Gallifrey One 32i: Day Two and Day Three
Mar. 15th, 2021 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverIt's been almost a month since I last posted. I've been having motivation issues, and for the most part have just been playing video games (though I've actually made headway on a story and hope to have it done soon). However, the big disappointment is that I never did finish posting about our imaginary Gallifrey One 2021, so here it is!
General stuff
We didn't accomplish as much as we wanted to, due mostly to the fact that my husband started playing a new video game and much of his time was taken up by that. We did visit the Video Room again, this time watching "Shada", which I think is one of my favorite classic episodes. The story sparkles with its Douglas Adams-ness (and totally makes me want to go read Dirk Gently again), and introduces the wonderful Professor Chronotis. Parsons is a recycled deer-in-the-headlights Duggan from "City of Death" without the "I simply refuse to believe that any of this is happening" attitude; his fellow Clare Keightley is far more adaptive and competent. And then Skagra, just the perfect arrogant, sneering villain. The pacing slows down in a few places, but you can enjoy mocking the gray sphere floating along, chasing the Doctor. It's all a blast.
We played a session of the "Into the Time Vortex" game - one of our favorites, even though it's actually too difficult for only two players. We have to play with the introductory rules, rather than the base game, to have a dream of winning. The game is definitely balanced for four players, but we still enjoy it. We also had a fanfiction panel, which is just a fancy way of saying that we went for a walk and discussed ideas for the multi-chapter I'm working on.
But the one thing we did that we'd actually scheduled was the Deathmatch!
Deathmatch!
Every year at Gallifrey One, Paul Cornell hosts his Deathmatch, in which he presents a number of "things" and then has a panel of nine people determine the best one - and this is our favorite panel of the whole con. You can look back at my discussion for Companions in 2019. For our Deathmatch, I wanted to do "Best episode", but my husband didn't "want to spend two hours on this", and he suggested "Best companion entrance/exit episode". I complained that I didn't want to only spend fifteen minutes on it, but acquiesced anyway. Guess what? It lasted about fifteen minutes - most of that from me writing out the cards. Oh well. (I wanted the Deathmatch to last bout an hour, and I don't think "episodes" would have been too long. It's pretty easy to look at a season and pick out the one or two episodes that have any chance at winning. You can, for example, pretty much throw out all of Six's episodes. Oh well.)
So what constitutes "best"? In Cornell's Deathmatch, it's whatever you want it to mean. This makes it difficult in the real Deathmatch, as everyone fixates on their own criteria. This bugs both of us, as we're both rules lawyers in our own way, so our agreed-upon criteria was that the story itself was good and either the companion was introduced well (for entrances) or left well (for exits). Note that "left well" doesn't necessarily mean "left happily"...
The first round of the Deathmatch is to remove the dross. That means reviewing each companion's entrance and exit episodes and noting the good ones. The next round is to remove episodes until we have a bracket of 16, which will then compete against each other. (By the way, we did not include the single-episode companions like Jackson Lake, Adelaide Brooke, and Craig Owens. We also omitted River because she doesn't actually travel with the Doctor; she just kind of shows up. We included Jack because he does travel with the Ninth Doctor, and only included those episodes.) So first, here are the episodes we removed to get the bracket:
* "Bells of St. John" (Clara)
* "Dalek" (Adam)
* "Logopolis" (Tegan and Nyssa)
* "Robot" (Harry)
* "Planet of Fire" (Turlough leaves, Peri joins)
* "An Unearthly Child"
* "The Hand of Fear" (Sarah Jane)
This is the original bracket. (Please excuse the stained card table. You know, I bought that thing in grad school. You'd think I'd've replaced it by now.) Each pair of cards (meaning, on top of each other) competed and the winner is placed further out (left or right) than the loser. For example, "The Eleventh Hour" beat "Mawdryn Undead" (sadly; I love MU, but TEH is an amazing episode).
"The Green Death" was a difficult decision. Susan's exit is beautiful, but TGD is such a great story AND Jo's exit is tear-inducing. We were also sad to see "School Reunion" go, but while it's a favorite episode, it really wasn't a great entrance for Mickey - very shoehorned in to give a reason for him to get stuck in Pete's World.
Then, the quarterfinals:
Okay, so "The Eleventh Hour" is really hard to beat. It is one amazing episode. Sorry, "Rose". Also a great episode, but it just doesn't measure up. It was exactly what DW needed to reboot, but TEH is DW matured. I was a bit surprised that "Earthshock" made it as far as it did, considering it was mostly there because "Omg, Adric was finally gone!!" but it got about as far as it could have hoped.
Semifinals:
This is where things got real. We had to discuss both sets, and we did follow Deathmatch rules, which are that you should support your choice, not denigrate the other. The point is to celebrate DW, not criticize it.
As I said before, "The Eleventh Hour" is a powerhouse. I argued a bit for "Smith and Jones", because it really established Martha's character so well and she was the one who put all the pieces together and figured out how to convince the Judoon that Florence was the real plasmavore, but ultimately I had to vote for TEH by our criteria.
Martha's exit vs. Donna's exit was a much more difficult decision. Both episodes are great and Donna has the most beautiful tragic exit of any character in the show, but we both agreed that storywise, the series 3 finale just edged out the series 4 finale, and Martha's strong, confident exit, saving herself from the Doctor's toxic environment, especially after walking the Earth for him, was probably the single best exit, period.
And this brought us to the finals:
Oo, the suspense! Which one did we pick? Well, actually, I uploaded the wrong image and was too lazy to go get the right one, so this is just the two cards side-by-side. But you should be able to tell from what I wrote above. The 2021 Companion Entrance/Exit Deathmatch winner is: "The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords"!
Yes, "The Eleventh Hour" is a fantastic episode and comparatively, it might be better than TSD/LotTL, but it was more of a Doctor-introduction episode than a companion entrance episode. It definitely did a great job of establishing Amy's issues after growing up from little Amelia, but the spotlight was on the new Doctor. As such, we both agreed that Martha's strong exit overshadowed it.
And that's the end of Gallifrey One 32i! They just announced that the real Gallifrey One 32 is on for next February, so, hope to see you there!
General stuff
We didn't accomplish as much as we wanted to, due mostly to the fact that my husband started playing a new video game and much of his time was taken up by that. We did visit the Video Room again, this time watching "Shada", which I think is one of my favorite classic episodes. The story sparkles with its Douglas Adams-ness (and totally makes me want to go read Dirk Gently again), and introduces the wonderful Professor Chronotis. Parsons is a recycled deer-in-the-headlights Duggan from "City of Death" without the "I simply refuse to believe that any of this is happening" attitude; his fellow Clare Keightley is far more adaptive and competent. And then Skagra, just the perfect arrogant, sneering villain. The pacing slows down in a few places, but you can enjoy mocking the gray sphere floating along, chasing the Doctor. It's all a blast.
We played a session of the "Into the Time Vortex" game - one of our favorites, even though it's actually too difficult for only two players. We have to play with the introductory rules, rather than the base game, to have a dream of winning. The game is definitely balanced for four players, but we still enjoy it. We also had a fanfiction panel, which is just a fancy way of saying that we went for a walk and discussed ideas for the multi-chapter I'm working on.
But the one thing we did that we'd actually scheduled was the Deathmatch!
Deathmatch!
Every year at Gallifrey One, Paul Cornell hosts his Deathmatch, in which he presents a number of "things" and then has a panel of nine people determine the best one - and this is our favorite panel of the whole con. You can look back at my discussion for Companions in 2019. For our Deathmatch, I wanted to do "Best episode", but my husband didn't "want to spend two hours on this", and he suggested "Best companion entrance/exit episode". I complained that I didn't want to only spend fifteen minutes on it, but acquiesced anyway. Guess what? It lasted about fifteen minutes - most of that from me writing out the cards. Oh well. (I wanted the Deathmatch to last bout an hour, and I don't think "episodes" would have been too long. It's pretty easy to look at a season and pick out the one or two episodes that have any chance at winning. You can, for example, pretty much throw out all of Six's episodes. Oh well.)
So what constitutes "best"? In Cornell's Deathmatch, it's whatever you want it to mean. This makes it difficult in the real Deathmatch, as everyone fixates on their own criteria. This bugs both of us, as we're both rules lawyers in our own way, so our agreed-upon criteria was that the story itself was good and either the companion was introduced well (for entrances) or left well (for exits). Note that "left well" doesn't necessarily mean "left happily"...
The first round of the Deathmatch is to remove the dross. That means reviewing each companion's entrance and exit episodes and noting the good ones. The next round is to remove episodes until we have a bracket of 16, which will then compete against each other. (By the way, we did not include the single-episode companions like Jackson Lake, Adelaide Brooke, and Craig Owens. We also omitted River because she doesn't actually travel with the Doctor; she just kind of shows up. We included Jack because he does travel with the Ninth Doctor, and only included those episodes.) So first, here are the episodes we removed to get the bracket:
* "Bells of St. John" (Clara)
* "Dalek" (Adam)
* "Logopolis" (Tegan and Nyssa)
* "Robot" (Harry)
* "Planet of Fire" (Turlough leaves, Peri joins)
* "An Unearthly Child"
* "The Hand of Fear" (Sarah Jane)
This is the original bracket. (Please excuse the stained card table. You know, I bought that thing in grad school. You'd think I'd've replaced it by now.) Each pair of cards (meaning, on top of each other) competed and the winner is placed further out (left or right) than the loser. For example, "The Eleventh Hour" beat "Mawdryn Undead" (sadly; I love MU, but TEH is an amazing episode).
"The Green Death" was a difficult decision. Susan's exit is beautiful, but TGD is such a great story AND Jo's exit is tear-inducing. We were also sad to see "School Reunion" go, but while it's a favorite episode, it really wasn't a great entrance for Mickey - very shoehorned in to give a reason for him to get stuck in Pete's World.
Then, the quarterfinals:
Okay, so "The Eleventh Hour" is really hard to beat. It is one amazing episode. Sorry, "Rose". Also a great episode, but it just doesn't measure up. It was exactly what DW needed to reboot, but TEH is DW matured. I was a bit surprised that "Earthshock" made it as far as it did, considering it was mostly there because "Omg, Adric was finally gone!!" but it got about as far as it could have hoped.
Semifinals:
This is where things got real. We had to discuss both sets, and we did follow Deathmatch rules, which are that you should support your choice, not denigrate the other. The point is to celebrate DW, not criticize it.
As I said before, "The Eleventh Hour" is a powerhouse. I argued a bit for "Smith and Jones", because it really established Martha's character so well and she was the one who put all the pieces together and figured out how to convince the Judoon that Florence was the real plasmavore, but ultimately I had to vote for TEH by our criteria.
Martha's exit vs. Donna's exit was a much more difficult decision. Both episodes are great and Donna has the most beautiful tragic exit of any character in the show, but we both agreed that storywise, the series 3 finale just edged out the series 4 finale, and Martha's strong, confident exit, saving herself from the Doctor's toxic environment, especially after walking the Earth for him, was probably the single best exit, period.
And this brought us to the finals:
Oo, the suspense! Which one did we pick? Well, actually, I uploaded the wrong image and was too lazy to go get the right one, so this is just the two cards side-by-side. But you should be able to tell from what I wrote above. The 2021 Companion Entrance/Exit Deathmatch winner is: "The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords"!
Yes, "The Eleventh Hour" is a fantastic episode and comparatively, it might be better than TSD/LotTL, but it was more of a Doctor-introduction episode than a companion entrance episode. It definitely did a great job of establishing Amy's issues after growing up from little Amelia, but the spotlight was on the new Doctor. As such, we both agreed that Martha's strong exit overshadowed it.
And that's the end of Gallifrey One 32i! They just announced that the real Gallifrey One 32 is on for next February, so, hope to see you there!
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Date: 2021-03-16 11:45 am (UTC)Ooooh Shada!! My exposure was the book version ( a fun read) . Might check if Britbox has the serial. Also what do you think of the Fanon that 13 was put in Shada?
That Deathmatch would be a hard choice. There are SO MANY good episodes