Zurich, Tuesday evening

[rm]

I got a bit lost coming back to the hotel from the office tonight, but might sense of direction was good enough that I solved it on my own. The streets here are a bit like the West Village in NYC -- you think you're walking one way, and you're not. You can navigate by the church steeples (the way we used to with the WTC) if you can tell them apart. I just followed the various trolly lines.

Tonight's supermarket adventure involves getting little sacks of marzipan fruit super cheap, and trying to figure out my size and color in pantyhose here. I really should wear dresses for the conference days, even as I feel less dressed up in them and the whole thing is conflict-y in my head. So now I'm running a bath so I can shave my legs.

The hotel we're in is weird -- business, students with a bit of a budget, folks just checking in for the night for various more obvious than they think reasons (hello gay guy in elevator with toy bag!).

I'm still all about Waters of Mars, and it led to a wide-ranging "is anyone watching the show I think I'm watching" email exchange earlier today, that basically boiled down to: Sometimes death is an act of hope. That's right, I like the Whoniverse for all the shit people find bleak, not because I like bleak stuff, but because I just don't find it bleak. Or something. It makes me feel a bit as if I'm on another planet sometimes (although that could just be Zurich). So, I'm like this close to putting it on a t-shirt to wear at Gally should I ever not be cosplaying. Because seriously? Adelaide Brooke? Ianto Jones? Harriet Jones? Beth? All acts of hope, regardless of lack of planning, individual tragedy, or writerly issues. But then, I'm really interested in the whole life/death/memory/heroism equation that the Whoniverse has going on because of Jack's not dying problem and the Doctor's regeneration thing.

Okay. Bath. Work. Writing. Sleep.

Comments

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

This is interesting, because there have been moments when I felt like Who was "pro-life" to a fault. I mean, living is all well and good and most any mentally healthy person would choose it over dying, but sometimes death is not the worst thing and sometimes it is, as you say, an act of hope. I never thought the Doctor understood that, that regeneration had given him a skewed perspective (which is actually the title of a fic I wrote about more or less this very thing) on the subject, but the conversation he has with Adelaide, where she asks what happens on the station and he says, "Something wonderful," made me think, briefly, that he did.

But in the end, all the Doctor really wants is a day when everyone, or at least someone, lives. One way of looking at the end of WoM is that he decides that he is willing to pay any price to get that. Because whatever he told Adelaide on the space station, the Doctor cannot understand death as an act of hope. The show does, I think; you named Adelaide, Ianto, and Harriet, but I would add the Time Lords themselves. Part of the reason I found that moment when he declares himself the Time Lord victorious so disturbing is that he is in effect dancing on the graves of people he has heretofore been mourning. He demeans their sacrifice.

So, yes, I think the show does demonstrate that sometimes death is an act of hope, even as its main characters fail to understand that very message. But maybe by the time Ten is done, he will.