Lara's Ramblings

And I'm sorry but at that point you're just descending into self-parody. Cool, let's not let the show recycle lead actors like it's done for sixty years now. I hope you like the show fucking ending OH WAIT!

Even if Ncuti Gatwa had decided to stay on for the rest of his natural life, and the show kept going until he was ninety… he would die, eventually.

The whole point of the show is that it can go on forever, and the only limits are those imposed by your own ability to conceive of new ideas. Why should that be sacrificed just so the viewers aren't ever made to feel uncomfortable? What, are we just supposed to pretend that death doesn't exist anymore? I know the tech CEOs would dearly love us to use AI to resurrect those who have passed away, whether it be William Hartnell or your own grandmother, but that's not what media should be about.

Shit that's not what *life* should be about.

Even if you've never left a substantial message or comment or anything, it does mean a lot to me that I've been able to do and achieve all I have with my blog in an age where genuine human media criticism is increasingly devalued if not outright attacked. And yes, I do think the modern fandom ecosystem is guilty of, at the very least, aiding and abetting a lot of those attacks. Consider Lara's Ramblings an attempt at defining an ecological niche of my own, then.

For my money, it's doing pretty good so far.

Now, free on hiatus, yeah, I'm going to bitch and moan a little bit. And also hopefully talk more positively in between it, which is more than I can say for half of this website. Is it very professional of me? Nah. Is it very mature or well-reasoned or constructive? No. But listen I've done 800,000 words of mature and well-reasoned. There's no point being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.

It did though. It quite literally did. When they filmed Jodie's regeneration for The Power of the Doctor, to all intents and purposes, that was it. There was no knowledge of who the next Doctor would be, no knowledge of if there even would be a season.

Which is great and all but uh... I only just finished The Book of the War, which means that the next book is... This Town Will Never Let Us Go... so if I do that in my current state, well, I'm mildly afraid that I might do something drastic and I don't really *feel* like having a self-harm relapse at the moment, funnily enough...

Well done, you won, the show is dead. You miserable bastards. Hope you have fun in the Second Wilderness Years, which I still guarantee you are going to be much less interesting than the first ones. I'll be back when I can actually muster up enough of a shit to give about *checks notes* Simon Messingham's The Face-Eater.

As far as the sixtieth anniversary specials go, while I liked them all, Wild Blue Yonder is a pretty clear winner for me, in that it was the episode that was most free to just kind of luxuriate in the pleasure of seeing Tennant and Tate together again, and a very good piece in terms of showing to the public "This is what Doctor Who has traditionally been very good at, would you care for some more?"

The best episode of Series 14, for me, vacillates between my base allegiance to Moffat and Boom and my appreciation, as the kind of girl who watches shows like Twin Peaks and Millennium for fun, for the weirder, darker, more uncanny kind of vibe on display in 73 Yards. In any case, I really can't come up with a convincing argument, personally, for there being another three episode stretch this side of Face the Raven/Heaven Sent/Hell Bent that can stand toe to toe with Boom/73 Yards/Dot and Bubble.

And yes there's a valid point to be made about reduced episode counts, but like... the upshot of that is that a three episode run of hits of that magnitude basically comprises a sixth of Ncuti's overall tenure, so the argument that it represents a failed era as far as quality goes has always been strained to me. You (as usual, this is the royal, collective "you") can say it represents a failed era as far as the show's pop cultural footprint is concerned, but unless that's just an opening salvo into a larger essay about how Seasons 25 and 26 are actually complete ass and not manifestly two of the strongest post-Hinchcliffe seasons, that doesn't hold much sway with me either.

Series 15 is a bit less undecided for me, in that I'd probably have to go with Lux just for the sheer, relentless cleverness of it, although second place is a pretty closely fought thing between The Well and The Story and the Engine. I know the latter is understandably divisive for the intensely theatrical vibe it gives off (and the former was basically asking for negative comparisons to its original source material by setting itself up as a sequel to such a beloved episode, not helped by the leaks giving everyone months' worth of time in which to pre-emptively decide that it sucked), but I for one love it.

As for the question of the best series, that's a bit trickier. I can't realistically give it to the specials, not because their quality isn't such that they deserve it, but more because, while I'm happy to grant the "counting the specials as a season in their own right," three celebratory episodes featuring the return of one of the most beloved regular casts in the show's history are, by necessity, a different beast than Series 14/15.

But what *of* Series 14 and 15? The latter certainly lacks anything on the level of Space Babies/The Devil's Chord (and while I still maintain that those episodes, representing the Second Davies Era on its off day, are nonetheless more interesting and ambitious than the Chibnall Era on most of its best days, the fact of the matter is that they are deeply flawed pieces of television that are going to sadly provide a huge stumbling block for people coming to Gatwa fresh) - no, not even The Reality War - but the flip-side of that is that it doesn't *really* have anything quite as good as that three-episode stretch in the middle.

So you're dealing with a question of raw quality vs. consistency, because on the whole Series 15 is a lot more consistent, for better or worse, and again, even allowing for Wish World/The Reality War (which I still maintain has interesting ideas at its core). In truth I don't know that I have a ready-made answer to which one I personally prefer, and it probably depends on the day you ask me.

It's... I mean, I can't lie, it's disappointing. Full disclosure, I knew nothing about any of this before receiving this Ask, so I'm kind of stabbing blindly in the dark here.

I wish I could say it's surprising, or that I was able to work up much of a fuss about it, but in truth, I suppose it isn't, and I'm not. Perhaps part of me is just... I'm so weary of expecting celebrities or artists to have the Right Take on everything. That's not to say that I think that people shouldn't hold them to account, but increasingly I find that when an artist I respect has a lukewarm or wince-inducing take on an important social issue my feeling is more along the lines of a resigned "Well of course." The fact of the matter is that I think it should have become increasingly clear over the past ten years or so that expecting publicly visible celebrities to be our unproblematic saviours is not a fruitful line of thought.

And perhaps some might say that that's me giving into apathy, but like... I'm going to be real, I think it's mostly me giving into entropy. I physically do not have the fire and fury of youth in me a lot of days, and at a certain point you do have to pick your battles.

I love the work of Nick Cave even if I think his takes on issues like cancel culture and the Israel-Palestine conflict are severely lacking in a proper appraisal of the contextual factors at play. I'm sure if I really wanted to I could get up in arms about PJ Harvey speaking in support of fox hunting. But in both cases I still like their stuff, while still recognising that, ultimately, they're human, with all the blindspots and foibles that that implies.

Frankly, I don't think that I've ever heard a great reason that makes me think that we *should* be turning to 68-year-old white Australian men for their takes on cancel culture or the horrifically aggressive and genocidal state of Israeli foreign policy, nor a then-29-year-old white British woman raised on a farm in Dorset interviewed for a piece in NME nearly thirty years ago. And if Harvey turned around and clubbed a baby seal on the press tour for every new album after that point or something, then yeah, I don't think This Is Love being a banger would really be sufficient for me to feel comfortable giving her money, just like I'd feel a lot more irked (to put it mildly) by Cave if he were posting selfies with Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir.

And look, the fact of the matter is that Davies is a sixty-three year old white British gay man. The chances that you're going to have friends who are a bit on the TERFy side under those circumstances are, frankly, not zero. I do think that sometimes there can be a tendency in leftist spaces to reduce the totality of an artist's being to a tally of "good person"/"bad person" points, and Lord knows I'm not above letting that kind of thinking influence my perception of authors like Gareth Roberts or Trevor Baxendale, but again we're inadvertently bridging the gulf from "people with TERFy friends" to "people who are actively espousing transphobic rhetoric on their public platforms," which, say whatever you like about Davies, he *isn't* doing.

Should the bar probably be higher than "isn't actively funding the genocide of people like me"? I mean, shit man, yeah, undoubtedly. But like, that's the bar we're working with, because the other big international children's/family fiction success story of the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s is busy chomping on cigars and spreading libelous bullshit about female athletes. TERF Island fucking sucks, and I don't even have to live there; and at the end of the day, Davies was willing to turn the huge media event of reuniting David Tennant and Catherine Tate into an excuse to give the latter's character a trans daughter. However clunky it may have been, it is fundamentally well-intentioned, and to me, the basic good of that *still* isn't undone by the man's unwillingness to drop friendships that have likely lasted for decades.