Doctor Who

New Earth (2×01)

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Okay, I can see why Davies thought of swapping the first two episodes. That was a kind of weak beginning. Not bad; just… it was a bit of a mess. It reminded me of The Long Game, kind of. And The Two Doctors — the later bits, especially. Not really sure why, aside from Chip.

My favorite bit was the pre-title sequence, especially the bit with Rose saying goodbye as the Doctor warms up the TARDIS again after — apparently — four months. In the commentary they talk about how the Doctor was probably living with the Tylers the whole time since Christmas. Curious.

After that, pretty much every major plot element and/or device lost me completely. The one body-swap is reasonable enough. What’s the impetus for all the other swaps, though? Why was Cassandra turned to a bit of fairy dust who can flit around at will? Besides it making the writing easier, that is? It doesn’t mesh with the elaborate procedure behind the first transfer.

Then the zombie patients. Okay, they can spread every disease known to man just by touching you. Fair enough. And yet if they’ve got thousands of diseases apiece, why are they cured by a handful of random serums yanked off the shelf? Just by being splashed with them? And why can they pass the cure on to other zombies (again) just by touching them?

And that’s just the immediate plot. Don’t get me started on structure.

This is the first time I’ve really been frustrated by a RTD script. I’m just… perplexed by this whole thing. There are so many nice little scenes in this episode, few of which are given space, most of which are basically throwaway. And aside from Boe saying he’ll say something more important later, we come to the end of the episode not really a bit further along than we started.

Obligatory. I guess that’s the key word for this episode, and most of its contents. A shame, as there’s such invention in the actual execution. I hope we see the catnuns again, for instance.

Ah well. The next five episodes should be an improvement.

EDIT:

New Earth didn’t actually make much sense. Which isn’t exactly a prerequsite, of course. It’s just a weird way to start the season. Especially since… how much actual Rose Tyler did we get? A few minutes’ worth? It feels like the kind of thing you’d give your actors somewhere in the middle of the season to keep them from getting bored.

And yeah, I think Davies would have been better off sticking with the gloomy conclusion he originally intended. Especially in light of the reason for the change — guh. It just doesn’t seem like he spent a lot of time on this one. It needed another draft or something. It says something also that it was directed by James Hawes, the guy behind The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances — since, you know, that was so excellent. And this is just… okay.

I think, frankly, it’s the weakest episode of the fifteen to date. The frustrating thing is that it’s got so much nice stuff in it. With a little fussing, it could have been a lot better. Some of it simply structural. It seems a mistake to reveal Cassandra at the beginning, for instance, instead of at the moment Rose discovers her. I don’t see any purpose to doing it earlier. You could have the spiders and their POV, and leave it at that. People will figure it out, if you want that foreshadowing. And it just gets clumsier as it goes along.

You can tell that this thing was rewritten to serve all kinds of different purposes, much like Long Game was. It’s just confused as to what it wants to accomplish. Originally Boe was to die here; then Davies decided to hold that off until next series. So having him here is… nice, but kind of beside the point of the episode and ultimately kind of fruitless. As executed it doesn’t even really set up a decent mystery; you’re just left thinking “huh”.

If he’s going to move it to series three — which he apparently did as soon as he knew there was going to be one — then take him out altogether. Refocus the episode altogether. Don’t keep the kibble. Likewise, frankly, the Cassandra thing is kind of wedged in. She wasn’t integrated into the story as she might have been. Toward the end she gets a bit of understanding from the situation and uses it to “create” herself, etcetera. That’s all nice, except it doesn’t really come out of the underlying conflicts here. It just kind of… happens. It’s never really explained what she’s doing there or how or why this whole body-transfer thing is happening aside from a few throwaway lines. It just seems like a neat thing to do, really.

Davies is a good writer in principle. I think he mostly needs a hard-ass editor to yell at him. I get the feeling much could have been saved even at the assembly stage, after filming — except it turned out this episode was hell to film. They kept picking up pieces for months after the fact, putting the episode together like a patchwork. So by coincidence they didn’t have that luxury either.

The Past Outrunning the Future

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I just now realized the connotations of the “return of Sarah-Jane” thing. When it comes down to it, essentially the Doctor dumped her. He left her behind. And come to think of it, she never really met any of his other companions — aside from Harry, of course. Jo left at the end of one season; Sarah-Jane showed up at the start of the next. And after the Doctor left her, he went off alone for a while. From beginning to end, she had the Doctor essentially to herself. So just as it will be a bolt from the blue for Rose to gel that the Doctor has had previous companions, meeting Rose will also be something of a first for Sarah-Jane.

Didn’t realize how tidy and self-contained this whole story is. Almost like it was waiting for closure. The K-9 issue just helps, as how often has the Doctor thought about a companion after moving on? For the most part, this is who he is — right here, right now. Except when it comes to Sarah-Jane. Then he can’t escape the past.

Between this thread and stuff like the revelation that the Time War was going on all through the old series, from Genesis on, and taking pains at every opportunity to make some actual sense out of the TV Movie, the new series is bringing a whole new dimension and context to the series as a whole. Not unlike, uh, the first Sonic Adventure?

Sci-Fi

  • Reading time:3 mins read

From the moment “Rose” started up, something seemed amiss. Eventually I hit upon what it was: somehow Sci-Fi had got ahold of the wrong edit of episode one. They showed the rough version leaked to the Internet last year instead of the final edit aired in Britain. Having watched the latter version many times over, I was startled by how much the rough edit continues to plod — especially toward the end. I’m reminded of how much I cringed during the climax, the first time I saw the leaked version. I had completely forgotten about that, as I haven’t felt it in over a year.

End of the World was just fine, though. I was impressed by how well the pacing lent itself to interruption, and by (in general) what good choices Sci-Fi made for breaks — usually right after one of the Doctor’s quips about a new situation he found himself in. One break even resumed with the “Bad Wolf” line, bringing more attention to it than you’d normally have. Eventually, after the new trailer Sci-Fi knocked up for “Unquiet Dead” (hey, they really are putting some work into this), I realized what had happened with Rose. Going by the end credits, these must be the Canadian prints. Sci-Fi must have gotten them from the CBC, rather than directly from the BBC. Aha! Hah! Ho. How odd, though.

As I brushed past a moment ago, at the end of the episode they just cut the “next time” trailer, then run a clean set of credits “crushed” to the left with a brand-new trailer (using Sci-Fi’s custom Doctor Who logo) on the right. It works well, and the new trailers aren’t bad (at least, the two I’ve seen). They work on a different level from the original ones, though. Rather than have an abstract “narrative” of sorts, they’re just a bunch of cool scenes with a voiceover outlining the plot. Less quirky-n-British, though — again — effective.

Which segues into another strange thing: these episodes never seemed so British before. Watching them on their own, I just accepted them on their own merits. Now, sandwiched between two “people in military suits standing around with bored expressions, waiting to deliver their next line of exposision” shows, everything about the show sticks out like a rock star’s errection. It feels like I’m watching A&E or Masterpiece Theater or something.

Anyway. Yeah. This looks like it’ll work well. The only snafu so far seems like it wasn’t anyone’s fault, really (except whoever sent the wrong master to Canada over a year ago). And in general I’m impressed with the care and interest Sci-Fi’s showing toward the series. It’s encouraging. The only question is, did people actually watch?

EDIT: Of course, Sci-Fi did program an entire four-hour block around the show — so if anyone flipped to Sci-Fi at all during the evening, they probably caught part of it.

No fool like a clever fool

  • Reading time:2 mins read

McCoy presents to me what is perhaps the ideal representation of the Doctor. It’s either he or Troughton; they’re too similar. Of all the Doctors, these two are the most “clever”. They play (as Thom notes) the classic Shakespearian fool; their power lies mostly in subterfuge. In appearing stupid, or at least harmless, such as to disarm those around them and thereby to give them the upper hand.

To some extent or another, nearly every Doctor has had his tricks to this end. Hartnell just seems like a crabby old man. Davison is a wounded puppy dog. Tom Baker plays a very similar role to McCoy and Troughton, though through such a filter of mockery that you really don’t know what to make of him — thereby making him seem insane, and thereby, indirectly, probably not a threat. Though he’s erratic enough that maybe he shoots himself in the foot as often as not. Colin Baker seems like such a pompous ass that you dismiss him out of hand. McGann is so earnest, and keeps throwing out so much information that he shouldn’t know, that he’s either endearing or just plain batty — though I think more effectively than Tom Baker, in that at no point does McGann seem like a potential threat. Not sure what to say about Eccleston or Tennant.

The only Doctor who does not seem to possess this vital — and in my mind character-defining — quality is Pertwee, the “James Bond Doctor”, which probably accounts for his being my least favorite, despite his charm and warmth and whatnot. The other Doctors tend to get ranked according to the efficacity of their particular ruses.

And of all Doctors, I think McCoy and Troughton are both the easiest and most dangerous to underestimate.

Role for Ten

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Starting with Peter Davison, the ending credit shifted from “Doctor Who” (as all previous Doctors had been billed) to “The Doctor”, with the explanation that this was the character’s proper name. That continued up through at least McCoy (I don’t remember about McGann), then the show ended. When it returned last year, Eccleston was again credited as “Doctor Who” — sending the fanboys into a tizzy, because that’s not the character’s name! How could Davies be so stupid! (This among so many other things, like the episodes being the wrong length and the TARDIS windows being too wide.)

The answer is that it’s almost certainly the proper billing. From the position of an audience member, it’s more precise; where the “Doctor” billing comes from is the incredible sense of literalism that John Nathan-Turner brought to the show in the early ’80s (about the time the show began to go downhill, I’ll note). The science must be “real” science (or at least more credible-sounding nonsense), since this is a serious show; the sonic screwdriver is an easy out for writers, so now the Doctor must find a unique and realistic way to pick every lock; the Doctor is from outer space, so let’s make the intro a starfield to illustrate that; we’re in the Eighties now, so let’s use neon piping for our logo so we’ll look all up-to-date; the Doctor is mysterious, so let’s throw question marks on all his clothes, to illustrate that…

Thing is, there’s a difference between a character and a role. The person in the role of Doctor Who plays a character named The Doctor. It’s not that different from how you’ll see, say, “Schoolboy #1” listed as a role — even though the boy’s friend clearly referred to him as “Jim”. Point is, he doesn’t play “Jim”, or “Pete”, or “Ichabod”, he plays “Schoolboy #1” — whose name might incidentally happen to be “Jim”, or “Pete”. That’s the role he serves in the production. By the same stretch, the role is most unambiguously “Doctor Who”. That this is not the character’s name is kind of beside the point.

After all this, it’s worth noting that Tennant is being billed as “The Doctor” again. The reasoning here is that Tennant, as a long-time fan of the series, insisted, since he’s the one playing the part, that he be credited by the character name. Or the “correct” name, from his standpoint. I suppose that’s his business.

I OBEY

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I have been requested of more Dalek footage (as referenced here). Far be it for me to overlook a chance to show off.



The colors are deeper now, and more in line with the New Series Daleks. I don’t know if it’s obvious from here.

As before, this fellow is a product of Graffiti Kingdom. I’ve now beaten the game; it’s short, and intentionally easy. There’s a lot more that could have been done, in the end; I kept waiting for a few tools that never presented themselves, like the ability to rotate and move pieces you’ve already drawn, or to define a “body” element, or to set multiple attachment points. Or to set individual portions of arms and legs. Or light-up or “hover” pieces. There’s a lot of overlap, and not much organization. The versus mode is a wasted opportunity, too.

Still, it’s pretty neat for what it is; these are all just details. If someone’s paying attention, a DS sequel could be one of the niftiest games around. Come to think of it, maybe the map drawing feature I proposed earlier would work even better if the levels were 2D. That would bring this game even closer to Cocoron. And that could hardly be bad!

I want to reach up/and touch the sky…

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Now that I have a TV again, and now that I’ve retrieved my copy, I’ve been spending most of my time with Taito’s Graffiti Kingdom (the successor to Magic Pengel, if you’re more familiar with that). Why this game wasn’t developed for the DS, I don’t know; if there’s a third entry in the series, it had better be a DS game. Heck, the development team had better make a DS iteration, whether they intended to continue the series or not.

The deal is, you draw your own characters in 3D, and guide their animation. For simplicity, the program figures out how to animate on ts own; you mostly help to narrow its guesses. That’s actually kind of neat, though, as you’ll find your characters do all manner of things you wouldn’t have been creative enough to have devised on your own. As you play, you learn new abilities — both on the drawing and the animation ends. For instance, you might learn how to paint on your models, or to define a segment of your model as a wheel. You start with almost nothing, and are constantly fed a stream of new commands, at about the right rate to learn them all as they come.

As a videogame, it’s no great shakes. The levels are strung together to give you something to do with your characters, and the monsters mostly serve to suggest ideas for future drawings. The level design has a little thought put into it, in that it’s paced to feed you new situations at the rate you gain new abilities. There’s a story, though there’s no need for one. It would be easy to dismiss altogether were it not for the horrendous localization. I watched and listened, and I swear the emphasis, intonation, or timing of every spoken line in the game is off. Rarely is it even in the general dimension intended by the script. Which is not to imply the script is any better.

The localization problems, unfortunately, also extend to the painting and animation controls. The names given to functions and abilities are often misleading, and sometimes unintelligible. There is a little descriptive window whenever you select a function; its descriptions, such as they are, only further the frustration.

Despite all of this, it’s engaging as all hell. According to my in-game timer I’ve spent six hours in the game; the timer only records playtime. This is an unwise decision, as I have probably spent three times that drawing and animating, rather than playing. Were the game itself worth bothering with, Taito would have something downright dangerous at hand.

I should mention that although I have not played Magic Pengel, this is apparently a great expanion from that game. Pengel‘s drawing tools were comparably primitive, and pretty much all you could do with your characters was put them in a rock-paper-scissors match against other monsters. Imagine if, in the third game, you were able to do your own level design. Just draw a map, then refine the way the game fills in the blanks for you. Populate your maps with monsters of your own design. Then pack your level up and transmit it over wi-fi to other users, to play through with their own characters.

See, that’s what the game does — it inspires. Both in its good and its bad, it gets the mind churning. Any time that happens, it’s worth bringing attention to.

On that note, here’s what I’ve been up to lately:


From left to right, these are my four creations to date (in order of their device): Çirpy, Sashanaut, Krorn Jones, and Yoonie. The last is Shep’s character, Rælf. Which reminds me: this game takes up a hell of a lot of space. You’ll want a separate card for it, if you regularly play any other PS2 games.

And here follows some illustration of how they look and work:

My first-hatched, subconsciously perhaps based on an old character of mine (other medium, other lifetime) named Fluffy Ralf. Today I revised his legs to improve his walking animation. For a while I gave him a stupidly long bo staff to attack with; it clipped so badly when Çirpy slung it over his shoulder, I just had to remove it. So now Çirpy’s a close-quarters fighter, with a jump-back move after every two-hit combo. His feathers flop all over as he moves.



Yes, it’s based on my cat. Roughly. Sasha’s wings are nowhere near this fluffy. And he looks less like a toaster struedel. He does taste of strawberries, though. Never did figure that out. See his moves here and here! Sashanaut’s, I mean.




My fourth, and most advanced yet. He’s not perfect; I’ve no way to put his feet on the pedals, and there’s clipping all over. I’m kind of proud of how he’s come out. He started as just an experiment with a wheeled instrument, about fifteen minutes before I actually earned the “wheel” designation. Instead, I just used rotating pieces. It seemed silly to just have a unicycle on its own, so I put a bear on it. The bear would have looked bored just sitting there, so I gave him a book to read. That eventually turned into a magic book, with flame properties. I’m getting better with the drawing tools, I think; his profile in particular is distinctive. Note that his legs are specified as arms; otherwise, he’d just stand up and run around with a unicycle sticking out of his butt.


And this is how they look in a bowling alley.

Yes, I realize Yoonie’s footage uncannily resembles that of a lake beast of certain repute. I assure you, the coincidence is entirely coincidendal.

Krorn Jones was another experiment. I didn’t expect to keep him around for more than a few minutes; it’s just, with his long arms, his backflip ability, and his firearms, he turned out as my most powerful character — and he’s got some personality, for a robot. I just recently added some moving gears and decorations, since I decided he’s staying around.

That’s it for now!

Seeing Ear Theater

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Hey, now that BBC7 radio has begun broadcasting the McGann audio plays, the BBC has suddenly been scrambling to tie them in with the new series, with RTD’s “blessing”. And heavily promoting McGann’s Doctor, perhaps as a stopgap between Eccleston and Tennant. By all appearances, McGann’s “audio seasons” have turned into canon overnight. At least, as far at the BBC actually keeps track of this stuff. Which isn’t too far. I guess it makes sense. I mean, why not. It’s the closest the show has had to new (forward-reaching) episodes between 1996 and 2005. And it’s the only opportunity McGann’s really had to play the role, and make it his own.

So that seems to mean that Doctor Who’s official run now consists of 26 TV seasons, then four seasons of radio with the Eighth Doctor, then the new series.

Roger. Noted.

Time And Relative Dimension In Space

  • Reading time:2 mins read

A certain legion of Doctor Who fans has been incensed by the New Series exterior TARDIS prop. Mind, not the interior set — the outer police box prop. The most common complaint is the size. It’s “too big”, people say. Actually, more like: “it’s huge!” Another issue is that the bevelling on the panels isn’t exactly right. Then there’s the aspect that it’s “just horrible” — or, in the Klingon slang UK Internetters speak, “naff”.

One fan was so irritated that he decided to build his own “proper” prop to assuage himself. Fan reaction was unanimous, from what I could see. This was a proper TARDIS, all right. It’s what the New Series prop should have been all along, damn that Russel T. Davies.

Just for the fun of it, let’s see how they compare. The New Series prop is on the left, the incomplete fan prop on the right.

Note that the fan prop is incomplete. No signs, and not fully painted yet. Still, you get the idea.

Spot the changes? Smaller windows, smaller space up top for the “Police Box” banner. Those are the major ones. The guy who constructed it admitted that he made the windows narrower intentionally, on a personal whim. Also note that the guy made it to scale of an actual police box, and found that it was the same size as the New Series prop. You can see for yourself how big it is, in the picture. As for the New Series box:

Actual police box (slightly older model) on the left. Notice the scale. Now compare to the John Nathan-Turner box, from the 1980s:

Also Note the amount of horizontal space given to the “Police Box” sign. There goes that detail.

Of course, the 1980s box is well-known to be larger and more “accurate” than the original TARDIS prop.

…

So. Let’s talk about gamers, shall we? Say… fighting game fans?

More observations into the vortex

  • Reading time:3 mins read

The new series is most well encapsulated in the opening and the ending of The End of the World — all of the melancholy wonder there, that the series always seemed like it was trying to get across yet which had never before been so concentrated. About how fleeting life is, and how important it is to understand and appreciate what you, while you, can.

It really is the overarching message of the series — the new one, in particular. It’s kind of the message the Ninth Doctor gives us. Everything has its time and everything dies. He especially is doomed, by his own head and hand. And yet when Rose’s father figures the reason he’s never done anything important is that he was meant to die, he’s told that “it doesn’t work that way”.

The new series is doing a really good job of commenting on the nature of life by crossing it with the nature of time. Being and Time; Heidegger argues they’re the same thing. It’s not a bad argument, from a subjective standpoint. From a human one. From the only perspective we can know.

Which is, incidentally, the new perspective of the series — now that it’s focused on the companions again rather than the Doctor as-such.

Some people have expressed dismay at how they no longer can appreciate the original series as they used to, much to the derision of the hardcore. I think the problem is now there’s a frame of reference for the old stories. Before, they were all that existed — so it was easy to take them for what they were. Now you get to compare with the current production. You can’t help it, really — even if it’s not really a fair comparison. Since there is a “New Who”, the old who by nature becomes “Old Who” — with all the baggage that entails. One of those unavoidable details.

The question then becomes, how do we reconcile the distinction? It’s something each of us has to answer on his own, in his own way.

You know what’s the least dated? The black-and-white stories.

Really. It’s obvious they’re from another era. They’re old. They’re crackly. There’s a completely different headspace to black-and-white film, compared to color.

Check out Tomb of the Cybermen, for instance. It holds up nearly as well as, say, Lang’s Metropolis. There’s enough distance that you have no real inclination to compare it to the new material. It simply is what it is.

Once you introduce color, though, you run into a whole host of psychological problems.

In response to some message board shenanigans

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Most of science fiction is magic in the end: you make an assumption for
the purpose of illustration (usually of a social or political issue),
and as long as everything around it follows in a reasonable manner, you’ve got a successful gimmick.

Doctor Who has never been any different; the difference is that its key
assumptions, on a long-term basis, tend to be more for dramatic than
hypothetical purposes. To provide solutions rather than ask questions.
The sonic screwdriver exists, for instance, to resolve any physical
impasse. Davies has had fun with this and, flying in the face of JNT,
has made it even more of a panacea. (Note Boom Town and the
teleportation.) This is fine because this one magical assumption allows
us to skip the obligatory procedurals (that frankly have little to do
with story) and go more directly from cause to effect, on a narrative
level.

The TARDIS has always been another magical device. It works how it
needs to work to do what the writers want to do. That Davies is having
more fun with this than earlier writers and producers just follows his
whims and — frankly — the demands of the modern format of the show.
And of modern standards in storytelling.

That montage at the start of Rose tells all, really. In two minutes we
know all we need to know about her, and all we really get are setup
shots. It would be pointless to fill in the blanks, as that’s not what
the story’s about. We get all we need to know from what we’re shown,
and we can fill in the rest ourselves. Take that, expand it, you have
Doctor Who in a nutshell. All Davies has done is boil it down. And in
most places, it’s effective in the end. If you really need
explanations, you can make them up on your own. Fans are good at that.
They’re kind of irrelevant to the purpose of the series, though.

Thus concludes my review of Metroid II.

The Blessing of Fatal Death

  • Reading time:1 mins read

So. Collectively, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is by far the most nuanced, well-written, well-directed, well-edited, well-scored, probably well-acted serial of the season. The best use of effects and lighting. The best premise. The best supporting cast. The best resolution. Even the best pre-title synopsis. This is just stupidly good. And it’s kind of melancholy in that the way this ends, the balance that it finds — it’s a kind of perfection. This is the TARDIS at its height. The relationship between the Doctor and Rose, the presence of Jack, the comfortability level. It feels like everything has finally come together, after a long lead-up. This is the classic formation we’ve been waiting for. And it’s about to end. Next is, in effect, the three-part finale.

Did you hear? Next season is going to deal heavily with the Cybermen. That should be curious to witness.

I haven’t been saying much lately. I will soon. The last month has been nuts. I have other things to do first.

People are bitching about Tennant’s age.

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So. Age range. Most Doctors began in their early-to-mid forties: Troughton, both Bakers, McCoy, Eccleston.

Two began in their early-to-mid fifties: Hartnell and Pertwee. (Hartnell sure seems a lot older, doesn’t he.)

Davison and McGann were in their thirties; early and late, respectively. Tennant turns thirty-four in two days.

In order:

55->44->51->41->31->41->44->37->41->34

There’s a certain regularity here, although the trend has been toward younger Doctors. Davison was the watershed; where before forty-one was a “young” Doctor, now it was comparably old. And that’s the pattern we’ve had since.

It’s a little odd how often the actors are exactly forty-one, or something-one. It’s either that or something-four, the only exceptions being Hartnell and McGann.

So it’s true that Tennant is the second-youngest Doctor; the transition is a lot like the one from Tom Baker to Davison or McCoy to McGann, except that both Baker and McCoy had aged by the trade-off and were then closer to the range of Hartnell or Pertwee. So the trade-off was to an appreciably younger man, much as it has usually been. There’s a certain significance to that concept: age trading itself in for youth. Now, we’re going from a Doctor who is still pretty young to a Doctor who is even younger. That’s a first. And that’s probably where the noise is coming from.

If Tennant sticks around for seven years — as long as Tom Baker, and as long as anyone’s held onto the role — he’ll only be as old as Eccleston is now. This means we’re not going to see a “mature”, paternal Doctor any time soon. At least, not unless McCoy comes back for a visit. Although Davison’s Doctor was younger, he had a short life before regenerating into older men. Although McGann was around the same age, he only ever appeared the once. In contrast, the idea here is that Tennant is supposed to persist for a whilie. He’s the Doctor we’ve really been waiting for; Eccleston was just setup.*

I guess this brings up the question of why he diidn’t just bring back McGann for the first season, if that was his plan all along. The only answer I have there is that McGann’s been done. He wanted a new start with the audience; a Doctor without a history to him, that we could get to know from the start. Rose is the audience; if we already know the Doctor, we’re too far ahead of her. He wanted the audience to feel ownership over this Doctor — like he was new out of the wrapping instead of a hand-me-down. Then when Davies kills him off, it will have more weight.

I guess it also brings up the question of why Davies didn’t choose an older Ninth Doctor, to provide contrast. I assume it’s because he wanted this Doctor to be new, and it makes little sense to regenerate into a geezer. The only time the Doctor has regenerated into a substantially older man was in the case of Pertwee, and that was imposed on the character by the Time Lords. So it seems like there aren’t too many options here; to get the effect Davies seems after, you need a youngish man for the Ninth Doctor, and you need an even younger man for the Tenth.

How, then, does this clash with public expectations? It’s because we’re used to the idea of a paternal Doctor — even if the only one we’ve had since Pertwee is McCoy. We have this image in our minds of an elderly chap. After all, he’s been alive for so long! That’s a little odd when you think that we also most associate Tom Baker with the role — a weird-o beatnick cross between Harpo Marx and Dracula. Maybe it makes some sense if you consider how short-lived the following four Doctors were, and how many problems the show had through the ’80s. We tend to forget about everyone after Tom Baker, leaving us with some kind of a cross between Baker and Pertwee and some idle memory of Hartnell and Troughton. And where does Tennant fit into that!

Well, he doesn’t. What he does fit into is the established mythology and overall pattern of the series. The trend has always been toward a younger Doctor; now we’ve got another. And furthermore, the mythology is still growing. The pattern is no longer static. The show is alive again, and Davies has his own ideas. So really, everything is about as well as it might be.

Regarding “The End of the World”:

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Holy shit. The new series is going somewhere.

EDIT:

Okay. About the Eccleston thing. Now that the shock is past, and now that it’s clear the season was scripted with this probability in mind, and now that we’ve seen episode two and what it suggests about how the new series will treat its characters, and now that we’ve gone back and read Davies’s comments about his ideas for the show — now where do we sit?

As uncomfortable as it might seem at face value, this could come off as an organic development. Consider the following:

  • that the reason Davies “never even considered” bringing back McGann for a regeneration was that he didn’t want to confuse a new audience; he wanted a fresh start
  • that the new series is about wonder and horror, and about the relationship between the Doctor and his companion
  • that unlike the original Doctor Who, the new series is organized around long-term character arcs

So the question to ask is, what do we get if we kill off the Ninth Doctor and keep Rose on, after the first season? What do we establish by doing this? The answer: a hell of a lot.

It establishes the concept of regeneration right off — or, rather, once the Doctor and Rose have had time to bond, and she’s gotten to think she knows him and become comfortable with who she thinks he is. This allows the show to go into his backstory, and explain that he’s had eight other lives before the one she (and by extension the new audience) knew. And maybe even to visit or flash back to a couple of them, eventually. When the notion has settled in well enough.

This whole concept ties into the innate wonder and horror of the new series. The horror that the Doctor is dead; the wonder that he’s not, and that there’s this whole extra dimension to him that he never mentioned; the horror of realizing even more than before just how alien he is and wondering what else that might imply; the horror of the very nature of the Doctor’s relationship with Rose, of everything she knows about him, coming into question as a result of it; the wonder that even with a new face and personality this can still be the same person; the wonder at all of the centuries and lives of experience and knowledge and pain that Rose had never even had a hint of before.

All of this feeds right into the concept of a character arc. It’s the juiciest kind of meat. This is a cornucopia of material for the Doctor, for Rose, and for their relationship. This is the kind of stuff that the series can work off of for years; that, once it’s established, can carry the series to its eventual end. And until the Doctor regenerates, it ain’t going to get established. All we’ve got is a kind of superficial setup.

Recall that the old series didn’t really get started until Hartnell regenerated into Troughton. Then, suddenly, we had something more to work with. So Hartnell stayed for three seasons, while Eccleston is leaving after one. Eccleston’s episodes are also paced more quickly. We have a lot to establish and we know the rules by now. As Davies said, today all you need to show is the cause and the effect; you don’t need to go through all the motions in between, because we get it already.

Of course it would sort of spoil things if the Doctor were to regenerate after every season. He only has a few lives left, and if the series is to work, he should only lose them when there’s a dramatic purpose to it. So whoever the Tenth Doctor is, he should expect to stick around for a while: Eccleston is a sacrifice to him, after all. He will be what we’ve really been waiting for.

EDIT AGAIN:

And hell. Seems this was all planned after all, and the BBC are just idiots for ruining the surprise.

Times Past

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I’m watching a documentary on the new Doctor Who; in it is a retrospective of all the previous Doctors, and in that is enough footage to remind me why I like McGann’s. It’s a shame he never got more time; with some refinement he could have been close to the best. Almost ideal.

McGann’s was the emotional Doctor. It seems, after seven lives and a terrifying regeneration, something finally hit him. He becomes wistful, pensive, idealistic. At one point, he actually kisses his companion. It feels like he’s started to grasp the value of this life, of his whole situation. Of what it all means. He is sad, and fragile — and appreciative of everything. I guess he realizes that he might not have as much time as he’s always thought. Which must be weird, for a time lord.

All of the pieces are there. A roundness, a sense of dimension and balance. He gives the impression he’s looked through his past and decided who he is, and what matters to him. McGann brings a certain poignance to the whole arc of the series; he seems to imply that it’s going somewhere, that it has some internal structure, that there is some real evolution going on in the character. That we’ve been building to this moment. He makes it easier to go back and extrapolate, to get a piece of the Doctor’s mind. Just enough to understand him as a person, without robbing him of his mystery.

I say all this as I learn that Eccleston has ditched the role after a single season. After he leapfrogged all of the other actors in line to ask for the role, after he decided past Doctors were too foppish and that he wanted to modernize the character, and after exactly one episode has aired (to ten million viewers), away he goes. That’s… I mean. Hell. If you’re not up for commitment, then why bother with Doctor Who? Of all series? I taste lemons. There’s something weird when a companion hangs around longer than the Doctor himself.

This stunt puts Eccleston second to McGann in brevity, though McGann is to no blame for his part. Colin Baker was yanked out by the teeth, too. And McCoy just had the series cancelled on him. When Davison signed up, he only wanted to do three years; that was supposed to be a short run. And when his time was almost up, he regretted his earliier decision. So — yeah. Eccleston’s in a class of his own. Recall that the character is supposed to be running out of regenerations, and make of him what you will.

I still want to see McGann again. Surely there is some backstory to patch up here. We never did find out what happened to him — and there is plenty precedent for crossover.

EDIT: Or did we? I wasn’t aware that McGann had taped four full “seasons” of audio episodes. I knew he’d done some more work with the character; that these are actually considered seasons 27-30, however, is new to me. And this final episode was only released in December.

Well. Hell, then. I need to get ahold of these. I wonder how.

EDIT AGAIN: Jesus. It turns out that, after all of the novels and audio plays and junk, McGann is the second most well-recorded Doctor of all (following at 116 to McCoy’s 120). And a lot of stuff has happened during his era. And after the second episode of the new series, it seems that Davies considers it all canon. So maybe he hasn’t done that poorly after all. I still would like to see him in action again.