Calufrax

Well, hello Calufrax. I will be your reccer for the coming week. It doesn't seem like long since I was last reccing here. Time flies, as they say.

Story: Fade Out
Author: Mandragora
Rating: Teen
Word Count: 2880
Author's Summary: A dying being of energy, a feline and a Time Lord's last days.
Characters/Pairings: The Doctor (7th), Wolsey (the Doctor's cat from the New Adventures novels)
Warnings: Swearing; animal death

Recced because: One of the reasons I have to keep coming back and reccing here is that I seem quite often nowadays to read new stories that immediately elbow their way to the front of my "to rec" list. I first came across this gem a couple of weeks ago and still have it on my mind. As I may have let slip one or two times, I'm a very big fan of the Seventh Doctor and while not quite as big a fan of some of the directions taken by the New Adventures after the original television series ended, they were the main outlet for my Who fandom for much of the time between the old series and the new. So reading about Wolsey and Seven's white linen suit and so on takes me straight back to those years. The appeal of this story to me goes beyond that, however. This touches on some deep themes that were starting to emerge in the televised Seven stories and were expanded on in the NAs before resurfacing more recently in the new series. The main one is the reminder that the Doctor, despite having great power (something the so-called Cartmel Masterplan emphasised and the new series is positively obsessed with) is still limited. He is still, for all of his abilities and longevity, only mortal. Probably. And then there is the exploration, particularly apt for a setting where time travel is a reality, of the nature of fate and destiny and how difficult it might prove to cheat them. We're in Turn Left or Waters of Mars territory here, and very definitely going down some of the same byways as Eleven's two series, especially the most recent one. Most definitely, though, this is a fine slice of late-period NA Seven, includes an extremely interesting author-created alien species and offers as good an explanation as any for the TV Movie's Gothic-themed TARDIS interior. And it has cats, for better and for worse.

( A taste... )