read-along discussion post: The Blue Angel

[cosmic-celery.livejournal.com]

Hey, everyone! We're going to discuss The Blue Angel by Paul Magrs and Jeremy Hoad today! If you need a bit of a reminder, you can check out the plot summary at the Doctor Who Reference Guide, or check the tags for the download link.

I've set up an IRC channel through Mibbit if you want to discuss with us in a more rapid format. Go to http://www.mibbit.com/chat/, type in a nick and #act_three to join. Thanks, and If you have trouble feel free to leave a comment here. The chat will officially start after 10 EST today.

SO! Tell me, what did you think of the book and its plot? What about Fitz's role in the plot? What do you think of Iris, and what do you think of Compassion so far? What confused you? What didn't confuse you?



Twenty Questions
1. Was it completely fitting that Belinda was transformed into a giant squid,
thrashing her newly granted tentacles as the captain of her ship stormed into
the throne room on Valcea?
2. Or was it an ad hoc, impromptu, arbitrary change of form, perpetrated by
a Daedalus embittered by his own metamorphosis, a Daedalus who laughed
aloud in glee as Captain Blandish informed the assembled rabble that they
were all about to die?
3. Or was it all to do with Belinda’s eventual, heroic status as commanderin-
chief of the defending armies on the frontier water worlds during the final
push that the worlds of the Obverse made on the Enclave, and was she destined
to find a new element?
4. And did Blandish’s personalised weapon really go off as devastatingly as
he had planned, destroying what remained of the throne room at the heart of
the City of Glass?
5. Or did it merely set off a bizarre and unforeseeable chain reaction which
splintered and shattered the transdimensional Corridors, causing them to mutate
beyond anybody’s wildest dreams?
6. And did those fractured conduits open up even further complex channels
into known and unknown universes, so that even more spaces were jeopardised
and even more races were sucked ineluctably into the bloody fray?
7. And was it so unforeseeable? Did Daedalus already know that the captain
of the Nepotist was bound to seek to detonate his secreted device? Did
Daedalus set the whole plan in motion, everything dependent on Blandish’s
incendiary internal organ?
8. Did Daedalus rule supreme in the chaos and did he lord it over the ravening
hordes?
9. How did he deal with the first new arrivals – the first being, naturally, the
Daleks – who entered the space of contention, the threshold between thesis
and antithesis bristling, buzzing, swivelling with fury?
10. Did the Steigertrudes and Ghillighast, led by Emba united with Meisha,
form an army between them to defend the Enclave and maintain its fragile
integrity?
11. At what point did the Doctor arrive?
12. And in which incarnation?
13. Was it really several, as many sources claim, and was it a tale as the
legends have it?
14. Did Iris forge an alliance between Cyber factions and insect races and
lead an assault on the homeworld of the first of the unknown races to emerge,
hungry, from the Obverse?
15. Did Iris ensure that the earlier, merely eighth, Doctor was safely out of the
way, on purpose?
16. Did she know what a can of worms had been opened?
17. Had she already been there and seen the outcome?
18. Did she live, like Merlin, backwards through time?
19. In the end, did she remove her Doctor, because she knew what must
eventually become of him, or simply because she couldn’t bear to see him
there on the battlefield again, again, again and over again?
20. Did she want to prevent her Doctor from seeing what really did happen
next?