In an effort to spend at least five minutes today not thinking about awesometopia (which you should all join, especially if you're into pirates, fish, or dragons), I'm going to catch up on a couple days' worth of this meme. I keep forgetting about it. :\

BTW, since I'm advertising things and the rest of this post is about RTD-era Doctor Who, I might as well mention rewatch_tennant. It's a live-blogging-style rewatch of Tenth Doctor episodes. We meet Sundays at 9AM PDT. I think Gridlock is next. Some of us are conspiring to make the mod do Hamlet at some point.

Day 06 - Favorite episode of your favorite T.V. show

I don't really know if I have a favorite. I could maybe give you a top ten list for anything that makes a good show, like the best-written episodes, though only with a disclaimer that there's probably something even better buried in nearly 50 years of canon. Worse still, peeking ahead in the meme I see that there's a day for an episode I've watched more than five times. The one I was going to put as my favorite is the only one I'm sure I've seen that many times, and I haven't got enough to say about it to fill two posts.

My standard answer when I'm asked for more than one is "the Moffat episodes and Midnight". There are serials that could be my favorite if they were about half as long. The Sea Devils comes to mind, followed closely by everything else with Jo in it.

Taking favorite to mean best, and best to mean the one I'd show a new viewer to hook them, I'll pick The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. The writing is clever, there are televised Who's first ever genuinely scary moments (you heard me), the OCs don't suck, the plot mostly makes sense, and everything is just so cool.

And then there's Jack. I'm iffy about Jack. He kind of creeped me out the first time I saw him. He has that sort of you're-supposed-to-find-this-attractive vibe that I get from pop stars, models, and the occasional actor (mostly in older films). I could go on trying to explain that, but it's not really the point and it wore off eventually. But Jack has his moments, and some of his best are in these episodes. Plus they set up the Nine, Rose, and Jack dynamic, which is one of the best Team TARDIS dynamics there's been.

Though they have a sad lack of Mickey. And now I sort of want to rewrite this to talk about how great Boomtown is. But I wouldn't use that to sell anyone on Doctor Who.

I'm also iffy about Nine, but he's the Doctor and I can't bring myself to dislike a Doctor. Even Matt Smith won me over in like three episodes.


Day 07 - Least favorite episode of your favorite T.V. show

Love & Monsters.

Well first, the episode at face value is this: our heroes have only a cameo, there's some terrible music, then a really horrible monster shows up and saves us from the terrible music. Gross-out "humor" abounds. The Doctor shows up just in time to trap an innocent girl in a slab of concrete forever, and then she gives her boyfriend a blowjob.

The more horrific the events on the screen, the harder they're played for laughs.

The meta is this: fans of the Doctor are dorks. Giant honking dorks like can never have friends. They're so creepy in their obsessive, fannish ways that only other fans of the Doctor can stand to be around them. Their fannish works are amusingly bad and serve as physical evidence of how pathetic fans of the Doctor are. Also, filk sucks.

Fun fact: RTD started his Doctor Who career by writing profic.

I just don't get why Love & Monsters happened.


I have no idea what to do for the next two days, but I'm sure at least one of them won't be about Doctor Who. This meme starts with the obvious questions and then gets more creative, so my answers will get more varied as it goes on.