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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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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.