Maius Intra Qua Extra

Stuff and things

Printer


Well, the printer is now in a box sitting in the garage, waiting to be taken to the tech recycling center in town. That's basically the "F$&# this" ending to this story. The tech never responded to my question about why they can't respond to the existing public post, and that was the last straw for me.

I did lodge a formal complaint about them. This took a bit of doing, as HP's product and tech support site tries it best to not allow you to talk to anyone about anything. I ended up going to their sales site and opening a chat with them to ask for where to send a complaint about the tech support. At first, they gave me the link to the tech support site, but when I pointed out that I'd been there and it doesn't lead anywhere useful, they gave me the corporate complaint link. So, that's done. And cathartic.


"Joy to the World"


So, I've been thinking about this episode for the past two weeks and have attempted to write a review of it three or four times now, but it always devolved into nitpicking and was not what I wanted to talk about. So, I'm eschewing a review and just talking about a few things I've been thinking about.

The episode was a mess. I loved the concept of the Time Hotel at first, but even thinking about it shallowly, it doesn't make any sense and just does what it needs to do to further the plot. It bugged me that the Doctor didn't care that the hotel was sending tourists to interfere with historical events and even seemed to encourage it.

Joy, for being the main guest character, was strangely one-dimensional. She regrets that she couldn't be with her mother when she died, but that was her entire character. She spent so little air time as herself that we don't even know what she was normally like, and nothing else about her history was revealed. The most significant part of the character was her first name, because it contrasted with her conflict and made the episode title clever; we only know her last name because it was in the credits. I felt sorry for Joy, but otherwise, she was a cipher.

The one who wasn't a cipher was Anita, in the best sequence of the episode: the Doctor, forced onto the slow path, takes the time to get to know someone. Over the year, we get to see not only how the Doctor copes with living the slow path, but how Anita helps him. The ending was very abrupt - the Doctor really didn't treat Anita very well with his mode of departure - but otherwise, that sequence was a jewel.

And yet, despite how good it was, it chopped the episode in half, killing its momentum. The other problem I had with it was that it started with the Doctor trying to figure out how to survive for a year, asking if he can stay at the hotel and how to get money, despite having tons of support he could call on: UNIT, Mel, Donna, even Fourteen. (Not that I want him to call on Fourteen, mind you. The show really should never bring DT back again except maybe for the 70th, and even that's not advisable.) The Doctor didn't need to stay at the hotel and didn't need to spend the year alone, but he had to for plot purposes, so that at the end, Joy could suddenly be the peaceful, wise goddess who tells the Doctor he's lonely and needs to find a friend.

The more I think about the episode, the more I think that this script was written for Matt Smith, perhaps for the Christmas before series 7a and thus shelved because "The Power of Three" was about to do the same kind of slow-path-Doctor scene. (It would have been a lot harder to shelve TPo3 because it required a companion with a family and a stable, calm domestic life that the Doctor could invade, and that's actually really rare. After the Ponds, the next opportunity would have been with Ruby.)

• The Doctor's dialogue is short, fast-paced, and disconnected, more like Eleven than Fifteen.
  
• In a number of places, the Doctor continues to talk and ignores all else while people are trying to get his attention, something Eleven did a lot but Fifteen did not.
  
• The Doctor isn't concerned with the Time Hotel messing with history or interfering with it himself. That's an attitude unique to Eleven.
  
• Joy's statement about the Doctor being lonely does not make sense for Fifteen, especially after this season (and especially directly after an episode which began with him going to friends for help), but is perfect for Eleven between series 6 and series 7a.
  
• Trev returning from death as a computer simulation felt like a stale rehash because it had just been done in Moffat's previous episode, "Boom", but would have been a fresh idea back then. (Well, fresher; it had been years since "Silence in the Library".)
  
• The scene with Ruby looking up at the star was sweet, but it would have been powerful if it had been Amy and Rory, who at the time thought that the Doctor was dead.
  
• The actual Christmas episode at the time, "The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe", ended the same way, with Madge telling the Doctor what he should do about his current lonely situation. She had a better reason to do so, though.
  

Last bit... I was surprised that Moffat took that shot at Christianity, saying that the briefcase possesses people which is how you start a religion and then had that briefcase become the star that started Christianity. But, not as surprised as I was that the BBC let him.


Oh, by the way...


"Ham and cheese toastie" sounds yum! So much better than "grilled cheese sandwich".


And random comments about current life


As I noted before, I'm currently unemployed and staying that way while my husband continues to work. We had been thinking about an early retirement but this is a bit too early, so when I got laid off, my husband said that if I wanted to not work, that's fine by him as long as he's still employed. I had thought he had said that I could take three months off but should start looking for work at the beginning of the year, but apparently I was wrong.

Anyway, he's still employed. He's managing two projects for clients and it had looked like one of them was going to implode at the beginning of the year, but it didn't. The rumor is that it will continue to survive at least until the end of March, so we have at least that much security. The other project seems to be relatively stable. It can't afford more than him and the two developers that the company provides to them, but at least there's that much.

We think that if either project implodes, the company will let him go and transfer the existing project to one of the C-levels (because there's no one else left). But as of now, we're still fine and I'm continuing to not seek work.

I'd gotten a bit lazy toward the end of the holiday season, but I seem to have picked up a second wind, finally. I cleaned out the bathroom closet and rearranged it all, and added stuff that hadn't had a home. I've gone through all of my husband's shirts (omg he's got a lot) and packed away half of it for the future, so that what he has on hand actually fits in the drawers. I cleaned the kitchen, including giving it a good mop. And we're not even halfway through the month yet!

But I haven't paid any attention to writing or music or any other hobby. I did start a new story but only finished the first scene. I want to get back into Metal Earth, but there's really only one space to work on it and I have other house-cleaning projects that need to use that space. I guess, all in good time, right?


And lastly...


I was just thinking today about something from last year's Gallifrey One. I went to meet Shaun Dingwall, who played Pete Tyler, and we chatted a little bit and I asked him about how he was enjoying coming to the con and all the attention. He said that it was the most surprising and amazing thing, because for him, at the time, it was just a job, playing a character for a one-off episode. Then he kept getting called back to do more episodes, and twenty years later, he's still being called back for that character, even if it's just for a con. He was loving it.

Jacqueline King, who played Sylvia, said something similar, though not in as much detail, that she's loving that she continues to return to the character. After all, her one-shot was much smaller than Pete Tyler, who got his own episode. She was just the mother of the Bride, and now look! I've seen people on Reddit say that Sylvia was the best part of "The Star Beast", and that Jax's (that's what she said to call her) performance was phenomenal.

It's fascinating how some of these DW characters, who start as just bit parts, get to continue developing, and their actors get the opportunity to really invest in them.