Calufrax

Well, it feels like returning to an internet home from home, being back here on calufrax for another reccing stint. Long may it continue, and I would urge any of you reading this who haven't already to sign up to have a go yourselves. It's pretty fun indeed, you know!

And we open with a consideration of this little gem:

Story: A Gentleman Can Have it All
Author: Sakura Tsukikage
Rating: All Ages
Word Count: 4,182
Author's Summary: The Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria discover the perks and drawbacks of gentlemanly behavior in 19th century Cardiff. And there's some time-traveling shenanigans thrown in.
Characters/Pairings: Jamie McCrimmon, The Doctor (2nd), Victoria Waterfield
Warnings: None

Recced because: I think we can all agree that there isn't anything like enough top-notch Two fic. Even if every fan in fandom devoted the rest of their fanfictional careers to writing top-notch Two fic, there still wouldn't be enough. Like the era of Who that inspires it, when Two fic is good - as this most certainly is - it is a unique pleasure to behold. Just like all of the other eras in their different ways, I suppose. That's just what it's like living the dream in the greatest fandom of them all...

Here, the Doctor and his companions Jamie and Victoria go undercover, more or less, in order to interact with a Victorian gentleman and get to the bottom of some space/time-related shenanigans involving the sinister interloper Mr. Johns. Well, at least the Doctor and Victoria go undercover; Jamie can't be persuaded, understandably, to part with his very fetching kilt. Much teasing, naturally, ensues at the very idea of the cosmic hobo attempting to smarten up his appearance. And then the action starts.

The thing I really like about this fic is the way it captures the main characters and their deceptively subtle and distinctive interpersonal relationships. All of the little interactions, the rhythms of the dialogue and the characters' attitudes towards each other are absolutely spot-on, not in the slightly heightened way common in a lot of fanfic, but the way they actually are on screen together. There's an argument to be made that most of us, as fans, only think we know Two and his character, based on the somewhat exaggerated versions portrayed in the multi-Doctor stories Troughton guest-starred in so magnificently during the 70s and 80s, and I think those latter-day performances certainly inform a lot of fic. Not this one, though; this is the real deal. Old school Two and two of his most memorable companions on fine form. Bask in it.

This is one of only two fics by this author on the Teaspoon, both of them lovely pitch-perfect Two fics, and I am glad to have recced both now on the comm. As I usually do, I urge you - go over there and read this and leave some nice words for the author.

( A Snippet... )

Story: The Darkness of Mere Being
Author: Sakura Tsukikage
Rating: All Ages
Word Count: 1,833
Author's Summary: Set during the Season 4 Serial "The Moonbase." The Doctor and Jamie discuss the nature of the Cybermen.
Characters/Pairings: Ben Jackson, Jamie McCrimmon, Polly Wright, The Cybermen, The Doctor (2nd)
Warnings: None

Recced because: I like to think of myself as a tolerant Who fan, all in all. Indulgent of the foibles of my fellow Who fans where others might be moved to irritation and internet rage. Well, unless it's about The Angels Take Manhattan...or angst about viewing figures. Then I get...animated.

Anyway, apart from the above hot-button topics, one of the things that is guaranteed to make me frown slightly when I encounter it in Who fandom is somebody claiming that (insert name of bigtime Who monster/villain - usually but not always the Daleks) is "overused". I maintain that while such icons of the show's lore are quite often used badly, or even worse blandly, there's always the chance that this time (e.g. in both the Capaldi-tastic Series 8 and 9 imho) they won't be, and that these hoary old concepts might even throw up a few surprises. They are classic monsters for a reason, at the end of the day; Daleks, Cybermen and their select few peers are, by and large, concepts that keep on giving. And that's just as true of fanfictional treatments of them as it is of official stories.

And this piece, by an author who unfortunately only has two stories archived on the Teaspoon, is an excellent meditation upon the denizens of Mondas, on what they have done to themselves and continue to do to others. It is even better for being filtered via a conversation between the Second Doctor and Jamie. The author really captures the traits of both characters; this Doctor's combination of compassion and a deep morality with a steely and at times vaguely worrying certainty that some things "must be fought", set against Jamie's relative innocence, especially when it comes to adventuring in time and space, but also genuine, for want of a better word, canniness and sense of right and wrong. At the same time, the examination of the Cybermen in all of their folly and tragedy (they are both monstrous and pathetic, the author reminds us) contains more than one sly parallel to human history and politics, and to another society that we have seen much of in Who canon.

What really makes this fic worthwhile, however, is the aforementioned characterisation. It used to be a truism that the Second Doctor was hard to write properly in (fan)fiction, but I think that was mainly down to the fact that not enough people tried it. Two leaps off the page here, as does Jamie (some will have an aversion to phonetic spelling of Jamie's dialect, but it's practically traditional in Who fanfic - I for one would be rather hypocritical if I complained about it!), and when Ben and Polly show up for a brief appearance at the end, it serves as yet another reminder of just what a good Doctor-companions team this one was, albeit one with far too few stories.

So as you may be able to tell, this is another one I like very much. I hope you will too when you read it, and if so I also hope that you will leave some words of appreciation for the author.


( An Excerpt )

Well, these past two weeks have sped by and I hope you've enjoyed the recs I've posted here as much as I have enjoyed sharing them. I'll just slip this last one in before handing reccing duties over to the inimitable lost_spook:

Story: Riddles in the Dark
Author: nonelvis
Rating: All Ages
Word Count: 1702
Author's Summary: The Great Intelligence easily sneaks onto the TARDIS. Defeating the Doctor, however, will be much harder.
Characters/Pairings: Jamie McCrimmon/The Doctor (2nd), the Great Intelligence
Warnings: None

Recced because: Well, mainly because this is a lovely, fluffy laugh-out-loud fic in which the Second Doctor finally gets that ultimate showdown he never got with the Great Intelligence post-Web of Fear and it takes the form of a somewhat whimsical riddle competition. Similarities to Bilbo's contest with Gollum in The Hobbit are entirely coincidental, the author assures us, and to be honest Professor Tolkien was never as funny as this. If you don't cackle like a fool at the bit with the pizza-related question then, quite honestly, I don't understand you at all.

This fic actually has quite a bit going on in addition to the great jokes. The Second Doctor, a character often thought of as quite difficult to capture in prose, is very finely portrayed here, with numerous moments and bits of dialogue that just ring true. Not only can you hear Troughton's voice at various points, you can picture his facial expressions. The idea of the Doctor having a romantic relationship with Jamie is presented so matter-of-factly and so tenderly that even if you're not a dedicated Two/Jamie shipper you'll find yourself getting behind it, and certainly you don't have to be into that ship to find the conclusion of the fic, and the means of the Doctor's victory over the Intelligence, very appealing indeed - a real "aww" moment, for me.

That pizza joke, though... :D Go and see for yourself. I'm not liable for anything you may spit out over your keyboard, by the way.

And that's your lot from me for now.


( A Moment )

Story: Ten Times the Doctor Hates the Daleks
Author: Derek Metaltron
Rating: All Ages
Word Count: 2,871
Author's Summary: Across ten incarnations the Doctor has faced a enemy who has cost him friends and allies, planets and stars, his very home world. They are the Daleks, and these are ten tales of how he has learnt to hate them.
Characters/Pairings: The Doctors (1st to 10th), various companions and supporting characters, Davros and the Daleks
Warnings: None

Recced because: I'll admit to something of a fannish obsession with the Daleks. Not so much the Daleks as we see them most of the time on screen, but the idea of the Daleks. Because it really is a great concept, and a fantastically horrible one when you really think about it. Which I have, probably a bit too much. The thing about the Daleks, however, while I obviously reject vehemently the idea current in fandom that it's possible to see them too often in the series, is that they rarely live up to the power of the concept in their TV outings. Often they fill a role that could be played by any generic aliens and/or robots with a bit of a search-and-replace on the script. And that, I often find, is where good fanfic comes in.

Whether the Daleks obsess the rest of you as much as they do me or not (I suspect not, in most cases!), they do occupy a unique place in the history of Doctor Who, both in-universe and in terms of the lifespan of the series itself. They're the original Who monsters, and still the benchmark against which new pretenders are measured. Even the Cybermen, probably the second most iconic Who monsters, were originally an attempt to find "the next Daleks". And in story terms, the Doctor already had an ultimate archenemy - he knew it and perhaps more importantly they knew it - long before the Master ever showed up and started telling people to obey him. I'll be very disappointed if they don't play a prominent role in the 50th Anniversary story.

And this excellent fic meditates upon that idea, the pivotal and perhaps unique role the Daleks have played in the Doctors lives, through examining the way the Doctor reacts to them. I don't think it's unwarranted to talk, as the fic does, about the Doctor hating the Daleks. Look at Nine's spitting fury in the new series episode Dalek for Exhibit A. We perhaps don't like to think as fans about the Doctor hating anybody, he's meant to be better than that and to hold himself to a higher standard - and the fic explores that as well. As much as the Doctor has been subjected again and again to the Daleks' ingrained evil, their murderous and destructive deeds again and again, he still doubts that giving in to hating them, and doing to them what that implies, is something he should be doing. It's the same moral dilemma posed by the famous scene from Genesis - does he have that right? Does feeling for them what they feel for him make him as bad as they are? This fic examines that idea through the eyes of all ten Doctors extant at the time it was written, and comes back to that essential truth about the Doctor and his relationship with his greatest enemies. As much as they've done, and as much as he's seen of that, as much pain as they've caused him, at the end he is better than they are, in moral terms, so he'll always have that doubt, and always hold back, and end up always having to fight them again.

It's a fic I really like, anyway. Please go and read it, and please leave some words for the author.

( A Sample )