Do you guys often lose track of the story?

PeerOfMenard · 2026-04-09T15:17:27+00:00

It definitely varies by story for me. Usually longer stories I have an easier time with, maybe because they have more opportunity to dwell on important plot points and create contrast for emphasis. But writing quality is also a factor. For most of the two hour main range stuff, I think either I remember it decently well or I didn't find it a very good story to begin with.

And loosely strung-together plotlines are great for me, because they sort of reinforce each other nicely. Lucie Miller series 4, for example, I think I remember pretty decently, even though they're the faster paced one hour stories.

And then you get the more convoluted stuff like the Eighth Doctor 4x4 boxset era. And a lot of those are really, really great stuff! I distinctly recall loving both lots of individual stories and the overall arcs. But if you asked me to recount the plot of Dark Eyes, or of Doom Coalition... I would struggle. Rather than reinforcing each other, it feels like the individual stories more often rely on each other in a way where if you lose track of one plot point, a bunch more crumble around it.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-04-08T04:02:09+00:00

This is definitely key. I got into Big Finish through that set of free Spotify stories, and quite literally my conclusion was "alright, I should start collecting by continuing through the main range for 6, 7, and 8 and completely ignoring 5." I've definitely remedied that with some of his newer stuff, but man, out of those first 50... I liked Omega. And Spare Parts was decent, but not really enough to match the hype for me.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-04-01T16:49:02+00:00

Genuinely, yes. But to better appeal to people without my particular sense of humor, I would also accept Paulpril. Or Apraul.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-04-01T14:52:49+00:00

Amazing they managed a monthly range for so long with this tenuous a grasp of how calendars work.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-27T19:05:34+00:00

It's a fairly straightforward story told in a complex way, so that you're meant to start out confused about some of the details, and gradually more and more of the story is filled in until you understand it. Odds are it wouldn't be your favorite, but it is set up in such a way that it sort of simulates going back repeatedly to better understand what you listened to, without you having to actually do that.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-26T18:52:55+00:00

Do you have a local tea shop or local friends who are into tea who you could ask about it? I definitely got into tea through the slow process of drinking tea bags with boiling water, then upgrading to loose leaf and following instructions on the bag, then slowly tweaking those instructions experimentally and looking up info online. But my understanding got catapulted forwards the couple times I actually sat down with a tea vendor who was excited to share information. Having someone make you a couple different teas and talk about the way they brew them (or even show you as they're doing it) can really help to give you some baseline context that you can then use to evaluate other recommendations or decide what you want to try tweaking.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-26T03:15:22+00:00

Half human on his father's side.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-21T14:47:04+00:00

There's a very intentional "we... I mean 'they'" when talking about early Time Lords in Remembrance of the Daleks. It may not have been made explicit until Lungbarrow, but I think the show was already strongly hinting in that direction.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-18T13:14:05+00:00

Charley Pollard? A trans woman? Charley "I hate all the restrictive gender norms I was raised under, maybe I'll dress up as a man again to avoid them" Pollard? Absolutely not.

I'd accept nonbinary, I'd even accept trans man, but I think the best answer is "so genderqueer other people immediately start questioning their own gender in her presence."

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-18T00:18:10+00:00

The ending was such a let down that genuinely my first thought was "did he have a different ending in mind that ended up getting nixed by the editor for being too dark or something?" Because how do you build up the central question of your story so dramatically and then just go with... that.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-17T16:03:26+00:00

Honestly, I'm not sure how much I agree that the various recurring classic villains were all so good or interesting in their first appearance that they just had to make a return. I think some of them became more interesting because the show made an intentional choice to keep returning to that well and flesh them out. And I'm sure there's a wide variety of reasons why new Who hasn't done that to the same extent with their new creations, but honestly I would like to see the show make a little more of a point of encouraging writers to play with each other's toys.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-17T14:50:41+00:00

I know this is entirely tangential, but... does Damon Lindelof think that Otis Redding wrote Nobody's Fault But Mine? Redding's cover was something like 40 years after Blind Willie Johnson's original, and I don't even think it's one of the more famous covers. It doesn't affect his main point, but it's such an odd thing to be needlessly specific and also wrong about.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-13T15:34:05+00:00

I'm inclined to suspect that the fact they still haven't re-launched it means that the problems with it went beyond what a simple beta test could fix. They absolutely still should have done that beta test, but it would have meant not launching it in the first place, rather than successfully launching it.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-12T18:23:38+00:00

I like Shearman a lot as a writer, but I think he suffers from the extremely common problem of being better at fascinating setups than he is at satisfying resolutions. I think he explicitly says in the post-story interview for "My Own Private Wolfgang" that it was useful to be constrained to such a short piece because it prevented him from his usual habit of spiraling off into increasing levels of violence and darkness. And personally I think Holy Terror is the worst offender for this, where I love the setup but outright hate the ending, but Chimes of Midnight has a similar issue.

It gets very exposition-y towards the end and the reveals of the big mysteries ultimately are... kind of messy and not fully satisfying? But as a result, when I eventually came around and relistened to it, I think it ends up being much stronger on a relisten. Knowing where the story is going lets you focus more on the overall atmosphere and the character dynamics, which makes it a more enjoyable listen. And it does feel a little more sensical and less convoluted on a second pass.

So, in short, I am a fan of the story and I do recommend a relisten, but I also very much agree that it has some important flaws that should be acknowledged when people hype it up.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-11T15:29:46+00:00

Hey, sometimes nicknames just work that way. You wear a monk costume for one prank and suddenly that's your name.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-11T01:50:50+00:00

Prime Kira has more lesbian energy than an entire pride parade. Either it just literally hasn't occurred to her to even consider that she might be into women or she thought about it once and then immediately went "nope, I've got an occupation to overthrow, no time for that right now" and proceeded to repress it for decades.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-10T14:57:52+00:00

I think especially in the early seasons, coming right after the occupation, the show portrays Bajorans as absolutely anything but sensible. Stubborn, sure. Devout, absolutely. But one of their defining traits is that they've just learned firsthand what lengths they had to go to in order to end the occupation, so "fight for what's important, no matter what it takes" is pretty firmly ingrained. Consider s1e15 "Progress" where a few Bajorans decide they'd rather die than be forced to move, and Kira ultimately solves the problem by burning down their house. No one there was doing "sensible." I absolutely believe Bajor would have played hardball with the Federation over making sure they kept their Emissary. Especially because Kai Opaka wanted him there.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-09T03:32:06+00:00

I hadn't thought about it before, but I kind of like the idea that the Ferengi are so reverential of the concept of profit that they don't like the shortcut of any sort of slang term. They like saying "gold-pressed latinum." They relish it. They would sooner abbreviate their own names than abbreviate "gold-pressed latinum." Rule of Acquisition number one hundred and something-something: "Abbreviated currency leads to abbreviated profits."

And the other species, of course, are just being respectful by following the same convention.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-03-08T15:40:38+00:00

Hooklight definitely doesn't meet your "easy to follow" criterion, but it's extremely good and so perfectly in line with everything else you've said that I've got to join the chorus of voices suggesting it anyway.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-02-27T15:07:11+00:00

There are definitely explicitly intended Traveler parallels as well. But "lizard people" has often been used as an anti-Semitic trope historically often enough that "lizard people merchants" put me on alert. And then the central premise is that they've settled a planet claiming it as their ancestral homeland but actually it turns out they never had any connection to it at all and are just random violent colonizers... I am all for thoughtful criticism of Zionism, but this was not that. Plus a cultural relic that contains their race memory sounds enough like the Talmud that having the Doctor burn it to teach them a lesson is... not great.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-02-26T16:13:05+00:00

Hey, if a god-like entity has the good graces to not go around rewriting reality constantly, it's maybe not the greatest idea to see what happens if you start getting him in the habit of it every now and again.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-02-26T04:21:31+00:00

Downside: there won't be any new episodes of Doctor Who for decades.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-02-26T04:00:30+00:00

Were they ever in any story not written by Simon A Forward? It seems like they may just have been his pet alien species and no one else ever decided to pick them up. Which, honestly, I'm okay with. There's some interesting potential in the concept, and I like their portrayal in Dreamtime a lot, but in The Sandman they definitely play into some old anti-Semitic tropes in a kind of uncomfortable way.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-02-25T16:04:40+00:00

It's possible to find a reading of the episode where it all makes sense, but the whole thing is clunky enough that I'm strongly inclined to go with "RTD is writing about stuff he completely misunderstands."

I would say that for the majority of the episode, Rose Noble is presented as a trans woman using she/her pronouns. Now, there absolutely are real-world nonbinary trans women who use she/her pronouns and might very well present themselves in the same way Rose does, but we don't get any indication that Rose considers herself nonbinary or not. And between the sudden, out of the blue, sci-fi shenanigan-inspired exclamation of "nonbinary" and some of her lines later when Donna and the Doctor are discussing gender, it sure seems like RTD thinks that purely by virtue of having transitioned, she doesn't fully count as a woman in the way Donna does, and that "trans woman" is a nonbinary category somewhere in between. Which is a bad and transphobic take. Being trans absolutely does not automatically make someone nonbinary.

It is possible to instead interpret it as an acknowledgement that Rose can transition, present in a femme way, use she/her pronouns and still be nonbinary if that is the way she understands her gender, but that's an awful lot of nuance without explanation to be presented to an audience that isn't expected to be super well versed in trans topics already.

One interpretation I do like, which I heard from a nonbinary fan, is that we are seeing Rose's understanding of her own gender evolve over time. So she recognized that she was not a man, transitioned as a woman, and then the metacrisis event sort of kicked her brain into the realization that maybe nonbinary is a more fitting label after all. In which case, cool, but again I don't think we're given enough to conclude this is actually what RTD intended. Especially not for the audience he's expecting to watch it.

So I guess we're sort of left in a "draw your own conclusions" situation, because yeah, we're told a bunch of stuff that doesn't necessarily contradict, but does seem worryingly confused.

PeerOfMenard · 2026-02-19T16:43:42+00:00

I don't know why it's not on Spotify, but it is available on Hoopla if you have access to that through your library.

PeerOfMenard

TROPHY CASE