Over-thinking things

[eruthros]

Two fannish take-offs on tossed aside lines...

One silly response to a line from Doctor Who series 2/28. About as spoilery as the title of the episode in question. (2x05)

So. So. Someone who shall remain nameless in case of spoilers says something like "I have [cyberman] factories on seven continents!"

The first time I heard it, I went "wait, what?"

The second time I heard it, watching yesterday with m_shell, I once again said "wait, what?" and then "what's he going to make more cyber, the penguins?"

And now I'm stuck in this space where I desperately want a cyberpenguin icon, you know, sort of a Wallace and Gromit penguin covered with the magic not-steel skin and a little square antenna over its head.

And then it lifts its wing, and opens its beak, and there's a little blue flash, and the penguin squeaks "delete delete delete."

ALSO. Someone says something about the cybermen all "thinking alike" and sort of sharing brain function. Which... omg, I want to see the cyberpenguins starting to take over the world! And the cybermen gliding down stairs on their stomachs, and attacking seals!

(Actually, might that be a way to slow down the cybermen? Start making cyberpigeons to leech processing power from the cybermen? It would be sort of like malware. Also, then we could escort flanks of pigeons through the cyberwhatsis, and then they would come out the other side. With not-steel skin. And an inability to fly. And bobbing heads. Going DELETE DELETE DELETE.)



And the second, from a tossed-aside line in the latest episode of Stargate: SG-1. It spoils... the theme of the last two seasons. Shocker, no?

So! In the most recent episode, someone who was in a position to know what the Round Table guys looked like says that Daniel Jackson looks like Galahad, and Cam Mitchell looks like Perceval (or Percival, spell it as you like).

And this made me really happy. The only thing that could've made me happier would be if Cam were Gawain (because Gawain is my favorite). But Perceval's my second favorite, and I wouldn't be able to make this totally cool point about the reference if Cam had been Gawain. So. It's probably entirely me rationalizing, but who cares: this is cool. (First I'm gonna do a huge Arthurian fangirl infodump, and then I'll bring it back to Why This Makes This Line Cool.)

See, here's how it goes: in the 1100s, Chretien de Troyes writes "Perceval, le Conte du Graal" in which Perceval is a hero of the graal (grail) quest. It's the first known story of the Grail Quest, and it clearly ties together this Perceval-grail idea. It's unfinished, but later fanfiction continuations continue this idea of Perceval as the hero. That is, he gets the grail. It's all Perceval, all the way. And lots of people use the de Troyes story of the grail as a basis for their stories, and it ends up being a huge Percival love-in. (See, for example, the German "Parzival.")

Galahad doesn't get involved until the French start mucking about, sometime in the 1300s; the introduction of Galahad in the Vulgate Cycle is partly because the French monks don't want a sinner to get the grail, so they invent this blessed knight out of whole cloth. Perceval's still a good guy; he and Bors accompany Galahad to the Grail Castle, so in a sense he still achieves the grail, but we all know that the real hero, the man who is pure enough to attain the grail, is Galahad. (This is the version that most people read, in one of the modern interpretations via Mallory's Morte d'Arthur.)

And that means that this toss-aside line has presented us with two knights, either of whom can be the Grail Knight, depending on your canon. You can read Galahad (Daniel) as a pretentious French interloper, or you can read Galahad (Daniel) as the true Grail Knight. Daniel achieves the graal, and Cam goes along with him, or Cam achieves the graal, and Daniel is uninvolved. Fab, no?

Also, I can read the whole dangerous-technology thing Daniel does in this episode as a parallel to Galahad sitting in the Siege Perilous, the seat at the Round Table reserved for the Grail Knight. Because, see, the Siege Perilous killed any man who was not going to be the Grail Knight for daring to try. (And, hey, we still don't know what happens to Daniel, so I can preserve my ambiguity, too.)

And I can persist in my belief that someone did this intentionally, because Perceval's not really the first knight to spring to mind after Galahad.

So, you know, I'm heartily sick of the overly-literal reading of the Grail Story, but that line? Teh cool.