stunt_muppet

So classes have been a little less suck lately, and I've almost resolved the whole deal with my textbook, and I finally figured out how to do the Wiki coding for my Bio assignment. [ETA] Except it turns out I don't actually know what I'm doing as far as the Bio assignment goes, so never mind, I'm still going to be up the hell all night. Bah.

Granted, there's still loads of stuff that I'm not doing that I should be, but for now, I feel like I can kick back a bit.

And what better way to kick back than with a fic commentary? biichan requested a commentary for than are dreamt of in your philosophy (also here on Teaspoon), so here we go (commentary in bold):

"than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

Funnily enough, I didn't start writing this out of any particular desire to write Adric, or Doctor/Adric, or anything like that. I was browsing the prompts for whoniverse1000 and seized upon this one because 1) it was an interesting combination of characters, and 2) hey, look, two characters I sort of know how to write!

What? Well, it's true. I can write maybe seven Who characters reliably, and three of them don't get requested very often.

It was one of his last assignments, right before the end. In a suicidal effort the Daleks had snapped shut the last CVE, damning the universe to its long-overdue heat death. He had been sent to open it again, and in the process he'd ended up on the other side.

The fluxes in timespace wrought by the war echoed even here, in the depths of E-space, and he crash-landed somewhere familiar before he'd ever been there at all

I overuse the Time War. It's my go-to plot device whenever I need disparate characters to meet each other, or if I need Eight or Nine to meet anybody at all.

That said, ever since I watched Logopolis I've found the concept of E-space and the CVE intriguing, and I don't think it gets used enough in fic. E-space doesn't make a whole lot of sense at face value - a tiny pocket universe where we siphon off all out excess entropy? How would that even work? - but, when you think about it, it adds a very unsettling dimension to the whole business of Logopolis in general. The best explanation I can think of for E-space is that it's a new universe, on the periphery of our own, called into being by the Logopolitans and dying faster and faster from all the entropy we keep dumping into it - a universe that we're slowly killing to save ours, that was created for the purposes of dying for us. Why's E-space so small? Because so much of it's already dead.

Yeah, I know, that's not how entropy works in Real Life, but I kind of like it.

I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Looking at the fic now, I don't think the Hamlet quotes really do what I meant for them to do - I was originally drawing parallels between the inevitability of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's fate (by way of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, sort of) and the inevitability of Adric's fate, but that comparison kind of falls apart when I remember that the Doctor has to let Adric die to maintain temporal stability whereas Hamlet let Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die because he was psychotic and/or an obsessive jackass.

Still, it's hard to go wrong with quoting Shakespeare. And a whole bunch of the Hamlet quotes work for the fic in other contexts; the "bounded in a nutshell" description is rather perfect for the Doctor in general and Nine in particular, I find.

He wouldn't have known anything about when he had landed if he hadn’t seen a yet more familiar face through the TARDIS scanner. Unruly hair, curious eyes, clothes he had not yet grown into. All without the ever-present badge for mathematical excellence.

Hello, wee Adric.

I specifically omitted the badge here because I wanted to give the impression that he was quite young at the time, so that enough time might have passed between the TARDIS' first visit and its subsequent visit in Full Circle that he might have forgotten about it or stopped waiting for it.

The Doctor opened the door to him, glad for the companionship, glad for a respite from the grim phantasmagoria unfolding in N-space. "Well, don't just sit there, then," he said. "Get in here and help me. You know a thing or two about maths, don't you?"

Considering he was my first Doctor, I'm not very comfortable writing Nine. I tend to make him too wordy and drift toward Classic levels of formal speech, to the point where he ends up sounding like Four when he's cheerful and Three when he's grumpy.

Also I really like the word "phantasmagoria" and wish I had more occasion to use it.

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

"But how does it work?" Adric asked, staring at its impossible interior - I saw a blue box, he'd said all those lifetimes ago, and hadn't there been just a hint of recognition in his voice, hadn't he adjusted to it rather too well?

I don't know why, but watching Full Circle I was struck by how quickly Adric adjusted to the TARDIS. He gets a few moments of "omg bigger on the inside", but after that he doesn't seem all that freaked out. This was...probably not intentional on the writers' and actors' parts, but it works for me, because it made me think that maybe he'd seen it before.

"Dimensionally transcendental," he replied, bent over the console. "Inside and outside exist in separate dimensions. What do you know about coordinate gyrostabilisers?"

I love technobabble. I love writing it, I love saying it, I love listening to other people say it. I do try to do at least a modicum of research for my technobabble, so that it makes a certain level of sense rather than just sticking big words together - I won't use a term unless I have an idea of what it means or does. Coordinate gyrostabilizers, for example, are used to focus the TARDIS’ trajectory on a single sequence of temporal coordinates, bringing it back into a single timestream or continuity after it travels through the Vortex.

He was as eager to please as ever, was Adric, setting straight to work on systems that he didn’t – couldn’t – fully understand yet. And he never stopped asking questions, most of which the Doctor couldn’t answer. Wouldn’t want to fool around too much with causality, after all. But he could tell him stories.

I’ve always imagined Adric as very eager to please and hungry for adult approval – fitting for a boy his age. He doesn’t really start getting bratty until Five comes along, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that the authority figures he looked up to – Four and Romana – are very suddenly gone. At this early date, he’d still be curious and eager for the validation he probably wasn’t getting from his brother or the adults back home.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

This Hamlet quote, and the one above it, can pretty much be stuck in any Whoniverse fic ever at some point, and they won’t seem out of place.

“Tiny little universe, this.” The necessary repairs had long since been made; they sat alone, just outside the doors, as the quiet of dawn disappeared. “Nothin’ more than a sink for another universe’s entropy, and look at it now. Whole species, whole solar systems, don’t even know they’re just a dumping ground for someone else. And y’know what? The people who made it that way? They wouldn’t hurt a soul.” He laughed. “There’s so much more out there. Least there used to be. Not so sure anymore.”

I think maybe I did a better Nine here than elsewhere? His speech is more casual, anyway.

I do like the way the Shakespeare quote ties into all this, though, since Adric would never have even known about the world outside E-space without the Doctor; would he still have been so eager to leave? Would it have changed his longing for “somewhere else”?

“Tell me more,” Adric asks him. “Tell me what else there is.”

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold their course for England; of them I have much to tell thee.

Also, the quotes make for handy scene transition markers.

The time came, finally, when he could delay no longer, when the call to war could no longer be resisted.

Hey, is that an oblique nod to the drumming in there? Huh. Didn’t notice that. Of course, I have no idea what the trigger would be for Nine to go back; I probably should have thought of that.

“Take me with you,” Adric pleaded, as the Doctor prepared to take off again. “I don’t want to stay here. Let me travel with you. I won’t be trouble. I can do repairs, help you fly. Please.”

Yeah, hearing that your universe is dying an accelerated heat death will do that to you. Cheers, Doctor.

(Although I didn’t think of it that way at the time, which is why it doesn’t come up in their dialogue.)

I could, the Doctor thought, in spite of himself. Time was already turbulent; how much more damage could he possibly do by taking him along, by saving yet one more person from dying for him? Let him spare lives, at least, if he must end them too.

I try to avoid writing Time War Angst when I can, because there’s just so much potential for it to be done badly, and I am not so good with writing emotions in a non-clichéd way. I’m always afraid of becoming melodramatic, of making the Doctor’s emo manpain self-parodic. So I got kind of nervous writing this bit and tried to make it as understated and direct as I could.

In retrospect, however, I think this section is, if anything, too cool, too detached. Considering that the Doctor’s just sent one more person off to die, there should have been more emotion, more impact to it than this.

And yet, despite that, I can’t think what I’d do differently. I don’t know what else I’d write here. I suppose that’s a good thing?

The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, to tell him his commandment is fulfill'd — that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

Temporary solutions. Pallitives. Not worth it. Think about the bigger picture. He’d heard the words so many times, repeated them over and over again as he watched another planet burn to cinders. You may save a few people, a few planets, but what will you lose in exchange?

A ha ha I was not at my most subtle that day.

So he shook his head, said “Not this time, Adric. But I’ll be back, not too long from now. You can come along then. Even if I don’t say so. Only don’t mention it to me; you know how it is, all this coming and going, I might be a bit confused.”

I don’t know if my Nine-voice is really working in this bit, but I really wanted for this dialogue to be here. In Full Circle, Adric mentions that he won’t still be on Alzarius when the Starliner leaves, but he won’t be on the Starliner either – he’ll be “somewhere else”. So where else would he be? Where else was he planning to go?

With that he shut the doors, and let the TARDIS disappear.

I realized, belatedly, that I ended my Three/Jo ficlet with almost the exact same sentence, but I think a departure’s a good note to end on. Very versatile, can be hopeful or grim depending on the tone of the rest of the story…departures seem like a natural way to end.

Feel free to leave a comment here or on the original entry if you'd like to pick a different fic.

...and that actually worked wonders for a writer's block. Which is what it was meant to do, so...good all around.

Not much to report so far as Real Life thus far, except that our futon is truly fabulous.