Life in Cardiff Commentry - concluded
Here's the remainder of the commentry (it seemed it was too long to go under a cut):
Rose’ eyes bored into the Doctor’s back. Turn round, damn you. Have the decency to answer us, at least. “Tell me that’s not true.” She repeated it, more urgently and angrily the second time, trying to force the Doctor into verbalising what was so clearly in his mind. In a minute, she’d want to hit him. “All those times you said I might not want to come with you because you’d changed!”
“He hadn’t,” Jack said coldly. “He’d been like that all along. He’s never been able to share you, Rose. If it had been his call, I’d’ve gone up with that German bomb and my ship.”
Is that true? I think it probably is. But it’s hardly surprising that the Doctor can’t handle it.
The Doctor spun around, goaded into a reaction at last. Rose had rarely been on the receiving end of his temper - not in this regeneration anyway. The way it seemed to come out of a clear blue sky and possess him like a malign entity was terrifying.
Again, this is very much the way DT plays Ten. And yes, it’s scary.
“I was wrong!” cried the Doctor. “And I paid for it! I had to watch her being sucked into the Void!”
“I think Jack paid rather more,” Rose pointed out, determined not to be intimidated.
“Let’s leave it at that,” Jack suggested. “I never should’ve brought it up.”
“No, you should!” cried Rose. “Because you can’t have the kind of relationship we’re talking about without trust. And if anybody doesn’t have it, that needs sorting out now.”
“It’s been quite the weekend for you not trusting me, hasn’t it?” the Doctor told her, bitterly.
This goes back to the events of C5, of course, when Rose really hurt him by assuming he couldn’t handle money and making her own living arrangements for them both.
“Just answer the question,” said Rose. “Is that why you didn’t go back for Jack? Because you wanted me all to yourself?”
His mouth opened and closed two or three times. When he finally spoke, he hurled his words at her with a force that made her retreat towards Jack. “You think everything’s so simple, don’t you? Sometimes you don’t know why you do things, not at the time, anyway. Why do you always expect me to do the right thing? Nobody does! I don’t just have all that trivial relationships stuff to think about, the stuff you humans spend your days worrying about. I have whole universes to consider! Timelines to unravel! Screwups to sort out! You never thought about that when you talked your mother into tearing the TARDIS open, did you? All you cared about was getting back to your boyfriend!”
This is powerful because it’s true, of course. And maybe the canon version is more honest - that he never would get this close to intimacy. I think he has a valid point - Rose’s actions in POTW are dangerous because love is dangerous.
“Is that what you thought you were to me? My boyfriend?”
“I was thinking about the end of the world and the Daleks taking over! Someone has to do it!”
“Hey, chill out, you two.” Jack moved to separate them, and Rose realised how loud their voices had become.
She glared at the Doctor. Love and hate could be so close, couldn't they? "You’re such a hypocrite sometimes!” she cried. “Talking about humans as if they wouldn’t have a clue how to behave without you around to show them. I don’t expect you to be right all the time. But when you aren’t, and you realise you aren’t, I do expect you to say you’re sorry.”
“I’m not listening to this!” He turned and hurried away, his face thunderous. And God, he couldn’t half walk fast.
“Doc…..” Jack rushed after him. “She’s right. We just need to talk!”
“I don’t do talking!”
It’s one of the great ironies of Ten, of course, that he talks all the time until he really needs to communicate. Donna pointed the same thing out in TDD.
He quickened his pace to a run. Rose stopped, sucking in her breath with frustration.
“We can’t just leave him,” Jack said.
“Maybe we can. He needs to stew in his own juice.”
“No,” Jack insisted. “He’s already raw because of the way we wound him up about us sleeping together. You gotta meet people where they are. Either you love them, or you don’t. Come on.”
Jack’s right, and I think this illustrates one of his best qualities. He’s very open and honest about people. He might run multiple relationships in parallel, but I don’t think he’d lie and cheat about them. I think that’s exactly why Rose and Ten need him around. He’s much more emotionally direct and he sees how far you can push people - then he stops. Rose doesn’t, not always.
They found the Doctor sitting in the corner of a shelter on the pier, his face working and his gaze miles away. The storm seemed to have blown itself out. It was almost a kind of compliment, that he knew them well enough to throw a tantrum in front of them. Rose sat down on one side of him, Jack on the other, and instinctively they closed their arms in a protective barrier around him. That, she realised, would be the dynamic of any future relationship between the three of them, and that was exactly the reason why the Doctor was having so much trouble accepting the idea of it.
Being dependent on anyone is very unnatural for the Doctor, particularly when they’re humans.
“You need us both,” said Jack. “Tried it the other way. Didn’t work.”
“I honestly don’t know why I left you,” he admitted. “There were so many things in my mind at the time……You kissed me, Jack. Rose came back with the Vortex. For me.” Anger exploded again out of nowhere. “I don’t know why people keep doing it! There’s nothing special about me! All I ever wanted was a bit of…….” His voice broke on the next word. “Company? Is that too much to ask?” He pulled himself up, away from their arms and walked away without looking back. “You all have to bloody well love me, don’t you? Don’t you ever learn?”
I think this is one of the best speeches I’ve ever written for the Doctor. It expresses so much of his confusion and inner conflict, and it contains several ludicrous lies, such as ‘There’s nothing special about me!,’ that somehow lead up to an underlying truth. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but I think it’s one of the few times I’ve managed to get close to RTD at his best.
“No,” Jack replied. Following him, he intercepted the Doctor with a skill born of lengthy practice and blocked his way forward. The Doctor had to look at him. “And you know why?” he continued. “Because you never learn, either. Love pours out of you. Love for life, for this planet and everything on it. It’s like warming your hands at a fire, being with you. Stop fighting it - you might as well, because you aren’t gonna change. And some day you’re just gonna have to wake up and see how dangerous love is.”
And this is Jack at his best. He’s just nailed the Doctor’s dangerous idealism. He’s charming, but not always intentionally so. It’s all that enthusiasm and the way he just makes you feel really alive when he’s around you.
In that moment, Rose seemed to see the Doctor’s whole, troubled history with his people unreel before her eyes. That was who he was, would always be - the man who loved too much, and tried to hide it because, in the world he’d come from, it was weakness and the badge of shame. He refused to apologise for the things he did, because he mixed it up in his mind with apologising for that love, and it was too much a part of him for him ever to deny it.
A good insight, I think. I’m quite pleased with that. It owes quite a lot to aibhinn's take on both Ten and Jack, I believe.
“All right, so I was scared,” he admitted to Jack, in a voice barely loud enough for Rose to hear, though she was standing right beside him.
“And that’s why you left me?”
I should have made it specific that Jack, not Rose, is asking the question. It could apply to either.
The Doctor’s fingernails dug hard into his shoulder. It seemed he didn’t trust himself to speak.
Jack slapped his back. “That’s just the hole you were dug from, I guess. All your people were scared of love. You can see why. Once you start factoring love in, how the hell do you keep your timelines straight? What happens to order? Where does that big picture go? No wonder you ran as far as you could. First me, then Rose, showing up ready to die for you. Hell, I’d’ve been scared.”
Jack is not just a human - he’s a human with a time-traveller’s perspective. He can give the Doctor things that Rose cannot give him.
The Doctor bit his lip, screwed up his eyes and, almost imperceptibly, nodded. “Yeah,” he whispered.
“It’s not the leaving I have the most trouble with,” Jack went on. “It’s the lying afterwards.” His phone rang. “Shit,” he muttered. He stood up and moved away to take the call. Relieved of Jack’s immediate presence, and the need to compete for the alpha-male position, the Doctor sighed wearily and leaned against Rose.
“I’m sorry,” he confessed. “I ought to be saying it to Jack, I know, but…..”
Alone with Rose, he can show a little more vulnerability, and I think she’s right to comfort him now because he’s just gone through some painful and difficult emotional work to change.
She stroked his back and felt his hair tickle her face. She really did love him so very, very much. And he would get better. She believed in him. He’d found a way back to her, hadn’t he? He’d changed, settled down, provided for her, opened himself up to the rough and tumble of a relationship, an ordinary life. And recently, it had been very ordinary. Torchwood had been quiet, little more than turning up each morning for a desk job.
But apparently that was about to change.
Jack came back towards them, his expression grim. “That was Owen,” he announced. “Gwen’s haemorrhaging; she’s gone into shock. He’s got Martha with him, they’ve stabilised things as best they could and they’re heading for the Hub.”
The Doctor was already up on his feet. “What do you need?” he asked.
He’s kind of relieved to be back to the familiar adrenalin-charged, having to save people stuff. But of course, he’s about to make his biggest mistake of all, when he tries to snatch Gwen’s baby and practically blows everything he’s achieved emotionally to pieces.
“State of the art facility, and an ectogenically-enhanced incubator with instant DNA sequencing wouldn’t come amiss.” Jack looked at him. “Or failing that, we’d settle for an extra pair of hands.”
Sadly, the Doctor is notoriously bad at just being “an extra pair of hands”. He doesn’t slot well into a team, as is made painfully clear by the way he takes over Owen’s case right in front of him. But that’s for the next chapter, one of the most controversial I’ve ever written because Ten behaves so appallingly badly.
“The TARDIS!” said Rose. “We have to get back.”
The three of them ran towards the bikes.
Rose’ eyes bored into the Doctor’s back. Turn round, damn you. Have the decency to answer us, at least. “Tell me that’s not true.” She repeated it, more urgently and angrily the second time, trying to force the Doctor into verbalising what was so clearly in his mind. In a minute, she’d want to hit him. “All those times you said I might not want to come with you because you’d changed!”
“He hadn’t,” Jack said coldly. “He’d been like that all along. He’s never been able to share you, Rose. If it had been his call, I’d’ve gone up with that German bomb and my ship.”
Is that true? I think it probably is. But it’s hardly surprising that the Doctor can’t handle it.
The Doctor spun around, goaded into a reaction at last. Rose had rarely been on the receiving end of his temper - not in this regeneration anyway. The way it seemed to come out of a clear blue sky and possess him like a malign entity was terrifying.
Again, this is very much the way DT plays Ten. And yes, it’s scary.
“I was wrong!” cried the Doctor. “And I paid for it! I had to watch her being sucked into the Void!”
“I think Jack paid rather more,” Rose pointed out, determined not to be intimidated.
“Let’s leave it at that,” Jack suggested. “I never should’ve brought it up.”
“No, you should!” cried Rose. “Because you can’t have the kind of relationship we’re talking about without trust. And if anybody doesn’t have it, that needs sorting out now.”
“It’s been quite the weekend for you not trusting me, hasn’t it?” the Doctor told her, bitterly.
This goes back to the events of C5, of course, when Rose really hurt him by assuming he couldn’t handle money and making her own living arrangements for them both.
“Just answer the question,” said Rose. “Is that why you didn’t go back for Jack? Because you wanted me all to yourself?”
His mouth opened and closed two or three times. When he finally spoke, he hurled his words at her with a force that made her retreat towards Jack. “You think everything’s so simple, don’t you? Sometimes you don’t know why you do things, not at the time, anyway. Why do you always expect me to do the right thing? Nobody does! I don’t just have all that trivial relationships stuff to think about, the stuff you humans spend your days worrying about. I have whole universes to consider! Timelines to unravel! Screwups to sort out! You never thought about that when you talked your mother into tearing the TARDIS open, did you? All you cared about was getting back to your boyfriend!”
This is powerful because it’s true, of course. And maybe the canon version is more honest - that he never would get this close to intimacy. I think he has a valid point - Rose’s actions in POTW are dangerous because love is dangerous.
“Is that what you thought you were to me? My boyfriend?”
“I was thinking about the end of the world and the Daleks taking over! Someone has to do it!”
“Hey, chill out, you two.” Jack moved to separate them, and Rose realised how loud their voices had become.
She glared at the Doctor. Love and hate could be so close, couldn't they? "You’re such a hypocrite sometimes!” she cried. “Talking about humans as if they wouldn’t have a clue how to behave without you around to show them. I don’t expect you to be right all the time. But when you aren’t, and you realise you aren’t, I do expect you to say you’re sorry.”
“I’m not listening to this!” He turned and hurried away, his face thunderous. And God, he couldn’t half walk fast.
“Doc…..” Jack rushed after him. “She’s right. We just need to talk!”
“I don’t do talking!”
It’s one of the great ironies of Ten, of course, that he talks all the time until he really needs to communicate. Donna pointed the same thing out in TDD.
He quickened his pace to a run. Rose stopped, sucking in her breath with frustration.
“We can’t just leave him,” Jack said.
“Maybe we can. He needs to stew in his own juice.”
“No,” Jack insisted. “He’s already raw because of the way we wound him up about us sleeping together. You gotta meet people where they are. Either you love them, or you don’t. Come on.”
Jack’s right, and I think this illustrates one of his best qualities. He’s very open and honest about people. He might run multiple relationships in parallel, but I don’t think he’d lie and cheat about them. I think that’s exactly why Rose and Ten need him around. He’s much more emotionally direct and he sees how far you can push people - then he stops. Rose doesn’t, not always.
They found the Doctor sitting in the corner of a shelter on the pier, his face working and his gaze miles away. The storm seemed to have blown itself out. It was almost a kind of compliment, that he knew them well enough to throw a tantrum in front of them. Rose sat down on one side of him, Jack on the other, and instinctively they closed their arms in a protective barrier around him. That, she realised, would be the dynamic of any future relationship between the three of them, and that was exactly the reason why the Doctor was having so much trouble accepting the idea of it.
Being dependent on anyone is very unnatural for the Doctor, particularly when they’re humans.
“You need us both,” said Jack. “Tried it the other way. Didn’t work.”
“I honestly don’t know why I left you,” he admitted. “There were so many things in my mind at the time……You kissed me, Jack. Rose came back with the Vortex. For me.” Anger exploded again out of nowhere. “I don’t know why people keep doing it! There’s nothing special about me! All I ever wanted was a bit of…….” His voice broke on the next word. “Company? Is that too much to ask?” He pulled himself up, away from their arms and walked away without looking back. “You all have to bloody well love me, don’t you? Don’t you ever learn?”
I think this is one of the best speeches I’ve ever written for the Doctor. It expresses so much of his confusion and inner conflict, and it contains several ludicrous lies, such as ‘There’s nothing special about me!,’ that somehow lead up to an underlying truth. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but I think it’s one of the few times I’ve managed to get close to RTD at his best.
“No,” Jack replied. Following him, he intercepted the Doctor with a skill born of lengthy practice and blocked his way forward. The Doctor had to look at him. “And you know why?” he continued. “Because you never learn, either. Love pours out of you. Love for life, for this planet and everything on it. It’s like warming your hands at a fire, being with you. Stop fighting it - you might as well, because you aren’t gonna change. And some day you’re just gonna have to wake up and see how dangerous love is.”
And this is Jack at his best. He’s just nailed the Doctor’s dangerous idealism. He’s charming, but not always intentionally so. It’s all that enthusiasm and the way he just makes you feel really alive when he’s around you.
In that moment, Rose seemed to see the Doctor’s whole, troubled history with his people unreel before her eyes. That was who he was, would always be - the man who loved too much, and tried to hide it because, in the world he’d come from, it was weakness and the badge of shame. He refused to apologise for the things he did, because he mixed it up in his mind with apologising for that love, and it was too much a part of him for him ever to deny it.
A good insight, I think. I’m quite pleased with that. It owes quite a lot to aibhinn's take on both Ten and Jack, I believe.
“All right, so I was scared,” he admitted to Jack, in a voice barely loud enough for Rose to hear, though she was standing right beside him.
“And that’s why you left me?”
I should have made it specific that Jack, not Rose, is asking the question. It could apply to either.
The Doctor’s fingernails dug hard into his shoulder. It seemed he didn’t trust himself to speak.
Jack slapped his back. “That’s just the hole you were dug from, I guess. All your people were scared of love. You can see why. Once you start factoring love in, how the hell do you keep your timelines straight? What happens to order? Where does that big picture go? No wonder you ran as far as you could. First me, then Rose, showing up ready to die for you. Hell, I’d’ve been scared.”
Jack is not just a human - he’s a human with a time-traveller’s perspective. He can give the Doctor things that Rose cannot give him.
The Doctor bit his lip, screwed up his eyes and, almost imperceptibly, nodded. “Yeah,” he whispered.
“It’s not the leaving I have the most trouble with,” Jack went on. “It’s the lying afterwards.” His phone rang. “Shit,” he muttered. He stood up and moved away to take the call. Relieved of Jack’s immediate presence, and the need to compete for the alpha-male position, the Doctor sighed wearily and leaned against Rose.
“I’m sorry,” he confessed. “I ought to be saying it to Jack, I know, but…..”
Alone with Rose, he can show a little more vulnerability, and I think she’s right to comfort him now because he’s just gone through some painful and difficult emotional work to change.
She stroked his back and felt his hair tickle her face. She really did love him so very, very much. And he would get better. She believed in him. He’d found a way back to her, hadn’t he? He’d changed, settled down, provided for her, opened himself up to the rough and tumble of a relationship, an ordinary life. And recently, it had been very ordinary. Torchwood had been quiet, little more than turning up each morning for a desk job.
But apparently that was about to change.
Jack came back towards them, his expression grim. “That was Owen,” he announced. “Gwen’s haemorrhaging; she’s gone into shock. He’s got Martha with him, they’ve stabilised things as best they could and they’re heading for the Hub.”
The Doctor was already up on his feet. “What do you need?” he asked.
He’s kind of relieved to be back to the familiar adrenalin-charged, having to save people stuff. But of course, he’s about to make his biggest mistake of all, when he tries to snatch Gwen’s baby and practically blows everything he’s achieved emotionally to pieces.
“State of the art facility, and an ectogenically-enhanced incubator with instant DNA sequencing wouldn’t come amiss.” Jack looked at him. “Or failing that, we’d settle for an extra pair of hands.”
Sadly, the Doctor is notoriously bad at just being “an extra pair of hands”. He doesn’t slot well into a team, as is made painfully clear by the way he takes over Owen’s case right in front of him. But that’s for the next chapter, one of the most controversial I’ve ever written because Ten behaves so appallingly badly.
“The TARDIS!” said Rose. “We have to get back.”
The three of them ran towards the bikes.