ladymercury_10 | in which "The Curse of Fenric" is watched

Entry tags:

in which "The Curse of Fenric" is watched

So I have been watching some Seventh Doctor episodes, but not particularly in order. I have, however, been sort of saving "The Curse of Fenric" because I knew it was supposed to be good, and I finally got around to watching it tonight. And it was really good! And much scarier, I think, than most current Doctor Who, low-budget special effects notwithstanding. (The haemovore makeup on the girls was really effective. The fake rain, which fell sideways, and sometimes fell more heavily on one side of the screen, was not. Especially since they didn't try to hide the fact that it was sunny when they were shooting the "rain" scenes. :P )

I am not sure I have anything terribly thoughtful to say about it, though. I am somewhat confused by the whole "the baby was Ace's mum" subplot, because I wasn't sure if she realized it before they threw it in her face or not. Because if she didn't, it seems a bit bad to go, "Hmm, here is a lady with my grandmum's name and surname and wartime occupation, and she has a baby with my mum's name, isn't that weird and kind of awkward?" and not make the connection. Also I am confused about how much the Doctor actually knew, and how much he said he knew, to mess with Fenric/to break Ace's faith/for other secret manipulative reasons. Furthermore, Ace seemed to recover from the whole "you insulted everything about me and only apologized somewhat vaguely" incident awfully quickly, didn't she?

But really, I did like it quite a lot, I am just easily confused and generally nitpicky. Mostly it would just be nice if people who have had longer to develop headcanons about these things/know the actual answers/etc. could enlighten me.

Also, I knew going in that there were similarities between this serial and "The God Complex," but it is interesting that Ace also has a "girl who didn't make sense" sort of thing, like Amy, and that she has a mythology background where Amy has a fairytale one.

Another question: Is "Survival" a good episode? It seems Important, but the cheetah costumes are slightly lolarious to me and I don't know if I could take it seriously.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah, Fenric is confusing but brilliant--my first time through, I thought I was just too slow to get it, or maybe that it had been written as six episodes and had to be cut down to four and that was why it didn't have time to explain anything. After watching Ghost Light and The Happiness Patrol and reading a bit about that era, though, I realized it's a recurring problem with Cartmel's script editing: someone turns in a coherent script, it gets snipped and trimmed in the wrong places, and you end up with a story where all the pieces are there but a lot of the connecting tissue that fits them together is gone. So a lot of stuff isn't clearly spelled out until it's too late, like "The haemovores aren't actually revenant Vikings, though they might've been what was chasing the Vikings--they are Fenric's hitmen from the future who agreed to be brought back in time to help him secure their timeline" and "Millington is trying to resurrect Fenric because he thinks he can harness Unliiiiimited Cosmic Powar to make it up to Turing--sorry, Judson--for causing the accident that fucked up his life" and "The Vikings exposed themselves to Fenric's influence when they nicked his loot, which is how their descendants can still be susceptible to his control centuries later."

As for how much Seven knew, I think he suspected all along that something was dodgy about Ace's past, but he only really put it all together over the course of the episode and he was bluffing when he told Fenric he knew from the very beginning.

I also kind of think, in my fluffiest of headcanons that wants everything to be all right for Ace, that after Seven revealed he hadn't meant a single thing he said in the "break Ace's faith" scene, she realized it was kind of a backhanded compliment: like their recurring "Ace, you haven't been bad and brought along any explosives, have you? Excellent, now blow that thing up" banter, he was actually picking on the things he loves best about her. That speech was crushing because it was about all the stuff that other people judge about her, and she'd thought the Doctor was a refuge and a mentor because he actually celebrated the things she was insecure about: not quite fitting in, being strong-willed and mouthy, being rubbish at tests and formal expectations but great at practical stuff where it really counts. So all he had to say was "I was lying through my teeth because I had to" and everything snapped back into place: "...couldn't even pass a chemistry exam" becomes "and quite right too, I loathe exams, did I ever tell you I only scraped by with 51% on my second try?"

Oh, thank you for the explanations! I got that the Ancient One or whatever his name was got brought back by Fenric, but I think I thought the other haemovores were just...hanging out underwater randomly, and I didn't really think about how they got there. I had to do some internet research to make sense of them, especially the bit about how humanity supposedly evolves into them in the future. I did not understand how Millington was related to Fenric at all, really, except that he wanted to use the cursed slime to kill the Russians. The Viking thing makes sense, though, although I don't think I quite made that connection.

That makes sense about the Doctor suspecting and only figuring it out on the spot. That's sort of how he usually does things, isn't it? :P

That is a very good headcanon and I like it very much. :D

Haha, I had to do Internet research to make sense of Fenric too, but I'm glad I did, and I think it's a very rewarding serial to rewatch once you've got it all straight in your head. Because the lack of connective tissue--and the minor niggle of "Enigma machines and natural language translation don't work like that, holy hell Fenric, for such a geeky and intelligent serial that is a really embarrassing bit of Magic Science"--are really its only flaws. And once you more-or-less know what's going on you can sit back and dig into the layers upon layers of themes and allegory and gah I love Fenric so much. It's like a demented six-way chess match where the pieces keep changing sides and then they set the chessboard on fire. Twice.

LOL, yes, I remember you saying before something about "off-label use of Enigma machines" and when they were using them to, like, Rosetta-Stone the Viking Runes it made me headdesk a bit. :P

I suppose since I am not terribly worried about spoilers, generally, I had the advantage of having read a bit about it beforehand. But I was still really confused, haha.

It's like a demented six-way chess match where the pieces keep changing sides and then they set the chessboard on fire. Twice.
That is a very good explanation of it. :D

There is so much wrong with the machine-translation bits, haha. Because quite apart from "uncovering the plaintext of a systematically-encoded enemy transmission != fuzzy natural language translation, an Enigma machine wouldn't be capable of the latter, and you'd need to know Norse to program it anyway"... it's Norse. They're not exactly running statistical analysis to crack some baffling linguistic isolate here--just pop over to any respectable university library and check out their copy of E.V. Gordon, for Christ's sake. Or write a colleague in Iceland, since Norse and Modern Icelandic are mutually comprehensible.

It just gives me inordinate amounts of rage, since I suspect that subplot could only have been written by someone with an interest in both computer science and Old Norse, and yet a passing familiarity with either subject immediately raises half a dozen reasons the machine translation bits are incredibly dumb.

Hahaha, that is very silly. But I suppose Doctor Who doesn't exactly truck in science, even the existing kind. :P

Ha, okay, all of this talk is making me think I need to watch it again. Like, maybe about 4 times again... I didn't get any of that when I watched it!

Do it! :D

I will have to track it down again. I got it when I had Netflix streaming, which I don't anymore...

Do you have Amazon Prime? I am pretty sure it's on Prime instant video, too.

Oh yeah, I did at some point. I might still...

If your Prime membership has expired, it's still available to stream, it's just a $1.99 rental instead of being free.

cool :) We should do some kind of viewing party for old series. I know

clocketpatch's group over at Death By Aspirin used to run live chats with episodes.

That would be fun. :)

Yeah. I basically watched it, went "Okay I'm sure that was brilliant but I have only a half-understanding of what was going on," looked up a transcript online, Googled the plot threads that still didn't make sense to find reviews/forum threads where people explained it, and then rewatched it. And it was brilliant. Unlike Ghost Light, which I was only able to keep straight in my head for about ten seconds while my friend was explaining it to me right after we watched it, the pieces really are all there. They've just been disassembled by shoddy editing. Once they're reconnected, Fenric is a goddamn masterpiece.

Come to think of it, I have like five pages of unfinished Fenric meta squirrelled away in Google docs, including an explanation of the plot--mostly for my own benefit. Maybe I should polish up that summary and post it.

Someone linked me this lolcat-style recap of "Ghost Light," which actually helped me make sense of it, haha. I am not sure what that says about the serial itself. :P

Fenric meta would be cool! I would like to read it. :D

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

in which "The Curse of Fenric" is watched

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject