Paul Gadzikowski

• Wed, 12:30: I think I'll need to create a Twitter account named for 3Faces once AKOTAS ends, but not till then.
• Wed, 12:56: The main IMDb page for Malcolm In The Middle is entirely bereft of the family's surname.
• Wed, 13:07: RT @kobunheat: Just now realized that in The Princess Bride, Christopher Guest's fingers go up to 11
• Wed, 13:21: RT @DrJaneChi: Jaw dropping, antichoice. RT @robinmarty when left unfiltered, this is what they really want: https://t.co/FcFgTd7wu2
• Wed, 19:57: #ConfessYourUnpopularOpinion Superman Returns shoulda generated a whole new branch continuity.
• Wed, 20:59: #AKOTAS update: sticking point. http://t.co/Az4yZePQ12 #webcomics #kingarthur
• Wed, 21:27: #ConfessYourUnpopularOpinion Steely Dan doesn't have a sound, it has a noise
• Wed, 23:06: #ConfessYourUnpopularOpinion Rose was made the agency of things I'd rather weren't done to the franchise, but Rose herself I liked fine.
• Thu, 05:24: Street full of flashing cop cars when I came out to go to work. I wished I'd checked messages yesterday to see if the new headlight was in.
• Thu, 07:39: Problem with making every comics superhero dark after Miller is it's like making every soap opera about weather control after Luke & Laura.
• Thu, 10:08: RT @linkshund: @1LyfeAynRand All the Richard Dawkins in the world have fewer Nobel Prizes than Muslims #makeuthink
• Thu, 10:29: It's always a good day when I draw something in triangles, but when 3Faces is on its summer hiatus it's particularly rare and appreciated.

• Mon, 13:24: RT @ferretthimself: I would read this version of Wonder Woman and never stop reading: http://t.co/I59Pp67yXn (H/t @ysabel)
• Mon, 13:47: Photo: rosalarian: I came up with this idea in the middle of the night, after coming up with a�different... http://t.co/MQA1kF6J5A
• Mon, 14:55: I was thinking, "What if Mordred and Galahad were playing Calvin and Hobbes? Maybe Galahad would complain he always has to be the tiger."
• Mon, 14:56: "No, Galahad wouldn't complain. Besides, he'd like being Hobbes. ... Maybe I could draw them going over the hill in the red wagon."
• Mon, 14:56: "No, it's winter now." Then I drew tomorrow's cartoon.
• Mon, 20:28: #AKOTAS update: he just doesn't want to go along. http://t.co/BsneZTABBK #webcomics #kingarthur
• Mon, 20:45: I wondered how that was going to happen. #BeingHuman
• Mon, 23:18: #TheFollowing needs to stop with episode climaxes with Ryan shooting after escaping vehicles. This's two in a row. Ryan needs to win one.
• Tue, 10:01: I like to say, I don't ship Doctor/Rose but the Doctor and Rose sure did. On BBC Sherlock, rather, all the other characters ship the leads.
• Tue, 10:05: The reason Johnlock shippers think their ship is "canon" is because all the characters but John and Sherlock ship John and Sherlock.
• Tue, 10:12: ( I put "canon" in quotation marks because I don't believe "canon" actually exists: http://t.co/339vk3ah2s )
• Tue, 10:44: There's no conspiracy among the wealthy to oppress the masses. That's just how the wealthy already think things are or should be.

Tweets copied by twittinesis.com

"Can I just say: werewolves."

"I know!"

"Four men, Sarah."

In one of my first LJ entries, I wrote in part:

Phil Khan observed, in a roundtable in the current Webcomics Examiner, of a particular artist that he's not interested in what the guy does but loves that he does it. scarfwoman didn't like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, because that day she'd been in the mood for something familiar, whereas I liked it, being a student of the way a fiction evolves from one medium and era to the next.

Trekfans railed against Enterprise from the start - at least till season four when Coto, Brennert and the Reeves-Stevens signed on - because it kept poor continuity with the original series. (The reason the year four stories were better wasn't that they kept continuity. They may have been inspired by continuity but the bottom line is that they were better written.) Fans complained that Berman was trying to make Star Trek over his way. But that's what I liked about it. I said so from the start: I said it was the closest he'd gotten to remaking the first series (and in saying so I persuaded scarfmom to keep watching when she hadn't been persuaded by the first episode or two).

More recently I posted (reprinting a comment I'd made at Websnark):

The thing about family is the explanation why I continued to enjoy Star Trek beyond 1995 when so many others were abandoning it or, worse, sticking around just to kick it while it was down. But this is no second cousin, this is a brother. I've always wanted to quote The Search for Spock, "I'm talking about loyalty", when the arguments roll around. ...

Then last week someone on my friendslist commented in a discussion on the current state of Doctor Who,

I like the TV Movie of Cheese too. But then again, I like Star Trek Enterprise. And the Tank Girl movie. ... So, y'know. Take it for what it's worth. :)

And that just brought home the thought I'd had earlier that day, that I've always been inclined to give a screen showrunner more credit for his/her intentions than most of the consuming public despite how actually successfully those intentions were executed in the eyes of everyone else. So if I've done that for Rick Berman and George Lucas, why won't I do it for Russell Davies?

Well, arguably I started, though I've backslid a bit. (And the Doctor's actions at the end of Family of Blood really do strike me as out of character for him and poorly rolemodelish, and as only the most obvious example of such in Davies' body of work.) But certainly I can afford to offer the same benefit of the doubt to the reviver of my favorite screen franchise as I offer to men for whom the internet invented the idiom "has raped my childhood".

I wrote this up as a comment on a post on my flist about the Doctor Who 'ship wars, but having articulated it I ought to put it here too.

This week I'm working on the perspective that everything in 21st century Doctor Who has zero depth and is to be taken solely at face value (where "face value" sometimes naturally means "backed up by encultured assumption"). Just like 20th century Doctor Who. Near as I can work it out so far this means that

• Time Lords have sex and this results in nuclear families
• the Doctor has had sex and a nuclear family
• the Doctor and Rose slowly fell in love over the course of her travels and were just at the point of professing it when they were seperated
• Sarah Jane fell for the Doctor but he only loved her like any other companion and never realized till she came back and told him
• Martha fell for the Doctor but he only loved her like any other companion and never realized till she walked out and told him
• Jack fell for the Doctor but he only loved Jack like any other companion and realizes Jack loves him but that's just, y'know, Jack, who's like that with everyone

I'll let you know how that works out.

Though I still say Sarah Jane never sat around thirty years pining for the Doctor. You don't give up investigative journalism in the 70s and then happen to take it up again thirty years later for the one case when you'll happen to run into the man who broke your spirit, not unless you're more psychic than Sarah Jane's ever been painted.

Here's the absolutely, positively, ultimate reason, I promise*, why I won't regard Rose to be the Doctor's one true love of his life(ves): I think it's bad storytelling, because there're only two directions it could go from there on.

1. The Doctor never loved like this before and never will again. I hope and believe this character is going to be around for a long time still, and to go all that time without love while having the capacity is very, very sad. But the longer the character lasts - given that new people with their own ideas get put in charge of the character all the time - the more this direction is not going to happen. Now that the Doctor's fallen in love once, someone else will want to do it their way. So:
2. The Doctor loves again. But, the way the relationship with Rose has already been built up (and continues to be built up even though it's past), it's too late for it not to be cheapened by the Doctor loving again.

I never liked the development (and I think that, all along, this though unarticulated was the reason why I didn't), but now that it's there it oughtn't have that happen to it. Yet, if the property lasts, that can't be avoided. The reason I must believe it wasn't what the Doctor believes it was is that, in the end, it won't have been.

* subject to change without notice

Edit 10/6/07 Obviously they play basketball in the U.K., when that's what Torchwood Three is doing in the Hub in the opening of Cyberwoman.

I had a new thought this morning about the Doctor's relationship with Rose. Now, I'm of the but-they're-all-special school of thought. I don't believe that Rose was the Doctor's one true love, though there's no doubt that he believes it, and shall for some time, perhaps for the rest of his life. I've written before that what the Doctor mistakes for the overwhelming loss of Rose is actually overwhelming because he lost not just Rose but her whole family, which in his mind and hearts was tantamount to losing his family and planet all over again. Certainly Rose's loss has traumatized the Doctor in a way no previous companion's loss has done. Contemplating Martha's gripe at the beginning of Gridlock, I've identified yet another factor why this is so.

Every new girl in the TARDIS from Vicki, perhaps Barbara, forward has been, in terms of dramatic ecological niche and also in the Doctor's mind (as you can tell from the incarnations who have trouble with names), a replacement of the one who came immediately before. Except Rose, because in her case there wasn't a girl immediately before. There hadn't been one for two incarnations.* Perhaps Grace turned him down because she picked up on his rebound vibe (or perhaps only because she recognized she was on the rebound herself). And then the Time War and its attendant trauma intervened. Rose was the first woman to approach the Doctor while his slate was clean (aside of course from the PTSD; I mean girl-wise) since he and Susan left Gallifrey (depending on whether Gallifreyan family customs allow for marrying for love, perhaps the first ever).

Rose is the only one of the Doctor's girl companions who wasn't a rebound girl.

I wonder if that isn't grounds for admitting that maybe Rose was the one true love of the Doctor, or anyway the only true love we know about.

* Obviously I'm excluding tie-in continuity here, but that's perfectly fair for the present argument since screen continuity is obliged to leave it out by the BBC's charter.

compiled from my comments in other journals, mostly doctorwho; so I can link back here and stop typing the same thing over and over

( Discusses but doesn't describe events in the new Doctor Who season )