RTD and death to smugness. sortof.
so, someone might actually look at this page someday. so maybe i should write something.
today i'm thinking about smugness in RTD's doctor who.
if anyone has seriously not seen the first two series, then stop reading.
in boomtown, jack, doc9, and rose seem smug to mickey and to some viewers. in most of season 2, doc10 and rose seem smug to some viewers. in both instances, the smugness is interrupted by someone dying. but not really. in fact, all of the smug participants except the doctor are at least implied to die, and then they don't, really.
witness: in bad wolf, rose seems to die; she is revealed to have merely been captured by fidgety daleks. in potw, jack really does die, and is then rebooted by uberose. in army of ghosts, we are told that rose dies; in doomsday, we are told that she is just dead as far as her universe is concerned.
why? there is an echo here of whedonness. again and again in buffy/angel/etc., people who are in happy relationships are utterly destroyed. it can't even qualify as a spoiler anymore; what's a spoiler in the whedon universe is when something resembling a happy relationship doesn't get obliterated. (and, the obliteration is almost always accompanied by massively crazy or violent or evil action from a beloved-by-some female character.)
RTD didn't nick the whole thing, but is there something whedony going on?
i wonder. for some reason, i'm thinking about the unit years. i'm thinking about how some of those episodes just seem kind of smug and excessively safe to me, and not just because i have little love for pertwee's doc. and i'm thinking of how the end of the green death is about the most heartbroken we see the doctor until doomsday. (with a close second to sending rose away in potw.)
so maybe it's more basic than that. lasting, normal relationships with someone nearly incapable of settling down and having a normal life may just be impossible. and that may be the doctor's core emo. maybe now it's because gallifrey's gone, but even here i think the doctor was fooling himself. he doesn't handle attachments that well. anything resembling safety and smugness will therefore eventually wither in the glare of his lifestyle.
don't cry, emo timelord.
today i'm thinking about smugness in RTD's doctor who.
if anyone has seriously not seen the first two series, then stop reading.
in boomtown, jack, doc9, and rose seem smug to mickey and to some viewers. in most of season 2, doc10 and rose seem smug to some viewers. in both instances, the smugness is interrupted by someone dying. but not really. in fact, all of the smug participants except the doctor are at least implied to die, and then they don't, really.
witness: in bad wolf, rose seems to die; she is revealed to have merely been captured by fidgety daleks. in potw, jack really does die, and is then rebooted by uberose. in army of ghosts, we are told that rose dies; in doomsday, we are told that she is just dead as far as her universe is concerned.
why? there is an echo here of whedonness. again and again in buffy/angel/etc., people who are in happy relationships are utterly destroyed. it can't even qualify as a spoiler anymore; what's a spoiler in the whedon universe is when something resembling a happy relationship doesn't get obliterated. (and, the obliteration is almost always accompanied by massively crazy or violent or evil action from a beloved-by-some female character.)
RTD didn't nick the whole thing, but is there something whedony going on?
i wonder. for some reason, i'm thinking about the unit years. i'm thinking about how some of those episodes just seem kind of smug and excessively safe to me, and not just because i have little love for pertwee's doc. and i'm thinking of how the end of the green death is about the most heartbroken we see the doctor until doomsday. (with a close second to sending rose away in potw.)
so maybe it's more basic than that. lasting, normal relationships with someone nearly incapable of settling down and having a normal life may just be impossible. and that may be the doctor's core emo. maybe now it's because gallifrey's gone, but even here i think the doctor was fooling himself. he doesn't handle attachments that well. anything resembling safety and smugness will therefore eventually wither in the glare of his lifestyle.
don't cry, emo timelord.