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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.
What is this LJ comment limit of which you speak...?
Rose Tyler is SUCH a Mary Sue.
LOL. You can say controversial stuff here anytime -- especially when I agree with it!
If you do get around to reading the above discussion, I go into some detail on how the thing that mainly bothers me about Rose is the way she's put on a pedestal by the other characters when she hasn't earned it. It's kinda like the Weir situation on SGA, where we're often told that she's the galaxy's greatest diplomat, when she's amply shown to be a mediocre one, at best. It makes me resent her, through no real fault of her own, because I feel like the writers are trying to force her down my throat. I'd like her much more if the flaws we keep seeing in canon were acknowledged by the show (and, preferably, brought to the forefront and analyzed and mocked, like with the guys...).
That line from Jack actually crystalised a lot of the vague discontent that I'd been having with Rose's character all season.
Yup. It really hammered it home to me. And like you, I don't dislike Rose; I just wish she were presented a bit differently. I think that the writers are trying to do her as kind of an "everywoman" of sorts, a self-insert character in the same way that a character like Kirk is something of a self-insert for men -- the cool, attractive person who's got aliens of the opposite sex swooning over him/her. I'm not 100% opposed to the idea of that; I like that Rose has a sex life, and love that she's the one bringing home the alien bimbos. But -- they push it too far, straight over the edge into Mary Sue-ness, and that comment from Jack is really the epitome of that.
I can understand Mickey's uncritical infatuation with her (even though it bugs me at times), because he's young and she's, presumably, the only girl he's ever gone with; he just doesn't have the experience or emotional distance to have a more mature perspective on her. But -- Jack? Jack, the con man and petty criminal, who's been around the block any number of times, who flirts with (and presumably, if he can swing it, sleeps with) everything that has a pulse, who on top of that has known her for probably no more than a few weeks at most? And on top of that, being from the 51st century, he'd probably see her as something of a primitive, ignorant about the simplest aspects of galactic culture. For Jack to moon over Rose is just ... bizarre. It really feels like the writers are using Jack's mouth to tell us how we ought to feel about their Greatest Creation Ever -- "Rose! She's awesome! Everybody loves her! Don't you love her?" Well, I'd love her a lot more if I'd stop hearing about how great she is while watching her yank Mickey around like a rag doll in order to chase after her precious Doctor.
Watching the Giles episode last night (I really need to look up its actual title!) made me feel more sympathetic towards Rose than I have in awhile. It's much easier to relate to an underdog than to the person at the top of the pecking order. The way that she was feeling jealous and pushed aside, the reminders that she really *isn't* as special as she thought she was -- it felt like it gave her character a balance that she really lost towards the end of the last season. I don't know if they'll keep on like this -- I really hope so, because I think I could really like Rose if the show will allow her to be a real person, with virtues and flaws, rather than reminding us of the Awesomeness of Rose Tyler at every opportunity.