’s deliberate, conscious Fairy Tale Vision. But wait. This is a show about a time-traveling alien who visits, like, alien worlds and such. If I was interested in fairy tales, I would be watching something completely different from Doctor Who. Maybe, I don’t know, The Little Mermaid or Cinderella.

In this New and Improved™ season, the RTD-bashing fans got exactly what they wanted: a head writer who knows what he’s doing. But if you ask me, the fact that he’s consciously taking the show in this direction is even worse.

The logical result is the kind of episode we got last Saturday: a misplaced Mr. Mxyzptlk shows up in the TARDIS to pull the heroes into a mind-screwy Cuckoo’s Nest “emotional” episode that evidently tries to be this season’s “Father’s Day”. Except “Father’s Day” made me feel sad for Rose (Me! Sad! For Rose of all people!), and I found it genuinely moving. Here, on the other hand, the only reaction this episode managed to evoke was wishing Amy would actually die in a van crash. She doesn’t, of course. The trio wakes up to discover that it was all a dream, even the supposedly “real” world. Congratulations, Simon Nye, you have managed to write the first ever episode in the new series where there were never any genuine threat at all.

A viewer like 7-year-old Amelia Pond would perhaps appreciate this episode, probably find it funny because the Nasty Grimacing Man is the kind of villain that kids find funny, or because the Doctor was preparing to catch Amy’s baby by holding his hands under her crotch. Sorry, but to make me take what’s happening on screen at least half-seriously, you need to do better.

This new season has become all style and no substance. The new TARDIS design, a steampunk retro glorified child’s bedroom with flashing bulbs (as opposed to the RTD-era alien look). The characters, also tuned up for kids instead of, I don’t know, ticking every age category and giving everyone someone to identify with (think of Martha, Jackie, Donna, and Wilf). And not even the supporting ones, although huggy-happy-go-round Winston Churchill could as well be drawing his battle plans in pink crayons for all the historical authenticity we got. The main cast are big offenders. Comparing their motivations with the RTD era makes me simply weep.

The Eleventh Doctor acts wacky and buffoonish because that’s what the Doctor is supposed to do. Amy follows him around and gets into trouble because that’s what the companion is supposed to do. Rory complains, quite rightfully, that she doesn’t look all too faithful to her groom, and her response is… to grin like an idiot after he crumbles to dust in front of her eyes in the dream world, firmly believing that he’s in no danger because her magic wizard in his magic phone box is around. Aaaargh. I’d strangle her, but when she displays all the personality of cardboard with bits of Rose 2.0 randomly thrown in, what’s the bloody point? To say this characterization is as deep as a puddle would be an insult to puddles.

As Alice summed it up, “nothing after 501 feels real”. Unlike the RTD series, starting at “The Beast Below”, at no point do I feel like I’m watching real events involving real people. But rather, toys (action figures?) being moved around a playground.

Next up: something or other with reptilians from 26 years ago. Meh. I’m done with Moffat and his fairy tales. I’ll return for the season finale, though, because it has River Song in it. You can’t go wrong with River Song. She’d make even “Love & Monsters” watchable. Other than that, I’m out.

The Doctor: Just touch these two strands together and the Daleks are finished… Have I that right?
Sarah Jane: To destroy the Daleks? You can’t doubt it.
The Doctor: But I do! You see, some things could be better with the Daleks. Many future worlds will become allies just because of their fear of the Daleks… But the final responsibility is mine, and mine alone. Listen: if someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you, and told you that the child would grow up to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?
Sarah Jane: We’re talking about the Daleks, the most evil creatures ever invented. You must destroy them! You must complete your mission for the Time Lords.
The Doctor: Do I have the right?

“I honestly couldn’t care less if Martha falls for the Doctor or not. And I don’t want any more references to Rose. I don’t want Martha compared to Rose. I don’t want Martha insulted because she isn’t Rose. I just want Martha and the Doctor to explore and battle bad guys. Is that really too much to ask?”
~ Kevin Lahey, review of “Gridlock”, pagefillers.com

Davies’ venture was inherently paradoxical, dualistic. This was noted by many. One Mike Taylor noted correctly that Davies, at times, seemed “not to get it”, made the Doctor too human, with too much emphasis on Twue Wub. And yet, it was his show and his writing that hammered the idea of the lonely Time Lord being alien, inhuman, other; following his own logic and moral code, often seen as weird by his human companions, but emerging right and victorious in the end—except the times he went too far, and needed the human factor, in the form of the companions, to stop him.

Davies was, on one hand, a producer and brainstormer interested in seeing the show blossom and prosper; but on the other hand, he was an old-time Doctor Who fan. But wait a minute, so is Moffat!

“I am incapable of contradicting an established fact of Doctor Who lore. I just can’t do it, any more than Russell. Russell sticks in little tiny bits of dialogue to account for the fact he might have vaguely contradicted a William Hartnell story in 1965.”
~ Steven Moffat

So, where lies the difference? We’ll get to that.

You could indeed argue that Davies wrote a good show, if you take “show” in the sense of spectacle. Let’s take his typical episode: everything is loud, things go boom, people are running and talking non-stop, there is some not-so-subtle postmodern commentary linking the exotic alien environments to the present day, and in the end… something happens. But what’s the problem? The problem is that these episodes are too absorbed in their own self-awareness, the author’s smug overview of the setting, and the mandatory “character development bits” disjointed from the main plot that they don’t tell good stories.

For an episode to be a story, it has to have, like, plot, with, like, cause and effect narrative—where the end conditions can be reasonably inferred from the starting conditions. When it breaks down, it accounts to the plot being little more than a chain of contrivances to drive the characters from one scene to the next one. This especially shines in episodes like “Boom Town” or “The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End”, where the plot is just a paper-thin pretext to get the characters to interact and either foreshadow things for future episodes or showcase the Cool Action Scenes. The often-noted “disjointed”, clip-show nature of RTD scripts (best exemplified by his final farewell to the series, “The End of Time”) stems exactly from this: writing individual scenes first and adding the plot as an afterthought. Of course, after all the Important Dialogue is delivered and the Great Revelations are made, the plot becomes a hindrance (best example: “Doomsday”) rather than the main point of the episode, and is quickly dispensed with, usually with a quick application of the magic TARDIS, magic sonic screwdriver, or some technobabble invented on the spot.

In fan circles, the words “RTD script” have almost become synonymous with “deus ex machina”. (In this sense, “The Parting of the Ways”, one of the worst offenders, is interesting in its own right: an almost-literal “god” steps out of a literal machine, the TARDIS, and sets things right.) Granted, this is not always the case. “Tooth and Claw” is ranked high among RTD episodes, presumably exactly because the resolution is adequately foreshadowed in addition to the episode itself being atmospheric. “Midnight” was good, but it was good by virtue of Davies abandoning the usual Doctor Who format in favor of writing something he’s actually good at: suspense drama.

And this is his second paradox: we’re dealing with a Doctor Who fan who despises Doctor Who fans, and a television producer who makes jabs at his own audience. An example of the two aspects of his personality reinforcing rather than contradicting each other.

“We already knew that Davies had a low opinion of his audience. They are too thick to understand scientific explanations; too unimaginative to be able to deal with stories set on the Planet Zog; too ignorant to have heard of any but the most iconic historical characters; and so shallow that if there is even two minutes of exposition, they’ll get bored and switch channels.”
~ Andrew Rilstone

Well, that may be too harsh. He did comment on “planet Zog” in defense of every season 1 episode being set within Earth orbit at some point in time, only to boldly go into that territory with the dreadful “New Earth” and later, less dreadful episodes. He does make in-story jabs at the Doctor Who audience, both the nerdy fandom (the even more dreadful “Love & Monsters”) and the mainstream (pre-character-development Donna). He wrote directly about hating Internet forums discussing him.

It would be easy to say that Davies “doesn’t get SF”. It seems more complicated than that. I’d say his main problem is that, and this is his producer side speaking, he underestimates his audience—an offense never committed by his Japanese “spiritual counterpart”, Nagaru Tanigawa, who also writes “soft” SF stories with a touch of romance for the “Internet generation”, yet manages to do it in a way that emphasizes both his skill as a writer and his respect for his readers. Davies thinks he can get away with nonsensical technobabble and lack of verisimilitude in his settings (“Gridlock”, anyone?) because it’s supposedly not what the mainstream audience cares about. So he goes out of his way to make his settings “relatable” to the modern audience by making them bizarre, grotesque pastiches of the present day (“The Long Game”, “Bad Wolf” and the aforementioned “Gridlock”), and he gets points for nailing the idea that the residents of these dystopias treat them as perfectly normal and the only possible states of living—while nevertheless depriving them of any degree of believability.

Note that I don’t ask for realism. Heck, I like some of the boldest, most “unrealistic” ideas from the new series, as long as it makes logical sense and is internally consistent. (For example, speaking of Moffat, I don’t mind the effing space whale, but I don’t see how anyone in their right mind would design peacekeeping androids on an Earth starship to look like the Smilers.) We have the 1984 effect: there is no way these societies can work, simply because of the human factor, even with all the advanced technology you want, and ignoring the pop culture references. (It’s telling how often “Bad Wolf” was praised for being allegedly a clever satire of mind-numbing reality shows, while in fact those were never intended as satire and RTD inserted them as a tribute to them.)

Davies is at his best when he drops his “viewers are morons” assumptions and writes intelligent stories for intelligent people. I haven’t watched it, but I was told that Torchwood: Children of Earth is really good, part of it because it drops all the random, inorganic, forced silliness that in Doctor Who specifically exemplified by two things: creating “kid appeal” species that fall flat, such as the Slitheen, Adipose and especially the dreadful Abzorbaloff, and inappropriate pop culture jokes where drama should be. (His pet character is specifically guilty of that, which is one of the reasons that contributes to the annoyances of season 2.) Doctor Who always oscillates between silly and seriousness, between comedy and drama; but in Moffat’s case, for instance, both tie together organically, without random bits of either sticking out like sore thumbs.

As for internal consistency, let’s just look at all the times he made familiar concepts exhibit many previously completely unseen functions, exceptions and corner cases, including such core ones as the TARDIS, sonic screwdriver and regeneration. (Regeneration can be either quiet or violently explosive, sometimes it plain doesn’t trigger when the plot demands it, you can refuse it at will—something never seen before—you can regrow limbs for as long as the plot says, you can suppress regeneration by channeling it into said severed limbs, which will cause copies of you to grow from them, etc etc etc.) Really, the phrase “it works that way except when it suddenly doesn’t” describes just about anything about RTD‘s pervasively used plot devices: while the basic concept stays the same, intricacies appear, disappear, and are plain handwaved in with no foreshadowing when the story demands it.

No review of RTD, even a very informal one, would be complete without mentioning his pet character, Rose Tyler, and the tackled-on George Lucas love story (at least the creators were smart enough not to make the Doctor mention love explicitly, not even Rose’s personal Doctor Clone For Shippers, thus allowing viewers to make their own interpretations). Indeed, that’s his fanboy side kicking in, and it’s best said by TV Tropes: sometimes it feels like he’s writing a fanfic of his own show, making all the same mistakes that make most fanfiction look bad (as opposed to stories written by authors who actually “get” the setting and the characters). The adventure-of-the-week format is both a strength and a weakness: a weakness because it forces writers to squeeze plots and interesting settings into 45-minute straightjackets, and a strength because if you didn’t like this week’s episode, chances are, next week’s will be completely different. The same story is with characters, the constant cast turnover lets you pick favorites. Don’t like Martha? Try Donna’s season. Can’t stand Ten? Chances are, Nine or Eleven will appeal to you more.

And this is where Rose stands out from the other companions. Not because she’s inherently better or worse, mind you. But her creator tries to force us to think she is, with all the subtlety of an anvil. While my opinion of Rose as a person is less than rose-colored, to put it mildly, what makes her particularly annoying is that the show couldn’t shut up about her even long after she was stranded on Earth-2—notwithstanding even her temporary return, purely to appease shippers, cheapening the drama of that separation. Yes, we get it—RTD thinks she was the Best Companion Ever, and wants to portray her and the Doctor as an item. (The fact that he didn’t give a 900-year-old Time Lord any legitimate logical reason for attachment to a completely random average companion is another story.) Now, can we please move on and see him saving the universe with someone else without the obligatory reference to Rose every episode?

Whoosh. This was a lot of text. Hopefully, I’ll be free of accusations of hating Russell T Davies. I hope I demonstrated that it’s not the case, I don’t hate him. As for love (in a non-romantic sense)... If I were to describe my complicated, multi-faceted opinion of him with a list of single words, perhaps that one would have a place on the list too, and maybe not even the last.

“I don’t want to go…”
~ The Tenth Doctor, last words

This is going to be a strange post. Strange because I don’t really know enough about RTD to judge him. Of his work, I’ve only seen his venture in the new Doctor Who series (2005–2009) and the pilot episode of Torchwood, “Everything Changes”. But I’m not going to speak of Torchwood (which I have no opinion about, although I’ve heard mostly negative comments about it) and his earlier works like Queer as Folk. This is an attempt to look, in retrospect, at his impact on the series that he spearheaded for five years.

Fan opinion on Russell T Davies is polarized. Some believe he ruined the series forever, or alternatively, did nothing throughout his years but spitting on the grave of the Good Ol’ Classic™ Series. Others regard him as the second coming of insert favorite producer here and worship the ground he walks on. This is to be expected, particularly since it’s a fandom we’re talking about. I said before that I don’t call myself a fan of anything, and part of the reason is that for every relatively recent work of fiction that I happen to enjoy, I eventually end up disliking its fandom. Or rather, disliking the loudmouth “yer doin it rong” factions that constantly bicker against each other, or focus on shallow, superficial traits of the characters and write kiloscreens of slashfiction with blatant disregard for plot, characterization and background themes (especially prevalent in anime fandom, for example Haruhi Suzumiya—a fairly clever teenage SF series by a competent author and maybe the closest thing thematically that anime has to Doctor Who, turned into a joke by its own fandom).

So, as a non-fan who just happens to be interested in Doctor Who, I’ll try to present a Cliff Notes version of my strange, complex love-hate attitude to the man behind the 2005 revival, Russell T Davies. As a disclaimer, I never saw any of the old series episodes (I honestly tried to watch the First and Fourth Doctor, but found them too cringeworthy by modern standards—although I did read a lot about the old series on the TARDIS Wiki, complete with screenshots), so all I can compare the RTD series to is the Eighth Doctor movie and the three episodes of Series 5 released so far.

First things first: RTD is a brilliant marketer. He succeeded in the seemingly impossible: not only did he bring back an old SF series, fairly obscure outside the UK and mostly remembered as low-budget and over-the-top silly (after a failed revival attempt in 1996, no less), the new series turned into an unprecedented worldwide success, ensuring its bright future for years to come. He seemed to know just the right actors; Eccleston, Piper, Tennant, Agyeman and Tate were all regarded as questionable choices at best when the casting was announced, yet these naysayers quickly drowned in cries of praise when the new Doctors and companions hit the screens.

He knew how to stir and bait the press (with pretentious titles like “The Next Doctor”) and ensure publicity for the show, how to keep the wheel of speculation and rumors (sometimes outright incorrect ones, intentionally so) running, and fuel the interest in both the series and its backstage revolutions for viewers and journalists alike. And here we see one of RTD‘s persistent qualities: everything around him screams loudly. “Look at me! I’m an important piece of information! I’m here for a reason!”

He knew that simply bringing the show back in its original format wouldn’t bode well with a 21st century audience, and to survive, it had to adapt and evolve. Hence the new 45-minute format and the new in-universe aesthetics: under various pretexts, the new series “modernized” such dated (“retrofuturistic”) elements as the TARDIS interior, the sonic screwdriver, the Daleks and the Cybermen, although the police box exterior proved to be too iconic to touch in any significant way. It almost feels like a “reimagining” that’s oddly in-continuity with the previous show; granted, Doctor Who evolved quite a lot over its original 26-year-old run (heck, the series as originally conceived didn’t have the Time Lords, regeneration and the sonic screwdriver, now considered iconic elements of the mythos), but the changes between the old and new series were the most drastic modification the franchise ever faced.

And amazingly, with such drastic changes, complete with the allegedly “un-Doctorish” Christopher Eccleston, Doctor Who remained recognizably Doctor Who—whereas the 1996 movie is often claimed to be “not really Doctor Who”. (And indeed, my first impression of it, after exposure to the RTD series, was that a recognizably Doctorish Doctor somehow ended up in an alternate universe of an American cop movie.)

At the same time, the series became more self-aware, if not necessarily “darker”—a definite plus in an age where a detailed analysis of every episode’s goofs and plot holes appears on the Internet within minutes after the episode finishes airing. The first season alone explored such themes as:

• The Doctor’s loneliness and survivor’s guilt following the Time War (by itself, a good catalyst to rebuild mystery around the Doctor after we found out too much about him).
• The companion’s ties back in their place of origin, and the consequences of traveling with the Doctor for the companion and those around them. (“Aliens of London”, “Father’s Day”, “Boom Town”)
• The two reasons the Doctor needs companions. (“The End of the World” and “Dalek”)
• What distinguishes a good companion from a bad one. (“The Long Game”)
• The drastic consequences of temporal paradoxes, and the justification of the idea that you only get one attempt to change history. (“Father’s Day”)
• The consequences of careless meddling with history and “setting right what once went wrong”. (“Bad Wolf”)

While it was loud, fast-paced and zany, the new series was clever enough to occasionally employ deconstruction (in the TV Tropes sense, that is, showing a grittier side of a plot device by playing it seriously and realistically). The finale nailed the inherent wrongness of the Doctor just waltzing into a dystopia, removing the reason for its existence, and expecting things to magically get better as he carelessly hops to his next adventure. Looking ahead, I should add it would be even nicer if these themes were consistently followed.

Self-awareness expanded to concepts that were originally intentionally overlooked, of the “elephant in the living room” variety. The pervasive TV SF phenomenon of aliens speaking English, which remains to this day unexplained in the Stargate franchise, not only got an in-universe explanation that was consistently followed on, but became a plot point in a couple of episodes. Regeneration, originally just a plot device invented to allow changing actors, became its own theme explored in detail. (There is speculation that Davies hired Eccleston with the specific intent to change him into Tennant at the end of his Doctor’s arc.)

“Eccleston then apparently released a statement through the BBC, saying that he would be leaving the role at Christmas for fear of being typecast. Fan reaction to the news ranged from disappointment to irritation to outright anger. Some did point out, however, that the series is uniquely suited to deal with cast changes. The number of angry postings on the popular Outpost Gallifrey fan forum was enough for Shaun Lyon, the owner of the website, to close down the forum for two days to allow tempers to cool.”
~ Wikipedia, “History of Doctor Who”

Davies laid the groundwork, the overall thematic direction, and the threads to follow on—which largely continue to be followed, as his successor Moffat has retained the overall format: self-contained adventure-of-the-week episodes with overarching season-long plots and personal arcs for the companions. As a long-term Doctor Who fan himself, Davies has preserved (bar some exceptions) the overall series mythos, going as far as to veto Children’s BBC idea of the near-assured disaster that would a young Doctor series. (The idea of a Doctor Who spin-off for kids, however, survived and became The Sarah Jane Adventures). Granted, this was offset by the creation of Torchwood, whose reception was… mixed, to put it mildly.

A marketing ace, a competent producer, a rebuilder and a preserver, the engineer of Doctor Who‘s worldwide success. Why, then, all the fan hate? Mainly, it stems as a criticism of the one thing that Davies, in charge of Doctor Who, wasn’t good at.

He was not a good Doctor Who writer.

But that requires a second part to analyze in more detail—one that will follow soon enough, where I’ll get to looking at Davies’ writing for the four and a half seasons he produced.

Doctor Who Series 5 is about to start this week, and with the new producer, new logo, new TARDIS design, new Doctor, new companion… it feels like the end and beginning of an era.

And rewatching that two-parter—written by the current producer no less—just made me convinced who the Doctor’s best new series companion is. It’s not Martha, not Donna, and definitely not Rose (ugh). It’s River “Spoilers” Song. Even though she’s only technically his future companion (in his personal timeline), in the one episode that she appeared in so far, she managed to establish herself as more mature than any of the regular companions.

Mind you, Martha isn’t bad—she has everything to be a capable companion, but she was always doomed to be the Doctor’s second. River, so far, has demonstrated herself as the only person in the entire show to be able to speak to the Doctor on equal terms. For a human, this is a remarkable feat to say the least. And this is why she fits him. She’s his equal, not an accessory to follow the Doctor and marvel how great and mighty he is.

And it really says something that despite my utter disgust for any kind of romance in Doctor Who, especially a Doctor/companion romance, I’d be the first to cheer at his wedding with River Song, if they would ever have one.

Wow. There is now fanart based on my fanfic (and not even the one I consider my best)—and I manage to find this depiction of Martha Jones even hotter than Freema Agyeman. Which is quite a feat… That’s probably because my imagination draws the rest.

I wonder why I was called “her”, though. Maybe this has something to do with the default gender of fanfic writers, which happens to be different from the default gender of Internet users in general?

Looks like it’s time to update both “Himeno FC-I” and “2008”. Readers are waiting—down with procrastination!