"No, Not the Mind Probe!!?!"

So, in response to the following meme, which I picked up from thisbluespirit
Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

And these were the words she gave me, revealing that she has been paying more attention to my online preoccupations/obsessions than I have XD:

Brigadier, UNIT, Torchwood, dragons, Romana

 

Brigadier: Ah, the Brig! Well, what can I say about the Brig that hasn't already been said? He is, for me, one of the stalwarts of Doctor Who during its existence. Who, I ask you, has seen the Brig and not immediately acknowledged his innate and self-evident awesomeness? Well, okay, there are probably some people, aren't there? I think I first saw the Brigadier in the Five Doctors, when I would have been a very wee nipper indeed, and not really knowing who he was except that for some reason I thought he was great. Maybe because he was in the Five Doctors - that's probably why I thought that XD. Anyway, apart from reading about him in Target novelisations, I probably didn't see the Brig properly until Battlefield, and not in his heyday until they repeated some Three stories on TV in the early 90s, and I discovered that our local video rental shop had just about all of the Three stories that had at that point been released (although, strangely, only Three stories...)

So - the Brig... I don't think you'd get a character like that in New Doctor Who. Somebody like the Brig would, in the modern television idiom, either be a heavy or an official buffoon the Doctor had to get around. To be fair, the Brigadier did get more Blimpish the more the Three era went on, to the point where he was at times almost a parody of himself. I much prefer the harder, more professional Brig of Season 7, who is much more credible as a military man and has this great, spiky relationship with the Doctor (mind you, I like Liz Shaw too). Yet, I think he always maintained that sympathy. I think a lot of that is down to Nicholas Courtney, who always portrayed him with a lot of charm and charisma even when the scripts weren't that great. Witness Battlefield, which would not be half so likeable a story without the retired Brig resurfacing; sure, he's clapped out these days, but he knows he's clapped out and is just doing the best he can, as he says. I cheered for him when he popped up in SJA; come on, Moffat, Courtney's not getting any younger, give him a guest shot in Who, for old time's sake.

UNIT: And we can't talk about the Brig without considering UNIT, can we? All I'll say is that a lot of things were better in the 1970s, and UNIT is no exception. (On the UNIT dating controversy, I don't think you can come up with a consistent explanation for the discrepancies, but I lean towards the theory that the Three stories very definitely took place in the 70s, even if that does contradict some of the non-Three UNIT stories). Anyway, Yatesy, Benton and the gang were endearingly useless (although let's spare a thought for some of the forgotten UNIT bods from the early days, before the format solidified - Captain Whatshisname from the Invasion, Captain Monroe from Spearhead, Corporal Bell...whatever happened to Corporal Bell?); I don't think they would have resolved, or indeed survived, most of the crises they faced had the Doctor not been around, but at least they weren't as annoying as their twenty-first century successors. If you want to portray UNIT as a bit harder and more military than they were in the 70s, the correct route to go down is Battlefield, where the organisation is portrayed far better than it is in NuWho. I refuse to believe the modern day Unified Intelligence Taskforce is even the same organisation; I think the real UNIT was disbanded after that unfortunate "blowing up Number Ten with a missile" incident in World War Three, and then reconstituted by some of the member nations outside UN control (explaining the name change); the new British contingent was probably made up mainly of newly-unemployed Torchwood personnel following that Canary Wharf business (see the hand-clapping in Planet of the Dead - you know I'm right!), explaining why they're such a bunch of w***ers. Which brings me neatly to:

Torchwood: Well, are we talking about Torchwood the television programme, or Torchwood the fictional organisation? Both? Okay. In the 1990s, I really liked the X-Files, and all of that UFO conspiracy theory stuff that was so prevalent at the time. I didn't really believe in UFOs, whatever that means, but I liked the stories, and I liked the idea of these secret organisations operating in between the lines of 20th century history, interacting with and concealing aliens and their technology, going at least as far back as WW2. At the same time, I really like British espionage fiction, John Le Carre and Len Deighton and all that stuff. I specify British, because there is a certain unique vibe you get from spy stories set in this country, a certain cynicism and sense of humour. Le Carre is basically all about upper-class Oxbridge types going around quietly backstabbing each other in a very polite, understated, office-politics sort of way, while being quite shockingly incompetent at their actual jobs and wistfully musing on the heroics they got up to back in the war, and the lost glories of the British Empire. The only man in the whole mess who knows what's what is George Smiley, and he keeps getting sacked after every fresh official scandal, and then getting brought back to head up the inquiry into the _next_ scandal. And his wife's cheating on him the whole while, but he's terribly polite and British about it...

Meanwhile, Deighton is the low-rent, working-class version, where the work of a spy is mostly about making tea and filling in forms and trying to avoid getting involved in the sort of sixth-floor machinations that Le Carre writes about. And about dining out well on the expense account, because Deighton was also a cookery writer on the side and knew a thing or two about that sort of thing. XD Anyway, that's sort of how I imagine Torchwood to be, in my fic-writer's imagination, before that Yvonne Hartmann came in with her management-speak (I bet the old hands from the good old days hated her, and not _just_ because she was a woman - the youth of most of her staff suggests she probably purged most of the oldtimers, anyway) and then Captain Jack ruined his branch of the organisation; George Smiley and Harry Palmer, with aliens. And of course, purely, blackheartedly, soullessly evil in that way that only British officialdom can be. And the fact that they were supposedly founded in 1879 gives a lot of potential for fic about them in the period setting of your choice. The real question is what the hell were they doing during all of the adventures the Doctor had in twentieth century Britain, considering he was supposed to be their sworn enemy? Well, fanfic is your friend in these sort of circumstances...

Which brings me to the television series; I have a love-hate sort of thing going on with the spinoff; I watch it, I do, while pouring scorn on it quite a lot of the time and wincing at the sex and violence, but I still watch it. And it does have its moments, more of them in the second series than in the first. The best "moment" for me was the one that confirmed the Torchwood scenario of my ficcy imagination; Gerald and Harriet of Torchwood 1918, being all stiff-upper-lipped in their coldblooded official shenanigans. Too bad they were only on screen for about a minute, they should have had their own episode at least. And they were totally at it, as well, in a very discreet, repressed Edwardian sort of way. I wrote fic about them, too.

dragons: Hmmm...dragons. Well, as a child and teenager, I read an awful lot of sword-and-sorcery type fantasy stories. I won't say I grew out of it, because that sounds horribly dismissive, but maybe I grew apart from it with time. I reread all of the Tolkien books in my early 20s, and have nothing but admiration for them, even while recognising the flaws that lead some genre fans to bash them in comparison to whoever their favourite author is. Anyway, dragons: Smaug the Magnificent from the Hobbit, is for me everything a dragon should be; proud, clever, greedy, and an absolutely terrifying, ridiculously powerful monster who is nevertheless strangely vulnerable to the right hero in the right place at the right time. I'm also a big fan of Glaurung, the dragon in the Silmarillion/Children of Hurin, who is a dragon very much in the tradition of stuff like the Ring of the Nibelungs or Beowulf. In fact, the Children of Hurin is very heavily influenced by the Ring Cycle, imho (not that I know anything about opera, but I know the story). Anyway, my point is, that dragons (European dragons, to clarify), in the medieval legends in which they originate, are pretty much a symbol of evil, the devil, whatever, so I like portrayals of dragons that have that almost demonic aspect, as opposed to the "noble creatures" take on them you see in some fantasy. That's just me, I guess. Oh, and there's a cartoon film called "The Flight of Dragons", which I haven't seen for years and years, but which I remember as being great. I think James Earl Jones did one of the voices.

Romana: Believe it or not, there was a time when I wasn''t a huge fan of Four; I think it was partly snobbery and/or my natural contrariness, but back in the 90s I used to see nothing but praise for Four in fandom and precious little love (to say the least!) for my favourite, Seven. Also, while I grew up watching the 80s Doctors, I'd only really heard about Four; I don't think I actually saw any of his stories until I was a teenager in the early 90s (although I read a lot of the Target novelisations when I was in school). But anyway, when I started watching the "official classics" of Four's era, I was converted, almost against my will; I mean, things like Genesis of the Daleks and Talons of Weng-Chiang were so obviously a cut above anything from the 80s (even if some of those 80s stories rank above them in my personal pantheon of favourite stories). And then, a little bit later, I saw some of the Four stories that people are not usually so complimentary about; the Key to Time season, and Seasons 17-18. And, God help me, I really liked them as well, for all of their very obvious shortcomings. I found it interesting to have a companion who was the Doctors equal in intellect, his superior in a lot of technical areas (and who keeps reminding him constantly of the fact!), but who still learns from him about life and compassion and a lot of things, really growing as a character over the course of her two seasons. And I like the humour and the banter and all of that stuff; as I was saying somewhere else recently, I'm easy for semi-clever one-liners.

Er, anyway, so the self-evident coolness of Romana (both of them) - to me  - led me to be quietly shocked when I discovered that the admiration for her and her stories in fandom is far from universal. I don't know, there's no accounting for taste, is there, but I''ll go on record in saying that Romana is my second favourite companion after Ace (although for a while a couple of years ago, Jamie dethroned her), and, to be even more out of step with parts of fandom, *my * Romana is Romana II, mainly because I saw her first, and because I absolutely love City of Death (I have an idea that the "cool" thing is to prefer I, and I'll agree she probably doesn't get the consideration she deserves). Anyway, I think the relationship portrayed between the Doctor and Romana throughout their time together is fascinating, the way it progresses from the bickering oneupmanship of their early stories to the almost married couple vibe they have in their later ones (they spend a lot of time arguing, but that doesn't mean they don't love each other). I didn't start writing fanfic for the shipping, but it seems so self-evident to me that there was that sort of relationship in their case that I felt I had to acknowledge it in my fic. And partly because it was some sort of counterargument to the "Rose/Doctor 4ever" sort of stuff you see a lot of. Anyway, whatever my motives, I quickly slipped into shameless Doctor/Romana shippiness...I'm happy the way I am, though. XD

.And, er...well. that's that. I went on quite a bit, didn't I?