![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
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.
no subject
Someone said something...lemme scroll back up because I loved it...oh, about the Doc's problem is that he sees too much of the big picture. I absolutely love that. Not only has he seen so much, but as a Time Lord, he's seen different outcomes of events. For all we know, some of these sacrifices could actually be for the greater good, some outcome that only he knows about. To be honest, I have to wonder how it is that the Doc isn't totally whacked by now. Closest we've come to that was Peter D and Colin B, because PD's regeneration was the "roughest", and Colin B was just...out there. LOL! No wonder Sylvester McCoy was a clown (though I tell you, he could crank up the power when he wanted to! Definite darkness underneath the mask.)
What I really love is the differences and how one leads to another. You have the original, who is just a cranky old man that knows a lot and is impatient with those that don't. In a sense he's very much a child in the Time Lord way even though his appearance is an old man. He's pompous and thinks he knows everything.
The second Doc was the vagabond, the one that was trying to find his place. He retains that child-like aura, and this being his second regeneration, is trying to come to terms with that whole senario and who is he, while still dealing with issues of life and death and morality (interesting notions for one who has so many lives). He's the teen, he's testing the waters. At times he's very immature, at times he suddenly seems to know things that are way advanced of even his years.
The third was the later teen/early 20's, the one that is more concerned with image and self expression. There is more confidence here, more of a certainty in who he is, what he is. He is more liable to make friends now, he's more willing to test these theories and notions that he's developed. He still is arrogant, but by this time has a "bigger picture" to look at, and allows that to temper him to some degree. But he is still very set in his ways.
The fourth one is the young adult. Tom Baker just took the character and made it his. He's cocky as they all are, but at the same time is more forgiving. At this point he accepts his need *not* to be lonely, which shows in his various companions (I believe he had the most companions of any doc). Part of this is his need for acceptance, not so much on an emotional level but more because his "job", who he is, is becoming planted in his brain. This doctor shows more discovery, more doubt, more of the original child-like tendency, and is becoming more philosophical.