o all right then: the fangirl post.

By request.

So yeah, as noted and obvious in the vids post below, I have turned my affections upon the new Dr. Who and Torchwood.

Or, well, so far I've just been sticking to the new stuff, only referring to the Wiki summaries of older shit when I need a reference.

I started by watching Torchwood, which is a bit grimmer and -slightly- less with the silly (well, the finale was pretty naff);

and then the first DW episode I watched was the "Empty Child" one, the one with the gas masks? which was genuinely creepy and seemed at least somewhat plausible, SF-wise (as these things go). So I was thinking it was all gonna be like that. Also, dunno if this was as true in the old series, but: Russell Davies is, besides being camp as knickers, a rather grim little petunia under it all. You see it more in TW, the whole "there's nothing after death, (except for the scary thing moving in the dark, which disappointingly turns out to be a rather risible CGI monster); "life is all;" it's the inevitable flip side to the firm belief in humanism that carries DW. I mean, that's true in a lot of SF, but this one...seems to go to the existentialist dilemma quite a bit, actually. And whenever it delves into WWII stuff especially, or the whole "British Empire" riff, you really start to see it, although it's symbolically there in even the cheesier Alien Menaces. How -do- you maintain hope in either a benign God or your fellow humyn when there are bombs dropping on your head? How do you defend against the authoritarian menace from outside without becoming Daleks or Cyberpeople yourself? What's actually worse: accepting that dying (personally or collectively) may really be just... the end of everything? Or the price one pays for artifically extending existence just for the sake of existence: shutting oneself off, turning oneself into a machine, or simply the pain of knowing that one is alone within one's own skin/shell, alone in the universe? What's the point of it all, anyway?

and then I go back and start from the beginning of S1, and it's like: giant farting prosthetic aliens! pissy flying salt shakers that shoot blocklike laserbeams at people and scream "exterminate" for long moments before actually y'know doing it, thus enabling people to run away! "K-9!" "the Weakest Link" is still on 200,000 years in the future! with chunky androids! scary savage futurekind 100 trillion years in the future (the universe lasts this long?!) have evolved fangs for eatin' people but apparently still visit their barbershop regularly (perhaps they use the fangs for grooming? nice to know that neither hair nor styles have changed much in 100 trillion years)...and...

and after some initial sputtering, i realized i was basically doing the equivalent of,

"Velvet paintings are -camp- and thus delightful, but flamingos on the lawn? Now that's just -tacky.-"

so said "fuck it" and accepted that this was 1) part of its charm 2) the price one pays for getting to watch both Billie Piper and David Tennant possessed by Zoe Wanamaker.



"Voyage of the Damned" was crap, though. Not campy, just crappy. Not sure how that happened, since it was apparently Davies who wrote that as well and as I've said, I thought the S3 finale was fucking ace. ho well.

"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever."

how deeply true that is.