i... live by the river

i watch things, on tv, that sometimes i don't really understand. either i come in halfway, or they use the conventions of some foreign place.
it is the same with music. sometimes i know exactly what they are saying. toni collette and the finish - i get it. paul kelly has always made sense to me. even silly things like old american love ballads are completely understandable. i don't think it is because they have fewer layers than something like augie march or mumford and sons. its just that sometimes, because of the person you are, the things you think about, and those experiences that you have had (and shared with others), some people make sense. and others don't.

take ashes to ashes. everyone gets the action scenes, they get that it is sad that skelton betrayed everything for a wedding ring, on a surface level they can handle the fact that alex is in a coma and might be dreaming the 1980's. it might even be okay, in a chuang-tzu way, that she is unsure whether she is a mother dreaming she is an out-of-place DI, or a bolly dreaming of the future and a girl named molly.
but you need to know more than that to experience the chills when supermac whispered 'rose' with his dying breath. you need to know that another rose had the last name tyler. and that the gene genie never believed the other man who had that same last name. as an aside, it makes even more sense when you find out that sam was given the name tyler by the billie-piper fan of a daughter of a writer on the show. you need to know that across the way, various punters had taken photos of a blonde-haired john simm in a grey hoodie accompanied by those four fateful knocks. it is necessary to realise that the hunt is going to have to deal with a comatose alex just when he had begun to believe her. and you need to remember that the first season was called 'life on mars'. and that the tenth doctor is nearly done.

or that doomed-to-one-season sitcom about superheroes on abc2. that the fishman that made a move on she-force was the clown that ended up with a pregnant clare keelan on a show that was graced-with-one-season about a wedding on a perfect day.

its all very meta- and intertextual, but i think there is more enjoyment to be had in the connections. it is the reason why things like imdb and six-degrees of kevin bacon exist. it fuels the crossovers of jpop stars into the world of film. it is the reason why traditional artists decide to paint a filmic palette instead of staying behind a static easel. why official tv websites now offer lists of 'music played in this episode'. these hyperlinked shows are the reason for the success of a show like glee, and the booksales of one richard castle, who in another (related) life was really the space cowboy he pretends to be for halloween.

there is a research tool called crowdsourcing. humans become computers again and pick out dust trails in interstellar jelly and craters on the red planet. im certain not too many of the sci-fi writers of the 1950's realised how capitalistic inequalities would re-create human slavery in a high-tech world. when we go to mars (of course it will be mars), the people living there will experience a kind of utopia based on the slavery of countless human masses sifting through data. we don't need the oud - we have the poor. i begin to lose hope in the dream of mechanical AI - on some poetic level i think it is right that we are doomed to be alone in this universe. alone to torture each other and end each other. alone so that we cannot blame anything else for the way that we trash our universe. i doubt we will ever make it out of the solar system. hawkeye said that the average existence of a single species on earth is 2 million years. we're in the tens of thousands i believe. do you think we can make it out of this mess we're in?

any dolt with half a brain...

the next doctor.

it is christmas in the 1800s and rtd has given us another character who knows more about the man with no name than we do. its a bit moffat-y, but that makes sense, given the impending changes. there is not a lot of long term stuff we can take out of the episode - usually there is something meaningful, a piece of the doctor's heart. but this time, as he says himself, his double organ is too broken. and it shows.

morrissey and the kid are far too obvious, and the kid is pretty generic. theres no chemistry between him and anyone. dervla's character was the best part of the show. i would love to have seen her escape to return. or to have had some kind of redemption. instead, like in all the christmas specials, the yuletide is a time for endings, not beginnings. only rose was a beginning, but that story looped in on itself so many times i'm unsure if regular semantics suffice. oh - and there was donna, but that story (before they decided to keep tate on) was an ending as well. there is no glory in these specials - only fire and the deep waters of the thames. its like humanity can only really appreciate the holiday when there is something to be truly thankful for - our continued survival against all odds. and another part of the doctor breaking . with every creature he sends into the abyss of endings, i think he loses part of himself. it doesnt matter that he never dies - his actions will diminish him until what is left is a gaping emptiness. he will send himself to the end. he will be not nearly so much a wonder if all he leaves behind him is a trail of fire and darkness through space and time.

there is a song, written for a movie about people who cannot see what the point of fighting is for, when, by fighting, you lose everything that makes you worth the effort. it is designed with bagpipes in mind, a tartan draped across the chest, freedom on the brain. the film ends with a train filled with german soldiers, sitting on crates in the dark. their c.o. is a jewish man who once spent time honeymooning on the banks of the seine. he once cheered his men on as they battled the scottish in a game of football in a snow-covered, bombed-out field in france. it was christmas. he was at the first world war. so they are being punished for their fraternising, sent away to the eastern front, certain death, in the train car, and so they hum a tune that sounds more celtic than anything. they are dreaming of a time and place gone forever to them. there will be no re-return. the sacrifice they make, demanded of them by others, is futile, becomes meaningless if they not only lose their lives, but they lose themselves. if they are forever alone, then what's the point? we forget we need to fix ourselves before we look outwards. an imprint needs to be changed from within, but we need to be pushed into it. we get weird if we are left alone.
and those soldiers? they are dreaming of home.

just our hands clasped so tight

doctor who 4.09
"the forest of the dead"

its something to do with rose. i didnt notice it myself, until the music at the end. when the doc leaves river's notebook on the ledge, rose's theme is sighed out by that choral voice. and then he sends her into an alternate life. she is gone, but she's fine.

perhaps it is only the parallel plot that is the reason for the unboxing of the theme, but then looking closely at the pictures that CAL has plastered around her living room, you can see only wolves and daleks and an angelic blonde girl.

rose.

maybe, and i hate to say it, but maybe the best parts of this double ep are not the disappearing children or donna's husband, or even that everybody lives. Maybe the best parts of this episode do not belong to steven moffat. river, the bad wolf, season-long story arcs, past experience tells us they are the provence of one rtd.

we're so used to moffat giving us stand-alone episodes, that nevertheless give us characters that know far more about the doctor than anyone else can. captain jack, sally sparrow, that girl in that fireplace, they all knew more of the doctor than any companion ever has. maybe he and rtd are luring us in to the finale, into next year and the next season after that. because when he takes over, the episodes won't be stand-alones. the whole season will be his plaything. the whole thing will stand alone. but if what has passed shows us what will come, every part will be important to the whole.

are we really yet to meet river? she approached the doctor and told him her name before she asked if he remembered her. does she look different to how she will? or how she did? and if ten is her doctor, how will we find the time to meet her, to take her to drillion, before tennant decides to walk out of this suit and out of this world? can you even imagine him with a haircut?

how does charlotte, the girl in the computer, the girl in the library, in the forest of shadows, how does she know about rose? how can she? and why would the bad wolf leave her trace in a simulation world that the doctor never gets to see? the episode contains so much that the characters know but we do not. the reason you may hate river is because she contains spoilers. she is a spoiler. but they have given us something that the characters cannot know - that rose is returning. that somehow, she is mixed up in all of this. the doctor is a time traveller, but its not one line. he cannot escape the finale, the bad wolf, that everybody dies.