Basically, Leela.
WELL MY FRIENDS I made it up to part TWO of Underworld today, smashing through my previous best of not making it to the first cliffhanger! I thought I had made it further than that and was a bit shocked to realise that only 25 minutes had passed rather than approx 1000 years. It was like being the Doctor in Heaven Sent, so it was.
ANYWAY. It *should* be interesting because it has all Time Lord stuff going on in the backstory and the people on that planet clearly have no idea what's going on (at least not by the end of episode two), but it's a wee bit Who-by-numbers with the Oppressed Proletarians and the Sinister Upper Class Who Kill Them and the Doctor is I assume going to sort it all out by the end but when I write it down like that it doesn't capture the true uninspiredness of it.
I am legally required to mention the bizarre choice to use CSO (?) instead of actually building a set for the tunnel-corridors of that planet. It does indeed look kind of shit, but so far that's only cosmetics and the bad stuff is the tedium.
Leela is great though, obviously. She got shot up with a lovebomb of some sort and went all hippy and then was really angry when she realised that they had made her twee. Leela is easily a top tier companion, plus you get K-9 as a bonus. I think K-9 is probably seething with resentment at the way the Doctor always refers to him as "my SECOND-BEST friend." Like in Father Ted, remember, with "you're the SECOND-BEST priest." Anyway Leela and K-9, that should be solid gold material right there. Louise is rly good at being Leela.* It gets overshadowed by Tom being astonishingly good at being the Doctor, but it is much the same but with less clothing and more knives.
Leela is v clever. She's probably the least-educated companion when she turns up, but she takes on complex ideas quickly and can work with them to make connections between things. Okay sometimes she seems to be replacing magic with the *word* science but I think she does get the difference most of the time? That she believes in things that are testable and logical, and that fits with her being our atheist (much as I dislike that "atheists are somehow more cleverer" stuff, it does form a connection between her backstory and her characterisation and that sort of thing is always welcome here). Like, I can see her leaving to settle on Gallifrey but she doesn't *need* a man she's only just met to do that. It'd be like if Romana left purely to shag that lion dude, because indeed Leela could have been Romana in reverse, going *to* Gallifrey to continue her growth once she's exhausted what the Doctor can teach her. And people aren't just joking when they say Leela stayed behind for Rodan rather than Andred, it's poking at the obvious hole where Leela has more of a relationship with proto-Romana than with her future husband. I really do think that Leela has the worst departure in Old Who, possibly even in the entirety of Who. Donna's her only rival there really, and both of them are victims of "how can I write out this character in a way which is basically nonsense from out of nowhere rather than a seemingly-inevitable step in her development as a character?" (Though see also "how can I get rid of Rose again now that to bring her back I have established that she really actually somehow can't live without the Doctor in her life?" Or even "what do I do with Clara now that she's stayed through two perfectly-decent departures?" You don't have to kill your darlings, but it's a terrible thing when you realise you can't get rid of them easily. BUT I DIGRESS.)
So anyway Leela is clever and adaptable and unwilling to take things on faith just because someone tells her to. She's very sure of herself in interesting and watchable ways. And she does indeed do that inverse of more recent companions where she *arrives* thinking that the Doctor might be a god she doesn't believe in and comes to view him as an unusally danger-happy flatmate who needs her protection. (My own Leela "headcanon" so completely includes the idea that Romana met her before leaving Gallifrey and was left with the knowledge that Leela would eat her still-beating hearts if she harmed the Doctor in any way. Even though there probably wasn't time for that with the Guardian of Whichever** impersonating the President and whatnot. BUT SHUSH YOU IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE OTHERWISE.)
Also am quite open to the idea that Leela is the Doctor's mother, whether he realises this or not. She's human, she fucked a Time Lord, and is completely the sort of force of nature who could discipline the Oncoming Storm for drawing on the nursery walls.
So anyway Underworld happened.
(*Here I insert a note about thinking earlier that Nicola Bryant must be quite good at the acting thing if I can believe in and extrapolate about a character as thinly-conceived as Peri. Is that reasonable or do I speak madness?)
(**Yeah okay so one of my OTPs met through the intervention of either God or Satan and it's not really clear which one it was, shush.)
This entry was originally posted at http://nostalgia.dreamwidth.org/1027962.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
ANYWAY. It *should* be interesting because it has all Time Lord stuff going on in the backstory and the people on that planet clearly have no idea what's going on (at least not by the end of episode two), but it's a wee bit Who-by-numbers with the Oppressed Proletarians and the Sinister Upper Class Who Kill Them and the Doctor is I assume going to sort it all out by the end but when I write it down like that it doesn't capture the true uninspiredness of it.
I am legally required to mention the bizarre choice to use CSO (?) instead of actually building a set for the tunnel-corridors of that planet. It does indeed look kind of shit, but so far that's only cosmetics and the bad stuff is the tedium.
Leela is great though, obviously. She got shot up with a lovebomb of some sort and went all hippy and then was really angry when she realised that they had made her twee. Leela is easily a top tier companion, plus you get K-9 as a bonus. I think K-9 is probably seething with resentment at the way the Doctor always refers to him as "my SECOND-BEST friend." Like in Father Ted, remember, with "you're the SECOND-BEST priest." Anyway Leela and K-9, that should be solid gold material right there. Louise is rly good at being Leela.* It gets overshadowed by Tom being astonishingly good at being the Doctor, but it is much the same but with less clothing and more knives.
Leela is v clever. She's probably the least-educated companion when she turns up, but she takes on complex ideas quickly and can work with them to make connections between things. Okay sometimes she seems to be replacing magic with the *word* science but I think she does get the difference most of the time? That she believes in things that are testable and logical, and that fits with her being our atheist (much as I dislike that "atheists are somehow more cleverer" stuff, it does form a connection between her backstory and her characterisation and that sort of thing is always welcome here). Like, I can see her leaving to settle on Gallifrey but she doesn't *need* a man she's only just met to do that. It'd be like if Romana left purely to shag that lion dude, because indeed Leela could have been Romana in reverse, going *to* Gallifrey to continue her growth once she's exhausted what the Doctor can teach her. And people aren't just joking when they say Leela stayed behind for Rodan rather than Andred, it's poking at the obvious hole where Leela has more of a relationship with proto-Romana than with her future husband. I really do think that Leela has the worst departure in Old Who, possibly even in the entirety of Who. Donna's her only rival there really, and both of them are victims of "how can I write out this character in a way which is basically nonsense from out of nowhere rather than a seemingly-inevitable step in her development as a character?" (Though see also "how can I get rid of Rose again now that to bring her back I have established that she really actually somehow can't live without the Doctor in her life?" Or even "what do I do with Clara now that she's stayed through two perfectly-decent departures?" You don't have to kill your darlings, but it's a terrible thing when you realise you can't get rid of them easily. BUT I DIGRESS.)
So anyway Leela is clever and adaptable and unwilling to take things on faith just because someone tells her to. She's very sure of herself in interesting and watchable ways. And she does indeed do that inverse of more recent companions where she *arrives* thinking that the Doctor might be a god she doesn't believe in and comes to view him as an unusally danger-happy flatmate who needs her protection. (My own Leela "headcanon" so completely includes the idea that Romana met her before leaving Gallifrey and was left with the knowledge that Leela would eat her still-beating hearts if she harmed the Doctor in any way. Even though there probably wasn't time for that with the Guardian of Whichever** impersonating the President and whatnot. BUT SHUSH YOU IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE OTHERWISE.)
Also am quite open to the idea that Leela is the Doctor's mother, whether he realises this or not. She's human, she fucked a Time Lord, and is completely the sort of force of nature who could discipline the Oncoming Storm for drawing on the nursery walls.
So anyway Underworld happened.
(*Here I insert a note about thinking earlier that Nicola Bryant must be quite good at the acting thing if I can believe in and extrapolate about a character as thinly-conceived as Peri. Is that reasonable or do I speak madness?)
(**Yeah okay so one of my OTPs met through the intervention of either God or Satan and it's not really clear which one it was, shush.)
This entry was originally posted at http://nostalgia.dreamwidth.org/1027962.html. Please comment there using OpenID.