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Apr. 12th, 2008 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neadodsSpoilerphobes - All episode spoilers are under cut. This uncut part is a multi-companion comparison of a moment which they all get and which, in this case, takes place a mere 23 seconds in.
There's a moment in the latest Who that I think sums up the Doctor's opinion of getting to travel with him better than any other moment we've had yet in New Who. It is, from his point of view, an amazing gift that he's offering, and he wants that (and his cleverness in providing it) properly appreciated.
Rose's first reaction to being taken to the end of the world was disbelief and a little bit of fear. (I kept waiting for them to do a ripoff of Adams' "The things! The people!" "The things are also people.") She got over it, but her initial reactions were more curious and wary than excited. It took her second trip/third adventure to make *him* happy by getting all excited.
Adam earned both the Doctor's and Rose's disgust by fainting.
Jack had been too many places and times to care.
Mickey was amazed, but the Doctor and Rose were a little busy having their clique of two to pay attention to him.
On Martha's first proper adventure, she peppered him with questions. (Quite in character for someone who always read the manual when asked to operate new equipment, and as a tech writer, how much do I love that?) They were intelligent questions, ones that proved that she has actually read and thought about time travel, but the Doctor got a tad huffy that she was gathering data rather than being blown away.
Donna, though - even though she has had one TARDIS trip already, her first reaction to being somewhere completely new is to squee herself practically into hyperventilation and hug him. I just love his delighted, contented laugh. THIS is what it's all about, as far as he's concerned!
(Mind you, part of his delight is doubtless that he thinks he's landed where & when intended, for once.)
Donna's squee doesn't last long, not when she smacks into the problem of the times when history must not be changed. Putting the squee and squee-harshing scenes back to back was a very clever counterpoint. And later on, it gets so much better (something I will address later on.)
Rambling a bit (I'm semi-liveblogging) - anyone else freeze-frame the scroll to see what it says? Just me then? Can't read more than the top two lines.
Had to laugh myself silly at "Modern art!" (Nice nod to City of Death there.) Lost it again on "Etruscans, Christians, and all sorts" and really lost it on "I am Spartacus." "And so am I." Cheap & cheesy humor, how I love it so.
I don't love buggering history, though. "Just a mountain to them"? They hadn't noticed the previous smoke? The abnormally fertile land because of the volcanic soil? Hello, yes they did know what it was. It's just that they figured it would never get such a modern, civilized society, just like we're all completely sure that Mt. Hood will never blow in America just because we're America, or some such. And in the meantime, there's plenty of money to be made in such a strategic, vital city. (And we will not even speak about the obvious zipper up the back of Donna's "toga.")
Liveblog rambly bit - As an American, I loved the line "pass me that torch" being followed by an actual passing of what I always think of at the word "torch."
Ha! I was right about the prophecies line! Not some slam on all womanhood, but Dickus Minimus proving how minimus his dickus is. (Although the subsequent "I can prophecy better than you can" was nifty & chilling, even though it didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. For a nanosecond, I was hoping for the Doctor's real name.) Pity this puts my prophecy rate at a random chance 50%, as there was, alas, no unexpected Jack. Damned pity.
Back to the meta - the scene where Donna is tied up is proof enough for me that New Who is going for the "three companions" template:
Ur Companion #1 isn't well educated, but is plucky and "real" and keeps the Doctor grounded - Polly, Jamie, Jo, Rose.
Ur Companion #2 is well educated and thinks her way out of situations that baffle the Doctor - Barbara, Zoe, Liz, Sarah Jane, Martha.
Ur Companion #3 is the fighter, who kicks ass while the Doctor is wasting time waffling around - Brigadier, Leela, Ace, and now Donna. The way Donna was threatening to bitchslap the seers into another century while tied up was pure Leela (who was my favorite companion back in the day, so I'm thrilled). If she had a Janus thorn, she'd be dangerous. If she finds a spare can of Nitro-9, she is going to be very dangerous.
When Donna and the Doctor had their in-volcano discussion about Time Lords, at first I thought "how nice, David gets a crack at the 'I can feel the planet spinning' speech." But it is much more than that, really. It's part illumination for the audience - we now know that it's not just white noise, but somehow differentiated in his mind. It's part reiteration of the Doctor's despair and burden - "I'm the only one" (he seems to have forgotten how rarely the other Time Lords bothered... and how often they used him as their agent if they did bother). But most importantly, it's a lesson to Donna (and to the new fans) of the terrible choices the Doctor must make. History is not always kind. Sometimes there is the choice of Pompeii or the world. Not the few vs the many, but the many vs the more.
Donna rises to her name here. After all she has done to try to save everyone - I particularly like how she tried to put it in terms of prophecy to try to save at least one family - when it's clear what has to be done, she accepts it, accepts her own death, and in what is likely to be her last act, comforts the Doctor. (For a moment, I thought it was going to have to be her pushing the lever. It wouldn't be the first time the Doctor chickened out at the last second.) That's noble.
They took historical liberties with the debris falling as the Doctor and Donna run too. When I toured Pompeii, one of the most chilling things I witnessed wasn't the stone bodies. It was hearing the tour guide pointing out that they found bodies at two levels. Bottom level entombed the people who had been caught in the first eruption, dead of gas or flying rock. Much further up were the other people. The ones who had escaped the eruption, and came back the day after the gasses stopped, to try to dig down to the city.
They were the ones caught in the lava flow and burned alive.
I don't tear up easy, but I did when the Doctor left the family behind. I thought "them, he'll take them out of history, take them somewhere safe" - it would be so characteristic... but it would be characteristic of the classic Doctor. The new one is never going to quite forgive the universe for not being able to save his own people.
Anyone who thinks Donna is shrill, whining, and selfish, has not paid attention to her begging for another person's life. Or giving thanks for their salvation. That scene, when Donna got her serious and formal welcome onto the TARDIS was excellent.
To shift from the sublime back to the ridiculous, Ten is never, ever going to get to be on top again after the "just us girls" line.
ETA and non episode specific - For the love of pete, fandom, not everything is automatically about Rose! Didn't you learn your lesson after working yourself into a frenzy over the lyrics of "The Stowaway" for months, only to have the "obviously about Rose" reference turn out to be about 15 seconds of background noise that the principles utterly ignored?
There's a moment in the latest Who that I think sums up the Doctor's opinion of getting to travel with him better than any other moment we've had yet in New Who. It is, from his point of view, an amazing gift that he's offering, and he wants that (and his cleverness in providing it) properly appreciated.
Rose's first reaction to being taken to the end of the world was disbelief and a little bit of fear. (I kept waiting for them to do a ripoff of Adams' "The things! The people!" "The things are also people.") She got over it, but her initial reactions were more curious and wary than excited. It took her second trip/third adventure to make *him* happy by getting all excited.
Adam earned both the Doctor's and Rose's disgust by fainting.
Jack had been too many places and times to care.
Mickey was amazed, but the Doctor and Rose were a little busy having their clique of two to pay attention to him.
On Martha's first proper adventure, she peppered him with questions. (Quite in character for someone who always read the manual when asked to operate new equipment, and as a tech writer, how much do I love that?) They were intelligent questions, ones that proved that she has actually read and thought about time travel, but the Doctor got a tad huffy that she was gathering data rather than being blown away.
Donna, though - even though she has had one TARDIS trip already, her first reaction to being somewhere completely new is to squee herself practically into hyperventilation and hug him. I just love his delighted, contented laugh. THIS is what it's all about, as far as he's concerned!
(Mind you, part of his delight is doubtless that he thinks he's landed where & when intended, for once.)
Donna's squee doesn't last long, not when she smacks into the problem of the times when history must not be changed. Putting the squee and squee-harshing scenes back to back was a very clever counterpoint. And later on, it gets so much better (something I will address later on.)
Rambling a bit (I'm semi-liveblogging) - anyone else freeze-frame the scroll to see what it says? Just me then? Can't read more than the top two lines.
Had to laugh myself silly at "Modern art!" (Nice nod to City of Death there.) Lost it again on "Etruscans, Christians, and all sorts" and really lost it on "I am Spartacus." "And so am I." Cheap & cheesy humor, how I love it so.
I don't love buggering history, though. "Just a mountain to them"? They hadn't noticed the previous smoke? The abnormally fertile land because of the volcanic soil? Hello, yes they did know what it was. It's just that they figured it would never get such a modern, civilized society, just like we're all completely sure that Mt. Hood will never blow in America just because we're America, or some such. And in the meantime, there's plenty of money to be made in such a strategic, vital city. (And we will not even speak about the obvious zipper up the back of Donna's "toga.")
Liveblog rambly bit - As an American, I loved the line "pass me that torch" being followed by an actual passing of what I always think of at the word "torch."
Ha! I was right about the prophecies line! Not some slam on all womanhood, but Dickus Minimus proving how minimus his dickus is. (Although the subsequent "I can prophecy better than you can" was nifty & chilling, even though it didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. For a nanosecond, I was hoping for the Doctor's real name.) Pity this puts my prophecy rate at a random chance 50%, as there was, alas, no unexpected Jack. Damned pity.
Back to the meta - the scene where Donna is tied up is proof enough for me that New Who is going for the "three companions" template:
Ur Companion #1 isn't well educated, but is plucky and "real" and keeps the Doctor grounded - Polly, Jamie, Jo, Rose.
Ur Companion #2 is well educated and thinks her way out of situations that baffle the Doctor - Barbara, Zoe, Liz, Sarah Jane, Martha.
Ur Companion #3 is the fighter, who kicks ass while the Doctor is wasting time waffling around - Brigadier, Leela, Ace, and now Donna. The way Donna was threatening to bitchslap the seers into another century while tied up was pure Leela (who was my favorite companion back in the day, so I'm thrilled). If she had a Janus thorn, she'd be dangerous. If she finds a spare can of Nitro-9, she is going to be very dangerous.
When Donna and the Doctor had their in-volcano discussion about Time Lords, at first I thought "how nice, David gets a crack at the 'I can feel the planet spinning' speech." But it is much more than that, really. It's part illumination for the audience - we now know that it's not just white noise, but somehow differentiated in his mind. It's part reiteration of the Doctor's despair and burden - "I'm the only one" (he seems to have forgotten how rarely the other Time Lords bothered... and how often they used him as their agent if they did bother). But most importantly, it's a lesson to Donna (and to the new fans) of the terrible choices the Doctor must make. History is not always kind. Sometimes there is the choice of Pompeii or the world. Not the few vs the many, but the many vs the more.
Donna rises to her name here. After all she has done to try to save everyone - I particularly like how she tried to put it in terms of prophecy to try to save at least one family - when it's clear what has to be done, she accepts it, accepts her own death, and in what is likely to be her last act, comforts the Doctor. (For a moment, I thought it was going to have to be her pushing the lever. It wouldn't be the first time the Doctor chickened out at the last second.) That's noble.
They took historical liberties with the debris falling as the Doctor and Donna run too. When I toured Pompeii, one of the most chilling things I witnessed wasn't the stone bodies. It was hearing the tour guide pointing out that they found bodies at two levels. Bottom level entombed the people who had been caught in the first eruption, dead of gas or flying rock. Much further up were the other people. The ones who had escaped the eruption, and came back the day after the gasses stopped, to try to dig down to the city.
They were the ones caught in the lava flow and burned alive.
I don't tear up easy, but I did when the Doctor left the family behind. I thought "them, he'll take them out of history, take them somewhere safe" - it would be so characteristic... but it would be characteristic of the classic Doctor. The new one is never going to quite forgive the universe for not being able to save his own people.
Anyone who thinks Donna is shrill, whining, and selfish, has not paid attention to her begging for another person's life. Or giving thanks for their salvation. That scene, when Donna got her serious and formal welcome onto the TARDIS was excellent.
To shift from the sublime back to the ridiculous, Ten is never, ever going to get to be on top again after the "just us girls" line.
ETA and non episode specific - For the love of pete, fandom, not everything is automatically about Rose! Didn't you learn your lesson after working yourself into a frenzy over the lyrics of "The Stowaway" for months, only to have the "obviously about Rose" reference turn out to be about 15 seconds of background noise that the principles utterly ignored?
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 02:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 01:28 am (UTC)Re. the 'not always about Rose' point, do you mean that "She is returning" line? Because I agree that it isn't always about Rose, but I really do think that particular line is supposed to be about her.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 02:08 am (UTC)After watching that whole dynamic play out fruitlessly over The Stowaway, it's making me want to percuss the keyboard with my frontal cranium.
Missing planets is another one, yes. But do we know that the original breeding ground of the adupois is missing or just off limits?
no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 02:50 am (UTC)My brain pulls up the Gelth from the first season, and wonders if there's a connection between the three... AND the "Lost" planet of Gallifrey.
(Seriously- they never belabored a point like this in the classic series.)
You know- I heard that line about "She is returning"... and MY thought was "Wasn't one of the Titans female? Are they talking about her? no- wait- they just mentioned Medusa...Hmmmm"
Truly- it did NOT click that they might have been meaning Rose.
Oh- and one last little thing... If an Earthquake- rumored to register 7.5 or better- opened a Rift 17 years prior for just a fraction of Time... What keeps the Rift in Cardiff open?
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Date: 2008-04-13 12:57 pm (UTC)I think Torchwood's steampunk machine.
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Date: 2008-04-13 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 01:45 am (UTC)Ten is never, ever going to get to be on top again after the "just us girls" line.
OH GOD I FORGOT ABOUT THAT. Killed me dead. Luckily, I'm having friends over to watch tomorrow so I can actually pay more attention this time.
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Date: 2008-04-13 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 01:52 am (UTC)Also Romana, Tegan (to a degree), and (and I'm stunned you forgot this one given the plot of your QoL story) Nyssa. *grin*
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Date: 2008-04-13 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 02:02 am (UTC)I am still having a ball and you hit pretty much every point of why, and included great meta about Ten not forgiving the universe (and himself) as the primary bit of bitterness underpinning the way his actions follow with the, "I'm so old now. I used to have so much mercy."
And the two layers of deaths in Pompeii? I had no idea. That's just awful.
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Date: 2008-04-13 02:03 am (UTC)Also Romana, Tegan (to a degree), and (and I'm stunned you forgot this one given the plot of your QoL story) Nyssa. *grin*
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Date: 2008-04-13 02:12 am (UTC)My favorite new-companion-welcome scene yet. And people are actually saying Donna's "shrill" and "whiny"? I liked her much better here than in PiC, her compassion was a lovely thing.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 02:38 am (UTC)Further later when my brain stops spinning... :D
no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 03:01 am (UTC)Here via
For the love of pete, fandom, not everything is automatically about Rose!
I liked Rose. I adore Donna. I had my reservations about her, but I think she's working out wonderfully. Something that bothers me in a big way is the way fandom seems to want to skip over Martha entirely. Personally, I hope that when/if Rose returns this season that it doesn't turn into a love-fest between her and The Doctor.
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Date: 2008-04-13 01:02 pm (UTC)I don't know about that; it seems that some people want to skip over her, and some are protesting that it seems like the show is skipping over both her and Donna by constant reminders of Rose. And I have to confess, if I didn't know the seasonal spoilers, I'd be ripping my hair out too, because the show can't link itself to any one companion any more than it can to any one Doctor... but Rose does show up more than any past companion.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 03:20 pm (UTC)Some people just never connected with her in the first place, or - like me - tried to in the beginning and then got put off by the lack of development given to her character and the endless repeated 'why doesn't he love meeee. I do blame the writers, but if I don't refer to Martha much it's because of that. Though I do think that she's been given a huge tribute/apology in the first episode. The writers aren't skipping over her one bit.
Of course there are different opinions about companions in fandom. There are plenty of people - most of whom became huge fans of Martha, and then felt betrayed, rightly enough, when Martha was removed from the scene so quickly with such poor overall development, no matter how brilliant she turned out to be in the final episode - who always disliked Rose, or ended up disliking her by the time she left.
Fandom does not speak as one united entity, and what does appear to be coming in this season seems to recognise that, because although Rose is coming back so is Martha - and for more episodes - and so are Jack and Sarah-Jane and Mickey and Jackie and, I think, Pete. Everyone's getting their companion moment, I think. Of course Rose fans are going to rejoice, but Martha fans also seem to have a lot to look forward to. The only disappointment is that it seems like no-one is sticking around with the Doctor at the end of this season, so Donna fans are going to be just as disappointed as Rose fans and Martha fans were over the last couple of years.
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Date: 2008-04-13 04:16 pm (UTC)So do I, in addition to the lines in Torchwood. Things that needed to be said were brought right out and said. I appreciated that, although it would/will be nice if they're said *to Martha's face.*
Fandom does not speak as one united entity
No, but it seems that way after you've seen the same comment half a dozen times on the f-list!
I don't know how pre-disappointed Donna fans should be. Considering that "they come back" is already part of canon with the return of Jack and the sighting of Rose, there seems to be absolutely nothing stopping Donna from returning after they use the liberty of short filming schedules to bring in some one-off stars. And Amazon is already pre-ordering her first three companion tie-in novels for September.
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Date: 2008-04-13 09:28 pm (UTC)I think that's exactly what it is. As a fan of Martha, I'm in communities where discussion is primarily about her, but after I watch an episode I go to the bigger communities where a wider scale of discussion is expected, only to find "omg ROSE" everywhere I turn. Then there's the praise of Donna, which I fully support, but it does all tend to make me feel my favorite girl is being left out.
How long did companions tend to last in Classic Who? I'm not sure because I haven't watched it, but it seems that the longevity of the show paired with the companions I can think of would mean longer running companions in general. I could be wrong, of course. Makes me wonder why the new series can't keep anyone around.
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Date: 2008-04-13 11:52 pm (UTC)I know - I'm wondering if/when I'm going to get slammed for liking Donna so much, as if it means I have to like Martha less. Oy.
Sarah Jane had the longest run of any companion old school, and she was around 3 years. It seems that the old companions had more time because they had far more adventures per year than the new school ones. Sometimes 13 installments didn't even tell the entire story, much less make up a season!
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Date: 2008-04-13 11:57 pm (UTC)I guess you could just say I'm worried about what's going to happen when they all get together. If Ten and Rose just go running into each others arms despite all that's happened, I'll be terribly upset with the writers. Seeing all the people who seem to want just that to happen makes me uneasy.
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Date: 2008-04-13 04:10 am (UTC)Yikes. :x (Of course, reading that before watching the episode made me extremely cynical about the penultimate scene. "Sure. Dump them at the edge of Pompeii, no money, no home, no goods, so that they'll end up going back to try to rescue stuff and get themselves killed.")
I totally loved this episode, though. Including Donna -- who, I'll admit, was somewhat annoying in the Christmas special but omg *love* -- and the parallels between Pompeii and Gallifrey, and the difference for the Doctor between /action/ and /inaction/ to preserve a fixed point in history.
(though I did find myself going "okay. they're inside a volcano and they're *touching the rocks*. aren't they, like. hot?" and also "...wouldn't the water in the water pistol kind of be steam by this point?" but the first bit with the water pistol was sheer awesome.)
(and the "she" that's returning is obviously Gallifrey. </tongue-in-cheek>)
NTS: it does help if you finish the comment. *cough* Anyway, the other thing that bugged me was the way the name of the race was presented; I had to stop and rewind once I figured out that it was a name, because I'd parsed it as "powerful", in parallel to the other statements ("who are you?" "we are awakening" / "who are you?" "we are rising" / "what is your name?" "...powerful"). ...how do you spell that, anyway, pyrophile? pyrovyle? @#$^#$%#$$? *snicker*
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Date: 2008-04-13 05:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 05:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 05:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 01:05 pm (UTC)Ooo, I like it!
And silly you, looking for science in Doctor Who. Silly, silly you. Just as silly as me looking for history, really...
no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 10:10 am (UTC)ETA and non episode specific - For the love of pete, fandom, not everything is automatically about Rose!
Yeah, I have seen a lot of that going on in the reviews. O_o
Then again, I suppose it would be hypocritical of me to not say that I had a total "Martha Moment" when Ten said the bit about the son acting brilliantly and encouraged his parents to praise him -- as if part of him was saying that out of residual guilt for not praising Martha enough for being "brilliant" herself. I am sleepy though, so I am probably just grasping at straws...
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Date: 2008-04-13 12:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-13 03:22 pm (UTC)And wow, didn't even make the association with Rose. Though I guess I'm not looking out for her all the time either...
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Date: 2008-04-15 04:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-17 04:22 pm (UTC)Which got my husband and I discussing if the Doctor could regenerate himself as a woman or not if he wanted to. Does he have any control over what he ends up looking like? Were there female Time Lords? If not, how did Time Lords reproduce?
no subject
Date: 2008-04-17 11:54 pm (UTC)