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daylander1000 · 11 months

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Will you watch season 2 of HotD or you've lost interest in the show? I wasn't thrilled with season 1, but I do like some characters and I'm curious to see if they'll do them any justice in the next season(s). I'm still trying to be optimistic (which is definitely against my nature 😁), although the latest leaks from Spain (which I desperately hope to be false) doesn't sound promising.

Idk it you read Fire & Blood, but that book is often overrated imho, almost all the characters there are painfully one-dimensional, shallow and bland, while the plot is full of illogical things (especially the Dance part) . So, as you can see, I'm not the biggest book fan, and I do believe that the show did some things better and gave a bit of depth and complexity to certain characters and fleshed them out. However, at the same time it seems to me that they didn't complete what they started, like, you see the potential of the characters and understand their motivations, but then out of the blue they do or say something totally nonsensical and OOC. Take Alicent at the end of episode 8. Rhaenyra says something nice to her and she suddenly forgives everything and forgets that's the same woman who wanted to "sharply question" Aemond after her son Luke maimed him over an insult (a fact, actually), the woman her husband always favoured at the expense of Alicent's own children and finally, the woman who is married to Daemon, the sociopath who hates Alicent and her children and who will kill anyone (and apparently with Rhaenyra and Viserys' blessing) without remorse if it benefits him and his side. I mean, the guy even had the gall to look annoyed during the prayer for Vaemond. Still, according to the show, Alicent somehow needs to "misunderstand" Viserys' last words to crown her own son, and not because it's probably the only way to keep her and her children alive and safe and because her son actually has the strongest claim to the throne according to Westerosi laws avd tradition. And don't get me started on the Velaryons who are collectively depicted as "Dae and Rhae fan club". Like, what is Corlys even thinking?! I won't ask about Baela and Rhaena because they obviously don't get to think and are just unconditionally supportive of Rhaenyra and the Strong boys. Rhaenys is contradictory and inconsistent. It's frustrating, really. Also, the fact that the narrative/the framing of the show heavily favours team black is also off-putting. Nevertheless, I'm still curious and just a bit hopeful that season 2 will balance these things a little. Maybe I'll just be terribly disappointed, but oh well. Sorry for the rant :D

Anyway, as a fan of your fic, I would like to know your opinion. Does the show deserve our optimism and what are your predictions regarding season 2?

S2 predictions? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Why would you ask me this? This is a show where someone in a professional HBO writers room said, "So what if a dragon just bursts up from the underground?" And the showrunner was like "Fuck yeah!"

I don't think they even thought to do a camera pan of the carnage. It's like they wanted to make Rhaenys look badass but did a Koolaid Man scene instead.

Tell me that this isn't Rhaenys

Predictions? This is not Leftovers where you could do a whole video essay on foreshadowing and subtext and hidden clues. This is a series where there's a horse running loose in a writer's room and nobody knows what it's going to write next.

This is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.

My prediction for S2 is that during the time off at least one person realizes that they failed to make Aegon into Joff 2.0, that instead of having him be affably evil, he's onscreen affable and offscreen evil, and they'll try to double down on actually showing that he's evil and actually showing that he's worse than Daemon and Rhaenyra.

We've seen Daemon in brothels, grooming and marrying children, killing Rhea, killing innocent people and murdering lords at court, but we've only been told (by very minor characters) that Aegon is a baby-eating rape monster. It's all extremely "tacked-on."

I think Aegon's the biggest problem that they have to work on. Just getting at least this one character to make sense moving forward.

When Jahaerys is killed, I think they'll use that to really commit to making him the bad guy. Like he'll have to be killing a baby or raping someone or eating someone so that it's not Rhaenyra and Daemon killing a child but "Look at what this bad man was doing instead of protecting his son."

As far as predictions go, that's all I can see. If they only develop one character in S2, it needs to be him. Rhaenyra has Rockstar!Daemon, Rhaenys and Corlys on her side, so they'll have to upscale the green threat otherwise it's a bunch of grown people and veteran soldiers fighting two children who have no experience at anything because the oldest one is a 20-year-old frat boy and his brother is still a teenager. Aegon's going to have to really be villainous.

I feel like there's a reason all his nude scenes are with his mother, it's one of the few consistent things between them through the time skips and actor changes, and I feel like they're going to go fully 500% in that Commodus direction

and have him just be creepy and rapey with her in a "bad incest," how-the-turntables, "be careful what you wish for" way. Alicent's defining trait seems to be "perpetual victim," so I feel like they'll go this way and frame it as if she's getting what she deserves for slapping him around. Ten extra points if they have Rhaenyra or Rhaenys there on hand to be like "Is this your king?"

I don't see them doing anything with Rhaena besides sending her away, and I actively don't want to see Baela going out there getting her dragon killed and her face burnt off in defense of Rhaenyra.

I honestly try to not think about s2 of this.

I was a hardcore asoiaf fan but I didn't like Feast or Dance. I read Dunk and Egg, but he didn't finish that either. And when F&B came out, I got the audiobook and I listened to it for a few hours, probably less than five, and I couldn't concentrate because I kept thinking "Did this bitch seriously package his story notes as a novel for sale??? This is an insult to storytelling."

And I deleted it.

It's the quality for one thing. It's the lack of diversity, it's the author not finishing anything, it's the fandom being 20% fantasy fans, 80% trump rally...

Like, in just 10 episodes HotD has managed to give a voice to pro-rape feminists. Didn't even know that was a thing until I saw it on Twitter.

I saw some of the leaked pics of Helaena at the funeral on my feed, didn't have to scroll far to see people just casually r-wording Helaena and acting like having six fingers is a killing offense since eugenics rhetoric is apparently thriving in this fandom.

And on top of all that, the story doesn't even make sense.

I don't want to be like "dramaturgically speaking" but narrative coherence is a thing. Just from bing chat (yes, I'm using bing 😣):

Narrative coherence is the degree to which a story makes sense. Coherent stories are internally consistent, with sufficient detail, strong characters, and free of significant surprises. The ability to assess coherence is learned and improves with experience. Individuals assess a story's adherence by comparing it with similar stories. The ultimate test of narrative sense is whether the characters act reliably. If figures show continuity throughout their thoughts, motives, and actions, acceptance increases. However, characters behaving uncharacteristically destroy acceptance.

This show has curb-stomped narrative coherence.

Like, take that scene where they killed Vaemond. The way they write it, Rhaenyra has come back after 6 years of never visiting her father to drag him off his deathbed so he can support her in taking Driftmark, the seat of house Velaryon, away from Velaryon people to give it to her son by Harwin Strong. Vaemond is killed for telling the truth.

With different lighting and music, that's peak tyranny. That's some Mad King Aerys shit. In full view of all the lords at court. Every single person in that courtroom is aware that Luke is a bastard and they've just witnessed a lord like themselves get beheaded over it. This isn't Daemon killing commoners. He's killing the lords and ladies of Westeros.

But there's no fallout. Nothing. All the lords of Westeros cease to matter. It's just another Tuesday to them.

Hell, they go even further and frame the scene like Viserys is Old Theoden fighting off the curse of Wormtongue. Otto, Alicent and her goblin children all but shrivel and wither from the sunlight that Rhaenyra brings as Vaemond is cut down by noble Daemon. In that scene, Dark Sister might as well be Andúril, Flame of Old Valyria, sword of justice.

There are shows that are easy to watch that we say are "no brain cells required," but HotD is like, "No brain cells allowed. Switch them off or put them on silent so you don't disturb anyone."

I have no hope for season 2. I would never rec this to anyone or say that I think the writing will improve. The foundation is shit. You can't build a strong s2 on a shit s1 unless you're writing a procedural or an anthology where nothing that comes before matters.

You can't undo things like Alicent supporting Aegon as king because of a misunderstanding. There's a limit to how many things you can retcon without destroying all sense of continuity and they've already gone beyond that in s1.

They're past plot holes. They have whole parts of the world that are just void of all thought. Alicent and Rhaenys are characters who respawn and disintegrate from scene to scene as needed. Corlys is three lines of dialogue in a trenchcoat. Daemon Targaryen is somehow, impossibly, a less-developed Damon Salvatore.

No optimism here.

I'm that jaded ex fan who's like, "hotd is a barren wasteland, riddled with racists, ableists and toxic stans, and those are just the writers. The very fandom air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten-thousand Lindelof-level writers could they fix this shit."

But that being said, I have a really bad habit of watching shit TV.

I've seen Catwoman more than 5 times.

Waterworld, Jonah Hex, Elektra, Daredevil (Ben Affleck and Colin Farrell), Battlefield Earth, Supernova. At least 8 of the Fast movies. All the Transformers. Dracula 2000. All the old school classics of bad cinema.

I haven't watched Morbius as yet and the only reason why is because I feel like Jared Leto is intentionally trying to become Nicholas Cage and I don't want to support that.

There is something about the cringe that hooks me. And with a TV series? That weekly cringe? That is peak entertainment.

It used to take me 4 sometimes 5 hours to watch and digest a single episode of Titans because there were so many questions to think about.

I hyperfixate on bad writing. Trying to figure out all the ways it went wrong and why and what they were trying to do. Once I start, I can't stop thinking about it. I'm hoping swhhw gets it out of my system, but I don't know.

Like, anybody can make good TV. Anybody can do that if you try hard enough. But truly horrible TV isn't supposed to exist. It's like 20 million an episode to make HotD? Nobody is supposed to invest that in a show where the showrunner doesn't even know how old the characters are. Bad TV shows are supposed to be snuffed out before they see the light of day.

But HotD is something special.

You don't accidentally end up with a Koolaid Dragon busting up through concrete. A director described that scene to a VFX crew. The actors had to rehearse that repeatedly. They had to do a read-through...

Like, just think about that.

And then they announce that they're going ahead with s2 without writers?!

That is insane. Part of me says look away, and the other part of me says that s2 of HotD will be something the likes of which I'll never see again.

I really don't want to watch S2, but honestly, I might. Not because I think it will be better but because I'm dead certain it can only get worse.

#long ass post #hotd rambling #answered asks #bad writing

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gojuo · 1 year

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I heard many people say that if the showrunners were good writers they would definitely make aegon and rhaenyra parallel each other. And tbh it's such an interesting take , because that would flesh out the conflict and make it very grey as it should have been. Also the fact that syrax is yellow and sunfyre is gold and you know... Gold and yellow are very similar so i think it's an interesting detail from GRRM. So what you think about this ? If u have given the chance to write their dynamic and how they parallel each other, how will u do it? I'm curious

Syrax and Sunfyre couldn’t be more different to be honest 😭 Syrax for starters is useless and lazy, never went out into battle, never hunted for her own food, forgot she could fly and breathe fire, essentially letting the mob of KL kill her, her one and only kill is Joffrey, etc. etc. She was worthless and did nothing during the entire Dance, mirroring her rider I guess 😭😭😭 Sunfyre contrary to that was a much younger dragon who DID ride out into battle, who DID hunt for his own food (balanced diet of other dragons, grand maesters and princesses #healthygainz), who has THE most dragon kills, who was horrifically injured but still kept on fighting kept on surviving who refused to die all to find his way back to Aegon and to help him achieve his goal of killing Rhaenyra, WHO SHOULD HAVE DIED TEN TIMES OVER BUT REFUSED TO ALL FOR AEGON BC SUNFYRE KNEW HIS BELOVED RIDER NEEDED THAT MONSTER DEAD AND HE COULDN'T LEAVE THIS WORLD BEFORE HE MADE SURE SHE WAS GETTING DIGESTED 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 Also exactly mirroring his rider...

Anyways this is about the dragons but dragons do resemble their riders so I feel like this would also be their dynamic. They’re just too different. Both in the book and in the show. In the book Rhaenyra is hungry for violence and makes the declaration of war first, she never cared for her siblings (always calling them her half-siblings), was gleeful when they died, when she was young in court she made fun of them along with Daemon to entertain herself, etc. Aegon in contrast had to be convinced to take up the crown, he says “What kind brother steals his sister’s throne?” (paraphrased, I don’t have the passage with me right now) when Criston tried to persuade him (RIP Kingmaker Cole, one of the most butchered Greens on the show), insinuating that he had resigned himself to being unwanted, only being convinced to ascend the throne himself because him and his entire family would have to be killed in order for Rhaenyra to have a smooth succession, etc. etc.

In the show they obviously tried to soften Rhaenyra’s canon ass personality bc they need their Daenerys 2.0, but then again, she was also beefing with her little 2-year-old brother on his birthday????? Like.. “No one is here for me,” she cries but they are at her baby brother’s birthday party ????? I’m fucking crying why was this grown woman so upset people were celebrating Aegon’s birthday, as if she herself didn’t get birthday parties every single year too 😭 Anyways show!Rhaenyra is less bloodthirsty and deliberately awful, but she still makes the declaration of war first, she still beefs with her baby brother, she still never makes an effort to get close to them (evidenced in the Driftmark episode), all in all she still doesn’t see them as family.

If the show was in my hands, I would have never whitewashed her character (bc she would be the antagonist and Alicent/Aegon the protag so lol) so if it was up to me, I would have had young Rhaenyra trying to bond with Aegon, but failing miserably because of her own feelings of doubt and insecurity of her position. And also, because Daemon is grooming her and slowly turning her against her siblings because he has his claws in her bc in my version of the show, Daemon would be the unequivocal villain of the series, serving no one but himself, not even Rhaenyra. Remember that he was starting with grooming her when she was 8 years old after being named heir. He, being as self-serving as he is, would have more chance of getting close to the throne as Rhaenyra’s King Consort than being uncle to King Aegon. (He doesn’t give a shit about her, he just cares about her power & title.) So Daemon would be poisoning young Rhaenyra against her siblings and since she would be feeling isolated in her younger years, fearing that her father would replace her with Alicent and their kids, it would be just way too easy for Daemon.

I think what I would do is that because of the big age gap between Rhaenyra & Aegon + Daemon always all up in her ear + her fucking off to Dragonstone for most of Aegon’s life, I would have had their characters be paralleled (Rhaenyra is loved by their dad and is the heir and has all his attention vs. Aegon is loved by the court + has better PR and Rhaenyra fears her position will go to him). Any interaction I would have them do would be extremely strained and filled with vitriol and resentment and bitterness, but I think what would be best for them is their interactions not being face-to-face but mostly through ranting about the other behind their backs. Aegon, whenever the family believes he’s fucked up and the frustration becomes too much for him, he’d just be like, “Who the hell cares what I do? Father only sees sister anyways/Sister-who-is-more-of-a-stranger-to-me is the one who will inherit everything that should have gone to me so why even bother?” etc. etc. such moments of vulnerability. For Rhaenyra, we would have such moments when she’s younger and Aegon is newly born. As a girl who’s lost her mother, who’s watching as her father is with a new wife, she would feel like she and the memory of her mother is getting replaced by Alicent & Aegon, and the fear of losing her only family (her dad) to someone that is not her and then also losing the inheritance her father gave her to someone that is also not her would make her a young and insecure girl, feeling isolated (perfect moment for Daemon to begin his grooming) and extremely hostile towards Aegon. As they grow older, Rhaenyra would see how Viserys cares so much for her and loves her whereas Aegon sees none of it, so she would be feeling vindicated and rub that in his face, only showing him apathy and spitefulness whenever they brush shoulders in passing. But what do I know, I’m just some girl writing fanfiction... Instead, the superior CondalHess are going to have their first and last interaction be when he kills her 🙃

#hotd spoilers #rhaenyra #aegon ii #anonymous #answered

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where-theres-smoak-2 · 1 year

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https://www.tumblr.com/stromuprisahat/712714435867869184/pretty-sure-the-only-reason-the-show-is-doing-dark?source=share

Damn, this kind of stuff scares me so much. What if they were right?! What if Alexander was never going to get a point of view from him not being completely wrong? What if the Darkling had no role in Alina's new powers and everything tied to Mal?! I worry.

Well truth is we've got no idea what the writers are planning. I will say that I am not worried about them not showing Aleks was right, I think they will because of how season 2 was set up. I mean Aleks spends the season saying that the fold being destroyed will not solve ravka's problems that people have hunted and hated grisha long before its creation, the finale shows a grisha who appears to have been deliberately drugged with a highly addictive substance and used as an assassin by Fjerda who, now that the fold is gone, is taking the opportunity to strike, which proves Aleks right, the fold is gone Ravka's problems are still there.

He also says that Alina will make the same decisions that he once did and follow his path, that they will come for her, the season finale again shows an assassin trying to kill Alina but also her using a shadow cut to take that assassin out and then looked on with pleasure and glee at what she had done, again this is proving Aleks right, already she is beginning to walk the same path he did.

So if they are already showing that Aleks wasn't completely wrong that I don't see why they wouldn't continue to do that in season 3. It is also worth pointing out that this angle is not from the books, the books never made an effort to show that Aleks was right, in fact instead it just made out like everything was all his fault. So the fact that they have changed the narrative from the books to me is a good sign.

As for Aleks having no role in Alina's new powers I find it highly unlikely, I mean she literally has his powers. They also spent the whole season hammering this idea that it was the two of them, no one else like them, like calls to like etc. Plus there was Aleks' warning at the end that without him she would have no counter and no balance. I think they have spent way to much time tying the fate of these two characters together not to involve him in her story with these new powers.

When it comes to the theory that they will use Alina's corruption arc as a way to strip her of her powers, be saved by Mal and ultimately end up with him, I don't know, its a theory. I will admit that it did briefly cross my mind that they might use the corruption arc as a way to justify taking Alina's powers away. That being said, one thing that is in our favour is that Netflix, the writers and the producers are surely painfully aware of how unpopular that ending would be, it was very unpopular in the books. I also think it would be a bit odd for them to change the ending of the trilogy in season 2 just to go back to it in a later season. But as I said we don't know and we aren't going to know until we see it on screen. Alina's corruption arc could end in a multitude of ways, Mal could save her from herself and they sail off into the sunset, boring personally, especially as I'm not a fan of the whole man saves poor corrupted woman from herself troupe. Or one possible ending that myself and @vesperass-anuna discussed was the possibility that it might end with Alina and Aleks sacrificing themselves together to save ravka, playing into the 'you and I are going to change the world' theme that darklina have going on, this is an ending that I think could be really interesting, though it would be sad to lose them both, there would be something poetic and tragic about that ending.

So I would say try not to worry or let it get you down, if you do have social media like twitter then maybe tweet out about what ending you would like to see as the writers and showrunners etc might see it and will then at least know what the fans want for the characters, and where they'd like the story to go, but ultimately as I said we are not going to know how its all going to end until it does.

#darklina #s&b season 2 spoilers #answered #anti malina

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sunnys-rewatch-blog · 2 years

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S2 Wrap-Up

Part 2

CW: Reference to teacher/student grooming and SA, the Montgomeries, reference of horrific crimes committed against babies

Okay, so, I might have suggested this before, but I'll say it again anyways. If PLL has to go making the protagonists' families into mini-soaps, I have some ideas that I think would make it a better watch. I would like to see Ezrella play out, and Byron- wallowing in self-pity- stumbles into Ashley Marin's arms; they bond over being separated from their partners or whatever. They develop a romance, we see Byron steamroll over Ashley a few times before he starts crossing boundaries with Hanna and inserting himself in places he shouldn't be, and Ashley finally tells him off. He ends up going to therapy and not making much of an appearance until later. They end up getting divorced and it stays that way, but maybe they could reconcile and become friends later. Meanwhile, on the Ezrella side, Aria is mad into Ezra and he uses this to leverage information from her about Alison's disappearance. I want a couple of scenes where it's blatantly obvious to the audience that he's doing this. Her crush on Ezra could affect her romance with an appropriate suitor (I still like the idea of Shawn/Aria, but Noel could also be a long-standing love interest) or keep her from developing one. Obviously, Ella would find out about the book and kick Ezra's ass out- because in this version of the story, Ella has standards. The showrunners could use the divorce to characterize Aria through her relationship with her brother (I think maybe this was what they were trying to do but it wasn't successful); I desperately want to see some narrative self-awareness on the show that Aria is being parentified and is vulnerable to abuse outside the home. They successfully manage to tell the story of how the systematic emotional abuse of a teenager left her vulnerable to the grooming and predation of an authority figure who pretends to care about her for his own personal gain- Ezra actually very closely matches the predatory teacher personality as documented by the people who study these kinds of things, as does his storyline (the practice of sending teachers to another district after they have been reported for sexual misconduct is a documented phenomenon known as "lemon passing" or "passing the trash"), to the point that I wonder if the writers did it this way as a covert joke on Marlene. However, in spite of the fact that Aria is a textbook victim and Ezra is a textbook predator, the writers seem completely unaware of what they wrote. Aria's family problems and completely inappropriate relationship are always treated like separate, disconnected things; Ezra is supposed to be her "true love" so their relationship isn't even meant to look like a problem that needs a cause and any family problems that are acknowledged aren't handled adequately.

Alright, I have spent far too much time on the Montgomery family, so it's time to move on. I want to talk about how queerness is treated in this show (and most others). This show in particular focuses super heavily on giving their lesbian character an unrealistically robust dating life, even at the expense of her characterization and the story, itself. Emily Fields is a character whose portrayal is designed by a lesbian and acted by a woman who chooses not to label her sexuality and she still reads like a lesbian as written and portrayed by cishets who have no experience in the queer community (except maybe their gay best friend). I'm not saying she's a bad character or even a poor rep, please enjoy my opinion with all the nuance it requires, I'm saying there are things about being queer that aren't directly related to your dating life and would make positive representation. For example, if you're the lone LGBTQ+ in your friend group (*and you usually are not, one friend coming out usually sends a shockwave of friends coming out around you), no matter how good your cishet friends are, you're going to want to find other queer people to share experiences with. Being accepted- even supported and encouraged- doesn't fill the need for a shared community. There's a lot you could do by including queer characters in the story who aren't love interests for Emily (or whatever was going on with Jenna, not to mention CeCe was trans). She is still the first lesbian to come out at her school and her role as a gay rep shouldn't be tied up in having a dating life that goes non-stop. It could have been cool to see the LGBTQ+ of Rosewood through Emily, maybe use her storyline to introduce the audience to some queer issues or represent even more marginalized identities (lesbians absolutely do need to be represented, especially as characters who actually survive the story, but at least anyone you talk to knows what a lesbian is; there are queer identities some people don't even know about, like aromantic and/or asexual, non-binary, gender-noncomforming- this show desperately needs more GNC folks- and although not all intersex people see themselves as queer and should not be forced to take the label, there is room for them in our community if they want to be included). I get that the story isn't meant to be educational, necessarily, but I feel like having an arc where Emily gets involved at that group where she met Samara and gets to know some people and learn more about the community she belongs to would have been a more satisfying watch than most of the filler they put on-screen, and it's not like we never see the other characters with other friends outside the group. We get to see Hanna with Lucas and Aria with Holden. They don't need to be heavy-handed with it, even just having a scene where she uses they/them or even neo-pronouns to refer to someone would be cool. And, being that she's apparently the first gay person to come out at a school where they apparently don't have a support group or alliance, she could very easily end up being someone that the baby queers of Rosewood High go to for advice ("How did you figure it out?" "Do you ever think maybe you should have been a boy?" "What does it feel like to get a crush?" etc). That's something they could do that would increase representation, characterize Emily, and allow them to take a few steps back from putting her in a bunch of meaningless, thoughtless relationships because they felt like they couldn't leave their queer character single for a few episodes. Her storyline and characterization could have benefitted by giving her, and us, time to sit with the trauma and grief of losing both of her first loves the same way in a span of two years. Getting to know some other wlw (specifically) could also help us glean insight into Alison as well.

Speaking of Alison, this season did some very weird stuff with her characterization that somehow goes...nowhere?? They just throw in a bunch of weird stuff she did that seems super disjointed and somehow tells us nothing about her. Why- and how- is she involved in so many relationships? Who is Duncan (to her)? Did he mean anything to her? Why was she taking pictures of Aria while she slept? I want to know more about "Vivian" as a character she made up (*probably with some help from Cece, whom I wish had been introduced by now), I want to know more about her fling with Ian, and they give me "randomly took pictures of Aria, specifically, while she was sleeping." What is this shit? What does it mean? I think they just wanted to throw in something a little creepy and ominous and didn't know what to do with it after to make it a twist (because this story can't just be a story, it has to have a bunch of twists that ultimately add up to nothing) so they decided to attribute it to Alison because she's the one known character no one can ask, right now, and also because she's supposed to be a little mysterious and unpredictable and they figured having her do weird, out of character shit with no hint at her motivation would develop the mystery behind her character. And frankly, I am throwing tomatoes at them.

If any of the characters could have been benefitted by focusing on their family, it's Alison- a character whose backstory we are meant to be interested in by design- because she isn't on screen to develop herself. Strangely, we see very little of them, and almost nothing as it relates to Alison. They develop a little sibling rivalry between Jason and Alison and emphasize it to make him credible as a red herring, but once you figure out that Jason has nothing to do with it, those flashbacks don't amount to much. All siblings have a little rivalry between them. They spend time early in this season on this teenage fashion show Alison was supposed to be really into, they could have done way more with that. I would also like to get a glimpse into Dilaurentis family life, both before and after the disappearance. I'd like to see some sign of the family dynamics that made it possible for Alison to establish a completely different identity in another town and go on flying trips with a teenage pilot. I'd like to see more of Jason getting loaded, or maybe even some drug-related scenes with Alison that could make her a little more complex- like finding and hiding his stash of cocaine and also stealing his alcohol. I also want to see more of what's going on with her parents, I don't even think I've heard her father's name by now. We could get some insight into her character by seeing what's going on with her family, and I desperately want them to show us something "off" with them- especially Jessica, whom we are later supposed to believe is a baby-killing psychopath. Give me something about her that seems insincere, something that seems put-on, something that's cold and callous. Let me hear her talking shit about her dead daughter and drug-addicted son.

Also, let me see Jason and Spencer going head-to-head, because they bring this up like it's common knowledge and it isn't.

I also wish they had done more to develop Alison's relationship with each of the girls. I'm no fan of flashback sequences, especially when there are already so many that you could make a whole season with them- and I don't know if just starting the story that far back in time would work, because we need the context of the disappearance and mystery to be invested in seeing that play out. I guess I wouldn't mind having some flashbacks that occur in the context of one character reminiscing about their friendship- like, making the funeral its own episode or even a two-parter where the characters talk about her, or giving us an episode completely dedicated to the memorial and showing us some scenes there. The stories don't always have to come with dramatic reenactments, though. They could just talk about her with the other members of the group or with other people. Something to give their friendships more depth. So far, I think Emily is the only one whose had flashbacks that show Alison in a genuinely positive light, and that's even debatable because we know Alison was kind of leading Emily on (I'm not sure if that's exactly the right phrase, but I think it works). I want to see more of her complexity realized, and I want to see any social pressures that might have made some of the girls feel obligated to stick it out with a "friend" who was always down to blackmail them for no reason (straight up, usually blackmail is used for leverage or control but this shit gets brought up out of nowhere). I want to see some backing for the phrase "I made you. I made all of you," because that line...I don't know, it definitely has a cheesey daytime drama vibe but part of me thinks it's cool- but it would carry more weight if we got to see it.

Now, last but not least, now that Mona has been unmasked, I want to talk about her diagnosis. First of all, I think giving her a fictitious psychiatric condition is a fantastic idea to avoid further stigmatizing an existing condition (one of the reasons I am thankful that Mona is never explicitly said to be autistic even though she's coded that way- hopefully the people who can pick up on those tendencies in her character won't be as likely to conclude that autistic people are inherently villainous and criminal in real life). However, narratively speaking, it's also a really bold move; your audience doesn't have a real-world context for what you've created, which can damage any empathetic connection we have with the character if not handled adequately. And what did the PLL writers handle adequately? I still go to sleep at night sometimes wondering what the fuck was in that barrel. This is a problem, especially because I don't think Mona is supposed to be the only one of our villains afflicted with it- both Mona and Cece admit to getting "addicted to the game" and Alex apparently came up with the idea to do this very weird and specific thing all on her own. All of their storylines include stalking, both Mona and Alex were replacement stalkers in particular. Alison might have had a variant of it, which would have been cool to explore.

If you're going to create a disorder, you have to create the disorder. Is it genetic? Inherited? Trauma-based? Maybe it's a little-known condition that hasn't gained much traction in the world of psychiatry and hasn't been studied enough to determine the cause. What are the symptoms? What is the onset? I think we could have really benefitted by having an episode focusing on Dr. Sullivan putting the pieces together Criminal Minds-style over the diagnosis, or splicing in some scenes like that in her reveal episode. We could also benefit from spending time in the perspective of these characters- not just seeing what they're doing for a few seconds at the end of an episode, but seeing how this all looks to them.

This mental health diagnosis only seems to exist as-needed for the plot and, to be honest, I don't know what the point of it was. "A state of hyper-reality" isn't even really needed to explain how Mona knew everything that was happening; a lot of what she knew, she learned through Ali's diary, and what she couldn't have learned from there she could probably have learned from her informants- especially since they all have very personal, supposedly secret conversations out loud in very public spaces all the time. She has her own motive. And I really can't imagine setting up something like a fictitious psychiatric condition, you could have a lot of creative freedom with that, and just doing fuck all with it.

It occurs to me now that a lot of what I said may have been repeated, but I'm not too pressed about it. If anything, at least I'm consistent.

#alison dilaurentis #aria montgomery #emily fields #hannah marin #pll spoilers #spencer hastings #anti ezria #ezria #pll rewatch #jason dilaurentis

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yeonchi · 1 year

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Doctor Who 10 for 10 Part 4/10: Series 4

This is the dream team, ladies and gentlemen. Following her brief appearance in The Runaway Bride, Catherine Tate was given the opportunity to reprise her role as Donna Noble, which she quickly accepted. During a tweetalong for that same episode in December 2020, Russell T Davies threw out the idea of returning to Doctor Who and asked Catherine Tate and David Tennant if they were interested. The two of them accepted and now, RTD is back as showrunner with David Tennant and Catherine Tate returning for three 60th Anniversary Specials in November 2023. But for now, let’s focus on their original series from 15 years ago.

This instalment will encompass the 2009 Specials alongside Series 4. During the production of Doomsday, RTD, Julie Gardner, Phil Collinson and Jane Tranter agreed to do two more series before putting the series on a break with a year of specials as they prepared to transition to a new production team, with Steven Moffat accepting the role of showrunner in September 2007. David Tennant had been offered to continue on for Series 5, but he ultimately declined and he announced his departure via livelink at the National Television Awards on 29 October 2008.

Interestingly, the production of Series 4 is probably the most documented out of all of Doctor Who. This is thanks to a collaborative project between RTD and Doctor Who Magazine writer Benjamin Cook, starting off as emails to create a series of articles in the magazine, but as the amount of correspondence grew, it was decided to create a book with them, resulting in The Writer’s Tale being released in September 2008 covering emails (and text messages) from February 2007 to April 2008. Later on, it was decided to compile another 18 months worth of emails up to September 2009, eventually resulting in The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter being released in January 2010. In those books you can get the biggest insight behind-the-scenes and see just how much planning and time goes into the production of a series of Doctor Who. You can also see RTD’s health slowly deteriorating as he oversaw three flagship programs over six years. Seriously, it makes me look like a joke, compressing decades worth of work into 10 years, and that’s mostly just writing, not all the filming and work that goes into pre-production and post-production.

Anyway, let’s jump into the retrospective for Series 4.

1. A Noble return

During the planning for Series 4, RTD intended for the companion to be a “leftover” woman in her mid-30s called Penny Carter, however when Catherine Tate agreed to return (possibly also because Penny’s character was similar to that of Donna’s), the plans were changed and Penny’s story became a continuation of Donna’s story.

Jacqueline King and Howard Attfield were signed back on as Donna’s parents, Sylvia and Geoff Noble, however during the filming of Partners in Crime, Attfield broke his leg after only having filmed a few scenes on a hill. After some quick discussions, Attfield was replaced by Bernard Cribbins as Donna’s maternal grandfather, Wilfred Mott, who was featured in the 2007 Christmas Special, Voyage of the Damned (the highest-rated episode of the revived era, presumably thanks in no part to the appearance of Kylie Minogue) and the scenes on the hill were refilmed. Cribbins’ character was originally named Stan, but after he signed on for Series 4, his character was changed to accommodate (luckily his name was never mentioned in the special so all they needed to do was change his name in the credits). If you ask me, given what we see in those scenes, I think Bernard Cribbins was a better fit in them, given what he was saying about aliens in the special. Attfield died a couple weeks after the recast, with his scenes being included as deleted scenes on the Series 4 DVD box set. The return of the Nobles marked the beginning of a storyline that tied the Doctor and Donna’s fates together, which would be concluded in the finale and later extended to the 2009 Specials.

The Nobles weren’t the only characters returning in Series 4, however. As RTD intended for this series to be his last, he wanted to make the finale as big as possible. Rose Tyler made a surprise appearance in the season premiere, followed by two brief appearances (filmed for one episode then added to the other) before her main involvement in the series finale and the episode before it. Martha Jones rejoined the Doctor for three episodes before returning again in the finale. Jack Harkness and Sarah Jane Smith also returned for the finale, bringing in characters from their respective spinoffs, namely Gwen Cooper, Ianto Jones, Luke Smith, Mr Smith and K9. Harriet Jones, Francine Jones, Jackie Tyler and Mickey Smith also returned in the finale as well. Most of them would appear again for cameos near the end of The End of Time Part Two, including Alonso Frame (who was originally scheduled to return in The Stolen Earth but declined due to other commitments) and Verity Newman, the great-granddaughter of Joan Redfern from Human Nature and The Family of Blood.

Additionally, there were plans for the Shadow Proclamation scene in The Stolen Earth to feature various aliens from across the RTD era, but that was cut for time and budget, resulting in the scene only having a group of Judoon. A similar scene would be realised in The End of Time Part Two.

2. Warnings from the future

After Donna officially joined the Doctor, their first adventure (in The Fires of Pompeii) was to Pompeii in the year 79 AD, right on Volcano Day. Since they knew what would happen that day, the Doctor insists that they can’t change anything about it, even though Donna tried her best to do so. This story also shows that while an actual historical event was hijacked by alien forces, the Doctor’s intervention allowed history to continue as normal. Other examples would come later in Series 6 with the Silence and Series 11 with Rosa Parks.

The Pyroviles’ homeworld was lost, though a group of them managed to escape and crashed to Earth, eroding to dust in the core of Mount Vesuvius. Following an earthquake in 62 AD, the soothsayers began to predict the future accurately, but they were never able to predict Volcano Day because the Pyroviles were using Vesuvius’ power for their plan to convert Earth into their new home planet. When the Doctor and Donna managed to expose their plans, the Doctor explains that he can invert the system and blow up the Pyroviles, but in doing so, he would be the one to cause Volcano Day.

The Doctor and Donna push the lever together and they manage to get back to Pompeii. As they head back into the TARDIS, Donna insists to the Doctor that he at least save someone, and he briefly goes back to rescue Caecilius and his family.

Karen Gillan, who played a soothsayer in the episode, would be cast as companion Amy Pond for Series 5 onwards, while Peter Capaldi, who played Caecilius, played John Frobisher in the third series of Torchwood before being cast as the Twelfth Doctor in 2013. In the behind-the-scenes episode, RTD suggested that Frobisher may have been a descendant of Caecilius and that his conclusion was time reasserting itself after the Doctor saved Caecilius in the past. This was confirmed by Moffat in 2015, but the rest will have to wait until we get to Series 9.

3. Double returning villains

Series 4 saw the return of not one, but two villains from the classic series. The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky saw the reintroduction of the Sontarans in a story that has them utilise humanity’s reliance on cars, GPSes and petrol to turn Earth into a cloning planet. Aside from Martha’s return in this story, we saw the Doctor’s attitude to soldiers and weapons, as evidenced by his aversion to weapons and people saluting him.

Davros, the creator of the Daleks, also makes a return in the series finale, with him reuniting with Sarah Jane Smith many years after their first meeting in his debut episode, Genesis of the Daleks. Although the Sontarans and Davros appeared considerably less than the Daleks, Cybermen or the Master, the production team’s confidence in bringing back gradually obscured villains from the classic series was proven by the success of the series so far. A scene featuring a young Davros in the past was scripted for the finale, but like the aforementioned Shadow Proclamation scene, was scrapped for time and budget.

4. The end of the river

After two single-parter episodes in the last two series, Steven Moffat’s contribution to Series 4 was Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, his last two-parter in the RTD era to round off his first two-parter in Series 1. The story featured the debut of River Song, a character at the end of her timeline who would become more relevant in future episodes as the Doctor’s timeline continues and her past is gradually explored. I think Moffat wrote the story knowing that he was going to be taking over from RTD and so he wanted to get a head start on his storylines.

The story also features the Vashta Nerada, carnivore piranhas of the air that live in shadows (thereby creating another innocuous thing for people to be scared of) and an underlying storyline involving the mind of Charlotte Abigail Lux, or the command node CAL. A century prior, CAL tried to save the 4022 people that were in the Library when the Vashta Nerada began to emerge, but since she was unable to teleport them away, she had to save their minds to the data core, leading to Donna being “saved” as well when the Doctor attempted to teleport her back to the TARDIS. In the end, River sacrificed herself to teleport Donna and all 4022 people out of the data core, but the Doctor managed to upload her data ghost into it, where she lived with the data ghosts of the rest of her crew and the avatars of CAL and Donna’s children.

5. Thematic story arcs

The story arc of this series was teased more subtly compared to previous seasons as multiple elements from the finale were scattered across the episodes of the series. Those elements included the bees disappearing, the Medusa Cascade, lost worlds, the return of Rose Tyler and the DoctorDonna. Other elements from other series were also resolved in this series, such as Harriet Jones, the mystery of the Doctor’s hand (which the Doctor retook possession of at the end of the last series) and Dalek Caan of the Cult of Skaro.

After Evolution of the Daleks, Dalek Caan’s Emergency Temporal Shift somehow took back into the Time War, which was meant to be time-locked. He travelled to the Gates of Elysium, where he managed to save Davros from the jaws of the Nightmare Child. Although his mind was damaged in the process, he gained the ability to clearly see through time, allowing him to manipulate events as he saw fit.

Davros was brought to the present day, where he used the cells from his body to create the New Dalek Empire before creating a reality bomb to destroy every reality. To power it, they stole 27 planets, some from different times, and relocated them to the Medusa Cascade one second out of sync from the rest of time. This caused some bees from Melissa Majoria to leave Earth as they sensed a disturbance.

Without the Doctor to stop it, the reality bomb’s effects began affecting other universes as stars began disappearing. Rose Tyler journeyed out from Pete’s World in search of the Doctor and ended up in Donna’s World, a world created around her when a Time Beetle was attached to Donna. It was revealed that reality had been bending around her since she was born, causing her to meet the Doctor again and be dragged into two parallel worlds, the other instance being in the data core of the Library.

In the Doctor’s universe, however, the Doctor’s absence led Harriet Jones, the former Prime Minister of Britain who was deposed thanks to the Doctor’s words near the end of The Christmas Invasion, to activate the Subwave Network in an effort to find anyone who could help contact the Doctor. Harriet found the Doctor’s former companions and used the network to call the Doctor, but the Daleks tracked her down and confronted her, but not before she gave control of the network to Torchwood.

Harriet was apparently exterminated by the Daleks, but in the anthology Now We Are Six Hundred written by James Goss and illustrated by RTD, there is a poem that details how Harriet managed to escape the Daleks by falling through a trapdoor and riding away on her motorbike. Phil Collinson was apparently not happy with RTD killing off Harriet Jones and “nagged” him about it ever since, so RTD took the first opportunity he could to send the poem to him. Collinson asked RTD if it counted and he said that he did. During the lockdown tweetalong for the Series 4 finale on 19 April 2020, RTD elaborated on Harriet’s escape, even going so far to suggest that it was a part of the Trickster’s long game, “but that’s a story for another time”.

6. My Choice, My Life, My Death

Fun fact - the title to this was the former title for my version of Turn Left in my personal project, which was a result of me ripping off bits of the RTD series while writing the first few series of Doctor Who.

Turn Left was the Doctor-lite episode of the series, double-banked alongside Midnight as the companion-lite episode of the series. As a result of the Time Beetle mentioned in the previous topic, a parallel world was created where Donna never met the Doctor, which led him to die in what would have been the events of The Runaway Bride. The timeline would continue to go on with the following differences; Sarah Jane and her group would take over the events of Smith and Jones before dying alongside Martha; the Titanic replica crashed into Buckingham Palace, destroying London and flooding all of southern England with radiation; the Adipose seeding happened in America instead of London; and the Sontarans activated ATMOS to convert Earth into a clone planet, but Captain Jack and the Torchwood team gave their lives to stop them.

Rose Tyler found Donna while in search for the Doctor. She kept Donna alive by diverting her away from London before the Titanic replica crashed into Buckingham Palace because she realised that she needed the Doctor and Donna together to stop the oncoming darkness. With the help of UNIT, Rose sent Donna back in time to where the split in the timeline happened and Donna ended up sacrificing her life to ensure that her past self wouldn’t make the decision that would inadvertently create the alternate timeline. Rose did manage to leave a message for the Doctor - “Bad Wolf” - to catch his attention.

7. The mystery of the Doctor’s hand and the DoctorDonna

After the Doctor regained possession of his spare hand at the end of Series 3, it has ended up playing a significant role in two Series 4 stories.

In The Doctor’s Daughter, the Doctor’s hand appeared to react as the TARDIS was brought to Messaline, which happened due to the creation of Jenny from the Doctor’s genes. Later on in The Stolen Earth, the Doctor was shot by a Dalek upon reuniting with Rose and proceeded to regenerate, sparking speculation as to whether David Tennant had resigned despite it being reported that he would be in the 2008 Christmas Special. In the next episode, Journey’s End, the Doctor ended up directing most of his regeneration energy into his spare hand, leading to speculation over the years as to whether a regeneration was actually used, though that was dispelled in 2013 when Steven Moffat confirmed as such in The Time of the Doctor. I wasn’t a fan of the regeneration twist initially, though I understand how it was needed for the rest of this storyline to work out.

The Daleks brought the TARDIS up to the Crucible and ordered everyone out. Donna became distracted by a heartbeat in her head and found herself unable to leave when the TARDIS locked her in. The Daleks dumped the TARDIS into the core of the Crucible, where it was to be destroyed, but as Donna fell to the floor, she reached for the Doctor’s hand, which formed into a copy of the Doctor while the ensuing biological meta-crisis gave Donna the Doctor’s mind, though it laid dormant until Davros shocked her. This allowed Donna to deactivate the reality bomb and send the stolen planets back to their original places in space and time. As such, Donna became the DoctorDonna, with the Meta-Crisis Tenth Doctor’s creation being the cause of the timelines converging around her, allowing her to meet the Doctor again despite missing events in previous stories through coincidences.

Sadly, the Meta-Crisis Tenth Doctor and the DoctorDonna weren’t able to stay in the Doctor’s universe for long. After destroying the Daleks in one fell swoop, the Doctor left his meta-crisis self with Rose in Pete’s World, because he was like himself when he first met Rose and he needed her to change him. As for Donna, she began to find herself being overwhelmed by her newfound knowledge, which would have killed her if not for the Doctor wiping her memories of their adventures together, thereby “killing” her mercifully. When the Doctor told Sylvia and Wilf of this, he noted to them that there are worlds out there singing praises of Donna, for she was the most important woman in the whole universe, though she can never know it.

8. The Time Lord Victorious

As stated at the start, there would be a series of specials broadcast throughout 2009 in lieu of a fifth series, which would come later in 2010 with a new production team. The Next Doctor saw the return of the Cybermen and a special guest companion, Jackson Lake, who began to see himself as a new incarnation of the Doctor due to an incident with the Cybermen. Planet of the Dead was an Easter adventure with scenes filmed in Dubai and the beginning of a mini-arc that would see the end of the Tenth Doctor’s life - “He will knock four times.”

The Waters of Mars shows the Doctor at his most reckless as he tried to avert a fixed point in time by saving Adelaide Brooke and two of her crew from Bowie Base One when an aqueous viral infection known as the Flood infested the rest of the crew. Originally, Adelaide was supposed to die with her crew and the cause of Bowie Base One’s destruction remained unknown. After the Doctor returned to Earth, Adelaide allowed the surviving members of her crew to leave and share their story. As the Doctor proclaimed to Adelaide that he was the Time Lord Victorious, Adelaide became horrified and angry at the potential of the Doctor’s power, so she took her own life in an effort to preserve the timeline, which led the Doctor to realise the seriousness of his actions, though he seemingly remained defiant.

I suppose I would have liked to see this attitude continue into the final specials, but it would be revisited a decade later with the multi-platform Time Lord Victorious series, covering books, comics, audios, games and webcasts. The series explored the Tenth Doctor going into the Dark Times, where he encountered a species known as the Kotturuh, who assigned lifespans to species based on their significance to the universe. By stopping the Kotturuh, the Tenth Doctor rewrote history and altered timelines, eventually resulting in the Eighth and Ninth Doctors allying with the Daleks and a group of vampires to make their future incarnation see the error of his ways.

Ironically, in the 2015 Titan Comics miniseries Four Doctors, the Tenth Doctor defied his fate and became the Time Lord Victorious again, conquering the universe before he was assassinated by a Raxacoricofallapatorian.

9. The evil of the Time Lords

Originally, three specials were commissioned for 2009, but in April 2008, Jane Tranter pushed for David Tennant’s final story to be a two-parter, and as such, RTD had to work hard in order to make The End of Time the big story that it was. The 2008 global financial crisis led to budget cuts across the BBC and with countries like Canada and Japan no longer deciding to buy rights to the series, RTD feared that the two-parter would be cut to 45 minutes each or that The Waters of Mars would be dropped, but luckily, Julie Gardner managed to raise the money to make all four specials possible. Both parts of The End of Time made up the 2009 Christmas Special and the 2010 New Year’s Special, the latter being the first of its kind before the Chibnall era decided to move the Christmas Specials to New Year’s Day.

Part One saw the Master being resurrected thanks to his contingency plan, but an accident left him with an energy deficit. Meanwhile, Wilf was contacted by a mysterious woman who told him to take up arms. Wilf manages to find the Doctor to see if he can bring Donna’s memory of him back, but he refuses to go to her. On Christmas morning, the Doctor finds Wilf again in an effort to find the Master, which he does thanks to a subconscious suggestion from Donna. Wilf goes with the Doctor to the Naismith mansion and confronts the Master, who uses the Immortality Gate to transform every human (except for Wilf and Donna) into himself, creating the Master Race.

Part Two sees two Vinvocci rescuing the Doctor and Wilf while the Master uses the Master Race to trace the origin of the drumbeat inside his head. The drumbeat was revealed to the the work of the Time Lords, who put the signal in the Master’s head when he was eight years old and was taken for initiation to the Time Lord Academy on Gallifrey. This was an effort by Rassilon and the High Council to win the Time War by breaking Gallifrey out of the time lock and ripping the Time Vortex apart, which was what made the Doctor destroy Gallifrey to stop them (apparently). Only two Time Lords opposed this plan, with one of them being the woman that contacted Wilf. The Doctor fell back into the Naismith mansion and confronted the Master and Rassilon, struggling to choose who to kill until a glance from the woman leads him to break the link, sending the Time Lords back into the Time War, with the Master going as well in an attempt to exact revenge for turning him into what he was.

In all honesty, it feels kind of surreal to see Rassilon becoming a villain in this story, given how he was revered by the Time Lords and also the fact that the Time Lords were written in a better light during the classic series (but what would I know, the only Gallifrey-related classic series episode I really watched was The Five Doctors). Then again, I don’t think the Doctor ever saw eye-to-eye with the Time Lords in the classic series, so it kind of makes sense how he wouldn’t see eye-to-eye with them in the revived series.

10. The grandest farewell

Once Rassilon and the Time Lords were sent back into the time lock with the Master, the Doctor was initially relieved to still be alive until Wilf knocked four times. After ranting about how he could do so much more, the Doctor couldn’t bear leaving Wilf to die and allowed himself to absorb the Immortality Gate’s regeneration to get him out of the control chamber. He then dropped Wilf off at home and went off on his final reward, visiting all his previous companions and other people he met (even those from spinoff media and the classic era, as would be revealed in SJA Series 4), seeing Donna at her wedding, and visiting Rose on New Year’s Day 2005 before struggling back to his TARDIS, setting it into flight and regenerating into the Eleventh Doctor, setting the console room on fire in the process.

Aside from the returning cameos in The End of Time, there was some bonus farewell content from the production team to celebrate the end of the RTD era. At the wrap party, two videos were produced by Jennie Fava for the cast and crew; a video of everyone singing to The Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) and The Ballad of Russell and Julie, featuring David Tennant, Catherine Tate and John Barrowman.

Although The End of Time was David Tennant’s final episode, he would also be involved in the filming of the 2009 BBC One Christmas idents and the SJA episode The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, which would premiere that October.

Unlike Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant readily embraced his role even after his time on Doctor Who, appearing at the Birmingham Lords of Time Fan Convention in September 2012, reprising his role in the 50th Anniversary special The Day of the Doctor in 2013 and making his Big Finish debut with the first volume of The Tenth Doctor Adventures, released in May 2016. And then of course, he returned again at the end of The Power of the Doctor in preparation for the 60th Anniversary Specials in November 2023.

In the end, there were too many things to say about Series 4 to summarise in 10 topics, so I’m putting in some honourable mentions below:

Was Mr Copper ungrateful?

One of the most notorious things about Series 4, or rather Voyage of the Damned, is the Doctor Who Magazine interview with Clive Swift, who played Mr Copper in the special and also Jobel in Revelation of the Daleks (he was also due to star in a Big Finish audio in 2003, but he withdrew due to a family illness). When Benjamin Cook interviewed Swift (on set in his trailer towards the end of the shooting), he didn’t seem to take the interview seriously, complaining about why Cook taped the interview instead of using shorthand and commenting about how he wasn’t getting paid for the interview. In 2017, Cook commented that RTD and Julie Gardner had to approve the interview before it was published, suspecting it was “testament to what a sod he’d been on set all month”.

Apparently, it was rumoured that RTD was going to have Clive Swift reprise his role in The Stolen Earth, but he changed his mind after the DWM interview. This was never confirmed, however his character was mentioned, as it is implied that Mr Copper established the foundation that developed the Subwave Network.

When Swift died in 2019, RTD apparently claimed that he should have not allowed the interview to be published as he felt that he had a duty of care to Swift, just as with any other actor. Although the only source for this is someone else’s Twitter without any primary source to back it up, it’s very likely that RTD actually said this because Benjamin Cook has replied to people replying to that tweet.

Something that can be verified, however, is a letter that RTD emailed to Doctor Who Magazine shortly after Swift’s death. This didn’t seem to have gotten much attention, but someone managed to take a snapshot of it and posted it online, which I’ll also attach below.

What do you think of RTD’s response? Do you think it made Swift seem less ungrateful about his experience on Doctor Who? Feel free to let me know what you think.

Keeping it (the timey-wimey) in the family

I’m gonna get flamed for the title to this, I just know it. But nonetheless, I’m still stating the obvious.

Peter Davison reprised his role as the Fifth Doctor for the 2007 Children in Need sketch, Time Crash. About a week before it aired, Davison’s daughter, Georgia Moffett, was cast as Jenny in The Doctor’s Daughter, meaning that a daughter of a Doctor was playing the daughter of the Doctor. After Tennant and Moffett married, Peter Davison became the former’s father-in-law.

Although Jenny was shown to have been killed near the end of The Doctor’s Daughter, the ending of the episode showed her being revived, unbeknownst to the Doctor, before stealing a shuttlecraft and leaving to go on adventures. Georgia Moffett was interested in returning to the series and although she hasn’t reprised her role onscreen, her character has returned in extended media, with Moffett returning for a Big Finish audio series featuring Jenny in 2018.

On a side note, former TVB actress Corinna Chamberlain (a Westerner) is literally Georgia Moffett and you cannot convince me otherwise.

That Time Lady

The identity of the Time Lady who contacted Wilf has never been openly explained on-screen, although the popular explanation seems to be that it was the Doctor’s mother since it was what RTD told her actress, Claire Bloom, and the production team. However, RTD acknowledged that it could have been any other Time Lady, such as Romana, Susan Foreman’s mother (aka the Doctor’s daughter) or even the Rani. And before anyone says it, it can’t be Tecteun because she would be with Division.

Another similar woman appeared in Series 9’s Hell Bent when the Twelfth Doctor returned to the drylands of Gallifrey. Steven Moffat said that he would rather leave it to the fans to decide who that woman was, whether she would be the Doctor’s mother, or even if she was the same woman from The End of Time.

“How many have died in your name?”

In Journey’s End, Davros reveals the Doctor’s soul, telling him that while he may abhor violence and never carry a weapon, his self-sacrificing nature convinced the people he meets to do the same, thereby making them into weapons, which makes him recall Harriet Jones and all the people who gave their lives in his name, including River Song and Jenny (again, he didn’t know that Jenny was revived). I’m sure there are many more examples of this from both before and after the RTD era, but that would be way out of scope for both the original episode and this retrospective series. I suppose I like to think that the people who are still alive are proud of having met the Doctor and would do anything they could to help him if he needed it. I mean, that’s what Harriet Jones did, didn’t she?

In my opinion, Series 4 and the 2009 Specials were the peak of the revived series, or rather the first of few. I didn’t get into Doctor Who for a few more years when this series came out (though I did watch one or two stories here and there), but even in Australia, the appeal of the show was as profound as it was in the UK. In primary school, I knew three kids in my year level who were fans of the show; one of them invited me to his house (or maybe his mum invited my mum and brought me along as well, idk) and we watched a story from Series 1 together; and the other two I played with in a Doctor Who-esque LARP with some Dynasty Warriors added in to boot; that LARP was one of the origins of my personal project which I would put to pen and paper (or rather, document and keyboard) in a few years’ time.

When I finally got into Doctor Who around 2011 or 2012, I took my time to watch the RTD era episodes as well; looking back, I only wish someone drilled it into me to start watching Doctor Who, whether by buying the DVDs or watching the episodes as they premiered on ABC, but knowing my mum back then, she would always have something recording on weekend nights, on the one DVR that could receive digital television, so I’d have to settle with watching on analog because the idea never came to me to buy the DVDs or find some way to watch it online (my 10GB internet data plan didn’t help things either).

This ends the Tennant and RTD eras of Doctor Who. Stay tuned for Part 5 as we enter the Smith and Moffat eras with my 10 takes on Series 5.

#doctor who #doctor who 10 for 10 #doctor who series 4 #tenth doctor #david tennant

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mermaidsirennikita · 1 year

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Have you read the Henry Cavill blind item leaks about the actual reason he left the Witcher? Thoughts on him?

I mean my thoughts on the deuxmoi ~leaks~ are that they remind me a lot of when Rege-Jean left Bridgerton. Deux, with basically nothing backing it up, said that he was a diva on set, horrible to work with, etc. Funny how this is what happens when Netflix loses talent that was perceived to be a big asset to a show's success.

Also, interesting that this leak only occurred when it became official that Henry was not in fact returning as Superman anymore, a couple months after he left The Witcher. Like, you'd think that this type of gossip would be leaked way earlier. I personally don't trust anything Deux says unless it is pretty like... visually obvious, or is backed by sources other than "Deux's sources". Deux is a gossip mill; whoever is behind that account will post literally anything and be like "HMM WHO KNOWS MAYBE TRUE". There is true shit reported to Deux, but there's also a lot of bullshit to sift through.

To be super blunt, The Witcher is a show that has had big numbers but has never been super critically acclaimed. I've seen some critics love it, some hate it. Reviews are mixed. Reactions got worse for season 2, which was just.... a mess, imo. I had no idea what was happening for s1, but I had a good time at points. S2 was really not great, and a lot of fans seemed to share that opinion. The one thing that was largely consistently well-receive was Henry Cavill as Geralt. And honestly? I don't think Henry is like, a once in a lifetime talent; sometimes I find him good, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I think he's really hot, sometimes he doesn't work for me at all. But in that role, he was good. He fit very well. He was the main selling point of that show, and I think it's kind of deluded to suggest otherwise. Other actors were good. Freya was good. Anya was good--though I'll be real. I wanted to love that ship, but she had like zero chemistry with Henry and her role was horribly written. Henry was the very clear star, though, and people responded well to him.

Imo, the only way Netflix would have fired that man would be if he was like... physically and/or sexually abusing people, or very clearly sexually harassing people. And even then! If they could cover it up, they probably would (and they have, for other big stars). That's just the reality. It's awful. But his attachment to the series meant money, and they prioritize money. It's possible that he was a dick on set. It's possible that he critiqued what the writers were doing and was difficult. He would not be the first star of a show to be difficult on set. I just don't think he ever would have been fired, unless he was truly, honestly horrible on set. It's ridiculous to me that people think he would be. Big names just don't get fired unless something truly impossible to brush off has happened--Frank Langella being fired from Mike Flanagan's House of Usher on Netflix due to sexual harassment accusations is a recent moment. And 100%, I think that if Netflix had something to prove Henry was fired due to those issues... I think they'd do it. He's not being protected by DC anymore. He's a babe in the woods. The reaction to Liam Hemsworth (who I for the record think is fine lmao) has been kinda negative. Why wouldn't Netflix take the opportunity to look like a responsible hero? If they could? They can't. And I don't think they would have fired him for ANY other reason.

And I'll be real! If Henry was being a dick on set about the quality of the scripts... Yo, he was right. The scripts for season 2 were baaaaad. I'm not a Witcher fan, but I'm friends with people familiar with the games and the books. All of that. Sounds better. Than what this show has been doing. "But the showrunner is a woman," yes and her work is bad. I do believe now, after seeing some interviews with Henry, that he wasn't happy with the scripts. I doubt that's the only reason why he left. But if you look back to like... 2021, there were rumors on the ground that Henry was wanting to leave because he didn't like the scripts and he didn't like the creatives in charge. I think it's as simple as him already being unhappy with the people and the scripts, and him thinking he had a safe place to land with DC. Which, honestly? I think he absolutely should've gotten paperwork in order before announcing his Superman return, but if DC literally told him to announce... A lot of actors have done that kind of shit based off verbals before. The world is changing, but DC is also HORRIBLE to talent, in front of and behind the camera. Gal Gadot (who I dislike) and Patty Jenkins got screwed. Jason Momoa is about to get screwed. Everyone working on Batgirl. Before Zaslav took over, Birds of Prey got set up for failure. Ray Fisher got fucked over. I don't think shit is suddenly going to improve under James Gunn (someone everyone is acting like they love, despite the fact that he's said some pretty off color shit and was backed by actors like Chris Pratt). Talent is not being treated correctly at DC... unless they're Ezra Miller!

All this being said, I don't think Henry is like... this great guy. I'm not going to cry into my cereal about him as an individual. I think he's dated girls far too young (probably younger than is known to the public) and he said some dumb shit about Me Too. But I can say all of that... and also say that Deuxmoi didn't seem to have any real evidence there, and the hyperbolic HE'S BEEN RED PILLED is kind of playing into what Netflix (and probably DC) want. Like, maybe he has been. But I don't think that's ever kept actors from getting jobs (look at Chris Pratt) and I don't think there's any evidence to suggest he was fired.

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thegirlwholied · 3 years

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any chance you can describe the scene in bridgerton that has sparked all the debate? i see people argue about it but i just need like.. the most basic description to decide if i can/will watch it and you seem to know bridgerton things

OK. Deep breath. Because you asked, I will try?

Without wading into debate... with some spoilers... and with the caveat that I’m always Team Extremely Enthusiastic Consent; this is one series I (clearly) both read & watched so the answer to can/will was yes for me but mileage will vary:

The two main characters have a very traditional romance-novel dynamic in one respect: the plenty-of-sexual-experience hero, and the so-innocent-she-doesn’t-even-know-how-sex-works virgin heroine.

However consciously the book was playing off that trope, which is in so many romance novels, I’ve always read it as ‘when your entire sexual education relies on 1 guy & only what he shows you’... that can go wrong. And it goes wrong.

You may have seen some of the series’ sexcapades going by on Tumblr in gif form by now... That Scene is episode 6, of 8.

Short version of the major driving plotline at this point: Daphne thinks her husband can’t have children when actually it’s a matter of won’t. Episode 6 is mostly filled with giddy honeymooning sexcapades... but with Simon using the pullout method, which goes right over Daphne’s head. And then she catches on.

Basic show-version scene breakdown, from there: Daphne leads Simon into their bedroom, with things proceeding as laughing-honeymoon-ly as usual... until the point where he’d usually pull out, when he says “wait”, meaning to do so. And realizes, when she physically hangs on (on top), instead, something’s different this time. It’s intentionally filmed as a power shift. Immediate aftermath, Daphne gets up to leave, starting to head to her own bedroom for the first time in their marriage. The duke, still in bed, realizes what just happened.

From his reaction, her suspicions re: his lie of omission are confirmed. From her reaction, he knows she did this intentionally. His dawning hurt is the hardest part of the scene to watch, for me.

It plays out as a ‘how could you’/’how could you’ situation, with fallout & reconciliation over the following two episodes ~

~and whether the narrative sides too much with Daphne, whether there’s the right kind of fallout and reconciliation, whether this scene was integral to the plot or should have been changed more, how much casting changes how the scene feels... that’s then part of the debate.

Which... oh no am I wading into debate? I do not have the energy to pull wellies on right now and that river runs deep... I do think the writers still could have done better especially in subsequent episodes, but sometimes characters’ actions are meant to be morally questionable and raise debate and sometimes it’s just a writing whoops (looking at Wonder Woman 1984, which I also watched on Christmas Day & which also managed to spark a consent debate, omg why, writers, when Steve could have just appeared). Bridgerton’s was an intentional writing choice - ‘murkiness’ is I think an apt word here - & I think the last paragraph of this article, and the articles it links to, speak well to overall context:

“as the number of romance novel adaptations continues to rise in upcoming years, there will be ongoing debates about how many of these now-dated books — in which nonconsensual sex, sexual assault, and rape are not infrequent — will be best adapted for the screen. The good news is that the genre has largely moved away from depicting these types of sex scenes as romantic. The bad news, however, is that it's a lot harder to erase them from the industry's messy past.”

I’m glad romance novels are being adapted; I’m glad I discovered how smart & fun many of them are (it took me too long!). Many romance novels are also Not for Me, for the above-stated reasons. Bridgerton, books & show, I do enjoy... but there’s many things I don’t enjoy that other people do because something in it’s problematic in a way that gets to me, so completely get it if it’s Not For You.

Whether you see the show as a success or failure on that front, I do think it’s trying to tell a story that reflects that sex is messy & complicated & has a learning curve & can be full of laughter & can make you feel deceived & helpless even when it is consensual especially when no one’s communicating clearly. Whether That Scene is/isn’t is the whole debate, but in writing I do think intent matters -especially as perception varies - and I do find it interesting the showrunner’s stated intent was to still evoke deception & helplessness without crossing the consent threshold. It becomes a a debate as part of the audience does see it that way! It’s also... fiction, as opposed to a how-to manual on consent. Since Bridgerton’s the first adaptation of its specific kind, there’s also a lot of extra attention/pressure on it. Can stories, romances especially, model consent? Yes; some do it brilliantly, and happily, more & more of them do! Do they have to...? Well... no. And when we start policing fiction we get a little Victorian & that’s not a good thing! That’s part of why AO3 exists, after all.

My personal take is, if Bridgerton was a fic on AO3, the writer would tag it as ‘dubcon’ not ‘noncon’. Some reviewers might disagree, but writers tag based on intent and to warn, I think that’s the warning they’d give.

...And also, my take is that Netflix would be better with AO3-style tags. & so would romance novels. AO3-style tags on everything please, the better to choose wisely!

I hope this helps you decide whether you can/will watch!

#bridgerton discourse #long post #under the cut because i do not want to trigger anyone and am adding tags as quickly as possible since answers make you post before tagging #(which is dumb)#more tags for everything #the summary version of my opinion: Netflix should have AO3 tags #and i think Bridgerton would be tagged as dubcon not noncon #as tags are based on writer intent and to warn and i think that's the warning they'd give #bridgerton #i don't use a blacklist I don't know what people may have blacklisted but we're going to take a stab at it!#tw: consent issues #cw: consent issues #tw: dubcon #(...discussion thereof this is the first time I've ever had to use this tag this is not my usual topic range!)#i also do think it's interesting the book is a woman writer but the showrunner is a man as that... brings both sides to bear on the topic #answers!#someday i swear some media i enjoy will be unproblematic again #...and then five or fifteen years will pass and that too will look problematic #the circle of life?#(recently was rewatching Doctor Who 2005 and it mostly holds up but also... there are the Slitheen episodes)#anyway i'm pro the debate but also the world is exhausting and the show is shiny with pretty people and flowers #i am just here for the pretty people and flowers tbh #...i'd bet maybe some people who didn't know what they were getting into and just wanted pretty people and flowers felt betrayed #by the That Scene of it all #...and that is why Netflix should have AO3 tags #...people would still disagree about what those tags should be but c'est la vie

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edgepunk · 3 years

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The Witcher Netflix Rant from your local frustrated Slav I cannot tell you how tired and frustrated I am by TWN and its treatment of Slavic people. An actual Polish man has pitched the show to Netflix, multiple other producers of Slavic descent have been alienated and felt like they didn't belong there because of how they have been treated, then ultimately left the production that has been handed over to a literal Karen that doesn't give a shit about it. The show has removed every instance of Slavic(mainly Polish)/other European (Germanic, Nordic) influences, cultural significance and turned it into an uninspired, boring, muddy fantasy. Hell, I have tons of criticisms about the games, but at least they kept the Central-Eastern European influences and, despite TW being a dark fantasy, weren't scared to make the games look bright and colorful. You'd think that Girlboss Lauren and her posse would put some effort into representing the cultural influences since the games pretty much got the series popular with the blend of different Central-Eastern European (mainly Polish, obviously) cultures and the usage of Slavic folk music thanks to Percival. A lot of the themes in the books draw from Poland's history, which also have been lost in the show (here is a post that's written by an actual Polish person and explains it better than I could since I'm not actually Polish, ya know). All of that has been lost, both the writing and aesthetics lack the cultural and historical significance that has influenced the world of The Witcher, because the showrunners are a bunch of Brits and USAmericans who aren't willing to put any effort into trying to understand the history and culture. They just want to make the next GoT, which,, huh? GoT ended up like it did, but to give them some credit, in the beginning the writers mostly stuck to the books instead of making a badly written Wattpad fanfiction from the get-go.

And it's possible for a western person to try to understand the circumstances, look at Craig Mazin, the man who directed HBO Chernobyl. Of course it's dramatized, of course they added some things that didn't actually happen and a few things were inconsistent. But you can clearly see in the production of the show that they put a lot of effort and interviewed people from Ukraine. Not sure if it's true, but I've seen somewhere (or was it a podcast?) that they gave the scripts to some Ukrainian people who were alive during the Soviet Union and asked them to correct the dialogues to make them sound more authentic, closer to how people adressed each other during the USSR (and how Eastern Slavs adress each other since it's a little different than western people do, including us Western Slavs, here is a nifty post explaining it if you're interested).

Can't speak for all Slavs, but the overall reaction has been positive from the people I talked to and my older family member. Note that a lot of "older" people here have been born pre '89 (that's when the USSR fell apart, the disaster happened in April '86), so the majority of them lived through the disaster. The biggest criticism people had that they turned Dyatlov into too much of a villain. when in reality he was way calmer during the night the disaster happened. Not to mention Mazin had it more difficult since he was adapting a story from real life that affected thousands upon thousands people. Mazin is a westener, he could've just shrugged it off and said "eh who cares about these filthy Eastern Euro people" but he and his team went out of their way to actually approach the victims, read several books written by people who actually lived through the disaster, that affected them and their families to make the story more authentic and respectful. Now, why can't Miss Lauren and her posse do it with a fantasy setting? Because they don't care. The only instance of "Slavic influence" (using that term very loosely) in the show is during the Striga episode when they mention a "vukodlak" which literally translates to "werewolf" so like,,, eh. It's still a werewolf, just a different version. I'm sure the writers were patting themselves on the back for including that word they found on the werewolf Wiki page. It would've been so nice to see a Slavic piece of media make it to Hollywood, but you see how that ended up. We barely get any recognition and if there is a Slavic character in a western production they're always: an assassin, gopnik, Seksi Female Spy that falls in love with the American, thief, mob boss, and I could go on. They never get the language right, because all Slavs speak botched Russian, right? All of us are named Anton, Ivan, Nikita, Natasha or Svetlana. And there are other mythical creatures besides Baba Yaga which Hollywood can't get right either. And it bleeds into the fandom too, all the modern AUs take place in the US or the UK. When other Slavic people criticize the show for its westernization they are told by westerners to shup up or they're "haters" (I do actually hate the show and the corpo bullshit Netflix is trying to pull here so,,, you can come at me all you want lol) tl;dr: The Witcher was the perfect opportunity for Slavs to have something positive in Hollywood, but it got doomed the moment it was handed to an USAmerican woman who doesn't understand the cultural influences and has zero interest in doing proper research. I probably would've forgiven her and her team if they actually tried, but they didn't. But seeing how other cultures that aren't USAmerican are being treated in movies and TV shows it shouldn't surprise me. Also I feel like I have to clarify - this has nothing to do with the actors, this is purely on the writers, the background and costume designers that put zero effort into researching the different cultures (not just Slavic, but I am Slavic so I wrote this from my perspective) that influenced The Witcher universe.

#the witcher #twn critical #if anyone actually takes their time to read my frustrated rambling I'll kiss you on the mouth #dw I'm fully vaccinated djdhdfj #long post

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calzona-ga · 3 years

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In her unauthorized book, Lynette Rice explores the stories behind some of the ABC drama's biggest moments, including — in this exclusive excerpt — the factors that led to McDreamy's shocking death.

In How to Save a Life: The Inside Story of Grey’s Anatomy, author Lynette Rice recounts the ABC medical drama’s eventful 16-year history, revealing new details behind some of the show’s biggest departures. Included in the unauthorized, 320-page oral history (St. Martin’s Press, Sept. 21, $29.99) is a chapter that offers new insight into leading man Patrick Dempsey’s shocking exit in season 11 of the Shonda Rhimes-created drama. In the chapter, Rice speaks with Dempsey’s co-stars and exec producers who were present during filming of his final days on Grey’s Anatomy, and reveals claims of “HR issues” that contributed to the death of his alter-ego, Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd.

“There were HR issues. It wasn’t sexual in any way. He sort of was terrorizing the set. Some cast members had all sorts of PTSD with him,” recalls exec producer James D. Parriott, who was brought back to the series to oversee Dempsey’s exit.

In more than 80 interviews with current and former cast- and crewmembers, Rice, an editor-at-large at Entertainment Weekly, also explores the show’s early days, recounts the thinking behind some of its more polarizing storylines and offers exclusive details about the show’s behind-the-scenes culture.

“After 17 seasons, fans still can’t get enough of Grey’s Anatomy,” Rice tells THR. But what went down behind the scenes was just as dramatic as what viewers saw every Thursday. I’m excited for fans to read what I learned about those early days, along with what it was like to work for Shonda Rhimes, and why the drama was so freakin’ headline-prone.”

Below, The Hollywood Reporter shares an excerpt — the full eighth chapter — from How to Save a Life, and tune in Friday to TV’s Top 5 for an interview with Rice about her book and the other big reveals she uncovered in her reporting for it.

(Reps for ABC, ABC Signature, Shondaland, and Dempsey declined comment on the reveals in Rice’s book.)

“He’s Very Dreamy, but He’s Not the Sun,” Or, How Grey’s Anatomy Loved — Then Learned to Live Without — Patrick Dempsey Ellen Pompeo may have played the titular role, but for many fans over many years, Patrick Dempsey was the real draw to Grey’s Anatomy. Some of it had to do with his celebrity: Dempsey was the most famous member of the original cast at the time of the pilot and brought with him quite a cult following from his 1987 movie Can’t Buy Me Love. But a lot of it was due to the way Rhimes wrote her McDreamy and how Dempsey depicted him. James D. Parriott I would say, “The guy would never say that,” and Shonda would say, “He’s McDreamy. He’s the perfect man. He would say that.” I’d say, “Okay. It’s your show.” Eric Buchman Shonda had a very clear idea of how important it was to keep Derek as this almost idealized love interest, not just for Meredith but for the audience. Naturally, the writers—especially writers who had been working on one-hour dramas for a while—were like, “Well, maybe have McDreamy make a big mistake in surgery and kill somebody. Or he develops an addiction of some kind. What is his deep, dark secret?” Shonda was very insistent: that’s not the character we do that with. Even when you find out he’s married, that was done in a very sympathetic way that kept him being a hero. He was wronged by his spouse and in spite of it all he was still gonna give his marriage a second chance. Stacy McKee Shonda was protective of McDreamy, but it was really with an eye toward being protective of Meredith. I don’t think the two were separate from one another. I don’t think she wanted to put something out there that maybe on the surface might seem a little frivolous. At its core, there was something really substantial that she wanted to say. She wanted to be very specific about the type of relationship values that she put out there. Tony Phelan I was in editing with Shonda once, and it was the scene where Meredith and Derek had broken up. He comes over and she’s like, “I can’t remember the last time we kissed.” And he says, “I remember. You were wearing this and you smelled of this …”

Joan Rater “Your shampoo smelled like flowers, you had that sweater on …” He described their last kiss. Tony Phelan Typically in editing you start on Derek, then you cut to Meredith for a reaction, and then you’ll go back to him. I noticed that we weren’t ever cutting back to Meredith. I asked why. Shonda said, “Because the woman in Iowa who’s watching this show wants to believe that Patrick is talking to her, and if you cut back to Meredith, it pushes them out of it.” In those special moments, we would just lock into Derek and let him do his thing. Joan Rater And he was a master at it. Patrick Dempsey He’s the ideal man, and that’s what Shonda constructed. There’s a projection [of him] onto me when you come in contact with fans, certainly with the younger and older fans. There is a certain amount of expectation. There is a responsibility to it. It made me grow, too. There were good qualities [of his] that you work on to obtain. Off camera, Dempsey was equally as charismatic to his fellow actors, crew members, and anyone who would come to visit the set. Lauren Stamile I was going in to meet him, and I remember I had this little cardigan sweater on and I took it off before I got into the room. Dempsey is one of those people—it’s almost like there’s a light shining around his body, and you feel like you’re the only person in the room. I got so hot and I remember saying, “Gosh, I would take off my sweater if I had one on because I’m so hot, but I took it off.” I was just babbling. He said, “You look nice,” and I said, “You look nicer.” I felt so awkward and he was so gracious and lovely. I was having a nervous breakdown. It’s like this “it” factor. I was like, God, whatever he has, I wish I had. I think it was very obvious how nervous I was, and he went out of his way to make sure he introduced me to everybody and made sure I felt comfortable, which he certainly didn’t have to do. But he did. Joan Rater He knew I had a giant crush on him, and he loved it. And when we’d go to table reads—I was an actress at one point in my life—they would always give me Meredith if Ellen wasn’t there. And I’d be getting my chicken tenders at craft services before the table read and he’d come up behind me and say, “Are you reading Meredith?” in my ear, like, so sexy. I’d be like, Oh my God. I mean, I could barely … I could not look at him. Tina Majorino I worked with Patrick a ton. I love him so much. We had a really great time working together. I think he’s such a great actor and he really made me laugh a lot. I feel like we had a good dynamic in scenes together, and it was always fun to play opposite him. Yes, he’s that charismatic in real life. Yes, his hair is that awesome. Yes, he is dreamy up close.

Chandra Wilson Patrick Dempsey will forever be known as Grey’s Anatomy’s McDreamy. Derek Shepherd is a permanent part of television history.

Norman Leavitt He is a big, personable guy.

Jeannine Renshaw We all love Patrick. Patrick is a sweetheart. If I saw him on the street, I’d give him a hug. I love the guy.

Mark Wilding I’ve always had a soft spot for Patrick. He really does try to do the right thing. Brooke Smith, who played Dr. Erica Hahn, remembers how Dempsey defended her when the decision was made to fire her from the show in 2008. Brooke Smith I remember calling him and saying, “Oh my God, they said they can’t write for me anymore, so I guess I’m leaving.” And he was like, “What are you talking about? You’re the only one they’re writing for.” Which at that time, it kind of did feel that way. But I guess someone didn’t like that. They gave me a statement [to release, about her departure] and I never said it. Patrick said that he actually took it out of his jacket on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and read the statement. He won’t let me forget it. He was like, “I defended you, see?” And it was true.

By season eleven, however, fans saw a disturbing break in MerDer’s once unbreakable bond. Six episodes had gone by without a peep from Derek, who was supposedly in Washington, D.C., where he had apparently made out with a research fellow. Fans began threatening to bolt if their hero didn’t return soon to Seattle. “I have never missed one episode,” wrote a fan on Dempsey’s Facebook page. “But I swear if [Rhimes] kills you off I’m done.” But there was a critical reason for Derek’s strange absence: behind the scenes, there was talk of Dempsey’s diva-like fits and tension between him and Pompeo. To help manage the explosive situation, executive producer James D. Parriott was brought back in to serve as a veritable Dempsey whisperer.

Patrick Dempsey [That] was the first year that I haven’t been in every episode. I [was] in every episode since the pilot— close to 250 episodes. That [was a] huge run. James D. Parriott Shonda needed an OG to come in as sort of a showrunner for fourteen episodes. There were HR issues. It wasn’t sexual in any way. He sort of was terrorizing the set. Some cast members had all sorts of PTSD with him. He had this hold on the set where he knew he could stop production and scare people. The network and studio came down and we had sessions with them. I think he was just done with the show. He didn’t like the inconvenience of coming in every day and working. He and Shonda were at each other’s throats.

Jeannine Renshaw There were times where Ellen was frustrated with Patrick and she would get angry that he wasn’t working as much. She was very big on having things be fair. She just didn’t like that Patrick would complain that “I’m here too late” or “I’ve been here too long” when she had twice as many scenes in the episode as he did. When I brought it up to Patrick, I would say, “Look around you. These people have been here since six thirty a.m.” He would go, “Oh, yeah.” He would get it. It’s just that actors tend to see things from their own perspective. He’s like a kid. He’s so high energy and would go, “What’s happening next?” He literally goes out of his skin, sitting and waiting. He wants to be out driving his race car or doing something fun. He’s the kid in class who wants to go to recess.

Patrick Dempsey It’s ten months, fifteen hours a day. You never know your schedule, so your kid asks you, “What are you doing on Monday?” And you go, “I don’t know,” because I don’t know my schedule. Doing that for eleven years is challenging. But you have to be grateful, because you’re well compensated, so you can’t really complain because you don’t really have a right. You don’t have control over your schedule. So, you have to just be flexible.

Longtime Crew Member Poor Patrick. I’m not defending his schtick. I like him, but he was the Lone Ranger. All of these actresses were getting all this power. All the rogue actresses would go running to Shonda and say, “Hey, Patrick’s doing this. Patrick’s late for work. He’s a nightmare.” He was just shut out in the cold. His behavior wasn’t the greatest, but he had nowhere to go. He was so miserable. He had no one to talk to. When Sandra left, I remember him telling me, “I should’ve left then, but I stayed on because they showed me all this money. They just were dumping money on me.”

Patrick Dempsey It [was] hard to say no to that kind of money. How do you say no to that? It’s remarkable to be a working actor, and then on top of that to be on a show that’s visible. And then on top of that to be on a phenomenal show that’s known around the world, and play a character who is beloved around the world. It’s very heady. It [was] a lot to process, and not wanting to let that go, because you never know whether you will work again and have success again.

Jeannine Renshaw A lot of the complaining … I think Shonda finally witnessed it herself, and that was the final straw. Shonda had to say to the network, “If he doesn’t go, I go.” Nobody wanted him to leave, because he was the show. Him and Ellen. Patrick is a sweetheart. It messes you up, this business.

James D. Parriott I vaguely recall something like that, but I can’t be sure. It would have happened right toward the end, because I know they were negotiating and negotiating, trying to figure out what to do. We had three different scenarios that we actually had to break because we didn’t know until I think about three days before he came back to set which one we were going to go with. We didn’t know if he was going to be able to negotiate his way out of it. We had a whole story line where we were going to keep him in Washington, D.C., so we could separate him from the rest of the show. He would not have to work with Ellen again. Then we had the one where he comes back, doesn’t die, and we figure out what Derek’s relationship with Meredith would be. Then there was the one we did. It was kind of crazy. We didn’t know if he was going to be able to negotiate his way out of it. It was ultimately decided that just bringing him back was going to be too hard on the other actors. The studio just said it was going to be more trouble than it was worth and decided to move on.

Stacy McKee I don’t think there was any way to exit him without him dying. He and Meredith were such an incredibly bonded couple at that point. It would be completely out of character if he left his kids. There was no exit that would honor that character other than if he were to die. Patrick Dempsey I don’t remember the date [I got the news]. It was not in the fall. Maybe February or March. It was just a natural progression. And the way everything was unfolding in a very organic way, it was like, “Okay! This is obviously the right time.” Things happened very quickly. We were like, “Oh, this is where it’s going to go.”

So that was that: McDreamy would die in episode twenty-one of season eleven, even though Dempsey was in year one of his recently signed two-year contract extension. Rhimes wrote a script that was befitting of her lead’s heroic persona: she began “How to Save a Life” by having Derek witness a car crash and helping the injured. Once it appeared everyone was out of harm’s way, Derek continues on his road trip but is suddenly broadsided by a truck.

Rob Hardy (Director) The paramedics leave. He’s there by himself. He’s having a moment. The nice music is playing, and all of a sudden, bang. It comes out of nowhere, which, you know, is how accidents happen. So as opposed to watching it as a viewer, we saw the accident happen through Derek’s perspective. Derek ends up at Dillard Medical Center, a hospital far from Grey Sloan and the talented doctors who work there. His eyes are open, but his brain is severely damaged. No one hears his plea for a CT scan; he can’t speak. To help keep the episode a secret, the scenes were shot in an abandoned hospital in Hawthorne, California, about twenty-two miles from the show’s home studio in Los Feliz.

Mimi Melgaard It was really hard on all of us because it was so secretive and we had so many different locations. We shot at this closed-down hospital that was absolutely creepy haunted. All the scenes there were so sad anyway, and in this yucky-feeling haunted hospital? It was really weird. His whole last episode was really tough. Patrick Dempsey It was like any other day. It was just another workday. There was still too much going on. You’re in the midst of it—you’re not really processing it. Rob Hardy Here’s a guy who’s immobile. Now you’re inside of his head. We were trying to make that feel scary from the perspective of a person who’s used to being in control, from a person who usually has the power of life and death in his own hands. But now he doesn’t have the ability to speak on his own behalf.

Samantha Sloyan When I went to audition, I didn’t recognize any of these doctors’ names. I assumed they were just dummy sides so people wouldn’t ruin the story line or anything like that. All we knew is that we were dealing with a man who’s been in a car accident. I had no idea that it was going to be Derek. I just figured I was going to be a guest doctor and that whoever this person was who was injured, was going to be just a character on the show. Once it became clear what we were working on, I was like, Oh, my gosh. I can’t believe this is the episode I’m on.

Mike McColl (Dr. Paul Castello) I signed an NDA before they would release the script to me. I was reading it in my house, and I was like, “Oh, my God.” I didn’t tell anyone, including my agents. I just said, “This is a really great booking. It’s a great role on Grey’s.” And they didn’t know anything until it aired.

Savannah Paige Rae (Winnie) The first scene I shot was actually the sentimental scene when I’m saying, “It’s a beautiful day to save lives, right?” I’m in the hospital room with Derek and talking to him. Even though I never watched the show, I recognized the value of the episode I was in and just really took it to heart. It was so special that I got to be a part of it.

Rob Hardy [Patrick] had a lot of emotions during the whole shoot, which evolved. I think when we first started, he was very calm and cool … the same Patrick that I remembered when I worked on the show a year or so before. With each passing day, he was a lot more emotional. A lot more was on his mind, and that would show itself in different ways. The finality of the episode and for his character was setting in. You’ve become a global icon on this show and then in five, four, three, two, a day … it’s over.

James D. Parriott Patrick was very cooperative and good.

Mike McColl When I met Patrick, he’s lying on a stretcher and we’re rushing him into the ER. I just introduced myself, shook his hand, and was like, “Man, I cannot tell you what an honor it is to be the guy to take you down.” He loved it. He could not have been nicer to me and was funny through the whole shoot. He was on the table in front of me there when I cut his chest open and all that stuff. He gave me a hug at the end. It was a real privilege to be a part of TV history in that way.

Samantha Sloyan I remember him being incredibly kind. They had his neck in a brace, and he’s strapped down to the board, so there wasn’t a ton of chatting. I remember him being really kind, but it was clearly intense for him.

Stacy McKee It was such a beautiful piece of storytelling. I knew this event was going to be a really sad, horrible event for Meredith, but I also knew it was going to be the beginning of such an incredible chapter for Meredith.

Dempsey completed his final hours of shooting on a rainy night. There was no goodbye party, no goodbye cake. Maybe that’s because some cast members were left out of the loop. James Pickens, Jr., told ABC News that the cast “didn’t know a whole lot. It was kind of on the fly. So whatever information we got, we pretty much got it kind of right before it happened.”

Caterina Scorsone (Dr. Amelia Shepherd) I didn’t get to say goodbye to Patrick when he left. I do think that helped, because I’ve been using the character of Derek in my internal landscape since Private Practice. Derek was the stability in Amelia’s life. He became a father figure after they watched robbers shoot their father. When he was suddenly gone from the show, we didn’t have that closure, so I got to play it out. She’s about to use drugs again before Owen confronts her in a way that she finally talks about her feelings about losing Derek. She doesn’t end up using.

James D. Parriott The day he left, that was my last day. There was a certain sadness to it, but I think he was relieved. I mean, I think it took a toll on him, too.

Rob Hardy I didn’t see other actors showing up and saying, “Hey, it’s the last day! Wanted to come and wish you well.” I didn’t get that. It was more the Patrick show. We were in the Patrick world, and then Ellen came, and there was definitely a lot of emotion that both of them had individually … not necessarily together. It was more so her being there on the day that he died. He had his own way of being with that, and the same thing with her. It was like two people who grew up together and … here we are. They had their own way of reflecting.

Patrick Dempsey I very quietly left. It was beautiful. It was raining, which was really touching. I got in my Panamera, got in rush-hour traffic, and two hours later I was home. Big news like this doesn’t stay quiet for long. Both Michael Ausiello—who left EW in 2010 to launch the news site TVLine—and Lesley Goldberg of The Hollywood Reporter learned two weeks prior to Dempsey’s final episode that he would be leaving the show. No reporter worth their salt wants to sit on a scoop—least of all one as huge as this—but Ausiello and Goldberg didn’t want to spoil the outcome for fans, so they agreed to hold the story until after the episode aired. I eventually found out, too, but in the nuttiest way imaginable: I was standing on the set of CSI: Cyber, watching Patricia Arquette talk about some droll techno-criminal. Unfortunately, the publicist also cc’d Dempsey’s manager and ABC publicist while trying to give me a major story, so I couldn’t immediately report the scoop. But I did use the information to successfully negotiate the one and only exit interview with Dempsey. Two weeks before his final episode, I met him and his publicist at Feed Body & Soul in Venice, California, for a story that would hit newsstands on April 24. He seemed a little shell-shocked and at one point choked up, but at the time he said nothing about how his on-set behavior may have contributed to his ouster. My editor, Henry Goldblatt, wanted to put him on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, but he couldn’t guarantee to ABC that no one would see it before the episode aired. Good thing we didn’t: some subscribers got the issue on the morning of Dempsey’s final episode— and one actually tweeted the story. Our PR department tried to get the tweets removed, but the cat was out of the bag: some fans found out early that McDreamy was about to be McHistory. Outlets like Variety reported how the story got out early, while our PR department released this statement: “We are surprised that an EW subscriber may have received their issue a day earlier than planned. We always try our best to bring readers exclusive news first. We would like to apologize to fans of the show that learned the news ahead of time.” Dempsey’s final episode was watched by 8.83 million viewers—the show’s largest audience since the premiere that season. Variety even pontificated whether the ratings boost was due to my exclusive with Dempsey.

Lesley Goldberg (The Hollywood Reporter) I’m used to working with networks to hold news as part of their efforts to guard against plot spoilers. But the way Patrick Dempsey’s exit was handled involved a layer of paranoia and secrecy that has been unlike anything I’ve seen in my reporting career. News that he was leaving, and his character being killed off, would have been a major story considering how big the show is domestically and internationally. However, it also would have meant spoiling the episode and, more important, damaging key relationships I’ve worked hard to build. At some point, publishing the news of Dempsey’s exit before the episode aired became an ethical question of what was more important—a big story and its subsequent traffic, which would have come no matter what, or the relationships and trust that it took years to craft. Ultimately, I still published early because EW subscribers received the issue with Lynette’s Dempsey interview before the episode aired.

Mike McColl The morning after Derek’s last episode aired, my daughter sent me a link that was on YouTube or Facebook or something. I actually pulled it up to look at it, and it was a Grey’s Anatomy showbiz cheat sheet. It asked the question “Who is the attending doctor who killed Derek ‘McDreamy’ Shepherd?” It included a photo that I posted from the set. I had on a bloody rubber glove and was in my scrubs and mask. I never obviously would have posted this before it aired. I posted it well after the episode aired, and I [captioned it] “McDeadly.” This writer said something like, “Kill McDeadly.” Maybe that’s why the producer didn’t choose a big-name actor to be the one who killed our beloved McDreamy! I want to be ultrasensitive to these hard-core fans because it means so much to them, and I certainly didn’t mean in that case to make light of it. It’s just, I’m an actor, and I recognize it for what it is. Is everybody clear on the fact that this is just pretend and Patrick knew he was going to be leaving the show? It was just like, “God. He’s okay. He really is okay.”

Peter Horton Derek was going to be there forever with Meredith because you went through a whole journey with them. That was incredibly fulfilling. So even if he’s not there, he’s there. I don’t think any of us really worried about that going away because by then you were so invested in it. The show can last as it has for years.

Patrick Dempsey Lots of people [miss him]. “It’s good to see you alive” is the comment I get. I’m like, “Yes, I’m very much alive in reruns.” People were really invested in that relationship. I knew it would be heavy. Very happy to have moved on with a different chapter in my life.

Samantha Sloyan The montage just killed me, when Meredith says, “It’s okay, you can go.” God, I’m getting choked up just thinking about it. The chemistry they have as a pair and the way they were able to build that and sustain it! So many of these relationships are, like, “Will they, won’t they,” and then it wears thin. They sustained it for the duration of their relationship on the show, and it’s just, I think, a testament to what those two created. It was just unbelievable.

Pompeo addressed Dempsey’s departure with a tweet that focused solely on his character, not on how she spent eleven years working side by side with him: “There are so many people out there who have suffered tremendous loss and tragedy. Husbands and wives of soldiers, victims of senseless violence, and parents who have lost children. People who get up every day and do what feels like is the impossible. So it is for these people and in the spirit of resilance [sic] I am honored and excited to tell the story of how Meredith goes on in the face of what feels like the impossible.” Meanwhile, fans futilely created a Change.org petition to reinstate McDempsey, while other, more desperate ones simply tweeted “We Hate You” to Rhimes.

Shonda Rhimes Derek Shepherd is and will always be an incredibly important character—for Meredith, for me, and for the fans. I absolutely never imagined saying goodbye to our McDreamy. Patrick Dempsey’s performance shaped Derek in a way that I know we both hope became a meaningful example— happy, sad, romantic, painful, and always true—of what young women should demand from modern love. His loss will be felt by all.

Talk about the mother (father?) of all postscripts: In November of 2020 Dempsey reprised his role as McDreamy in the season opener—but only in Meredith’s dreams. Stricken with COVID-19, an unconscious Meredith “imagined” reuniting with her husband on the beach. After talking exclusively to Deadline and saying how it was “really a very healing process, and really rewarding,” Dempsey would return for more beach-based episodes that would ultimately stand out as the best moments of season seventeen. “It was a second chance thing,” one ABC executive told me at the time. “Shonda likes a comeback. Also, they wanted him in their last season.”

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my-mt-heart · 2 years

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[This is really loooong, but since your questions in both posts tie into one another, I figured you'd rather have it in one go. It's also speculative and I encourage anyone reading to do their own critical thinking.]

Late last year, like @kryptoniancape suggests, seems to fit the timeline for the change of gear, but I don't think it has anything to do with Melissa and her supposed leave. AMC doesn't mention this clean and easy out, and their press release would have had to pass through Legal. They struck franchise wide deals with the actors and the only reason you 'exit' a project is if there's a paper trail to complete. MMB was locked into the first season of the spinoff.

Remember when the talk about the subpar feature scripts resurfaced? Whatever options deal Gimple had with AMC expired at that point. That's when the studio had to decide how to bring Rick back.

Melissa might have wanted to have the summer off, but do you believe she's naive enough to assume she'd still have a career if she takes a leave of absence? An actress woman her age retires if she takes an extended leave. (A vacation after a crazy long season isn't leave.) We only have this assertion from NR and JDM, and honestly? It sounds like publicist spin to make an actor more likable, "Look, he has his costar's best interest at heart. Isn't he a sweet guy? Watch his show!" Both of these guys have quite a lot riding on those spinoffs being successful.

What is Lauren Cohan saying? She also has a stake with AMC. Has she told anyone that her good friend Mel needs a break, so quit being so toxic and watch her show instead?

Take what I say with a grain of salt since most of this is conjecture, even if it's based on my experience in the industry, but always pay attention to what isn't said. Most often, there's a wealth of information in silence because like MT has said before, TV operates on personal connections and you need to keep at least a glossy veneer with people. Circles are small. You don't want to make enemies if you can avoid it and we all love plausible deniability.

This whole mess is managed by studio executives and the legal department, and to a degree, NR and his management team. There's a host of people making a tidy sum off their earnings, so an actor's opinion in these types of situations is very rarely their homegrown output. There will have been meetings discussing what their opinion should be, with outcome probabilities for those options.

I don't think there needs to be crazy editing for the finale. Whatever we end up with is what AMC intended all along.

Remember how AK said there were discussions of how to end Leah and what we got was because "Norman wanted to just shoot her"? Take a moment to think about that and its implications. Good showrunners keep an open door to their actors, but they don't have an invite to the writers room to break the season arc. AK also isn't telling us who was part of that talk and most people probably infer it was an informal chat between her and NR. What's her point in sharing? Do we think that's a funny anecdote of how approachable she is and what a cool dude NR is?

The fact that Daryl has hoarded over a decade's worth of Clairol should also tell the viewer things. NR's team is trying to sell the image of a virile man in his prime, a panty dropper. That's why he hasn't wanted any romance for Daryl, claiming there's already enough of that on the show to go around. His brand is alluring bad boy and tying his character to an age appropriate woman who hasn't dipped into Daryl's secret stash of hair color?

His team is looking at the bottom line and trying to ensure their livelihood. Why do you think he's diversifying his income, with whiskey and novels?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if 'Daryl is the most popular character' is pure marketing. He's the only character original to the show (without a comic book template) so AMC owns the rights outright. I think viewers like Daryl a lot, but he's a reactive character, not an instigator and he needs Rick and Carol to come into his own. Obviously, I don't have access to AMC's market research, but I suspect that those two characters are the ones who are drawing an audience.

Think about TV shows in general (and a decade back in time), why would a show that keeps killing off its cast, keep Carol alive for the duration of its run? Whether you love her or love to hate her, the network has people talking about their show and Rick is a conventional hero, so you have another segment of the audience right there.

AMC will want to keep the Caryl viewership because it's not an insignificant number, so they'll dangle that possibility as long as they can. I have a few theories on what might happen and they're depressing enough that I'll just keep them to myself.

The only thing I can claim to know for sure is that the Daryl solo spinoff isn't a recent development. Pre-production takes too long for a shoot to happen this summer if you didn't start planning before April. That's the only thing I can say to be objectively true. Everything else I've said is subjective to varying degree and I hope I'm wrong.

Thank you for taking the time to explain. Like I said, I find your insight very helpful even if it is just speculation. You are always welcome to share your theories even if you think they're depressing. Honestly everything is just depressing now anyway.

#caryl #darylneedscarol

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lais-a-ramos · 4 years

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ok, one question

do ppl really think it's this hard to know christina's true intentions????

i mean, it's kind of hard to guess exactly what she's plotting, but, her overall motivations are not that hard to figure out

she wants what she says she wants, which is power

she might be white and rich, but, at the end of the day, she's still a woman in the 1950's

and one that seems to have sexual attraction for women, even though she doesn't exactly label herself, or even knows how to besides the short amount of labels of the time period

who also happens to have been raised into a very sexist, patriarchal environment with a deeply self-centered father who neglected her emotionally

she wants power, and she wants it bc she needs it to be able to feel truly safe and free

while it's true she comes from a place of privilege bc of her race and class, she's still in a position in which, for example, she could be locked in an asylum by a husband or father or brother in a snap of their fingers, a situation that was aluded in the begining of episode 1x05 when the cops took ruby, in her hillary form, as a "hysterical woman" under the tutelage of her husband

the show doesn't give much room for explanations about her past, probably to keep her status as this trickster archetype that keeps the audience on their toes all the time, and to focus more on the black characters that are, y'know, the protagonists of the show

but, considering the way she talks about her father since episode one, it seems like not only she resents being left out for being a woman, but also feel that kind of resentment that comes from being opressed and feeling like you live in a world in which you are an object and not a subject, which is understandable considering the time the show is set. also, given the emotional neglect that she probably endured by living with a father more concearned about the order and exploitations, as she aluded in this week's episode/1x09, she seems to have had no childhood whatsoever, as we can see by that scene in which an adult christina plays with the kids in the street

actually, if we consider things like the whole "free britney" situation, women are not completely safe even in 2020

so, it's understandable she likes to shapeshift as william, bc she gets to feel safe and feel a type of freedom she doesn't get to have on a daily basis

she feels about her gender the same way ruby feels about her gender and her race

it's kind of hard to know whether christina identifies as non-binary or not, a recurring issue when it comes to shapeshifter characters and the shapeshifting tropes in pop culture as a whole

but it seems like this feeling of security and freedom extends to her sexuality as well, given that, well, she could still be non-binary, or gender non-conforming if she's cis, and sapphic even using her own body and skin

but being openly non-binary, or gender non-conforming, and sapphic in the 50's would put her in such a position of marginalization that no one would ask for, as we can see by the way sammy and montrose have to keep a secret about their affair and how the entirety of the gay culture back then was clandestine

she wants power so she can feel free and safe, and she wants immortality bc she can feel this way for all the eternity; it's how, in her head, she can feel truly uninterrupted

it's a combination of real-world social issues, being raised by a very self-centered and emotionally neglective father -- another paralel with ruby and her hustler of a mom

being raised in a world in which there is magic and, therefore, ppl can bend reality to their will, everything she feels and does is like a very hightened extreme version of real-world issues and behaviors

and that's why many ppl have pointed out christina is a representation of white feminism, or, at least, shows some of the same flaws that white feminists usually do

because she has a lot of rage and resentment towards that world and says she doesn't agree with their racist views, but, at the end of the day, she still rather try to climb to the top of that organization instead of just trying to destroy the whole thing down, all because she still feels that need to prove her father that she can be as good as a cis men heir

that is a clever way for the show to do a commentary on white feminism and all that "girl boss" talk that took over the mainstream, with cis women, particularly cis white women, preferring to try and get to the same positions that cis white men occupy instead of just trying to dismantle the system entirely

also, she is an accurate portrayal of white feminism because, while she says she doesn't agree with racism, she doesn't seem to actively do anything to prevent the issues and focuses on her own individual interests

that moment with her re-enacting the brutal murder of emmett till gets a new light under this perspective, because it becomes a very extreme version of when white ppl try to "understand" our pain consuming black culture, when, to have true empathy, white ppl don't actually have to go through the same experiences and feel what we feel in order to emphatize, just break free from their natural human narcisistic impulses and see black ppl's pain as valid even though it has nothing to do with their own

that's why christina is such a fascinating character, i mean, besides abby lee's very charismatic acting

because while she still benefits of the opression of black ppl being a rich white woman, and her privilege grants her the freedom to be indifferent to black ppl's pain beyond her feelings for ruby (more on that on another post, because there's too much to unpack about these two, whew), she is still a woman and queer in a time and place in which it was very dangerous to do so (it still is right now in 2020, really, even in western countries like US or Brazil)

and that is why it was an brilliant move from misha green and the writers to gender-swap samuel braithwhite's son in the books, caleb, for christina, because a morally ambiguous villain like her prevents the show from getting into a dualistic good vs evil dynamic, and her presence helps to adress the theme of how even opressed and marginalized groups can opress other groups (tic being a war criminal and an agent of american imperialism is another brilliant example of this)

and that is one of the reasons why she is a charismatic villain, and one many ppl -- including me -- seem to be getting attached to, and it would be a huge loss for the show if her character dies in the season 1 finale (i mean, besides losing an amazing actress, something no showrunner wants, tbh)

like, she obviously has to get through a huge defeat and disappointment in order to have a sense of actual consequences for her actions -- actually, it would be really entertaining to see her lose all her power and having to hustle her way back to the top

but her presence -- and her relationship with ruby, of course -- help the show to keep morally complex

and chaotic characters like her, interested only in their own gain, are very fun to watch 🤷🏾‍♀️

so, the show could really use more of her, and i hope that, if lovecraft country isn't just another limited series and gets renewed to plenty of seasons like game of thrones or the sopranos, they can keep her for very long

#lovecraft country #lovecraft country hbo #lovecraft country spoilers #christina braithwhite #character analysis #this was exhausting #but it was fun #really missed making these metas #hopefully i'll have the energy to talk about other things

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fandomshatelgbtqpeople · 2 years

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Do you think the last season of the 13th doctor’s run was even better than the first two? I liked all their seasons but some people seem to like the last two seasons better. Also I have seen more positive reception of the time loop special and the flux than the first season. Though maybe more enbiphobes and sexists are pressed that they changed their form and had a lady form before the first doctor. That was an interesting subplot. I really liked Ruth. I hope we see more of Ruth, the Ruth doctor, more of them in the future if possible or maybe they could have their own books or something. I think I am using both Ruth and thirteen’s pronouns right. Sorry if I am not

Personally opinion: season 12 was the weakest of the three. The Doctor was separated from the companions in almost every episode so we didn't get as much relationship development between them and the monster of the week plots were more forgettable than in season 11.

I think some of the backlash to season 11 was probably rooted in growing pains with a new showrunner who had a very different style than the old one. From what I can tell, most of the people who were very set against the doctor being a woman were not exactly won over as the series went on. Thirteen is still one of the most controversial doctors from New Who.

But I'm also seeing some people try to rewrite what public perception around seasons 11 and 12 was because they don't like Thirteen/Yaz or how Yaz' feelings for Thirteen are playing out, and they're doing the classic tumblr "this writing decision was bad so the writers have never made a single good writing decision" thing. So I also think how much people liked season 11 when it aired is being downplayed somewhat.

#mod k #doctor who #doctor who spoilers #dw spoilers

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rachelbethhines · 4 years

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TTS Songs Ranked Worst to Best

Someone asked me to rank my fav and least fav TTS songs a while back, but I’ve since then relistened to the soundtrack and there’s a whole bunch of songs that just forgot about, so here’s a more accurate ranking now that the songs are more fresh in my mind

32 . Life After Happily Ever After (Reprise)

This song is infuriating, because the finale is infuriating. Listening to this song just makes me angry all over again because it reminds me just how unsatisfying the ending to TTS was. I wanted to turn it off at several points. I barely can get through it despite it being so short. It doesn’t help that the soundtrack leaves all the dialogue in there and fails to actually end the song. It just cuts off before the final note.

31. Hook Foot’s Ballad

Does this even count as a song? Why is it here on the soundtrack but not the Hurt Incantation? Did Menken really waste his talent writing a joke and did the showrunners really waste money and limited resources on this?

30. Friendship Song

Bland, boring, and pointless. It was clearly written as a marketing stunt for the radio disney charts and not as anything to do with the plot of the series. They just throw it up on screen to fill out the running time and don't even let the whole song play through. It’s pitiful.

29. Waiting in the Wings (Reprise)

I didn’t think much of the original song one way or the other, but the reprise is soooo dumb. The plot twist it introduces winds up ruining the whole show and sabotaging both Cassandra’s and Rapunzel’s characters. It’s not even a nice sounding song on it’s own. The kid’s voice is irritating (who I’m sure is doing her best, but really little kids shouldn’t be made to sing professionally as a general rule) and the melody just as bland as the first time it was played. The only reason to like this song is if you’r a mega fan of Cassandra’s or her VA, which I am not. (Note: this is not a criticism of Eden Espinosa, I just don’t happen to follow any of the VAs in this show)

28. Through It All

I like the instrumentals in this song, and that’s about it. Everything about this song is wrong. It doesn’t fit the story, it’s a misuse of the cast and songwriters, it’s a waste of valuable screen time, the melody is dull, and the dang soundtrack had to throw in that lame dialogue about ‘greatest threat ever’ at the beginning. If you want a pump up song in your story then you got to earn it. You can’t just tell us things are bad, you got to show it. A joyful horseback ride and everyone sitting in a bar safe and sound isn’t threatening or depressing enough to warrant a cheering up session. Plus the song itself doesn’t add anything to the overall story.

27. The Girl Who Has Everything

Sometimes I think the writers were willing trying to sabotage themselves. It’s as if they were determined to make the only two main female characters in the show unlikeable bitches in season three. Don’t believe me? The creator Chris has said this song only exists to highlight how much easier Rapunzel has things than Cass and went onto say that Rapunzel was in the wrong during their conflict because ‘she held Cassandra back’. (Oh yeah she totally ‘held back’ the grown woman who left on her own accord, returned on her own accord, and then assaulted and tried to murder a bunch of people for no reason of her own accord.) But this song does succeed in furthering season’s three narrative that Rapunzel is a spoiled selfish brat. Shame the story fails to address this setup and never has Rapunzel learn to be a better person. Rather the narrative bends over backward to tell us how special Rapunzel is without any sense of self awareness and this song falls into that same trap; making it both irritating and pointless.

26. Listen Up

Yeah, I talked about this on my salt marathon, but I just don't like this song very much. The melody is fine but the lyrics are a real miss in my mind. It doesn’t help matters that the song is indeed pointless in the grand scheme of things.

25. Livin’ the Dream

This is much on the same level as Listen Up as it features the same problems. It doesn’t add to the narrative and the lyrics kind of let it down. I placed it higher just because I like the melody a little more.

24. More of Me

This song is a lot like the Friendship Song in that it was created to be an end credit song for the pop charts and you’d be forgiven in forgetting it even exists. However, it at least got to actually play all the way through. I think this song was a real missed opportunity. I honestly believe that it should have been the opening theme song of the show instead of Wind in My Hair. It’s more built to serve such a purpose and it’s a waste of resources not to actually use it. Alternatively, I would have accepted it being reworked into the actual series as a character song. Especially since we’re missing a song in season three due to budget cuts.

23. Wind In My Hair

Speaking of theme songs, I think I would like Wind In My Hair a lot better if i didn’t have to listen to it every episode. On its own it actually has a lot of things going for it; a nice melody, interesting instrumentals, good singing, ect. Unfortunately it’s just over exposed, and none of those elements lend themselves naturally to an intro song for a tv show. In fact the theme song feels really out of place and is edited oddly to fit the shorter intro.

22. Wind In My Hair (Reprise)

Honestly the theme song is mostly comprised of this reprise, but it has the opening instrumentals from the OG song frankensteined onto it. This means that the version that plays before every episode is on fullblast all the time to keep the energy up, but that’s not how the song is suppose to go. The actual reprise that plays in the pilot builds to a crescendo, starting soft and melancolony and getting louder and more hopeful and determined. It sounds a lot better in full because of that. It’s still too overexposed though. Both these songs would probably be higher on the list of not for the theme song version.

21. With You by My Side

This song is fine. It’s nothing special, but it’s not bad either. What knocks it down the list is the fact that Lance isn’t in it, despite Lance being right there. Like don't bother hiring a famous Broadway singer if you’re not going to have him sing! But that speaks more to the poor writing of season two than anything else. This song also doesn’t really add anything to the narrative as, contrary to what the writers intended, it doesn’t actually enhance the emotional impact of Cassandra’s betrayal later in the episode. The song itself is just tacked on and doesn’t take the opportunity to lay down any foreshadowing for that plot point.

20. Next Stop Anywhere

Another perfectly serviable song. It’s not bad but nothing outstanding. It gets the job done. It’s also really ho-hum and the soundtrack keeps all the unneeded dialogue, which is a pet peeve of mine.

19. Waiting In the Wings

Despite it’s hype, I never thought much of Waiting in the Wings. It’s got nice instrumentals and Eden Espinosa gives it her all in the singing department. The problem is it’s too generic. It’s a bare bones basic ass ‘I want song’. Cassandra's movations are weak and unsupported by the narrative, the melody is boring, and it honestly doesn’t add anything to her story. I mean it should, it’s her character solo, but because she’s written so poorly the song just winds up undermining the character in the end. All I’m saying is that, this is not the song from season two that I would have nominated for the Emmys. But it’s still Alan Menken, it’s still nicely performed, and given the rest of the competition for that year, it did deserve to win.

18. If I Could Take That Moment Back

This song is also pretty generic, but it’s less boring than I See the Light, (yeah, I said it, I See the Light is boring) so that’s a win in my book. Ergo this holds the title of the only New Dream duet that I enjoy. But there’s better stuff on this list.

17. Next Stop Anywhere (Reprise)

Well no, I take that back. The reprise of Next Stop Anywhere is also technically a New Dream duet. It’s still not anything amazing, but it works for what it is. Plus, Adria’s opening dialogue in the soundtrack version doesn’t bother me quite as much as some of the other dialogues choices that were kept in.

16. Stronger Than Ever Before

I really enjoyed this song in the moment. It’s catchy and fun, and it finally has Lance doing something rather than ignoring his existence. However it is borderline unnecessary in terms of story placement, and I’m slightly mad at it now that I know that we could have gotten a Rapunzel and Varian duet but it was scrapped for this instead.

15. Crossing the Line

Keeping with the theme of ‘songs I have conflicting emotions about’, we have Crossing the Line. This song is confused. It starts and stops, the melody isn’t clear, the orchestration is playing tug of war with the singers for dominance, and it’s basically Alan Menken and the show’s creators ripping off Frozen. (I guess he’s kicking himself for leaving that particular project?) But it’s interesting. I never heard anything quite like it. It’s memorable even if it doesn’t fully work. It’s got these interesting bits and pieces to it that just never quite comes together as a whole. Some of the lyrics are some of the best Glenn Slater has ever wrote and is far better than the story actually surrounding the song. Yet there’s other lines that are total cringe. Sometimes the song is bold and catchy and gets you all hyped up, and then other times its limp and staggering and feels so awkward to listen to. Yet it’s not boring or generic and so I have to place it higher than the rest of the songs that’s come before. (Also, there’s some amazing orchestral covers out there that really pulls together the various parts really well, just fyi)

14. Nothing Left to Lose

I really don't like this song. I’ve been one of its biggest critics ever since it was leaked by the marketing team earlier this year. And yet... I can’t in good conscience place any lower on this list. All of the problems I have with it are the exact same problems I have with Crossing the Line. It’s confused, the various pieces don't line up, the instrumentals are competing with the vocals, the song’s progression is weird with it’s constant key changes, some of the lyrics are good while others are absolute shit, ect and so forth. It also actively works against the story it's trying to tell. The song wants you to sympathize with Cassandra, but her lines are as shallow as a puddle and makes her look like a sociopath. Especially when she’s physically attacking Varian through out for no reason. Also neither character learns anything from the exchange and it fails to impact the story. By all accounts this is a bad song. But I’m Varian trash. There I said it. You happy? Varian’s parts in the songs are fine, good even, and the song is anything but bland. I would rather listen to a mess then be bored to tears by a competent yet standard four chord pop song.

13. I’d Give Anything

This song is nice to listen to. Story wise it absolutely sucks and shouldn’t have been in the finale at all. But it sounds pleasant. This is one of those songs that could pop up randomly on the radio and I would just think it it a nice sad break up song. I can’t say that about some of the other misplaced songs in the show. This one however, you can very much, absolutely divorce this song from the narrative and it would be fine. Now that’s not good writing, and it’s very much a waste of limited resources, but I’m rating the music here first and story second.

12. Buddy Song

The Buddy Song also absolutely did not need to exist but it also sounds nice. Plus, it makes use of Lance so I’m a little more lenient towards it. I can’t however place it higher since it really is just Alan Menken ripping off Alan Menken. Like, I would not be at all surprised to find out that this was originally a deleted song for Aladdin or something.

11. Bigger Than That

What can I say, Lance just gets good songs. When the show bothers to give them to him. Unfortunately, it’s not the best placed. It kind of interrupts the more important drama of Be Very Afraid, and probably should have been saved for a later episode. Especially since it hinges on a plot point that is contradictory to Lance’s character. We should have gotten a Varian and Rapunzel duet here and given Lance his own episode in the second half of season three. This song could have easily been refitted into being a bonding moment for him and the girls. That would also have filled out the season’s original songs to the usual eight instead of only seven.

10. Life After Happily Ever After

Now we’re getting to the good stuff. The top ten. The best of the best. This song makes the cut for three reasons. 1. It lyrically and musically interesting 2. It does the job of furthering the story and the characters and 3. Eugene’s part is so damn good. Like this song could have easily fell down into the ranks of ‘fine but generic’ if it wasn’t for the bridge with Eugene. That puts it over the top and to my mind makes it better than anything from the OG film. (well almost anything, Mother Knows Best is still great) This is the barometer by which I measure all of the music in the series. Is it better or worse than Life After Happily Ever After? Because this is the level that I equate good musicals with. What keeps on the tenth spot and not higher is the dialogue that still left on the soundtrack and the lack of a Cassandra introduction. That and also the rest of the songs are just flat better.

9. Hurt Incantation

Hurt, Decay, Reverse, whatever you want to call it, this was such a cool fucking concept. One that was utterly wasted by the show. I place this so high because it just sounds awesome! It looks good too, and it offered up so many possibilities from a story perspective. What lets it down is the lack of follow up for it and it’s too short. There’s needed to be another verse. It also should have been on the actual soundtrack instead of Hook Foot’s Ballad. (The Heal Incantation also was sung in What the Hair, but I’m not counting it since it was written for the film)

8. The Girl Who Has Everything (Reprise)

I hate the initial song and the set up that it took to get here, but I love this reprise. It’s perfect. This is what the story needed more of. Rapunzel taking her life into her hands, and her proposing to Eugene would have been the perfect capstone for her arc. In fact I’m angry we didn’t actually get that. There’s absolutely no reason why Rapunzel couldn’t have done so and we could have had her and Eugene engaged during the second half of season three. How much better would have it been if Cassandra threatened their wedding plans and that’s why they couldn’t go through with it until after the series ended? So much more tension that way.

7. I Got This

This is a really good song that actually futhers the characters and the narrative. Moreover it’s refreshing to see the heroine not be perfect and to fail sometimes due to her own inadequacies. It’s just a shame that the series didn’t follow through with this set up, but I appreciate the attempt all the same.

6. Set Yourself Free

This is the only song in the series that’s an actual satisfying pay off for anything. Music wise it’s nothing too special, but in terms of context it just works. We were sorely deprived of such resolutions and songs with actual meaning in the show.

5. View From Up Here

This song is too good for the episode it actually appears in. We needed something like this back in season one to introduce Cassandra with. It also sadly doesn’t fit with the wider narrative after season three. However I shall still appreciate it as a ‘what might have been’ type song.

4. Let Me Make You Proud

The only reason why this song isn’t higher is just overexposure and I’ve no one to blame but myself for that. I’ve listened to this song way too many times. As such it tends to alternate between this, View from Up Here, and the next song on the list. But make no mistake it is glorious. Fantastic instrumentals, set up, and of course amazing vocals.

3. Everything I Ever Thought I Knew

Yes, I know this plot point didn’t lead anywhere, but it works for this song at least. Also Eugene’s VA is a really underrated singer. He sounds nice and he emotes really well. Though I’ll be honest, this jumped up to third place because it was fresh in my mind after listening to the soundtrack before making this list. I’ve always liked the song and I do rate it highly, but it can change places with Let Me Make You Proud and View from Up Here at anytime depending on my mood.

2. Let Me Make You Proud (Reprise)

This song is heartbreaking! Story wise it probably shouldn’t exist because it gives away the twist too soon, but who cares, it’s awesome! Varian’s arc is the most compelling in the show and the only thing that saves TTS from falling into mediocre obscurity; and it’s songs like this that help make the arc stand out even more than it already does.

1. Ready As I’ll Ever Be

I said it before and I’ll say it again; Ready As I’ll Ever Be is the greatest thing Alan Menken has ever written in his entire career! If you know anything about the multiple award winning songwriter then you know that is no faint praise and I do not dole it out lightly. This song is the reason why this show even has a fanbase. People are still getting into the series because of this song. And no matter how many times you listen to it just rocks! It’s complex, layered, moody, and with a fantastic beat and energy. The performances are wonderful and the instrumentation glorious. It belongs in the hollows of Disney’s greatest hits and not regulated to a spin-off tv show that failed to make its money back. I weep for the lost potential that this song and this show had. It hurts to know that so many people will never see this flash of brilliance that has come out of the House of Mouse, will never know the wonderfulness that is Varian. Ah, ‘c'est la vie’, I suppose. Tangled the Series got what it deserved, but it's crew did not. While I can not in all honesty recommend the series in full; I do sincerely urge any Disney fan to check out the songs at the very least. Especially this one. And that’s it. There’s my official ranking of all the songs, and I hope those of you read my Tangled reviews appreciate the hours it took into making this.

#tangled #tangled the series #rapunzel's tangled adventure #varian #rapunzel #eugene #cassandra #lance #alan menken #Disney #disney music #disney songs

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