I Was Watching The Bts Videos Yesterday Including The Making Of The Opening Credits And Mr. Anderson

fourteen and the toymaker making out sloppy style but fourteen is actually kissing tooth!master

A revelation of a design for me!

Could do without a posy at the belt, though.

1920 c. Cotton day dress with blue stitched design. From Rococo Vintage, Etsy.

Amazing how uncannily fitting are the words of that song.

When I first heard about this story, I thought - wow, EVEN Patti Smith herself isn't immune!

Patti Smith and Her Dedication To David

On this day in 2014, the iconic rock-n-roll queen Patti Smith (who's celebrating her 77th birthday today, by the way) dedicated her song "Distant Fingers" to David Tennant. Which makes me even happier when the first thing he said to me when I told him my name and spelled it so he could sign an autograph, he asked me, "Oh, like Patti Smith?" Yes, sir, exactly like that! For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, let me elaborate. I don't know how often she did it on her 2014 tour, but I know that on 29 December 2014 at New York's Webster Hall, she had a talk with her audience (watch at the link) before singing her song "Pumping (My Heart)," and described how David first caught her attention for his role as Alec Hardy in Broadchurch. Then, after catching him by accident in Doctor Who, she ended up watching his entire run as the Tenth Doctor, and - predictably, because DUH! - fell head over heels for him.

The following night, again at Webster Hall, was her birthday. That night she dedicated another of her songs, "Distant Fingers" - from her 1976 album, Radio Ethiopia - to David. You can watch that here - and I'd advise you to watch it in its entirety, as she begins to riff at the end of the song and talks about David:

And oh, just in case you're having difficulty understanding her words, or English isn't your first language, here are some of the lyrics to the song:

When, when will you be landing? When, when will you return? Feel, feel my heart expanding You and your alien arms

All my earthly dreams are shattered I'm so tired, I quit Take me forever, it doesn't matter Deep inside of your ship

La, la, la, la, la, la, landing Please, oh, oh, won't you return? Feel, see your blue lights are flashing You and your alien arms

Deep in the forest I whirl like I did as a little girl Let my eyes rise in the sky looking for you Oh, you know, I would go anywhere at all 'Cause no star is too far with you, with you....

Keeping in mind she wrote this song in 1976, the lyrics fit David's turn as the Tenth Doctor with eerie clairvoyance!

And because she is the queen she is, she adds a sly little comment: "So come for me, David. I know I'm an older woman, but I know so many things."

One wonders what David thought about this. I've no doubt someone in his circle alerted him to Patti's dedication, because how could they not? And as an aside - his interaction with me about Patti Smith was about nine months before she did this dedication to him. So not only was he aware of her as the music connoisseur he is, the fact her name sprung immediately to his mind when speaking to me has always made me think he's a fan.

He probably blushed. Deeply. Well played, Patti. Well played.

Don't get me wrong, but Spies Of Warsaw was THE handsomest DT ever looked (before the 60th specials, that is). And un-fucking-believably dashing, too. And a healthy dose of whump never hurts (as opposed to clumsy puns). Rewatch is due.

This DT edit is my Roman empire

Now we’ve had this bi-generation I just think we should go full unhinged and have gold tooth turn into Simm Master. Have a full ‘why has this face returned?’ parallel. Shove him into retired life with Tennant’s doctor. Scale down their enmity to absolutely microscopic proportions. From cosmic scale to just domestic life. Have the Nobles stuck in the front row watching them sort their shit out.

I want them trying to survive Sylvia Noble together. I want them at war with their neighbours. I want them battling with the chaos of Evri deliveries - ‘not even the TARDIS can locate the safe place they’ve apparently left it in’. Have them arguing in Tesco over whether it really matters whether eggs are free range. They can make up by getting their own chickens which The Master can regularly threaten to roast much to Rose’s horror (but he won’t because he named them after the Teletubbies and The Doctor knows he’d never hurt Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa or Po… and he just enjoys having dominion over lesser creatures or something 🙄)

I want aliens turning up for their regularly scheduled fuck with London at Christmas time moment only to be faced with the two of them in their matching Noble family Christmas jumpers (and they will be wearing them because have you met Donna?) And no, The Master hasn’t gone soft, he doesn’t care about Earth in general, but the Strictly final is on and he’s a little invested in that.

I want Donna, in her new UNIT job, explaining this to her new colleagues. Because they know The Doctor and The Master, they’ve seen the files, and they just…live in her garden now.

“I need you” isn’t “I love you,” and it isn’t “Yes, let’s go off together,” but the thing is, it might as well be. And it might be one of the more honest things Aziraphale has ever said.

He has never said it aloud before now. Not like this, with eons worth of raucous indignant feeling crawling up into his throat. He had not wanted, not expected to say it like this, mocked by his own stricken reflection in Crowley's sunglasses, each lens a dark mirror.

"I—I need you," says Aziraphale, and his voice breaks down the middle. It might as well, for he's confessed too late. Crowley is shut to him, recedes from him like a wave broken on the terrible bedrock of Aziraphale's futile stubbornness.

And still, even like this, Aziraphale needs him.

His presence, his constancy. His unfailing, tenacious friendship.

Crowley’s kindness, his softness, his solicitousness under the prickly façade Aziraphale sees is just that—a layer that can be so easily peeled away to reveal the deep core of caring beneath, too entrenched to be deserved by any world they could live in. He needs Crowley’s unguarded gaze, needs the way Crowley’s forever looking at him across distances when he thinks Aziraphale doesn’t notice: chin tilted up, eyes soft as marigold petals.

A phone call away whenever anything or nothing at all happens is Crowley’s dear voice; his lovely dry humor; his sauntering, slithering, improbable walk despite which he somehow flawlessly falls into step alongside Aziraphale anywhere and all the time. His hip knocking against Aziraphale’s, casual as anything and yet so much more than. Flashes of black and wisps of red flitting in and out of Aziraphale’s periphery for thousands of years.

He needs their circuitous arguments, their winding ethical debates—after most of which they somehow end up on the same side, that is, their own side, terrifying and exhilarating in its Promethean familiarity—and Crowley’s chaotically-sure moral compass. The times Crowley is braver than Aziraphale could ever be; and the times Crowley reminds him of how brave he actually always has been.

And Aziraphale needs even the great big awful rows, the ones that end in their standing on opposite verges of another chasm of their own making. Because the culmination of such a fight is always the meeting again in the middle. It’s the low sweeping bow of their apology, a ritual not half earnest for all its facetiousness, which says so much without either of them having to utter a word. Crowley holds a whole conversation in the dip of his fiery head and the exaggerated flutter of his elegant wrists, when it’s his turn; and, when it’s Aziraphale’s, the hashing-out of differences is there in the way he executes each familiar movement with the practiced ease of a faithful courtier, though it’s been ages since he stood in any king’s court.

He needs the knowledge that they always forgive each other. Because, well, they do. They must. They will. What’s a spat or a quarrel or even a proper falling-out to two beings like them, to him and Crowley?

Aziraphale needs Crowley’s happiness. His truest happiness. If that isn't the crux of it all, what is?

He remembers the ancient light of Crowley's joy, how it had shone once about both of them like an aura through the blackness of undeveloped space. It never left, all that bright, barely reined-in giddiness, all that frenetic energy, but he's transmuted it, magpie-like, into something else. Aziraphale can sense it whenever Crowley brings him a new vintage record to add to his collection. Whenever Crowley pulls out Aziraphale’s chair for him outside Marguerite's, or orders just what he likes for him at the Ritz. Whenever he drops into the shop unannounced with a little box tucked under his arm, full of gorgeous petits fours from the new bakery Aziraphale hasn’t yet tried, and says, gleeful, Ohhh, you wouldn’t believe all the wiling I had to do to get my hands on these, angel. You’ll have to thwart me for this, I know. But first—no, no, no, first! The only sensible thing for you to do would be to try them… you’ll like the pear macaron...

And of course Crowley is right. He's right about most things, isn't he, after all? Because Crowley knows him, and he needs to be known, but it simply wouldn't do for anyone else to be the one doing the knowing.

Aziraphale likes the pear macaron, just as Crowley knew he would.

He likes all the things that come along with Crowley, really. The fast car, oh yes, sleek and stylishly classic and so very Crowley through and through, though Aziraphale has committed staunchly to grousing about it. The way no companionable silence held in Crowley's company is ever truly silent. The jaunts to the park on seasonable days: Crowley's touch lingering where he pours frozen peas for the ducks into Aziraphale's cupped palm; the fondness in Crowley's tone poorly disguised as he points out his favorite mated pair trawling placidly across the pond. The drinking together long past the small hours of the morning in the back room of the bookshop, where the walls are the same warm ochre shade as Crowley’s eyes.

It isn't ever so much about the drinking as it is about the together bit. How the space between them dwindles with the syrupy passage of time. How Crowley softens and melts into the settee. How he becomes Aziraphale's to watch, for once. How he grows so wondrously relaxed and gloriously at home there in Aziraphale's space that Aziraphale begins to wonder if this will at last be the night Crowley does not, eventually, get up and retreat back to his Bentley to take himself away again...

There is always that fragile little moment, right after sobering up, when everything in their universe seems at the same time to be entirely too set in stone and entirely too much as though it all hangs by one delicate, dissembling thread. Always the split second in which Aziraphale looks into Crowley's guileless face and remembers he could unravel everything with a single tug.

Yes, one sharp tug on the lapels of Crowley's jacket would do it, he knows. How easily it could be done... Tumble the two of them into one another, just then, and they would never be parted again. And his deft-tongued Crowley would lick the heat and the aftertaste of Talisker into Aziraphale's mouth, then, before it had the chance to dissipate completely.

He could. He could.

It's in those stretched milliseconds, brimming with a tender longing so acute it tips right over into an agony, that Aziraphale realizes: I do need all of you, darling, don't I? So terribly much it might unmake me one day. Never mind Aziraphale's most fickle and blustering attempts at denial, he knows this to be true as he knows the truth of little else in the cosmos.

And perhaps today is that day—the day Aziraphale will dissolve and be remade in the permanent shape of lack.

I'm really glad that for once, in 2023, a David Tennent character ended up "Happily ever after!"

we do not talk enough about the moment right before crowley puts his sunglasses back on. the "nothing lasts forever" is devastating and if you're like me your eyes were so full of tears you couldn't see the screen the first time you watched it (just like crowley, look at us all twinning in sadness!).

there is a shift that happens in his eyes and i think it is absolutely fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time.

we begin with crowley averting his gaze from aziraphale's face and staring off into the distance instead, and you can see his spirit break. that crowley just lost the one thing in the world he cannot live without and we can see it written across his face like a neon sign.

then, as you'd expect, he gives into the need to cover up his pain, to try and make himself less vulnerable, and even before he lifts his glasses he looks down so aziraphale can no longer see his eyes.

now, the next part is what would not let me out of its grasp all day. we know it happens because of his demeanour afterwards and up until the kiss, but you can actually watch as crowley makes himself numb to the world.

i am intimately familiar with dissociation as a trauma and stress response, and while you can never fully control it, you do eventually find the switch in your mind that makes you snap back into the haze. crowley has had six thousand years to get really, really good at leaving reality behind when he needs and/or wants to.

that's exactly what he does.

he still looks sad, and yet there's just something distinctly distant in his eyes, the shift from openly heartbroken to "i don't want to feel any of this let me leave".

glasses? on

emotions? off

hotel? trivago

i have stared at those four frames more than any person probably should and i don't know if it's the light, if i am going insane, or if there is a single tear sliding out of his right (our left) eye. i'm probably insane and the light is a bitch so if anyone has some high resolution shots or anything that could answer that question without a doubt PLEASE do add it.

by now you are probably ready to threaten me with a knife in a dark alley but before you do that or drive your car off a cliff, let me tell you the best part:

aziraphale notices.

they might be communicating on two different frequencies but aziraphale knows crowley. he knows and loves him, and, most importantly, over the last few years he has gotten used to seeing crowley without his glasses. aziraphale could probably write a book on the expressions in his eyes alone and watches that shift happen and is devastated.

look.

he tries to make himself hope the same second, tries to convince himself crowley is putting on his glasses so they can leave together, but he knows.

aziraphale sees the light leave crowley's eyes, sees crowley leave, knowing that he is quite literally running away from him. you and me against the world, angel, but in that moment crowley firmly pushes him back to "the world" (or tries to, anyway).

the entire season we see crowley take off his glasses whenever he enters the bookshop to the point where he's running around without them on in broad daylight with jimbriel right there.

can you imagine how hurt and confused aziraphale must be?

because what crowley is telling him, if we really, really break it down, is that aziraphale is no longer a safe person for him. and repairing that trust is going to take time and work, no matter how much crowley loves him, how badly they love and need each other.

anyway to seal this off and really rub in the pain - how it started vs. how it ended. <3

oh one last thing: now crowley no longer has a single person he can be himself around, no one that knows him, no one he trusts. no one in whose presence he can take his glasses off.

and outside of the bentley and his own flat, he no longer has a place to do so either. the bookshop was theirs. with aziraphale gone, is it really a safe place anymore? is it somewhere he can just let himself be knowing he will be looked after and protected?

easy answer: no.

alright, off i go. see y'all on the next angst post or in the tags.

something about those little moments in s2ep3 with crowley alone in the bookshop while aziraphale is in scotland. I watched them all as a single sequence and it's just... SO MUCH.

look. the fact that crowley is cool as a cucumber when aziraphale is around, but when he isn't... well. there's the deep, deep breath he takes while he watches azi drive away, and i can't tell if he's more scared of being alone with gabriel or worried about azi going away alone. because as someone pointed out, aziraphale gets the car keys right after muriel arrives, and obviously it's safer for him to take the bentley which will hopefully keep him safe as it usually keeps crowley safe; but at the same time, crowley has to give up what's basically an extension of him, the one protection he has ready, to shield himself or to run away with, should anything happen while the guardian of the eastern gate aziraphale isn't there.

and then crowley is alone, without aziraphale, without his comfort car, stranded in his favorite place which has ceased being safe and has become instead somewhat inhospitable because his mortal enemy now lives here too. and the way he's wearing no jacket, no waistcoat, and he's just so thin, and snake-like, especially standing there near gabriel, who is built like a tank and you just know that if he's right, if by any chance gabriel became hostile, even in a non-magic fight crowley wouldn't stand a chance.

and yet, AND YET, he's quietly explaining gravity to him, then trying (and failing) to make Maggie and Nina vavoom and also explaining THAT to jim (azi didn't stop to hear his very romantic plan so at least maybe does jim? Can I hear a fucking wahoo?!), and you can't help but feel how badly he needs to talk to someone, anyone nonhuman around who isn't immediately outright hostile, without censoring himself, without complicated feelings in between.

and then, the exact moment later, the temporary peace is broken by gabriel himself remembering something ominous and ONE MOMENT LATER YET shax is outside, complete with background screaming chorus, and then crowley is desperately trying to convince her they don't know where the archangel is, still playing cool but swallowing like that, and then she says Hell will declare war and he's just thrown for a moment and says "to me?!" in THAT voice! but it's even worse than that, because they'll actually declare war not on him but on his friend, and he could maybe cope with hell wanting his scalp (again) but Aziraphale's?! And then STILL keeping that facade and telling her that anyway the angel is inside in the basement, because he knows that Aziraphale is safe while he's inside the bookshop, and therefore trying to keep her off Aziraphale's back while he's outside and alone? Which btw doesn't work because she somehow knows anyway and proceeds on harassing the angel in the bentley the very next time we see him?! AND at the same time he's trying to keep her from realizing he is all alone, here, in the bookshop?!?

And he's been flippant throughout, but the moment she leaves he's like, wreaked?! And his first instinct is of course to go back at being mad and threatening at Jim, but even that feels pointless, because the machine is already in motion, and it's always too late, it's "we're doomed" all over again, isn't it? and the fact that he's shaking all over as he comes to this conclusion?

and then we learn that he hasn't slept all night after this, and as soon as Aziraphale is finally back he's immediately out as if he'd been looking out the window all night waiting for him to be back home safe, and for his car to be available for him to finally feel safe into, and i've seen people wonder why he bolts the fuck out of there as soon as azi is back as if he didn't need a breather after all he's been through, AND THE FACT THAT LATER ON HE TELLS AZIRAPHALE CaN I WaTcH AS IF HE'S AT ALL INTERESTED IN HIM RUNNING ERRANDS ACROSS ALL OF SOHO AND NOT IN FACT UNABLE TO LEAVE AZIRAPHALE'S SIDE NOW THAT HE'S FINALLY BACK AFTER A FULL DAY AWAY DURING WHICH HELL IS APPARENTLY ABOUT TO DECLARE WAR TO HIM SPECIFICALLY WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK

anyway what i want to say is this sequence is the epitome of anxiety and claustrophoby for me, and it plays like a horror movie. It's just A Lot

no but it's the way for aziraphale "nothing lasts forever" meant "i'm willing to give up the bookshop if it means i can be with you safely" and for crowley it meant "nothing lasts forever, not the bookshop, not earth, not us"