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Finished with Doctor Who Season 1
I loved the finale. What can I say ... I have this huge sappy weakness for "last stand" stories. Even if the Daleks STILL remind me more of giant salt shakers than something you'd run away from. (Being attacked by an army of shoulder-high, heavily armed salt shakers is nothing to sneeze at, though.) And Jack in Rambo mode, and the Doctor sending Rose home in the Tardis, and the origins of Bad Wolf ... much love, yes. Even if it's really, really best NOT to think about the time travel too much.
However, I'm starting to have, well ... problems with the way that the Doctor and Rose behave towards the people around them. Rose and the Doctor aren't bad people, but they're not particularly nice people -- it's not that they're deliberately cruel, but they just don't bother to care. Like leaving Jack behind on the space station (not that, I gather, it's a big deal to him or that he even minds; but it's the principle of the thing, dammit -- abandoning your allies on a space station full of dead people in a dead solar system is very bad form) or the way Rose has been treating Mickey, especially given how often he goes out of his way to help her.
Rose and the Doctor are very committed to high ideals -- saving the universe, that sort of thing -- but when it comes to the little, day-to-day things, like, say, behaving like decent human beings towards other people (aside from each other), they fail at it. Whereas, someone like Mickey, or Rose's mother, could care less about the fate of the universe -- what they do instead is protect and help the people they care about. It's a lot easier for me to sympathize with Mickey defending Rose's mom with a bat than to sympathize with Rose exploiting her boyfriend's affection for her in order to obtain his help chasing after the Doctor.
With the exception of each other, they're far more committed to their ideals than to the welfare of individual human beings. It seems like they're willing to give the people around them just enough information and assistance to really get them in trouble, and then turn them loose to fend for themselves -- like taking Rose's genius boy-toy from the museum to the year 200,000 and then abandoning him in an alien environment that he knows nothing about to sink or swim. I realize that the people around them are adults and are responsible for their own decisions, but at some point you *do* have responsibility for the effects of your actions on other people; it's not enough to fall back on the "Well, I know I talked him into it, but it's not my fault he said yes" defense. It's almost like they're little kids playing with toys -- getting what they want out of other people, but failing to notice the effects of their actions on anyone else.
They're willing to sacrifice themselves to save the universe, or apparently each other, but when it comes to anything beyond that, they're kind of self-centered, aren't they?
And sometimes they aren't even willing to take the saving-the-universe step, like the Doctor refusing to push the button to destroy the Daleks. Okay, I understand that he doesn't want to become like them -- that it's a violation of everything he believes in. But, at this point, he's not saving anyone but himself -- he's sacrificing the universe on the altar of his own conscience. The Earth is dead, everyone on the space station is dead; if he activated the device, all he'd be killing would be the Daleks (and himself). By pushing the button, he saves the universe; the only thing he stands to gain by not pushing the button is to keep his hands clean, at the cost of countless lives. Violating his own ideals to save the universe would be a tremendous sacrifice, but it's a sacrifice he wasn't willing to make; he chose himself and his own conscience over the lives of countless innocents.
Luckily Rose took the choice out of his hands, so there were no consequences for his failure to act. Convenient, that.
The ultimate problem here is that I'm finding it harder to empathize with the characters the more I see of them. I can't quite seem to sink into full appreciation of their devotion to each other when that devotion is generally at the expense of everyone else. Jack's comment about saving Rose, that "she's worth it" -- er, I'm not really sure that she is, actually, given that she's done very little lately except for single-mindedly pursuing the Doctor through time and stepping on whoever she has to in order to do that.
My, this has turned into a wee bit of a rant. ^_^ I'm certainly looking forward to seeing the Tennant episodes -- it's just that I'm having trouble right now emotionally engaging with the characters, because more and more they're turning out to be people I feel slightly skeevy empathizing with.
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Some of these issues actually come up in the show - they're definitely character flaws, and written as such. People who meet him do react on this. I think - for the Doctor, it's just part of who he is, which is not human. His mind works in different ways than you'd expect from a normal human, and it can make him seem - cruel, even, as Rose finds him in the first episode when he's got plastic!Mickey's head with him, and she's freaking out about her boyfriend being dead and the Doctor really doesn't get it, at first. And then Rose - she's 19. Which is an age where we like to think we're all grown up, but it's still so easy to be influenced by people around you, and when you meet someone who's pretty much a force of nature, personality-wise? She's not mature enough to tell him off for his behaviour, not once she gets used to him. (It does happen, though! Which is good. It's good for him to have people around who ground him; remind him of all those aspects of being human he never quite seems to grasp.)
Not saying you should excuse them everything, but... Well. Alien. Hard for me to hold him by human standards, especially when he does have such enormous depths of compassion. I remember being moved by the scene where he was comforting the dying pig the Slitheen had modified and put in their crashing ship - a pig. And because it had to die scared and alone, he felt sorry for it.
That the Doctor couldn't push that button - the thing is, I think he already has. He's the last of the Time Lords for a reason. He ended the war. He ended the war, and killed all the Dalek, and killed all his people. And it almost broke him. He's really not - well. Rose is helping him heal, but the Doctor you catch glimpses of in the pilot (talking to Rose about being the last, and pleading with the Nesteen Consciousness-glob thing), with the Tree Lady at the end of the world, and with the lone Dalek... The war did quite a number on him. Being the one to pull the metaphorical trigger on no less than two whole civilisations - one of them his own - isn't something someone like him is equipped to handle. Very few beings are equipped to handle something like that, actually. So - yes, it was cowardly to want to avoid going through that again, and for being responsible for wiping out the planet he always seemed to love more than his own home, but. I don't think it's keeping his hands clean (I read him as being very aware that they aren't) as much as being completely unable to force himself to go through with something like that again.
And then there's the writing on the show, which is all following the age-old adage of "if you're not with the Doctor, you're screwed". Watching the Confidentials ("making of" specials for each episode, with interviews with actors and writers and producers and looks at the f/x production and shooting and lots of lovely things like that - they're the same length as an episode, and they were made to air right after the show) actually helped me get less bothered by all the people they were failing to save. It does bother me (I have a whole theory on how reading manga made it worse, because anime/manga usually deals more with the the actual consequences of killing, but that's for another time), but I shifted the blame for that from the characters by putting it squarely on the writers' shoulders. Yeah, you probably shouldn't use authorial intent that way, but... Um. I wanted to. They let people who aren't with the Doctor die to make a point/create tension; that's not his fault. (I kind of suck at not trying to be an apologist, don't I?)
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I believe RTD also made comment during season 2 (possibly in the Dr Who Confidential about the episode Fear Her?) to that idea of kind of selfishness.. I can't remember the comment exactly but it was something to do with the series building a growing feeling that this cannot last, that they are spinning around the universe, carefree and reckless and that it's got to end, it's starting to catch up with them, the danger and the threat is growing and at some point things are going to go wrong.
Season 2 again also built more on the idea that you expressed above about the Doctor being not human, not held to human standards, and that he is very much broken by what has happened to him, by what he was forced to do to end the time war. And that he can be cold and he can be cruel. There is a darkness in him... and that makes him all the more interesting to me! :D
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And the Daleks, yeah, I felt the same; it wasn't that he was selfishly putting his own conscience above the fate of the universe, so much as that he was too weak to do it. Rose totally saved his bacon there...and still, to me, I'm not sure what she did was 'right'. The Daleks are monsters, but...they could be more. "Dalek" proved they're sentient beings. Committing genocide...again...is that right? (one wonders what Ten would have done...)
I love the show for how the Doctor is the hero, but you're not supposed to blindly accept everything he does as the right thing - he screws up, he makes a lot of mistakes. And a lot of times there just isn't a right answer, and the Doctor himself isn't perfect - far from; he's badly damaged, an emotional basketcase. But he's trying; he's doing the best he can, for all his flaws and faults. And he's never on the wrong side - even if he's not always on the right one - so you can cheer him on. Or at least I can!
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Being alive for 900 years old would be enough to make his mindset alien, if it wasn't already, yes. And leaving people behind is a protection mechanism, is necessary. The moment he stops to really think and feel, the moment he starts taking the responsibility he probably should for people whose lives he screws up - that's the moment he'll break, utterly.
Take "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" - the moment at the end, where everybody lives. At how he's so incredibly joyous and exalted - that's the depth of compassion he's capable of. That's how much he wants everybody to live. Every time. And that he can't do that, can't protect everyone - and even if he does, they'll all die so soon anyway... Yeah. I think "emotional basketcase" covers it all pretty nicely.
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I loved that moment, and his ecstasy which was at once wonderful and painful to see -- and no more of the series than I'd seen, it was very obvious that this isn't something that happens to him very often, but it's very clearly what he always wants to happen.
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That moment is possibly my favourite moment from S1, just because it expresses so much of who the Doctor is. And Eccleston plays it so beautifully, with that incredible energy and emotion. ♥
Um. Really should be off poking the thesis now, but... *whimper*. Stuff! To discuss!
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... and yes, I'm supposed to be working on my novel today, but I keep sticking my head in for a quick peek at LJ, and then two hours later I'm still writing comments, aaaaugh.
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(isn't this the best discussion? I think I had a secret unfulfilled need to analyze the Doctor in detail and hadn't noticed it ^^)
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(It is! And - yes, I think you did too. Except for the "secret" part... ♥)
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I think this is really the problem I'm having at the moment -- that I don't feel the show itself is acknowledging his failures. The big failures, yes, but the smaller ones, his inability to relate to people and the consequences of that ... not so much. On the other hand, I did just watch the first season in about 2 days and now I'm digesting and thinking about it.
The two big areas I'm having trouble with right now are the abandonment of Jack on the space station, and the way Rose treats Mickey. I think I could deal with the rest of it a lot better if it wasn't for those two things. And, morally, this does make me think, because I seem to be at least *somewhat* okay with background characters getting screwed over on the show if they're not ones I'm personally attached to. I notice it, sure, but I can get past it. With these two, I'm having trouble getting past it ... which is interesting to think about, since the whole issue is that of morality and fairness, and obviously it's a lot easier for me to accept the betrayal or loss of characters I'm not personally attached to. Hmm... *thinks*
Opening his heart to all the people he meet would just kill him over and over, because wherever he goes, people die...
It's interesting that the "crackpot" viewpoint of the first couple of episodes is actually turning out to be, well, TRUE. He really *is* a walking disaster of sorts.
Though a lot of the Doctor, it's even a question of how much is it a totally alien mindset, and how much is just what any sentient being would be like after over 900 years of witnessing time & space
I do think at least some of it is that he just isn't human. The scene with the pig, which I just mentioned in one of my replies to
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The abandonment of Jack - people have mentioned this already, but while trying to tread lightly around spoilers, there's a lot more going on there than the Doctor just up and leaving. It wasn't anywhere near as casual as it seemed, and while the Doctor wasn't right to do it, he did have reasons.
Rose's treatment of Mickey...he's the boy next door, the hanger-on friend she fell into a relationship because he was always there, and she's a nineteen-year-old girl. She does take him for granted, but it's such a very human thing thing to do...Rose is very immature in most respects; she's never deliberately malicious but she can be thoughtless, the way teenagers can be (and she's an only child to boot). And the Doctor is not exactly a great role model in that respect, because he's awfully immature by human relationship standards - he's a permanent footloose bachelor!
I think the Doctor feels it when anything around him dies; he loves life so, it hurts him to see it hurt or destroyed. He just doesn't always take the time to let it show, usually having other things to do...and he loves humans because humans always survive, even when it's at the expense of other life (the Tenth Doctor is less "stupid apes" but he still has his moments of rage...) Individual humans are so very mortal, but the human race is eternal, as even the Time Lords were not, and the Doctor loves that so much...
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Yeah ... Rose is an immature person with lousy role models, and I can see *why* she does the things she does; I just have trouble mustering sympathy for her a lot of the time, perhaps because I keep feeling like the show itself wants us to feel sympathy for her rather than recognizing the effects her actions are having on other people.
In my head, I keep contrasting her with the main character in Dead Like Me -- did you ever watch that? (Highly recommended if you haven't.) Georgia is a similar character -- about Rose's age, smart and capable of affection and self-sacrifice, but very self-centered and immature in general. However, I found George to be worlds more sympathetic than Rose, in large part because Dead Like Me was about George's journey to maturity and the way that she slowly comes to an understanding that she can't get away with acting like a bitch to people who care about her and still expect them to keep coming back. On the show itself, she's castigated, repeatedly, for her immaturity, and slowly the lesson starts to sink in and she begins to build bridges rather than tearing them down. Whereas Rose keeps doing impulsive, immature things and winning, or at least winning a great deal of sympathy even when she fails (like in the episode with her father) ... and that bothers me.
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Comment 1 of 2 (what? long-winded? me?)
I do get that from the show ... basically all of that. Especially the Doctor not being human, and not relating to things as a human -- the scene with the pig really demonstrated that, I think, because to him there's no real difference; I loved that scene, and one of the things I loved most about it is that it made me stop and think, "You know, to him a pig in that situation is just as sympathetic as a human in that situation; he's no more invested in either one of them, because he's an *alien*." I think they've brought that across very well. And it made me think about how much difficulty he sometimes must have in dealing with humans, seeing how we treat other living things on the planet, especially as seen from an outsider perspective.
But even though I understand that, it doesn't make him easier to relate to -- at least not for me. It's similar to the problems that I had reading C.J. Cherryh's "Foreigner" books; I don't know if you've ever encountered those, but they're about a human ambassador to a race of aliens who have no concept of friendship or personal loyalty ... in their society, it's all about screwing over the other guy and getting ahead. The main character, being human, keeps instinctively relating to them on a human level, making friends and liking them personally and, on a subconscious level, expecting them to like him and be loyal to him right back -- I didn't make it very far into the series, because it was too hard to watch him getting repeated emotional smack-downs. The author did a fantastic job of developing a very different, very alien morality and thought process -- but for me, as a reader, it ended up being too difficult to relate to, because I wanted the affection that the characters just weren't capable of demonstrating.
The Doctor's not nearly on that level -- but in some small ways he's kind of getting there, if I'm making any sense? I think it's made worse in his case because he obviously *is* capable of love and affection and compassion, but he's brutally callous to the people that he doesn't give it to. I think it would be easier for me to deal with if he were like that all the time, but he's not, so it's very hard for me to get 100% emotionally involved in a scene where he's giving his all to save Rose, when we've just come off a scene where he betrayed or abandoned someone else.
He's really not - well. Rose is helping him heal, but the Doctor you catch glimpses of in the pilot (talking to Rose about being the last, and pleading with the Nesteen Consciousness-glob thing), with the Tree Lady at the end of the world, and with the lone Dalek... The war did quite a number on him.
This is something I hadn't really thought about (consequence of mainlining the entire first season in about two days), but looking back on it, I can definitely see what you're saying here. I don't think I'd recognized the depth of the damage that the war had done to him, but looking at the first season as a whole, the signs are there.
Re: Comment 1 of 2 (what? long-winded? me?)
Yeah, I don't think that comes across so much the first time, but when you rewatch the season - Nine is broken. He's suffering PTSD on an almost unfathomable scale, so much so that repression and denial is about the only conceivable way any psyche could handle it, human or alien. He's the last of his species; his survivor's guilt is tearing him apart. A lot of his manic joy in the face of danger is alarmingly close to being self-destructive; in "Dalek" when it's mentioned he was the survivor, he responds, "Not by choice."
The extreme closeness he gets with Rose is in a large part because she is so innocent, so small and young and petty and human. He can just enjoy himself with her, he doesn't have to think about all the things that happened. She's his lifeline. And I think that's why I can like Rose, because she can be petty, she can be small-minded, but that's what the Doctor needed...an escape. (I admit, Rose's treatment of Mickey didn't bother me all that much...I always got the impression she really didn't know how much he truly loved her, so didn't realize how much she was hurting him. And Mickey has a fair bit of growing up to do himself...)
(in other news, I rather enjoyed the Foreigner books - have some issues with Cherryh's advancement of plot or the glacial speed thereof, but the characters themselves fascinated me because the aliens (ack, blanking on the name!) actually were capable of loyalty and closeness, just in an entirely different way from humans. But I'm rather fascinated by alien mindsets...I don't need to relate to characters so much as understand them, and a lot of the pleasure of fanning for me is that seeking to understand. Actually a lot of my most favorite characters, I don't really relate to at all...huh. Never thought about that before but it is a bit weird on my part! ^^;)
Re: Comment 1 of 2 (what? long-winded? me?)
I don't think it's weird at all. For me, I think it really comes down to expectation -- to what I *want* to get out of a fictional work. With Doctor Who, there's turning out to be a bit of a divide between what I want from it, and what it's giving me -- which really means that I just need to revise my expectations a bit. I read certain authors *knowing* that their books are going to depress the hell out of me (e.g. Larry "never created a character I didn't want to kill" McMurtrey), but I still enjoy reading them enough to push on through. I think that I'd come into Doctor Who wanting something that the show's not really delivering, but, like I said, it's really at this point a matter of figuring out what it *is* giving me and then appreciating that.
Maybe I ought to give the Foreigner books another go. I don't even remember off the top of my head if I made it through the first one -- they were my roommate's, and I was reading my way through the contents of her shelves and was pretty quick to give up on something that didn't seem to be meeting my expectations. In general, I like Cherryh, though she does plot her books with all the speed and tension of a 500-page volume of insurance regulations, at times. Several of her books have really hit my friendship/"families of circumstance" kink. I think that I shied away from Foreigner because I was hoping for that and wasn't finding it.
Re: Comment 1 of 2 (what? long-winded? me?)
Anyway, I really had no expectations about Who except knowing that people enjoyed it. I enjoyed the first season but didn't start fanning on it until the end of 2nd, so then I was just appreciating what I got (and I really, really appreciate it. DW is rapidly becoming one of my favorite shows of all time, so if I get wacky in my defense of chars or plots or writing or whatever...that's why, don't take it personally, please! ^^;;)
As for the Foreigner books, I seem to recall there being things I quite enjoyed, but I can't recall clearly, and I do know there were a lot of pages to wade through to get to those bits, sooo...
Re: Comment 1 of 2 (what? long-winded? me?)
Believe me, I certainly don't mind being argued with. *g* I think that I came into DW with mega-high expectations based on the fannish response, because the last time that I saw LJ erupt into stratospheric levels of squee, it was for Supernatural, which turned out to be a smarm fan's wet dream. *g* Plus, I knew that both you and
Re: Comment 1 of 2 (what? long-winded? me?)
It's odd, because I didn't think I could love this much a series like that, because goodbyes and eternal partings tend to depress me, but...the key is with Doctor Who, so much of it makes-or-breaks on loving the Doctor, because he is absolutely the only constant. And I am crazy in love with him, so, yep, there you go...(this also gives me sympathy with Rose - I understand her feeling for her Doctor!)
Re: Comment 1 of 2 (what? long-winded? me?)
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And like I said below - Doctor Who is weird in how much of a fannish response it's gotten out of me, because it does lack so many of my fannish buttons. It just taps straight into my soul, the TARDIS obviously making it able to bypass all the normal channels.
Comment 2 of 2
And then there's the writing on the show, which is all following the age-old adage of "if you're not with the Doctor, you're screwed".... It does bother me (I have a whole theory on how reading manga made it worse, because anime/manga usually deals more with the the actual consequences of killing, but that's for another time), but I shifted the blame for that from the characters by putting it squarely on the writers' shoulders.
LOL! Well, at least SOME of that is inevitable in any action/adventure type show, I think, unless it's written with a depth of sensitivity that the genre doesn't tend to achieve very often. Because people are GOING to die, or at least get hurt, and the protagonists have to either become total basket cases or suck it up and deal with it. Doctor Who does seem to be falling on one end of the extreme, though...
You've probably noticed that there's a tendency towards that in SGA, as well -- a darkness that becomes more pronounced as the series goes on. In some cases, the consequences of their lousy decisions aren't nearly what they should be; yes, I blame the writers for that. *g* I'm actually looking forward to discussing this with you when you get to episodes where they make *very* questionable choices, because in my head I've been comparing it to the Doctor Who situation and trying to figure out why one bothers me more than the other. But I won't really go into details yet ... you'll get there soon enough.
Actually, Western entertainment in general -- and American in specific -- is pretty bloodthirsty, the whole Lethal Weapon/Dirty Harry type of thing (which I think Jack, with his American accent and his guns, is TOTALLY riffing on). I'm not sure if I'm noticing it so much in Doctor Who because the emotional consequences of that kind of mentality are being brought to the forefront of the show, if not actually managing to get the characters' attention. I *like* it when shows humanize the cannon fodder and make you think about what things are like for the not-so-faceless victims in the background -- actually, this is something I really like about SGA, because they do a good job (I think) of making you sympathize with the "redshirts" and regret when they die, or even using established, already-sympathetic characters in the "redshirt" roles. (Waaah!) And Doctor Who does that as well, maybe even a little TOO much, because it sometimes gets hard to emotionally disassociate from the victims and go ahead and enjoy the more lighthearted aspects of the show when someone sympathetic just got killed, betrayed or abandoned.
Re: Comment 2 of 2
Switching between anime and Western shows, it always does get me how violence is treated like a... solution, like something everyone should be okay with. We both know all anime isn't exactly peaceful, but I've still gotten the impression that death and killing is treated as much more serious in a lot of Japanese series. Trigun is the ultimate example, of course, but there are a lot of other shows that spring to mind where one of the major themes is that killing people can be almost as bad as getting killed yourself. One of the shows I grew up with, City Hunter, had the main character trying to keep his partner/Most Important Person from ever having to fire a gun. This despite the fact that Ryo could give Vash a run for his money for accuracy, and that he killed heaps of people during the course of the series. But it was something that was acknowledged as a darkness in him, and the whole point was that it was too late for him to undo any of that - but he could still try to keep Kaori from becoming a killer, too. And I think about Rurouni Kenshin and Fushigi Yuugi where killing (even in self-defense) comes back to haunt the characters (good guys, not bad guys) responsible, and Saiyuki, where one of the themes is that the protagonists are very much anti-heroes, and they've all "sinned" by killing.
I don't think it's ever dealt with at the same level in Western shows - at least not Western action shows! I only vaguely remember how SG-1 dealt with Daniel starting to carrying guns and being in fights, but I know that SGA hasn't actually addressed the fact that Rodney and their doctor are now carrying automatic rifles, and that Rodney's at the point where he can actually shoot a former friend, and how wrong it is, really. Not that I mind McKay saving the day, not at all, and I'm not saying they should keep their scientists all safely locked up in Atlantis, but - I'd like to see the impact this must have to the characters. Especially once they start killing not just Wraith, but other humans. The reaction in the Storm episodes to most of the sixty Genii soldiers killed, and that one of them was Kolya's son - that's exactly the kind of thing I think is important to at least acknowledge.
What they do with those of our characters getting killed, though - that really is very well done. It doesn't feel like anyone's just there to be a redshirt, they're all people, and when they die, it's a real person dying; it's the Atlantis crew losing a friend and someone somewhere losing family, and Weir and Sheppard losing someone in their charge, and it does get to them. So that I really do like. (And when I say "like" I mean that they can really make it hurt when people die. A lot. *whimper*)
Yep, Doctor Who is completely willing to make you like a character, and showing them as having friends and dreams and whatnot, and then killing them off without a second thought. And the Doctor and Rose just deal, for reasons that have been extensively covered elsewhere in this amazing discussion... But that does get to me, it really does.