Home is the Place that Doesn't Stand Still

Twitter Sonnet #274

Your face can come outside if you go bald.
Beyond Glasgow smiles become gore spheres.
"This is it," goes the joke told by Ringwald.
Recon dresses can hide covert ops tears.
Whisp'ring taffeta crushed brittle brown vein.
Clear shards spoil the awaited alloy.
True old steel bears a red tarnishing stain.
Golden masks greet grim rocket gun envoy.
Mottled deli sliced sponges launch skyward.
Pleasant breezes can't invade your black car.
Prototype bow tie was just a halberd.
Putting on the ritz can still leave a scar.
Improvised maracas imprison flies.
For every cg elf a real one dies.

I still don't want to say much about my new comic, but I will say I'm already really sick of drawing gladiolas.

I'm five episodes into Christopher Eccleston's tenure as the Doctor on Doctor Who. It seems to me he's spinning a lot of plates--he has to be the familiar Doctor, he has to add his own interpretation, he has to be more romantic, and, perhaps the most interesting aspect of his performance to me, he needs to show how the Doctor has been changed by the destruction of his homeworld. This is a rather a good idea to make him more accessible to modern science fiction audiences--it seems to have made him more vulnerable and more dependent on his friends, most notably his current companion. Eccleston plays the Doctor with kind of a manic quality that feels false at times. The way he grins and works the TARDIS's new bicycle pump--the impression I get is the Doctor throwing himself into his old patterns of living, the old wanderlust and joy of discovery, in an effort to outrun his sadness. Rose, as the young woman dazzled by the strange and haunted man, is a credible counterpoint, and it makes sense that her mother's worried. The Doctor's newfound hatred for "domestic" also reflects this--this is such a contrast to the more homebody-ish seventh Doctor making dinner at the Brigadier's house. It's more reminiscent of Ace and her hatred for her mother--one could say the Doctor has kind of become Ace. It would be really interesting to have Ace appear at some point in the new series with a sort of thematic role reversal.

I also like this change because I usually found the episodes on Gallifrey to be some of the most stilted and uninteresting. Though there was a line in The Invasion of Time that still makes me smile--when the Doctor, pretending to be the new tyrannical ruler of the Time Lords, is offered a jelly baby and says, "One grows tired of jelly babies, Castellan. One grows tired of almost everything, Castellan, except power."

I like how the ideas of impermanence and death are played with in "The Unquiet Dead", subtly showing us things about the Doctor's state of mind as he reacts to the plight of the ghost like aliens.



But I must admit, Eccleston's Doctor doesn't always work for me--some parts I feel like I'm supposed to be laughing along with fall flat for me, like when the Doctor and Rose are giddy about going to Downing Street in "Aliens of London". I don't buy that reaction from the Doctor.



And while I think his mania nicely reflects recent emotional damage, it would be nice if one of the other characters on the show reacted to it in some way.