“Everything has its time”
Yesterday was the second anniversary of my online journal. I created it on July 13, 2006, so that I could comment on an old-school fan’s review of “Doomsday.” (I don’t usually go around tickling sleeping dragons. But it was less than a week after the episode aired, and I was half out of my mind with grief.) Anyway, I just went back and reread my comments and her replies, and it looks like things have come full circle. I’m still trying to accept that the story I fell in love with ended with “The Christmas Invasion.” But I still think she was wrong when she said, “The story you fell in love with was a misconception.”
The Valiant Child
If I were going to believe that Rose’s character arc was the same in all four seasons, I’d need to know why “Bad Wolf” meant one thing in season one and something else in seasons two, three, and four. In season one, it was a message from Rose to herself. It meant that she didn’t have to accept the choices that other people had made for her. She could make her own. That’s what she told the Doctor when she came back to the Game Station in “The Parting of the Ways” - “I create myself.”
But when the words appeared in later seasons, their meaning had changed. In “Turn Left,” they were a message for the Doctor. They’d also become a warning - when Donna asked, “Doctor, what is it? What’s Bad Wolf?” he told her, “It’s the end of the Universe.” And “Journey’s End” turned the phrase completely on its head. I came away from the scene on Bad Wolf Bay feeling like everything since Emergency Program One might as well not have happened.
I’d also need to know why the writers never followed up on some of the things that happened in “The Parting of the Ways.” I spent three seasons wondering how looking into the Time Vortex had changed Rose. They told us it had - in “Tooth and Claw,” the Host sensed that she had “something of the wolf” about her, and that was well after the Doctor supposedly “took the power out of her.” But that was the last we heard of it. Ironically, the Vortex’s effect on Jack was more important to the later seasons than its effect on Rose.
And we still don’t know how much of what happened on the Game Station Rose remembers. In “Doomsday,” she told the Cult of Skaro, “I met the Emperor. And I took the Time Vortex and poured it into his head and turned him into dust.” But we don’t know when or how she found out about that. And in “Turn Left,” she knew that Jack was alive and working for Torchwood. But again, we don’t know how. She doesn’t know that she made him immortal - “Journey’s End” made that clear. And she either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the Doctor abandoned him.
The Lonely God
On the other hand, if I were going to believe that the Doctor’s character arc was the same in all four seasons, I’d need to know why he fit one archetype in season one and another in seasons two, three, and four. In season one, he seemed to fit the Mentor archetype. It’s not just that he brought Rose (and the audience) into the “special world” of the story. It’s that, more often than not, he was the catalyst for other people’s journeys. That’s one of the things I liked best about season one - the way ordinary people (a servant girl, a lifelong backbencher, a teenage single mother) stepped up and became heroes.
But in the later seasons, the Doctor himself was the hero. He literally rode in on a white horse in “The Girl in the Fireplace.” And the less said about the “romance novel cover shot” in “Smith and Jones,” the better. I think orange_crushed hit the nail on the head when she said, “I can’t even imagine Nine (who was quite cool at times) getting some of the business Ten does - a slow-motion walk through fire for Nine? I just imagine him glancing back every now and then like ‘whoa, calm down back there.’”
I’d also need to know why the writers waited till season two to suggest that the Doctor’s loneliness was at least partly a self-inflicted wound. In “The End of the World,” he told Rose, “I’m left travelling on my own because there’s no one else.” But in “School Reunion,” after she met Sarah Jane, Rose said, “I’ve been to the year five billion, right, but this… now this is really seeing the future. You just leave us behind.” And when she found out what he’d done to Jack, Martha asked, “Is that what happens, though? Seriously? Do you just get bored with us one day and disappear?”
And it doesn’t look to me like the Doctor has learned anything since “The Christmas Invasion.” If anything, his decisions seem to be getting worse. The first time he sent Rose away, he told her, “If this message is activated, then it can only mean one thing. We must be in danger. And I mean fatal. I’m dead or about to die any second with no chance of escape.” I think Emergency Program One was his answer to the question Jackie asked at the end of “World War Three” - “What if something happens to you, Doctor, and she’s left all alone standing on some moon a million light years away - how long do I wait then?”
But the second time, things weren’t quite as bad as they’d been on the Game Station. The Doctor had a plan for sending the Daleks and Cybermen to Hell without getting pulled in himself. But he sent Rose away anyway. And the third time, they’d already beaten the Monster of the Week, so he had no excuse at all. He took her back to Pete’s World because that’s where he thought she belonged (and he didn’t care what she thought).
The Simplest Solution
On the gripping hand, everything I thought was true of the series as a whole still is true of the first season. Half of season one is still Rose’s journey from shopgirl to epic hero, and the other half is still the Doctor’s journey from being alone to being part of a family. The season still ends with Rose becoming the next best thing to a goddess, and the Doctor becoming the next best thing to a Tyler. And there are enough differences between season one and the rest of the series that I can believe the later seasons happened in an alternate universe, and that my Doctor and Rose are still together.