I liked that open thread last weekend. Let’s do it again.

So, Nightmare in Silver, obviously, once it airs. There’s been a fan theory going around in comments that the episodes are linearly representing classic series Doctors in some fashion, starting with the Susan reference in The Rings of Akhaten and continuing through to Tegan in The Crimson Horror. I would like to point out that if this theory is to hold for this week then we should be invoking Attack of the Cybermen. So I’m expecting a pointless continuity runaround, personally.

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I’ve been terrible, over the years of this blog, about linking other blogs – I am for whatever reason not hugely fond of blogrolls on the sidebar of blogs. But I figure since I’m trying to find content on something more like a five to six post-per-week schedule, some talking about other great blogs on Teh Interwebs is a good plan.

And since it was one of the first blogs to give TARDIS Eruditorum a prominent link and is wrapping up, making it a sort of now-or-never thing, I figured I’d start with the well-loved Adventures With the Wife in Space. Which I assume most of you have heard of and already read, but hey, maybe my readership isn’t just a subset of theirs and this is actually news to someone.

The premise is pretty straightforward: Neil Perryman, as fannish a Doctor Who fan as ever did fan, marathons Doctor Who with his thoroughly not-a-Doctor-Who-fan wife. They banter, he writes up the banter, and everyone enjoys it. It’s a pretty reliable blog structure, as comic double acts are wont to be. (Indeed, when I get around to the commentary tracks I’ll be employing Jill to something like this effect.)

But what’s really interesting is the way the blog illuminates Doctor Who. One of the problems we reliably face in talking about Doctor Who is that, well, all of us who are willing to talk elaborately about Doctor Who are fans. Whereas Doctor Who, for most of its life, is widely consumed by people who are not dedicated fans. And while we know very well what we think of The Curse of Peladon or Snakedance and all the major perspectives, all of the perspectives we know are fan perspectives.

It’s not as though Sue is representative of all everyhuman perspectives. That’s not the point or the value. Rather, it’s that Sue offers a genuinely fresh take on Doctor Who. We get to see someone watch Doctor Who fresh and judge it more or less without the influence of fandom. Or, rather, in dialogue with fandom, which is faithfully represented by Neil, who reliably sums up the fan consensus so that Sue can dismiss it as idiotic. Which, actually, it usually is.

The blog is, in other words, not sufficient. It doesn’t solve the problem of our blindness towards the perspectives of people who are not dedicated fans. But it gives us a look we’ve never really seen at Doctor Who before and starts to break down the barrier. Plus, and perhaps more importantly, it’s terribly, terribly funny.

And has, as I said, just wrapped, meaning that if you want to do a big archive dive now’s your chance.…

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Right, I promised you all some notes on how the DePaul colloquium went last weekend.

I sadly only ended up catching half of the panels due to being behind on work, the lack of a scheduled lunch hour, and the fact that during one I got to make a choice between going to the panel or chatting to Rob Shearman, and I picked the latter. But some broad observations based on three panels (two of which I was on).

• I’ve never wanted to end the blog with The End of Time before this weekend. I’m not going to, but my God, the level of fan hatred directed at the series as it stands right now is sickening. And overstated. The number of people who blithely declare that “forty-five minute episodes don’t work” is just bewildering to me. I mean, I’m not going to pretend that Moffat is flawless, but to hear people talk you’d think he was producing Timelash week in and week out. It’s really kind of depressing.
• The fan/academic divide remains irritatingly persistent. There were a lot of unabashed fan presenters who just wanted to geek out about Doctor Who, and there were a lot of people who held to the traditional academic conference model of “I will read a paper out loud that is twice the length of the speaking slot I was told to fit a paper into.” The two did not always communicate edifyingly. 
• Despite these complaints there remains a lot of really wonderful work going on regarding Doctor Who. Ashley Hinck is doing some marvelously interesting stuff with the intersections of fandom and social justice work. Derek Kompare does some lovely gritty technical analysis of Doctor Who. And people like Lynne M. Thomas and the rest of the people who created the (quite rightly) Hugo-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords anthology or the frabjous folks behind the Verity! podcast bring fresh perspectives to things. (I was absolutely thrilled to hear an extended analysis of Romana’s footwear – one that implied that there was an entire iceberg of further analysis on this point to come.) One of the things I’m going to really enjoy in a year or so when I’m done with TARDIS Eruditorum is being in a position to soak in more Doctor Who fandom.
• Rob Shearman is a wonderfully gracious and funny man. If you’ve not looked at the fiction collections Big Finish have put out of his stuff, I really recommend them. I snagged Love Songs For The Shy and Cynical at the conference, but seriously, if you’re only familiar with his Doctor Who work, you owe it to yourself to check out his wider body of material.
• I also need to thank Rob for the once-in-a-lifetime experience of walking into a restaurant and having someone whose work you’ve admired for nearly a decade bound up to you and tell you that he’s a huge fan. I, of course, repaid him by torturing him with the knowledge that I was in the midst of writing up Dalek.

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I dunno, we’ll see how this goes as a new feature. But let’s try a Saturday open thread, shall we? A “kick our feet up and talk about whatever for the weekend” sort of thing.

We’ll also make it the discussion thread for The Crimson Horror when it comes up. Going in, I’m torn on expectations. On the one hand, Gatiss. On the other hand, Gatiss’s last two scripts (Baskerville and Cold War) have been solid. On a third hand, Diana Rigg playing an over the top Doctor Who villain, which might well make all other arguments invalid.

And, of course, there’s Gatiss’s odd curse when it comes to inadvertent reactionary tendencies. Last time he wrote an inadvertent paean to mutually assured destruction that managed to sync with Thatcher’s death. This time Diana Rigg says stupid things about feminism just in time for his episode. I almost start to feel sorry for him.

Plus, of course, the extra suspense question: how much will I have to hurriedly rewrite Monday’s Unquiet Dead post after watching The Crimson Horror?

I’m writing this actually slightly earlier in the week, since I’m traveling Friday for that DePaul Doctor Who thing. Which I’ll try to write up impressions from and get up sometime next week.

And related to nothing even remotely covered by this blog in the course of normal service, has anyone ever had rillettes? Jill and I are going to a lovely place that we went to last time we were on Chicago for vacation, and are positively giddy over the prospect of getting to have the salmon rillettes we had last time again. Seriously. We’ve been talking about these rillettes for a week now. We’re horrible. If this blog becomes a food blog with an unhealthy obsession with rillettes next week, you’ve now been warned. Rillettes Eruditorum: A Psychochronography of Shredded Meat.

So, what’ve you got planned for the weekend?…

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Someone asked me, and I found it an entertaining question, what I thought the most jarring mismatches in story quality vs title quality were. I noted, for instance, that The Ark in Space, Rose, and all of Power, Evil, and Remembrance of the of the Daleks set were spectacularly underwhelming names for great stories, as are City of Death and The Mind Robber, whereas Nightmare of Eden, Let’s Kill Hitler, and The Arc of Infinity are all rather lovely names with stories that really don’t come close (though really, what story could be good enough to be called Let’s Kill Hitler?)

But then I asked what I find the more interesting question: what stories most perfectly match their titles in quality. I suggested Delta and the Bannermen as one that, regardless of how much you like it, is almost exactly as good as its title suggests. Someone else went for Love and Monsters. You?

Also, there’s two new Kickstarter rewards – a sort of scaled down version of the “signed and numbered books” version and another high roller option. I’ve been finally watching Game of Thrones, about which I knew basically nothing, and doing short recaps on another social media venue, and have been quite enjoying that, and thought it might be fun to run a few short-run features on other media here, just to see what sorts of things are a good fit for me and attract interest.

So here’s your opportunity. Want me to write up the entirety of Firefly? Always wanted a systematic close-reading of that 1990s classic of Avengers crossover Operation Galactic Storm? (No. Nobody has ever wanted that.) Looking to see me go back to video game criticism and do Mass Effect? Itching for an overview of the films of Darren Aronofsky? These and any other topics can be yours for $200 over here. (Don’t feel like it has to be an object that breaks sensibly into four parts. You pick the topic, I’ll figure out how to get four posts out of it.) Only about $4000 to go before we get the William Blake book.

Back to writing Dalek with me. Well, actually, Rob Shearman already did that, so I’ll be going with writing About Dalek.…

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It’s time for this to become the second best Doctor Who/Blake crossover book ever published.

I know, I’d been going to shut up until Wednesday. But this is cool and I want to get the word out.

I’ve just opened a new stretch goal on Kickstarter – an ambitious one for if we can reach $15,000. A number that seemed unthinkable two weeks ago, but now seems ever so slightly possible. In the same vein as the Logopolis volume, a stand-alone version of my essay on The Three Doctors. You may remember that essay as the sprawling William Blake-style analysis of the story.

And so, of course, the book will be William Blake-style – an oversized, full colour book featuring, as its centerpiece, the Three Doctors essay done in the style of a Blake illuminated manuscript. It’ll also include some new explanatory essays, including one that actually explains the essay instead of that gently mocks the very idea of explaining it.

I’ve also opened up a new way to increase your rewards – the $10 TARDIS Eruditorum Starter Pack, in which you get all three existing volumes for $10, delivered as soon as the Kickstarter ends, and then, for good measure, get the revised Hartnell volume when it comes out. That’s available as a standalone pledge level, or can be added to any existing pledge for $10. So if you’ve not actually bought the books yet, here’s your opportunity to, in effect, buy two and get the third one for free.

You can give me your money here.

Also! I should have mentioned this much earlier, but this Saturday, May 4th, I’ll be appearing at a one-day colloquium at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. I’m on roundtable panels at 10am and 11am, but far more interesting people than I, namely Rob Shearman, will also be there, at one point giving a live commentary track on Dalek while I frantically rewrite my post on it.

The webpage for that event is here. If you’re in the area, I hope you can make it by and say hi. To Rob, of course.

EDIT: If any of the coverage of Big Finish during the Wilderness Years (or elsewhere) has intrigued you and you want to check it out, Big Finish is holding a 10% off sale on their entire stock for May 1st. Details are here.

I assure you, there’s stuff there worth spending money on. In particular check out any of Rob Shearman’s stuff, Marc Platt’s divine Spare Parts, the much-loved Doctor Who and the Pirates, the wonderful Companion Chronicle Find and Replace (featuring Jo Grant and Iris Wildthyme), and probably loads of other stuff people will point out in the comments as particularly good. (Josh Marsfelder, for instance, will tell you to buy Robophobia.)…

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What’s really interesting about Hide and The Rings of Akhaten is the consequence of Neil Cross being brought into Doctor Who. It tells us that Moffat was watching Luther, and that the shows were cross-polinating. Doctor Who and Luther, of course, currently share a tradition of being meaty character parts. The appeal is that they’re big, broad, theatrical parts that give the actor a solid platform on which to build a definitive performance. Then they go on to get character parts as villains in American co-productions, and that’s how they make the real money. See also David Tennant as Barty Crouch, Christopher Eccleston as every movie part he’s played recently, et cetera. Except it didn’t really work for Tennant – his movies never took off – and he’s come back for another round of television where he’s bankable; Broadchurch. (Is it good? Should I watch it?)

So, Doctor Who’s a chameleon of a show. That’s its Raison d’etre under Moffat; it will jump around and imitate all sorts of things in a schizoid fashion. And one of the biggest things Doctor Who has never really intersected with is the Prime Suspect style of show. Long stories where you know the villain and state of play at the start of it, and the pleasure is in watching the lead actor work through it. And where that very open perspective is contrasted with an emotional drama. So we have a story in which the mystery plot is one in which we watch the main character come to a conclusion we already know, but the emotional plot is one where we and the main character move along together. Luther is similar, but with a clever twist in the form of Alice Morgan, who plays the Irene Adler sort of role of simultaneously being a villain and a romantic interest. And so every episode (for the first season at least) the crime plot unfolds completely open whereas the emotional plot plays dangerously closed.

The open approach is a structure that works trickily with Doctor Who, because it needs some equivalent of a crime. And Doctor Who doesn’t quite do crimes. (Nor does Sherlock, apparently – Series 2 has exactly zero episodes about Sherlock solving a crime.) Typically it’s only possible to do that sort of open storytelling with a baroque alien invasion plot. So, for instance, in The Bells of Saint John we know who the bad guys are and what they’re doing, but we build a mystery around why, since their plan is horribly over-elaborate. But it’s hard to build an emotional plot around that, since having the Doctor fall in love with the femme fatale is just jarring and a bad idea. (Unless it’s the Master.)

All of which is just to say that this is, structurally, how to understand the River Song story. It’s an attempt to find a way to the Luther plot structure in Doctor Who. So instead of a crime we have a time-wime. But we and the Doctor still both know who did it: River Song.…

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