Doctor Who Mid-S6 Thoughts (Eleventh Doctor)

Not going to lie. I had bogged down quite a bit on Doctor Who as I got into the Matt Smith era, especially as first Marvel and then Star Wars ramped up with multiple series apiece. The fifth season, and Smith’s first as the Eleventh Doctor, ended on a very surreal note that I’m still not entirely sure that I get, and it dampened my enthusiasm just enough that it wasn’t that hard to put a pin in it and look elsewhere when other options became available.

But… Loki’s done. Falcon and Winter Soldier are done. WandaVision’s done. (Frankly, they’d blurred on long enough that I had to look up what came before F&WS.) The Bad Batch is done. And now I’m a year out from when the Mandalorian started its second season last year, and… *looks around* …there does not seem to be a Mandalorian right now. I briefly flirted with watching The Sopranos so that I could watch the new movie and not feel lost, but I bogged again after about three episodes there as well. And, to be honest, when I binge watch stuff, I tend to do it one at a time. The fact that Another Life has finally released its second season might bode ill for my likelihood to finish much further of Doctor Who until I’m done with that, too. That show’s first season had its warts, but I did like it, so I’m likely to keep going with it.

But I did want to at least resume, to some degree, with the Doctor. Matt Smith was rather popular, I’ve started to carry a bit of a torch for Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, and although the end of the fifth season left me with a bit of a weird feeling, I didn’t want to quit the series altogether.

So the first two episodes, which I watched a while ago, set the season on a rather weird trajectory. First, we see the Eleventh Doctor die and fail to regenerate. It’s made implicit that this Doctor was at least a hundred years or two older than the one they’d been hanging out with, and we eventually find out that it was a young River Song wrapped up in a set of astronaut-like powered armor who did it in subsequent episodes. A group called the Silence (who basically have mental control to make sure that you can’t remember them in some fashion once you look away, sort of a reverse Weeping Angels sort of thing) sent her, but it becomes apparent that there’s several other organizations trying to leverage River in the same way.

The third and fourth episodes were even weirder, and kind of convinced me to stop again for a little while. One involved a weird take on the sirens legend. The other was… yeah, I don’t even want to look it up again and grok it to explain it.

Then you get to episodes five through seven, taking us through the midseason finale from that year, and business just starts to pick up.

The first part begins when you see people messing with really dangerous acid, and then one of them falls in. It’s made clear that he’s going to die, but then the same person comes along like nothing happened. Just to make it clear, they show him continuing to dissolve back in the vats, and then it eventually becomes evident that they’re using artificial flesh-protoplasm to make clones — they call them “Gangers” as a short for “Doppelgangers” — that they are able to basically remote-control, and then go back to their real bodies. The Doctor comes along with this amidst a solar storm that looks like it’s going to cut the signal between the original humans and their Gangers, and then the Flesh — the blanket term for all the artificial organisms — begins to take on a life of its own. In fact, at the end of episode 5, a Flesh version of the Doctor comes out.

The Gangers and the originals become increasingly hostile to each other. The Gangers know exactly how to think like the originals, which creates some gamesmanship. The Doctor and his Ganger, though, treat each other like they’re twins, which annoys everyone else to no end. The theoretical way to tell them apart is that the real Doctor accidentally dissolved his shoes in acid earlier, whereas the Ganger has copied the destroyed shoes. The Doctor seems to sniff at Amy’s contempt for the Ganger, and neither Doctor nor Ganger-Doctor appreciate this at all. However, a swerve is thrown their way when push comes to shove at the end, and the Doctor and his Ganger announce to Amy that they’d switched shoes with each other a while back, just to see if anybody would notice. So when Amy had been expressing her contempt that the Ganger could never be the real Doctor, it turns out she was addressing the real Doctor all along as though he didn’t measure up to the Ganger and didn’t realize it.

There’s a mildly heart wrench thread that went through this, where one of the crewmen of this screwy chemical factory has a young son whose birthday is during episode six. The Ganger of the dad breaks ranks with the others when they’re thinking of killing the originals, because he feels the love for this child of the original and can’t stand the idea that he’d kill the boy’s real father. Trouble is, when he breaks ranks, he’s too late, because the father has taken a bit of the acid to his chest, which is swiftly going to dissolve his heart. The original realizes exactly what the Ganger is thinking, and gives his blessing for the Ganger to take his place and be the father to the boy that he would otherwise be robbed of. Only the people in the room are given to know that the swap has happened.

Most of the other Gangers don’t make it, although a number of the crew members don’t, either. The Doctor’s Ganger (once they’ve sorted out which one he is) volunteers to stay behind to protect the others in their escape from a particularly vicious Ganger who’s been playing both sides. He gets dissolved altogether, thus putting the kibosh on my theory that had been shaping up that maybe the Doctor we saw dying earlier was actually this one. And through it all, the Doctor’s eventual lesson that the Gangers are just as human as the originals, and that this factory system has been mistreating the Flesh all along, eventually comes through.

Then he turns around and dissolves Amy, revealing that she’s been a Ganger long before these two episodes and was kidnapped some time back while pregnant, and that he brought them to this factory in an effort to cut the signal to the Ganger so that they could try to trace back the original Amy.

Then the real Amy gives birth, and names the daughter Melody. Melody is taken by a weird army on a space station that’s been holding her for a while and subbed in the Flesh Amy to keep the Doctor from noticing, except it didn’t entirely work, he’s been on to them for a while, he just didn’t want to reveal it to her so that her jailers wouldn’t figure it out. There’s a weird smorgasbord of other characters who owe the Doctor a debt, that he calls in all the debts to find Amy. The army, associated by a bunch of weird not-Sith calling themselves the Headless Monks, was seeking to use Melody Pond, with her exposure to the time vortex, as a possible counter-weapon against the Doctor himself.

They all rescue Melody in season seven amidst a bunch of very serious tone (quite at odds with other finales), only to find out that she’s also made of the Flesh. River Song shows up only after they discover this, and the Doctor is quite upset that she chooses then to show up. However, River reassures him that the child will be all right. For illustration, she points him at the little crib he made for Melody, and suggests he re-read the name written on it in Gallifreyan. He seems to get it, and heads off to find Melody.

Amy takes a gun and points it at River, wanting to know what she told the Doctor and not being too thrilled that she doesn’t know where her child is. River tells Amy that the Doctor just found out who Melody really is. Amy, still not understanding because she can’t read Gallifreyan, is pointed back at a token that a turncoat among the army they were fighting gave her with Melody’s name written on it in her own language.

Turns out, the army’s language doesn’t have a word for “pond.” It translates roughly as “river.”

Which means that “Melody Pond,” in this army’s native language, is “River Song.”

Yeah, River is Amy and Rory’s daughter, grown up to become the Doctor’s wife in the weird juxtaposed future where the two of them meet each other in reverse order of one another’s mixed up timelines.

Now, I had actually self-spoiled by reading various wikis on Doctor Who, so I actually wasn’t even a little bit surprised at this reveal. That said, the way they went from “Melody Pond” to “River Song”, and evidently the writer actually chose Amy Pond’s name with the deliberate intent to eventually get to this place, was kind of a clever play on words. I’d be curious if he intended any part of this when he wasn’t the main show runner way back in the fourth season, when the Tenth Doctor was still on the job and Amy Pond hadn’t been created yet, or if he had an idea that he eventually wanted to do this and then got his wish in the end. I’m guessing it’s more likely the latter. That said, the writer in question (Steven Moffat) has made clear that he did indeed name Amy Pond herself with the eventual intend to wrap her back around to River Song.

So… we got about four kind of weird episodes, and then three more interesting ones. We’ve still got an unresolved plot line as to who the Doctor was that Amy and the rest saw die in the first episode of the season, given that I happen to know from other self spoilage that the actual character of the Doctor eventually becomes the Twelfth and then Thirteenth Doctor, so I know that whoever that was, can’t be a “fixed point” where the actual character of the Doctor dies. I don’t know, maybe it’s the clone of the Tenth Doctor that went off with Rose, who actually regenerated into his own version of the Eleventh after all? That, or the Ganger we saw die in episode 6 wasn’t the only Ganger of the Doctor existing.

I’m interested in seeing the rest. But on some level I wouldn’t mind just getting it over with so I can feel like I didn’t miss out, and I can get over to Another Life season 2. Or maybe I’ll do that before I come back to the second half of this. I honestly don’t know.

Thanks for reading.

What If…? Episode 4 Thoughts: A Familiar Look At Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Stuff (Spoilers)

Episode 4 of What If…? focuses on Doctor Strange. Guilty secret: his movie is probably my favorite of the origin stories, and possibly of the Marvel movies overall. If I had to come up with a top ten list of all my favorite comic book movie scenes? The sequence where Hit Girl rescues the title character in Kick Ass and fails to prevent her father from dying in the process — indeed, Big Daddy spends his dying voice calling out signals to tell her how to stay alive, and then speaks his pride that she succeeded — is at the top of the list, but “Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain…” is either second or not very far behind.

So this episode was very interesting, in positing the question as to what would have happened if had Strange “lost his heart,” in the form of the death of Dr. Christine Palmer instead of the use of his hands the night he wrecked his car.

That said, it had a ring of the familiar to it for me.

So, the answer?

Time to leave this here…

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW

The answer is that he destroys the universe.

No, seriously. He tries to use the Time Stone to go back and save her, only to find that there’s no way to do so. He tries not doing the maneuver that results in the original version of the crash, only to find that the rest of it happens and kills her anyway. He tries not taking the windy coastal road, only to get T-boned by a truck instead. He tries not actually driving with her in the first place, and then some other random catastrophe kills her.

Eventually, the Ancient One shows up and tells him that her death is what’s called an Absolute Point in time, where no amount of manipulation, not even the Time Stone, can undo it.

Wait, that sounds familiar. Because it is. The Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) in Doctor Who posits the largely identical concept, calling it a “fixed point in time” in the first season episode “Father’s Day,” when his initial companion Rose tries to save her father, only to find that she can’t. And, similarly, the paradox she creates spawns all-devouring monsters that consume everyone around her until her father realizes he has to die and sacrifices himself to reset things right. Frankly, the acting and everything else in that episode was consistently so tear-inducing that I compared it to Up in its sadness level on this blog. The Tenth Doctor has a similar “fixed point” in a later episode, where it’s posited that even the Daleks don’t dare try to mess with such a thing.

Well, Strange has similar problems. Except he abandons the scruples that Time Lords and Daleks observe and gets more meta in his efforts, resorting to dark magic that he’s forced to evade the Ancient One to pursue. Then it turns out that she split him in two so that his good self can hope to stop his maddened self from doing so. Except his good self can’t do it, so his maddened self tries to save Christine anyway.

He fails. And the paradoxes of his attempt cause the universe, or at least his own timeline in it, to collapse in on itself.

Long time followers of this blog know what’s coming. It’s even in the post title.

Yup…

In some ways, watching Doctor Who has been a wonderful experience, and sometimes it blurs together. But clearly the Marvel crew does, too, because this episode is a near total lift from “Father’s Day.” It doesn’t do it quite as well, either, although the fact that Strange destroys his universe while Rose unscrews hers is a divergence. (See what I did there?) It’s still a really good episode, but the emotional impact probably was lessened somewhat for me for the fact that I’d basically seen it before.

I was definitely interested in every moment as it unfolded, but once it was over — aside from the fact that the ending wasn’t happy, as the corrupted Strange destroys his world in a futile effort to save his love — the familiarity of it all just kind of popped out at me.

Ah, well.

Thanks for reading.

Doctor Who Season 5 (Amy Pond, feat. the Eleventh Doctor): the Doctor vs the Nothing

There’s an old saying that everyone dies twice. The first time is when a person biologically dies on a physical level, and the second is the last time someone says their name.

The fifth season of the revival of Doctor Who, with Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor and Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, is ultimately about the implications of time travel on the second form of death. It takes a long, long time to make that clear, and in all honesty, I came out of the last regular episode going “what did I actually just see?” because the resolution of the plot was rather abstract and easy to miss. But it’s there, in the end. It just takes a bit to think about it and realize what they were going for.

The season starts off with perhaps the best introduction of a new companion in the series’ history. Gillan, looking strikingly different with something like her regular red hair than she does in her nearly unrecognizable blue CGI or makeup as Nebula in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, doesn’t come in immediately, as the Doctor, thus far only having been seen in the ongoing demolition of the Tenth Doctor’s TARDIS after regenerating, comes to a crash after that wreckage in the front yard of a little girl named Amelia Pond. She comes out alone to confront him, asking if he’s there to fix the crack in her room. The TARDIS has to fix itself for a while, so he’s stuck, so he goes to take a look while he’s at it. And it becomes clear that this situation isn’t a normal structural crack. She’s got a form of timespace crack breaking through her bedroom wall, and voices are coming out of it.

His TARDIS gets functional enough to sound an alert, which he has to go answer. He promises to come back in five minutes, but, the Doctor’s precision being characteristically bad in this incarnation as it was in previous ones, he doesn’t come back for twelve years. He’s confronted by a strikingly beautiful young woman that appears to be a police officer in a short skirt, which turns out to be the adult Amelia — now going by Amy — in her kissing telegram costume trying to bluff with an unknown intruder.

It turns out that in the mean time since he left, Amy has been talking about a fellow her family dismisses as her “imaginary friend” and has endured a great deal of involuntary psychiatric care, and more than a little haunting by a creature who’s come out of the crack in her house. Her boyfriend Rory comes along off and on, and after a few episodes, he is more or less swallowed up by the energy coming out of the cracks. Amy literally is unable to remember him moments after his disappearance, and goes along as though nothing important just happened, while the Doctor carefully avoids spilling the painful secret.

It’s worth noting that, at least for the first half of the season, the usual relationship between the Doctor and Amy is flipped from the fairly avuncular one that Tennant and Eccleston took with their various companions. For the first several episodes, most of the main puzzles of what start out seeming like fairly normal episodes are actually solved by Pond and not the Doctor himself in the end. This was a rather interesting twist to the formula, and one that made Pond stand out a bit besides being probably the best looking companion any of the new Doctors have had so far.

There comes a point where it stops going that way, though, especially after Rory disappears. And when he disappears, he’s cosmically made into an unperson. And then Amy sort of loses her bearings after that,

The remainder of the series seems to lose its footing somewhat as a result until the end. However, the Doctor points out as it’s ramping towards the climax that Amy’s life makes very little sense. She doesn’t remember the massive Dalek invasion of the previous season despite clearly having been there. She doesn’t remember Rory… and it eventually dawns on them all that she doesn’t remember her parents, either. It’s at this point in time that it occurs to us that we’ve never seen them — in fact, Amy is the first primary companion of any of the new Doctors who, up to this point, never has any of their family show up. While this was a weakness for Donna, in my opinion, because the character herself was limited beyond general sass, Pond carries it a lot better on her own, to a point that it’s kind of hard to notice because, at least in my case, I didn’t mind even a little. She also breaks the mold (for the most part) of having any romantic tension with the Doctor himself.

The ending is extremely confusing at face value. Just about every enemy the Doctor has had appear in this series all show up at once to stuff him in a prison box referred to as the Pandorica, believing the Doctor himself to be behind the cracks and a threat to destroy the universe. Rory seems to reappear out of nowhere as a Roman soldier who doesn’t understand how he got there after he died, only to have it turn out that he’s just a self aware servant of a Nestene Consciousness, who breaks his programming enough due to his disguise working a little too well that he doesn’t want to hurt Pond even when he’s forced to. Amy eventually comes to be shocked out of forgetting the real Rory, just in time for him to be forced to shoot her. Once the Doctor is put into the box after a quite tedious leadup, most of the stars in the universe go supernova, somehow without the Earth being destroyed in the process.

What happens next is extremely surreal… or more so. The child Amelia, now apparently living with her aunt, goes to a museum to see the Pandorica. There are notes all over telling her to stick around, and the Pandorica eventually opens, two thousand years after the Doctor was stuffed into it by his enemies, to reveal… the adult Amy. It eventually comes out that the Doctor saved the wounded Amy by putting her in there, and then the sun is apparently the TARDIS exploding instead of an actual star, since no stars are left now (to a point that Amelia is chided for painting them), and somewhere in edgewise they also forgot the Doctor because he went through the cracks. There is huge head scratching sequence from there where everyone goes through an existential exercise in remembering those who were lost, all while the (genuinely) revived Rory and Amy are getting married.

If that all sounds weird and strange, it’s because it was. I’m trying to recount what of it I remember here upon writing this, but it doesn’t really get less weird at face value. Eventually, the good guys win, the stars return, and everything is all ok because the Doctor does lots of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff until everyone remembers him and everyone and everything else again.

No, seriously… that was the ending.

So… they’re going deep into epistemology and existential philosophy, I think, and blurring the lines between awareness of things becoming the existence of things, and the principal “villain” of the series is that the reverse of this is breaking down. There is never a conscious being that is revealed to be behind this as there is in previous seasons, It Just Is. There’s no spot where it’s clear that the Doctor defeats it. In a way, it may be taking a page from the Neverending Story, where he’s fighting a temporal version of The Nothing. And much like the film where the Nothing is defeated by giving the Empress a new name, this Nothing (which only manifests as the cracks) is defeated by simply remembering its victims, apparently.

After thinking about it a bit, it’s not a total loss, but it was very, very strange in real time. I did eventually come around to what I think they were going for here, and I liked it better than Raised By Wolves as such. It was closer to The Fountain than it was to RBW, although I don’t know if they entirely pulled it off. It’s more abstract than the previous seasons were, but then I didn’t entirely care for the ending to the Tenth Doctor’s final season either.

And then the Christmas special was a pretty simple Christmas Carol knockoff, which was entertaining in its own right and probably better than the actual season. So far, I’m liking the Eleventh Doctor considerably less than the Tenth, although they tried harder for coherent stories here… until they didn’t.

Thanks for reading.

Doctor Who Binge: Farewell to the Tenth Doctor

I’m through the last of the specials in which David Tennant starred as the Tenth Doctor, and the regeneration into the introduction of Matt Smith as the Eleventh. While I already know that, unlike Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth, Mr. Tennant will be back in another appearance or two, it seems like it’s a good milepost to just sort of drop thoughts.

I did come to greatly enjoy the Tenth Doctor, although he was somewhat held back by the chaos around his companions. He had a different primary companion in each of Tennant’s three seasons, and while this created a good deal of variety it also led to a general impression on my part that they weren’t at all sure what they wanted to do in this area. Rose probably had a hard limit as to how far she could go as the forlorn romantic tension person. Martha was much more capable as a person, but the writers clearly didn’t know what to do at this phase of the series with a woman of color as the primary companion at all, and wound up with unfortunate implications when she’s constantly treated as being an inferior replacement for Rose even though she was a much smarter and more independent woman as a general thing. This is all stuff I’ve gone over before.

And then there’s Donna. I’m sort of standing by what I said about her as a character before: I think she was created as a reaction to all the things that went wrong with Rose and Martha, instead of as a person who had a life of her own. The writers decided that they’d put themselves in a box with the previous two companions showing so much romantic tension, and then created Donna as a list of checkboxes for what not to do. Disavowing romantic tension? Check. Sass instead of simping for the Doctor? Check. Don’t make her as smart as Martha? Check. …and that’s it. While it was perhaps unfair of me to say that there was never much involving the rest of her family, Donna herself was pretty thin. Her mother was just a general harpy stereotype whose name was (looks it up… no, really) Sylvia, and while her grandfather had a bit more characterization to him, this doesn’t help Donna just for the fact that they took more effort to fill out a secondary companion character’s back story than they did for Donna herself.

I was told, and hinted at in the story, that Donna didn’t come to a good end. Well, she lived. She just had her memory of the Doctor himself wiped, right after she finally got interesting. Oh wait, we can’t have a capable woman about, that’d uncheck the box of “don’t make her too smart” that we wanted to check off. So we can uncheck that for an episode, and then write her off. then

Sigh.

The character of Lady Christina de Souza was interesting, although the episode she was in was somewhat thin and wouldn’t have worked if you had taken her out of it. She was similarly sassy to Donna, but she actually was capable of doing things for herself, which pretty much immediately made her more interesting to me.

The character of Adelaide Brooke was similarly interesting. She was like a more capable Donna as well. She was in command of her own situation, literally, and took just as little guff from the Doctor as Donna herself did. However, she actually was good at things. She had no romantic tension with the Doctor whatsoever, and didn’t need to spend a few moments in every episode drilling that into our heads; it was just a fact of the character. We knew from the beginning that she was doomed, which immediately put us on a timeline knowing that whatever happened with her was going to be bad, and unlike with Donna, it actually was pretty bad. We saw the Doctor undertake a bit of a maddened effort to save her, and “maddened” is not really metaphorical at all here: he started to get a little power drunk with the idea that he was the last Time Lord, and started to think that this meant that he could write the rules of time by himself.

Now, this does create a few continuity questions. Apparently he’s forgetting his predecessor’s experience with seeing Rose save her father, and also failed to realize that if even a Dalek didn’t want to mess with her fate — at a time and place where the Daleks were even literally seeking to commit universal genocide on every species but themselves in a fashion that would’ve vastly topped even Thanos’ “finger snap of doom” — that maybe he should consider not doing so himself. Then Adelaide realized, selflessly, that her own survival was wrong, that other people who came after her took inspiration from her death, and that she shouldn’t attempt to subvert that for her own selfish desire to live. And so when the Doctor tried to take her death away from fate, she gave it back herself. So… there was a bit of contrivance going on here, but it at least sort of explains why the Ninth Doctor got eaten by Reapers when Rose messed with her father’s death, and the Tenth Doctor didn’t even see any. Ms. Brooke fixed the timeline herself. Now… maybe her suicide wouldn’t have inspired her granddaughter the way her mysterious death would’ve, but this is what they’re telling us on the screen.

“Journey’s End” was probably the weakest Dalek episode I’ve seen so far. Although the Daleks’ plot to out-Thanos Thanos was definitely sufficiently epic to go there, they kind of wound up being back burner characters to the reunion tour of all the Doctor’s companions. The way they just looped absolutely everybody in there and then kind of let them took over the show frankly just left us with too many moving pieces in the Tenth Doctor’s last regular episode. I mean, I hate to make comparisons to Rise of Skywalker here again with the whole “lots of gratuitous cameo appearances” bit here, but…

Sorry. Gotta point it out when I see it.

They had a similar reunion tour at the end of it. The Master’s reappearance was interesting, although it does seem like they’re reaching for a lot of large scale “I can change everything” sort of stuff without a lot of effort on the part of our villains here. First the Daleks can move 27 planets and use them as a reality bomb to kill every other life form in the universe. Then in “The End of Time”, the Master can change every human being on Earth into a hive minded instance of himself, but conveniently this doesn’t work on Wilfred or Donna.

It’s my understanding from glancing through wikis that this Rassilon character that Timothy Dalton was playing in these episodes has been a rather monumental recurring villain from the classic series… frankly I sort of feel like maybe that should’ve merited a little bit more development to tell us who this guy was? The possibility of the Time Lords breaking out of the lock on their existence seems like it’d be a really, really big deal, and that they were responsible for the Master’s hearing noises in his head throughout his life was an interesting development, although the casual way with which this became the case seemed… maybe a bit slapdash? Contrived?

In a fair number of respects, they prioritized rule of cool here over writing the actual story. They’d obviously come to regard David Tennant’s tenure as being a rather large success for the show, and they’re not wrong. Tennant still places highly, frequently on top, in polls taken on an annual basis of the favorite incarnations of the Doctor. They wanted to send him off with a bit of a tribute, with a big who’s who of characters that were somewhat memorable in his tenure.

And, at some point, that probably got in the way of telling the best possible story that they could. Do we need the Joker pointing at Rise of Skywalker comparisons again? Nah, you get the idea.

To be fair… this wasn’t as big a train wreck as Rise of Skywalker. But I do get the sense that Tennant was carrying the show out of sheer talent and personality, and the writers weren’t quite able to keep up with him. The Tenth Doctor was a wonderful character, and I’ll miss him. His last few staggering steps in the snow coming back to the Tardis, and his final line, “I don’t want to go”, were very very sad for me to watch.

But… very little of what was going on around him was all that well sorted. After Rose left, the writers were flailing a bit on the other companions, and I don’t know if they ever quite got there. It stands out quickly in the first episode or two with Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. Amy Pond just captures the screen as soon as she walks onto the set. She’s strikingly beautiful, and it stands out the very first moment she shows up, but this doesn’t have to mean that she has to have romantic tension with the Doctor. She’s got her own personality, and even reintroduces herself to the Doctor as an adult with a cricket bat to the dome (!), but the sass doesn’t define her, either. The story of how she came to know him, with the extradimensional prisoner hiding out in her house for most of her childhood, stands on its own, defines her initial introduction, but doesn’t become a weight on her character after he’s gone. She even solves the second episode on the Doctor’s behalf when he isn’t able to morally come to a good decision on his own, and while she takes a risk doing it, the explanation she gives makes perfect sense and is coming from a place of greater empathy than the Doctor himself showed.

In short, Amy Pond immediately exposes, in just an episode or two, how badly the Tenth Doctor’s writers were flailing with both Martha and especially Donna. Martha improved dramatically in every episode once she stopped simping as the inferiority complexed replacement for Rose with a side dish of unfortunate implications that a woman of color couldn’t measure up to a blonde. The in-between specials where the Fifth and Tenth Doctors meet and a one-off with a different woman were both great. And then Donna just… never really got there, in general. Catherine Tate did a game effort at it, and I’m told that Tate and Tennant loved working together, but as a character, Donna was just thin on development beyond sass and not-interested, and the show itself got better almost every time she wasn’t the focus. The two episodes with River Song, along with “Midnight,” were the best shows of the fourth season… and I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s because Donna either wasn’t the focus or just flat out wasn’t around for most of them. Lady Christina and Adelaide Brooke both brought out great sides of the Tenth Doctor without needing to simp for him either, and were both very much their own people.

And then Amy Pond came along with the Eleventh Doctor and just kind of blew all of the Tenth Doctor’s later companions out of the water. It’s not a competition… but even if it were, it still wouldn’t be a competition. Amy’s just better.

So… farewell to the Tenth Doctor, and although I’m sure he’d never read this, but my thanks to David Tennant for a great run on the show. And greetings to Matt Smith as the Eleventh. Allons-y and Geronimo!

Thank you for reading.

Doctor Who (Tenth Doctor): The Introduction of River Song

In the episode “Silence in the Library,” we’re introduced to what I understand is one of the most important recurring characters in the Doctor Who revival, in River Song. I’ve read a little bit of the wikis to understand the foreshadowing that they made in this episode, so I know that over the next few seasons of the show she’s going to be one of the more important people who doesn’t have a regular cast credit in the show.

This struck me as a big enough event that I felt like I probably ought to write about it, if I’m going to keep writing about Doctor Who in general.

Long time Whovians will need to forgive me, as I’m a fairly recent afficionado of the show, who has only watched through (most of) the first four seasons of the show and up to “Forest of the Dead,” the followup to “Silence in the Library.” I’ve seen only brief clips of what I now understand were part of the “Aztecs” arc of the First Doctor and the Fourth Doctor’s arrival in the methane refinery in “The Power of Kroll” from when I was in roughly middle school (read: a good decade or so before the Internet existed), which I don’t even remember enough to be able to comment on at depth. I remember enough of the scenes and the various Doctor’s reaction to them from the two classic episodes I happened to see on PBS flipping through channels on my grandparents’ TV at family gatherings to identify what they were today from Google and not much more. Aside from that, the Ninth and (most of the) Tenth Doctor eras are my entire experience with the show aside from deliberately self-restrained perusing of Fandom wikis in an effort to know what’s going on while trying not to self-spoil too much of what I’m seeing. So if you’re a long time Whovian, I doubt I’ll have much to say that you don’t already know. That said… maybe you’ll find my primitive blundering through it as I go amusing, anyway.

So here’s what I know of where I am: I know that I am coming to the end of David Tennant’s tenure as the Tenth Doctor. I know that Matt Smith will be taking over as the Eleventh Doctor at the end of the season-plus that I’m going through now on HBO Max. And I know that River Song is a significant romantic interest for the Eleventh Doctor, and that she knows who the Tenth Doctor is enough that, although he doesn’t realize it yet, she knows who he is. We are in a rare and unique place in the show where the Doctor encounters another time traveler, and it’s the first time he meets her, but (what appears to be) the last time she meets him. Their points in the time line are at opposite ends when they encounter one another. She was deliberately looking for him, but since both of their understandings of time and interacting with it are imperfect despite their respective dizzying intellects, she sent him a beacon that she is apparently accustomed to doing when she needs him, but the Tenth Doctor encountered it at a time in his life before he has ever met her.

As a result, there is a mildly sad familiarization process where she realizes that he doesn’t know her, but she has a whole series of memories of being with him. She demonstrates this (with amusing references to “spoilers”) by whispering his name in his ear, and showing him his own sonic screwdriver — largely identical to the one he’s carrying at the same time — and telling him that he gave it to her in his own future. Seeing the screwdriver doesn’t convince him, but hearing her speak his name in his ear does. He realizes this is someone who must be very, very special to his future self. He is careful to try to avoid self-spoiling in his own way — notably, she carries a diary with herself, relating her own past encounters with him from her own perspective, but which we are made to understand consist entirely of things which are in his future from his perspective.

And, in a sad twist, this diametric opposition of their perspectives of beginnings and endings is made most poignant when it becomes clear that, while it’s indeed the first time he sees her, it is the last time she sees him.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, we had a plot line with microscopic flesh eating creatures called the Vashta Nerada, that resemble dust motes in small numbers but that in large enough swarms resemble false shadows and can skeletonize a human being in under a second. They live normally on billions of worlds, but here they’ve destroyed all the normal occupants and visitors of the library. The library’s central computer can’t detect any humanoids when requested at the beginning of the episode, but when the Doctor asks it to detect inhuman life forms it detects a “million million” (more commonly called a “trillion”) before it caps out at its counting limit, and it’s later made clear that these are the Vashta Nerada. Haunting but vague messages are left behind indicating that something has eaten the previous occupants of the library a hundred years prior, but the only specific warning is “count the shadows” — e.g. if someone has more than one normal shadow, it’s a strong indication that the Vashta Nerada are about to eat them, and everyone else should stay away from both them and any other unusual shadows.

The Tenth Doctor and River Song come to familiarize themselves with each other and their perspectives as to whether they’ve met, across two episodes where they are dealing with this threat together — for the first time for him, and the last time for her. In the end, she is forced to sacrifice herself to save him.

She comes to realize, when she painfully describes future encounters from his perspective and past ones from hers, that she suddenly understands why he treated her the way he did. She always sensed a sadness and an awareness of tragedy from him, and she never understood why and he never explained to her. Now she knows: every time she’s seen him in her own past, he’s already seen her die. He apparently falls in love with her anyway, and in this respect there’s a loneliness to the Doctor as a persona in the revival shows that comes out: he is desperate for any sense of having a peer who he can talk to on his own level.

There are moments where the Doctor seems like he’s close to falling for particular companions. He allows Rose and Jack Harkness to kiss him in his Ninth and Tenth incarnations. He keeps Martha at a distance because, although she’s a wonderful person, he’s mildly in pain over losing Rose and doesn’t want to get too close to her — and she, wonderful though she is, understands this every moment even as she can’t avoid falling for him in turn.

But there’s also moments like his encounter with the Master at the end of the third season. The Master literally dies and refuses to regenerate, just to spite him, but the Doctor’s loneliness after the Last Great Time War is such that he literally wants to keep one of his greatest enemies around, because this person used to be a friend, and anything is better than nothing. Indeed, the Face of Boe’s last words to him are “You are not alone,” spoken as an acronym for “Yana”, the alias the Master keeps when he hid his persona in his not-really-a-watch to avoid the Time War. Similar to River Song, the Face of Boe has also seen the Master in his past self as Jack Harkness (spoilers… but it’s been officially confirmed that yes, they’re the same person), and tells him from his own past knowledge that he isn’t as alone as he thinks.

So, even though he has no real reason to fall in love with River Song other than the paradox of meeting her at the end of her life for the first time, with their perspectives on their time together juxtaposed, he can’t help it. He closes the loop, starts to fall for her anyway, and tries to save her when he realizes she is going to die for him the first time he remembers meeting her.

The Doctor has an amusing scene in edgewise where, after the Vashta Nerada have eaten one of River Song’s compatriots, he asks them for time to get everyone out of the library and leave it to them. They’ve learned to use the neural relays of the people’s suits to speak by this point in the second episode of the duo, and collectively use the suits themselves to move in a zombie-like fashion, although there’s a ghostly side effect that these relays hold after-images of a person’s psyche for a short time after they’ve died and continue talking as if they’re alive while doing so. The Doctor had tinted the visor of the suit black in hopes of fooling them into thinking they’d already eaten the crew member inside, but this obviously didn’t cover the person’s smell and they used this to their advantage by eating her anyway and then using the neural relay to speak to them like they were her and the tinted visor to cover their presence. They don’t want to let the people go at first, so the Doctor menacingly tells them they’ve killed someone he likes, that “that’s not a good place to stand,” points out to them that they’re all standing in the largest library in the universe, and suggests that they look him up as a hint that he’s not a good enemy to make. The multiple shadows that had been stretching outward from the suited skeleton of the crew member towards him start receding a few moments later in a moment of silent, dark comedy. The neural relay then relates that he has one day to get everyone out.

This also ties into the mystery of who CAL and/or the girl who’s apparently somewhat in charge of the library or feeling ownership of it are, and what happened to the original inhabitants. CAL, when the Vashta Nerada began eating the occupants, did an incomplete teleport on them and saved their imprints away. The Doctor comes to realize this, and in the span of the day gets the people out of the computer and to safety. Donna was saved in this fashion as well, and in her limited consciousness inside the computer meets a speech-impeded fellow who is portrayed in the virtual world within as her husband. They promise to find each other when they realize they’re about to leave, but when she fails to do so she assumes he was a fictional construct to appease her inside the virtual world. In the worst way, she’s wrong, as the fellow spots her when he’s literally on the teleport pad to leave, but due to his speech impediment he can’t make himself call out to her in time to get her attention before he goes.

This setup, in turn, leads to a resolution of sorts for the Doctor’s tragedy of just meeting River Song, the confusion of who she is and why he would give her his sonic screwdriver, and then coming up with a theory after he realizes that she’s died. He reasons that his future self would have given it to her to secretly come up with at least a backhanded way of saving her, and after she’s physically gone he goes back to where he left the screwdriver and her diary. After fiddling with the small panels on it, he finds that his future self has indeed put one of the neural relays on the screwdriver before he gave it to her, and as such the screwdriver is basically acting as a data stick keeping a data ghost of her mind. He picks up the screwdriver he gave her, and runs to the central computer to save the imprint. He doesn’t even know how he’s going to get her back out, apparently, but when she’s inside she kind of laughs at “that impossible man” and realizes he’s stuffed her away until he figures something out.

The juxtaposition of the Doctor and River Song’s points in their own timelines also leads to an uncomfortable encounter between River and Donna. River, once she’s told Donna’s name, clearly recognizes it, but she doesn’t recognize Donna herself. When Donna asks what happened to herself, River is visibly uncomfortable and doesn’t give any verbal answer other than, “spoilers” after a moment of displeasure.

I haven’t skipped ahead on wikis enough, but I’ve seen hints on people’s comments on my Facebook wall that Donna comes to some sort of sad end. This appears to be the first in-show indication that something indeed happens to her some time between now and all the other occasions where River would have met her. I know that this is David Tennant’s last regular season on the show, that there’s only a few specials between the end of this season and Matt Smith formally taking over as the Eleventh Doctor, and although I’ve avoided trying to find out too much about the specials afterwards, it’s my general understanding that the Tenth Doctor is traveling alone during this final period while BBC was playing out this string. Thus, it’s my general suspicion based on various comments and snippets I’ve seen is that Donna probably dies, either at the end of this season or somewhere amidst those specials in some tragic fashion. I’ve only about three regular episodes left, so I’ll find out fairly soon.

To be honest, I’m not as big a fan of her as I was of Rose and Martha. I feel like in some ways the show runners decided to make her the anti-Martha, where she’s white, less attractive, very much not romantically interested in the Doctor, and pointedly naive whenever she needs to take agency for something in contrast to the intelligent and independent Martha. She has no real family ties that are ever portrayed as an ongoing thing other than to establish that she doesn’t get alone with an overcritical mother, and her only real characterization as an ongoing thing is her confusion whenever she needs to do something for herself, gratuitous contrarianism along the way, and the running joke of her and the Doctor insisting they’re not romantically together when people constantly assume. I can’t lie here, it’s… pretty thin characterization to me. In “Midnight”, the next episode of the show after we meet River, the show runners don’t even bother having her come along with him when he goes on a tourist cruise on an alien resort planet of whatever sort they’re staying at… and at least for my part, she isn’t really missed. He can just get into random arguments with people he meets on the cruise shuttle who are similarly useless to do much, and it largely replaces her contribution to the show — although I’ve read that this was intended to be portrayed as a situation where the Doctor has trouble relating to humans without a companion at his side.

That said, River’s story got off to an amazing start (and end), and I’m looking forward to when she returns.

Thanks for reading.

Doctor Who Season 3 (Tenth Doctor): Thoughts

I’ve finished the third season of Doctor Who, so this will be a bit of a bulk recap over two seasons since Chris Eccleston left the show as the Ninth Doctor.

David Tennant definitely takes a different tack on the Tenth Doctor, so this is my first encounter with just how much different actors put their own spin on the character. The Tenth Doctor clearly is much more eccentric and goofy than the Ninth, and it’s my understanding that this sort of portrayal is much more typical of how the classic series took it. It’s rather humorous in many spots, but the Tenth Doctor still has a shade of ruthlessness left over from the Ninth, and he’s clearly not yet gotten over all the implications of the Last Great Time War.

Billie Piper left the show as the much-liked Rose Tyler after Tennant’s first season, and was replaced by Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones. (The scene where the Daleks and Cybermen were talking junk to one another was gold.) I’m told that Martha was the least favorite among Doctor Who fans at large of the Tenth Doctor’s regular companions, and I’m totally okay with saying that I think that’s rather unfortunate. That said, there was a bit of an exposure of the concept of Doctor Who that I don’t think the showrunners were entirely ready to tackle: a show about time travel is going to have to be very careful about how it portrays a woman of color going back in time in a British-centric setting, because let’s be real, there are not going to be very many points in the past where such a person is going to go and like the results. The show makes some efforts to acknowledge this without focusing on it too much, and the result is… awkward. (The spot where the Doctor obliviously tells Martha to go around Elizabethan England as though she owns the place, and that this always worked for him, was especially tone deaf.)

That said, I loved the way Martha made her exit after spending the entire season feeling like she wasn’t a good enough replacement for Rose. And frankly, the story trope of two young female companions falling in love with the Doctor had probably gone on long enough. It got a little bit hard to watch Rose constantly shedding tears when the Tenth Doctor first has a reunion with Sarah Jane Smith, and then with Madame Le Pompadour. It got harder to watch as the Doctor’s first regular female companion of color was repeatedly told she wasn’t good enough to replace her blonde predecessor in his eyes.

They tried to soften it a bit when Jack Harkness came back and informed her that she should get used to this treatment in general, with the unspoken hint that it isn’t unique to her, trying to reinforce a less racialized hint that the Tenth Doctor simply never gets particularly affectionate with his companions, and re-emphasizing his tendency to act like the smartest guy in the room very loudly so that he can stave off being too close to them. But even at that, it still was the right move to have Martha Jones be the first companion that chooses to leave the Doctor of her own accord. In the end, she left on her own terms, and that was the right thing.

And of course, you have the BBC Children In Need special where the Tenth Doctor meets the Fifth, taking place as a fast follow to that scene and splicing in a few extra minutes of classic interplay between David Tennant and his future father-in-law playing the earlier incarnation. It makes everything better.

Thanks for reading.

Doctor Who Binge: Through S2E10 (Tenth Doctor)

As the title may indicate, I’m through episode 10 of the second season, with David Tennant as the much-lauded Tenth Doctor firmly in the swing of things.

It’s definitely a very different flavor from Chris Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor. It’s my understanding, now that I’ve read around as to why Eccleston only stayed for one season, that that was pretty much all he’d ever intended to do, and that once he got into the production of it, he didn’t really enjoy the working environment anyway. While he’s kept mum about why he left other than not wanting to be typecast, and the studio released a statement on his behalf that he didn’t actually agree to (which ruffled feathers still further), it’s nonetheless rather disappointing, because his season as the Doctor was highly entertaining.

That said, it’s also now my understanding that just about all the Doctors were some degree of oddball, and as such the Ninth Doctor was, I’m reading, by far the most straight-laced of the mainstream, canonical Doctor incarnations. His grim, melancholy acceptance of the results of the Last Great Time War were clearly weighing on him, and while there’s an element of that in the Tenth Doctor as well, the goofball shtick is definitely back with Tennant. In fact, seeing him as the Tenth Doctor, it’s hard to visualize the same actor as played the villainous Kilgrave in the first season of “Jessica Jones.”

That said, David Tennant is a marvelous television actor, and the Tenth Doctor is popular for good reason.

Probably my favorite episode of the crew thus far is “The Girl in the Fireplace.” The chemistry between him and Sophia Myles as Madame de Pompadour is obvious, and she’s really quite the eye catcher in the wardrobe she wore as a 19th century chief mistress of Louis XV of France. From what I’ve read, that chemistry was not entirely acting: Tennant and Myles started dating during his episode, and were together for two years afterwards.

That said, the visual of a beautiful, strong woman who came to fall for the Doctor’s charms amidst the madcap threat of the androids aboard the spaceship that the Doctor and Rose were coming to was very compelling TV. So too, you could feel for Rose as she realized that she was not, and probably never was going to be, the Doctor’s sole female companion, and when this came on the heels of the return of Sarah Jane Smith in the previous episode (who was a popular companion of the Third and Fourth Doctors back in the original series, so this was a bit of a nostalgia episode), Rose was getting her heart strings yanked in every which direction here. Meanwhile, the androids using their crew as spare parts to repair their ship was macabre and yet set up the idea of what they were going to do with Reinette when she got old enough, so when they declared they wanted her brain to replace the central computer of the ship, the threat potential was made clear.

I’m going to admit, I had so little idea who this person was that they were acting out the role of, and got curious, so I wound up pausing the episode to look up the actual person it was based on. And so, after an episode full of instances where every a few moments of the Doctor stepping away from the time windows in which he visited her, I knew what was coming when he actually walked away from her when she was 37 in order to get stuff in the ship ready for her to come with him. Strangely, even though the Doctor was apparently familiar with her and figured out who she was rather quickly when she was a teenager, he seemed not to realize what was going to happen when he left her at this age.

And so, when he came back, my throat was already a little bit tight with sadness, because I knew what he was seeing before he did. The actual Madame de Pompadour died of tuberculosis in her early 40s, and sure enough, when he returned, he was left to find her funeral hearse pulling away, and the King handing him a note that she’d left for him, wishing he’d come back but grimly aware that she was probably not going to live to see him again. I’ve had just enough heartbreak in my life (some of it relatively recent) that this struck me as very sad, indeed.

The return of the Cybermen was also an interesting pair of episodes. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe this was actually a part of the series that I actually saw when it was first broadcast on American TV, when it was the lead-in to Battlestar Galactica. The Tennant era was contemporary to that show, so I caught just enough glimpses to get a bit of interest, without actually being quite up to speed enough in the pre-Google era that I knew what was going on well enough to want to keep up. I’m glad I’m watching now, but I’m more familiar with the concept now due to the amount of information I’ve found on it elsewhere.

One potential weakness: they had two fairly closely consecutive sets of episodes where the Tardis got taken out of play, right after two consecutive episodes where Rose was made to feel jealous of another woman the Doctor met. It’s a potential critique of the format if they’re feeling constrained enough that they tried to shake up some of the conceits along the way.

The Abzorbaloff in Episode 10 itself was cute, though. This was the result of a “create your own monster” contest that was won by a nine year old, and the result was certainly original, if nasty. But then, given that it followed up a meeting with a satanic monster imprisoned on a rogue planet orbiting a black hole (with somewhat sketchy black hole physics, but I’ll allow the license), it was a bit of a step down in the nastiness. That said, this series definitely isn’t for kids with this stuff.

Definitely interested enough to keep going. Almost done with season 2, and it’s my understanding that Tennant went for about three or four seasons, so I’m looking forward to seeing a bunch more of him.

Thanks for reading.

Doctor Who Binge: Goodbye to the Ninth Doctor

I’ve reached the end of Chris Eccleston’s run on Doctor Who. I knew it was coming, but it was still really well done. It’s too bad that he didn’t get a longer run at it, but he left on his own terms because he didn’t like the working environment of the show, I understand. That said, the actor has said he was glad he did it, and it’s without a doubt that he helped launch the modern show with a good run out of the starting blocks.

The Ninth Doctor clearly is living with a lot of trauma from the Time War, and according to Wiki if Eccleston hadn’t left so quickly, he would’ve eventually overlapped into the role that eventually was played by John Hurt as the War Doctor. In other words, Eccleston was playing it somewhat as though he’d been the War Doctor, because that had been the plan.

The plotline of the Dalek Emperor surviving the Time War and reconstructing the other Daleks from the genetic material of humanity was an interesting one. The Daleks themselves taking his as a blasphemous impurity was a nice touch — they existed, but they hated their own existence because they were no longer Kaleds in their purity, and that they were now spawned from an “inferior” species drove them nuts. I really get the conceptual greatness of the Daleks now, and whenever I see those old pepper pots my eyes always get just a little bit bigger.

On to the great Tenth Doctor! Can’t wait.

Thanks for reading.

Doctor Who: “Father’s Day” is in “Up” Territory of Sadness

I’ve been plowing through the first modern season of Doctor Who at a pretty serious clip. There wasn’t a particular episode that stood out, aside from maybe “Dalek”. Going to say… I get it on the Daleks now. It’s kind of hard, not having really seen them, to understand why they’re a powerful villain concept. Most of the direct description I’ve seen of them came from my first wife, who found their voices and fairly one-note verbalisms fairly annoying, and I hadn’t really seen them myself. So the pathos of seeing the lost Dalek soldier in that episode by itself, and the reaction of the Ninth Doctor to finding it, was a rather interesting thing.

The Ninth Doctor’s defining characteristic is that he’s haunted by what he had to do in the Last Great Time War, apparently committing genocide both upon his own people and the Daleks to end it. I’m vaguely aware that eventually I’ll see John Hurt as the War Doctor who disavows the very name of the Doctor, and that the Ninth Doctor is the incarnation afterwards who’s carrying the weight of what his predecessor had to do. The Dalek dryly observing that the Doctor’s relentless hate for it would make him a good Dalek was a good piece of irony that, after a time or two, brought the Doctor up short. And then the Dalek internalizing Rose’s emotional senses when it uses her DNA to reconstruct itself, and then finding the resulting self doubt and questioning to be a “sickness” that makes it no longer want to live… that was a very interesting narrative choice.

…and then there’s “Father’s Day.”

So, I’m going to explain the “Up” reference here. Up is, of course, the Pixar movie from about a decade ago. It’s about a highly introverted boy who meets a similarly quirky girl who’s just as into the adventurous exploring and imagination as he is, but kind of acts as his bridge to the more social parts of the world. He grows up. Marries her. Made a childhood promise that he’ll take her to Paradise Falls in South America when they first met, and never forgot it, even though she stopped caring about it even a little as she grew up. And then he loses her, and feels like he failed to keep his lifelong promise to her. On her hospital bed, dying, she gives him back her old scrapbook with the page in it written, “Stuff I’m Going To Do,” and he never could bear to look, assuming that this would be where she intended to keep all the adventurous stuff she thought she’d do as a kid. Then, towards the end of the movie, he realizes it wasn’t empty after all. The resulting scene makes me cry upwards of 90% of the time I see it. I actually sobbed a bit again, watching it just now. In fact, my wife and I had a table topic question once on a date night, posed to me, “What movie makes you cry every time no matter how many times you see it?” For me? I answered without hesitation: Up.

To an introverted guy who couldn’t imagine doing much better than a woman who understands you but is basically an emotional bridge to the “normal” world? (Or at least, so it sometimes feels like to a really introverted person?) And then loses her, but then realizes she was totally fine with how it went? That’s a devastating scene to me, on an emotional level.

So… the “Father’s Day” episode. I’m still somewhat processing why this one also put me into “I need to take off the glasses to cry now” state, because it did. It’s a really, really powerful and sad episode.

One or two paragraph summary: Rose decides that, since the Doctor has a time machine, she wants to go back and meet the father she never knew. Her mother always told her that he was practically perfect, was always there for them, etc. He died in a hit and run accident. So she wants to go back to the day he died and meet him. She winds up seeing the accident that kills him. The Doctor tells her to go to him, quickly. She can’t quite do it. Then she wants to try it again, to be there with him at the end. The Doctor carefully warns her when they see themselves from the first time that they can’t allow their past selves to see them. Then she doesn’t listen and goes and saves her father’s life. And the resulting time paradox causes all heck to break loose, as time reaper monsters start showing up and “sterilizing” everything on Earth to make up for the fact that this man was supposed to be dead, and wasn’t. When they get hold of someone, they erase them from time and reality. Including the Doctor himself, at one point. The time-space continuum is pretty ruthless about correcting “fixed points in time” when the Time Lords themselves aren’t doing it themselves — which, I suppose, makes the whole “why didn’t any renegade Time Lords go back and kill Hitler?” question in Doctor Who answer itself. But she can’t bear to lose her father again when she realizes what she’s done, and even when the Doctor proposes to fix it, he can’t bear to take her father from her in the process. It’s her father who figures it out on his own when Rose lets slip who she is, and ultimately sacrifices himself, realizing that it’s for everyone’s good.

And along the way, Rose discovers that her mother and father didn’t exactly have the best relationship. He’s apparently very flakey. Very given to fooling around on her. In fact, when her mother sees Rose with her father, her immediate assumption is that he’s having an affair with her. When her mother finds out her name is also Rose, she thinks it’s a sick joke that he apparently decided to give their baby daughter his girlfriend’s name. One moment after the next, Rose realizes that her mother didn’t even slightly hold her father in high regard, and her father doesn’t even think he deserves to be. She’s been sold a fantasy about how she was cheated out of the perfect dad, but in real time the lie comes home. Then he does the one self-sacrificing thing he ever does in his life… and she can only barely stand to watch, even though she knows it has to happen.

It’s a really rough thing to watch. But it was really, really well done. In stressful times like this, it was almost something I wasn’t sure I was ready to see, although it wasn’t quite the pointless dreariness of “Raised By Wolves” for half the season.

Nonetheless, on I go.

Thanks for reading.

Doctor Who: Early Quick Thoughts (Ninth Doctor)

A blogger I’m fond of reading (Annlyel James) wrote yesterday that she’s started watching the modern Doctor Who. Although I’ve had brief glimpses of it from when it was on Syfy Channel right before Battlestar Galactica, and periodically I’ll find myself going down the rabbit hole of wikis about it, I’ve never actually followed this on a regular basis. I’d probably say that Doctor Who and Babylon 5 are the two biggest sci fi shows I haven’t watched any large part of. And I’m compelled to acknowledge that even Babylon 5 kind of pales in impact compared to the Doctor. I’m missing stuff here.

So I decided I’m going to rectify that.

I’m only two episodes into the Chris Eccleston/Ninth Doctor era, and there’s not much I’m going to say here that people probably haven’t seen a gazillion times over the last 12 years (yeah, really…. I said that! Me! Sometimes I do manage not to expound at novella length on things!) but I’m liking it so far. The second episode itself was both philosophical and even a little sad, postulating that at the moment the sun expands and destroys the Earth, the only ones paying much attention were aliens taking a look for show, and even at that, sabotage of the shielding aboard the space platform they were watching from distracted them so that nobody was actually paying attention when the Earth shattered in the heat and solar wind. It was a sobering reflection, that perhaps was difficult to take when I was sitting home alone late at night, that sooner or later every single thing around us will end.

I’m in. It’ll probably take me a good month or two to go through it all at my relatively slow binge pace, but I don’t know if any big things are going to come along that’ll give me a reason to stop in the next couple months anyway. I’ll see whether I’ve got the stomach to go back to the classic version when I’m done. Meanwhile, I’ll throw the occasional post on here while I’m at it.

Thanks for reading.