Eleven in general is just... the best Doctor ever.

re: One on Netflix: Wait, do they have An Impossible Child on DVD? *needs to upgrade from WI only* That is amazing. I haven't been able to find it online thus far. 

Hi, TNO. How's it going in Iowa? Did it get cooler today? It's going to be in the 40s tonight in Illinois!

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TOP!

*pokepoke*

*is in completely the same situation* I watched "Eleventh Hour" actually last year and, because I get scared by everything and yes I mean everything, was scared and kept on being paranoid about lines on my walls being cracks and so on and so forth.  But during the summer, I found a script of Smith and Jones online, read it, then watched the episode and was miraculously not scared!  And then... yesterday, I watched "The Runaway Bride" and "The Shakespeare Code."  Oh. my. goodness.  The Doctor is fantastic!!  (By the way, if you need a good laugh and have not seen "The Shakespeare Code" do so immediately!)  And I wasn't scared at all (maybe I'm groing out of it? *crosses fingers*).  Thank goodness for that!  So now, like you, my life is complete.  Now I just have to make time to watch the episodes, and be very careful not to watch Steven Moffat (sp?) episodes... because if I was initially scared by "Eleventh Hour," I don't even want to think about "Blink." :)

This is entirely unrelated to my previous post, but I'm bored right now.

For those of you who haven't realized this yet, it is very, very popular on the Internet to claim that such-and-such a character from a different franchise is a Time Lord or Time Lady. Generally, I don't partake of such silliness, with two exceptions, namely that it either makes too much sense not to be true, or that it's just so brilliantly wonderful that I love it too much not to.

In the case of the former, I am utterly convinced that Mary Poppins is a Time Lady, and that Lord Havelock Vetinari is a Time Lord.

Bear with me here.

Mary Poppins:

1. The Bag. It is bigger on the inside, at least big enough to hold all the junk revealed during her first day in the Banks house and implied to be much bigger than that. And why, pray, shouldn't a TARDIS with a working chameleon circuit not disguise itself as a carpet bag?

2. The propensity towards flying around and helping people who are likely very insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Because, honestly, are Jane, Michael, and the twins that important? What makes them different than the rest of humanity? None at all, unless one happens to be a very old, very powerful entity who's been flying around the universe for centuries and, like the Doctor, has learnt to appreciate the little things most of all.

3. This is specific to the musical, but the exchange between Michael and Mary at the end ("Mary Poppins? Will we ever see space?" "[mischievous smile] Not for a very long time") suggests that, at the very least, Mary exists in a nonlinear fashion. This is backed up by the books, as well, though never so directly. 

4. Certain events which are handwaved in the books as being mere magic start making a lot more sense when one applies the Whovian idea of what amounts to shoddily patched together dimensions. Shops that only exist in certain places on certain days of the month are old hat for Time Lords. 

5. Mary Poppins is, in her own words, "Practically perfect in every way." Have we ever met a Time Lord who wasn't outrageously egomaniacal? (even the Doctor manages it, despite his massive and ever-growing inferiority/self-loathing complex. The Time Lord Victorious, anyone? The Lonely God?) 

6. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It's just such a... Time Lord-y word, don't you think? And while we're on the subject, the revamped version of the song makes a ton of allusions to history, which is in keeping with Time Lord... ness.

7. The Doctor himself made mention of Mary Poppins in A Christmas Carol ("Have you ever seen Mary Poppins?" "No." "Good. 'Cause that comparison would have been rubbish."). 

8. Mary Poppins talks to animals and babies, who are, in the books at least, presented as very clever until their first birthday, at which point they loose the ability to communicate. The Doctor is shown at least once talking to an ordinary cat (in The Lodger), and, as of Closing Time, is further shown to understand baby-language (Stormadeggon! Dark Lord of All! indeed).

9. Mary, like most Time Lords, seems incapable of staying put for extended periods of time; she stays only "until the wind changes." She does, however, have a habit of coming back repeatedly, which is a habit shared by the Doctor. 

10. Whether she survived the Time War is a toss-up, though I'd tend to think not. 

Vetinari:

To be absolutely specific, Vetinari is an extremely knurd Time Lord who, immediately before the end of the Time War, fled largely the same way the Master did. And, also like the Master, decided that the best way to hide would be to chameleon-arch himself onto some backwater little planet on the very edge of the universe. The uniqueness of said planet may or may not have piqued his interest a little, too; after all, even Time Lords don't see a flat planet on the back of four elephants standing on a giant turtle every day.

In my head canon, Vetinari parked his TARDIS inside the Patrician's Palace of Ankh-Morpork, then regenerated. ((Because he'd come from the end of the Time War. There's an absurdly high chance he was fatally injured.)) Unfortunately for him, he ended up in a very young body, possibly a toddler (which is stated to be possible in the Who-verse). So he chameleon-arched himself into the Vetinari family, leaving the fob watch inside his TARDIS. Since the act of chameleon arching comes with a perception filter and anyway the Discworld runs on narritivium, naturally no one questioned this.

[Now this next bit ties in with a bit of fanon that I made up to explain what I think is a major plot hole regarding the chameleon arch, namely, what happens if the Time Lord never opens his fob watch? John Smith's thoughts in Human Nature/Family of Blood seems to indicate that a Time Lord chameleon-arched into a human grows old like a human does. So what happens then? Does the he simply die? Does he snap back to Time Lord normal when this happens, or does he regenerate? Or simply die? If the chameleon arch was powerful enough to literally make a Time Lord biologically human, the latter seems likely. Surely there would be some kind of mechanism to prevent such an occurrence? I mean, not every Time Lord has a Martha Jones to rely on...

ANYWAY, so I decided that a chameleon arch has a built in fascination of sorts for the Time Lord underneath the perception filter. In Human Nature/Family of Blood, the kid (...Latimer?) says something about how the watch is "ready" to be returned to John Smith, which seems to indicate that chameleon arches can have a timer of sorts added in.

It is further implied that specific memories can be hidden "inside" the fob watch, in which case it makes sense that Vetinari, genre savvy as he is, might keep specific memories that ensure he won't just waste the rest of his X regenerations by dying as a human. Either way, he leaves the watch in the TARDIS and leaves them both in the Palace, cleverly disguised as a dungeon cell. And then he insinuates himself into the Vetinari family as a young child. It's all very clever.]

So all the machinations discussed in the last three paragraphs give Havelock a huge incentive to get back to the Patrician's Palace, and naturally the easiest way to do that is to become Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. Possibly he had an attachment to the place in much the same way that the Doctor is attached to England, and he wants to help it. Certainly this might be easier to do as a proper Time Lord, but, given that the Disc is full of vampires who hear heartbeats and werewolves who smell species, it would be hard to pass himself off as human if he hadn't used the chameleon arch.

Regardless, it's doubtful that someone like Havelock would force himself to relearn childhood, so he probably kept most memories of his education and previous life/lives as a Time Lord, which is why his childhood was characterized so deeply by severity and solemness despite the fact that Madam heavily implies that his father was the opposite (see Night Watch, p. 197). Further it explains his preternatural calmness in the face of extreme bullying, in particular the burning of his book. Someone like Havelock doesn't seem the sort to take kindly to having his books burnt, but if he knew that, later on, he'd be able to travel back in time and pick up a new copy, then he needn't get upset in the present.

It could also be the reason behind his comments in regards to the Patrician's Palace. He's known his way in for years- because that's where his TARDIS and his fob watch are and he likes to keep an eye on them. 

Also, spatial reasoning; John Smith is proven to be just as spatially aware as the Doctor, and, equally, the young-man human Havelock Vetinari can catch a flying apple on the end of a fork without looking.

Exhibit B is the Überwald segment of his Grand Sneer. Lady Margolotta tells Vimes rather bluntly in The Fifth Elephant that, contrary to Vimes' assumption, young Havelock taught her all she knows, rather than vice versa. This seems a bit of a stretch for a not-more-than-twenty-year-old. If Havelock's really a centuries-old time traveling entity who's entire species has been heavily embroiled in a war for gods know how long, who's commanders were willing to sacrifice the entirety of Time itself to end said war, well... it follows that he's a bit more experienced than some vampire who'd probably never left Überwald at that point and is heavily implied to have still been a blood-thirsty monster rather than the cunning politician of the modern Disc at that point. By a fair margin. Further, Time Lords seem very adept at... impressing other species, and given that Überwald is steeped in tradition, someone who could swan in and be impressive and cleverer than the residents, at the apparent age of probably-nineteen, would probably create something of a stir. Certainly it would give someone like Lady Margolotta a pause, perhaps even drive her to switch from blood to politics and start the League of Temperance.

Following which Havelock returned to Ankh-Morpork and, an indeterminate amount of time later, got himself made Patrician. At which point he started doing what he does best.

In fact the only time he hasn't done what he does best since then is when the Dragon took over and he got flung into his dungeon cell in Guards! Guards!, which was convenient... since the cell was actually a TARDIS. Since the discovery of an alien ship in the depths of the Patrician's Palace would cause something a stir, the interior had been perception filtered and/or chameleon circuited too.

Being Gallifreyan and a survivor of the Time War also explains Havelock's particular brand of cynicism. He thinks that evil is omnipresent, except in rare individuals like Vimes or Carrot, and that he himself is evil. In Unseen Academicals, he states, very matter-of-factly, that he sees evil when he looks in the mirror, that he can't consider paltry excuses for evil (such as "it exists to emphasize good") without laughing at the absurdity of it all, and that the universe itself is by nature evil. Given that he's lived through the Time War, given that he's seen Daleks and Cybermen and gods know what else, can we really blame him? If he's knurd (and I'm certain he is extremely, extremely knurd, otherwise how could he have drunk that much in Unseen Academicals without being completely plastered out of his mind?), then he doesn't even have something akin to the Doctor's wide-eyed optimism to fall back on when it gets to be too much. 

At some point he'll either fake his death or resign his post, retire to the TARDIS, open the fob watch, pick up Lady Margolotta, and then go off to have wonderful adventures. Possibly Drumknott will come along too, although frankly I don't see the poor boy as being the type to enjoy such malarky. 

Um. Pointless rambling over. I apologize, but I needed somewhere to put this.