Like an Old Ruin (The Power of the Doctor)

And so, at last, we come to the end of the Whittaker era of TARDIS Eruditorum. In the wake of recent events, I’d like to stop and offer a special and deep thanks to my Patreon backers, who allow me the security and flexibility to keep doing what I do in spite of everything. This is all absolutely terrifying and dismaying, but it would be infinitely more so without them. I’ve got a few things that’ll go up on the site over the next few weeks, and obviously Joy to the World at Christmas, but I’ll mostly be over there until Last War in Albion returns in 2025.
It’s October 23rd, 2022. Sam Smith and Kim Petras are at number one with “Unholy.” Beyonce, Lewis Capaldi, Stormzy, and Nicki Minaj also chart. In news… fuck, man, there’s been a lot. We’re two days out from the end of the Liz Truss vs Lettuce race. Let’s just leave it there and move on to the entry.
Two months after Legend of the Sea Devils, while Penn and I are at a comics convention in North Carolina, I get the call that my father has had another stroke. The news meanders back and forth between bad and worse over six weeks until, at the end of August, he finally passes. I never go and see him, deciding that my week taking care of him in the spring is a better last memory than him stuck full of tubes, no longer even there enough to straightforwardly recognize the people around him. My mother doesn’t begrudge me this decision, recognizing, I think, that her and my sister’s need for hope is not compatible with my need to accept the inevitable and start processing it. A week later the Queen dies, and I turn forty.
Unsurprisingly, I crash into one of the worst and longest burnouts of my life and career. The handful of things I do write are stuff I’m proud of—a sprawling mystical poem called Ithaca a Saga (which I’m actually posting next week) and a blistering (affectionate) review of Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, which, perversely, Penn and I listen to in the car on the way down to bury my father. But everything else just craters. The novel I’m writing dies on the page. The fourth volume of Last War in Albion stalls out completely (a lucky break in hindsight, but agonizing and humiliating at the time). Leaning into the midlife crisis vibe, I indulge in a complete wardrobe refresh, ditching nearly everything I own in favor of a futch-leaning aesthetic based primarily around jackets.
By the time the Chibnall era limps over the finish line I’m in New York to give a talk at NYU about Neoreaction a Basilisk. I get in shortly after this finishes airing, pulling out my phone as we check into the hotel to see if it’s Gatwa or Tennant. I don’t actually get around to watching until late that night, after we get back from a nice dinner with Christine.…