Alexander Siddig, aka Siddig el Fadil, is one of those enviable people - like Timothy Dalton - who look better and more impressive as they age. I found him good looking as a young man, but not exactly charismatic. (Though I liked Julian Bashir; but it was the kind of sympathy that wants to feed soup and cookies, not ask for an imaginary date.) Flashforward twenty years later, as could be seen in Cairo Times (for example), and: wow. Currently he's playing Saladin in a new play at the Globe, and check him out now!. I rest my case.

Multifandom:

Good meta on fannish reactions to female characters falling in love. To quote the writer: It can be refreshing to see a woman character who doesn’t have romance subplot, because so many women characters are seen as as extensions of the male hero. But people can fall into a trap of judging women characters as automatically less if they do fall in love.

Too true. I mean, yes, there have been sad cases of female characters losing their non-romantic agenda and -relationships once they fall in love. (Insert grumblings including the name Laura Roslin here.) But that's no longer the rule. (Take Once Upon A Time, which has been called a fantasy soap often, and I can see why; there are definitely romantic storylines happening all over the place, and it's not the reinvention-of-tv-type of show. But the non-romantic relationships of the leading ladies are even more key to what drives the stories - Regina and Snow, Regina and Emma, Emma and Henry, Regina and Henry, Regina and Emma and Henry, Emma and Snow, Regina and Cora, etc. Or Orphan Black, where the relationships between the clones are the heart of the story, rivalled only by Sarah's relationships with Kira, Felix and Mrs. S..) So to automatically assume a female character will no longer get written/acted in an interesting way once they hook up strikes me as patronizing. (Also possibly "concern-trolling", which is a fascinating term I learned via reading this post, meaning, if I interpret it correctly, to disguise a negative reaction to a female character by dragging up social justice reasons as opposed to "she's in the way of my ship!" or "I just don't like her".)

Going off on a tangent: mind you, there are a few examples of male characters benefitting from no longer being the love interest (for example, Angel is a far more interesting character on his own show than on BTVS where he was strictly Buffy's love interest, and in one season also opponent, and one of reasons is the way AtS gives him a lot of other relationships), but generally I don't think - if the internet is anything to go by, which could be misleading - people mind male characters being mainly defined through their relationship to the heroine, possibly because there are still on avarage many more male-centric stories than female-centric stories, and they see it as some sort of karmic payback/refreshing twist.

One more utterly unrelated link: An interview with the delightful Bernard Cribbins, living British entertainment legend and familiar to Whovians as Wilfred Mott, Donna's grandfather.