Spring Break TV: Doctor Who
Funny story: during my Spring Break, I killed my dvd player with my mind. It was just a cheap little dvd player from Target, probably about a year and a half to two years old, and one afternoon I made the fatal mistake of looking at it and thinking, 'Huh, it's been a while since I had a dvd player break down on me.' And the very next day, my dvd player froze twice, then abruptly refused to read anything or receive any command ever again. If you try to load a disc into it, it will make a horrendous clack clack clacking sound at you.
Now, a person might choose to do some research at this point in order to find and purchase the optimal replacement, but I didn't really want to be without a dvd player over the small remainder of my spring break. So I went down to the Best Buy in town and found yet another cheap, tiny little dvd player to replace the previous cheap, tiny little dvd player. (I bought some Nerd Herd Geek Squad protection on it, at least, so they will fix it or replace it if it breaks within two years. Just the one dvd player in 2010!)
Meanwhile, my friend Janelle had loaned me her Doctor Who: Season 3 on dvd a while back, and I had finally gotten around to watching it over the first half of my spring break. It's hard for me to make intelligent comparisons between the various seasons of New Who, because I've seen the episodes mostly all out of order and with long gaps between seasons, so my affections are distributed mostly arbitrarily, and I don't have equally good exposure to each of the seasons, companions, and actors who have played the Doctor. Some of my friends - notably lj-friend tempestsarekind - have well-developed views concerning, for example, the Doctor's long-range character development. I am happy to entertain such views, but have few of my own, because I just don't have the strong sense of progression that comes from watching a series attentively, in order.
That said, I think Doctor Who: Season 3 may be my new favorite season, overall. I suspect Donna will continue to be by far my favorite personality among the companions (if nothing else, I identify closely with her wild swings of emotion between loopiness and, say, grief or regret), and certain season 4 episodes may continue to top my list (the Silence in the Library two-parter stands out in my mind), but Season 3 has an almost effortless cohesion to it. Somehow, everything just works together; it all seems to be of a piece, one story, and whether that strikes me as remarkable because I haven't paid sufficient attention to the other seasons, or because it's truly the standout season of the show, I dunno, I'm impressed.
Martha, it now seems to me, is easily the most admirable person among the companions so far. I like them all. Donna is my personal favorite - she's the funniest and the most unpredictable. I feel less attached to Rose, but I think I still love her - perhaps *because* of, and not in spite of, all her little episodes of pettiness and self-absorption. Rose is scrappy and irrepressible. As I've now said elsewhere, it's not always clear what Rose has to contribute to the fight against the next inevitable multi-dimensional disaster across time and space, but she does contribute, nonetheless, and I respect her for it.
Martha, on the other hand, is just kind of a straightforwardly AMAZING woman. Altogether companionable, and she challenges the Doctor, even when she's not trying. (Donna does this, too, to some extent). I love the way it falls to Martha to define and discover the Doctor for herself, because he won't explain anything to her. When Martha compares the power of the Doctor in his TARDIS to the power of Shakespeare in the Globe Theater and the Doctor's eyes light up? It's such a meaningful judgment, because no one has told Martha what to think about the Doctor or how he works. What she tells him, she has intuited herself. Clearly, Martha is also called upon to endure more - and more often - than the other companions, and often she must exercise this endurance without the Doctor's help and support. A running theme of her adventures is going it alone. But though the Doctor sometimes - all unintentionally - causes her pain and makes these long sojourns harder to outlast, she manages to come away unburdened by resentment. (Even if there are other burdens, like her feelings for the Doctor and her family's trauma, that she still has to bear).
I don't look for romance between the Doctor and his companions, because I so enjoy watching tv friendships resist taking that turn. But I also don't blame Martha in the slightest for the way she feels. I'd go so far as to say that I'd watch her for a contemporary primer on unrequited love with dignity. (My previous models have mostly been historical characters - like Elinor Dashwood, say). Martha is plain about her feelings, she flirts, but she's also a *marvel* of boundaries. When you love someone who doesn't love you back, you can linger, you can drift along behind picking up scraps; you can tell yourself that the moment anything changes, there you'll be at the ready, so it's worthwhile to stay, even if it's a little like bleeding out a single drop at a time. Or you can kindly and gently say 'no' to a life which, while thrilling enough, you would only be living as a facsimile, a pantomime, of the life you're really longing for. I'm ridiculously proud of Martha for the staggering accomplishment that is turning down the one and only Space Man in a blue box she's ever likely to meet, in favor of the hope that her own life - her own journey as a lower case doctor and a generally remarkable human being - can be every bit as rewarding.
Still, that said: of all the companions, I think Martha is the one I'd most have liked to have kept for longer. Even just a little bit longer! I'll always want more Donna, but mainly because of Donna's ending. I wait for the day when Donna gets another chance. But I also feel very satisfied by Donna's journey with the Doctor, content with it, right up to (almost) the very end. Season 3 ended before I, for one, was ready to give Martha up.
So, uh, what does this have to do with my broken dvd player? Other than the part where, if the Doctor is in the market for a wacky new American companion, a girl who is looking to avoid her dissertation and who can break dvd players with her mind is surely the exact sort of girl that he needs?
Well, I wanted to watch the whole season a second time before returning the dvds and writing a review, but my new dvd player can't read the discs! It turns out, somehow, my friend Janelle acquired region 2 copies of Doctor Who. (I told her on Sunday, and she was as surprised as I had been). And it turns out somehow my previous cheap little dvd player was multi-region. And it turns out that half an hour after the swell of hope I experienced upon learning that you can hack most cheap dvd players and make them multi-region, I learned that my particular model of cheap little dvd player happens to be completely unhackable. *sigh*
So I decided to go ahead and write this from memory, weeks and weeks after I first saw Season 3 over my spring break. (I will have to Netflix new copies of the Season 3 discs, or else rewatch all the episodes in little bits on YouTube). And having done most of my squeeing and said my piece already, the remainder of my thoughts are as follows:
- 'Blink' was everything I was ever promised it would be.
- I love watching the Doctor get grumpy about Captain Jack.
- I DO NOT, as a rule, like bad guys, but The Master is like an incorrigible little boy.
- I am currently in the market for a HILARIOUS general Doctor Who icon - something good quality, but FUNNY. If you know who makes all the best, most hilarious Doctor Who icons, tell me? The funny Doctor Who people and the funny BSG people don't seem to intersect.
Finally, in other news: I had a dream that I helped Neal Caffrey escape from an Evil Hospital where he was being held captive in some kind of Experimental Wheelbarrow of Bloodletting. (Or something like that). This was a) not nearly as sexy an escape as you are probably picturing, and b) not nearly as sexy an escape as it should have been, sez I. I just wheelbarrowed him out of the hospital and down the street, before depositing him at a friend's house in the neighborhood where I grew up. We were living in my old house, only suddenly it was located in the middle of a farmer's field. And this government spy/bad guy of some kind was wearing a trucker hat and sunglasses and driving around and around the outside of the furrowed field around our house, watching us from his tractor. I was worried because I didn't want to betray Neal, but I also didn't think I could stand up well to interrogation, should it come to that.
I hid some secret documents in the stash of old sewing patterns my mom kept at the back of my closet. So... if I should go missing or anything... lj now knows where to look.
.
Now, a person might choose to do some research at this point in order to find and purchase the optimal replacement, but I didn't really want to be without a dvd player over the small remainder of my spring break. So I went down to the Best Buy in town and found yet another cheap, tiny little dvd player to replace the previous cheap, tiny little dvd player. (I bought some Nerd Herd Geek Squad protection on it, at least, so they will fix it or replace it if it breaks within two years. Just the one dvd player in 2010!)
Meanwhile, my friend Janelle had loaned me her Doctor Who: Season 3 on dvd a while back, and I had finally gotten around to watching it over the first half of my spring break. It's hard for me to make intelligent comparisons between the various seasons of New Who, because I've seen the episodes mostly all out of order and with long gaps between seasons, so my affections are distributed mostly arbitrarily, and I don't have equally good exposure to each of the seasons, companions, and actors who have played the Doctor. Some of my friends - notably lj-friend tempestsarekind - have well-developed views concerning, for example, the Doctor's long-range character development. I am happy to entertain such views, but have few of my own, because I just don't have the strong sense of progression that comes from watching a series attentively, in order.
That said, I think Doctor Who: Season 3 may be my new favorite season, overall. I suspect Donna will continue to be by far my favorite personality among the companions (if nothing else, I identify closely with her wild swings of emotion between loopiness and, say, grief or regret), and certain season 4 episodes may continue to top my list (the Silence in the Library two-parter stands out in my mind), but Season 3 has an almost effortless cohesion to it. Somehow, everything just works together; it all seems to be of a piece, one story, and whether that strikes me as remarkable because I haven't paid sufficient attention to the other seasons, or because it's truly the standout season of the show, I dunno, I'm impressed.
Martha, it now seems to me, is easily the most admirable person among the companions so far. I like them all. Donna is my personal favorite - she's the funniest and the most unpredictable. I feel less attached to Rose, but I think I still love her - perhaps *because* of, and not in spite of, all her little episodes of pettiness and self-absorption. Rose is scrappy and irrepressible. As I've now said elsewhere, it's not always clear what Rose has to contribute to the fight against the next inevitable multi-dimensional disaster across time and space, but she does contribute, nonetheless, and I respect her for it.
Martha, on the other hand, is just kind of a straightforwardly AMAZING woman. Altogether companionable, and she challenges the Doctor, even when she's not trying. (Donna does this, too, to some extent). I love the way it falls to Martha to define and discover the Doctor for herself, because he won't explain anything to her. When Martha compares the power of the Doctor in his TARDIS to the power of Shakespeare in the Globe Theater and the Doctor's eyes light up? It's such a meaningful judgment, because no one has told Martha what to think about the Doctor or how he works. What she tells him, she has intuited herself. Clearly, Martha is also called upon to endure more - and more often - than the other companions, and often she must exercise this endurance without the Doctor's help and support. A running theme of her adventures is going it alone. But though the Doctor sometimes - all unintentionally - causes her pain and makes these long sojourns harder to outlast, she manages to come away unburdened by resentment. (Even if there are other burdens, like her feelings for the Doctor and her family's trauma, that she still has to bear).
I don't look for romance between the Doctor and his companions, because I so enjoy watching tv friendships resist taking that turn. But I also don't blame Martha in the slightest for the way she feels. I'd go so far as to say that I'd watch her for a contemporary primer on unrequited love with dignity. (My previous models have mostly been historical characters - like Elinor Dashwood, say). Martha is plain about her feelings, she flirts, but she's also a *marvel* of boundaries. When you love someone who doesn't love you back, you can linger, you can drift along behind picking up scraps; you can tell yourself that the moment anything changes, there you'll be at the ready, so it's worthwhile to stay, even if it's a little like bleeding out a single drop at a time. Or you can kindly and gently say 'no' to a life which, while thrilling enough, you would only be living as a facsimile, a pantomime, of the life you're really longing for. I'm ridiculously proud of Martha for the staggering accomplishment that is turning down the one and only Space Man in a blue box she's ever likely to meet, in favor of the hope that her own life - her own journey as a lower case doctor and a generally remarkable human being - can be every bit as rewarding.
Still, that said: of all the companions, I think Martha is the one I'd most have liked to have kept for longer. Even just a little bit longer! I'll always want more Donna, but mainly because of Donna's ending. I wait for the day when Donna gets another chance. But I also feel very satisfied by Donna's journey with the Doctor, content with it, right up to (almost) the very end. Season 3 ended before I, for one, was ready to give Martha up.
So, uh, what does this have to do with my broken dvd player? Other than the part where, if the Doctor is in the market for a wacky new American companion, a girl who is looking to avoid her dissertation and who can break dvd players with her mind is surely the exact sort of girl that he needs?
Well, I wanted to watch the whole season a second time before returning the dvds and writing a review, but my new dvd player can't read the discs! It turns out, somehow, my friend Janelle acquired region 2 copies of Doctor Who. (I told her on Sunday, and she was as surprised as I had been). And it turns out somehow my previous cheap little dvd player was multi-region. And it turns out that half an hour after the swell of hope I experienced upon learning that you can hack most cheap dvd players and make them multi-region, I learned that my particular model of cheap little dvd player happens to be completely unhackable. *sigh*
So I decided to go ahead and write this from memory, weeks and weeks after I first saw Season 3 over my spring break. (I will have to Netflix new copies of the Season 3 discs, or else rewatch all the episodes in little bits on YouTube). And having done most of my squeeing and said my piece already, the remainder of my thoughts are as follows:
- 'Blink' was everything I was ever promised it would be.
- I love watching the Doctor get grumpy about Captain Jack.
- I DO NOT, as a rule, like bad guys, but The Master is like an incorrigible little boy.
- I am currently in the market for a HILARIOUS general Doctor Who icon - something good quality, but FUNNY. If you know who makes all the best, most hilarious Doctor Who icons, tell me? The funny Doctor Who people and the funny BSG people don't seem to intersect.
Finally, in other news: I had a dream that I helped Neal Caffrey escape from an Evil Hospital where he was being held captive in some kind of Experimental Wheelbarrow of Bloodletting. (Or something like that). This was a) not nearly as sexy an escape as you are probably picturing, and b) not nearly as sexy an escape as it should have been, sez I. I just wheelbarrowed him out of the hospital and down the street, before depositing him at a friend's house in the neighborhood where I grew up. We were living in my old house, only suddenly it was located in the middle of a farmer's field. And this government spy/bad guy of some kind was wearing a trucker hat and sunglasses and driving around and around the outside of the furrowed field around our house, watching us from his tractor. I was worried because I didn't want to betray Neal, but I also didn't think I could stand up well to interrogation, should it come to that.
I hid some secret documents in the stash of old sewing patterns my mom kept at the back of my closet. So... if I should go missing or anything... lj now knows where to look.
.