Life on Queen Street

I have a suspicion that when we get to the end of Series Six, this will turn out to have been terribly important...

Oh, Doctor.

I see what you did there.

( River Song says Spoilers! )

Snurched and adapted from about the Flist:

1)Tell me who your favourite(s) female character(s) is/are and I'll tell you 3 things I believe about her/them.

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2) List five characters you'd want on your side in any kind of trouble. Bonus points for assembling an "Action Team" with complementary skills:

Team Leader: Ellen Ripley - she's a survivor, she's cool in a crisis and she doesn't flinch - from anything. If you're going someplace hellish, it's good to follow someone who knows the countryside. Ripley can also pilot deep space freighters, run exo-suits and solves munitions crises with duct tape. Leave the cats and small children at home, though - Ripley's relentless decency can be her own worst foe even though we love her for it.

2nd/Tactician/Geek: Colonel Sam Carter - career military with more than 10 years experience in all forms of small unit combat, she's an astrophysicist and engineer who can make computers and all sorts of alien technology sit, lie down and roll over for her on command. And if it doesn't, she'll blow it the fuck up. Besides, math is a universal language and Carter speaks it fluently. That's gonna come in handy.

Medic: Martha Jones, MD - between Ripley and Carter, something's bound to explode sooner or later and you want someone there to deal with the inevitable flash burns, shrapnel wounds and radiation poisoning (Carter and Ripley are scarily fond of nukes) that follow. Jones trained as a doctor before traveling with The Doctor and then went on to work for UNIT and Torchwood, which means she's now qualified to treat everything from an Alien infestation to passing a four-day liberty with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (or a night with "Captain" Jack Harkness). More importantly, Martha just doesn't know how to quit - if push comes to shove, she'll go to the ends of the Earth to save a friend: that's the kind of determination you want in your doc. Dislikes: tiny blonde chavs; men who can't see a good thing when it shares a Tardis with them; traditional Gallifreyan drumming. Likes: black leather.

Pilot/Muscle/Badass in Black Leather: Aeryn Sun - centuries of selective breeding and a training regime designed to weed out the unfit have made the Peacekeepers the most feared military force in their corner of the galaxy, crushing all resistance under the heels of their shiny black leather boots. Aeryn Sun was among their best until she got caught in the middle of her insane commander's blood feud with displaced astronaut, John Crichton. Four years later, Aeryn's just another working mother, trying to juggle a busy career as galactic fugitive with raising her toddler son and keeping her husband out of trouble, a career in itself. Because Sebaceans are long-lived, Aeryn has more piloting experience than pilots twice her apparent age and that dash of Pilot DNA she picked up along the way gives her an affinity with the Uncharted Territories' most interesting species, the living Leviathan ships. She's also fiercely loyal to her comrades, compassionate, believes shooting something will cure most ills, and doesn't mind hanging around with nuclear weapons, so she'll fit right in with Carter and Ripley.

Fixer/Sage/Handler/Intelligence: Emma Peel - James Bond wishes he were this suave or this deadly. Mrs. Peel is everything that is most elegant and shit-scary about British women - she can wield a tea cup and a stiletto with equal grace; apply a sleeper-hold as easily as lipstick. Spy, genius industrialist, adventurer and Avenger, Mrs. Peel brings a necessary sang froid to our band of heroes as well as an impeccable dress sense and an infectious elan to the proceedings. She is, as they say, "extremely good in the room."

eta - I know, I know I didn't pick Sarah Connor but there's no "my son's destined to save Humanity from The Machines if I don't stop the Robot Apocalypse" in t-e-a-m. Now, if the question were "who would you want to save your ass from killer robots" Sarah Connor would definitely top the list.

Honourable Mentions: Toshiko Sato, Zoe Washburn, Julie Parrish, Ashely & Helen Magnus (Helen Magnus & Emma Peel - there needs to be fanfic), Barbara Gordon, The Black Widow, Carolyn Fry, Elizabeth Swann (who should be reborn as a Space Pirate now), EVE, Marion Ravenwood (Helen Magnus and Marion Ravenwood walk into a bar... inevitably, they throw some guy out the window) and Tara Chace.

I stayed up all night watching the last seven episodes of NuWho series four.

I think NuWho and I might be done now. There will be more on that when I feel less like (an) ass.

The goal for today (now that I've reviewed the correspondence) is to keep from drooling on myself in the office.

Cheers, all. It's Monday again.

The weekend was marginally productive. No surprise to me but the account of my surgical adventure is not exactly flowing from me for my life writing class. I did get some editing done for the anthology we're putting out, so not all was lost.

Media Consumed Recently:

Movies
Imagine Me & You

TV
30 Rock 2.12
Battlestar Galactica 4.03
Doctor Who 4.03
ER, Bones, L&O:SVU latest episodes

Books
Still working my way through Anna Karenina - Russians are wordy, God!

Doctor Who was a serviceable romp that once again highlighted the differences between Donna and Ten's previous companions. I can see the much more traditional sidekick/partner dynamic NuWho is trying to build between them and I like it. However, the best part of the episode was the trailer for next week - why hello, old friend. You look particularly made of awesome in that jacket. Good to see you, please proceed to kick much ass.

I'm tempted to break up with BSG and if the Internet weren't in love with the show, I would probably wait and watch the whole thing when it comes out on DVD. I'm not loving the idea of waiting another year for the last 10 episodes and I'm not loving the fourth season so far. The performances and individual scenes have been very good. The overall effect, I find to be less than the sum of its parts - with only 20 episodes left, BSG should be starting to give us some answers butis laying more questions on us instead. 17 episodes left and I'm not feeling terribly confident about Ron Moore and his writers' ability to answer them all by the end of the series run. I have a terrible feeling we're going to be stuck with a Trek-esque two-hour finale to wrap things up rather than a proper third act to the series.

I'm also not loving the way BSG is throwing out story beats of all of a sudden like ( spoiler ) More scifi tokenism - it's really not very progressive to have all these strong female characters if you're going to spend all your time making them crazy (Starbuck), grasping (Roslin) and untrusty (Tory, Boomer, Caprica, Gina, Starbuck, Roslin). C'mon, Ron, take your head out of your press clippings and take a look at how you are actually portraying the women on your show.

Finally, Tina Fey has officially made my short list of women I want to be when I grow up. Tina Fey is made entirely of awesomesauce and snark. It's a beautiful thing.

From Comicbookresources.com: Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre Presents "Torchwool."

Bonus: Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre vs. the Darleks ("Do not take the mock!").






*Reason no. 1: wise enough to leave Ireland 1,200 years before the rest of us *snerk*

Three words: Bloody fucking brilliant, mate (oops, that's four).

Two More: Sam Tyler.

Brilliant.

Anyone even remotely familiar with Doctor Who couldn't have been cheered with delight when the guy with the thing demanded you-know-what. I'd called it when I saw the whatsit but it didn't detract one scintilla of pleasure from the reveal.

That's three in a row, guys. Keep it up.

As I've been recuperating from my latest round of surgery, I've been watching copious amounts of *achem*'d TV. To whit:

The Good - You Could Do Worse Than Watching These

Torchwood Series One - wonderfully good Brit sf with a dash of Queer As Folk mixed in. It's nice to see Russell T. Davies, the man behind QaF and Bob and Rose, let loose on the 'after the watershed' crowd after two seasons of doing Doctor Who for the strictly PG crowd. I've always loved Captain Jack Harkness and John Barrowman's take on the character and Gwen Cooper is a fast favourite.

Doctor Who, "The Runaway Bride" and Series Three, "Smith and Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code" - all brilliant but I still miss Rose. Nicely, though, so does the Doctor.

ITV's Mansfield Park - a bit spotty in places but a generally lovely adaptation that understands that the genuine goodness at the core of Fanny Price is the hub around which the story turns. It also answers the question of what Rose's been up to lately: Billie Piper's quite winning in the role. The potential for Doctor Who/Jane Austen crossover fic is a charming bonus.

The Bad - What I Meant By Worse

Blood Ties, episodes five and six - I want to like this series because I adored the series of Vicky Nelson novels by Tanya Huff. Alas, the writing on each successive episode seems to get just that little bit worse. The actors are fine enough in their roles and, after a while, I got past the weird of seeing Vancouver stand in for Toronto but the "straights and supernatural" story has been done and done before and far better. Blood Ties suffers in comparison not only to Buffy and Angel but Torchwood, every companion's first look inside the Tardis, Veronica Mars and just about every police procedural on the tube. It has a prefab, Harlequine Romance Presents: The Supernatural Romance of the Month Club feel to it that I'm having a hard time getting past and the 'every week Vicky gets a new supernatural case' plots feel hackneyed - something the novels never did. Not recommended.

The Sopranos, whatever the latest episode was called - Tony gets arrested, Tony doesn't get along with his sister, Tony broods, yadda, yadda, yadda. To be honest, I've never warmed up to The Sopranos - some episodes were very, very good but I've often felt that the hype exceeded what was actually shown onscreen and this was one of those episodes. It's been more than a year since the last new episode of The Sopranos and was anyone waiting breathlessly for the show to return with an episode that centers around Tony and his sister spending a tense, passive-agressive weekend together at a lake somewhere in Vermont? Fuggedaboudit.

The Ugly - Just Say No

The Tudors, episode one - Dummer. Than. Dirt. Excellent performances and generous views of Henry Cavill's naked ass do not make up for the fact that The Tudors is stupid even by the standards of those old Big Three Network American miniseries us kids of the 70s remember from Sundays nights throughout childhood. The writing is sloppy, anachronistic and inaccurate to the extent that The Tudors doesn't merely take dramatic liberty with the historical record but instead makes up details wholesale because apparently the life of Henry VIII was insufficiently dramatic already. Showcase desperately wants The Tudors to be their Rome and the latter's influence is clearly seen the in the liberal amount of raunch splashed throughout the first hour. But where Rome fiddled and reinterpreted the historical events leading to the rise of Augustus Ceasar, the action of the series was nevertheless based on solid historical research and painstaking attention to detail. In comparison, The Tudors settles for stock locations and costumes that belong more to the Elizabethan Renaissance than Henry's reign. I was particularly distracted by the tournament scenes which featured the actors jousting with throats and legs left bare, chests and shoulders virtually unarmoured while riding thoroughbreds - not, generally speaking the way a Renaissance Prince like Henry would dress for a joust. More attention to such details would have made it easier to overlook the clunky writing. Instead The Tudors, for all its pomp and velvet doublets has the look, feel and sound of a bog-standard 'historical' soaper. Recommended only for fans of Henry Cavill's naked ass.

1) Rose and the Tenth Doctor were lovers.

2) Good fanfic about Rose and the Doctor does not exist.

3) The idea of Ianto/Jack slash is both conventional and boring.

4) The essential bourgeois conservatism of fandom is revealed by the fact that fanfic embraces the idea of incestuous homosexual relationships but not threesomes - even when one of the characters involved is canonically omnisexual.

5) Being shocking for the sake of being shocking is neither shocking nor iconoclastic nor interesting.

6) Torchwood does the "effect top secret job has on your private life" beats better than Spooks.

In other news: internal monologue - still Welsh.