New Who: "Cold Blood"

[lizbee]

Don't give away the Outback, Amy. People live there and stuff. (For some reason, non-Australians are always trying to give away the Outback. When the idea of creating a Jewish state was being kicked around, in the aftermath of WW2, one suggestion was to locate it in central Australia. COME ON, GUYS, PEOPLE ARE USING THAT AREA!)

More importantly, however:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, RORY IS NOT DEAD! I REFUSE TO ACCEPT IT! violetisblue AND I HAVE DECIDED THAT HE WAS SUCKED THROUGH THE CRACK AND INTO E-SPACE, WHERE SOME MAGIC E-SPACE TECHNOLOGY BROUGHT HIM BACK TO LIFE, AND NOW HE AND ROMANA ARE HAVING ADVENTURES. ONLY RORY'S ALL, "BUT MAH AMY IS ON THE OTHER SIDE," SO ROMANA'S GOING TO BREAK OPEN THE UNIVERSE AND REUNITE THEM, AND THAT'S THE SEASON FINALE.

And it was such an evil set up! There I was, thinking, "At last, a Silurian episode with a happy ending! Nasreen didn't die! And she and Tony are going to wake up in a thousand years and have each other, and a brave new world, and she'll have her dream of exploring under the earth! WAIT, WHY IS RORY BEING SHOT? WHY IS RORY DYING? HEY, WHAT'S THAT CRACK DOING -- OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, NO WONDER THE HATERS CALL HIM "EVIL WIZARD MOFFAT".

Oh yeah, evil. But in a brilliant way.

Other things that are not related to Rory's accident:

- The underuse of Amy last week: completely rectified when she picks a lizard man's pocket. I LOVE YOU, AMY.
- I loved that most of the Silurian soldiers were women, but I do rather wish the elder had also been female, just to balance out the vague impression of Dangerous Irrational Women vs Sensible and Rational Mens. It wasn't enough to even make me eyeroll, but it could have been easily averted all together.
- I do not think the Doctor would have loved the Silurian scientist so much if he'd known about the wide-awake dissections.
- Also, when he goes off, having woken Elliot, I seriously believed he was going to go into a room FULL of suspended-animation children.
- All these scenes with good actors in full-lizard face, and impromptu negotiations for the planet actually went a small way towards satisfying my unfulfilled need for more Babylon 5. So well done, show.
- People who are not going to get jobs on space stations dedicated to interstellar peace: Amy Pond. I laughed at the bit where she's obviously gotten bored and put her head on the desk. She is, in so many ways, still a child. And, you know, she did come up with actual constructive ideas, even if they did involve GIVING AWAY BITS OF AUSTRALIA. So maybe she can be, like, a diplomatic aide. G'Kar needs a new aide after Na'Toth; the Doctor needs to leave Amy in a safe place for five minutes weeks while he does something very important involving River Song, an archaeological convention, a bottle of Saurian brandy and a feather boa. Hilarity ensues.
- My friends list is maybe a bit more upset about Rory suffering a brief and temporary withdrawal from life than the TARDIS shrapnel. But really, two OTPs were destroyed today.

So yes, this was a bit amazing, and I am not going to spoil my fun by reading links from the Daily, for they will be full of people saying wrong things, like that Amy and Rory are underdeveloped and bad actors. And it is sad that so many people are somehow getting the Crap Edit, but I love my show and want to hug it, and indeed, may have to make some kind of Amy-and-Eleven plushie for exactly that purpose. But first, if anyone needs me, I'll be building a shrine to Rory outside Upper Boat, and sending packages of nurse's scrubs to the BBC until they bring him back.

Comments

[violetisblue]

"Don't give away the Outback, Amy. People live there and stuff."

I was also wicked amused at the offer to give away large parts of Nevada. Er...Vegas? Some of the fastest-growing suburbs and exurbs in the United States (pre-housing bubble collapse, anyway)?

"When the idea of creating a Jewish state was being kicked around, in the aftermath of WW2, one suggestion was to locate it in central Australia."

I also read somewhere that another suggestion was Arizona. Which, er, given recent events there is a mite ironic.

"HE WAS SUCKED THROUGH THE CRACK AND INTO E-SPACE, WHERE SOME MAGIC E-SPACE TECHNOLOGY BROUGHT HIM BACK TO LIFE, AND NOW HE AND ROMANA ARE HAVING ADVENTURES. ONLY RORY'S ALL, 'BUT MAH AMY IS ON THE OTHER SIDE,' SO ROMANA'S GOING TO BREAK OPEN THE UNIVERSE AND REUNITE THEM, AND THAT'S THE SEASON FINALE."

WHAT D'YOU MEAN WE "DECIDED" THIS? IT HAPPENS TO BE TRUE!

"I loved that most of the Silurian soldiers were women, but I do rather wish the elder had also been female, just to balance out the vague impression of Dangerous Irrational Women vs Sensible and Rational Mens. It wasn't enough to even make me eyeroll, but it could have been easily averted all together."

I had the same feeling but couldn't help be interested that even amongst the (aboveground) humans, the women fell into the aggressive/"martial" category of behavior (Ambrose) and the male the nurturing (Rory nursing like a nursing thing).

"My friends list is maybe a bit more upset about Rory suffering a brief and temporary withdrawal from life than the TARDIS shrapnel."

I'm too a-skeered to contemplate that part.

"I am not going to spoil my fun by reading links from the Daily, for they will be full of people saying wrong things, like that Amy and Rory are underdeveloped and bad actors."

What is this mysterious "Daily" of which you speak? It doesn't exist on my home planet.

[lizbee]

I was also wicked amused at the offer to give away large parts of Nevada. Er...Vegas? Some of the fastest-growing suburbs and exurbs in the United States (pre-housing bubble collapse, anyway)?

Well, now we need a Silurians in Vegas fic!

I had the same feeling but couldn't help be interested that even amongst the (aboveground) humans, the women fell into the aggressive/"martial" category of behavior (Ambrose) and the male the nurturing (Rory nursing like a nursing thing).

This is true.

Also, I was thinking about it last night, and I do not think the Silurian soldiers were actually irrational. By their own, consistent standards, they were taking justified, if harsh, steps to preserve their race. (I kind of wonder if the word we'd be using is "irrational" if they were all unbending male militarists.

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

I think I consider it irrational, in that I think prejudice against ape/lizard people is irrational, and I would totally call it that for males, too (in fact, I was watching the whole thing, thinking, "Normally, this would be a bunch of men being jerks and saying that insulting nonsense.")

I do think there's a slightly more... well, it's the whole mothers and sisters and familial bonds thing, that felt less 'male'.

But the emotional connections are NOT the irrational part of things.

[lizbee]

All of that is true, but I think the family ties were necessary to (a) motivate Ambrose and (b) provide motivation to the Silurian general. Because without that, she's just the reptilian Dick Cheney*. Speaking of people who are totally batshit but aren't constantly being labelled "irrational".

* But I repeat myself.

[violetisblue]

"Well, now we need a Silurians in Vegas fic!"

Tourists would barely bat an eye!

"I do not think the Silurian soldiers were actually irrational. By their own, consistent standards, they were taking justified, if harsh, steps to preserve their race."

I agree. By their standards the "ape" behavior that ensued was the height of irrationality.

"I kind of wonder if the word we'd be using is 'irrational' if they were all unbending male militarists."

I think we both know that if the Silurian military class were male they would never have been called "irrational," and that if Howard Johnson Lizard Pope had been female she'd have been roundly dismissed in some corners as a silly hippy-dippy-mystic type thinking there could be peace.

[cyprinella]

I was also wicked amused at the offer to give away large parts of Nevada. Er...Vegas? Some of the fastest-growing suburbs and exurbs in the United States (pre-housing bubble collapse, anyway)?

Yep, and I actually would be kinda happy if the area went to people with better tech so as to help alleviate the water situation. Which is Not Good, especially if you're a small fish in a very small environment.

[violetisblue]

The whole "If it's a desert clearly people don't live there" subtext was a rather amusing bit of Basic Background Research Fail. I think about six of the ten fastest-growing U.S. states in population are partially or largely desert climates?

[liviapenn]

Yeah, but how sustainable is that? That's the point. If they turned off the water to Vegas tomorrow the whole town would dry up and blow away in two weeks. And that water is actually being taken away from natural aquifers and stuff that aren't just magically replenishing themselves. "Yay let's just pump more water out into the desert" is a bubble that's not just going to keep growing forever.

[violetisblue]

I don't know, maybe some of the vaguely alluded-to advanced Silurian tech could help them out there? I was commenting on the screenwriter's apparent assumption that desert environments are ipso facto devoid of people, not holding up an UNSUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT YAY sign.

[liviapenn]

Well, I don't know about the other places Amy mentioned specifically, but people really *don't* live in Vegas-- I mean they don't live there sustainably. It's like jumping up in the air and deciding that means you can levitate. So this whole "BUT WE LIVE THERE" thing, in a sense, isn't really true. If we're talking super-long-term sharing-the-planet timeline, then it does seem reasonable to give the Silurians places we can't actually live (without pumping so much water out of the ground that it actually starts compacting and collapsing beneath us.)

[violetisblue]

Well, that's true, the whole Colorado River basin area (Nevada also draws on that, right?--forgive my ignorance if that's a mistake) is potentially uninhabitable by humans sooner than anyone's imagining. It would all certainly make an interesting end to the West Coast riparian rights fights.

[lizbee]

If we're talking super-long-term sharing-the-planet timeline, then it does seem reasonable to give the Silurians places we can't actually live (without pumping so much water out of the ground that it actually starts compacting and collapsing beneath us.)

Yeah, but sustainability isn't the only issue -- if we handed over the Outback to the Silurians, it would mean either an end or a significant change to current mining practices, which would be fantastic, but it would also mean cutting a hell of a lot of Indigenous Australians off from traditional lands and sacred places. I mean, we're still dealing with the fall-out from the last time a bunch of people assumed those places were uninhabited and up for grabs.

[liviapenn]

Yeah, I tried to clarify that I was *only* talking about Nevada in my comments. If that didn't come through-- I was specifically addressing the "but there are big American cities there" objection to giving away Nevada, not any of the other places Amy mentioned.