prof_pangaea (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
prof_pangaea) wrote2010-03-26 02:29 pm
prof_pangaea) wrote2010-03-26 02:29 pm
Entry tags:
obvious things that have been stuck in my brain so i decided to type them out
random whovian thoughts:
donna is the companion that ten never gets over. i mean, End of Time takes place at least a few years after the events of JE, and yet seeing her through a window and a short conversation about her with wilf is enough to drive him to tears. obvs the initial tears are linked to adelaide's death, but that is also linked to his loneliness and inability let a new companion into his life precisely because of how much he can't deal with what happened to donna. SitL/FotD tells us that he's still not got over it years and years later, because he's talked about it with river. more telling even than the tears is the fact that when wilf says, "you need her, doctor!" he nods, almost says something ("I need --"), stops himself, and then has to flee from the scene. because i think he was thinking, "i do need her, i bet if i tried i could fix her, and then we could be together again", and that scared him, because the last time he thought he could do anything he made someone kill herself.
god, ten was fucked up.
meanwhile, russell seems to really like stories where characters set up their own downfall in some way. this is usually only implicit in doctor who, so we watch s2 and think, "does he realise he wrote a story about how rose and the doctor create the very circumstances that lead to their being separated?", or we watch s3 and think, "when he wrote the master coming in and taking over the power vacuum that ten left when he deposed harriet jones, did he actually do that on purpose?" because these things don't get addressed directly by characters, they just happen. but when RTD wrote children of earth it is explicitly stated that jack created the circumstances that lead to the ianto's and stephen's deaths. he gave the 456 those initial sixteen children or whatever back in 1965, and the other characters are like, "why the fuck did you do that?? you're the reason they're back!" so i do think that we (the adult audience) are supposed to watch doctor who and go, wow, ten and rose, you guys really fucked yourselves by acting like arrogant jerks to queen victoria, didn't you? he just doesn't have another character come in and say that, because he's writing it for the childrens, and doesn't want to freak them out. it is telling that he originally had a line in The Sound of Drums or Last of the Time Lords where the master explicitly says that he was able to rise so easily to power because the doctor deposed harriet jones, but ended up cutting it (this info from a panel at chicago TARDIS a couple years ago, if i recall correctly).
it's weird because he can't stop himself from trying to make the stories darker and more complex than he thinks is appropriate for the audience, so he compromises and tries to shellac everything with a distracting layer of glee and fun, which... doesn't always quite work. until waters of mars happens, of course, and it's like watching all those previous years without the protective layering and it's rather scary. but also quite good. which i suppose points towards children's television as possibly not the best place for him to work, in general. maybe he's fine if he doesn't write it himself, since SJA always strikes a very good balance between some quite dark or serious storylines but always keeping it appropriate for The Kids.
donna is the companion that ten never gets over. i mean, End of Time takes place at least a few years after the events of JE, and yet seeing her through a window and a short conversation about her with wilf is enough to drive him to tears. obvs the initial tears are linked to adelaide's death, but that is also linked to his loneliness and inability let a new companion into his life precisely because of how much he can't deal with what happened to donna. SitL/FotD tells us that he's still not got over it years and years later, because he's talked about it with river. more telling even than the tears is the fact that when wilf says, "you need her, doctor!" he nods, almost says something ("I need --"), stops himself, and then has to flee from the scene. because i think he was thinking, "i do need her, i bet if i tried i could fix her, and then we could be together again", and that scared him, because the last time he thought he could do anything he made someone kill herself.
god, ten was fucked up.
meanwhile, russell seems to really like stories where characters set up their own downfall in some way. this is usually only implicit in doctor who, so we watch s2 and think, "does he realise he wrote a story about how rose and the doctor create the very circumstances that lead to their being separated?", or we watch s3 and think, "when he wrote the master coming in and taking over the power vacuum that ten left when he deposed harriet jones, did he actually do that on purpose?" because these things don't get addressed directly by characters, they just happen. but when RTD wrote children of earth it is explicitly stated that jack created the circumstances that lead to the ianto's and stephen's deaths. he gave the 456 those initial sixteen children or whatever back in 1965, and the other characters are like, "why the fuck did you do that?? you're the reason they're back!" so i do think that we (the adult audience) are supposed to watch doctor who and go, wow, ten and rose, you guys really fucked yourselves by acting like arrogant jerks to queen victoria, didn't you? he just doesn't have another character come in and say that, because he's writing it for the childrens, and doesn't want to freak them out. it is telling that he originally had a line in The Sound of Drums or Last of the Time Lords where the master explicitly says that he was able to rise so easily to power because the doctor deposed harriet jones, but ended up cutting it (this info from a panel at chicago TARDIS a couple years ago, if i recall correctly).
it's weird because he can't stop himself from trying to make the stories darker and more complex than he thinks is appropriate for the audience, so he compromises and tries to shellac everything with a distracting layer of glee and fun, which... doesn't always quite work. until waters of mars happens, of course, and it's like watching all those previous years without the protective layering and it's rather scary. but also quite good. which i suppose points towards children's television as possibly not the best place for him to work, in general. maybe he's fine if he doesn't write it himself, since SJA always strikes a very good balance between some quite dark or serious storylines but always keeping it appropriate for The Kids.
no subject
but anyway i was mostly posting because i felt satisfied that i'd resolved (for myself at least) that he wrote the themes i was seeing in s2 and s3 deliberately. cos that has long bugged me how there's all this brilliant stuff sitting there but then i wasn't quite sure if it was there on purpose or not. like how the doctor/master subtext with pertwee and delgado is probably not there on purpose, but the doctor/master subtext with ten and simm obviously is.
no subject
I do believe it's deliberate, though I don't think it was necessarily deliberate from the get-go--the whole 'ushers in a Golden Age' bit about Harriet Jones in S1 is utterly fucked by the Doctor in TCI, and I don't think that the whole Master bit had come to mind for RTD and the writers by then.
As for the themes, though, hasn't he said something about Ten's massive hubris, that his good intentions always go south? (Or am I confusing that with someone's meta journal entries?)
no subject
so later, when he was actually writing it, he might have been, how can i tie this in more... haha, i have it.
As for the themes, though, hasn't he said something about Ten's massive hubris, that his good intentions always go south?
that would be interesting if he had. i don't know.
no subject
no subject
no subject