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Post by Star Platinum on Jul 27, 2022 21:47:25 GMT
Apologies for the delay in getting this topic up and running, news of David Warners passing has me suddenly returning to some of him material.
The third series of Gallifrey is off to a rather explosive start wouldn’t you say?
I think it’s safe to say that Leela is the star in this one. Blinded, but not helpless she’s still a warrior at heart. While I feel that the Time Lord civil war falls into a trap where the main characters have significant plot armour, Leela’s blindness is a suitable development for the character.
It’s a solid set up, and I look forward to the next chapter.
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Post by Digi on Aug 1, 2022 12:54:06 GMT
Just finishing this one off now. It's mostly the same as I remember it...a bit of a step down after series 2, albeit a completely necessary one. Fractures is reframing the entire range up to this point really; a completely politically reconfigured Gallifrey with all of our star characters in entirely different places than they were prior to now, the alien students removed from the storyline, entirely changing Leela from a position of physical prowess into someone that'll grow to be more introspective.
I think that last point (which you also made SP) is really the salient one here though. Whatever else is and isn't going on in this story, this really is a great vehicle for Lou/Leela. You'd expect that Lalla and Mary would be the key figures in the first story of the civil war storyline, and in fairness both do feature prominently, but this is significantly a story that develops Leela. And I quite like what they do with her here. Being blinded is something that could be irreparably damaging to the self-esteem of someone who prides themselves on their warrior instinct and ethos, but Leela finds her way through and continues to be not only tough, but also continues to grow as a leadership personality.
So. Not the best entry in the range, but certainly not the worst. Decent episode.
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Post by Kestrel on Sept 3, 2022 2:31:32 GMT
I think a fair bit of what I have to say here, I have already said, with regard to the preceding episode, Imperiatrix.
Continuing on from where I left off....
...And now the war is on! And I find it doesn't quite work. As I mentioned last time, there's a great deal of confusion surrounding the premise here: how, exactly, did Pandora seize power? Who is supporting her, and why? And with a civil war being fought in earnest, we must also ask who is fighting for Pandora, who is fighting for Romana (and to both camps the question, why?) as well as where they're fighting. (Does Gallifrey even have a proper military?)
And, further, what is the scale of this war? A few key districts in the capital? The entire capital city? Is it planet-wide? Have Gallifrey's off-world holdings gotten involved, as battlefields or simply by aligning themselves with either faction? That we see a field hospital in neutral territory implies that battle lines exist, but how? Why? Where? And yet more: what weapons are being used? Or perhaps more crucially, what weapons aren't being used? This episode sees Romana, Narvin and Leela effectively on their back foot, leading a resistance from the ruins of the Academy. Which was bombed early in the war. Bombed but still intact. So, evidently, this civil war is being waged remarkably civilly, with weapons considerably less destructive than those we have had access to here on earth for the last century or so (approximately speaking).
What stays Pandora's hand? For a ruthless tyrant from the dark ages, she could stand to be a helluva lot more ruthless, a helluva lot more tyrannical. Especially considering -- as we will learn in the finale (so: spoilers!) Pandora used her brief reign to develop all manner of horrific temporal weapons so ghastly that not even the Time Lords could stomach their continued existence.
By itself, Fractures does an adequate job setting up the new status quo for Gallifrey: Romana and her allies leading a desperate resistance against Pandora's despotic regime. An incarnation of the "best" version of Romana head-to-head with an incarnation of her "worst" version -- the good and evil twins duking it out on the field of battle. An excellent premise, on paper. The problem is, Fractures inherits all of the failures of Imperiatrix -- most unfortunately the lack of legwork. War stories, more than any other one thing, require ample context. And we don't really get that. Instead we get the bare minimum--just the tropes.
So a disappointing 3/5 for me. In general, I think series 3 is a step better than series 2, but this whole arc, I think, is the low point for the range. Which I'll probably expound on, at my usual exhausting length, when we get to the finale.God knows I'll have plenty to say on our antagonists, Pandora and Darkel.
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