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stunt_muppet at 12:24am on 30/04/2008 under bouncing ideas off y'all, college, doctor who, writing, yay!
stunt_muppet at 12:24am on 30/04/2008 under bouncing ideas off y'all, college, doctor who, writing, yay!Presentation was much less awkward than anticipated. Now all I have left to do are my research paper (which I have a topic for, yay) and four frelling enormous finals and I'll be all done!
Also, this presentation managed to make me a tiny bit obsessed with fifties pulp science fiction. I read bits of "City of the Singing Cubes" aloud before I presented to set the mood, and I just got so into it. I barely even felt nervous. And now I kind of want to fangirl this completely obscure 1950 short story, pulpy though it is. I love the stories - both the stories that were published and the stories of the magazines themselves. I love the cover art in all its sensationalist, cheeseball glory. I love the idea of cheap magazines full of cheaper fiction that catered explicitly to the genre markets. I love the unpretentiousness of it all, even when the quality of the fiction itself improved.
I get obsessed with slightly random things, yes.
Best part was when the professor broke out his own carefully preserved collection of Astounding Science Fiction, though.
Anyway. Planning on taking a few hours tomorrow to examining the five pages of backlog that have built up on my flist, but for now, as I do so often, I seek advice. Yes, on "Memory" again, the first chapter of which is almost ready, I promise. There's a certain plot development that I'm really unsure of, and it could go either way at this point. Any suggestions/commentary/discussions would be greatly appreciated.
...that got really long again. Oh well.
And now to bed. But we shall talk in the morning! Afternoon. Whatever.
Also, this presentation managed to make me a tiny bit obsessed with fifties pulp science fiction. I read bits of "City of the Singing Cubes" aloud before I presented to set the mood, and I just got so into it. I barely even felt nervous. And now I kind of want to fangirl this completely obscure 1950 short story, pulpy though it is. I love the stories - both the stories that were published and the stories of the magazines themselves. I love the cover art in all its sensationalist, cheeseball glory. I love the idea of cheap magazines full of cheaper fiction that catered explicitly to the genre markets. I love the unpretentiousness of it all, even when the quality of the fiction itself improved.
I get obsessed with slightly random things, yes.
Best part was when the professor broke out his own carefully preserved collection of Astounding Science Fiction, though.
Anyway. Planning on taking a few hours tomorrow to examining the five pages of backlog that have built up on my flist, but for now, as I do so often, I seek advice. Yes, on "Memory" again, the first chapter of which is almost ready, I promise. There's a certain plot development that I'm really unsure of, and it could go either way at this point. Any suggestions/commentary/discussions would be greatly appreciated.
Part of the premise of “Memory” is that the Third Doctor spends much of it fobwatched, thinking he’s a UNIT Corporal named John T. Smith. This happens in the very first chapter, so I hardly think it a spoiler. Since I’ve only seen the Human Nature arc on TV (I haven’t read the books), my knowledge is incomplete about how the Chameleon Arch actually works – I know that it rewrites biology down to the cellular level, and that it could, in theory, change almost everything about the fobwatched Time Lord’s physiology, including appearance (because you’re obviously going to look different if you fobwatch yourself into something non-humanoid, which I’m sure is possible even if it isn’t done. Or is it possible? Does the Arch only make you human? I’m none too clear on that point).
Anyway, the only way I’d ever seen the Arch used was to make the human Doctor look exactly like he did in his Time Lord body, so that was how I wrote it in Chapter 1 of Memory. But then someone (I forget if it was my lovely beta kayliemalinzaor someone else I showed this to) pointed out that, if Three looked exactly the same as a human, he’d be a bit old to be only a Corporal, especially given how young Benton and Yates (and, for that matter, the Brigadier) look.
kayliemalinzaor someone else I showed this to) pointed out that, if Three looked exactly the same as a human, he’d be a bit old to be only a Corporal, especially given how young Benton and Yates (and, for that matter, the Brigadier) look. I thought about moving him up a rank or two, but part of the whole point of using the Arch, in this case, was to be inconspicuous, to allow him to blend in with the rest of the UNIT personnel. If he were a Captain or a Warrant Officer (sorry, I didn’t really write down the ranks after “captain”), he’d be more noticeable – not to mention he’d presumably be in command of a section, thus naturally drawing attention to himself.
There was the additional problem of how everyone at UNIT who wasn’t Benton, Liz, and the Brig managed not to recognize him, but I figured I could handwave that with a line or two about advanced perception filters.
But then I had another idea. By necessity, the Arch must be able to change the subject’s biological age, yes? After all, any human who is the same age as the Time Lord they used to be would be really most sincerely dead. The John Smith in Human Nature wasn’t 1,000 years old, he was…thirty-something-ish, I’d say.
Well, who’s to say that the Arch couldn’t make its subject a different age than they appeared to be as a Time Lord? If we’re already rewriting every cell in the body – changing it down to the DNA in some fundamental ways – then there’s little obstacle to changing the age of the cells as well. So what if, when the Doctor fobwatches himself, he’s aged down a bit? Not too much, obviously – maybe ten, fifteen years, so he looks to be in his mid-to-late thirties – but enough for his presence as a Corporal to make sense.
This solves rather a lot of issues for me, actually. It accounts for his rank, for why people don’t recognize him (especially if he’s got paling brown or blonde hair rather than gray), and for the casual, cheerful air I ended up writing Corporal Smith with. Not to mention it makes the “Jamie being written into Smith’s artificial past” a bit more plausible (they still wouldn’t be the same age, but they’d be closer than they were). I’d have to make modifications to Liz’s descriptions of him, but since he’d still look something like the Doctor, I wouldn’t have to completely discount the strangeness of him being someone else.
(Also, this would make the Smith/Benton subtext even dodgier. Yay!)
There are problems, though. For starters, I’m not entirely certain that the Chameleon Arch can even do that. I mean heck, I’m not even sure that the Arch works for any species transition besides human-to-Time-Lord and back – it would be really strange if it didn’t, but they never explicitly states that it does, and maybe it’s because they wouldn’t have to make changes to appearance that it would only function in turning Time Lords human. Granted, that doesn’t make any sense either, because I would think if you have to go from two hearts to one, among other things, a change in eye or hair color would be the least of the issues.
-Point! But Ten does seem awfully concerned about the Family of Blood seeing him before he gets in the TARDIS. That implies that he can’t change his human appearance.
-No, he was worried if they’d seen Martha. Whom he presumably wasn’t going to fobwatch. And if he has to go to a singular vascular system from binary and completely get rid of the respiratory bypass, it seems really bizarre that the Arch couldn’t alter something as basic as bone structure.
Which brings me to my next point, which is: why not give the Doctor a completely different appearance, then? If the whole point is to hide, and the Arch is capable of making such extensive changes to appearance, wouldn’t it be more effective if he didn’t look at all like his old self? This wouldn’t completely ruin the “zomg the Doctor’s in uniform carrying a standard-issue firearm” thing, but it would make it different (and harder to write).
-But the point isn’t to “hide” in that sense. It’s to, quite simply, not be a Time Lord. The thing he’s hiding from doesn’t know what he looks like, so appearance wouldn’t be an issue.
-Yeah, but then if the TARDIS is already aging him down and changing his external appearance, why wouldn’t it just go the whole hog and give him a different body altogether?
-Same reason it didn’t change his appearance in Human Nature.
-Which would be “the BBC doesn’t want to hire a whole different actor for an entire two-parter”. Try again.
-That wouldn’t have been the case in the book.
-You haven’t read the book. I don’t think it’s really appropriate for you to retreat there for canon. Besides, the Arch isn’t even Time Lord technology in the book, so that’s a whole other can of worms to deal with. Next.
-Maybe it doesn’t want to change his appearance. Maybe it’s less work for the TARDIS to preserve as many outward characteristics as it can – that much less of the genome to fiddle with.
-Except that’s assuming that Time Lord traits are even genetically encoded at all – which they might not be – or that their genome works the same way humans’ does. Which it almost definitely doesn’t, given that humans and Time Lords aren’t on remotely the same evolutionary tree and have presumably had no contact with one another. For all we know, Time Lords might not even have DNA – they might be constructed a whole different way. And even if they aren’t, I’d bet that they’ve got a wildly different genetic structure, to the point where converting Time Lord physical traits to their human analogues would be as much work as changing said traits.
-Maybe there are certain analogues that the TARDIS knows, and can easily switch between? Like “this genetic sequence for brown hair in Time Lords” equals “this genetic sequence for brown hair in humans”? And it’s easier for it to use these preprogrammed analogues than to wing it and switch them around?
-But that works against your aging-back theory – the analogues would correspond to his current appearance, so he’d look exactly the same. You wouldn’t be able to alter ages.
-Except age isn’t in the genes, per se. The appearance of age is based on changes to the cells and genes over time. The TARDIS would have to duplicate those effects as well, which means it’d be able to set the cells at whatever age they need be. And if the TARDIS can give him a personality and memory that corresponds to wherever he’s hiding, I see no reason why it couldn’t give him the appropriate age.
-But if you’re working with the idea of appearance analogues, wouldn’t there also be age analogues in place? Otherwise every fobwatched Time Lord would end up a random age.
This generally goes on for quite a while.
So I ask: would it make sense for a fobwatched Doctor to be aged back a bit? Or does that not work with the Chameleon Arch? Could I handwave this away, or would it stick out too much in the story? Thoughts? Suggestions? Swift slaps to the face?
(There’s also the bit where I feel sort of weirdly ageist for not keeping the protagonist fifty-something (in human terms, anyway) like he’s darn well supposed to be. But since I didn’t do it for shippy purposes I can ignore that.)
...that got really long again. Oh well.
And now to bed. But we shall talk in the morning! Afternoon. Whatever.
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