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I had hopes for the first season, which were dashed hard enough that I didn't watch all the episodes. I'm not sure I'll watch the second season. Maybe I will go write me some fanfic.

Ooooooooooh I did not make the connection between Bonds and Harry's tagalong Horcrux, that is . . . wow. Everyone stop marrying, no more marriages! Marriages bad!

I don't know what it says about me that I mistook a gag from a Team Starkid production as foreboding foreshadowing . . . (Though I was referring more to the dark-haired witch than the mouse stuff.)

Okay, that Mordicus Egg Gambit is a genius concept! Forcing the Malfoys to pretend Monty Python jokes are real . . . as real as Avalon, ha ha!

—doctorlit makes a clever joke involving Parselmouths and pythons who are monty

Harry tries Occlumency, courtship, and running damage control on Hermione's revelation.

Warning for allusions to and brief depictions of assault in Harry's dreams and Occlumency classes.

Re: Lady P... >:3c

Karkaroff already betrayed Gaunt last year. He was "screaming like a Jobberknoll" about all the Knights in that Pensieve memory, remember? You'll see why he was poking around in a couple chapters. And yes, we all knew Regulus was a Knight because Regulus in the books was a Death Eater--but it's Hermione's surprise and what she does with this info that's the interesting part! :P

Yeah... I had originally wanted to make them a bit more chill but my beta pointed out that it makes sense to have this obstacle to take away Harry's plan to run off to the Muggle world. The Muggle world has its own problems, too! Gary and Rose will come around, but... slowly!

The line about "It wasn’t like he’d ever paid particular attention to Hermione’s curves." is a little bit more in-denial than actual obliviousness, but I don't blame you for not picking up on that, you've mentioned being too ace to notice these things ;P

Ron: Yeah I'm a wizard. Yeah I play vodeo games. What about it?

It's all right! I know real life can be busy as hell.

Yeah the one big happy Weasley family thing falls apart when you're in it :P and I feel like Molly and Arthur even in the books were arguing a bunch--or, rather, Molly seemed to henpeck Arthur a lot. But yes, the formerly-moneyed-but-had-it-all-confiscated situation here does amplify arguments since neither Molly nor Arthur were raised to handle economic precarity. Love can't buy your kids food and robes for Hogwarts, after all.

I made the deliberate choice to have the Weasleys in that situation because it's the natural extension/subversion of the idea that families "in the sacred 28" must be Pureblood aristocrats with money and Wizengamot seats. It always seems to extend naturally to, say, Blacks, Malfoys, Potters, but not so much to Weasleys because, well, they're poor in canon so fandom gets weirdly classist about them. And yet, in the books, the type of poverty the Weasleys are in is a fairly genteel sort and Arthur Weasley's job at the Ministry, while unglamorous, gives him enough power to write laws that affect people like Mr Bashir (GOF) and Lucius Malfoy (CoS, Muggle Protection Act). So I've tried to be a little bit more consistent with the sort of social punishment that took the Weasleys' former status away from them.

The wardstone of a magical family powers the house's wards, so yes, the Ministry was trying to remove the wardstone out of the building so that the land could be sold to pay back Lord Septimus' debts. However, I kinda borrowed from Encanto's Casita for the Burrow--that thing isn't going anywhere without a fight! Hence them deciding to confiscate the house-elves instead.

Of course Ron is acting bratty in his own way. He's eleven, and he's had ten years of (what he perceives as) unfair treatment :P

Given that I'm leaning hard into making a magical bond look and act like Voldemort and Harry's horcrux bond, it only seemed natural to have Occlumency be more widespread as a result.

Re: the poison: it was B :P Occam's razor. The reason for the poison flashback is to show Lily and Severina brewing a poison that acts like black mamba venom, and then imply that black mambas and runespoors are close enough taxonomically (they're both native to Burkina Faso) that runespoor antivenom would neutralise this poison. And the ASKE antivenom was, yes, a stopgap--it's more effective against stuff like bee stings and Swedish Short-Snout bites, but it managed to keep Lily from going into total anaphylactic shock before help could come.

(The idea is, ofc, that it looks like a bad allergic reaction to most people, and initially medics would try to treat an allergy not knowing it was replicated snake venom. And then by then it would be too late.)

Lockhart is just being weird lolol that monologue is from A Very Potter Senior Year!

Yeah, this world's messed Neville up :P Purity culture is one hell of a drug!

Actually, the deliberate usage of Monty Python by Mr Weasley has a more prosaic reason, as mentioned during the Christmas Eve parlour dance when Ron mentioned Dirty Dancing Filthy Frolicking. Mr Weasley just watches a ton of Muggle films and has instilled a healthy love of Muggle literature, cinema, and music in his kids. Though he has his gaps--Ron hasn't read LotR yet, and didn't know about Star Wars and Doctor Who until he befriended Harry! But we see the twins knowing about 1984, and Ginny listening to vinyls, so of course by the end Arthur is just throwing out Monty Python references because, well, the whole game is made up and Avalon isn't even real, so why not be silly with it? utilising the incredibly risky and radical Mordicus Egg Gambit which, if played perfectly straight, allows one any amount of silly Muggle film references that force the Purebloods to either accept the location as a valid location in Avalon, or contest it and therefore confess to consuming Muggle film.

Narcissa was established in Year Three as taking parlour games very seriously. It's because the Black sisters were very competitive growing up. Lucius tries to hold his own, but Narcissa knows exactly how to push his buttons...

Thanks for catching the misspellings!

(I wanted a Regulus who was different from the fandom-popular sarcastic sad boy (that's just Snape reskinned to be rich ok) so my Regulus is a bit pompous and all about manners and being civil, so that's why he's Momma's Boy, as well as why he seems so much more mature than Sirius.)

The plots themselves felt half-baked, and though I know Devil's Chord is supposed to set things up for later in the season, it didn't set things up in a satisfying way. Space Babies was just tonally all over the place, and it was especially painful because this is supposed to be a new introduction to the show.

I do love Ncuti and Millie as the TARDIS duo, and love their dynamic so far. They've been the highlight of the new season, and I was admittedly loving Jinkx's performance as the Maestro. Lowkey dreading building up to a possible reveal that the Doctor is another one of the entities from beyond our universe, and that this is how it's all going to tie into the Timeless Child again.

Anyway, all in all, not a great start to the new series. I'll keep watching because I do want to know if my theory that Ruby is Susan's granddaughter, or Susan herself under the effect of a Chameleon Arch, is correct. (the Doctor does seem to have settled into a more familial relationship with her quite quickly, huh?) The Rani namedrop also had me sitting up and pointing excitedly (how long has it been, now?) so I'm really hoping we'll see other Time Lords starting to make a reappearance.

Moffat coming back could either be brilliant or a complete circus. Either way, I'll be there with popcorn.

I dunno who your "Tauriel" is, but I think "Kili" is Human!Sauron. ... Unless Movie!Kili was Sauron all along!! That might honestly explain him, using smarm in an attempt to disrupt Elven society. {X D

I like your time travel idea, though! The show is already bending time anyway. I'm sure it's fine, because the Valar can canonically bend space. And, what's George Lucas' thing, rhyming? And Tolkien liked poetry, too!

Not sure what the joke is about Tolkien deleting the Riddles scene, but if they wanna go ahead and take a mulligan on the last episode of S1, they have my permission. ^_^

On an actual serious note, I wonder if one of the Elves drawing swords was Celeborn? If they want a romantic subplot, that would be a reasonable place to get one. Oh, or, if Galadriel and Celeborn are married already then where the heck was he in S1?, the female elf could be Celebrían, and she and Elrond can have the romantic subplot.

~Neshomeh

"Space is warped and time is bendable!"

I did a line by line description of it over on the Barrow-Downs, and all it told me is a) Sauron is in it, b) there are Rings, possibly Of Power, and c) I barely recognise any of these characters.

In the sillier part of the Downs I also speculated on possible plot points, which I feel are worth sharing here. These are my very serious predictions:

• Since everything in Middle-earth must be explained on-screen, the oceanic kraken seen in the middle of the trailer is the Watcher in the Water. The... underwater girl?... is going to take it to Moria.

• I definitely saw Movie!Kili and Tauriel in there, so I'mma say time travel. Since Mithril is silmarils or whatever that was all about, Bilbo's mithril vest is magically linked to the Second Age and Hobbit movie characters are going to travel back to join the show.

• The entire last episode of Series 1 will be deleted, "which is okay because Tolkien did the same thing with the Riddles scene!". The Three haven't been forged, and Sauron is still undercover. Though the whole "drop a river on a volcano" thing is presumed to have still happened offscreen.

• At least one First Age elf from the opening of Appendix A will appear in person. Probably Feanor; I don't see any mention of him dying in this, the only book that matters.

I think I'm onto something with that last one. Could be Turgon or Idril, though.

hS

Official trailer here.

I... quite honestly don't know what to make of this. We're doing Annatar now, I guess? Seems a bit late unless, as Phobos thinks, it's going to be part of a "looking back and putting together the pieces" sort of thing. It could work, but I'm skeptical. Still wouldn't absolve them of making Galadriel miss it.

Maybe we're getting the appearance of the Watcher in the Water, if it's that big black pile of leeches?

It really sounds like we're getting the Balrog, which... we shouldn't? I mean, maybe Durin is talking about the Watcher when he says an ancient and powerful evil has returned, but idk. They showed us the Balrog at the end of last season. (We're supposed to think he's talking about Sauron, but I don't believe that at all.)

We notably don't see any of the Harfoots in this trailer. I personally wouldn't miss them, but it would surprise me if they were dropped altogether. At least there's still got to be the two being probably-Gandalf's travel buddies, right?

I hope they do something with the other Istari in the East. Theoretically they got there first.

I also hope we get quite a bit more of Númenor than the trailer implies. That's where the most story has room to happen, IMO. And, well, referring back to Annatar, maybe that's where we'll see him spend most of his time, corrupting the rulers?

I dunno. As with the trailers for season one, this doesn't tell us much at all about the story they're planning to tell. There's a lot of stuff that just confuses me, like what the heck is that big sea monster? Maybe it's one of several shots that could be visions rather than actual events, like the tree tendrils and the suddenly appearing tower?

Admittedly, my Tolkien lore is rusty, so I might have missed things. I'll have to brush up before August!

~Neshomeh

But I do have one burning question: What has it all got to do with Chris?

You know, Mr. Waites.

... Maybe nothing, it could just be another callback to the First Doctor and Susan, apparently. But then again, maybe something. Suppose we'll have to wait and see.

~Neshomeh

[The series finale. The Doctor lost Ruby about ten minutes ago, let's say in an explosion. Now suddenly she shows up alive]

DOCTOR: Oh Ruby, I'm so glad you're okay! How did you even survive that?

RUBY: Ruby? Who's Ruby?

DOCTOR: What? Babes, what's wrong? Don't you remember?

RUBY: Oh Doctor, haven't you figured it out yet? I'm not Ruby Sunday.

DOCTOR: Oh no. No no no no no.

RUBY: Ruby Sunday never existed. I... am... the Master.

---

Of course I have evidence; otherwise it would just be a Crackpot Hypothesis.

1/ There have been five musical numbers in Doctor Who. Three of the others were the Master. The fourth was the Toymaker with the Master in his tooth. The Master should be involved this time too.

2/ A woman's hand picked up the Gold Tooth Master. Ruby is also a woman. QED.

3/ The Doctor has been scanning Ruby and getting puzzling results. The last time that happened was when Amy Pond turned out not to be human right now.

4/ The presence or absence of Ruby Sunday has repeatedly caused major alterations to the timeline. The biggest of these was her stepping on a butterfly - which the Doctor had pretty much told her would have no effect - and Silurianising the human race. That says Time Lord to me - like back in Turn Left, when the Doctor's death caused the whole world to go to pot practically overnight.

5/ She looks like Clara Oswald cosplaying Rose Tyler. You know - the only two NuWho companions the Doctor kept across regenerations, so plausibly the ones he was most attached to. If you were trying to gain his trust, that's a great way to go about it.

So how did this happen? There's multiple options here:

a) She's just the Master. This is how she regenerated after being freed from the tooth.

b) She's a bigeneration of the Master at some point.

c) She's the Gold Tooth Master, possessing a human body like the Tremas Master in OldWho.

d) In 13's last episodes, she was briefly forced to regenerate into the Master; Ruby could be the Master half of that combination, running around by herself.

e) She's the Master's daughter, either from Harold and Lucy Saxon, or from Saxon and Missy during that one disturbing episode they had together. She calls herself the Master because the Master is dead, so she feels she's inherited the title. (This could also be the case for option d.)

The biggest hint that we're looking at the Master's daughter would be if the Doctor's daughter reappeared, which has been rumoured since forever. Bonus points if she believes the Doctor to be dead and is calling herself the Doctor, "to keep the name alive". Options c and e also both explain why Ruby became a Silurian, which is a bit tricky if she's a full Time Lord.

Obviously I will be adding evidence to this theory as it comes in. ^_^

hS

But yeah, I pretty much agree with everything you said. I don't think it all rubbed Phobos and me the wrong way quite as much, but still. The look and feel is very much influenced by Disney, IMO, which is sometimes okay but often a bit cartoonish and cheesy. And the writing suffers from Davies' "because reasons" approach to plots. I was also fed up with "space babies!" by the end. ;^_^;

But the eps ARE fun, though. {= )

Maestro is extremely well performed. Maybe a tad out of place, but worth it. I'm curious about the rest of the "pantheon" even if it makes me scratch my head a bit. If the Toymaster is play and Maestro is music, then what other, say, cornerstones of sapient experience might we get?

~Neshomeh

So Doctor Who has been revived again, without... actually being cancelled first. Series 13 of "Doctor Who (2005-2022)" was the last; now we're back on Series 1 of "Doctor Who (No Years For You)".

At the same time - and as far as I can tell, the reason for it - the show has switched from airing first on BBC1 to releasing on Disney+ and (for the UK) BBC iPlayer at some godsforsaken hour, and then airing on BBC1 many hours later. That means the US actually gets to watch it first, while we in the UK either wake up to it or catch it on the TV most of a day later.

I've been saying that Doctor Who sold out to America/Disney, but that's not... really true. Certainly, they're intending this to be an entry point for a huge new American viewer-base - the first episode of "Series 1" (aka Series 14, aka Season 40) starts with a heavy-handed infodump of What The Heck Is This Show - but the first two episodes make it clear that "sold out" is not accurate.

My spoiler-free review of the first two episodes: if you're an American who's been waiting years to have easy access to the quirky British "wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey" sci-fi show you've seen all the memes about, you are likely to come out of these episodes going "that is not what I thought I was getting". And same, my friends, same.

Now it's time to bring River back, because... spoilers!

Yeah, so I have Thoughts.

Overall Impressions

Starting with this because the rest is coming out quite negative... Kaitlyn and I agree that Ncuti and Millie are fantastic actors. They bring a huge energy to the screen and work well together (even if I can't shake the idea that Ruby Sunday is actually Clara Oswald attempting to cosplay as Rose Tyler). When they get a script by someone other than Uncle Rusty I think they'll be fantastic.

Space Babies

How many times do you want to hear Ncuti Gatwa say "Babies... space babies!"? Because I guarantee he does it more than that. Which is weirdly racist/othering, because they're a) not actually babies (they're about seven years old) and b) not especially 'space' other than being currently in space. They want to be on a planet. They just can't be.

They're also deeply lost in the Uncanny Valley, because they used CGI to make them talk. So their lips move in time with the words, but don't often manage to look much like lips when they do. It's creepy and very distracting.

I was also very, very offended by the science of "the airlock door is partly open, the Doctor jumps into the airlock... and is sucked against the closed part of the door". I just... what?

We also-also start with a really overdone & badly-scripted infodump on the Doctor and the TARDIS. I get that it's for a new audience, but... the 2005 series didn't even use the name "Time Lord" until the second episode, why did we need to just dump everything on Ruby in tell-don't-show mode? Then there's a weird excursion where Ruby steps on a butterfly and Back-to-the-Futures herself into a Silurian, then the Doctor revives the butterfly and shifts her back. Which a) probably ate a load of SFX budget, and b) since when does Doctor Who care about the butterfly effect?! But whatever.

In terms of plot, it was fine. Weirdly, after making sure to slap down the Timeless Child stuff from 13's era in the Specials, they've now made it a core part of 15's character and how he connects to his companion. Um... 'kay? But yeah: were it not for "space babies!" and the uncanny lips, this would be a standard middling-to-bad episode. As it is, it's a really rubbish intro to the new series.

The Devil's Chord

This was better, but still makes a load of baffling decisions. Like, why would you make and advertise an episode about the Beatles, and then barely have the Beatles in it? Why would you have a Beatle tell the Doctor a chord, and then have the Doctor need a chord from a genius, and not connect these? Why are we resolving this situation in the 60s when it was established as starting in the 20s, and there's no timey-wimey reason the resolution would echo back? Why did the Doctor feel the need to take Ruby and show her her own destroyed future? (Answer: so that the TARDIS would be locked to only go back to the 60s, because they realised the above question had no good answer.) Why does the Doctor now know, on no basis other than "my legions are coming", that the Maestro is part of "the Pantheon" - or has he just made up that name to sound smart? (I mean... checks out.)

The plot was definitely better. I mean, it made no sense, but in a Doctory sort of way, and had far fewer logic leaps than the previous episode. The CGI on the music tentacles was... Kaitlyn called it 'very 90s', and I can't argue, which is weird when there's now Disney money in play. And while the musical number had me going "what" the entire time, it wasn't actually bad.

Though Kaitlyn is extremely offended that the mysterious lost chord which takes a genius to rediscover is just a tritone.

Overall Impressions, Redux

Kaitlyn says that these episodes feel more like The Sarah Jane Adventures than Doctor Who, which I agree with. It makes me wonder whether Uncle Rusty is planning to use the "Whoniverse" banner to also run a more adult show, along the lines of Torchwood... aaaand yep, looks like he did indeed confirm they were planning a UNIT show. We'll have to see whether the younger tone of the main series continues, or whether it's just Rusty Gonna Rusty. The next episode is by Stephen Moffat, so... we'll see.

hS

. . . Well, gosh. Hermione seemed to so obviously be Lady Polixenes before, but this chapter is making me doubt that. I could understand her not reporting the cursed quill when Hermione was the only victim, to help obfuscate Polixenes’s identity, but she surely would have said something when Luna started getting hurt. My suspicion has now turned upon Lavender, of all characters. Lavender is riding the Pureblood train hard in this timeline, so it might seem at first glance that she would be supportive of Umbridge’s “reforms;” however, she’s also been waaaaay too interested in the “who likes who” of school life, so Umbridge’s blockage of the take-notice board, and the restrictions on public displays of affection, may have put too much of a damper on Hogwarts social life for Lavender to be properly entertained by her classmates. Plus, she was asking Harry about Lily’s outfit, and whether she was romantically involved with Regulus in an earlier chapter, and this chapter has her trying to pry information about Draco’s love life out of Ron, of all people. She’s been after material to publish as Polixenes the whole time, and no one (including me) has been noticing because she was already such a gossip. Well played!

A note from Karkaroff, eh? Hopefully, he’s following in his canon self’s footsteps and betraying Gaunt, though hopefully with less getting-murdered-for-it this time. I wonder if the finale of the Triwizard Tournament made him decide to prioritize the safety of his students/community over loyalty to Gaunt. Perhaps he had some dirt about Gaunt to provide Regulus with, as leverage? And as for Regulus’s own vassal bond with Gaunt, I had rather taken it for granted he would have a Knight’s Mark, since the canon original had a Dark Mark, so it wasn’t really a surprise for me. But I can understand Hermione’s shock over it; she was seeing Regulus as a separate option from Gaunt, only to learn that Gaunt is holding something over Regulus’s head all along. Hermione’s righteous anger in that moment was a beauty and wonder to behold! The reformation will not be spellcast!

Ah, man. The reaction Gary and Rose had to learning of Harry’s love for Draco felt all too familiar, as someone who attended grade school and junior high in the 90s. Yeah, let’s just leave it at that. It’s good for that decade to stay in the past . . .

Some other, minor observations:
-Ron is so gloriously unaware of Hermione and girls in general right now, I love him for it!
-I see Qiu has finally come to terms with exactly what kind of friend Marietta is. She deserves some better friends now!
-Ron is going to $*%@ing crush some high scores at Tetris, absolutely!

—doctorlit, $*%@ing crushing some mediocre scores at Tetris

It is in fact, not. Your first ever post (under a different username) is from May 11, 2021. Your introductory post was on the 12th, though, so I would count this as your third Boardiversary.

I knew the two years was inaccurate, since my 2nd Boardiversary was last month, and you definitely joined before me. Still, it's been great knowing you, and thanks for coming back. Happy Boardiversary!

--Ls

The fortepiano, or pianoforte, is an earlier form of the modern piano, which simply shortened the "pianoforte" term of its predecessor. For the purposes of this AU, wizards use the older term (you see Ron and Draco's POV both using the term, plus Ginny saying it in dialogue), while Muggle-raised Harry and Hermione call it a piano.

ETA as a general note that there's just a lot of different lexical differences between mages and muggles, like pianoforte/piano, pall-mall/croquet, fridgerator/refrigerator, etc. Some of the misspellings in canon like fellytone and elecktic are also treated like a wizarding dialect rather than ignorance since I'm using a descriptivist approach to language differences rather than a prescriptivist one.

(Edit: Stupid enter key.)

I was away for most of the second year due to school, but here I am again. Writing may or may not happen, as I am trying to do fifty-seven things this summer including traveling, participating in my first D&D campaign (which is going pretty well so far), and trying to work on too many craft projects at once.
- Bookworm

is messed-up environments generally. So, for instance, "help, I deleted the ground and now I'm falling forever!" or "Uh, ... I accidentally an Escher room, someone please fix?" or the like, in addition to exploding coffee.

That being said, your idea is fantastic and I will go looking for a way to steal it.

Because there's no reason I can't give Tomash#Post-Self a reputation as the coffee incident guy that's gotten a bit out of hand

When trouble strikes... in any time... in any place... whether latte, cappuccino, or triple-pumpkin-spiced espresso... one dog gets the call.

Even if he doesn't quite understand why.

hS