The Doctor

[celticdragonfly]

So thanks to Gerry, we've been sloooowly getting to see the current Dr. Who stuff, now and then, in the evenings after the little ones have gone to bed. We're not done with the season yet, but getting close.
Okay, mostly I like this Doctor. And mostly I like Rose. Not that I think I'd get along with her or such, but she's interesting.

I'm actually mostly annoyed by the ep I just watched, Bad Wolf. But to be fair I'll go back over several recent ones.

The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. Hm, they are liking two-parters this season, aren't they, we apparently have several. This was SOOOO creepy, we stopped watching it almost to the end of Empty Child because it was just getting to me too much. Decided to start it again the next night when all the creepiness and scary music would have had a chance to fade from my system. Well-done creepiness. Yeek, gas masks are sinister and eerie. Must have been TERRIBLE to have to come face-to-face with people wearing them back then, on top of all the scariness of the Blitz. I did figure out the mechanism of what'd gone wrong partway through, although that didn't spoil it for me. The go-to-your-room bit was amusing, Karl was laughing hysterically at the part about "I'm glad that worked. Those would have been terrible last words." So, that's Captain Jack, yeah, I'd heard various types online talking about him. "Charming con man" is NOT a type likely to endear himself to me, so I'm viewing this suspiciously.

Boom Town - oh yeah, that rubbed my face in just how Welsh my family is. (for those that don't know but may be curious - so, bkseiver, did you click on the LJ-cut? - villainess is an alien who's using the body/appearance/voice of a Welshwoman, the lone survivor of a batch of villains from a previous ep who were all taking over bodies of MPs and occasional policemen and such) It is creepy having the Nasty be someone who looks and sounds like she could be closely related to me.

Heh. Cardiff, south Wales, an area I think of as not as dear to my heart, it's north Wales that I loved. Right. Until the plot starts discussing the the planned destruction of Cardiff Castle, and Karl finds me whimpering next to him in shock.

Bad Wolf - okay, basing an ep on various popular TV shows loses my interest REALLY quick. Bleah. And am I the only one out there who got REALLY tired of the Daleks after, oh, the first few minutes of the first time I ever saw them, WAYYYY back when? And, as selenite pointed out, the Daleks as long-term careful manipulators of human history? Nah, I don't buy it either. Gah, the Daleks annoy me. Superpowerful and apparently STUPID. And half a million more of them, even though they were wiped out.

Actually that whole Time War "both sides all wiped out except for the Doctor" thing annoys me. Okay, these were TIMELORDS. Presumably lots of them traveled in time. So even if there was some catastrophic mass battle wiping them out, even if that battle was in the past compared to, say, Rose's personal timeline, surely there ought to be all kinds of encounters with others of the Doctor's kind, here and there, that happen to be earlier on the individuals' timelines than this battle?

Some detailed Doctor Who fan who knows amazing details about the Doctor and his people will probably now demolish me.

Anyway, there was still interesting character stuff in Bad Wolf, watching the Doctor's reactions, getting more amused by Captain Jack. Okay, Captain Jack is amusing me despite myself. Lynda, not so much. Coming along? What, is he going to have a whole crowd now? Well, we'll see.

Pity this Doctor isn't sticking around. I don't know if Captain Jack is or not, I am not up to date on what's going on in realtime on the Doctor Who front, I live under a rock too much for that. I could ask on ORAC, if I felt like it, but I don't bother.

Comments

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Actually that whole Time War "both sides all wiped out except for the Doctor" thing annoys me. Okay, these were TIMELORDS. Presumably lots of them traveled in time. So even if there was some catastrophic mass battle wiping them out, even if that battle was in the past compared to, say, Rose's personal timeline, surely there ought to be all kinds of encounters with others of the Doctor's kind, here and there, that happen to be earlier on the individuals' timelines than this battle?

That bugged me, too. Andrew and I argued at length on the subject, but I knew I was right!

And I quite agree about the extreme creepiness of the London Blitz episodes. I really liked the one with Rose's father, too.
love

Catherine

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the one with Rose's father was interesting, although the Bat-things as evil forces of messed up Time were kinda snapping the Suspenders of Disbelief. As we started to watch that one I was realizing oh damn, this is gonna be HARD for Karl, who lost his dad at five. He handled it fine, though.

[technomom]

…the Bat-things as evil forces of messed up Time were kinda snapping the Suspenders of Disbelief.

That makes me wish I were still part of metaquotes. Someone with more energy should post it there :-)

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

oh gawds, a post of mine that in the comments I compare my mother to a Slitheen, posted to metaquotes.

oh what the heck, why not.

"May the force be with you" is a Welsh quote

[bkseiver.livejournal.com]

You, perhaps, thought all this was a new idea? And had you forgotten that the force has a dark side?

Re: "May the force be with you" is a Welsh quote

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

Heh.

Here, look at this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/gallery/11gallery/800/12.jpg

Doesn't she look like a relative? And the voice. Mom, you coulda played this part. You'd have been scary in it, too.

Re: "May the force be with you" is a Welsh quote

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

Hee! She certainly does. Possessed Mom, surely the scariest thing in the universe!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

About the time-travel, people-wiped-out thing: you're interrogating the text[1] from the Watsonian perspective[2]. From the Doylist perspective, the DW writers are approaching it in a way that will allow them to get rid of most of 30 years of accumulated story-cruft and start again, because if you bring all that to the table and dump it down, you get a large number of potential new viewers turned off by the sheer mass of story-history they need to learn.

But with this small outpost of the Daleks surviving, that raises the possibility of outposts of the Time Lords surviving, if some writer wants to take that on, plus one of the Companions next year is supposed to be the actress playing Sarah Jane Smith from the 4th Doctor (and since the BBC announced that some time ago, I'm not considering it a spoiler in any way), and she can provide continuity if necessary. Looking at it that way, I'm assuming the get-rid-of-everything from the first season was to get new viewers sucked in, and now they can choose to trickle small bits of the previous 30 years in.

It's a different approach from the way Star Trek did it, and I think it works better for me: I've watched a lot of DW in the past, but here and there and my knowledge of canon is incredibly spotty. If there were a lot of stories this season that relied on canon, I don't think I would have become as much of a fan.

[1] Er, that phrase is now stuck in my head from a big kerfluffle over on fandom_wank, but you understand what I mean. :)

[2] I'm assuming you're familiar with the terms from the Bujold list.

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I'm familiar with Watsonian versus Doylist. I can argue the Doylist side of things, but generally find that if I am it's to excuse something being poorly done. I much prefer being able to argue Watsonianly.

Hm, if they want to get rid of the accumulated story-cruft, then they shoulda left the bloody Daleks out. Grrr. I'm not all that up on canon, myself - I mostly was watching the Tom Baker Doctor some when I was younger, don't much know the others. I'd have been a happier viewer without them. They're just so bloody stupid. I generally hate the supervillain omnipotent enemy, anyway - I hated the Q, and pretty much lost all interest in Star Trek once they brought in the Borg, and haven't watched that movie or any since. If you have an undefeatable enemy, and you defeat them ONCE, okay, maybe, but if you KEEP facing them, and keep beating them, then man, that totally shreds my suspenders.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I have a tendency to assume that there's a reason for something happening or not happneing,a nd that it will eventuallyb e revealed, so it's not until the end of a series or book that I go "OK, so why not [blah]?" However, there's a couple of things going on which make it reasonably believeable to me - the DW universe is a large one. The Time Lords were never that populous, and TARDISes even rarer, so the Doctor rarely ran into other Time Lords without deliberately going to Gallifrey or being given orders from them, and the such, IIRC. I seem to recall that they weren't much for going out and traveling randomly, either - the Doctor was pretty much an anomaly for them. He almost never runs into time travelers, either, that we know of - Jack's one of the very few. So I'm OK with not running into any stragglers from other eras. Then, there's the idea of - if you know that someone's dead in your personal past, if you run into them again in the future - nothing is going to be the same, since you know their fate. You can't interact nomally with them, and we've seen in one of the episodes that if you attempt to change Time in any way, Very Bad Things Happen. I don't think I'd want to associate with anyone knowing their future like that, because I'd be too tempted to try to change it, potentially causing the destruction of large portions of the space-time continuum. So, the way I interpret it, that's the way the Doctor thinks, and if I wrote fanfic, that would be how I characterized him.

As for the Daleks, well the Daleks are so much a part of the Doctor that you almost can't remove them: they're his thematic opposite. Almost mindless hive-creature types, more machine than human (er, well, for alien values of 'human'), committed to destruction, single-minded. If you want to show the Doctor changing from the broken person he was at the beginning of the series and reaffirming his basic humanity, the Daleks are a good foil for that.

Not arguing that you have to like them or agree with that thinking, just that I'm speculating this is how the writers are using them.

The cricket in the office is STILL THERE. And STILL LOUD. And behind a desk where I CAN'T GET TO IT! Guess it's time to deploy the iPod.

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I'm still waiting to see the bit in your icon. I'm guessing it's gotta be in the next episode, right, since that's the last one with this Doctor? What a waste, getting to know and like him when he's only there for one flipping season.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup, last episode.

You get a bit more about this particular group of Daleks in the last ep, too. I like the Daleks slightly better this series than I did in the old one, but they're still not my favorite villains.

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

Feh. I don't care about mroe on the Daleks. There's not much scope for interesting character development in something that shouts in a monotone. And interesting character development is why I get interested in stuff.

Sigh, there HAS been interesting development with the Doctor, and from the icon I'm sure there's more - and then he's going to go AWAY.

It's like why I'm getting disillusioned about Bujold. Curse of Chalion I didn't much care for on first reading, because I didn't know any of the characters. I did like it a lot more on rereading. And I liked Paladin of Souls a lot, because I got to see a character I've met developing more in interesting ways. The Hallowed Hunt was back to square one for me. At least the worldbuilding continued. And now she's going off with this new book, totally unlike anything she's done before. I don't want to start from scratch with every reading. I liked what she was doing before, darn it, and now I can't get any more of it to read.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Did you see the earlier episode with the single Dalek? What did you think about that?

I like Bujold's fantasies, but there's no characters in them that really grab me like her Miles books do. And as far as the Miles books go - there comes a point when there's not much more you can do without retreading stuff you've done before, and I'd much rather she end on a high point, leaving us wanting more, than stretch it out too thin or get so overwhelmed with story-cruft she can't move.

I'll be really annoyed if Captain Jack doesn't show up again, after the last episode. Whcih I can't talk about yet since you haven't seen it, but I think there's things they will have to deal with next season that if they don't will be a problem for me. :D *uses icon AGAIN* so he's making out all over your page. XD

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

"It's a different approach from the way Star Trek did it"

Is it? Heaving out known canon and using time traveling villians to change everything from the beginning. On the other hand, "Enterprise" was arguably the worst Trek series of the lot and it's early cancellation confirms this. [This all changed in the fifth season but it was all too little, too late.]

Bringing in the Daleks and Sarah Jane does emulate one of the latter-day Trek's more successful gambits: familiar faces and aliens to tempt the fans of the earlier series to watch the new ones. Beginning with Dr. McCoy's cameo on the TNG pilot, ending with the Andorians and other familiar original Trek aliens finally showing up by the end of Enterprise. And it worked, I started watching ENT again... just in time for cancellation. Shfu.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup. Can't find the LJ essay that made me think about what DW did and why they did it, more's the pity, but it was a convincing argument to me.

I have not seen the least bit of necessity to tempt older fans of DW to watch it. Admittedly, I don't haunt Who forums, so I may be missing a lot of people who refuse to watch it because of the choice to make the first season intelligible to people who don't know canon, but I haven't run across any.

[selenesue.livejournal.com]

Why tempt back the older fans? IT's all about the numbers! The kids who grew up on DW are now parents and even grandparents so if it's on telly then their descendants will see it too. Thus do these things run in families, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Interesting essay. I don't agree with all of it, notably about the importance of "canon." Anyone smarter than a box of rocks is going to get frustrated with broken continuity sooner or later.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure what you're saying there, but I think you're not quite getting my point about the older fans. I'm not seeing any older fans who are refusing to watch the show because of canon issues.* There's some complaining, sure, but there would be complaining either way.

The big thing about DW is that is it is - and always has been - viewed by the BBC as primarily a kid/young adult show. That's your core audience, not the older fans. And you need to make damn sure that it is and remains accessible to that core audience, so you don't lose them. If you can make it pleasing to the older fans, great, but they are not the target audience.

* There may be older fans who are not watching because they no longer care about DW, and that's perfectly legitimate - I no longer watch Trek (and haven't since somewhere in the first season of DS9) because I just don't care. Has nothing to do with what they do or do not do, and there's nothing they can do to tempt me back: I just don't like prime-time space opera anymore. Haven't seen any of the Bab5 movies, and haven't seen more than 1 or 2 episodes of any of the crop of SF show for the past 5 years or so, because the whole genre just no longer interests me.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

And the moment after I posted that, I found it: pabsungenis' How the British can save Star Trek!