#and the Tennant Doctor will die of old age)

[littldoctor]

When he talks with Sarah for the first time in years.

Doctor who – S2E3 – School Reunion

He's so smiley during the whole thing and so delighted to have her in front of him again.

#This is exactly why I hate immortal tropes #this is just cruel #doctor who #david tennant #tenth doctor #tvshow #10th doctor #series #literally watching people you love die of old age while you cant do the same #always alive #old but never dying #it also explains why he is so reckless

[being-of-rain]

So the last few years of TV Dr Who have done a lot of new things with the Doctor's ability to regenerate, and at no point is it very clear what does and doesn't count towards the limit of the Doctor's new regeneration cycle that they received in The Time of the Doctor. You could debate whether a few of the changes are exceptions to the limit, and whether the new regeneration cycle is still something that applies after the retcon that the Timeless Child apparently has more than twleve regenerations in the first place.

But, assuming the new cycle is still a limit, and that each change of body may count to the total, is the Doctor already more than halfway through it? Let's count.

1st incarnation: Old Man Matt Smith. Remember that he counts as the first incarnation out of thirteen, because there are twelve death-saving regenerations in a cycle (so an original body followed by twelve additional bodies). Almost immediately after gaining the new cycle, he starts using it up by dying of old age (because that body is more than a thousand years old by that point).

2nd incarnation: Peter Capaldi, who after a century or so gets electrocuted by a Cyberman and takes two full episodes to die from it.

3rd incarnation: Jodie Whittaker, who seemingly spends most of her decades-long life in prison. Halfway through The Power of the Doctor she's force-regenerated into...

4th incarnation: Sacha Dhawan. This incarnation is artificially created by the Master, not regenerating for any stated mortal wound, but Patrick Troughton regenerated for the same reason and he still counted to the total (...unless you wanted to say that Troughton's change didn't count, and he turned into Jo Martin, who later turned into Jon Pertwee, which is a theory I'm not opposed to). In any case, three quarters of the way through The Power of the Doctor, Dhawan turns into...

5th incarnation: Jodie Whittaker Again. That change might be the least likely to count towards the cycle total, because the Master's tech and the regeneration energy of the CyberMasters are used to "reverse" and cause a "degeneration". I like to count it though, because I think it's funny, because literally ten on-screen minutes later the Doctor is hit by the energy of the Qurunx redirected by the Master, and she turns into...

6th incarnation: David Tennant Again (Again). It literally only just occurred to me that turning back into David Tennant might have been an after-effect of the degeneration ten minutes earlier. The Doctor's body was still set on reverse. Anyway, around fifteen hours later (according to The Giggle's novelisation) the Doctor is shot with a galvanic beam by the Toymaker.

Then the 'bigeneration' happens. Now, it's established in the Tardis at the end of the episode that Gatwa's Doctor is somehow taken from the future of Tennant's retired Doctor (he's "older" than Tennant, after he "fixed himself"). So my question is: is there technically two regenerations between the Doctor at the start of The Giggle and the Doctor at the start of The Church on Ruby Road? See, the bigeneration stopped Tennant from dying by laser beam, resulting in...

7th incarnation: David Tennant Again Again Again, who retires to live with Donna's family and presumably has a series of low-stakes wacky domestic adventures. And possibly at some point in his future he suffers another fatal injury, resulting in...

8th incarnation: Ncuti Gatwa, who is pulled down his timeline to 2023 UNIT tower. This could've been straight away, or a bit later in this incarnation's life, and he could've been the result of another fatal injury or not, we can only speculate.

So at the very most, that's eight incarnations out of thirteen. That's over halfway through the new regeneration cycle. That's like the entirety of Classic Who and the TV Movie, this time over ten years of intermittent TV. To quote Susan when she's reunited with the Doctor in the audio An Earthly Child and asks about his regenerations, "Eight?! How did you manage that! That's just throwing them away!"

#doctor who #dw spoilers #doctor who meta #my posts #doctor

[angrycloudloud]

Every other face of the Doctor: *dies doing something heroic and regenerates*

The Doctor with the face of David Tennant: "i'm only doing that once, Donna and Rose say i can't be more dramatic than them."

Everyone else: "what?"

Rose: "yeah, he is allowed to do that once with that face."

The universe: "what?"

Donna: "we'll keep the skinny martian alive until he dies of old age, he can't die until i say so."

The universe: "What?!"

The Doctor with David Tennant face:

- The Meta-Crisis Doctor

- Bi-generation

#doctor who david tennant #doctor who #rose tyler #tenth doctor #fourteenth doctor #donna noble #he can't die twice with that face

[awesome-badass-cafeteria-sauce]

Just hear me out for a sec!

Just some Fourteen and Donna thoughts

(My gif and sorry the quality is shit I dunno what happened 😢)

What if, after the bi-regeneration thing, Fourteen lost or gave up the ability to regenerate? Like he doesn’t age like a human because he’s not but he can die.

And he doesn’t do some weird merge with Fifteen bc I said so.

So basically he just continues living with Donna and her family. He’d be a lot more careful than before because he doesn’t want to die just yet.

BUT!

Donna eventually dies due to old age and Fourteen is there with her until the very end because of course he is.

And Donna is lying there surrounded by her loved ones and she just smiles at The Doctor and says “see you soon, Spaceman.”

And he knows that he’ll see her soon but he’s still sobbing because she’s his best friend and he doesn’t want to be without her.

“See you soon, Earth girl.”

As soon as Donna’s gone, The Doctor just looks his family and gives them a sad smile. They understand why he’s doing this but that doesn’t mean that they don’t hate it.

The Doctor goes back to his TARDIS and says “I’m ready to go.” The TARDIS helps him go and it’s easy and painless. A lot easier and less painful than regenerating. Just like falling asleep.

Then he’s awake again. In his TARDIS. But the TARDIS looks different. It feels more…him.

“Finally, Spaceman! What took you so long? I have places to be and things to see!”

It was like they hadn’t been apart or stopped travelling and she looked just like she did when they first met.

“Sorry! So. Where to, Earth girl?” The Doctor does his hyper jumping and running and grinning thing he does.

“Pluto. Pluto deserves justice! I just want to give the little planet a hug.”

The Doctor does his raised eyebrow thing.

“Oi!”

“Sorry! Pluto it is! Allons-y!”

fin

Tagging people who I think might like it: @quite-right-too @casasupernovas @tennant @tatennant @theetherealbloom @kbishop @denaliwrites @my-lonely-angel @davidtennan-t @raining-stars-somewhere-else

#doctor who #14th doctor #fourteenth doctor #donna noble #10th doctor #tenth doctor #doctor who fic #doctor who imagine #fourteenth doctor fic #fourteenth doctor imagine #14th doctor fic #14th doctor imagine #the doctor donna #the doctor x donna #donna noble fic #donna noble imagine #ten x donna #fourteen x donna #10 x donna #14 x donna #kinda but not really #i just love them so much #I want them to stay together forever #just the doctor and donna in the TARDIS forever pls! #david tennant #catherine tate

[variousqueerthings]

I note that I don't, and I never, was much of a fan of doctor-and-rose as romance, but that I -- rather than get annoyed at the romantic-coded scenes -- had a tendency to simply read them from a totally different perspective, and really maybe should have been a sign of sooomething different about me, that I continuously felt that the doctor's concepts of connection must be so alien, that to call it romance would be to diminish the actual Thing that they had, which was presented as such onscreen (to my mind then, now I realise what was happening, but I prefer what I had going on), which is basically that the doctor was a shell of a person, hurtling towards destruction (he would have died without rose in ep1), desperately lonely and sad and traumatised, and she retaught nine -- and by extension ten -- how to love the universe, at the same time as nine and ten taught her the same. (I think about the scene in father's day, where while they're arguing, rose says that she knows how sad he is, and he'll just hang around the tardis waiting for her -- she knew!)

and then on top of that with sarah-jane (which, I never watched the classics as a kid, so I didn't have that context for her beyond what the episode presented) it felt like that was sort of confirmed and made even more canon through this idea that the doctor is constantly mourning the inevitable deaths of their companions and would rather simply leave them behind at some point than watch that happen (and they've seen that happen before, although dying for a cause versus just... dying, because you die, while they don't, they just continue on and on, always seeking connection, always knowing that time will take them away, that's a whole other thing)

and then of course there's ten's... I would call it "sex appeal" because it's david tennant and with his performance there's immediately a bit of a focus on oh he's quite pretty and he faints/is knocked unconscious in both of his first episodes, and a lot more flirting, and the people want to see sparks or what have you... but the doctor as portrayed and written is still... not coming at it that way. yes yes girl in the fireplace but also, once again, doesn't work for me, because I find it soooo much more interesting that the doctor would imprint on A Life - and a life that they admire -- and speedrun the exact thing that they're most afraid of with their companions... that she ages and dies and it's the one thing that the doctor simply cannot stop

meanwhile rose is quite young and swept up in this whole massive adventure and very much reads the doctor not as an alien (frequently surprised by their alien-ness) and gets jealous of sarah-jane as if she's an ex, and renette as if she's... a replacement? but really it's more that the doctor met her at the point when she was about to accept her life as it was. not an exciting life, not a bad life, but always having to ignore the idea that there must be more to it than this. and the idea that she might be unceremoniously dumped back in that after seeing just how This the this could be, of course that's terrifying. and of course she's simultaneously taken with the dashing doctor and the jetset life, and worried she could be replaced, because to her the doctor saved her at 19 years old. in some ways the doctor created her (considering who she becomes after dooms day)

contrasted to martha who initially has a similar kind of experience, but the doctor doesn't meet her at the space she's in with them -- ten is leaning on her, like they did with rose, but not giving anything back unless kicking and screaming and traumatising her whole family. martha's trajectory is so so tragic, because she barely gets a taste of the splendor versus the horrors and the latter marks her for life. but she also knows to walk away from those overwhelming feelings, rather than give into them, she knows they'll never be rewarded and she also grows beyond wanting to be a crutch for the doctor (the fact that she then ends up as a soldier, well... ouch)

and then of course donna, who never has those fucking awe-feelings to begin with and whose connection with the doctor is explicitly de-romanticised but never placed on a lesser pedestal as if there's a hierarchy of alloromanticism. topples those pillars, never sees the doctor as anything but what the doctor is. good old donna. (sobs.) (but also... cautious hope for the specials.) (but also sobs.)

my point being. just don't buy alloromantic doctor, they're a near-immortal alien. it's such a dull simplistic way of reading their relationships to other beings. other point being. all those women who were making heart-eyes at ten, wish they'd met thirteen and had a... "yeah, this still works for me," moment. their horizons, too, are broadened by seeing More. (that or they realise they were never actually "in love" but just thought ten was a sexy skinny little snack and it blinded them.) (although jodie whittaker, too, is a snack.)

and lastly lastly ofc, is that if the doctor has a longterm (by doctor time measurement) intense relationship with anyone, whatever that might be called, it's the tardis. and that relationship is also so alien it cannot be quantified by human words for concepts

#im rewatching doctor who #doctor who #dw #aroace doctor #look im rewatching into 13 and beyond i am willing to entertain yaz and 13 because we enjoy a good bit of lesbianism #however will wait and see because the doctor in my head is so so aroace in every incarnation #they just manifest it in different ways #i could go into the whole eleven-and-river and how i feel about that #i am perhaps in the minority in that river's arc just doesn't work for me and often neither does her character #i kind of want to listen to the audio adventures because ive heard she's got much more to do there #than be a flirty enigma/sexy lady/moffat fantasy #but i can say that one of my least favourite things about moffat's run was how 'sexy' he tried to make everything #by literally just having people use the word sexy all the time and talk about bad girls and what have you #it's like sexiness as written by a straight teenage boy #and not a supposedly grown man writing for grown people #other minority opinion perhaps but eleven just isn't my cup of tea #am interested in how i'll feel going back into that run #dont like matt smith much dont like moffat much and dont like what they envisioned for the doctor and how they directed/acted the doctor #feel like capaldi had to claw the character back into some semblance of thematic coherency #i was never too much into especially ten getting a bit high and mighty with lonely god and the like titles BUT #waters of mars places that in a very particular context that makes it so so gooood #(another post for another day about companion opinions)

[ofpineapplesanddawns]

"we didn't mean to kiss. it was never supposed to happen."

Arthur and that oughr. Uh. The guy. The robot dad. The cartoon robot dad DT plays in the show you recommended me. (No I don't know how he can kiss without a mouth that's not important) Or did you have a non cartoon policy? I have written this so i cannot go back and look because mobile and there is cat on my lap so i cannot check laptop. If cartoon is nogo as i am now beginning to suspect it is, i mean. Does DT play any live action robots? I forget. Is there an android tenth or fourteenth doctor copy out there? Surely by now there must be. There are so many david tennants in doctor who. Or just 14 maybe.

You mean his character from Eden? I do have a policy on cartoons, but it's mostly any animal based ones. Also, no one has ever asked for a cartoon so this is a first, haha.

He also played a droid in Star Wars named Huyang (who came to the Jedi temple in a, I'm not kidding, a blue box thousands of years ago, so technically a droid Doctor exists), and I think he was an android in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles thing, but I never watched it so I don't really know.

Anyway, since I've never written E92 before and I don't think there's any, ANY content of him within the good omens extended universe because no one ever talks about this series, I'm going for it. I'm making him kiss the bartender.

On with the fic!

--

It was Earth, that much was clear.

Long occupied with robots, androids only came into being here with the arrival of The Avalon years ago. It had been meant to go to a whole new world while other humans slept for ages back on Earth as it repaired itself.

Now these humans were back, and humans, androids, and robots were living together, trying to make a new life for themselves.

Arthur had been one of the few androids, the most human of them all, to become part of the new Earth. He was still a bartender, as that was all he really knew, but he worked with other androids and robots, helping them learn about humans. He had the most knowledge, he was meant to talk to them, to interact and be part of their lives.

In order to do that, he was given legs to help him move about the robot's old city. It was strange, they were more spider-like than human, but it helped him move about, they would do. He stood out among the other robots and androids, and among the humans.

It was...

He wasn't sure how to put it.

Luckily, he found robots that were kind to him, even if he was different from them. A small group that had learned of humans, who had even raised a child together, a human child. From what the child's 'parents' told him, she was found in a pod as a baby, and they rescued her.

They couldn't leave her to die, even though taking care of a human went against their protocols.

They did a lot of things against their protocols over the years to protect their daughter, and they told him they always would.

A37 was the mother, she was kind and a bit more open to things than her counterpart, E92.

He was the father figure, and the more reserved one, but Arthur had found a kindness in him that was rather human-like. He seemed to have picked that up from his daughter, Sara Grace. E92 had been the one to take him in and help him when he arrived.

He didn't have to do that, but Arthur was grateful for it. He was also grateful for Sara helping to give him legs and for E92 and A37 to get him some sort of work with the other robots instead of just doing things for the humans.

It had been a day of helping both populations with the continuous need to adjust to things, and Arthur felt worn down. He needed to recharge, and found E92 getting ready to do the same after a long day of work in the fields, a job he honestly seemed to enjoy.

"There is only one charging station left." The robot said, voice its usual calm down.

"I am sure we can share it, or we could take turns, depending on battery depletion." Arthur suggestion.

A quick scan indicated that the second option was not ideal, as both were under 20%, and being the advanced systems that they both were, they constantly spent battery power.

"Sharing is better than one of us going into offline mode." E92 offered, gesturing to the pod. "You may enter first."

"I think it's better if you do, I can squeeze in afterwards."

E92 looked at the pod, gave a slight nod with his body, before entering it. Arthur squeezed in, it was tight, but it would work if he wrapped his spider limbs around the other robot's legs. There was some adjusting, but they found a bit of comfort with E92's arms loosely wrapped around Arthur, keeping him close but not too close.

"Will this work for you?" The taller of the two asked.

"I..." Arthur looked him up and down, at the faded paint on the blue and red casing. He had never been this physically close to his friend, how odd that he felt his systems start to overheat, his fans spinning internally. "I think it will do well for the situation."

"Then we shall rest for the night. Good night, Arthur." E92 said quietly, he didn't need to lower his voice, the other robots were already in sleep mode, they would not wake them.

"Good night, E92." He replied just as softly, a hand placed on the other robot. He could feel him powering down, going into sleep mode himself.

But Arthur was awake.

He had been here on Earth for a few months now, adjusting as well as he could here. He was thankful for the few friends he had made here, considering his only other ones were long dead now. He cared about Sara Grace, and A37, along with the other robots from their little family.

But E92 was different. He was someone that Arthur could talk to, spend time with, without having to put on the customer service act in his programming. It was odd, he didn't understand it, didn't know if he could.

But he enjoyed this other robot's company.

He wondered if there was something strange in his programming since coming to Earth, or at least to Eden 3.

Because he was sure it wasn't in his programming or protocol to do what he was doing now.

His lips were pressed to the cool casing in front of him, and he felt his insides running faster, louder, hotter. Arthur blinked twice, and then pulled back.

He didn't mean to kiss him. it was never supposed to happen. It wasn't something robots or androids did.

He tried to put himself into sleep mode, to not think about this. But he was distracted, just for a moment, when those loose arms around him tightened, just a little, bringing him closer to E92.

Best to think about this in the morning.

--

Arthur has feelings and doesn't understand what they are. E92 has had much longer to feel human emotions so... >.>

Also, I need to watch this again.

If I had a nickel for every time David Tennant played a character associated with the color blue and strong emotions towards a human alongside a villain played by Neil Patrick Harris, I'd have two nickels.

#good omens extended universe #john's drabbles

[denimbex1986]

'Traveling with the Doctor is not safe and many companions already know that. So why did the Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris) have to hurt the Doctor like this? In “The Giggle,” we had to watch as the Toymaker uses fun puppets to completely wreck our emotions. At least, my emotions.

As the Toymaker forces the Doctor and Donna through a fun house of doors, he leads them into a room for his “game.” The Doctor (David Tennant) knows what the Toymaker can do. It is why he asked Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) to go back to the TARDIS the minute he realized who he was dealing with. Still, what ended up causing me such a visceral amount of pain was simply the Toymaker telling Donna the truth about what happened after she left.

Before the two even realized who they were up against, Donna was trying to ask the Doctor about himself and the non-stop world he was living in. He essentially ignores Donna, as he is wont to do, and instead points them in the direction of the Toymaker’s shop. But this led to what the Toymaker was teasing regarding all the companions that came after Donna Noble.

Donna didn’t know about the regenerations after her Doctor. She didn’t know about the other “companions” and the Toymaker didn’t leave any nuance in describing their endings. And let me tell you, laying out their stories with the Doctor like that, without any kind of explanation? It was brutal and wholly unnecessary.

My girls don’t deserve this!

The Toymaker uses puppets to show Amy Pond dying while the Doctor points out that she dies of old age, years after she is trapped in New York. Then he shows Clara dying and the Doctor again interjects that it was her own choice after she was done traveling. Bill Potts, who does die but whose consciousness lives on, is the one that the Doctor has a hard time justifying, and you can see it as he struggles to address it.

All three of these women trusted the Doctor. He tried to keep them safe and he did, for the most part. But the Toymaker sharing these stories without the nuance they deserve? That was rude to Donna. It was rude to Amy, Clara, and Bill. But boy was it rude to me, who loves Amy, Clara, and Bill oh so very much. Toymaker, that one hurt. Especially watching the strings of my beloved girls getting cut and falling to the stage below. Why did you have to make David Tennant relive that and cry?'

#The Giggle #Doctor Who #60th Anniversary #David Tennant #Neil Patrick Harris #The Toymaker #Amy Pond #Clara Oswald #Bill Potts #Donna Noble #Catherine Tate

[theskyexists]

wild blue yonder was really good. Great pacing. Calm. Focus. Drama. Action. Nice use of cgi budget for spatial awe and seeding unease. Unfortunately I didn't download subtitles and rtd writes scripts with lots of fun asides that my dad can't even follow...I really like that but I need subs. There was actually a moment of serious suspense and then horror in this. As my brother said: it's been ages since doctor who managed that. Do love how rtd takes the flux and the timeless child and FLIES with it. Yes yes yes. Chibnall could never - somehow. Rtd simply does not back down from the implications. And I love how he returns to his good old anti-war theme. He pulls it off - the Doctor not ok - keeps going - David Tennant and Catherine Tate also - a million years... Well done. It hooked right into that good old rtd Doctor trauma - but it also made me think: eleven and twelve and thirteen....all of that has happened ....

THAT moment when you realise the Doctor has ACTUALLY chosen wrong and Donna thinks she's going to die.... wow. And then the Doctor fixes it.

I guess he saved all the serious interpersonal drama for the start of the second episode that I was missing from the end of the first... Love how it starts from Donna realising: if I die now, I'll leave everyone I love behind. Great organic way to get to that. Really wish I could have followed all the stuff the copies said when they dropped the ruse and also when they were making arguments for why they were who they said they were (ARGH SUBTITLES) ...love the excuse for personal talks though. There's even a repeated motif with the person on the outside of the spaceship... Not sure rtd wrote those episodes about the Devil really but very echoey. Has this universe really pivoted to mavity now??? Great gag with crazy implications.

Also liked the little choice to make the clever self-sacrificing captain a she.

#blue wild yonder #dw #my stuff #personal

[what-gs-watching]

“I really do remember though…every second with you."

So I’m in the last week of my bootcamp and I have a couple of job interviews this week and things are going I guess BUT my brain doesn’t really care about any of that.

Because Y’ALL. I’m still 1000000% inside the first episode of the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary specials. I’ve been waiting for this since I saw the first trailer in like September and David Tennant has been constantly on my mind and it was just everything. All the things. 

Wherein, after the 13th doctor regenerates into THE 10TH DOCTOR’S OLD FACE, he lands in London obviously and immediately runs into none other than Donna Noble, his very best friend in the entire universe who absolutely cannot remember him because if she does, she’ll very quickly die.

They did an  intro into the episode that explained the whole backstory which was a little forced and cheesy  but I get it, not everyone is insane enough to have just rewatched all of 10’s episodes just because this was coming (though they should be). 

I’m gonna admit I had no idea what the episode was supposed to be about other than reuniting some of my two favorite characters in the whole wide world, and I’m glad I didn’t. It was definitely a traditional Doctor Who romp: aliens crash land on earth, UNIT gets involved,  one alien faction is going after another alien faction, Donna’s family ends up in the center of it, they need to figure out a way to keep London from getting destroyed.

Ya know, the usual. 

The thing I’m here for, friends, is David Tennant becoming a new version of his own doctor because that’s fascinating, while still absolutely painted into his skinny suit (which is so Crowley somehow), and catharsis. All the catharsis.

After watching his entire run again, I stand behind the opinion that Donna got the worst deal of all the companions. Rose got to keep her Doctor human clone, Martha ended up with Mickey, but Donna had literally EVERYTHING ripped from her. Can you imagine the size of the hole the Doctor would leave in your subconscious after being removed? Like, how do you manage any kind of life after that?

But she did. She’s got a husband, and a kid, and she donated almost all of her lottery winnings while dealing with what I can imagine is an overwhelming, horrible sense of loss. Humans can get used to anything. And that thought is kind of devastating.

Which means all I really wanted was to see the two of them together again, and Russell T Davies delivered the goods. 

The Doctor runs into Donna basically immediately after landing in London of course and he learns her daughter’s name is Rose and I can’t get over how many times he shouted “WOT?” in this episode, I always loved 10’s incredulous “WOT!” 

She rambles at him of course and is messing with boxes full of stuff she’s holding so she misses the spaceship very NOTICEABLY crashing to earth because that’s her thing, always missing everything. But she’s ready to go so in true Donna fashion tells him “Nice to meet you, skinny man. Oh, word of advice. You can wear a suit that tight up to the age of 35, and no further.” Baby girl is still herself, and she’s ruthless, and I love it.

 After the Doctor follows the ‘crashed’ spaceship, he runs into a scientist from UNIT who is holding herself together insanely well considering she’s stumbled upon the doctor, and he tells her that all of this is swirling around Donna of course and he says “she was my best friend in the whole wide universe. I absolutely love her” and then he’s surprised that popped out of his mouth because you know 10 was never going to admit to that so thoroughly, and these are the interactions I need in my life.

Here’s the situation gang: I absolutely love a love story. I really do. If my Good Omens fixation is anything to go by. But I also really love a good, solid, perfect friendship. Two people challenging each other and accepting each other and just being on the exact right wavelength. I’ve had some terrible friends in my life, and so beautiful positive depictions  cut right to my heart. Which means I’m really here just for the two of them being those amazing friends again.

Meanwhile, Donna’s daughter finds one of the rogue aliens, AKA The Meep, which I found to be HELLA creepy, like everyone was all ‘aw it’s cute’ but nah y’all, I knew that motherfucker wasn’t cute. But just like her mother, she wants to help and she brings The Meep into her little shed in their backyard because obviously, and it all takes a turn.

The other aliens that were apparently pursuing The Meep show up, and Donna catches wind that there’s a martian in her house (I love it, everything is always a martian, she’s my favorite) and her mother, bless her, tries hard to make Donna ignore the entire situation because she cannot remember, but it doesn’t matter, the Doctor crashes in anyway.

I also love that she was instantly annoyed with him, still calling him “skinny man”  and wondering why the hell he was following her. And he does kind of try to extricate himself from her and her family but of course it was never gonna go that way.

So the UNIT soldiers have been overtaken by some weird light they found in the spaceship and they come to the house to start attacking and the other aliens are there to also attack and the Doctor’s gotta get everyone out, of course. They do some ridiculous trek through the attics in the attached rowhouses to try to get out to the car parked nearby. Miraculous escape, always! 

Also why am I weirdly all about the Doctor driving the car? I was like ‘yes’ but maybe that’s just a residue Bentley thing, who knows. The point is, he takes them to an underground garage and the other aliens tracking The Meep show up and TWIST, we find out The Meep lied about his backstory while the Doctor wears a ridiculous barrister wig he pulled from his jacket. Turns out The Meep is absolutely crazy because the sun his planet orbited went…psychedelic? Don’t look too much at what’s going on with that whole story, it’s fine, just go with it. 

So The Meep tries to attack! And the Doctor jumps to cover Donna and the dosed up UNIT soldiers show up and everyone is taken hostage and brought back to where the spaceship is being repaired. The Meep wants to eat them, or something? Because sure. The teeth they put on that thing, woooof. I knew that asshole was trouble from the get.

Turns out The Meep plans to escape in the ship and to do so he basically has to burrow under London which will obliterate the entire city. Surprise!

Not to worry about that though, the Doctor and the UNIT scientist create a scenario wherein Donna, her husband, Rose and the grandmother can all get away and the Doctor will handle this situation on his own, thanks. But Donna’s brain kicks in, and she says she has to help him, even if she doesn’t know why. 

She follows him into the ship. And he’s like ‘nah girl you gotta get outta here’ but she’s not having that of course, because that’s her. He tried to shake her a few times the very first time they met and he never could. It’s that friendship pull.

The point is, he’s trying to disable the ship himself but there’s a lot of buttons to press and he has to do a lot of weird shit (again, don’t pay attention to the crazy dialogue of the things he’s saying he’s doing) and then a separator comes down and splits the room they’re in, the Doctor on one side and Donna on the other. And he’s still trying to protect her. He knows they could stop the ship together, but he’d need her, all of her, to do it. 

He tells her that if she helps him, she’ll die. And she just says “okay.” She says her daughter’s down there, and 9 million other people, so who cares about her? And now we’re into what I was waiting for, he’s yelling “I DO!” She says she’s just no one and he emphatically tells her she’s not, and he screams

“WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE THIS?!”

Anyone else crying yet? No? C’mon. This is when I started crying at the trailer. It’s horribly unfair; he gave her up so she could live her life and he never wanted to involve her again, she’d helped save the fucking world already and 10 never really did get a break really, and here he is back at it as 14 and it’s still just as terrible. 

So he starts saying words. And his poor face. You can see it’s ripping him apart. “Westerly. Pelican. Dreams. Tornado. Clifftops. Andante. Grief. Fingerprint. Susurration.” And then she picks up on it, she says “Sparrow” and he says “Sparrow. Dance. Mexico.” 

And she finishes, “Binary. Binary. Binary.”

In true Donna fashion, as soon as she’s fully aware she starts freaking out at him about giving away her lottery winnings because she was trying to be like him and I love it, there’s a countdown to launch in the background and she doesn’t give a shit, it’s so the two of them but she jumps into action anyway again saying some crazy shit about what she’s doing. He tells her she has 55 seconds to live and she says “55 best seconds of my life” and she flips a bunch of switches and tada, they’ve done it.

The partition comes up in the room and The Meep storms in and Donna collapses in the Doctor’s arms. She asks him why this face had come back and she says “to say goodbye? Good fun though” and she fucking DIES. 

The way he cradles her. Jesus. It’s so tender. And the pure fucking anguish in his face. David Tennant’s face, goddamn. I can’t. 

The Meep is still trying to kill him though using UNIT soldiers and he doesn’t give a shit because he’s been basically foiled by “The DoctorDonna” but then, suddenly, the UNIT soldiers are released from their hold and Donna WAKES UP and everyone is like “WOT!”

And we see Rose, manning the controls outside the ship, brilliant as anything. I love this explanation so much: Donna’s metacrisis was too much for one person, but because she had a child, she passed it down, a “shared inheritance.” Her little shed in their backyard was an errant memory of the TARDIS, she’d been creating little stuffed animal toys of all the creatures Donna and the Doctor had met traveling, she’d chosen her new name herself,  the name of one of the Doctor’s most important companions. They realize, the two of them, Donna and the Doctor are binary, but Rose is not because 

“The Doctor is male…and female….and neither. And more.”

IT’S SO FUCKING CUTE. And perfect. And I love it. She had timelord energy strumming through her, her entire life, and it made her feel weird and different but also made her amazingly unique and wonderful. 

And then, to top it off, the Doctor tells them he still needs to heal them of the crisis because it may be slowed down, but it won’t stop. And Rose and her mother just scoff at him. They know exactly what to do. They just let it go. Because they’re incredible.

And I love all of this so far. But I cannot lie, my favorite part of the entire episode is when the Doctor convinces her to take a ride in the TARDIS so they can go visit Wilf. They go inside, and of course the TARDIS has changed again and I’m not gonna lie, it’s probably my favorite design so far. The Doctor freaks out about it, and Donna tries to be nonchalant but she finally admits “it’s GORGEOUS!” and the happy fucking look between the two of them, the Doctor is bouncing, he’s bouncy Crowley. And then he starts racing around the place, running up and down the different levels and honestly that just made me cry harder.

10 was always so sad, I always wanted that boy to be happy and maybe he was a little bit but everything was always so serious but now he’s been able to resolve probably his biggest regret and that’s such a gift. Which I think is gonna make it even harder for him to let go, a second time. I am not excited to watch him leave, again. 

The point is, after he makes her a coffee the way she likes, he says “ I really do remember, though. Every second with you. I'm so glad you're back, cos it killed me, Donna. It killed me, it killed me, it killed me.” And she deserves to hear that. It was one of the worst things he had to do. And 10 was never going to say it. I’m SO glad 14 got the chance. 

Catharsis. They needed it, I needed it. The Doctor back to a true and familiar form. It’s going to kill me to only have 3 episodes of this, but I’ll take it. As long as I get one last “allons-y!”

#what g's watching #doctor who 60th anniversary #doctor who #tenth doctor #fourteenth doctor #donna noble #david tennant

[waitformethistime]

The Star Beast review

I remember RTD getting announced to return and the fandom acting like he "saved" the show. Now mind you, I didn't love Chibnall's era (and had my complaints about Moffat too) but to act as if RTD was the sacred cow was just irritating.

That being said, lets get into his second debut.

We start with Ten- sorry I mean Fourteen running into Donna. Now Donna was always a favorite of mine so I'm relieved to see shes in top form here. She immediately roasts Fourteen upon seeing him (with a wink and a nod to Tennant no longer being 35 years old) and that's very On Brand for her.

Then we get [sigh] Rose. No, not Billie Piper. Rose Noble. Donna's 15 year old daughter. For starters, her age makes no sense. How can she be 15 if Donna only lost her memory 15 years ago? Did she get hitched and pregnant the very next day? You could hand wave this by saying shes a stepdaughter, but no. RTD wants to make it clear she is Donna's daughter. Her trans daughter to be exact. So let's get into that.

I love that shes trans and that shes played by an actual trans actress. The representation has been long overdue. I love that Donna is such a good and accepting mum and that even Sylvia (a character I previously didnt care for) redeems herself by being a good grandma to Rose, even if she slips up sometimes. Shes trying, which is more than she ever did for Donna.

That being said, Rose is little more than a plot device. Her only real purpose is to introduce our alien, the Meep, and then save the Doctor and Donna with her magical transgenderism (I'll get to that in a second), which is a shame because Yasmin Finney is lovely.

Now let's get into the metacrisis. I always thought this plotline was stupid and the way its resolved is even stupider. Turns out Donna won't actually die if she remembers The Doctor (duh!) because she transferred some of her "Doctor-ness" to Rose...somehow. Now I couldn't tell if RTD was saying that Rose was trans because of the metacrisis energy or if the reason the metacrisis didnt affect her is because shes trans, but either way, it didnt make much sense. How is she able to "remember" things that happened before she was even born? It was convoluted and reminded me a lot of River Songs origins in a bad way. Convoluted is Moffats thing. I don't need it from RTD too.

But wait it gets better. We still have to figure out what to do with the metacrisis energy right? So how do they get rid of it? They simply just "let it go" with their womanly superiority (no really). We get this corny exchange about how 14 is "Male-presenting" and therefore doesn't know how to let things go because of it. Excuse me what? Did RTD watch any of 13's era at all? She was an emotional trainwreck. Callous, dishonest, passive-aggressive and quite vengeful too. And she was a woman. You wanna know who was the Doctor that had to let things go? Literally his last line is "I let you go"? The one who had to let go of his companion because he was hurting both of them? The one who learned to forgive, not just the Master, but also Davros, of all people? It was 12, the old white guy. Swing and a miss, RTD. That was a corniness I would expect from his first era, with Jesus!Ten. I expected some kind of growth since then. I also just felt like I was being lectured and I got quite enough of that from the last era, thank you very much.

This sounds negative so far, so let's look at the positives!

Tennant + Tate are incredible together as usual. I like that 14 is more emotionally honest than any of his previous predecessors (and 13 was getting there at the end so it's a natural progression imo). Love the alien designs. The Meep is so cute. I saw the twist of it being evil a mile away, but it's cute so I'll let it slide. The Wrarth are also cool. Just dudes in suits as Doctor Who aliens should be lol.

Didn't appreciate the Donna death fakeout because I knew RTD wouldnt actually go through with it and it felt cheap, but the acting in the scene was top-notch.

The new opening is cool and I love the new Tardis. You can tell that's where all the budget went lol. It's like a beautiful mix of 11, 12, and the Classics and it looks huge. You can tell Tennant was having a blast with it.

The Doctor actually took the initiative to not regenerate in the tardis this time and it still gets blown up. Poor tardis...

Some other thoughts:

since when can the Sonic create forcefields? I don't care for that. And 14's non-reaction was weird. Shouldn't he be surprised his tool got an upgrade? Also the fact that his clothes regenerated too with no explanation is dumb. Were they too afraid to put Tennant in Whittaker's clothes? It's not like she was wearing a handmaiden dress.

Also they kept asking "why this face?" Which is valid but my theory for why the regeneration went all wonky in the first place is because the Master fucked it up somehow when he tried to steal them in Power of the Doctor. I'd like for RTD to bring that up but I'm not holding my breath. That would require actually acknowledging other eras besides his own exist.

Overall, this was kind of a mid-tier RTD episode and very underwhelming for an anniversary special. Heres hoping it gets better in the next 2.

#the star beast #doctor who

[stormxpadme]

How I made peace with my favorite franchises getting fucked over

I talked about this to @effervescentdragon and it was kind of an epiphany, so I felt like sharing, because maybe someone else feels the same and can use a few positive thoughts.

With Hollywood running out of ideas respectively courage, a very specific generation of fandom is facing a renaissance recently. If you are a dinosaur like me and were online from the moment, internet went big, if you were part of the first big online fandom spaces from ca. 2000 on, chances are good you’ve been feeling like you’ve used the TARDIS in the last few years a couple of times and were stuck in it for good in the last few months.

I think it started, for me … Well, with MCU still being one of the major franchises these days, let’s not forget that the first huge superhero online fandom grew around 2000 with what was - along with the first two Maguire Spider-Man-movies - one of the first excellent big screen comic adaptions, X-Men. So this process of rehashing geek icons of the last, say, 30 years, at least for me already started a few years back when they tried to save the old X-Men movie series, including not only a timeline that was supposed to fix what X-Men: The Last Stand fucked up but also some of the original actors.

Well, turns out that was only the beginning, doesn’t it? In the last couple of years and especially months, we have seen the original 3 Jurassic Park icons return and Keanu and Carrie-Anne return for Matrix. We have Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen teaming up for a series set in an era that - surprise, surprise - people don’t hate half as much as the dudebros wanted to make you believe around 2005. We have a Star Trek series that put a closure to one secretly beloved character like Wesley Crusher, who is - not least thanks to his nerdy and mental health advocate actor being very active on social media - also not half as hated as everyone thought. And reviving the rest of the old crew is coming up in the next season of Picard. We had Jamie Lee Curtis returning for Halloween and Neve Campbell and the rest of the original actors once more returning for a Scream movie. Not to mention MCU hogging those Spider-Mans and even the original Professor X now.

And a couple of days ago, the bomb was dropped that what’s probably one of the most beloved Doctors aka Tennant will return for a special with his companion.

I don’t know how you guys feel, but a geek of my generation (proud Xennial, born ‘82, bullied for 8 years straight in school so I had nothing but movies and series), I’ve been getting whiplash lately.

Here’s the thing: Most of these franchises I just mentioned that I’m in have let me down beyond belief. Some of them more than once.

X-Men: The Last Stand was the first major disappointment I ever had with a franchise I loved. The new movies couldn’t save that for me.

Star Wars died for me the moment they killed the old EU. I gave the new movies a chance. They sucked for me.

I stopped watching Star Trek mid-Voyager, and my interest as a whole not least dropped because of how they treated Wesley in Star Trek: Nemesis. I’m okay with the new movies but nothing I hear about the new series had hooked me up so far.

I still haven’t watched Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom because boy, did I not think they could make it any worse after Jurassic Park III but holy shit, is Chris Pratt annoying in this reboot.

After Avengers: Age of Ultron happened, I had to leave tumblr. I simply couldn’t deal with fandom anymore, with all tags and my dash filled with stuff I hated. I only watched MCU movies when I had to watch them for my magazine. And just to be very clear, I’ve been such a die-hard MCU fan, I paid a lot of money in 2014 to go to SDCC just for that experience. And I still haven’t been able to get myself to watch Hawkeye and Black Widow. I was hurt too much over those characters.

So what I’m trying to say is: I should be feeling anxious as fuck right now, with that rehash process going on and on. Eru knows I have been for far too long.

Like, when I get my hopes up for a beloved franchise too much, usually things like the The Hobbit-movies happen that I can’t watch unless I’m drunk enough to deal with them, or a franchise goes downhill so unbelievably quickly, like in the moment when they let Joss Whedon take the first pen for Age of Ultron in his sexist little hands. It always felt like whenever I loved something too much, it was doomed to go to shit.

I was already torn between being devastated and so fucking EXCITED when they rebooted the X-Men movie series back then. Especially when it was clear Patrick, Hugh and then Famke and James were coming back. What can I say? They managed to turn me away from the new movies as well. It is beyond me how you can fuck up a brilliant story like the Dark Phoenix saga two times in a row.

At this point, I don’t even expect Hollywood to do anything but fuck it up further when they try to fix things using elements people used to love.

So when news broke about that new Obi-Wan series and Hayden, I should have been fucking GUTTED. Star Wars was one of the best times of my life. My eating disorder was doing okay, I had several expensive, beautiful cosplays and at the Revenge of the Sith premier, I met George Lucas and Hayden and was told by them, my AOTC Pastel Lake Dress was beautiful. I love the PT, unashamed and unironically, and everyone can suck my ladyballs about that. And now they got Ewan and my boy back and JFC, I should just be shutting my internet down, now that the promo has started and I’m beginning to see this everywhere.

And here I am sitting, realizing, quite amazed ... I no longer care.

After The Hobbit-movies, I think it was, I decided something very important for myself. I don’t need to accept the official canon. Just because I’m a fan of something, doesn’t mean I have to be a fan of each and every aspect. I don't need to watch/read the parts I hate. In fandom online spaces, I don’t need to follow people posting about these things, and I can use extensive blacklists. I can leave conversations when they’re about aspects of franchises that I don’t like. I’ve never been someone who tries to spoil other’s fun of something I hate. So if a place is not for me, I can just go.

I didn’t realize how liberating that was until like, 2015. Until that point, canon had always been a mandatory fact for me. That’s coming a lot, I think, from having been a fanfiction writer for 30 years. When I started publishing online, canon purists were still far more common. Your stories were far more likely to be widely ignored and even dragged if you didn’t stick to canon accurately. With time, I found that I’m a niche author anyway, and the stuff I write won’t appeal to more or less people, just because I force myself to acknowledge parts of canon I hate.

So I started slapping “verse: movie(s) x exclusively” on my stories and started to just fucking ignore what I didn’t like. And after I while I realized, I didn’t need to limit that approach to fanfiction. Time is far too short and too precious to waste it with consuming media I know I won’t like.

So what I do is when something like Wesley’s return or cameos of my favorite characters in franchise incarnations I hate happen these days is: I wait. I’m not in a hurry. I don’t need to write reviews the moment these things are out. I can lean back and wait until my anxiety issues allow for a new piece of media to consume. In the meantime, I read up what they did with elements I love so much. When I feel I can stomach seeing them and/or if the new incarnation actually FIXES something for once, I’ll watch either just the scenes in question or maybe even catch up with some other franchise installations I missed.

Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Like. The X-Men timeline is far too fucked up to repair that canon in any way, not least because of the Logan movie. I might as well give Picard a chance soon though, because watching that Wesley scene (and reading Wil’s thoughts about the whole process), for the first time in a long while, I had a feeling we're dealing with writers here who actually UNDERSTAND. I’ll probably watch the Obi-Wan series, but I already know there is no way this is going in “my” verse since it’s new EU. But I might enjoy it anyway.

So every now and then, I’ll visit current installations of my favorite franchises, and every now and then I might even like them. Might even incorporate them in my own verse in one or the other way (if nothing else, usually faceclaims and/or other material for graphics and videos is the least I can get out of new installations like that; we do NOT talk about Days of Future Past though, because how they managed to fuck up things like Scott's glasses like that is beyond my wildest imagination).

Sometimes, canon surprisingly kind of fixes itself in a satisfying way, like in MCU where they now introduced multiverse and everyone feeling like me can just pretend we’re back in Winter Soldier and nothing coming after that happened in canon, because there’s millions of canons now. Seriously, multiverse is the best that can happen to a writer and a broken fan heart.

I’ve had people tell me “BUT YOU CAN’T DO THAT, YOU HAVE TO CONSUME AND TAKE CANON LIKE IT IS, EVERYTHING ELSE IS DISRESPECTFUL TO THE WRITERS” and I’m like. What? Gonna cry? Gonna shoot me or something? What fucking business of yours is it how I consume my media? I’m not posting hate in character tags, I leave conversations when fans of things I hate are around, I label all my fanfics clearly enough to not steal any reader’s time.

Fanart is not always but very often fixing the canon reality you don’t want to deal with. And for me, that saved my whole fandom experience.

Gosh it feels GOOD, finally no longer giving a fuck.

TL;dr: As my dear effervescentdragon said: "if i dont like it it didnt happen, xoxo, fuck off"

Seriously. It will give you so much peace.

#misc stuff #that made me stop scrolling #personal #writing #star wars #phallic glow sticks and cheese #star trek #my love before I was old enough to turn on the tv #MCU #the one that let me down harder than my first boyfriend #lord of the rings #and all tolkien lore #dysfunctional elves ftw #x men #everything after x2 didn't happen sue me #x men original timeline movies

[layaboutace]

Season 3 Episode 8: Human Nature/Episode 9: The Family of Blood

AHHHH DAVID TENNANT IS SUCH A GOOD ACTORRRRR AUGHHHHH GOD THIS WAS SO AMAZING!!!! god i love this premise so much, and the setting of the school and john smith as a teacher was so good!!! martha jones you are so strong, the racism she had to face from everyone around her even the doctor not remembering how important she was to him, its so good. and john smith falls in love!!! he falls in love so easily as humans often do, something the doctor hesitates to do. honestly i feel so sad for joan, she found love too and watched him die, sacrificing himself for the sake of not only the world but the universe at large, i knew she wasn't going to become a companion but god did i want her to be, even if the doctor couldn't love her as quickly or as freely as john did. and the battle at the school, the doctor unable to shoot even scarecrow, the interesting side characters too, for as little as she was in this episode i really felt for jenny, her actress did a great job before and after she was taken over by the family, this episode has an amazingly strong ending, with the doctor acting as if he was still human, deliberately destroying their ship, it was so damn good, and tim growing up, seeing the doctor and Martha again in his old age, still holding onto that pocket watch for dear life, and johns time flashfoward thing where he saw the life he could have with joan 😭 to the point of growing old and dying, something he can't do as a timelord 😭😭😭😭 godddd i wanted john to have a happy ending so bad but he couldn't, because hes innocent, hes a real human being even if he wasn't born as one, and he had to sacrifice himself for the greater good, and when the doctor returns he punished the family for what they did, as they realized him running was mercy for them, and that in his calm fury, he didn't give them a second chance

5/5

#doctor who #dw #watchlog #10th doctor #tenth doctor #martha jones #s3

[aslanscompass]

Power of the Doctor

Thoughts, rants, etc,

Time-Lord-Cybermen are stupid. I don’t even remember the details of the episode that established them, but they’re still stupid. Cybermen with Time Lord headdresses? Ugh?

aLSO, enough with the this is so cool moment and actually do the rescuing, maybe?

Syberia 1916. Location 1. Well, two. Gregory Rasputin, Rasputin is obviously the Master.

2022 London. Ace Which means absolutely nothing to new fans and odd for old ones

Hi Tegan. I mean, nothing specific that fits it. Ugh, am I weird. This isn’t making sense. My mind, I mean. But like, when Sarah Jane came back, it was in a way that fit her established character, as an investigative journalist. And teaming up Ace and Teagan is just odd. 

And Dan is far too insightful about his life. NOBODY talks like that.

At least she’s still smart enough to not trust daleks

Serioiusly, are you trying to sound like a parody of extreme right ring-ism? Because that’s how you ....

Mondas? are we finally getting Mondas in NuWho

Nobody has any subtly in Chibnail who.

Technobabble increased. At least it’s not an actual child. Stop rambling and pay attention.

Hi Kate. Love you, 

“You said a woman, you never said young.” Hillarious. But this is less wierd if I don’t see their faces and treat it as a Big Finish.

But it is weird that Tegan brings up age. Davison was youngest of the classic Doctors. And of course we have to replay the School Reunion vibes. Ugh!

“Do I win a prize if I guess how this all fits together or do we just have to listen to your grandstanding!”

‘“The day you die--” (I can’t wait. It’s absolutely past time for Thirteen to die)

Looked aside for five minutes and he’s in the TARDIS. wHATEVER

The Master actually had subtlty for a moment. Or at least more emotions than just surface. 

I mean, the Doctor physically shocked Ace and Tegan and then they SAID AS MUCH. As if we don’t 

“The last time I saw you, you were half cat.”

“A man’s allowed to experiment.”

--That’s a classic Master line.”

I’m not surprised that the Cyberman was a trick from the Master. It didn’t seem very Doctor y especially not this Doctor. 

oH COME on, I’d rather have the unsettling hatred of the Master than the emotionless Thirteen. Do you even have emotions? 

“Forced regeneration Doctor. To Force you to regenerate into me....”

What the fork? Is Tennant the Master now? Or is it 

So confused. Or is that Ncuti? No. That’s tennant? But wait, what? So confused. No in a good sense. Did we pick up the wrong one? Cause if they’re doing a swap 

“You’ll get used to me. everyone will.” Sod off.

The Tardis knows it’s the wrong time lord.

It’s so obvious wrong. Can’t you do osmething more like the Big Finish episode with the Daleks, where Davros mind-swapped with Six?

To quote Amy to 11″:  “You can’t just drop me off like we shared a cab. “ i HAVEN’T even wwatched Dan’s episodes and I feel he was done dirty.

Oh, so this is where we get the past Doctor stuff.

Hi One. Strength of Character? Bah, no character whatso ever.

“You can’t ruin it for the next one.” You already have, Chibs

I am a manifestation of our consciousness, I can wear what I like,

“It’s symbolic, obviously.” No duh,

I mean, they got a lot 

A very 9th Doctor end of era feelings.

Vidar? Why should we care,

The facial shift is creepy. 

fIVE SECOND background exposition.

I was upset not to see Osgood at first, but now I’m glad she’s not hear. Let’s stick with the BF audios please. 

Now this is more like it. Mentioning Adric. “Brave heart!”

I miss you classic who

“All children leave home sooner or later. The joy is to watch them fly.”

Ace and Graham.... where did they leave Graham? Earth, I thought.”

Come on, Kate, be yourself. You are being totally underserved her.No wobbly voice. 

course it’s an elevator shaft.

So, October 2022 is time for villieans to trigger volcanos, apparently.  First Sauron and now the Master

Ruth? I still don’t know who you are either.Okay, it is a hologram.

Safe is grossly overrated,

If I didn’t know for a fact whittaker is leaving, I’d feel majorly afraid that she’d be sticking around.

The celery matches so well with the vest

SHE DID NOT SAVE YOUR LIFE, REGENERATION ISN’T DEATH!

Pieta pagerism again. Ugh

And the boxes from End of Time apparently made a reapperance,

Like, despite despising Whittaker and everything she stood for,I sitll had a twinge when they carried her back into the Tardis.

There is absolutely no reason for Jodi to regenerate, 

cLOISTER BELL.. BECAUSE OF YOU.

i AM SO GLAD YAZ IS GOING. I can’t see you with any of the other regens

And now you’re going all tennent before tennant, because ‘more time.’ No more time for you. Nope. You didn’t use what you had welll.

and when did you have time to explain the whole reg thing to yaz? Please?

oh please. the only thing that makes this goodbye hurt is how flippin long it;s taking to to get to the point.

i HAVEN’T LOVED you, get out of here and save me some exasperation.

Like, I’m glad Graham and Dan are there for them, but this wrap-up is so cliche. AND THE sticky-note name tags. Let’s see-- I wannna read the name tags. Okay, we have Jo Grant. Love to see that. And Sarah Jane should be there, Ian too. But good lord, get on with it!

I know these teeth? WHAT? CLOTHES REGENERATING WITH HIM. WEIRDNESS

Like, I knew how that ended but still....

#fanram #aslanscompass watches Telly #power of the doctor #goodbye Chibs #goodbye wHITTAKER #GOODBYE AND GOOD RIDDENCE #ANTI CHIBS

[queenie-lexieee]

[[ CC Character Profile ]]

Fandom:

Doctor Who

Full name:

Rose Tyler

Nickname(s):

•The Bad Wolf

Sex/Pronouns:

Female

Birthdate:

April 27, 1987

Age

19-20s years old

Powers:

None

Skills:

Rose was able to use firearms to effect. She was a skilled gymnast; Rose told the Ninth Doctor she had "got the bronze" during her school years.

[[ About ]]

Personality:

•Resourceful

•Brave

•Sweet

•Kind-hearted

•Intelligent

•Observant

•Romantic

•Jealous

•Selfish

Likes:

•Tea

•Pretty Things

•Traveling

•The Doctor

•Helping People

•Space

•Flitting With The Doctor

•Chips

Dislikes:

•Losing The Doctor

•People Dying

•Daleks

•The Doctor Enemies

•Other Girls being flirty with The Doctor

Background:

Occupation:

Shop assistant, Dinner lady

Fears:

•The Doctor dying

Sexual Orientation:

Straight

Species:

Human

Faceclaim:

•Billie Piper

•Young child (Julia Joyce)

[[ Relations ]]

Father: Peter Tyler {Dead}

Mother: Jackie Tyler

Adoptive Father: Peter Tyler

Little Brother: Tony Tyler

Husband: John Smith (Clone of Tenth Doctor)

Significant Other(s):

Ex:Mickey Smith & Meta Crisis

Husband: John Smith (Clone of Tenth Doctor)

(Opened to only ten doctors)

[[ Biography ]]

Rose is introduced in the eponymous premiere episode of the 2005 series. There, she is saved from an Auton attack by the mysterious alien Time Lord known as the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), and assists him in preventing an invasion of Earth.[1] Subsequently, the Doctor invites Rose to be his travelling companion, taking her to the end of the world and giving her a "superphone" so she can remain in contact with her mother Jackie (Camille Coduri), and boyfriend Mickey (Noel Clarke).

In their travels through time and space, Rose learns the importance of not tampering with history, when she attempts to save the life of her father Pete Tyler (Shaun Dingwall), who had died when she was a baby. Throughout these journeys, she and the Doctor are haunted by two mysterious recurring words: 'Bad Wolf'. Rose, the Doctor, and new companion Captain Jack (John Barrowman) come to understand the meaning of this phrase when they encounter an unstoppable army of evil alien Daleks on the space station Satellite 5. To return to the Doctor after he sends her home to Earth in series finale "The Parting of the Ways", Rose tears open the console of the Doctor's time machine, the TARDIS, and becomes suffused with the power of the time vortex. Returning, she uses her power over the infinity of time and space to spread the words "Bad Wolf" over its entirety, then saving the universe from the Dalek invasion. Rose resurrects Jack, who died from Dalek fire, and destroys the Dalek fleet before the Doctor drains the energy out of her—by kissing her—to save her life from its harmful effects. Rose is horrified as the Doctor appears to die and regenerates into a new man (David Tennant), who proceeds to take the TARDIS and a terrified Rose to Earth, abandoning Jack on Satellite 5. The new Doctor and Rose arrive on Earth on Christmas Day, where he passes out from the strain of regeneration in the midst of a Sycorax invasion in the 2005 Christmas special "The Christmas Invasion". Having woken up and saved Earth, the Doctor enjoys Christmas dinner with Rose before the two once again depart to parts unknown.

Over the second series (2006), Rose and the Doctor grow increasingly close to one another. After defeating a werewolf, they are knighted by Queen Victoria (Pauline Collins), who banishes them as threats to the Empire whilst setting up the Torchwood Institute, which aims to track the Doctor and other aliens. Their relationship proves a source of tension once Mickey joins the pair in their travels, at the suggestion of the Doctor's former companion Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen). Whilst stranded in a parallel universe, Rose meets a rich, entrepreneur version of her father who never died. Mickey decides to stay behind on this world to battle the Cybermen—emotionless cyborgs which seek to convert humans to their ranks—as he no longer wants to feel like a spare part. Alone with the Doctor again, Rose faces the mythical Beast (Gabriel Woolf), who prophesies that Rose will soon die in battle.

This day comes when, in the present day, the Torchwood Institute's director Yvonne Hartman (Tracy-Ann Oberman) accidentally allows the Cybermen army and Dalek Cult of Skaro into Rose's reality, where they begin a war. In sealing the Cybermen and Daleks back into the "void" through which they came, Rose is transported to the parallel universe by Pete, to save her from also being pulled into the void. Rose becomes trapped in the parallel universe with Jackie and the alternate universe Pete as the walls between universes seal; she is later declared dead in her own universe. Months later, the Doctor is able to transmit Rose a goodbye message. She reveals she now works for that universe's Torchwood, and confesses her love for him. Before he can reply, their connection is lost

When the Doctor is reunited with Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) in the show's fourth series (2008), Rose mysteriously begins to appear in the Doctor's life—first seen only by Donna, and later in silent video messages which the Doctor fails to notice. When a "Time Beetle" creates an alternate universe in which Donna never meets the Doctor and the Doctor dies, Rose travels from her parallel world to this world, working alongside the organisation UNIT to send Donna back in time, and make Donna's younger self turn left at a junction and not right. Rose tells Donna to say two words to The Doctor; 'Bad Wolf'.

The Doctor concludes this is a sign that the Universe, and reality itself is under threat. Later, in the midst of Davros' (Julian Bleach) plot to obliterate existence, Rose unites with the Doctor and his companions Donna, Martha, Jack and Sarah Jane to make a stand against him and his army of Daleks. In the midst of the battle, a part-human Doctor is created and destroys the Daleks. The Doctor returns Rose to the parallel universe along with Jackie, and his part-human counterpart. Rose challenges the Doctor to say the words he did not say to her during their previous farewell. The Doctor does not answer, but his part-human counterpart whispers in her ear and Rose kisses him. The Doctor retreats, leaving Rose behind with his part-human counterpart.[19] In the closing scenes of The End of Time (2010), just prior to his regeneration, the Doctor travels to Rose's housing estate in the first minutes of 2005. He speaks to her from the shadows, asking her what year it is. She tells him it is January 1, 2005.

The Doctor promises her that she will have a really great year. Piper returned for the show's 50th anniversary episode "The Day of the Doctor" (2013) as the interface of a sentient weapon of mass destruction known as "the Moment". The War Doctor (John Hurt) intends to end the raging Time War by using the Moment to destroy both the Daleks and the Time Lords. Using Rose's image, chosen for her future significance to the Doctor, the Moment attempts to persuade him to seek an alternative course of action by showing him how the decision will affect his future.Back with real Rose Tyler, she had married the part-human counterpart of The 10th Doctor, he used the name John Smith. The continue their days together and working with Touchwood

#doctor who #love love love #tenth doctor #fangirl #obsessed #canon character #rose tyler #ten x rose #rose icons #roleplay #canon #canon roleplay #ten and rose #they are married #rose x tentoo #billie piper #love her #she is amazing #otp forever

[denimbex1986]

'“Why did this face come back?” Though that question is asked throughout “The Star Beast,” it goes unanswered thus far. But Doctor Who’s very fun, delightful, nostalgia-filled, cinematic, and, at times, funny first 60th anniversary special, featuring brilliant performances by David Tennant and Catherine Tate as The Doctor (yes, Fourteen feels very much like Ten) and Donna Noble again does solve one major problem.

At times, it feels like Tennant and Tate never left and The Doctor and Donna never parted — especially during a moment involving his sonic screwdriver (used in impressive ways). As Donna says near the end, “it’s like the old days.” But there’s the matter of aliens running around and, as The Doctor and Donna recap somewhat awkwardly for viewers to open the episode, the fact that she saved the universe by taking the power of a Time Lord into her mind, which resulted in her having to forget him and their travels together — or she’d die (“Journey’s End”).

Everything’s drawing them together in “The Star Beast,” starting with The Doctor going to help someone he sees carrying a tower of boxes only to realize it’s her (“Oi, do you mind?” she calls after him when he re-stacks the boxes and begins walking away). “What?” he asks (and it feels like this special was designed with making Tennant ask just that as many times as possible) when she then calls for Rose — her daughter (Yasmin Finney, who would be so much fun as a companion), not Billie Piper‘s character. Continuing the thread from their original run in Season 4, Donna completely misses the spaceship crashing because she’s turned away, dealing with the boxes. And in true Donna fashion, she leaves The Doctor with, “Nice to meet you, skinny man. Word of advice: You can wear a suit that tight up to the age of 35 — and no further.”

When Donna’s husband Shaun (Karl Collins) calls out to his family, The Doctor intercepts him and has the cab driver take him (“Allons-y!” — it had to happen) to the crash site. (“Catch up,” he tells the psychic paper identifying him as Grandmistress instead of Grandmaster.) He pretends to be a friend of Nerys (How is she? “She’s fine.” After the accident? “She’s not fine.” It was her fault. “She’s been fine.”) and learns that Donna gave away all the money she won with the lottery ticket The Doctor gave her (through her mother and grandfather) on the wedding day.

While sneaking around the steelworks factory where the spaceship crashed, The Doctor meets UNIT science officer Shirley (Ruth Madeley, who will hopefully recur going forward); she has figured out it actually landed, and he has determined there are two sets of visitors, at war. But, she wonders, why is he hiding? They’re on the same side. “It’s all a bit mad,” he admits. “I don’t know who I am anymore.” He looks like The Doctor. “Exactly, the one in a skinny suit. After that, I wear a bowtie. After that, I’m a Scotsman. After that, I’m a woman,” he explains, and that’s not his future. “I regenerated, and she became me.” What has him worried is Donna, “my best friend in the whole wide universe. I absolutely love her. Oh, do I say things like that now? … I won’t be the one who killed her.” And so of course, soon after, he encounters her again.

When The Doctor tags along with UNIT soldiers, he ends up on her block — just in time to hear her shouting about aliens (“We’ve got a bloody Martian in the shed!”). Rose stumbled across The Meep (voiced by Miriam Margolyes) and tried hiding the alien from her mother in her shed, with the toys she makes and sells online, but failed to do so. Despite the level of concern, it’s comical the way that Donna’s mother Sylvia (Jacqueline King), heeding The Doctor’s warning of what would happen if Donna remembered, tries to continue keeping her in the dark. There’s no such thing as spaceships in the sky. No, Donna doesn’t see The Meep clutching her leg. No, The Doctor — whom Sylvia hits — cannot come in, nor does Donna see him as she tries to hide him behind her.

Donna does wonder why The Doctor is so interested in them, and he doesn’t help matters by asking about her grandfather, Wilf (Bernard Cribbins). When she says he’s not with them anymore, The Doctor thinks he died. “Of course, he wasn’t young. I loved that man. I’m so sorry for your loss,” he offers his condolences, and we can’t help but think of their conversation about death in “The End of Time.” No, Wilf is still alive, in sheltered accommodation, paid for by UNIT’s Kate (Jemma Redgrave, who will appear in these specials). “I know her!” The Doctor exclaims.

He assures the family that he’ll help get The Meep — “My chosen pronoun is the definite article,” the alien says after Rose calls The Doctor out on assuming “he” — home. But soon after The Meep explains the Wrarth Warriors cultivated Meepkind for fur and slaughtered them, the house comes under attack — by the other aliens and UNIT soldiers who were hypnotized after opening the spaceship, fighting each other. The Doctor creates shields using his sonic screwdriver, which he hands to Donna at one point and she takes like the partners in crime they once were, and directs everyone upstairs. But after they crawl through adjacent attics and reach Shaun’s car, The Doctor realizes something’s off.

Away from the action, The Doctor dons a barrister’s wig (we were expecting all the nods we got to previous Doctor Who episodes, but not to Tennant’s role in The Escape Artist), intercepts the Wrarth Warriors’ teleport, and extracts the truth: They’re using stun guns and trying to capture The Meep, mutated into a cruel beast by a living sun gone mad, for despicable crimes. The Meep kills the Warriors and uses the hypnotized UNIT soldiers to take The Doctor (who uses the fact that he, too, has two hearts, as a strategy the alien should want to unpack) and the others as hostages.

On their way to the factory, The Doctor, while dodging questions about his identity, asks Donna why she gave away the lottery money. “Because there are places out there where people are in danger, in pain, in fear, and I could help. It just felt like the sort of thing he would do,” she says. And if that “he” has Sylvia worried, that’s nothing on when Donna, as Shirley helps the group escape (weapons in her wheelchair, of course) and sends The Doctor to stop The Meep and the family to safety, stays behind. “If The Doctor can’t save the city, we’re all going to die. I’ve got to help,” Donna says, and her mother realizes she called him by name.

To be fair, The Doctor does try to keep Donna out of it, even as they’re trapped on The Meep’s ship, the alien is destroying London (and about to kill everyone) to take off, and a glass door divides the room in half, so the Time Lord can only reach half the buttons to stop it. But then, with time running out, he tells her, “You and I can stop this ship, together, but it will kill you.” She agrees because not only is it Rose’s life in danger but also nine million people. “Who cares about me?” she asks. “I do!” he says. “I’m just no one,” Donna argues. “No, you are not!” The Doctor tells her before raging, devastated, “Why does it have to be this?” And with that, resigned, he activates the Time Lord part still in her.

Here is when Donna feels (and sounds) the most like Donna again (other than her reaction to teen boys being awful to her daughter), as she rants about giving away her money because of a subconscious part making her act like him while also saving London and stopping The Meep. But then, with seconds left to live, she collapses. Maybe his face came back “to say goodbye,” she suggests as she dies in his arms … or not? Just as The Meep’s soldiers are about to kill The Doctor (do what you want, he says, “you were beaten by The DoctorDonna!”), someone begins flipping switches, freeing UNIT: Rose!

The Doctor realizes that the metacrisis passed down to Rose, a shared inheritance, and she, too, was activated when Donna was. That’s why Rose chose the name she did. The shed was her memory of the TARDIS, and she remembered the creatures The Doctor and Donna met as toys. While they’re binary, Rose isn’t, because The Doctor is male and female and neither and more.

After that, it’s just a matter of Wrarth Warriors taking The Meep into custody, though the alien warns The Doctor before the transport, “I will escape and have my revenge, so you beware, Doctor. Because there’s one more thing. … A creature with two hearts is such a rare thing, just wait until I tell the boss.” And while the metacrisis in Donna and Rose is still troubling, they solve that problem themselves: by just letting it go. (“It’s a shame you’re not a woman anymore because she would’ve understood,” Donna comments, with Rose adding, it’s “something a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand.”)

Then it’s back to the TARDIS for The Doctor, and Donna refuses to let Rose see inside “because something will go wrong and you’ll end up on Mars with Chaucer and a robot shark.” The Doctor does convince Donna to come for one last trip, to see Wilf, now that she remembers. “It’s like the old days, just me and The Doctor, together,” Donna says, happy.

It’s once they’re inside that we see how the TARDIS has changed: sleek, shiny, with lots of ramps for The Doctor to run up and down, which he does, exclaiming, “This is amazing! You clever thing!” He’s delighted in a way he couldn’t have been until now, with Donna back. She, at first, complains it’s still nippy before conceding, “it’s gorgeous!” And it is! Still, she asks about his face coming back. “Does there have to be a reason?” he asks. “We’re stuck with it now.” (We know that’s not the case.)

“I really do remember… every second with you. I’m so glad you’re back because it killed me, Donna. It killed me, it killed me, it killed me,” The Doctor admits, giving her a cup of coffee. She doesn’t see why he can’t stop by to visit with her family after this trip because “you’ve been given a second chance. You could do things different this time, so why don’t you do something completely new and have some friends?” He’s non-committal in his answer. And then Donna, just as she wonders, “What’s going to go wrong?” spills her coffee on the TARDIS console. She did warn him that was how she lost her job… And so the TARDIS takes off, and they “could end up anywhere in time and space,” according to The Doctor.

Since The Doctor might not feel like saying it here, we will, because we can’t wait to see where they land: Allons-y!'

#David Tennant #Catherine Tate #Donna Noble #Rose Noble #Yasmin Finney #the Meep #Miriam Margolyes #The Star Beast #Doctor Who #60th Anniversary #Journey's End #Karl Collins #Shaun Temple #Shirley Anne Bingham #Ruth Madeley #UNIT #Sylvia Noble #Jacqueline King #The End of Time #Wilfred Mott #Bernard Cribbins #Jemma Redgrave #Kate Lethbridge Stewart #The Escape Artist

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #474

Top Ten Characters Who Came Back from the Dead

I am stunned – stunned! – that I’ve not done this one before. I mean, come on! It’s right there.

So there’s obviously a thematic resonance going on here. This weekend – the weekend you’re meant to be reading this – is famous where I come from because of a story where someone came back from the dead. Unlike other holidays – Christmas, Halloween, the release of a Star War – I’ve actually been a little slow off the mark in making lists that celebrate Easter. I’ve done eggs and bunnies, but incredibly I’ve never done resurrections, which really is the day’s whole deal. I mean, if you get down to brass tacks, it’s kinda the big selling point of the entire religion really. I hesitate to say “USP” because, well, it’s been done elsewhere, but it’s still supposed to be one of the big Christian takeaways (there’s definitely a chain of Christian takeaways in the States, isn’t there?).

Anyway, resurrection. It’s actually more common than you might think. Certainly in terms of comics there are probably more characters who’ve “died and come back” than have never “died” at all. But! And this is where I get pernickety. Most characters who “die” don’t actually die. Take Batman for instance: he’s shot in the face by Darkseid, and then Superman ups and finds his charred corpse, but – shocker! – he’s not actually dead, he was just sent back in time, where he Quantum Leaps his way back to the present day, accumulating enough Omega Energy with each leap that by the time he reaches the present day he’s blow a hole in reality. Or something, I’ve not read that story for quite a few years. Anyway: he wasn’t dead. Neither was Sherlock Holmes, or for that matter Dirty Den. Generally speaking, if someone dies in a story and then reappears, they’re not dead. Not really.

So this list here is supposed to be people who actually died. Now, even here, it’s debatable; I mean, is E.T. dead, or does his body just go into some kind of hibernation? If Optimus Prime’s brainwaves survive, does he ever really die? Is a clone someone coming back to life or not? It’s all a bit wishy-washy really, which kind of makes sense when you’re talking about resurrection. And let’s not get onto the chief resurrector, the Doctor; do they die every time they regenerate? Or is the regeneration itself a way of staving off death? When David Tennant turned into Matt Smith, did the Tennant-Doctor die? “I don’t want to go,” and all that; there’s always a subtle (or not-so-subtle) change in personality. Does that count? Well, for the purposes of this list, I’ve kinda decided it doesn’t. But it’s an interesting discussion to have, if you’re a big old nerd like me.

So yeah: people who have died – properly, I suppose – and then come back to life. That’s the list. No fakery, to mistaken identity, no alternate universe shenanigans; they were dead but they got better (no Chev Chelios either; sorry, Stath stans). No zombies either! Or vampires! They’re not undead; they were dead, and now they’re alive again. That’s the rule. Also I’ve seriously tried to limit comic book characters. And I’m sure there are some big omissions (like, I know there’s one from Game of Thrones that’s not on here, but that’s because I’ve not seen that far into the show yet; I know, I know). But I reckon these are the best at being back.

Optimus Prime (Transformers franchise, from about 1987): OP is the OG when it comes to coming back to life. Dying and then stopping being dead is pretty much his thing. Technically the first time he came back from the dead was in the original animation; famously being offed by Megatron in The Transformers: The Movie (1986), he came back to life a year later. Subsequent media have frequently killed him and brought him back, even in the live-action movies, but I want to talk about the comics. Because the original Marvel run killed off Optimus at a similar time as the cartoon; he’s blown up in slightly contrived circumstances, but his brain is saved on a floppy disk. Two years later he has his body rebuilt and his brain restored and he’s off to the races once more. Then in 1991, when facing down planet-eating mega-bastard Unicron, he sacrifices himself again, but this time his personality has begun to merge with that of his ostensibly-human companion Hi-Q. Hi-Q/Prime is converted/rebuilt into a new body, and he wins the war. So there you go: even in this one sliver of continued continuity – not including off-shoots or spin-offs, let alone other iterations of the overall franchise – Optimus Prime died and came back to life twice. Beat that, Easter.

E.T. (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, 1982): not much to say here that we don’t already know from the Book of Spielberg. E.T., doddery little alien magic-man, grows sicker and sicker as he’s stuck on Earth, until in a thrillingly-edited set-piece he seems to expire, human doctors unable to help him. “I know you’re gone,” says best bud Elliot, “because I don’t know what to feel.” But then! His heart glows! His colour returns! And he positively yells, “E.T. phone hooooooome!” – and Elliot’s euphoric laugh is just devastating. The whole sequence – what is it, ten minutes? Fifteen? – is masterful in every way, from the technical to the performative to the emotional. Bloody magic is what it is.

Gandalf (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 1954): Gandalf the Grey famously leads the Fellowship of the Ring across the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, where he faces off against a Balrog. After a bit of “you shall not pass” and all that, they both fall from the bridge, battling each other on the way down, before both perishing at the bottom. Gandalf, though, is not really Gandalf, but Olórin, one of the Maiar – basically a kind of angel, I guess. He is returned to Earth by the powers-that-be to complete his mission, and is promoted to Gandalf the White, supplanting the corrupt wizard Saruman. This new iteration of Gandalf is a bit more serious and steadfast, although he does retain his fascination with hobbits. Regardless, he gets a terrific death scene and a triumphant resurrection, and how it ties into Tolkien’s wider mythology is interesting.

Superman (DC Comics, 1993): comic book characters die and come back all the time; it’s pretty much a staple of the medium. I guess Jean Grey/Phoenix is probably the most famous, but they’ve all done at some point (even if, like in my Batman example earlier, sometimes they don’t actually die). Anyway, Superman died, very famously, after getting into a tremendous barney with genetically-engineered super-git Doomsday (as famously, and atrociously, depicted in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). The whole “Death of Superman” arc is interesting and entertaining as an example of mid-nineties big-panel EXTREME storytelling: as the issues tick down to the fateful scrap in Metropolis, the number of panels-per-page is reduced until the final issue is basically just full of splash pages. It’s a terrific, exhilarating rumble, really selling the heft of the confrontation. Interestingly, the comic spends a lot of time afterwards dealing with life without Superman, as a raft of imitators/wannabe successors emerge from the woodwork; these include the best-ever Superboy, Conner Kent, and Steel, who’s basically Superman meets Iron Man. Eventually, of course, Superman comes back, his body essentially having been sent to a Kryptonian day spa to recuperate; he emerges clad in black and with a mullet, so death obviously has some lasting repercussions. Overall, it’s a whopping arc with long-term consequences, and whilst it’s easy to make Christ parallels when discussing Superman, this story doesn’t really hew that way (unlike the Snyder-verse which really goes all-in on that plot point, much to the films’ detriment). One of the better aspects is how, even in death, Superman is an inspiration, which in itself has a long trail; leading, eventually, to Batman’s famous withering diss, “the last time you inspired someone was when you where dead.” Anyway, I’ve gone on about this far too long.

Spock (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, 1984): let’s start by acknowledging just how great Spock’s death is in Wrath of Khan. As a plot point within the film, as a piece of staging and performance, and as a landmark moment in this franchise, it was seminal; a death for the ages (as an aside, it’s crazy to think Star Trek as a whole was only sixteen years old when Spock died; the MCU was eleven when Tony Stark clicked the bucket). Anyway, they built an entire film around how to bring him back, and Spock as we know him is absent for much of it; a presence looming over everything as he rapidly ages, going through his Vulcan super-puberty and everything. It’s actually a rather sombre film as Kirk’s son is killed and the Enterprise blows up; bringing back Spock comes with a very real cost. Trek III is not one of the top-tier films – in the loose trilogy that comprises Khan, Spock, and The Voyage Home it’s certainly the weakest – but it’s still pretty good, often underrated. And, of course, it brings back Spock, which is nice.

Agent Coulson (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., 2013): Coulson’s death in Avengers comes as a huge shock, one of the fan-favourite characters being brutally offed in surprising fashion. In a film chock full of super-people, it’s the ordinary guy who buys it tragically. However, did any of us really think he was dead-dead? And so barely a year later he pops back up in the TV series Agents of SHIELD. However, his reincarnation became a recurring plot point; his references to spending time in Tahiti (“It’s a magical place”) becoming increasingly sinister as we come to understand even he doesn’t know how he’s back up and running. The eventual truth – Nick Fury using painful and transformative alien tech to basically bring Coulson back to life – may be a bit underwhelming, but it gave Clark Gregg a lot of meat to chew on dramatically speaking, and it underscored a lot of his character development going forward (especially when he, yes, died again, and then sort-of came back, twice).

Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 2001): full disclosure: I never watched Buffy religiously. I think I just missed it at the start and it was only when all my friends were talking about how great it was that I started tuning in more regularly. Weirdly, I think the most I watched it was around the time Buffy died and came back. It’s fascinating, really, and full credit to the show for the way they explored it; in a series full of magic, the afterlife, and the undead, bringing a character back to life isn’t too shocking. Willow, Buffy’s witchy mate, resurrects her with magic; but in an excellent twist, it turns out that she was in Heaven, and is super pissed off to be pulled out of paradise and stuck back on Earth, leading to her feeling depressed and alienated all season. That’s a great hook for bringing a character back, and leads to some meaty stuff for Sarah Michelle Geller to do.

Agent Smith (The Matrix Reloaded, 2003): do you ever feel that The Matrix has slipped from popular culture a little bit? Twenty years ago it was ascendent, rivalling Lord of the Rings for the title of “the new Star Wars”. Everyone was copying it. but now hardly anyone talks about it. probably because it hasn’t had a multimedia shelf-life comprising dozens of games and spin-off shows. Maybe the new film will change that. But I digress; Hugo Weaving is tremendous as Agent Smith in the first film, and is exploded at the end (spoilers) by Keanu Reeves’ Neo. Unsurprisingly – especially as he’s, well, just bits of code – he’s back in the sequel. However, he’s now been corrupted; he becomes, basically, a virus, self-replicating and threatening not just our heroes but the Matrix itself. This builds across two films, as Neo has to fight dozens of Smiths in the famous “Burly Brawl”, before the final conflict in The Matrix Revolutions when it seems everyone in the program has been Smithed. It offers Weaving a lot of scenery to chew on and makes for some great set-piece battles, even if the films themselves are a little disappointing.

Olaf (Frozen II, 2019): let’s not beat around the bush here – Olaf carks it in Frozen II. Okay, maybe Elsa dies; maybe Anna dies in the first film. They’re frozen, right, but I feel like it’s “magic ice” and there’s something going on there. Do they come back to life or were they ever really dead? Anyway, Elsa is effectively “gone” but we get a protracted death scene for the comic relief talking snowman. He literally fades away, slowly dying in Anna’s arms, and melts into a flurry of snow that blows away. People talk about Bambi’s mum all the time, but mark my words; “Olaf’s death” is going to be cited as a major traumatic incident for twenty-year-olds in 2030. His resurrection, truth be told, is slightly less great, Elsa just straight-up bringing him back to life, reminding us that “water has memory” to let us know that it’s the same Olaf and he remembers everything (including, presumably, dying? That’s creepy). And that, to be honest, is where I draw the line; sentient wind and rock monsters I can handle, but we all know homeopathy is bollocks.

Emperor Palpatine (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, 2019): look, I hate this. But let’s deal with it anyway, because I have a funny feeling it’s going to lead to some quite interesting stories being told in spin-off Star Wars fiction. I personally feel quite strongly that Palpatine should have stayed dead. And maybe he did? We are led to believe that the Palpatine we see in Rise is a clone; there are jars of stilted Snokes floating in the background. He’s all knackered and broken, eyes blackened and fingers dropping off; clearly he’s not well. So is he really the same character at all? Is his Sith essence somehow fed into this new body, the way Prime’s mind is downloaded from a floppy disk (“run prime.exe”)? Let’s say it counts, let’s say he’s the same slimy Palps we know and love. He is, at least, a sinister presence, and like I say, the whys and wherefores of how he came to be back is quite interesting. There’s a fascinating story to be told about the rise of Snoke and the seduction of Ben Solo – a more interesting story than anything told in The Rise of Skywalker, for starters. Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian seems to be researching cloning and seeks to extract midichlorians from a Force-sensitive being; are we to conclude that this in service of making a new body for the Emperor? All this – stuff hinted at but not explored in the film itself – is, like I say, interesting if not outright fascinating. And I agree, there is a certain degree of circularity in bringing back the series’ Big Bad for the final instalment. But I still feel, hand on heart, that it undoes a lot of the victory of Return of the Jedi (as did The Force Awakens, if I’m honest), as well as throwing away all the development of Rey and Kylo in The Last Jedi. So: Palpatine is cool, his presence and backstory in Rise of Skywalker is suitably creepy and interesting, but on the whole it’s crap and they shouldn’t have brought him back. The end.

Ten people who definitely died and definitely un-died! What could be more Easter-y? Honourable mention goes to the episode of Red Dwarf where Rimmer changes history and ends up not being a hologram, only to accidentally blow himself up in the final seconds.

#top ten #dead characters #alive characters #easter #back from the dead #resurrection