troisoiseaux

I’ve been spiraling about David Tennant slightly less than I have about Michael Sheen since seeing them both in Good Omens only by virtue of the fact I have a steady foundation of adoring David Tennant since I was 14-15 to keep me from completely hitting rock bottom, so I picked up my every-episode-in-chronological-order of post-2005 Doctor Who watch where I left off: season 3, ep. 4 and 5, a two-episode storyline where the Doctor and Martha travel to 1930s NYC to stop the Daleks from using the newly-built Empire State Building to turn everybody else into Daleks.

On one hand, I feel like this arc was actually pretty serious and genuinely moving – the commentary on inequality and the ep. 4 plotline about how people were disappearing from Hooverville, because the Daleks’ human agent was able to prey on their desperation for work and the police didn’t care about poor people going missing; the dalek-human hybrids’ ability to feel emotions and question orders; the Doctor working to save the last of the dalek's slaves because “there’s been enough death today. Brand new creatures, wise old men and age old enemies!”, etc. – but. BUT. It also featured baby Andrew Garfield with a Southern accent distinctly à la Forrest Gump and just generally, there was something amusingly disorienting about watching a story set in 1930s New York created by a British TV show with all British actors. There was a whole grab bag of emotions here, is what I’m saying.

This past week, I also watched the 2011 Wyndham Theater production of Much Ado About Nothing starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate, which is available on YouTube (act 1, act 2.) It’s every bit as enjoyable as the Tennant-and-Tate casting suggests; the best possible description of their vibe in this production is a post I saw on Tumblr that described Tennant’s Benedick and Tate’s Beatrice as “two Kinsey 5s making it work.” Tennant also gets to use his Scottish accent, which is definitely a plus.

( Assorted thoughts )

At the moment, I can’t focus on anything with a more complex plot than "competitive baking" or "people calmly demonstrating their expertise in niche things," but once I’m off for Christmas break I’m going to pick up Doctor Who again. At the beginning of November I started re-watching it from the start of the reboot, mostly in order, and I got through the end of the second season by Thanksgiving. I loved Doctor Who in high school, so I expected to enjoy it mostly out of nostalgia, but I'd forgotten how genuinely delightful the early seasons were: silly and earnest and optimistic, rooted in the idea that people are essentially good and even the most mundane life has value. Which is a nice message at any time, but especially given *waves hands at current state of world politics* and also the stress of approaching graduation, finding a job, etc.

Ten was and always will be my favorite, but I can't believe how much I underappreciated Nine as a teenager. His goofy smile! His dad jokes! His deeply repressed trauma from being the sole survivor of his species fueling his willingness to throw down at any moment to protect others! I think I appreciated Rose more this time around, too. I especially liked the reoccurring theme in the first season, of Rose having a bonding moment with a random, "unimportant" person they meet on their travels, like the alien janitor in S1E2 or the maid in S1E3. Rose’s empathy and Ten’s wide-eyed gleeful exclamations about how much he loves us clever, curious, ridiculous humans make them a really good pair. (I'd still have to pick Donna as my favorite companion, though, because Catherine Tate and David Tennant are an unbeatable combination.)

Also, re-watching a TV show at 21 that I loved at 15— it's wild to me that Rose is nineteen. Nineteen! I think Billie Piper was actually in her early 20s, but it's always surreal to find that you're older than the characters you thought of as Grown Up when you first encountered them.

In other news, I'm currently reading Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, which I found out about via pretty much every news publication's Best Books of 2018 list. I'm about halfway through. The novel started off as the story of a young woman's affair with a much older, famous author (apparently a very thinly disguised Phillip Roth, who I've never read and fortunately cannot picture, although I keep picturing Jeff Goldblum circa Portlandia which makes, uh, certain scenes both more awkward and unintentionally hilarious) before switching focus entirely, to the story of an Iraqi-American economist detained in a London airport and reflecting, in alternating past/present chapters, on how he ended up there. I have a guess as to how their stories are related, which apparently gets revealed in the last, one-chapter section. Not a spoiler, exactly, but I've included my theory below the cut:

( Read more... )