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Post by Star Platinum on Aug 8, 2022 21:22:50 GMT
It seems the more things change on Gallifrey, the more they stay the same.
No sooner has the civil war ended, we now have the other temporal powers circling over Gallifrey as vultures.
We finally have Narvin commit to Romana fully, and it’s good to see him do so.
I’m a little surprised that Valyes and Darkel were able to grab power quite so quickly, though I guess with Romana out of the way it certainly made things easier for them.
Now on the topic of Valyes, what a cowardly little man. Totally useless while Gallifrey was being invaded.
As for Matthias, I’m not sure where the character has come from or what they’re agenda is compared to Romana or Darkel, it just feels like a power grab from someone with the personality of a wet noodle.
The last 10 minutes or so, isn’t exactly fun. Everyone is basically just shouting various legal protocols at each other doesn’t exactly make for riveting storytelling.
Not the worst Gallifrey has had to offer, but not the best.
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Post by Digi on Aug 10, 2022 4:35:00 GMT
This is a very.... necessary episode. Exactly the sort of thing that needed to happen immediately after the civil war, but this time through, I felt like it really emphasized the way that story was rushed through to its conclusion. I knew I'd written a gripe about how the politics are done in Gallifrey a while back, had to go looking but I found it: It tries to be a bit overly self-congratulatory in its cleverness at some point. “The constitution says X!” “Ahh, but subsection 12 says Y, therefore I won” “oh ho ho not so fast, subsection 18 says Z, so you lose after all!” (As we the audience have no clue about Gallifreyan legal documents). It’s a great series that I love to bits, but there are times when its politics are a bit eyeroll-inducing. Amused that that seems to have been a comment about this exact episode, ha. Overall....I dunno, it is what it is. Kind of middle of the road. |
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Post by Kestrel on Sept 4, 2022 7:49:39 GMT
Yes, that constant legal-one-ups a ship very quickly reached the level of parody. This is one of those stories that is exceptionally difficult to take seriously. All the moreso because they introduce Mathias as this spanner in the works, but give us very little reason to care about whether he succeeds or fails. There's no real narrative arc here, just an escalating series of characters retconning legal justifications in a bid to make themselves president, because apparently all you need to seize ultimate authority on a Gallifrey is a sound argument.
But, yeah, "necessary" is the word for this story. It's all about reshuffling characters a bit to set the stage for the Dogma Virus storyline that's coming. Speaking of, here we get the reveal that K-9 engineered the virus in the first place--or was that revealed before? I found that detail very confusing. Though to be perfectly fair I remember very little of the details surrounding the Dogma Virus in prior episodes save that a student attempted to use it to poison the Academy's water supply.
We also get a Tsunari invasion of Gallifrey, which is a pretty big deal. And the ease with which they're able to get troops in the capitol would seem to I dictate that Gallifrey does not, in fact, have a proper military. Making the civil war arc we've just concluded all the more bizarre.
Quote of the story: "I fight for Gallifrey, madame President. You are Gallifrey."
It's nice to see Romana actually does have some supporters out there, but that line... I dunno. I found it a bit problematic. It hints at a kind of populist cult-of-personality thing that could be very dangerous. I can't help but wonder if there's another, better Pandora arc out there where Pandora only ever existed as a historical figure, and Romana herself took a turn for the villainous due to the conflation of her own wants and needs with those of Gallifrey. I dunno. Pandora as a cautionary tale. Going back to that old idea that Pandora was never really the villain she was made out to be, having been vilified postmortem by the accepted histories.
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