further adventures in the land of Classic Who

[ladymercury_10]

So I watched "Remembrance of the Daleks," and basically I was, as shinyjenni would say, making little fists of glee the whole way through.  Oh my goodness.  I know I say it all the time, but I love this show.  Entertaining background lady scientists!  Bechdel test passing!  The Doctor, for once, managing to be less impractical about money than the companion!  Power-synth music and other 80s tropes for childhood nostalgia and great justice!  Ahem. *straightens sweater, calms down*


But pretty much everything I was told would be there by the people who commented on the last post was there: the Doctor being an adult and not whining, Ace kicking tail, and a very entertaining mixture of well-written serious bits, perhaps accidentally campy bits (was Davros wearing old-school curly telephone wire?), and lots of intentionally playful bits.  (Thanks to everyone who told me I should watch it--you were right!) 

And Ace and Seven are fantastic.  Somebody on Tumblr was saying that Ace is like the Strong Female Character archetype done correctly, i.e., not exaggerated.  Much as I love some of the characters who take flak for supposedly being exaggeratedly strong and/or being one-dimensional, I think this is a pretty good characterization of Ace and her awesomeness.  

Also, I hyena laughed at Ace's Dalek racial purity explanation, reconstructed with help from olivia_sutton's quotes page:

Ace: Renegade Daleks are blobs.  

The Doctor: Blobs?

Ace: Imperial Daleks are bionic blobs with bits added.  You can tell the Daleks are into racial purity.  So one lot of Daleks reckon that the other lot of blobs are too different.  Well, they're mutants.  Not pure in their blobbiness.

The Doctor: Result?

Ace: They hate each other's chromosomes.  War to the death.

The Doctor: Well, um, Ace, let’s go and see which blobs are winning, hmm?

ALSO also I am relatively certain Ace was wearing Batman earrings for the duration of the episode.  See here:

 
So, uh, what do I watch next, guys?  I mean, Fenric, but what else?  And does anyone have any Seven-era fanfic recs to share?  (Probably nothing too long--if I'm going to read something above 10k, it's probably going to be one of the bajillion library books I have on my desk already.)

Comments

[lyricwrites.livejournal.com]

She reminds me a bit of Amy, but kind of the kinder, gentler version of Amy? Which is hilarious to say of someone who carries explosives in her backpack, but what I mean is that Amy is louder and brassier and less likely to show you that she's scared, I think.

Yeah, I can see it. Amy goes to a lot of trouble to pretend that she's emotionally invulnerable. Ace isn't quite so . . . armored, I guess.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

That confused me a little bit at first, because I had read a fair bit of Seven-era fanfiction, and so I was expecting Ace to...put on more of a front, I guess? I think maybe what happened is that a lot of the time when she sasses people, she does it sort of quietly and not in a particularly aggressive way--which is harder to convey in writing, and which I wouldn't have just known since I hadn't seen her serials before I read the fanfic.

[lyricwrites.livejournal.com]

Well, there's also the influence of the New Adventures books, which I don't tend to credit since they tend to harden Ace up too much. Luckily, I'm free to ignore them, since they occupy the quasi-canonical gray space occupied by most other non-television spin-offs.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Ah, that would also help to explain it. Or most of the Ace fanfic I read had Hex in it, too, which I guess would be from the audios, so I don't know if that makes a difference?

[lyricwrites.livejournal.com]

Very possibly. I haven't actually listened to any of the seventh Doctor audios, but I know that Hex is an audio character. (About the audio adventures, I can say that "The Chimes of Midnight," with the eighth Doctor, is really excellent.)