Doctor Who 510 - Vincent and the Doctor

[skipthedemon]

ETA: I'd think it'd be obvious, but post might be triggery on depression/suicide?

Or, Lis writes a proper review with some meta. Spoilers for...the whole show up to 5.10.

• This was a gorgeous, gorgeous episode. One that cut a little too close to home, but not in a bad way. I loved it, and I did cry a little.
• From the beginning of this season Amy-with-the-four-psychiatrists is not quite right. I love her for it and I identify with her, which is a very rare thing for me to do. I like a lot of characters. I don't usually feel like I'm like them. She's bright, and witty, and eager to experience new things. She's also damaged, was damaged when she was seven years old and cynical already about adults who leave and never come back. I don't think her life is a tragic ruin, but I do think she sometimes, maybe even often, has been frustrated and sad and not coped well. She may not even have remembered why she's been sad, in a less sharply defined way than she's forgotten Rory. After all, how often in our day to day lives do we stop and think about the small (or large) awful things that have happened to us? Only the most dysfunctional of people would dwell on them every day. One method of therapy is giving ourselves a safe place to unpack and remember the things that have shaped us and try to wrestle with them.
  
  I'm really curious how memory, and hopefully healing, is going to play into the finale now. Memory, as a lot of people have pointed out, is a big part of this season.
  
• All right, so Amy's mental health issues are the obvious mirror for Vincent's insanity. But so are the Doctor's. I think we can all agree the Doctor has been struggling with PTSD and depression since at the least the beginning of the new series? Bear with me as I rapid fire a few (lengthy as it turns out) points.
  
•  You can look at the Doctor as struggling with mental illness for a lot longer than the new series, and I don't mean in a vague 'he's always been mad' kind of way. The Master's has been explicitly spelled out being damaged as a child from the painful and traumatic experience of looking into the Untempered Schism. Much of his evil and madness, New Who says, is due to that trauma. There's some major problems I feel with ret-conning the Master's evilness, but I don't have a problem with a lot of him being explained by trauma as such.  The Doctor's reaction to the Schism was even more outwardly violent; he ran away and admits he's been running ever since. sixfootpooka, my lovely other half, points out that several of the Doctor's regenerations were arguably suicides, even in Classic Who. Three deliberately went to his death as much to face death as to save Earth.  Four may or may not have fought as much as could have to live. Five doesn't even attempt to share or duplicate medicine to save himself, and then nearly doesn't regenerate he's so busy fighting his inner demons as he's dying. (Pardon me while the shipper in me giggles that it seems it's remembering the Master's anger than makes him fight to live.)  
  
• Vincent says, in his fit of black mood, "When you leave - and every one always leaves - I will be left with an empty heart and no hope." The Doctor argues for hope to which Vincent snaps back, "Then your experience is incomplete. I know how it will end, and it will not end well." I'm stuck by how much Vincent sounds like Nine and Ten's mantra that everything dies. Ten in particular harped on how he always even up alone, and everyone left him.  Yet, more often than not, Ten actively pushed people away, just as Vincent snapped at the Doctor to leave him, immediately after bemoaning the fact that the Doctor will leave.
  
  It's long been my fanon that what the Doctor saw when he looked in the Schism is the bare truth that everything does die, even the universe itself, no exceptions. See my ficlet: Shunyata for a full take on that. It's a harsh lesson for an eight year old to learn, but one seemingly indelibly stamped on his mind way too soon  for his young mind to cope with it fully. While it's a true lesson, it is also incomplete. Even if it wasn't same day, he did at some point in his young life get a lesson from a hermit on a mountain in finding hope. It made a large impression as well, hence the daisiest daisy speech in 'The Time Monster'.  Interesting that Vincent's symbols of hope in this episode were sunflowers, which are part of the same family as daisies.
  
  At any rate, it makes a lot of sense that the Doctor is the Doctor, trying to hold off death and entropy, because he learned about despair at an early age.
  
• Another mirroring quote from Vincent - "We have fought monsters together and we have won. On my own, I fear I may not do as well."  I thought immediately of Ten choosing to not take on companions, and his fairly clear downward spiral into madness through out the specials last year. Being alone for a long time is rarely good for anyone, but it seemed pretty disastrous for the Doctor. Ten struck me  as often about half a step away from self-destructing. 'Turn-Left' implies heavily that on the heels of losing Rose the Doctor was suicidal. Donna yelling at him kept him from drowning himself with the Racnoss. I suppose it could be read as an accidental death, but in 'The Runaway Bride' that room was nowhere near immediately full with water, and getting out wasn't actually difficult. He would have had to have waited, knowing it would kill him and he probably wouldn't regenerate. Even after Donna called to him, to my eye he hesitates, but decides to get out with Donna. He's not quite willing to take down an innocent human with him.
  
• Donna may not be a trained psychologist, but I think she's the companion who sees most clearly he's damaged and how. Oh, Rose and Martha understood that he was sad and lonely, and worried about him, sure. Donna seems to grasp that the Doctor sometimes acts completely irrationally, and he doesn't know how to fix himself. She calls him on it in 'The Runaway Bride', in 'The Fires of Pompeii' and again, in 'The Doctor's Daughter'.  One of tiny favorite moments with her is in 'Journey's End,  when the Doctor is frozen and shaking when he first hears Davros' voice. Donna seems to get that he might be being triggered, and reminds him gently of where he is and that he's safe. I wonder if Wilf had bad spells while she was growing up? Maybe some of Wilf's friends from WWII. However she learned to deal with veterans with lingering shell shock, she is good for the Doctor.
  
  Wilf seems to see that too. The Doctor's quiet breakdown with Wilf in the cafe in "End of Time" is one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever seen. The Doctor is terrified, fighting for his sanity, but he doesn't know how. The story of 'End of Time' is on the surface about the Doctor trying to find a way not to die despite the prophecy, and it being fulfilled anyway. I am not sure that the Doctor being convinced by the prophecy he will die soon isn't part of his depression. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. He dies by his own conscious actions. His attitude the entire story really is echoed by Vincent talking about knowing how it will end. Until he's actually on the cusp of regenerating, and then he decides he really does want to live after all.
  
• Eleven is a new man, but he's still the Doctor. I really do think he's coming out of depression a little to a healthier state, and thank goodness. He's able to talk about the loss of Gallifrey and his people as a awful thing that happened, that's part of him, but not necessarily the defining thing in his life. Eleven has cried, a lot, more than Ten did in two seasons, I think. It's different kind of crying though. Ten usually cried because he felt sorry for himself, and fandom has called him on his emo. He couldn't usually manage more than a rote "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," when it came to other people's pain. Eleven cries because the people around him are suffering, and he feels it keenly. I feel like there's a different quality to their affection, too. Ten hugged and touched because he wanted to be demonstrative of his feelings, but sometimes I'm not sure it mattered who it was he hugged. Maybe it's too harsh to say the nearest person he could cling to would do, and I don't think that's true every time he hugs someone, but sometimes maybe it is. Eleven's little gestures gestures come off to me as generally lingering and focused  very much on the person in front of him. In short, Eleven represses honest emotion in the moment less, and is less turned inward on his own pain.
  
  Regeneration clearly hasn't magically fixed him anymore than a few good days with the Doctor and Amy fixed Vincent. 'Amy's Choice'  brought out the self-loathing and despair for all to see. 'Amy Choice' is also all about suicide as a way out. Or, conversely, it's about killing the delusions that our brains make, and that make us more ill. Tricky, that. I don't have the energy to analyze the entire episode and this post is already really long. But a couple of things, quickly.  I missed on first viewing - before any of them realizes Upper Leadworth may be a dream, the Doctor asks how Amy and Rory stave off the..... I only heard Amy's 'boredom' the first time. But the Doctor says self-harm. Ouch, Doctor, ouch, especially in light of the rest of the episode.Another one thing Amy's Choice makes clear in the Doctor is aware of his self-loathing. Part of his mind wants to tear him down. He knows it. He's fighting against it. Again, quite a flip from Ten who projected his destruction as coming from outside of himself, fighting, but mostly flailing uselessly because he was looking in the wrong place for what would kill him.
  
  I'm looking forward to how Eleven grows and what other glimpses into his head we get. In the meantime, "The good things don't always soften the bad things, but visa versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things, or make them unimportant." Such a simple obvious statement, but so hard to hold onto. Eleven will always be (one of) my Doctor(s), for reminding us.
  
  This post is cross-posted on Dreamwidth at:http://skipthedemon.dreamwidth.org/130802.html. Comments there are welcome.