prof_pangaea | sweet miracle of life (Reply)

some thinkins about the themes for this series of doctor who. general spoilers for the entire series up to "the stolen earth".

my favourite bit of the "the stolen earth":

"I gave myself to them, quite literally. Each one, grown from a cell of my own body. New Daleks; true Daleks."

"I have my children, Doctor. What do you have, now?"

this season has been so good -- there hasn't been an actually bad episode this year (closest was "the doctor's daughter", which is full of excellent concepts that seem to have been unfortunately mired in a weak and rushed execution. but i still love it), and most episodes have been really wonderful. And it has been so rewarding to watch the development of the themes that began back in the first series, but really became prominent when david tennant took over the role of the doctor: the decisions we make, how we deal with loss, and how we finally move on.

last series the doctor confronts the master, but not until he sees, in professor yana, the kind of man the master could have been, perhaps even the kind of man he was, once, until fear and hatred twisted him so utterly. and it's the master who makes him remember the kind of man the doctor once was, never cowardly nor cruel, a man who does not truly believe in vengeance, but in forgiveness.

in the second series the doctor is confronted over and over again with the fact everything has its time, and everything dies, but it's not until this series that he starts to confront the fact that it is not only cherished places, friendships, and love that end, but also anger, loneliness, and grief.

from "the doctor's daughter":
doctor: "It's just.... When I look at her, now, I can see them. The hole they left, all the pain that filled it. Just don't know if I can face that every day."
donna: "It won't stay like that. She'll help you. We both will."
doctor: "But when they died that part of me died with them. It'll never come back. Not now."

but then, two episodes later, the doctor comes face to face with river song, and the proof that one day he will be able to face that pain and embrace love again, even knowing from the beginning that it will end, and how.

it's a scary thing, to confront something that you're not ready to accept. at some point in our lives we've all become attached to a feeling of loss, of grief, of fear; to an idea that no matter how much we might want to, there is something we cannot resist; or something we can do, but are not ready to admit that we are capable of.

but somehow, even if we're not ready, we can't seem to be rid of the desire to free ourselves from whatever prison we have manufactured for ourselves. and times passes and we look around and suddenly realise that all this time we thought we'd been stubbornly standing still, we've been moving forward and never noticed.

"What do you have, now?"

i love this picture. all of the people the doctor has met and become close to since the end of the time war (or, in sarah jane's case, met after he thought he never would again); since he decided that the part of him that had been for love had died for good. and that's his answer, even though he's not quite ready to accept it.

but he will be. and i find a lot of solace in that.

"All those things you'd been ready to die for... I thought, for a moment there, you'd finally found something worth living for."
"Oh, there's always something worth living for, Martha."