#genrequeer

Struggling to find anything critical to say about this one tbh. It kind of gave me everything I've been wanting/expecting from RTD2 since it was announced. Finally nailed the perfect blending of mythic and threatening stakes with quietly effective melodrama with outrageous maximum camp with ostentatiously provocative retaliation.

To put it another way, the first new Doctor Who episode since 2017 that actually feels like it was made by someone who watched the Moffat era, and thought of ways to evolve from it.

Ring-a-Ding himself is easily the best villain since at least the Toymaker, and the best new villain in I don't even know how long. On a technical level he's such a smart concept for doing an effective CG villain on a Doctor Who budget. If it's going to look like a cartoon anyway, just lean into it! Make the best evil cartoon you can dream of! Also you can taste the cackling glee from RTD at putting lines like "I am the glint in the eye of the mad! I am the last things you see before you fall into the Abyss!" in the mouth of a tap dancing rubberhose cartoon.

All I can think to say right now about THAT scene is that the reason Doctor Who is the greatest television premise that's ever existed is because the Doctor can escape through the fourth wall and discover his own existence as a fictional TV character in the course of a routine monster-of-the-week adventure, and not only does this not break the show entirely, it's actually what empowers him to jump right back into the plot, defeat the villain and move right on to the next adventure. Fucking superb.

This is what I mean by the series actually meaningfully absorbing the lessons of the Moffat years. Taking literally and seriously the full implications of the Doctor as the ultimate transgressor across the boundaries between worlds. He alone can harness the power of his own fictionality to defeat the enemies who are confined by the laws of the type of story they're in. The Doctor's true superpower is being Genrequeer.

TL;DR: Paul Magrs won.

The great problem with Friar Lawrence is that he’s genre-savvy up until that moment. He thinks he’s the benevolently machiavellian friar in a romantic comedy, so his schemes will definitely work however desperate things get, and up until that point he was right. He perhaps rather likes the idea of punishing the Capulet parents for how they’ve treated Juliet, knowing that eventually all will turn out well. It’s exactly the same trick that Friar Francis would later use in Much Ado About Nothing and it works great (you know, for a given value of “great” that still involves Hero marrying Claudio...).

But Friar Francis really is in a romantic comedy. Friar Lawrence was, but he isn’t any more.

So basically Romeo and Juliet is the play that goes wrong, and I love it so so much for that and every time I watch it it breaks me. <3

When I watch Macbeth I viscerally know the ending that will come. Hamlet, Lear, Julius Caesar... same. When I watch R&J some part of me is still expecting that THIS TIME it’s going to get the romantic comedy ending after all. Fucking devastating. Well-played, Will, you sadistic git. Well played.

Solo Guitar Improvisations by Lilah Larson

Lilah Larson spent much of their musical life framing queer-centric perspectives in the raw, angular, rock clangor in the New York City-based Sons of an Illustrious Father. In addition, the guitarist has made one solo, song-based album called Pentimento, in 2016, and has collaborated with the Mozart in the Jungle actor Lola Kirke on a couple of discs. This latest album, a collection of improvised and atmospheric guitar pieces breaks with any obvious narrative, luxuriating instead in pure sonic vibration.