Thoughts on the Time Lord
This is a long overdue entry on the new series of Doctor Who. Some of my thoughts have already appeared in comments in other people's journals, specifically those of pellegrina and gervase_fen; but pennypaperbrain has requested more detail. The opportunity arose in the early hours of this morning when I replied to a lengthy review of the series so far e-mailed by a friend, and what follows is based on that message.
In general, it's taken me a little while to get used to the new, frenetic, character-led style, and I’ve had to watch three of the four episodes several times before appreciating them better. More specifically:
'Rose' matures well; like lots of other viewers, I thought it was rather like the end of an old-fashioned 'Doctor Who' story, as watched by an outsider who gradually becomes drawn into events. However much I was cast adrift by the absence of plot-driven tension, the dampening of the 'Terror of the Autons' through overfrenetic music and the clownish interpretation of the Auton Mickey, I was still uplifted by Rose’s gradual discovery of the Doctor, the vindication and redemption of Clive-as-Everyfan; and of course Rose’s final dash towards the TARDIS at the end. Christopher Eccleston's Doctor seemed too over the top at first, and I wasn’t convinced on the first viewing by his antics with the Auton arm, even though I could see that both were part of the production’s strategy. With the latter scene, we were intended to view the scene through Rose’s eyes (had she been looking), and that she wouldn’t have (and didn’t) immediately assume that anything unusual was occurring other than the Doctor behaving even more strangely than before. It was while watching this episode that my pre-transmission idea of the ninth Doctor as an exile from the welfare state stranded in an individualistic universe was joined by one of the soldier-Doctor - nothing in these scripts is careless and the line 'I fought in the war', not something one might have expected the pacific Time Lord to have said, suggested that some character development is to be unveiled during this series.
'The End of the World' was a slight disappointment on first viewing. I was waiting for the accoutrements of a thriller plot to make themselves known - red herrings, scenes where we got to know the aliens before they were murdered, and we didn’t get this. The main plot, again, was about Rose, and was driven by her reactions to her surroundings; the murder of the Steward and the ambitions of Cassandra served to underscore Rose’s sense of her humanity and what it meant to her. I inferred a "Babylon 5"-like message; that 'humanity' and 'mankind' are inadequate words to describe what human beings have in common with their fellow sentient life-forms, but that the values we recognise as human are universal and not the property of one species alone. The Doctor’s indifference to Cassandra’s life suggested that the fatalism which has occasionally and erratically been part of the Doctor’s makeup in the past (the Robert Banks Stewart stories, bits of the Cartmel era, aspects of the Hartnell characterization) will be prominent here, with Rose providing a commentary on the Doctor’s morality. Indeed, the whole Time War backstory harks back to the idea of the Doctor as a refugee from an intergalactic war which informed the first and second Doctors back in the 1960s, before the Time Lords were introduced. Having followed some of the arguments which have raged in Who fandom on the subject for the past couple of decades, I don't mind the disappearance of Gallifrey and the Time Lords one bit; admittedly the 'last survivor of an ancient and powerful race' is something of an SF cliche, but it's not overworked here.
The gap between Rose's morality and that of the Doctor was made more prominent in 'The Unquiet Dead', immediately my favourite of the four episodes so far on first viewing, although I am finding that there might be less to get my critical teeth into on further viewings. I liked the way in which the audience was left with a clearer view of the nature of the Gelth than the Doctor, who seems to be suffering from guilt and a self-conscious uneasiness towards his sympathies with the people of Earth. Perhaps humanity, and not the Daleks, were the principal antagonists of the Time Lords in the War - or were humans implicated in some other way?
I watched 'The Unquiet Dead' with a group assembled by Cellis; they included her neighbour, who happens to be SSG, current president of DSoc. He’s a 29-year-old philosophy graduate from Sydney, who isn’t particularly a fan, but is old enough to remember weeknights on the ABC when Doctor Who and The Goodies were shown back-to-back in then 1980s. He greeted 'The Unquiet Dead' with the comment "Doctor Who is back. They’ve done the introductions in the first two weeks, now it’s an old-fashioned kind of story." Except that it wasn’t, really, old-style ‘Who’. The episode was almost as character-led as the first two, although I thought the plot was just right for the 45-minute length, whereas in ‘The End of the World’ I could have done with a few more minutes of explanation. It even got away with the understaffing at Sneed and Company. Simon Callow’s Dickens was well-judged, and a complaint by Cellis, about Dickens announcing that he was going to travel by mail-coach when trains were the dominant form of travel in 1869, turned out (as gervase_fen told me) to be the product of research: Dickens survived a train disaster in 1865, and rarely used trains thereafter. Eve Myles as Gwyneth was of course gorgeous, and I hope that she does turn up later in the season as some have predicted - though I suspect the clues could just be pointing to John Barrowman's character.
I’m reviewing 'Aliens of London'/'World War Three' for the fanzine This Way Up, and as a result am reluctant to make sweeping assessments until I've seen the whole story. A lot of the humour doen't work for me, but I did enjoy, and was touched by, the scene with the pig, who could easily have carried more screen time. I also appreciated the Doctor's interaction with the domestic environment of Rose's flat. One break that Russell T Davies has made with the original series format is that he's not particularly interested in the literal realism of the situation, and as a result I found the Downing Street scenes difficult to take in at times. Harriet Jones wouldn't call Joseph Green 'sir' - they are both backbench MPs from the ruling party, and would be on first name terms. Themes I’m looking out for in 'World War Three' include the dignity of living creatures (the Slitheen joke about killing people, place re-engineered pigs as pilots of spaceships, and think flatulence is terribly funny); balancing independence with family as one grows up (not just Rose, but on reports that the Slitheen are actually badly-behaved children of an alien family); the role of armed force in solving problems (the Doctor displays his ‘natural authority’ in ‘Aliens of London’ as he takes effortless charge of the platoon at Albion Hospital); and the Doctor’s continued ambiguity towards human beings.
In general, it's taken me a little while to get used to the new, frenetic, character-led style, and I’ve had to watch three of the four episodes several times before appreciating them better. More specifically:
'Rose' matures well; like lots of other viewers, I thought it was rather like the end of an old-fashioned 'Doctor Who' story, as watched by an outsider who gradually becomes drawn into events. However much I was cast adrift by the absence of plot-driven tension, the dampening of the 'Terror of the Autons' through overfrenetic music and the clownish interpretation of the Auton Mickey, I was still uplifted by Rose’s gradual discovery of the Doctor, the vindication and redemption of Clive-as-Everyfan; and of course Rose’s final dash towards the TARDIS at the end. Christopher Eccleston's Doctor seemed too over the top at first, and I wasn’t convinced on the first viewing by his antics with the Auton arm, even though I could see that both were part of the production’s strategy. With the latter scene, we were intended to view the scene through Rose’s eyes (had she been looking), and that she wouldn’t have (and didn’t) immediately assume that anything unusual was occurring other than the Doctor behaving even more strangely than before. It was while watching this episode that my pre-transmission idea of the ninth Doctor as an exile from the welfare state stranded in an individualistic universe was joined by one of the soldier-Doctor - nothing in these scripts is careless and the line 'I fought in the war', not something one might have expected the pacific Time Lord to have said, suggested that some character development is to be unveiled during this series.
'The End of the World' was a slight disappointment on first viewing. I was waiting for the accoutrements of a thriller plot to make themselves known - red herrings, scenes where we got to know the aliens before they were murdered, and we didn’t get this. The main plot, again, was about Rose, and was driven by her reactions to her surroundings; the murder of the Steward and the ambitions of Cassandra served to underscore Rose’s sense of her humanity and what it meant to her. I inferred a "Babylon 5"-like message; that 'humanity' and 'mankind' are inadequate words to describe what human beings have in common with their fellow sentient life-forms, but that the values we recognise as human are universal and not the property of one species alone. The Doctor’s indifference to Cassandra’s life suggested that the fatalism which has occasionally and erratically been part of the Doctor’s makeup in the past (the Robert Banks Stewart stories, bits of the Cartmel era, aspects of the Hartnell characterization) will be prominent here, with Rose providing a commentary on the Doctor’s morality. Indeed, the whole Time War backstory harks back to the idea of the Doctor as a refugee from an intergalactic war which informed the first and second Doctors back in the 1960s, before the Time Lords were introduced. Having followed some of the arguments which have raged in Who fandom on the subject for the past couple of decades, I don't mind the disappearance of Gallifrey and the Time Lords one bit; admittedly the 'last survivor of an ancient and powerful race' is something of an SF cliche, but it's not overworked here.
The gap between Rose's morality and that of the Doctor was made more prominent in 'The Unquiet Dead', immediately my favourite of the four episodes so far on first viewing, although I am finding that there might be less to get my critical teeth into on further viewings. I liked the way in which the audience was left with a clearer view of the nature of the Gelth than the Doctor, who seems to be suffering from guilt and a self-conscious uneasiness towards his sympathies with the people of Earth. Perhaps humanity, and not the Daleks, were the principal antagonists of the Time Lords in the War - or were humans implicated in some other way?
I watched 'The Unquiet Dead' with a group assembled by Cellis; they included her neighbour, who happens to be SSG, current president of DSoc. He’s a 29-year-old philosophy graduate from Sydney, who isn’t particularly a fan, but is old enough to remember weeknights on the ABC when Doctor Who and The Goodies were shown back-to-back in then 1980s. He greeted 'The Unquiet Dead' with the comment "Doctor Who is back. They’ve done the introductions in the first two weeks, now it’s an old-fashioned kind of story." Except that it wasn’t, really, old-style ‘Who’. The episode was almost as character-led as the first two, although I thought the plot was just right for the 45-minute length, whereas in ‘The End of the World’ I could have done with a few more minutes of explanation. It even got away with the understaffing at Sneed and Company. Simon Callow’s Dickens was well-judged, and a complaint by Cellis, about Dickens announcing that he was going to travel by mail-coach when trains were the dominant form of travel in 1869, turned out (as gervase_fen told me) to be the product of research: Dickens survived a train disaster in 1865, and rarely used trains thereafter. Eve Myles as Gwyneth was of course gorgeous, and I hope that she does turn up later in the season as some have predicted - though I suspect the clues could just be pointing to John Barrowman's character.
I’m reviewing 'Aliens of London'/'World War Three' for the fanzine This Way Up, and as a result am reluctant to make sweeping assessments until I've seen the whole story. A lot of the humour doen't work for me, but I did enjoy, and was touched by, the scene with the pig, who could easily have carried more screen time. I also appreciated the Doctor's interaction with the domestic environment of Rose's flat. One break that Russell T Davies has made with the original series format is that he's not particularly interested in the literal realism of the situation, and as a result I found the Downing Street scenes difficult to take in at times. Harriet Jones wouldn't call Joseph Green 'sir' - they are both backbench MPs from the ruling party, and would be on first name terms. Themes I’m looking out for in 'World War Three' include the dignity of living creatures (the Slitheen joke about killing people, place re-engineered pigs as pilots of spaceships, and think flatulence is terribly funny); balancing independence with family as one grows up (not just Rose, but on reports that the Slitheen are actually badly-behaved children of an alien family); the role of armed force in solving problems (the Doctor displays his ‘natural authority’ in ‘Aliens of London’ as he takes effortless charge of the platoon at Albion Hospital); and the Doctor’s continued ambiguity towards human beings.