8 Charley C'rizz
May. 21st, 2026 05:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have been relistening to the 8th Doctor adventures from the beginning, and C'Rizz gets more interesting this way than I remember. He has an arc going on, stuff about being Eutermesan and also being strange for a Eutermesan. Stuff about being a chameleon who picks up personality from those around him. It's interesting in theory, but I don't know how well the practice is going, since it mostly seems to result in him being grumpy and inconsistent.
Also absolutely terrible things keep happening to him, including being tortured, caged, put on display, and treated like he's subhuman whereever he goes. And that seems like it should be an interesting angsty storyline. But. It also seems like Charley and the Doctor don't notice? And to be fair the Doctor is getting tortured at least as much as C'Rizz, and also having one of those stretches of story where he doesn't go long without losing his memory again, so it seems relatively reasonable for him to be distracted. But it means C'rizz is having a terrible time as almost a seperate track of story, and dealing with it alone.
I was comparing this in my head to how Hex gets treated, and Big Finish really do put the guys through it, but Hex is with people who both notice and care.
The story is not treating C'rizz equally or dealing well with stories that keep landing on racial discrimination but not calling it that.
It's also a story arc about mental illness but aside from one character of the episode calling him a schizo (not a kind reference or a sympathetic character) the story isn't exactly foregrounding it. Dealing with it *well* seems like a lot to hope for.
Next episode up is Absolution, and C'rizz will be all done until this set of Sontar stories now coming out, as far as I can tell.
I do not remember Absolution.
Shall see how that goes.
ETA: Absolution did not work for me at all. It was actually boring. Sure as a stand alone episode it had all the standard parts, but it paid off precisely none of C'rizz's journey. Things happened to him a lot, and he just sort of got swept along to the end of the story, where his first and only choice happened. And it didn't seem like much of a choice because the two conflicting definitions of 'save' and the way the version of time C'rizz grew up in shaped them got like a couple of lines of mention. And then he just chose to die like his wife from his first episode. Which is an ending that only makes sense if he never changed, and if a companion choosing to die seemed like a good idea to someone somehow.
I can take the available parts and make a better ending but I don't see it as a viable reading on what actually happened. The world that got stuck at its worst moment and became a sort of hell met the man from the cyclical universe, where all things must die in order to be reborn. That should work. But that isn't what I thought I heard.
Either I was sleepier than I thought and slept through the bits that made it a good story or that was a rubbish ending.
/ETA
... in other news this on screen keyboard is driving me spare, I absolutely cannot figure out why it keeps bringing the start menu up. it seems to statistically correlate with trying to type words beginning with o but typing around the o on purpose does nothing. Invisible function for the lose???
Also absolutely terrible things keep happening to him, including being tortured, caged, put on display, and treated like he's subhuman whereever he goes. And that seems like it should be an interesting angsty storyline. But. It also seems like Charley and the Doctor don't notice? And to be fair the Doctor is getting tortured at least as much as C'Rizz, and also having one of those stretches of story where he doesn't go long without losing his memory again, so it seems relatively reasonable for him to be distracted. But it means C'rizz is having a terrible time as almost a seperate track of story, and dealing with it alone.
I was comparing this in my head to how Hex gets treated, and Big Finish really do put the guys through it, but Hex is with people who both notice and care.
The story is not treating C'rizz equally or dealing well with stories that keep landing on racial discrimination but not calling it that.
It's also a story arc about mental illness but aside from one character of the episode calling him a schizo (not a kind reference or a sympathetic character) the story isn't exactly foregrounding it. Dealing with it *well* seems like a lot to hope for.
Next episode up is Absolution, and C'rizz will be all done until this set of Sontar stories now coming out, as far as I can tell.
I do not remember Absolution.
Shall see how that goes.
ETA: Absolution did not work for me at all. It was actually boring. Sure as a stand alone episode it had all the standard parts, but it paid off precisely none of C'rizz's journey. Things happened to him a lot, and he just sort of got swept along to the end of the story, where his first and only choice happened. And it didn't seem like much of a choice because the two conflicting definitions of 'save' and the way the version of time C'rizz grew up in shaped them got like a couple of lines of mention. And then he just chose to die like his wife from his first episode. Which is an ending that only makes sense if he never changed, and if a companion choosing to die seemed like a good idea to someone somehow.
I can take the available parts and make a better ending but I don't see it as a viable reading on what actually happened. The world that got stuck at its worst moment and became a sort of hell met the man from the cyclical universe, where all things must die in order to be reborn. That should work. But that isn't what I thought I heard.
Either I was sleepier than I thought and slept through the bits that made it a good story or that was a rubbish ending.
/ETA
... in other news this on screen keyboard is driving me spare, I absolutely cannot figure out why it keeps bringing the start menu up. it seems to statistically correlate with trying to type words beginning with o but typing around the o on purpose does nothing. Invisible function for the lose???