Wonder, by R. J. Palacio

Hello!

I'm doing another book review. The reason is because I have officially been alive for two decades; also, this book is quite a special book to me. Confession: Harry Potter is not my favourite book. Lord of the Rings is not my favourite book. Wonder is my favourite book, because I relate to the main character, August Pullman, quite a lot - more, I think, than I relate to any other character.

A wonder-ful book!

August is a ten-year-old boy with Treacher-Collins syndrome. Treacher-Collins syndrome is (to quote Wikipedia), characterised by deformities of the ears, eyes, cheekbones and chin. It has no impact on intelligence; however, August, at the time the story starts, has spent his life up till then being home-schooled, partly because he still experiences a lot of difficulties. The story starts with his parents enrolling him in a middle-school (it's set in America), as they want him to experience more of the wider world.

The plot of the book revolves around August's first year in public education: the main characters, other than August, are his sister Olivia, his parents, his friends Summer and Jack, Olivia's friend Miranda, and Olivia's boyfriend. Also August's bully, Julian.

Movie poster - left to right is August's dad, Olivia, August himself, the dog, and his mum.

The book starts with August's parents enrolling him in the school; the school year starts with August meeting Jack and Julian, who were friends from early childhood. They've been assigned by the head-teacher to befriend August. Jack does a pretty good job of it; Julian, on the other hand, starts off by asking if August was caught in a fire! Things only go downhill from there: Julian (feeling threatened by August's friendship with Jack, I guess) starts being actively horrible to August. Jack ends up getting caught in the middle, forced to choose between his best friend and August; things come to a head on Halloween, when Jack, compelled by peer-pressure, says some rather horrible things about August, without realising he's nearby. Unsurprisingly, August isolates himself from his classmates and friends; eventually, though, Summer, another one of August's friends, finds out what happened and tells Jack. Jack, guilt-ridden and becoming increasingly unsure that Julian is someone he wants to be friends with, eventually punches Julian in the face. After this, his friendship with August is repaired, though at the cost that Julian's bullying of August extends to Jack as well. 

Jack and August in the movie.

Olivia, meanwhile, has her own problems - she's spent most of her life defined by being 'August Pullman's older sister'. Also, Miranda has been avoiding her since the start of the school year (this is later revealed to be because Miranda essentially committed fraud and pretended that August was her brother at a summer camp, and now feels guilty.) As a result, when Olivia starts at a new school, where hardly anybody knows her, she starts distancing herself from being 'August Pullman's older sister'. This means that nobody at school knows about August, and nobody at home knows how she's doing at school. This comes to a head when Olivia gets a part for a play. Olivia reveals to her mum that she doesn't want August (or the rest of her family) to see the play. Can you guess what happens next? August overhears this, and is naturally very upset. Olivia, being a good sister, relents and allows her family to come to the play. Miranda is also in the play, as it happens - Olivia's her understudy. She goes on stage at the beginning, sees August, and is so overwhelmed with guilt for claiming that he was her brother that she decides that she can't play; Olivia takes her place. After the play, August gets lost, but Miranda finds him. Olivia's also looking for him, which results in the two girls reuniting and repairing their friendship.

Olivia with August.

From there, August's year starts getting better. Julian's bullying is still happening (by way of a rather horrible game of pretending that August has the plague!), but August mostly shrugs it off. The turning point in the bullying is one of my favourite scenes in the book - August jokingly tells a friend that the UglyDolls brand of toys was based on him. After this, people start realising that he's funny and cool (not to mention, confident enough to make jokes about his disabilities), and they get bored of bullying him. Even Julian's closest friends stop - but Julian himself doesn't.

At the end of the year, there's a three-day nature reserve trip, which August is initially apprehensive about, in part because he's now got a hearing-aid which is not inconspicuous. In the end, he decides to go anyway. The new hearing aid turns out to be a non-issue for his classmates; on the other hand, however, those who don't know him aren't so friendly. August has a chance encounter with several highly immature teenagers, who start mocking him and beating him. He's rescued by Julian's ex-friends, but it turns out that the hearing-aid has gone missing. It later turns up mangled beyond repair.

At the end of the school year, August wins an award for 'being notable or exemplary in certain areas', and his mum name-drops the title, calling him her wonder.

I, uh, won a similar award, for similar reasons.

Wonder is a very interesting book - it shows the world through the perspective of someone with disabilities. And of course that's not in itself unique, even though Treacher-Collins is a very rare syndrome. There are many books and films which focus on disabled people and their lives, some of which are fictionalised, and some of which are based on real-life events. What makes Wonder unique is the fact that it focuses on the social dimension of being - as the book says - 'born to stand out'. As a result of his disabilities, August finds it very difficult to make friends - he's not the...most photogenic person. Various times, younger children see August and, bluntly, are so scared of him that they burst into tears; even children of August's own age are uncomfortable around him. This discomfort, combined with the admirable maturity of fifth-graders, makes August prime bullying material, which leaves him very isolated.

It's something I can very much relate to. While (I assume) nobody was scared of me, I've always felt isolated, in a way. The most obvious reason being my hearing-aids - I find it difficult to hear in loud environments, which means I can't keep up easily in conversations, and I feel left out. It's partly why I spent so much of my adolescence feeling like I didn't have friends. Even now, I struggle with insecurities over friendship, and that's part of the reason why. Another aspect of this isolation, for me, is the fact that I quite literally don't fit in. I'm deaf, which partially alienates me from the hearing world, but I feel more at home around non-deaf people than around deaf people. I'm British, but raised in Africa. Similarly, after returning to England, I adjusted to life back in England far faster than you'd think, considering I grew up in Africa. Even with my CHARGE Syndrome - it's rare enough that each individual case is entirely unique, each case having a different arrangement of symptoms. And everything I am is because of CHARGE Syndrome. No balance canals? CHARGE. Deafness and coloboma? CHARGE. High pain threshold? CHARGE. Tendency to become obsessed with certain things (e.g. the human body)? CHARGE. Almost everything which makes me who I am derives from a syndrome which is so rare that literally nobody else in the world can fully relate. Other people can (and do) relate to various aspects - I'm friends with other deaf people. A friend at university grew up in Africa, just like me, and my sister and cousins also grew up in Africa. Many of my friends have poor eyesight. But nobody in the world would truly be able to relate to the sum of those parts, which is soul-crushingly isolating. I would love nothing more than to not have CHARGE, even to just be only deaf. And it's true that everybody is the sum of their experiences, but sometimes it feels like everything I am stems from something which occurred before I was born. But, as Wonder says, how can you blend in when you were born to stand out? It's why I relate to August so much - Treacher-Collins is fairly rare. So while we don't have the same syndrome, we do both understand something of being practically unique.

Another thing Wonder does is depict the perspectives of people who know August - the impact that he has on their lives. His family, for instance, have had to schedule their lives around August's condition and his subsequent need for assistance. His mum had to quit her job to home-school him (though this was admittedly partially because other children wouldn't have the emotional maturity to be nice to him.) His sister, poor Olivia, is very independent for her age, because their parents often had their hands full looking after August. So if she had a problem, she'd generally need to solve it herself. Also, she's known as 'August Pullman's older sister', which pushes her to form her own identity, separate from being August's sister. Miranda, similarly, considers herself as good as August's sister, due to her close friendship with Olivia - and it's August's presence at the play which enables her to strengthen her relationship with Olivia.

It's a good demonstration of the ways in which people's lives are impacted by knowing somebody with disabilities. It's a similar story with the people I know - my parents have had to devote a lot of time, effort and money to supporting me, e.g. accompanying me to hospital appointments for ears, eyes, endocrinology, annual check-ups, and so on. And my sister, similarly to Olivia, has been rather over-shadowed by being 'Robert Murrell's little sister'. She started at secondary school the year after I did, and found that everybody knew her as my little sister. As a result, she wanted to establish her own identity, and over time it created distance between us, which hasn't entirely gone away even now. Though speaking as a proud older brother, she certainly succeeded at establishing her own identity!

Regarding my own experiences with bullies, I honestly don't have a clue why the bullying started. My main bully could have felt upset that I was deaf and still in mainstream school. Or, he could have been jealous that I was reasonably academically successful and liked by the teachers. The most he ever said on the subject was that I was 'arrogant', because I'd tell other students to behave. But then, he never had a problem telling me what to do. It's something I often think about - whether my deafness factored in to the bullying in some way.

Another thing I really like about Wonder is how it presents disabled people as essentially normal people with certain difficulties. Apart from his condition and the attendant issues it causes, he's a fairly normal ten-year-old. He's a big fan of Star Wars, and starts the book off with a Padawan braid. When he receives the hearing aid, he receives a consolation in that it makes him look like Lobot; August's response is 'But Lobot's lame.' And when he finds out that Olivia's got a boyfriend around half-way through the book, he immediately does what siblings are contractually obligated to do - he starts teasing her. Another aspect of this is the sub-plot of the family dog getting ill. August's so consumed with his various other problems that he fails to truly realise how ill the dog is, which I think is something which a lot of people, and especially children, do.

It's a good reflection of how disabled people are just people, who happen to have more problems to deal with than most do.

Overall, I would rate Wonder 9/10 - I highly recommend!

Random observations

-There's a movie, which is fairly accurate to the book. I like it. I saw one of my classmates while watching it at the cinema.

-The movie does a pretty clever version of August and Jack's reconciliation - they chat while playing Minecraft. In the book, that takes the form of letters/texts.

-Olivia's boyfriend's perspective is one of the perspectives in the book. The entire section is written in lower-case, which is a rather interesting stylistic choice.

-In fitting with August's fondness for Star Wars, the dog's called Darth Daisy. But the 'Darth' bit is usually dropped.

-At one point in the book, August and Summer notice that they both have names relating to summer, as does Julian (July), so their lunch table could be the summer table, and they could include Julian. It's ironic, given Julian's behaviour...

-At one point, Julian asks August if his favourite Star Wars character is Palpatine, because of Palpatine's appearance. Unsurprisingly, August doesn't just pick his favourite characters based off apparent similarities in appearance - his favourite's actually Boba Fett. A sentiment I can second, though my favourite character is Obi-Wan.

-My mum, like August's mum, quit teaching. Unlike Mrs. Pullman, my mum quit to become a Bible translator - I hadn't been born yet.

-One thing that has garnered a fair amount of criticism for the movie, and the book to an extent, is the fact that it downplays the difficulties of life with disabilities - August's able to solve the bullying through kindness. In real life, tragically, that's not as likely.

The Woman Who Fell to Earth/The Ghost Monument: A New Era

 Hello!

I've split the Twelfth Doctor's regeneration episode and the Thirteenth Doctor's premier episodes into two posts, because the Twelfth Doctor's swan song is three parts. Then the Thirteenth Doctor's premier is split into two as well! The first episode of Series 11 deals with the Doctor's adjustment process and ends on a cliffhanger. The second deals with the Doctor and her new companions finding the TARDIS. Fittingly, Whittaker's first episode features new characters, new aliens, and even a new location - the Doctor's relocated to Sheffield! Even the TARDIS and sonic screwdriver get thrown out - the TARDIS disappears, and the sonic screwdriver falls out of the Doctor's pocket en-route to the ground, necessitating her making a new one.

I think the tagline at the bottom sums it up.

The Woman who Fell to Earth

The Woman who Fell to Earth, like Rose (and, technically, Spearhead from Space), starts by introducing the new companions - first we get introduced to Ryan Sinclair, his grandma, Grace, and his step-grandad Graham. Ryan has dyspraxia, so he has coordination difficulties, and can't ride a bike; he's also 19. We open on him learning to ride a bike; he repeatedly falls off, ends up getting frustrated, and chucks the bike off a hill. Graham and Grace leave him to get the bike out of the trees, as their train leaves soon; they have a conversation about Ryan struggling to accept him. Ryan goes down to retrieve the bike  and finds a glowing button in mid-air. He presses it, which causes a mysterious blue object to appear; he then phones the police The next companion to be introduced is Yaz, a police-woman who's currently embroiled in solving a parking dispute. She's the one who responds to Ryan's strange phone call, though she suspects that he placed the object, then prank-called the police. The train which Graham and Grace are on gets attacked by a coil sparking electricity; Grace phones Ryan, who heads to the site with Yaz. The Doctor appears minutes later, punching through the roof with the power of terminal velocity! Ryan and Yaz turn up in time to get scanned by the coil, along with Graham, Grace, the Doctor and a guy called Karl. The Doctor falls unconscious and gets taken to Grace and Graham's house. When she wakes up, she realises that she and her new friends have been infected with DNA bombs, which are exactly what they sound like. She then re-formats Ryan's phone, which was lying around, into a device for tracking the coil. They locate the coil on a roof, stopping along the way so the Doctor can make herself a new sonic screwdriver; once they reach the coil, she sonics it. An alien, a Stenza called T'zim Sha, (or, as the Doctor calls him, Tim Shaw) appears and extracts information from the coil before teleporting away. It turns out that Shaw was there to capture a target; when the Stenza want to be promoted, they must first hunt and obtain a specific target. Shaw is cheating, though; he's using the coil to scan the area for the target to avoid having to look. The Doctor and friends realise that the target is Karl, the guy on the train, and learn that he works as a crane operator at the construction site; accordingly, they head there as well. Graham and Grace stay on the ground to escort people out of the construction site, while the Doctor, Yaz and Ryan climb up the crane next to his, so they can confront Shaw, who has captured Karl. During the confrontation, the Doctor bluffs Shaw into activating the DNA bombs...which she earlier transferred into the data coil, so when Shaw transferred the information he also transferred the bombs. As he collapses, Karl shoves him off the crane; he activates his recall device and escapes just before hitting the ground. At the same time, Graham and Grace dispose of the data coil, which is half-way up a crane, by jamming a live wire into it; as she does this, Grace loses her balance and falls, dying minutes later. The Doctor stays for the funeral - though she doesn't have much of a choice. After the funeral she builds a teleport device designed to take her to the TARDIS, out of the remains of Tim Shaw's travel pod. It malfunctions and drops her in deep space...along with Graham, Ryan and Yaz. Whoops.

And that was such a nice suit...

The Ghost Monument

In true Doctor Who fashion, the cliffhanger is overcome quickly: spaceships appear and rescue the Doctor and her companions. The Doctor and Yaz are picked up by a man called Epzo, while Graham and Ryan are picked up by a woman called Angstrom. When Yaz comes to, she hears the Doctor arguing with Epzo about the proper means of landing the ship. Epzo and Angstrom are participating in a race; the final planet of that race has been shifted out of its orbit. By coincidence, it's also where the TARDIS is - if all had gone to plan, presumably the Doctor and friends would have materialised on the planet. Angstrom successfully lands; Epzo is not so successful. He lands, but the ship crashes and nearly squashes the others. Epzo and Angstrom find a tent which is being holographically projected; in here, they learn that the next, and final, stage of their race is the titular Ghost Monument. The Ghost Monument, by the way, is the TARDIS - it's been stuck in a materialisation loop for thousands of years, long enough that the long-extinct natives of the planet have extensive documentation of it. Epzo and Angstrom head off, with the Doctor and her companions tagging along, as they need to reach the TARDIS to escape the planet. The journey takes several days, over the course of which they have several adventures. The most pertinent are an escape from SniperBots; the discovery that the natives were forced to create deadly super-weapons by the Stenza (the antagonists of the previous episode); and an encounter with sentient rags, during the course of which the rags cryptically mention the "Timeless Child". Eventually, Angstrom and Epzo reach the finish line; Epzo forces the organiser of the race to agree to a joint victory by threatening to torture him to death. Lovely! The Doctor and her friends, meanwhile, are still stranded, with the Doctor giving in to despair...until the TARDIS materialises. The Doctor stabilises it using her sonic screwdriver, then laments that she lost the key. The TARDIS doors obligingly open on their own, and the Doctor and her friends pile in; the Doctor then pilots the TARDIS away from the planet of horrors. Though the Doctor could have snapped her fingers to open the doors - the Doctor's displayed the ability to open the doors with a snap of their fingers since the Tenth Doctor. Solves the problem of needing the key, and impresses her new companions.

The Doctor and her companions. Clockwise (ignoring the dude in the centre), Yaz, Graham, the Doctor and Ryan. The centrepiece is the man who organised the race.

Overall, the Thirteenth Doctor's first two episodes are OK. They're definitely better than The Twin Dilemma or Time and the Rani, but they aren't as good as some episodes, such as Castrovalva, or The Christmas Invasion. The first episode has some contrivances, such as the Doctor happening to land exactly where the data coil is, or Graham's friend happening to see exactly what the Doctor is looking for. The characters are a bit...flat. The Doctor's companions barely react to being on an actual alien planet, or to seeing the interior of the TARDIS; it's especially jarring because the Thirteenth Doctor's companions are an elderly man who didn't even believe in aliens a few days ago, a police-woman and a 19-year-old warehouse worker; as a result, they have no reason to be so unsurprised.

Another element of this dodgy characterisation is the Doctor's random hatred of all violence. She gets angry at Karl for shoving Shaw off the crane, despite having literally just boastfully condemned him to a far more brutal death. She also allows Ryan to go play Call of Duty against the Sniperbots, anticipating that he will be outnumbered, to teach him that violence is never worth it. She later clarifies that it's OK if the thing you're breaking can be repaired, such as Sniperbots. Willingly risking a companion's life for a message she doesn't even believe in? Moreover, a companion who's 19? To me, that just comes off as irresponsible, even for the Doctor.

There's also the problem of under-utilised plot threads - the Stenza are significant throughout both episodes. Tim Shaw is the antagonist of the first episode, and the Stenza as a whole are the reason for Desolation being the way it is. But the Stenza get ignored after this - they literally never appear again. Apart from Tim Shaw in the final episode of Series 11, but he's once again a stand-alone villain. It's a pity, because the Stenza are an active empire during the 21st century, an era commonly frequented by the Doctor. So I feel there was a lot of potential for them to be great recurring villains - like the Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans of the Classic Era, or the Weeping Angels of the new era. This is especially in light of Angstrom saying that they're basically engaging in genocide on her home planet; they're an active imperial force, and actively committing mass slaughter - but nobody's doing anything. Though that is tragically realistic, I guess. However, it's not just a case of not caring - it's like the Stenza cease to exist after this episode, with the sole exception of Tim Shaw in the final episode of Series 11. After that, the Stenza just get forgotten about - by the characters, and seemingly by the writers.

Another element of this is the Timeless Child. The concept is promising - the idea is that the Time Lords didn't actually obtain their ability to regenerate or their supremacy over time through legitimate means (e.g. evolution). Instead, they performed a bunch of highly unethical experiments on the child in question, who did have the inborn ability to regenerate. One of the most promising things is the ethical question - is it right for the Doctor to use regeneration to survive and keep surviving, given how the Time Lords gained the ability? After all, that's the only reason the Doctor's survived so long - in Turn Left, part of the reason the Doctor's allies fall is because they can't regenerate. If the Doctor were in the same position, he'd have died back in The Tenth Planet. However, this genuinely interesting dilemma gets side-stepped by the reveal that the Doctor is the Timeless Child. There is no ethical dilemma, because those powers are the Doctor's by birth-right. Another aspect of this is the lack of development - the Timeless Child concept is brought up in The Ghost Monument. It's ignored for the rest of Series 11, then brought up again in the second episode of Series 12. After that, it's implied in episode 5, referenced in episode 7, and ignored until episode 10, whereupon it's revealed that the Doctor's the Timeless Child. Almost no build-up on the Timeless Child, none at all for the possibility that the Doctor's the Child...it just feels lazy. 

This is kind of a problem with this era as a whole. The companions and the Doctor are cardboard cut-outs, reduced to specific traits. Potentially interesting plotlines and moral dilemmas are ignored or drained of what makes them interesting. Political and social issues - something the show's always been famous for - are reduced to the simplest form possible, then used as an improvised bludgeoning weapon. Point of fact, a later episode discusses global warming and climate change. It ends up being about as subtle as Rubeus Hagrid knocking down a door - the Doctor even blatantly exposits on the urgency of preventing climate change. Indeed, this 'subtlety' is down-right off-putting - not only is that episode my least favourite episode of Doctor Who, it has the lowest ratings of that series (series 12). It's the same as Time and the Rani, in some ways - the Thirteenth Doctor's era has potential, but it doesn't seem quite capable of achieving that potential. Even the latest series, which a lot of people have called miles better than what came before, is still a disorganised mess, trying to balance a million different plotlines, ideas and characters. Though I will say this - I still think that, on the whole, the show hasn't sunk as low as it did for Time and the Rani.

Overall, I would rate The Woman who Fell to Earth 7/10 and The Ghost Monument 5/10.

Random observations

-Ryan's dyspraxia is another example of an under-utilised plot element - it rarely comes up over the next two series. I feel like there was a lot of potential behind a companion who has a disability. Especially as I am myself disabled, though in a different way.

-Yaz has a rather amusing predicament in the first episode - she wants to be trusted with bigger stuff than parking disputes. However, she's the same age as Ryan - 19. Being on the police force at all at that age is quite the achievement on its own, in my opinion. Also, she has the opportunity, in the form of reporting the events on the train, to prove that she can be trusted to handle serious situations. Instead of reporting it, she keeps quiet on the word of the Doctor - who's a civilian. And not entirely of sound mind (to an ordinary person, anyway), if she's rambling about having been male and elderly half an hour ago. Maybe Yaz's superiors had the right idea?

-I do like the way the Doctor describes the process of regeneration - every cell in your body burning, and a feeling of coming close to death, just before being born again.

-There's a bit where the Doctor and her companions learn that Ryan's button-pressing summoned the alien. Graham and Grace immediately go off on Ryan, in different, though mutually horrifying, ways: Grace has a go at him for not having the precognitive ability to simply know that pressing the button will summon an alien. Graham, meanwhile, tries to accuse Ryan of using his dyspraxia as an excuse for potentially starting an alien invasion. And he wonders why Ryan doesn't like him - don't know about you, but I can think of a pretty good reason why!

-Amusingly, though, this particular trait of Graham's falls by the wayside after this episode. In fact, he never again so much as acts negatively towards Ryan, which makes up for the comment in my mind. Perhaps the writers realised Graham's statement in  The Woman Who Fell to Earth came off looking really, really bad?

-I feel like another under-utilised plot thread in The Ghost Monument is the titular Ghost Monument. To me, there was considerable promise in a premise where the Doctor spends the bulk of Series 11 trapped away from the TARDIS and trying to get back to it. Especially as it would maintain the serialised format which characterised the Smith and Capaldi eras, easing viewers into a potential change in style.

-For all that I dislike how the Timeless Child arc has been handled, it is really funny how the Child was forgotten and abandoned even in a meta sense.

-Something which I find quite interesting is the scene with the sentient pieces of cloth. The Doctor, being the Doctor, shields the others from the rags, luring them to her...and she says something quite interesting. She says that she has 'a dozen lifetimes' worth of fear for them to feast on - on the face of it, this makes sense, as this is the Thirteenth Doctor, and she's only just started that life. Except, she isn't the thirteenth - the War Doctor and the Metacrisis Doctor still counted as the Doctor, meaning that Thirteen is actually the fifteenth incarnation of the Doctor. The Thirteenth Doctor's only just started her existence, so obviously she doesn't have many memories of fear; the Metacrisis Doctor split off from the others, so the original Doctor wouldn't have access to any of his memories following the split. But that still leaves one lifetime who, judging from the Doctor's statement, didn't experience fear - my money's on the War Doctor. Of course, it's more likely that the writers forgot that the Thirteenth Doctor is only numerically the thirteenth, while actually being the fifteenth.

2020: A Summary

 Hello there! 

Well, 2020 was quite the unusual year. A global pandemic, everyone in their homes, Donald Trump becomes the first US president to get impeached twice... For a long time, I've been putting off this blog, because as I understand it, not much happened between March and September. But it's here at last!

I found a picture of the date surrounded by viruses, but it seemed a bit too topical.

January

January involved more mock exams. As per usual, I didn't do well. 

I also looked after Frodo and Sam! Only for a couple of days, though.

I remember that Covid-19 made its appearance in late January, early February. Though now I'm not so sure - apparently, the first case occurred in November 2019. Additionally, my mum had a bout of 'flu' in January, involving continuous coughing. So, who knows.

We live in a beautiful world

February

Now, February was an interesting month - Covid was becoming more prevalent. 

I also did a Biology Olympiad. I did reasonably well.

Another thing that happened was I attended a Laser Kombat event with an organisation called Oxfordshire Friends of the Young Deaf'; it was lots of fun.
My Sixth Form also had a Valentine's Ball Social, featuring the return of RELATIONSHIP BANDS!! ...I don't know why that's so exciting. I wore green, indicating single. A group of classmates were suitably impressed - evidently, they expected that I would hook up. My band colour didn't upgrade over the course of the evening, let's put it that way. I had to leave early, once again missing out on the final 15 minutes, because my sister wanted to leave early, and my parents didn't want to make multiple trips to the event to pick us up. Ah well - I finally featured in my selfies!

My dad was away for about half the month - he came back in March, just before Covid shut everything down. Talk about lucky!

Me and a good friend.

March

March really was a 'month of trials and tribulations'! Well, if you want to be slightly melodramatic. Covid was sweeping the globe, people were panicking, toilet paper supplies were at an all-time low. (Seriously, future historians are gonna look at that last one and say "No, that has to be made up!" And it really happened!)

Something that happened in March was my school's Christian Union did testimonies about their faith. The people who actually delivered testimonies were the leaders, one of their friends, and me. Due to a miscommunication, I gave my testimony to one of the leaders at church, assuming she'd bring it in on the day. She did not, as she assumed that I had a copy of my testimony. I didn't, meaning that I had to recite the thing from memory! It wasn't as bad as I expected, though.

Also, schools shut down at the end of the month. I finished my final year of secondary school three months earlier than I had intended. In a way, we came to the parting of the ways - this blog was always about my experience of Sixth Form.

Though I didn't quite finish school - I still had work to do, I just did it from home.

Some scenic woods. I took the picture for an Africa post.

April

I'm going to be honest: very little happened in April. I stayed home and worked, much like the rest of the world's population.

There are some details of things which would have happened in April on the calendar, such as visiting my godparents, but it's a while ago now, so I actually can't remember if those things happened. I took up jogging at one point. I also might have had asymptomatic coronavirus - my toes got really swollen and painful. Apparently, that's a symptom of coronavirus, in some cases.

Pets benefitted from lockdown, at least.

May

May was more of the same. New things, though - I started my short-lived series of reviews! I might continue them one day.

I would have had exams except they were cancelled.

Another thing was that Oreo was maybe born in May, though we aren't sure exactly when he was born.

This picture isn't from May, but it is hilarious, because Pippa looks so weirdly nervous about getting her picture taken.

June

June, the final gasp of exams! My final exam would have been Biology Paper 3 on the 15th.

I continued my short-lived review series, culminating in probably one of my favourite books, Never Let Me Go. I also started writing a series of blogs on life in Africa.

During June, I also started making preparations for university - mostly disabled student support stuff.

If you haven't read it yet, go read it!

July

In July, we welcomed Oreo into the family! When he was a small kitten, he was tiny! He was also quite shy - something which hasn't changed much. For the first month, he had to be kept separated from Pippin, as Pippin doesn't like cats much. It's a lurcher thing, apparently. They eventually became friends - the turning point was when Pippin came back from a long walk on the Cotswolds. Oreo escaped from upstairs and met Pippin for the first time; Pippin was so exhausted he basically went "Oh, you exist." We gave him a treat as a reward...except he was too tired to eat it! Though I think Oreo still felt slightly threatened by Pippin; if Pippin entered a room where Oreo was, Oreo would stand on two legs and whack him. Such a sweet kitten...

Something else that happened was I made a lot of Minicraft stuffed toys for family friends, including a tiger cub and a puppy for Neve and Huw. Uncle Will was the one who bought me and Karys our first kits - a tiger cub and a puppy.

Some of the toys I made

August

August was when I received my exam results. I did pretty well - I got an A in English Literature and Language, a B in History and a C in Biology.  The marks were based off my schoolwork over the previous 2 years. I got into Reading!

Will and Hel also visited in August; it was nice to see them. Something quite surprising was that Huw tripped over Pippin and he actually growled. At a two-year-old. I've trodden on him (by accident) many times, and elicited only a pained look of 'Why did you do that?' A toddler trips once and he goes 'DON'T do that!' In fairness, all he did was growl.

Tiny Ri-ri!

September

Well, here we are! Uni time! Though not quite yet - I only moved to Reading on the 20th. In early September, we went on holiday to a place in Shropshire called Jackfield Mills, with Granny, Tessa, great-aunt Sally and Pippa. It was a lot of fun. One of the highlights was probably the walking. Also, we went to the nearby town one day, and I ate one of the best pork pies I've ever had. On the same outing, I got a picture with the signatures of all the actors to play the Doctor so far, from a signature shop. Unfortunately, it's closed now.

I moved into my halls on the 20th; I found that nearly everybody else in my flat had already moved in.

That week, from the 20th to the 27th, was Freshers' Week. As might be expected, there were not many events. I did select my modules for the upcoming year, though! Autumn term was a module on immigration into Britain, a module on black history in relation to Britain, and a module on belief in the Middle Ages. Spring term was warfare in Early Modern Europe, Iran's relations with the West in the modern era, and the rise and fall of chivalry in the Medieval period. They were fun.

My parents and Pippin on a hill

October

October was fun, though it was mostly work. My parents visited half-way through, which was nice.

I joined multiple societies, including the Christian Union and the Science Fiction society. 

I also started making arrangements for housing for second year, with limited success at that time.

In addition to that, I started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix. It's very good - I highly recommend it.

There are still squirrels! I also saw a cat on campus the other day.

November

My birth month, zodiac sign Scorpio. Or Sagittarius, if you're born after 22nd November. Happily, my birthday fell during Reading Week. Reading Week is a period where you don't have any seminars or lectures. Don't be deceived, though, it's not relaxation time; it's for preparing for assignments. I spent Reading Week with my family.

I also made more headway with finding a house - the freshers in CU created a Whatsapp group for house-hunting. Well, six or so of us did; over time, multiple people left, leaving just four. 

I found the Harris Garden - it's a hidden garden on the Whiteknights campus, There's a gravestone in the garden, belonging to somebody called Michael. It's not the grave of the founder of the garden; it's a mystery.

This is from a couple of years ago, but I like it.

December

Most of December was the Christmas holidays - my term finished around the 8th.

It was nice to be back home. Though I still had to do lots of work, including a 2,500-word essay for the start of term.

Pippin was happy to see me - it was nice to see him. I think Oreo was also happy to see me - it's harder to tell with him.

Of course, a second lockdown happened towards the end of the Christmas holidays, trapping me at home.

I don't really remember much else that happened in December. I got a nice hat, scarf and gloves for Christmas from Sarah; the hat had a torch in it! Unfortunately, the torch has broken off...

I don't really have many photos.

Overall, I don't think this was a fun year. I'm not sure it was fun for most people. Looking back, it already seems unreal - everything seems almost back to normal, in England at least. We already have lots of people out in public, albeit wearing masks in a lot of places. Of course, it's not the same everywhere - lots of places are still struggling.

Though a lot of other stuff happened in 2020, which I feel like Covid overshadowed. For instance, there were the Black Lives Matter protests in June; the protests suddenly erupted in response to George Floyd's death, lasted several months, then died down again. And I've seen barely anybody discussing the protests lately, even though the problems which prompted them are still ongoing. Like Covid, they came out of nowhere, had a big impact, then seemingly died down, except that unlike Covid, there's almost nobody talking about them. 

In August 2020, there was an explosion in Beirut which killed 218 people - I haven't seen much mention of that either. Covid has dominated the public consciousness, which is fair enough, given its global repercussions; but I feel like it's blinding us to other tragedies as well. Or maybe that's human nature - we only really care about something if it affects us. 

Covid affected all of us - every single human being alive was affected in some way by it. What I think would be really amazing is if we all accepted that, if we all treated one another as fellow humans. Even for a single day. The Christmas Armistice of 1914 was like that - thousands of soldiers, British, French, German, from opposite sides of the First World War, abandoned the fight and made peace with one another. Bound by a common faith, a common celebration of Christmas, they refused to fight. One day, 117 years ago, just a few thousand soldiers, and it's still remembered today. Imagine if that happened across the world - how much would change, even if it just lasted a day? 

I don't think that would be possible, sadly. But what we can do is be kind. So let's do that.

World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls/Twice Upon a Time: To Be or Not To Be

 Hello!

The Doctor's latest regeneration - the first transition from male to female! The Doctor gets mortally wounded in The Doctor Falls, but The Doctor Falls is a follow-on from World Enough and Time. Twice Upon a Time is when the Doctor finally decides to go through with the regeneration, and The Woman who Fell to Earth is the new Doctor's adjustment period. Capaldi's final trilogy is a return to old patterns - it sees the return of the Mondasian Cybermen. And the First Doctor - well, we never saw where he went between leaving the Cybership and going to the TARDIS, nor was there much explanation for his cryptic statement that it was "far from being all over". Twice Upon a Time explains both these things - he went for a walk in the snow and accidentally bumped into his own future. As you do.

Going out with a bang, I guess

World Enough and Time

World Enough and Time starts with the Doctor - he stumbles out of the TARDIS into an arctic waste and starting to regenerate. Then it switches to earlier in time, with the TARDIS materialising on a spaceship stuck by a black hole. A partially-redeemed version of the Master, regenerated into a woman and calling herself Missy, is undergoing a test to determine how far she's been redeemed, with the Doctor's companions, Bill and Nardole, serving as her temporary companions while the Doctor monitors the situation. The sole person they encounter is pleased to see them...until he learns that Bill is a human. Apparently, there are creatures in the bowels of the ship which emerge and abduct the crew-members, but only if they detect human life-signs; the man is an alien. As the creatures arrive, the man panics and shoots Bill; the creatures take her (yeah, her) into the lifts, promising to mend her. It turns out that, several days ago, the ship nearly bumped into the black hole and some of the crew went to the bottom of the ship to activate the rear thrusters. They never came back, and over a matter of hours hundreds of new life-forms appeared. Over the next couple of days, more crew-members disappeared, abducted by the creatures. The Doctor explains - the gravitational pull of the black hole means time is moving slower at one end of the ship than at the other. The crew-members who went to the bottom of the ship got stuck down there, due to the time dilation; the new life-signs are their descendants, because while it's been a couple of days at the top, it's been closer to a couple of millennia at the bottom. After 10 minutes and three different explanations, the man still doesn't get it, so the Doctor just judo-flips him and climbs into the elevator with Missy and Nardole.

Bill, meanwhile, is operated on. She later meets Mr Razor, an employee of the hospital, and ends up working for the hospital with him, over time losing hope that the Doctor will ever turn up. Eventually, the chest-piece she received starts failing; she receives the 'full upgrade' to rectify the problem. This is a common thing in the bowels of the ship - surprisingly enough, such places are not good places to live. The people there are dying - so they must be 'upgraded' to survive.

The Doctor, Nardole and Missy arrive; the Doctor and Nardole head to the operating theatre while Missy finds out what its planet of origin is. She finds that the planet of origin is Mondas; she then encounters Razor, who turns out to be the Master - specifically, the Harold Saxon incarnation. Nardole and the Doctor, meanwhile, find a Mondasian Cyberman in a closet; it turns out to be Bill, upgraded into the first proper Cyberman.

Missy and Saxon Master either side of the unfortunate Bill

The Doctor Falls

The Doctor Falls starts with a scene of children in the countryside - it's still on the spaceship, it's a solar farm. One of the children notices the ground shaking; a shuttle emerges, nearly flattening her, then Bill appears, carrying an unconscious Doctor. Cut to a few hours previously - the Master and Missy, having sided with each other, are mocking the Doctor on top of the hospital, brainstorming ways to kill him. Just after the end of the previous episode, Missy hit the Doctor, knocking him onto a computer; Nardole, meanwhile, ran off. The Doctor wakes up eventually and bickers back and forth with the Masters; eventually, the Master notices that the Cybermen are coming after the Time Lords on the roof.

As it turns out, when the Doctor got smacked onto that computer, he took the opportunity to change the number of hearts the Cybermen scanned for to two. Missy knocks out her past self and Nardole turns up - he wasn't being cowardly, he was looking for shuttlecraft. He found one; the Masters get in. Before the Doctor can, he gets electrocuted by a Cyberman; Bill fries it, then grabs the ladder on the bottom of the shuttle. They escape to one of the solar farms...in the process nearly flattening Alit, the little girl. Two weeks later, Alit visits the barn (where Bill lives now), bringing her a mirror so she understands why people are scared enough to stick her in a barn. Kind, but perhaps thoughtless as well, as Bill has a freak-out over seeing a Cyber-face instead of her own. Bill retains her sense of self only because she refuses to acknowledge the truth of her situation - her mind acts as a perception filter, blocking out the truth.

At the same time, the residents of the solar farm are preparing for battle with the Cybermen - they will return eventually. The Doctor's plan is to repel the initial advance and trick the Cybermen into marshalling a military response - up till this point, it's just been raiding parties to kidnap children. The initial advance is successfully repelled, by triggering fuel lines under the soil to explode While the Cybermen are re-grouping, Nardole takes the evacuees through service tunnels to the lifts, so that they can escape to a solar farm five floors up. Just before the battle begins, the Masters sneak off, having no desire to risk their lives performing heroics; the Doctor, absolutely livid at this cowardice, rants to them that he's fighting the Cybermen because that's a good thing to do, and he will happily fight and die in the name of doing the right thing. He also demands that the Masters consider what they would fight and die for; unfortunately, he doesn't get through to them, and the Masters walk off, deciding that that decision can wait. Bill and the Doctor fight the Cybermen; the Masters, meanwhile, back-stab each other: Missy literally stabs the Saxon Master in the back, while he shoots her with a laser screwdriver. The Saxon Master heads into the lift to return to his TARDIS; Missy, meanwhile, dies properly, unable to regenerate. Eventually, the Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to blow up the entire floor. After the explosion, Bill finds him and mourns, before being de-converted by Heather, a reality-warper from episode 1 of Series 10; she gets turned into a reality-warper as well. They both teleport the Doctor back to the TARDIS; Heather pilots the TARDIS away from the black hole, while Bill says her farewells. Bill and Heather depart to travel the universe, shortly before the Doctor resurrects, brought back to life by Bill's tears. He refuses to regenerate and stumbles out of the TARDIS...into the Antarctic.

This is the titular fall - mortally wounded, seconds before blowing up an entire floor of a spaceship. Epic way to go out, personally.

 

Twice Upon a Time

Twice Upon a Time begins with a recap of the previous episodes... the first three episodes of The Tenth Planet. It then shows the First Doctor, now played by David Bradley, walking to the TARDIS, stubbornly refusing to regenerate all the way. He encounters his own future - the two proceed to bicker, with the Twelfth Doctor demanding to know why the First won't regenerate. The argument is cut short when they encounter a World War 1 captain. He got plucked from his time and placed in a strange room, but then he landed in the South Pole when a "timeline error" occurred. A glass woman appears, and the Doctors hustle the Captain into the Twelfth Doctor's TARDIS. The Doctors are so busy bickering that they fail to notice the TARDIS being lifted into the air. It's delivered into the ominous-sounding Chamber of the Dead. The Chamber is inhabited by Testimony - which the glass woman calls "what awaits every person after death". She offers the Doctor the chance to meet with Bill one last time in exchange for the Captain; the Captain accepts the deal readily, much to the frustration of the Doctors. The two Doctors, Bill and the Captain escape onto the snow below, heading for the First Doctor's TARDIS - the aim is to find out who the glass woman was in life, and what Testimony is up to. For that, the Doctors head for the largest database in the universe, located at the centre of the universe. Once they get there, they learn that Testimony is completely benevolent - it's just a way to enable the testimony of the long dead to interact with the living populace. The Doctors accordingly agree to put the Captain back in his proper temporal place - though the Twelfth Doctor deliberately lands a few hours later, right before the Christmas Armistice, so the Captain survives. It also turns out that he's a Lethbridge-Stewart - an ancestor of the Brigadier! The Doctors say farewell; the First Doctor steps back into his TARDIS, taking it back to the South Pole and opening the doors for Ben and Polly before collapsing to the ground...

The Doctor - a crotchety old man with a fondness for black-and-white colour schemes

The Twelfth Doctor has one last chat with Bill; during this conversation, he says goodbye to Nardole and Clara, who were both collected by Testimony. (Nardole died of old age after the events of The Doctor Falls, Clara died a while before in circumstances I shan't reveal). He then returns to his TARDIS and regenerating. When the Doctor's finished regenerating, she gets chucked out of the TARDIS into mid-air, just before an explosion wrecks the console room. The TARDIS dematerialises.

Impeccable dress-sense...

Slightly less impeccable dress sense! 

/

Overall, I really like the ending trilogy of Series 10. I particularly like the fact that the Doctor willingly gives his life to help protect people he barely knows - in some senses, it's the culmination of a character arc stretching from the First Doctor. The First Doctor allowed himself to be weakened to the point of regeneration to protect humanity from the Cybermen; the Twelfth Doctor actively fought the Cybermen just to buy time for some humans (or Mondasians) to escape. It's exemplified in the Doctor's speech to the Masters as they leave - he does what he does because it's the right thing to do, because it's kind; the speech perfectly encapsulates who the Doctor is. He's the man who protects, not for glory or to get back at someone, but because it's a good thing to do. This is also exemplified in the following episode - while Twelve is researching Testimony, Bill and One discuss his reasons for leaving Gallifrey. As it turns out, one reason he left was to find out how good triumphs over evil, despite the fact that evil is more likely to go to extremes to win. Bill realises something the Doctor hasn't over thousands of years. He's the reason good prevails over evil - a single man racing around the universe, helping people and inspiring them to do good themselves. It's also fitting that the first Doctor of the Doctor's second cycle, a grumpy old man, meets the first Doctor of the first cycle, a grumpy old man, after both have had a confrontation with the Cybermen. 

In some ways, the Twelfth Doctor's final episodes wrap up his entire tenure; at the start of that life, he was unsure of whether he was a good man or not. By the end, his declaration of his beliefs prove beyond doubt that he is a good man. Additionally, there is some irony in the fact that, in his first episode, he begged Clara to accept him; in his final episode, he rejects the idea that Bill is Bill, despite her attempts to make him accept her. He tries, desperately, to repair his friendship with Missy; back in Series 8, Missy's whole plan was an attempt to repair their friendship. Indeed, it's possible that his appeal to Missy is what drove her attempt to repair their friendship - he makes the appeal in front of the version of the Master immediately preceding Missy. Similarly, Missy shows noticeable signs of change - she's visibly conflicted during that speech, and gets her past self out of the way specifically with the intention of siding with the Doctor. Moreover, when Bill's been taken into the lift in World Enough and Time, Missy's almost as angry with the man who shot her as the Doctor is; she cares little for Bill, but is still angry for her, because she understands that the Doctor does care for her.

I feel like World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls/Twice Upon a Time has a similar poignancy to The End of Time regarding loss and moving on. Both stories deal with death and loss, both feature the Doctor being unwilling to regenerate. However, while the Tenth Doctor was afraid of death, the Twelfth is tired of living - he describes a life as long as his as a battlefield, where everyone has fallen, including him. Specifically, the Doctor has grown tired of losing himself, in a way; every time he regenerates, he has to figure out what sort of person he is all over again. The Twelfth Doctor in particular struggled with figuring out what sort of person he was; he finally figured it out, and now it's time for him to re-discover himself again. Tying in with this battlefield statement, he's also tired of losing everybody he loves, tired of having to move on. What gives him the courage to embrace the post-regeneration period of discovery once more is meeting his original self, and being reminded that some things have remained consistent throughout the Doctor's lives; saying goodbye to his companions gives him the strength to continue living. Ultimately, he regenerates, stating that 'One more lifetime won't kill anybody.' Fittingly, he says goodbye to Bill, Nardole and Clara through Testimony, which was designed with the express purpose of allowing the living to find closure with their deceased loved ones. 

Just like with The End of Time, I find that there's something very relatable about the Doctor's fears. We all change, through our lives, and we don't know what we'll become. I'm terrified that, as I grow older, I'll do nothing with my life - I'll spend all day lazing around, isolated and alone, while everybody I know goes on to do amazing things, shape the world into a better place. It's not that I don't want the people I love to be successful if I'm not - I'd love for them to be successful, no matter what's going on with me. The thing I fear most is the possibility that I will waste the time that I have, rather than spending that time with my loved ones, or helping make the world a better place. Every day I live, every action I take brings me closer to that potential future, and I don't have the faintest idea how I'd prevent it from becoming reality; I have a constant concern that nothing I do will be enough to avert it. At the same time, it's only one possible future out of billions. Though I feel like it's not an uncommon fear - I once made a testimony at Christian Union at school expressing my fears for the future. During the course of the testimony, I noted that, from my perspective, the CU leaders knew what they planned on doing in life; their response was to emphatically shake their heads. On that note, as the Doctor demonstrates, deciding what you believe in, what you stand for, is a brilliant way of making a first step in establishing a direction in life.

Addressing the second part of the Doctor's fears - losing people; it's often difficult. I still miss Nana and great-uncle Stu, who died years ago. You know who else I still miss? Charlie - the dog I had when I was growing up. She died in roughly 2010, about 11 years ago now; in fact, given that she was born in 2006, she would be dead by now anyway. Even so, after all this time, I still wish I could see her, and Nana and great-uncle Stu, one last time, because that's how grief works. It doesn't go away, you just grow used to it; indeed, the Doctor says something similar. In a previous episode, after the death of someone he loved, the Doctor noted that the day you lose someone isn't the worst day of your life - it's every day they stay dead, every day that you live with the pain of losing them. It's especially difficult when you don't have closure - the reason Testimony existed was to give people that closure. A lot of people haven't been able to have that closure, myself included - Nana was essentially comatose the last time I saw her, and great-uncle Stu died in his sleep; I never had the opportunity to say goodbye to either of them. But I think we do have a form of comfort - our memories of those we loved. That's all Testimony is, really - memories, poured into glass robots. We carry those memories with us, wherever we go. The Second Doctor once said, while comforting a grieving companion, that he forgets the pain of losing those he loved, most of the time, but when he really wants to remember them, he does; he goes on to say that the same will happen for the person he's comforting. The Thirteenth Doctor, in her first episode, says something rather similar - she remembers what they would have said and done and thought, constantly. Though the pain diminishes, we never really forget the people we've loved. Albus Dumbledore says a similar thing: he says that those we love never truly leave us, and they show themselves when we have greatest need of them. Accordingly, like the Doctor, we can move on - not pretending the grief isn't there, but accepting its presence and honouring the memories of those we lost.

Overall, I would rate World Enough and Time 8/10, The Doctor Falls 9/10 and Twice Upon a Time 7/10.

Random observations:

-I will say, the sequence when Heather appears is a little bit out of nowhere - she hasn't appeared since episode 1 of Series 10, so the viewers probably wouldn't remember her.

-After shooting Missy, the Master answers the Doctor's question about whether he's considered how he'll die - he notes that the mutual backstab is where the Master was always headed.  He's right - the Master has been double-crossing and back-stabbing since their first appearance, so it is very fitting that they back-stab each other.

-Something else I really like is the bit where the Doctor proves how well he knows the Master. Acknowledging that he last saw him in the events of The End of Time, he predicts that the Master got kicked off Gallifrey, eventually got stuck on the ship, ruled over the people in the bowels of the ship until he got overthrown, then resorted to skulking around in disguise. He's evidently correct, as neither version of the Master corrects him on anything other than a trivial point about exactly how he left Gallifrey.

-At one point, Bill comes out as lesbian to the Doctor - it's a nice scene, especially because he had already guessed, so he ends up looking a bit confused that she's mentioning something they both know. It's particularly nice because other than the aforementioned confusion, he's completely accepting.

-On that note, the First Doctor says in Twice Upon A Time that he's had sex with women before, as part of a sexist joke about women being made out of glass. Bill says she's had sex with women, too - the Twelfth Doctor's smirk in response is glorious.

-Similarly, I like the Doctor's chill attitude towards Bill's cyber-conversion - neither he nor Nardole treat her as if she's lesser because of it. In particular, when Bill gets angry at the Doctor for leaving her for ten years, she blows up the door of the barn. Nardole, standing outside, simply notes that "somebody broke the barn", as if there's nothing unusual about that sort of occurrence.

-Another thing I quite like is the homage to Power of the Daleks - when the Doctor's regeneration is finished, a ring slips off her finger, just as the First Doctor's ring no longer fit after his regeneration. Additionally, the audience gets treated to a rotating view of the wrecked console room - just as the Doctor's perspective post-regeneration depicted the room spinning in Power of the Daleks.

-The novelisation of Twice Upon a Time adds another layer to the Twelfth Doctor's fear of regeneration - last time, he nuked a village and destroyed an entire Dalek fleet. He's worried about the regenerations getting stronger. Given what happens to the TARDIS when he regenerates, he might have had a point.

-Something which does irritate me - the First Doctor's confusion about the sonic screwdriver. Sonic screwdrivers are Time Lord technology - there's no reason for him to not know what they are. Though granted, the Twelfth Doctor is sporting sonic sunglasses at one point, which does partially justify the First Doctor's confusion.

-The Masters' interactions are quite fun - particularly, there's an interesting parallel with how multiple incarnation of the Doctor treat each other. The Doctors bicker, but ultimately get on quite well. There's no such self-respect for the Master - the Saxon Master willingly flirts with himself, apparently not registering Missy as the Master because she's female. Missy, meanwhile, willingly stabs her own past self, and earlier sided with the Doctor when he insulted Saxon Master's appearance. That's actually quite tragic, if you think about it.
-Something else I like is a scene in Twice upon a Time where Bill swears at the Twelfth Doctor for refusing to recognise her. The First Doctor overhears and threatens to spank her if she does it again (!) The Twelfth Doctor is understandably mortified, but Bill actually finds it quite amusing, expressing the wish that she and the Doctor will spend years laughing about the awkwardness of that moment. The Doctor's expression makes it clear that that's what he would like as well - part of him is desperately hoping that the Bill he sees is the real Bill, not a trick. It's a sweet moment which emphasises their bond.

-Immediately after regenerating, the first thing the Twelfth Doctor did was complain about the colour of his kidneys. Just before his regeneration, in Twice Upon A Time, he falls to the floor, clutching his abdomen - the kidneys have quit, evidently. Every time I watch that scene, I can't help but think about the fact that the Twelfth Doctor's loathsomely-coloured kidneys just quit on him. Who knows, maybe it was payback!

-One of my favourite scenes in the trilogy is at the beginning of World Enough and Time; Missy introduces herself as 'Doctor Who', rather than 'the Doctor', apparently to circumvent the whole situation where people ask 'Doctor who?' She then makes several rather dated pop-culture references, much to Bill's confusion. Another amusing aspect of this scene is the fact that Missy's been locked in a vault for decades - how does she even know those incredibly specific references?

-Regeneration count - electrocuted and shot by Cybermen (Twelfth to Thirteenth Doctor). 14th regeneration (second of second cycle).

The Time of the Doctor/Deep Breath: A Cycle's Culmination

 Hello!

The Time of the Doctor followed on from The Day of the Doctor. It involved the return of the Time Lords, in a sense, as well as the reveal that the Doctor had exhausted his regenerations. The Time of the Doctor ends with the Doctor being granted a new cycle of regenerations by the Time Lords - though we don't actually know how many he has now. Deep Breath had the Twelfth Doctor suffering from major post-regeneration sickness - probably due in part to the new regeneration cycle.

Thirteenth regeneration!

The Time of the Doctor

The Time of the Doctor begins with a woman called Tasha Lem describing how a planet, called Trenzalore, began emitting a broadcast. Nobody could understand it, but everyone in the universe felt afraid anyway, and rushed to investigate. Tasha Lem got there first and put a forcefield around Trenzalore; she's the Mother Superious of a giant flying church. All the Doctor's enemies are there - though if everyone in the universe is there, it stands to reason that there's plenty of people who would side with the Doctor as well. The Doctor's also poking around; he's picked up a new companion, a cyber-head called Handles. Clara's still travelling with him, just not on that specific occasion. He's arranged a meeting with Tasha in order to go onto Trenzalore; before he goes to the meeting, he picks Clara up from Christmas dinner with her family. They get to the surface of Trenzalore and find the source of the transmission in a tower in a town called Christmas. The transmission is coming from the Time Lords - the plan to save Gallifrey in Day of the Doctor worked. They're asking the question "Doctor who?". It's a safe-word - only the Doctor and his allies know his name, so if somebody answers the question, it's obviously the Doctor, sending the signal that it's safe to return to the main universe. Of course, if the Time Lords emerged, the Time War would just begin anew; for that reason, the Doctor sends Clara away, then spends the next few centuries protecting Christmas from attackers. 300 years later, the TARDIS returns...with Clara hanging onto the door. She heard it dematerialising and hitched a ride, necessitating a slow journey through the time vortex to protect Clara from dying. The Doctor and Clara have a discussion, during which it is revealed that he's used up all his regenerations; he then sneakily drops her off at home again and returns to Trenzalore. Over the next six hundred years, he fights a full-on war against all his oldest enemies. Eventually, it's down to him and the Daleks, with the Doctor dying of old age; Tasha travels to the 21st Century in the TARDIS to pick Clara up again, so she can say goodbye. She greets the Doctor, now an elderly man, as he shuffles up the bell tower to wait for death; Clara, meanwhile, pleads with the Time Lords to help him. They oblige by providing the Doctor with a whole new set of regenerations; he then uses the energy from the first one to blow up a Dalek fleet, along with the town of Christmas. Clara and the townspeople survive by hiding in the basement of the clock tower. The Doctor then returns to the TARDIS, changing into new clothes just to regenerate, hallucinates Amy Pond, then regenerates at last. The first thing the Twelfth Doctor does is complain about the colour of his kidneys, followed by forgetting how to fly the TARDIS. Clara's reaction to this is priceless, as one might expect.

A crack in the wall, guarded by a now elderly Doctor. The crack is a crack in reality, with Gallifrey on the other side.

Deep Breath

Deep Breath starts with a dinosaur...in London, in the 19th century. Like The Christmas Invasion, it features the return of characters who were prominent during the previous Doctor's era - the characters in question are Madam Vastra (a Silurian), her wife Jenny, and Strax their Sontaran butler. Sontarans are a clone race, the 'perfect warriors'. Sontarans are enemies of the Doctor, first introduced in the Third Doctor's era; Strax, however, is a willing ally of the Doctor. The Silurians were the previous inhabitants of Earth - they learned of a coming catastrophe and went into suspended animation to wait it out. The  crisis passed, but they didn't wake, giving humans time to evolve and take over; over time, small groups have periodically woken up and disagreed with the new management. Madam Vastra woke up in the Victorian era, where she found that human construction workers had accidentally annihilated her family; she started eating construction workers as revenge. The Ninth Doctor found her and persuaded her to stop killing them, though this occurred off-screen - she first appeared on TV in the Eleventh Doctor's era. Jenny, meanwhile, is an ordinary human. Though given her wife's a lizard-person from the dawn of time and her butler's a disgraced alien clone warrior, maybe not that ordinary.

Left to right - Strax, Jenny and Vastra

Madam Vastra is called to investigate the dinosaur; Jenny quickly deduces that it's choking on something. That something is the TARDIS - during the end of The Time of the Doctor, the Doctor crashed it into a dinosaur's throat, tried to escape and took the poor thing with it. The dinosaur spits out the TARDIS; the Doctor soon emerges, very confused. Once the Doctor's been taken to Vastra's house, he quickly falls asleep...though Vastra helps by psychically knocking him out. He wakes up in the night and escapes from the house, making his way to the Thames, where the dinosaur is still roaring its displeasure at its new home; as the Doctor watches, it gets burned to death. By the morning, he still has not returned to Madame Vastra's house; Clara deduces his location through newspaper adverts. Clara reunites with him at a fancy restaurant, finding in the process that he has obtained a new outfit from a tramp. He and Clara quickly realise that there's something very strange about the other patrons of the restaurant - they aren't eating or breathing. It turns out that the other patrons are robots; a spaceship staffed by robots from the far future crashed in Earth's past, millions of years ago. Throughout these long years, they've been rebuilding themselves out of spare parts - human and animal; they were responsible for the death of the dinosaur. Vastra, Jenny and Strax lead an assault on the droids, while the Doctor pursues the main droid - the command node. The command node flies the restaurant into the air, suspended from a hot air balloon made out of skin! The Doctor and the command node tussle, which culminates in the command node falling and dying, resulting in the deactivation of the other droids. At the end, the Doctor and Clara have an emotional confrontation in modern Glasgow, where the Doctor begs Clara to recognise that he is the Doctor, making Clara the first companion since Ben, in the First Doctor's time, to straight-up reject the idea that the new Doctor is the same man as the old one. Technically Rose also struggled to accept the new Doctor - but she accepted that it was him within about ten minutes of the regeneration.

End of one cycle...

Beginning of another!

Overall, I quite enjoyed The Time of the Doctor. I do think it was a bit more rushed than The End of Time, but it's still a fitting send-off for the Eleventh Doctor. For one, the First Doctor started running from Gallifrey; at the end of his cycle, the Doctor stays still, in one place, for centuries, to protect others. Fittingly, by the end, the Eleventh Doctor looks quite like the First.  Also, the music from the Tenth Doctor's sacrifice plays again when Clara reunites with the elderly Doctor; while in The End of Time, it represents the Tenth Doctor's potential future fading away, I feel like here it represents all the moments the Eleventh Doctor has lived, fading into the past. Indeed, given that without Clara's intervention the Doctor would have died fully, it feels like all the moments the Doctor's lived, across all his lives, fading away. It's also fitting given how the Doctor's just come off the events of The Day of the Doctor.  He's just experienced the final battle of the Time War, three times over; now, he wages a millennium-long campaign to prevent the war from breaking out anew. Additionally, it's interesting how the Time War has almost overshadowed the Doctor's entire regeneration cycle. It was his first encounters with the Daleks, in his first and second lifetimes, which made them aware of life beyond Skaro and encouraged them to develop inter-stellar travel. In his fourth and seventh incarnations, he took actions which (apparently) contributed to the increasing tensions between the Daleks and the Time Lords: being sent on a mission to wipe the Daleks out at their creation by the Time Lords and baiting the Daleks into destroying Skaro, respectively. The Eighth Doctor's life was ended because of the Time War and the War Doctor fought in it; the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors were continually haunted by what they did in the war. It's therefore fitting that the Eleventh Doctor's life culminates in him preventing a fresh outbreak of the war.

I quite like Deep Breath as well; my favourite thing about the episode is Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. Second is the Doctor and Clara's interactions - Capaldi and Coleman (Clara's actress) play off each other very well, creating effective banter. It's also effective at the end - the Doctor is hurt that Clara refuses to recognise him. Clara, meanwhile, feels abandoned by the Eleventh Doctor being replaced by a stranger. While I dislike how stubborn she is on that front, it would be wrong to criticise the episode for a genuinely good sub-plot where Clara struggles to accept the new Doctor. Indeed, she has a valid point - on some level, the Doctor is no longer the man Clara knew; that's the nature of regeneration. At the same time, the Doctor is right to feel hurt by her rejection - especially when the Eleventh Doctor, right before his regeneration, phones Clara, telling her to stick by the new Doctor. The Twelfth Doctor then, in an attempt to persuade Clara, repeats back to her what his past self said...and Clara's immediate response is to assume that he was eavesdropping, highlighting just how much she fails to recognise the new Doctor. On the other hand, when Clara does come round, she just needs to look at the Doctor to recognise him, despite the difference in appearance between the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors. It leads to a pleasant sequence where Clara, delighted to have realised that the Doctor is still the same person, hugs him. The Doctor grumbles that he's no longer a hugging person, but he's quite obviously just as overjoyed that Clara's accepted him.

However, a major problem with the episode is Madam Vastra's characterisation. For one, after incapacitating the Doctor, she calls men 'monkeys'; it's unnecessarily demeaning of men. From this scene, she is evidently someone who finds it perfectly acceptable to mock her delirious and dazed friend, attributing his confused state (and subsequent gullibility) to his gender, rather than the difficult and agonising process of dying and coming back that he just went through. Moreover, it's not a case of not being aware of regeneration - Vastra first met the Doctor when he was the Ninth Doctor. She's fully aware of regeneration and its effects, and still mocks the Doctor for his confusion. Additionally, various lines in the previous episode suggest that this delirium and confusion was, in part, there before the regeneration - in other words, the Eleventh Doctor was going senile, and this carried through to the start of the Twelfth Doctor's life. So Vastra's mocking the Doctor for losing his mental faculties due to old age - some friend! I especially dislike this because I had to watch Nana go through a similar decline - the Doctor's confusion reminds me of Nana's confusion. Seeing Vastra make fun of that confusion...it's disgustingly callous, especially as she's supposed to be someone the Doctor can rely on.

Moreover, Madam Vastra's relationship with Jenny is also demeaning - when Vastra makes that joke, Jenny's initially under the impression that it's another demeaning nickname for humans in general. This implies that it's common for Vastra to insult her wife's species, which itself implies a rather verbally abusive dynamic between the two. Indeed, this implication is made explicit by Vastra's explanation - 'People are apes. Men are monkeys'. Despite her wife's obvious discomfort with Vastra calling people apes, she still does it. Additionally, there's a power imbalance in their relationship as well. In public, Jenny pretends to be Vastra's servant - this makes sense, given that two women married to each other, in the Victorian age, would not be taken well. However, she also appears to be her wife's servant in private; Jenny herself notes that there's a rather suspicious coincidence behind the fact that she's still the one serving tea in private. Between that and Vastra's proclivity towards insulting Jenny's species, their relationship doesn't come across as particularly healthy. This isn't really addressed in the episode - indeed, this episode is the last we see of them. 

It's actually quite disappointing, as Jenny and Vastra are the only recurring LGBT+ couple to appear in the series thus far...and not only is their relationship somewhat unhealthy, but they're also never even seen again after this episode, so there's no chance of depicting them develop a healthier relationship. It's especially unfortunate both for Vastra and her relationship with her wife because previous episodes had depicted Vastra as being compassionate and moral, kind to her friends, with a few moments of insensitivity; previous episodes depicted her relationship with Jenny as overall healthy, and pretty sweet. A previous episode, in which Jenny died temporarily, had Vastra absolutely distraught; after reviving Jenny, Strax commented that the heart is a simple organ. Vastra's response that she has not found it to be simple indicates how deeply she cares for Jenny; her love for Jenny, by that episode, had enabled her to (mostly) overcome her prejudice against humans. Additionally, another episode had Vastra looking after the Doctor while he was suffering from depression - and she was nothing but kind and supportive. Here, her character and her relationship with Jenny get butchered in the name of a few moments of cheap comedy. It's tragic, and in my mind, it really brings down an otherwise great episode.

Overall, I'd give The Time of the Doctor 8/10 and Deep Breath 5/10.

Random observations:

-The Time of the Doctor clashes with an earlier episode, where the Doctor had died on Trenzalore. Or kind of, anyway - I like to think that a future final incarnation might have returned to Trenzalore to die there, with his TARDIS changing to match the Eleventh Doctor's TARDIS, resulting in the past version of the Doctor and Clara assuming that it was the Eleventh Doctor who died on Trenzalore.

-Both Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, who played Amy, were wearing wigs - they were doing other roles at the same time, which necessitated their heads be bald.

-The actual regeneration is a short, quick blur, which has attracted considerable mockery. But the regeneration had already started, and the Doctor used a lot of energy destroying the Dalek fleet. It's entirely possible that the actual transition was so quick because there really wasn't much energy left for that regeneration, most of it having gone into nuking Christmas.

-One of my favourite scenes in Deep Breath is the sequence where Clara and the Doctor reunite at the restaurant. During the course of the conversation, it is revealed that neither of them placed the adverts which led them to each other; it also turns out that the advert leading the Doctor to Clara referred to a 'needy egomaniac'. Clara gets side-tracked by the egomania comment, to which the Doctor says that the conversation is about the adverts, not the fact that the advert leading the Doctor to Clara implicitly called her an egomaniac. Clara then literally says "Nothing is more important than my egomania!" Accordingly, the Doctor promptly mocks her for that.

-Clara, Rose and Sarah-Jane may jointly hold the record for meeting the Doctor during his regeneration the most times: Sarah-Jane witnessed the Third Doctor's regeneration, interacted with the Tenth Doctor shortly before his aborted regeneration (and after), and saw him shortly before his regeneration in The End of Time. Clara interacted with the War Doctor shortly before his regeneration, witnessed the Eleventh Doctor's regeneration, and saw the Twelfth Doctor shortly before his regeneration. Rose, meanwhile, witnessed two regenerations (Nine to Ten and the aborted regeneration), and a past version of her was the last person to see the Tenth Doctor before his regeneration into the Eleventh Doctor.

-Regeneration count - extreme old age (Eleventh to Twelfth Doctor). New cycle, 13th regeneration.