the most fun part of watching the making of episodes each week has been watching Russel say out loud that he wanted to do all the stuff that Sarah predicted in this video he would want to do
I've been thinking about why that is--how she and I tend to be very good at getting in the heads of certain serial stories--and some of it is just, I think, gravitating towards stuff created by people (Davies, Moffat, Andrew Hussie) who think kinda like us, but I also think part of it is knowing how to sift out the specifics from the broad preoccupations.
like, a lot of people get hung up on "well Dave has x y z heroic signifiers so therefore he's going to die fighting Lord English", like ultra specific claims about how the story must go. it's a very puzzle box approach to narratives. everything that happens is a Clue to a Mystery. sometimes fans are even right! but they're right in the way sometimes a gambler is right about what the slot machine is going to do, because often those details are arbitrary, or just pertinent to a particular character. moreover, it's easy to latch onto symbolism that exists within the wider culture and miss the significance to a given character: yes, Dave Strider is set up to be a particular kind of Heroic Protagonist, but the point of that setup is to underscore his own ambivalence about this role, particularly in the face of his brother's abusive and neglectful tendencies. so we arrive instead at the repeated symbolism of Dave shattering swords, especially Dirk's "unbreakable katana". all of this snaps into focus much more in retrospect, though. I doubt anyone called "well the version of Spades Slick possessed by Lord English is going to grab Dirk, and then the cyborg Spades Slick will grab HIM so Dave has to decapitate all three at once breaking Dirk's sword in the process".
I mean, god look at that mess of a sentence. wild stories end up in wild places, much wilder than fandoms can often predict.
but it was pretty apparent early on that the gnostic symbolism in Homestuck was more significant, because it keyed into so many of the story's preoccupations about inescapable situations, being dealt a bad narrative hand, unwinnable games, and malevolent systems that kids are trapped in. stuck, if you will. characters in Andrew's stories are constantly trying to get out of wherever they're trapped in--one of the early indicators, in fact, that the story was going to wind up indelibly queer.
by the same token, Sarah's sense that fables would be a core part of this season of Doctor Who bore out wonderfully in the first two episodes. yes, Space Babies included. after all, isn't the whole thing the result of an education system running wild and inventing a monster, one that immediately as the Turn comes everyone decides actually should be allowed to stick around? it didn't ask to be brought into being just to terrify a bunch of talking babies! if that's not the Doctor having to learn the science of a fable, I don't know what is.
but more than that what we're observing in the making of videos--and the (all time hilarious) commentary for Boom--is this clear interest in turning towards fables and the mystical as a way to explore new possibilities within the franchise. it feels notable that Moffat and Davies are asked what the essential features of a Doctor Who story are, and they instead rapidly spin off talking about all the ways you can "bleach the story out". Moffat jokes that you start to understand why so many third episodes in old series have the Doctor getting knocked unconscious. there's just not that many ways to put an immortal higher dimensional time lord "on the back foot" (literally). and there's a palpable sense that the same tiredness Sarah points out as deeply endemic to Franchises right now must be struggled against, Doctor Who must be broken out of its comfortable patterns. (notably, another thing that's significant here is the emotional availability and vulnerability that Gatwa brings to his performance--something else Sarah spends time with in her video).
this isn't a huge leap into prophecy, of course. she isn't predicting who Susan Twist is or anything like that. (unlike me: I'm confident she is a Word Lord who will fully enter into this universe through the fandom's conviction that there must be a Susan twist.) but I think it's valuable because it puts you into the space of engaging with what the creative team is actually interested in, as opposed to how "the story should go". it's a lot easier to pick up what a creative team is putting down if you're turned to face them rather than turned away looking at some random set dressing and extrapolating wildly specific theories from it! you run a real risk of not catching whatever they're handing off to you, and then saying, "well that was really clumsy of the creators, clearly they just didn't care." and that just doesn't seem like much fun for anyone!
like, the ending of Homestuck (and the Homestuck postcanon) is a lot more satisfying if you've caught on to the idea that the narrative is a prison that the characters are trying to escape from, Gnostic-style. the ending of the whole "mystery" of The Hybrid in that last 12/Clara season is more satisfying if you recognize that Moffat doesn't really care what The Hybrid "actually is" or whether it exists at all, he cares about what the concept means for Gallifrey, for the Doctor, and for the toxic, codependent, escalating stakes of the Doctor's relationship to Clara. the ending of Lost is more satisfying if you actually watched the last three seasons instead of letting a bunch of dumbasses online convince you that "they were dead the whole time" (they were not). none of this stuff required specific predictions about the exact events of a story's finale, but they all came out of left field for some viewers, who might've had a better time if they'd focus less on tropes and allusions and more on how those things fit into broader themes and obsessions of the creators.
Sarah's video is a good stealth crash course on how to take a look at, say, four tv specials from a returning showrunner and extrapolate, from those few hours of tv, some solid insights into what the new series would be.
...none of us predicted Space Babies, though. gotta hand it to Davies, he's still finding ways to make us say, "now what the hell was that?"
