smith
Outside the Government: A Scandal in Belgravia
I Owe it To My Friend To Try, Because I Got Her Into This (The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe)
In this image, Clara is cleverly disguised as a cardboard box. |
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 82 (The Fades)
After the Moffat/Willis/Wenger team broke up, Moffat was paired with Caroline Skinner as his new co-executive producer. As we’ve already discussed, this was seemingly not a creative partnership that ended happily. Nevertheless, Caroline Skinner occupied a position on Doctor Who that was nominally as Moffat’s equal opposite number, and though her tenure is brief, it must surely be considered as important as, say, the departure of a script editor or a producer during the classic series. To wit, Caroline Skinner was, upon taking the Doctor Who job, most recently coming off of a BBC Three series called The Fades. This, then, provides us with one of our occasional opportunities to see what the BBC thinks Doctor Who’s nearest equivalent shows are. This is, apparently, how you get the top job at Doctor Who: make The Fades first.
You Were Expecting Someone Else 32 (Night and the Doctor)
Beyond the Police 1 (The Adventures of Ms. Smith and the Curator)
Outside the Government: The Man Who Never Was
Outside the Government: The Curse of Clyde Langer
Outside the Government: Sky
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 81 (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic)
Jen writes My Little Po-Mo, the TARDIS Eruditorum of ponies.
In this scene, Clara is cleverly disguised as a pony named Rose. |
Consider a fandom. A curious beast, an amorphous, shifting mass of people wrapped around a core of fiction. Despite the variation in cores and size, fandoms all look basically the same. The swarm of flesh devours the core over and over again, yet the core is unharmed. The beast excretes its assumptions and predictions by consensus, layering it around the core like an invert pearl, fanon-grit encrusting a glittering center. Fanficcers and shippers and “expanded universe” authors build their own structures, grit and crystal in varying amounts, arcing off the core. Sometimes these extend all the way out of the beast, where they draw in their own squishy masses of fan; sometimes, rarely, they break off, forming the cores of new beasts, drawing their own paradoxical factions of fans. That is how the beast reproduces; mostly, though, it just grows, feeding on the source work, drawing new fans into itself with reviews and memes and recommendations by slightly pushy friends.