Come along, Ponds

Though the year is not over yet! I have ten days left and I will get to fifty books this year. If I have to, I'm bloody well reading Target novelisations.

Anyway, the year...I hope I can remember anything at all:

( Fannish Year In Review )

I made a list; I like lists:

• Plato's Stepchildren is making me ALMOST CRY. Yeah, TOS's Plato's Stepchildren - no running away till you've heard me out! Channel One, formally Virgin One, is doing a promo for their TOS reruns and they've taken Uhura's speech to Kirk when she's forced to kiss him and OMG, Nichols' delivery is so good which oddly, since it's surrounded by PLATO'S STEPCHILDREN, I never noticed before. But strip all that awfulness away, and combine it with a nice montage and suddenly it's kinda awesome. Her voice is so beautiful and she says "and I am not afraid" and I may have FLAILED SLIGHTLY THE FIRST TIME.
  
  
• It is one of my favourite things about Uhura that she is allowed that emotional vulnerability and it works for me pretty much wholly because of how Nichols plays it: not as "omg, I am so scared," but as a woman who has enough confidence and self-knowledge that she's comfortable admitting when she's afraid and when she needs emotional support.
  
  
• Everyone has seen this Sherlock/Doctor Who crossover vid, yes? If not, it's pretty goshdarned good. FEEL FREE TO MAKE THIS BEEB!
  
  
• I am Backing Stuff Up. It's very dull.
  
  
• Getting a smidgen excited about the return of SJA because I saw a wee clip and OMG ( clip spoilers )
  
  
  Also, from an interview selenak linked to is this frankly awesome quote from RTD: “We talked about it a lot beforehand,” says Davies. “I know there’s a feeling that she’d have got divorced, and there was a theory that she’d be living on her own in Wales in a little cottage – some of the novels did this – and you think, ‘Nice idea, but actually that’s absolutely betraying the way we left her’. We left her with the promise of happiness, of adventure, of love and joy, and you can’t be cynical and undercut that by saying, ‘Oh, she’s a drug addict now! Her husband left her, she’s lonely, her life is bitter’. That’s just interfering with classic Doctor Who and rewriting what we were promised. So I was absolutely strict about that.”
  
  Which is not exactly how I feel but it's PRETTY DAMN CLOSE and more-or-less the main reason that I so very Do Not Like so much the the NAs.
  
  
• I sort of inhaled The Thick of It after reading this post of meddow's. It's Yes, Minister twenty years later with the swearing - there is an awful lot of swearing - left in and, basically, it's brilliant, brillianter and then, omg, BLOODY BRILLIANT. I did have a bit of a problem with the first season as I recgonised the name Chris Langham but couldn't remember from where and looked it up and, uh, yeah, that. I remember that being in the news, though I had no idea who actor was as an actor at the time and, WEIRDLY, knowing someone was downloading child pornography did slightly interfere with my ability to enjoy the show. Mostly I scrunched up my eyes when he was onscreen and tried to pretend he was Bill Nighy.
  
  Anyway, then Langham went off to have a trial and go to jail and there were the specials and, oh, SO GOOD. The Opposition are AMAZING. It is possible Peter Mannion is my favourite character; I do love them all really, but he's exactly the sort of vaguely competent politican who has zero time for pandering to his media image that means I end up liking him even if I find his politics appalling and Roger Allam is so gloriously deadpan and CONSTANTLY LOLARIOUS. (Randomly, I keep getting Allam mixed up with Kevin McNally.) And then there is season three and there is a political comedy where EVERY EPISODE gets to pass the Bechdel test which is like Extra Bonus Points on top of the marvoulessness that is Nicola Murray MP. And my very favourite bits are, I thinkit is 304 and 305, where there is Nicola and her dudes and Peter and his dudes and there is GLORIOUS COMEDY LOLS pay-off for so much character stuff it makes me utterly glee.
  
  And I haven't even mentioned Peter Capaldi, who is AS MAGIC. Sweary magic.

Rewatching the last episode of Sherlock. The first scene still annoys me ridiculously because he won't get "hung" or "hanged", if sentenced to death, he'll get shot. Execution in Belarus* is by firing squad. But, by all means, don't let the facts get in the way of a half-assed punchline.

*Belarus, the only country in Europe to still have the death penalty. (Sort of, IIRC Lithuania also has it, but only during wartime). 2009 was the first year on record when there were no executions in Europe. No such luck for 2010, as Belarus have already shot two dudes.

This post brought to you by my learnings from the last issue of Amnesty International's magazine.

The first scene in the flat is rocking though. Stuff the mystery/adventure bit, just give me forty-five minutes of Sherlock being an arse in the flat and John going slowly insane. Marvellous.

In other news, I now own this. Try not to judge too hard. Even though I did spent an appalling amount of time examining the differences between the Doctors in this box and the other Doctors what I have. Trought has a slightly different shade of blue shirt, you know. *sob*

I like the s18 Baker though. Deranged and corpse-like! Very accurate. And the awesomeness of a Delgado!Master and Axon tentacle monster boxset gives me hope that, one day, I will get my Giant Clam, with Harry foot-eating action.

So I was quite excited about this new Sherlock series, despite the fact that the reasoning for it is something that makes me go "oh whatevs." Cause I like the handsom cabs and the gas lights and the smog and the top hats and all that jazz. It's not just window dressing, it's setting, and to hell if Arthur Conan Doyle was just using it cause that was when he happened to be alive and it's not meant as Victorian setting but contemporary setting, it makes me happy. On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes is modern legend and it should be redefined and reinterpreted and changed and examined from any old facet you like, because that flexibility and that level of recognition in the cultural consciousness where you can take characters only a century old and put them in space or up against vampires or in modern times or have Holmes be a genial old man, or witty and acerbic, or have difficulty maintaining his grip on reality or all of the above but still be recognisably Holmes is marvellous.

Plus, I'm not exactly fond of A Study in Scarlet so I can't imagine sticking it in the modern day is going to make it any less enjoyable.

( then I stopped babbling online and went and watched it and thought it... )

Because the post didn't arrive until...whenever the post arrives - it may be brought my magical pixies for all I know - I ended up reading the start of King's Monstrous Regiment. I do not regret this; the first chapter was hysterically funny. I have no idea whether I was actually meant to be amused or not, but heh, I cannot knock it too badly for that.

I can't stand the cover though. Irony or no, I don't want a reminder of bloody Knox every time I pick a book up.

But, yes, then there was post and The Holmes-Dracula File had arrived, so I had something less hrrm to satisfy me Holmes craving with, hurrah! Thus far it is proving to be most diverting. And I'll now have to go read Dracula again since it's been like a decade and I can barely remember a thing other than deciding no more epistolaries. Probably I'll be utterly horrified by actual Van Helsing because my head says he's clearly Peter Cushing and Hammer is canon, omg.

In other fandoms, the last few days brought BEAUTIFUL PICSPAMS to me flist reminding me about how I love Martha RATHER A LOT. This one is of that magical last scene in Gridlock where my like went to love and I started to get all fuzzy and omg!yay about season three. And this one's from Human Nature and almost made me tear up cause the Doctor keeps giving Martha more and more responsibility throughout the season, building up to this, the first time where she's effectively gotta be the Doctor. And she is and it's a bit great and one of the things I do quite love about JE is Martha's goodbye because it is perfect for who she's become, that the Doctor can just casually ask her to save the world again and she just as easily says, yeah, alright, because that is what she does now and it makes me glee. (Also the piscpam sort of makes me ship Martha/TARDIS, which is yay but also weird because I don't really do TARDIS shipping.)

Reading Sherlock Holmes canon. Is great. I used to hate it rather a lot, but I was clearly a young and foolish idiot. Gallingly, I seem to read a lot faster online than I do on paper. Three books in two days is rather a lot more than what I normally read. Am product of horrid information age, woes.

New Who trailer is awesomesauce. Not just because they look like they landed on Arrakis even though that is clearly a Perfectly Good And Valid Reason for preemptively loving telly. Actually it does look a wee bit ( more spoilery trailer stuff, yo )

I do not know what happened in the Ashes To Ashes trailer. I may have done flailing and zong!yaying because there was Alex and Gene and they looked v shiny and soon they will be on telly again, omg! I do love A2A something rotten.

The K-9 trailer, on the other hand. I, um, don't know what to say about that. How SJA could have gone incredibly wrong? How not to do an English accent? Why dog clothes should never ever include pseudo-Flash Gordon Emperor Ming style robes? In its favour, I think I saw Eric Johnson for a split-second, but that might just have been OT wishful thinking.