Thoughts on a scene from Time of Angels (SPOILER)

[sensiblecat]

Sam got Frodo up Mount Doom by reminding him that back home in the Shire the first strawberries would be ripening. And I bawled, unashamedly, hearing the voice of who knows how many Tommies in the trenches trying to get their comrades through hell on earth.

Comments

[scarfman]

Here is a journal entry where ireactions points up a great difference between the Doctor during Tennant's tenure and anyone else's. Rephrasing it my own way: Tennant's Doctor was the hero, the protagonist, while usually the Doctor is a Merlin figure, the omnisicent mentor whose dramatic ecological niche is to supply exposition that's never wrong; who accidentally inherited the show when the hero went home to 1963 with his girl. (The entry reminded me very much of your discussion of Davies' Doctor Who as tragedy instead of comedy, as another example of what Davies did differently, and arguably wrong, from everyone else.) I often like to say Merlin figures are plot devices instead of characters, even if you have to occasionally treat them like characters for an episode in order to get people like Anthony Stewart Head and Alec Guinness to play them. I also characterized 20th century Doctor Who itself, during the rampup to the US premiere of Season 2005, as "a bunch of plot devices running up and down corridors".
I wonder whether the Davies/

[mls03j]

Usually the Doctor is a Merlin figure, the omnisicent mentor whose dramatic ecological niche is to supply exposition that’s never wrong.

That’s actually the story I fell in love with, back in 2005. I still see the first season as Rose’s hero’s journey, with the Doctor as her mentor. (I wouldn’t have called the Ninth Doctor “omniscient,” but then, neither was Dumbledore.)

The good thing about making the Doctor the mentor rather than the hero is that it lets you keep him more or less the same. Mentors aren’t expected to grow and change over the course of the story the way heroes are. The bad thing is that you risk losing people who care more about the companion than they do about the Doctor, when the companion they care about leaves.

[sensiblecat]

I hear what you're saying, but isn't your analysis of the 2005 series complicated a little by the fact that Nine needed Rose so much? That conflicts with the role of mentor. And I've often wondered whether it was an intentional change, or whether RTD et al went with it instinctively when they saw the chemistry between the two leads

[mls03j]

I hear what you’re saying, but isn’t your analysis of the 2005 series complicated a little by the fact that Nine needed Rose so much?

Not really, no. Granted, Nine had a character arc of his own, which most mentor figures don’t have. But the biggest difference between Nine and Ten, for me, was that Nine was almost always the catalyst for other people’s journeys. The only episode I can think of where he got to be the hero is “The End of the World,” and it had the lowest stakes of the season. (Part of me knew that the story I fell in love with was over the minute that Ten rode in on a white horse in “The Girl in the Fireplace.”)

There’s a very interesting essay in Chicks Dig Time Lords that maintains, convincingly I think, that Rose became redundant after Nine regenerated into Ten-because although he was fond of her he was too self-absorbed to need her any more.Are you familiar with the terms “doylist” and “watsonian”? I’m a doylist-at the end of the day, I don’t see Rose and the Doctor as people. I see them as fictional characters.

[goldy_dollar]

This was a really interesting read, thank you for sharing. I've been enjoying S5 so far and I'm fond of Matt and Karen, but I can't really say that I find the story emotionally compelling so far. I like it and I might be sad if it suddenly disappeared, but if either Eleven or Amy disappeared from my screen tomorrow, I think my reaction would be "oh, well" rather than spending three months curled up in the corner of my room and sobbing, "Ten!! Rose!! Martha!! Donna!!" in rapid succession

[azalaisdep]

Mmmm. Like you I am not feeling that this series has anything like the degree of emotional intensity and resonance that RTD's Who had for me. And to be honest I was expecting that, and it almost came as a relief, because I was more emotionally invested in Ten than is probably healthy ;-) So far it's just fun which I've come to with very little in the way of expectations other than to be entertained...

But I've been pondering this business of the depth and fullness of character realisation. I was thinking of the way RTD talks about character-building in various places in Writer's Tale; how his tendency to notice the tiniest details about people causes him to build characters about whom he knows everything, what they would have for breakfast, what they read or watch on TV, how they speak - whether or not any of that makes it into the show. You could see that as a soap-opera-y view of character, with all that domestic detail, and certainly it seemed to be one of the aspects of RTD's writing that really irked the Who-isn't-a-soap crowd

[sensiblecat]

Yep. Moff is probably being very professional about it and building a show that will survive the long haul - rescuing it from the excesses that threatened to shipwreck it under RTD's tenure. Like you, I accept that I was more emotionally involved than is healthy. I think a lot of us will look back on the RTD years as we might remember an intense, passionate affair that almost wrecked our lives...but a part of us could never regret having that experience, regardless of the emotional fallout.

[azalaisdep]

Moi, je ne regrette rien :-) (Except possibly DT's decision to bugger off to try to break into Stateside TV when I was so hoping for more theatre, dammit!)

re character realisation..

[surliminal]

I saw a clip of the start of Rose (series 1, ep 1) the other day and what struck me was how in SECONDS you knew what kind of life she had; that she dragged herself out of bed to go to a dull job, but she was cheerful about it, her mum, her boyfriend, how she lived, her class, such vast swathes of info in seconds, really

[wendymr]

watching the two of them in that scene was like watching two marbles knocking against each other. There was no depth, no subtlety. Too many times in this new series, we’ve been told, not shown.

Yes. Definitely yes.

I want to be emotionally engaged. I'm not interested in a series that doesn't offer me that kind of engagement, through compelling, likeable characters who grow and develop over the weeks. I know no more about Amy now than I did in episode 1, and Eleven's still not resonating with me. Without emotional engagement... yeah, I'll watch, but I don't care. If it was taken off-screen right now, I wouldn't even miss it.

And your observation about that scene with Amy is so astute. I liked it; in fact, it was probably the one scene in the entire episode that I did enjoy, but it did lack that degree of emotion. Where's the gut-wrenching fear as Ten watched Martha being swept off into the sun in 42, poor and all as that episode was? Or, far, far better, the tears and the lump in my throat as Nine can only stare through a screen at

[sensiblecat]

Of course, the point about comedy is that you mustn't care too much about any of the characters or the whole thing falls apart. That's been the truth from Shakespeare onwards, a point I've made before. Try enjoying Much Ado About Nothing without handwaving what happens to Hero, for example.

[surliminal]

Yes. Just yes

[sensiblecat]

I've got some problems with the way the issue of the Doctor's anger is being handled. From his confrontation at the end of TOTA, it seems that we're supposed to recognise his temper as a problematic thing in this regeneration.

But again, it seems to me we're told, not shown this. In every episode since 11th Hr he's lashed out at some point - at Amy, hitting the Dalek (which could have been a plot point) and here - but it comes from nowhere. We don't see any close-ups of him holding back rage so it's "oh, he's angry" with no tension.

Ten's anger was silent and deadly. Nine's was a pitiless force once it was roused - I still tremble at his coldness when he threw Adam off the TARDIS and left him to his fate.