Doctor Who "The Interstellar Song Contest" Review (Spoilers)

Also reviews for the season finale of The Simpsons, the latest episodes of Family Guy, Bob's Burgers, and Law & Order: Organized Crime, and the season finale of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

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TAKING STOCK (A DREAMWIDTH EXCLUSIVE)

After Gilda And Meek "Enter Tork" Special Edition was finished, and I did the first round of fixes on the site (there is still plenty more to fix) what I wanted to do was read all 68 issues on the site followed by the final 22 scripts yet to be put to paper.

I am 49 and I did something I was never able to do at any previous point in my life: I was able to read the entire Gilda And Meek And The Un-Iverse saga in order. This is the first time I've EVER been able to do that and it sort of blew my mind.

My thoughts. I am happy. VERY happy.

I knew my upcoming scripts were gonna be great, but on some level that almost doesn't matter. I had had the nagging suspicion in the back of my mind The Terran Wars was gonna blow everything else out of the water and things you formerly loved would seem underwhelming in comparison.

That's not what happened for me. I was happily surprised how well every bit of the saga fits into each other and compliments everything else. Granted that was the idea, but there is a difference in having a seemingly impossible to achieve goal, and achieving it.

What do I like most about the story?

I have always bragged about the pacing, and indeed Candice is of the opinion the whole thing has the feel of a TV show or movie rather than a comic book because of it. What makes me happy is that my pacing was not merely down to scripts or artwork. As I started the saga, I deliberately separated various parts of the saga. For F.I.S.H. and Lace Doilies I went back and forth between the issues. Some people might be annoyed that breaks up the pacing of each title, but my idea was me doing that would actually IMPROVE the pacing by upping the tension every month and waiting a bit to release it. My pacing also was done to the formatting of the saga. And this goes for the fact that the four titles of The Terran Wars mostly have different casts, and don't interact with each other to start out with, so each cliffhanger is especially crazymaking to get back to four issues later.

The other thing I like, and this is something I could only quantify by reading the entire set canon, is the fact that the saga doesn't just vary in tones with comedy, horror, and drama. The story explores a bunch of entirely different genres and somehow makes them all fit (Gilda And Meek is fantasy, F.I.S.H. is sci-fi, Lace Doilies is Superheroes). The amount of disparate story points that seem unconnected and entirely different from each other aren't just cool because they all connect by the end and have to do with each other. It because having all of those different and varying genres in the same story gives it a richer scope than a project that picks a solid idea and is basically about that the entire way through. Being able to connect these things is rewarding, but even if I hadn't bothered doing that, I still feel all of the various story types, genres, tropes, and tones, makes the saga feel not just bigger than other similar stuff, but more well-rounded too.

Doing another few read-throughs and getting in some more site fixes. But May 17-19 2025 was the first time in my entire life I read my entire life's goal front to back, and it holds up as well as I could have hoped. I'm very excited.