face the strange

I apparently haven't posted since Sunday. 🖖 Hi 🌞
I started watching 12 and Clara and then paused to ponder how Clara is immediately the person I remember and am vaguely annoyed by, and it seemed rather abrupt to me this time.
Some of it is her reaction to the regeneration. It does not make her more likeable, or more relatable to the long time Doctor Who viewer, in theory. But I actually had some problems with this regeneration at the time for unreasonable reasons, since Children of Earth was not fun. So it is a bit interesting watching my own reactions there.
I think the bit about Clara's ego is... new. New? Felt new. And not improved.
But her changing actually makes sense after the whole Impossible Girl thing.
But part of the Impossible Girl thing is how impossible it is for it to have happened any more? So *big shrugs*.
And I'm not sure how new she is vs how different the situation is. The job is a progression, the confidence suits, what is feeling new?
I also think the romance is... for one, not my sort of thing, but for another, not seeming at all romantic to me? Interesting story, sure, the Doctor parallels and the soldier stuff and the tangled up times and everything, certainly a lot of story is going on there. But I don't get why they like each other or are acting that way so. *small shrug*

I have watched up through Listen and I am more interested than I remember being the first time.

But then I picked up the headphones again and have listened to 7 and Mel adventures from Big Finish.

Bang Bang a Boom is not my thing.

Fires of Vulcan is interesting twists amid a lot of Romans I didn't much like listening to. But part of the point is their values don't mesh well with ours so the audio did what it set out to do. So, good, but not always fun.

Flip Flop lost my sympathy by making the bad guys a bunch of blind beings who enslave people to be their guide and who get their own way by complaining anyone disagreeing with them is a hate crime. They call themselves a minority and when it is pointed out they have 90% of the planet they say something like numbers aren't much to do with being a minority. In short this story did not feel like it was punching up, and I did not want much to do with it. I relistened it on fast forward. The alternating structure was a bit interesting in theory but does appear to leave us with two of the Doctor and Mel leaving the planet for further adventures, so I am not quite convinced. The specifics of the story didn't seem to be worth the elaborate setup. Didn't like it.

Unregenerate was one I put off listening to because its stated setting of run down asylum but evil doesn't really have a good side or good options. The story starting with someone doing the classic deal with the devil visit and then coming back on the last day of their deal recipients life to take them to the asylum? Pretty classic as horror set ups go, but, I do not want horror set up asylums. Honestly, neither mental illness nor mental healthcare need making scary. But Mel was quite emphatic about countering some prejudiced statements from a character of the week, so that bit was as good as it is getting I guess. Once the specifics of the alien experiment got made clear it was pretty interesting, ( Read more... ) So I'll just cut tag it so it can remain a mystery if anyone wants to listen to an audio from 2005.
I liked a lot of bits of it but the evil asylum spin loses it a star.

Last of the Titans isn't something I remember listening to before. 7 on his own, meets a nice seeming new sapient who pilots a planet eating ship. ... I don't actually remember how this ended but the options were all sad. Okay so I listened the end again. Big kabooming. Well that's a bad ending for a young being. I never like that, it's another case of inventing a mentally ill person to blow them up.

Robophobia at least had the mentally ill person survive the story.
I didn't much like how the Doctor communicated in this, yelling about people having to listen to him isn't the useful bit of the communicate, he should have led with the urgent words. Mysterious and manipulative only excuses him so far.
The Doctor, traveling alone, meets Liv Chenka, who is interesting enough already.
I like how the story arc goes through how everyone gets scared and then swings them back. Who they blame always makes enough sense.
And I liked the robots.
I feel like it's unlikely there's no course in an entire solar system except the self sacrificing one but as a story beat yeah alright.

Clicking through those adventures reminded me of the thing in the Big Finish app where you cannot seperately unload the interviews and music. If they filed all those bits under bonus you could save so much space. They are nice extras and I always like listening to new chatty bits, especially after the scarier stories, but I wouldn't carry them all around in my phone at all times when I could be carrying more main stories.



My week had a bunch of story in but doesn't feel like it had much week. It's the sleeping backwards but getting woken up a lot, it makes it all feel blurry. Still, pretty okay. 🤞