A list about Doctor Who
I just started season 4 of the 21st century version of Doctor Who. I love-love-love it. Here are some things it makes me think about :
1) I enjoy the Doctor's different relationships with the various "companions" he has with him. I liked that he had to sort of convince Rose to go along with him; I liked that Martha was eager and unassuming about going with him; and I like that Donna went out of her way to find him and then to get into the blue box with him. It'd be easy for the show to treat all of the women/companions the same, to follow a formula and to focus only on the Doctor -- but the show doesn't do that. Rose, Martha, and Donna are all clearly different characters: Rose liked to have a good time and also wanted more out of her lived experiences than she could get at home in her time; Martha had an excellent home life and was moving ahead with her career; and Donna is a bit older, still adventurous, disinterested in finding a husband but very interested in finding the Doctor. They all have different goals, they're all on different paths in their lives, and they all seem to gain something different from the Doctor and traveling with him.
2) Not only are the relationships distinct and well-written, but each relationship is complex and nuanced in ways that I don't feel I see in other TV shows. Or maybe I just think that because I'm in love with the show. I have to admit, it bothers me a touch that Rose and Martha both "loved" the Doctor, and it looks like season 4 is revving up a bit of sexual/romantic tension between Donna and the Doctor. When we met Sarah Jane Smith, the Doctor's former companion, in season 2, there was a great deal of jealousy between Sarah Jane and Rose about who was traveling/in love with the Doctor when. In the end, it worked out and Sarah Jane gave Rose some nice guidance; but the female jealousy seemed unnatural and a bit sensationalized. At the same time, this meeting of past and present "lovers" served to make the Doctor look a little slutty; it sort of undercut his sincerity, his integrity, at the same time as it underscored his loneliness and his utter loveability. We saw a similar thing happen when the Doctor talked about Rose to Martha -- Martha said once that she was a rebound. Maybe she was, maybe not; whatever the case, she was certainly one among a number of companions that the Doctor has had aboard the Tardis.
These relationships make me think about what this show is saying about male sexuality, about the stereotype that one man "needs" many lovers, "needs" to "spread his seed." It's more complicated than "approves of" or "disapproves of" this stereotype. You've got the loneliness and the immortality pieces thrown in -- not to mention the fact that the Doctor isn't actually banging these gals (as far as we know). The most we see is a kiss. The most expressly emotional the Doctor gets is when he's saying goodbye to Rose in the parallel universe -- and he gets cut off before he (ostensibly) gets to say "I love you" to Rose.
In any case, I do think you could make the argument that the Doctor "really loved" Rose -- I mean, he did seem despondent and scatter-brained for most of season 3 -- and that he loved Martha but mostly platonically, as a friend and companion. Thus far in season 4, Donna is seeming like the stereotypical nagging housewife, but at the end of episode 3, the Doctor said himself that he needed something like that to make the right decisions. My point here is that I think the show does a good job of painting his different companions as different people. There's not the Female Companion/Sidekick role that various up-and-coming actresses fill; there's Rose, there's Martha, and there's Donna.
3) Along these lines, I also liked that Christopher Eccleston's Doctor and David Tennant's Doctor had slightly different relationships with Rose. This is probably the result of different actors having different visions (and in Tennant's case, longer visions) of the Doctor. But it does make me think about how a body might impact a personality and thereby a relationship with another person. There was somewhat less sexual tension between Rose and the Eccleston Doctor than between Rose and the Tennant Doctor. Maybe in Doctor-Who-World, this has to do with the Tennant Doctor's age. Or maybe it's the glasses. Or the hair. It's probably the shoes, though.
(Aside: I was very disappointed to see Eccleston in GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Same with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.)
4) I can't stop thinking about how the Doctor LOVES humans. Almost every episode, he waxes poetic about the wonders and beauties of humans, even when these wonders and beauties bring them to the ends of the universe, to war, to violence, and to death. He just can't get over us. Now, if there really were Time Lords out there, I would not want them to be obsessed with us, personally. We're obsessed with ourselves enough as it is; we don't need more attention. But the Doctor's love for humanity, his profound understanding of what it means to be human despite being non-human himself, is really the crux of science fiction's role in our literature. The Doctor tells us that, yes, we may be stupid and ignorant and close-minded, but we are curious, we are ambitious, and we are tenacious. We may be violent, but we can also be loving and gracious and kind. The Doctor is the objective observer who notices our flaws and still loves us, who really couldn't get along in his very long life without us. I think the best expression of this is when the Doctor explains that Rose saved his life by staring into the Tardis's time vortex; he says that some of those who do this go mad, some run away, and some are inspired. Rose, at her essence, is kind and loving, so being suffused with the time vortex doesn't drive her insane or make her violent -- she just saves everyone's life and, in the case of Captain Jack, makes some of them live forever. The Doctor notes that if the Master had taken on the same energy Rose had, he would have killed everyone -- Rose didn't because she's human.
If you compare this narrative with, say, Hitchhiker's Guide or any of Vonnegut's stuff, you can see some new and interesting approaches to talking about humanity. Hitchhiker's takes a more non-chalant approach to humans and humanity: they're neither here nor there, philosophically. Take 'em or leave 'em. Ford Prefect may love humans, or he may not; it's not clear from the story how he feels about humanity as a whole. He and Arthur Dent are pretty okay friends for about half of the stories featuring them, but they do have a petty fight that separates them for quite a while in one of the novellas/stories. I don't get the sense that any human the Doctor took under his wing would leave feeling so ambivalent.
As for a Vonnegut comparison, I think the "so it goes" approach kind of sums it up. The Doctor is clearly a humanity-optimist, whereas the aliens and non-humans in Vonnegut's tales see a much, much larger picture of which humanity is a rather minuscule part. They're not really ambivalent towards humans, but they see mostly humanity's ignorance and smallness rather than the great things humans are capable of.
5) Can I just take a minute and talk about the Family of Blood story? THAT WAS SO INTENSE. The Doctor hid himself as a human in 1913 for three months so that the Family of Blood wouldn't find him. In the middle of this storyline, the human Doctor -- who has taken the name John Smith and fallen in love with a human woman whom he wants to marry (and who isn't Martha) -- finds out that he's actually a Time Lord. As John Smith, he had built a life, had fallen in love, had felt and experienced things he didn't want to give up. He raged against changing back to his Time Lord self, raged against Martha asking him to leave his lover. This was fucking EXCELLENT acting, for the record. You can really see the difference between human and Time Lord in Tennant's acting. Yes, it's a matter of picking the right words and writing and all of that -- but these scenes! THESE ARE AMAZING. "Falling in love, that didn't even occur to him? And what sort of man is that?" FUCKING QUESTION OF THE DECADE SRSLY. The desperation. The bargaining. The denial and the anger. Someone in this show -- the writers and/or Tennant -- has his or her finger on the pulse of humanity. For real.
Okay, maybe I'm overstating it a bit. STILL. IT'S SO GOOD.
6) Clearly, I like to think about gender, gender stereotypes, gendered dynamics, all that shit. This show makes me think about the different kinds of power different women have over the Doctor. For example, in the above clip, Joan has a steady, somewhat healing, down-to-earth way of dealing with the Doctor/John Smith. Martha's relationship was forged because she was independent, clever, and quick-thinking. Donna pretty much forced the Doctor to have a relationship with her. Rose saves the Doctor in their first meeting, and they go off to have adventures together. This goes back in a lot of ways to the complexity and nuance of the characters on this show. But I also think there's something here that challenges the lazy reading of Doctor Who, that the Doctor just saves people, especially women, especially women that he likes/loves. It's easy to look at just a few episodes and conclude that the Doctor is just another male chauvinist from another galaxy who thinks that women need to be saved. But if you actually watch the show and pay attention to the dynamics and the interactions between the Doctor and his various companions, you can see that they save his ass nearly as often as he saves theirs. Not only that, but the Doctor often winds up needing bigger help. Like when Rose looked into the time vortex to save the Doctor at the end of season 1. Or when Martha traveled AROUND THE WORLD to tell the story of the Doctor to save him from the Master. It's in stories like these that you can see the commitment on both sides of the relationship -- both the Doctor and the companion, whomever she may be, love (platonically or no) each other and would do anything to save each other from death and destruction. In this show, unlike many other shows and unlike the Campbellian monomyth, there's some equity in the saving. There's some give and take. And there's honest respect.
7) It's a strange feeling having to get used to new actors and new characters in a show that pulls you in so dramatically. Right now, I'm trying to acclimate to Donna -- she a bit whinier than Rose or Martha, mouthier, mousier. She's not as "conventionally attractive", she's not in her early 20s, she's lived a somewhat full life of her own already. She's just altogether different, and it's a challenge to feel like I'm friends with her like I became with Rose or Martha. I suppose there's also a bit of jealousy there (weird!), a protective feeling of the Doctor because I "know" him so much better than Donna does and I'm just not sure she's right for him. WOW. It's a TV show, Lacey. Anyway. The constant shifts make the show fresh and new nearly every season -- there's always a new reason to watch. I wonder how well this show propels these actresses into other lead roles on TV or the big screen. I know Billie Piper went on to do Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Freema Agyeman hasn't done anything since DW, but her role only really ended in 2008, and it looks like she has a pretty strong TV/recurring role background anyway.
8) I love the campiness and the cheesiness of this show. I love that the Daleks are clearly spray-painted and run on remote control wheels. I love that all of the aliens are humans in costumes. I love that the creators of this iteration of DW didn't feel the need to make it look completely 21st century with computer-generated effects and digital animation and all that boring crap.
1) I enjoy the Doctor's different relationships with the various "companions" he has with him. I liked that he had to sort of convince Rose to go along with him; I liked that Martha was eager and unassuming about going with him; and I like that Donna went out of her way to find him and then to get into the blue box with him. It'd be easy for the show to treat all of the women/companions the same, to follow a formula and to focus only on the Doctor -- but the show doesn't do that. Rose, Martha, and Donna are all clearly different characters: Rose liked to have a good time and also wanted more out of her lived experiences than she could get at home in her time; Martha had an excellent home life and was moving ahead with her career; and Donna is a bit older, still adventurous, disinterested in finding a husband but very interested in finding the Doctor. They all have different goals, they're all on different paths in their lives, and they all seem to gain something different from the Doctor and traveling with him.
2) Not only are the relationships distinct and well-written, but each relationship is complex and nuanced in ways that I don't feel I see in other TV shows. Or maybe I just think that because I'm in love with the show. I have to admit, it bothers me a touch that Rose and Martha both "loved" the Doctor, and it looks like season 4 is revving up a bit of sexual/romantic tension between Donna and the Doctor. When we met Sarah Jane Smith, the Doctor's former companion, in season 2, there was a great deal of jealousy between Sarah Jane and Rose about who was traveling/in love with the Doctor when. In the end, it worked out and Sarah Jane gave Rose some nice guidance; but the female jealousy seemed unnatural and a bit sensationalized. At the same time, this meeting of past and present "lovers" served to make the Doctor look a little slutty; it sort of undercut his sincerity, his integrity, at the same time as it underscored his loneliness and his utter loveability. We saw a similar thing happen when the Doctor talked about Rose to Martha -- Martha said once that she was a rebound. Maybe she was, maybe not; whatever the case, she was certainly one among a number of companions that the Doctor has had aboard the Tardis.
These relationships make me think about what this show is saying about male sexuality, about the stereotype that one man "needs" many lovers, "needs" to "spread his seed." It's more complicated than "approves of" or "disapproves of" this stereotype. You've got the loneliness and the immortality pieces thrown in -- not to mention the fact that the Doctor isn't actually banging these gals (as far as we know). The most we see is a kiss. The most expressly emotional the Doctor gets is when he's saying goodbye to Rose in the parallel universe -- and he gets cut off before he (ostensibly) gets to say "I love you" to Rose.
In any case, I do think you could make the argument that the Doctor "really loved" Rose -- I mean, he did seem despondent and scatter-brained for most of season 3 -- and that he loved Martha but mostly platonically, as a friend and companion. Thus far in season 4, Donna is seeming like the stereotypical nagging housewife, but at the end of episode 3, the Doctor said himself that he needed something like that to make the right decisions. My point here is that I think the show does a good job of painting his different companions as different people. There's not the Female Companion/Sidekick role that various up-and-coming actresses fill; there's Rose, there's Martha, and there's Donna.
3) Along these lines, I also liked that Christopher Eccleston's Doctor and David Tennant's Doctor had slightly different relationships with Rose. This is probably the result of different actors having different visions (and in Tennant's case, longer visions) of the Doctor. But it does make me think about how a body might impact a personality and thereby a relationship with another person. There was somewhat less sexual tension between Rose and the Eccleston Doctor than between Rose and the Tennant Doctor. Maybe in Doctor-Who-World, this has to do with the Tennant Doctor's age. Or maybe it's the glasses. Or the hair. It's probably the shoes, though.
(Aside: I was very disappointed to see Eccleston in GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Same with Joseph Gordon-Levitt.)
4) I can't stop thinking about how the Doctor LOVES humans. Almost every episode, he waxes poetic about the wonders and beauties of humans, even when these wonders and beauties bring them to the ends of the universe, to war, to violence, and to death. He just can't get over us. Now, if there really were Time Lords out there, I would not want them to be obsessed with us, personally. We're obsessed with ourselves enough as it is; we don't need more attention. But the Doctor's love for humanity, his profound understanding of what it means to be human despite being non-human himself, is really the crux of science fiction's role in our literature. The Doctor tells us that, yes, we may be stupid and ignorant and close-minded, but we are curious, we are ambitious, and we are tenacious. We may be violent, but we can also be loving and gracious and kind. The Doctor is the objective observer who notices our flaws and still loves us, who really couldn't get along in his very long life without us. I think the best expression of this is when the Doctor explains that Rose saved his life by staring into the Tardis's time vortex; he says that some of those who do this go mad, some run away, and some are inspired. Rose, at her essence, is kind and loving, so being suffused with the time vortex doesn't drive her insane or make her violent -- she just saves everyone's life and, in the case of Captain Jack, makes some of them live forever. The Doctor notes that if the Master had taken on the same energy Rose had, he would have killed everyone -- Rose didn't because she's human.
If you compare this narrative with, say, Hitchhiker's Guide or any of Vonnegut's stuff, you can see some new and interesting approaches to talking about humanity. Hitchhiker's takes a more non-chalant approach to humans and humanity: they're neither here nor there, philosophically. Take 'em or leave 'em. Ford Prefect may love humans, or he may not; it's not clear from the story how he feels about humanity as a whole. He and Arthur Dent are pretty okay friends for about half of the stories featuring them, but they do have a petty fight that separates them for quite a while in one of the novellas/stories. I don't get the sense that any human the Doctor took under his wing would leave feeling so ambivalent.
As for a Vonnegut comparison, I think the "so it goes" approach kind of sums it up. The Doctor is clearly a humanity-optimist, whereas the aliens and non-humans in Vonnegut's tales see a much, much larger picture of which humanity is a rather minuscule part. They're not really ambivalent towards humans, but they see mostly humanity's ignorance and smallness rather than the great things humans are capable of.
5) Can I just take a minute and talk about the Family of Blood story? THAT WAS SO INTENSE. The Doctor hid himself as a human in 1913 for three months so that the Family of Blood wouldn't find him. In the middle of this storyline, the human Doctor -- who has taken the name John Smith and fallen in love with a human woman whom he wants to marry (and who isn't Martha) -- finds out that he's actually a Time Lord. As John Smith, he had built a life, had fallen in love, had felt and experienced things he didn't want to give up. He raged against changing back to his Time Lord self, raged against Martha asking him to leave his lover. This was fucking EXCELLENT acting, for the record. You can really see the difference between human and Time Lord in Tennant's acting. Yes, it's a matter of picking the right words and writing and all of that -- but these scenes! THESE ARE AMAZING. "Falling in love, that didn't even occur to him? And what sort of man is that?" FUCKING QUESTION OF THE DECADE SRSLY. The desperation. The bargaining. The denial and the anger. Someone in this show -- the writers and/or Tennant -- has his or her finger on the pulse of humanity. For real.
Okay, maybe I'm overstating it a bit. STILL. IT'S SO GOOD.
6) Clearly, I like to think about gender, gender stereotypes, gendered dynamics, all that shit. This show makes me think about the different kinds of power different women have over the Doctor. For example, in the above clip, Joan has a steady, somewhat healing, down-to-earth way of dealing with the Doctor/John Smith. Martha's relationship was forged because she was independent, clever, and quick-thinking. Donna pretty much forced the Doctor to have a relationship with her. Rose saves the Doctor in their first meeting, and they go off to have adventures together. This goes back in a lot of ways to the complexity and nuance of the characters on this show. But I also think there's something here that challenges the lazy reading of Doctor Who, that the Doctor just saves people, especially women, especially women that he likes/loves. It's easy to look at just a few episodes and conclude that the Doctor is just another male chauvinist from another galaxy who thinks that women need to be saved. But if you actually watch the show and pay attention to the dynamics and the interactions between the Doctor and his various companions, you can see that they save his ass nearly as often as he saves theirs. Not only that, but the Doctor often winds up needing bigger help. Like when Rose looked into the time vortex to save the Doctor at the end of season 1. Or when Martha traveled AROUND THE WORLD to tell the story of the Doctor to save him from the Master. It's in stories like these that you can see the commitment on both sides of the relationship -- both the Doctor and the companion, whomever she may be, love (platonically or no) each other and would do anything to save each other from death and destruction. In this show, unlike many other shows and unlike the Campbellian monomyth, there's some equity in the saving. There's some give and take. And there's honest respect.
7) It's a strange feeling having to get used to new actors and new characters in a show that pulls you in so dramatically. Right now, I'm trying to acclimate to Donna -- she a bit whinier than Rose or Martha, mouthier, mousier. She's not as "conventionally attractive", she's not in her early 20s, she's lived a somewhat full life of her own already. She's just altogether different, and it's a challenge to feel like I'm friends with her like I became with Rose or Martha. I suppose there's also a bit of jealousy there (weird!), a protective feeling of the Doctor because I "know" him so much better than Donna does and I'm just not sure she's right for him. WOW. It's a TV show, Lacey. Anyway. The constant shifts make the show fresh and new nearly every season -- there's always a new reason to watch. I wonder how well this show propels these actresses into other lead roles on TV or the big screen. I know Billie Piper went on to do Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Freema Agyeman hasn't done anything since DW, but her role only really ended in 2008, and it looks like she has a pretty strong TV/recurring role background anyway.
8) I love the campiness and the cheesiness of this show. I love that the Daleks are clearly spray-painted and run on remote control wheels. I love that all of the aliens are humans in costumes. I love that the creators of this iteration of DW didn't feel the need to make it look completely 21st century with computer-generated effects and digital animation and all that boring crap.