Commentary for Listen
Commentary for Listen, as requested by nonelvis . If anyone's interested in a commentary, fire away.
In the wee hours of the night, the Doctor became fuzzily aware that Rose had untangled herself from him. Still more asleep than not, he shifted to settle into the warm spot her body had made, and he would have drifted back into dreams if it hadn’t been for the sound. He sat bolt upright, blinking to clear his vision and see her where she perched on the edge of the bed.
I like the image of them sleeping in the same bed, and the Doctor being just familiar enough with that to adjust when she moves.
The sound came again, and it tore at him. He put a hand on her bare back and felt the trembling there. "Rose," he said softly.
"I’m all right."
"You’re crying."
"It’s nothing - I just -" Her next sob was louder, half hiccup, like she couldn’t quite hold it in.
"Here," he said, turning both of them so he could wrap his arms around her. He kissed her hair and waited for the dam to break, and when it did, he held her and whispered to her. She burrowed into his shoulder and cried without words while he rocked her back and forth.
I don't think this is evidence of a new, new, new Doctor. He's always been pretty good at offering quiet comfort. He's just terrible at talking through it.
In time - a seemingly very, very long time but only moments in reality, which he wondered at - her sobs stopped. Every few breaths, she sniffed and caught her breath. When she spoke, her voice was lower and full of feeling.
I don't like that aside in the middle of the first sentence and I wish I'd cut it out.
"I didn't think about him tonight," Rose confessed into his shoulder. "Not once. I always did, before. Before I went to sleep, I thought about what you were doing, if you were all right. Tonight when we - I didn't even think about him at all."
This hearkens back to the first time the Doctor saw Rose's brown pinstriped bed in the third part of The Private Universe. The Doctor could easily visualize Rose in that bed, dreaming about him on the other side of the Void. She, of course, did just that.
The Doctor's new life was filled with comparisons and contrasts, but his thoughts had been focused on the changes and not the welfare of his doppelganger.
Bless him, but he is a bit self-centered.
"I'm afraid I'll forget him," she continued. "You're right here, and it's so easy to forget because I - I love you so much, but he's still out there - you're still out there and I'll never know. Will you know when he … you know, when he regenerates?" She sat back and looked at him. Her tear-streaked face was full of both fear and hope, and he couldn't lie to her, not even to assuage her grief and guilt.
The pronoun scrambling in that paragraph is quite deliberate. Rose is talking about the Doctors individually and as a collective.
"No."
I wrote this well before The End of Time, but naturally Ten's regeneration was on my mind. Really, it doesn't matter how he regenerates for the purposes of Ten II and Rose. I've seen a lot of stories with poignant scenes where one of them somehow knows or senses the regeneration, but for purposes here, I wanted them well and truly cut off. Ten II knows it. This is final.
"Would you even tell me if you could?" she bit back.
That stung, even if she had good cause to doubt his truthfulness when it came to protecting her feelings or her welfare. "I would." He thought he meant it.
The Doctor avoided the question of whether or not he'd leave her behind for her own good in The Quiet Chamber. With this question, I think he means it, too. He hasn't told her any lies, other than the one of misdirection about Donna, which he deals with later on here.
They were both quiet for a moment, looking away from one another. "I'm sorry," Rose said in a soft voice.
"You don't have to be sorry, not ever." He met her eyes and gave her a smile that he knew was weak. "I won't know. It could be years and years anyway." That wasn't a lie. It could happen that way, although he rather thought not. He wished he could offer consolation that someone would be looking out for his double, but the insinuations that they both had made on the beach about Donna's continued presence were disingenuous enough.
Yep. Lying Doctors and the lies they tell.
"It could have happened yesterday," she said. "And what if - what if you're both wrong again? What if he shows up tomorrow?"
The Doctor ran his hand through his hair, hating the aching pain writ across her face. "I won't make any sweeping statements this time, but I do know one thing for certain." He swallowed. "He doesn't intend to come back."
I believe he didn't intend to come back the first time, either. Rose found him, not the other way around.
She cried harder at that, and he felt he had no right to hold her, but he did. Her body shook and she didn't try to hold in her anguish this time, which he thought at once was very positive and oh, so terrible. It was impossible to hold himself at an emotional distance from her when he had given in to intimacy between them, and a small voice inside him noted that he had been very right to keep those walls in place before. He cringed at what he might have done for her now, faced with her grief. He'd have gone as mad as Dalek Caan and broken the universe in just as profound a way.
I like the comparisons to Dalek Caan more in hindsight, even. TWoM showed us a bit of what that kind of Doctor could be like. If the Doctor had snapped in the same way right after Doomsday, he would have been exactly like Dalek Caan.
It was easier now that he didn't actually have that choice to make.
He's got a lot less pressure on him. He's brilliant, and he can still save the world with a shoestring, charisma, and his gob, but he's not equipped with the power of his TARDIS and the consequences of that power. I fully intend to explore the idea that Ten II feels as much responsibility for the universe as he ever did, but it's not quite the same thing and he's acutely conscious of that.
"I know something else, Rose. I'm here," he said, as much for his benefit as for hers. "I'll stay. Forever."
"Forever" being relative, of course.
When she stopped crying this second time, he kissed her and skimmed her face with his fingers, tracing the shadows under her eyes and the moist tracks of her tears.
"I need to tell you something," she whispered into the space between them. "I did - I did something awful, and I think I had to, but it was still awful."
Turn Left shows a hard, determined Rose - still compassionate, to be sure, but very Doctor-like in her resolve to set things right. Jackie's worry about her becoming the Doctor was quite well placed, but it turned out that the separation from him is what drove it. At any rate, the responsibility of what Rose decided weighs on her.
"You don't have to -"
"I need to," she interrupted, putting her finger across his lips. "I need you to know. I kept jumping, and no matter where I landed, I almost always found some reference to Donna. I met her for the first time when the ship with all the fat blobs took off."
"Adipose," he corrected automatically from behind her finger.
He's pedantic even in dramatic, emotional moments. Rose ignores him.
"I thought I'd found you then. I thought for sure you'd be there and you were, I'd just missed you by a few minutes. It made me - God. I didn't recognise her until later, after we started seeing her all over the place." She shivered, and her hand slid down to rest limply on his shoulder. "When I found her again, it was all wrong. You were -" She swallowed and continued, her expression darkening with resolve. "You had drowned under the Thames. It wasn't supposed to happen that way, and then it got worse for everyone, so much worse. There was this horrible future and the only thing that had changed was Donna. She didn't meet you."
I think Rose's desire to change the outcome seen in Turn Left is not simply about her need to find the Doctor. It's a horrible future for the Earth, and she's compassionate enough to want to change that.
He didn't want to talk about Donna, not when he was trying so hard not to tell Rose the truth about what had happened. Instead of running, or changing the subject, or anything that he might have done to avoid the conversation, he waited and listened.
"I killed her," Rose said.
That's a fairly harsh assessment, but I think from Rose's POV, it's how she would feel.
Stunned, the Doctor blinked, frowned, and squinted at her face. She was utterly serious. "What?"
"In that other universe, I mean. We had the TARDIS, because you were gone, and I told her she had to die so the other her would meet you. I made her trust me, and then I sent her back to die. I killed her."
She's discounting the fact that Donna chose her fate, but even so, it's terrible to be the messenger in that situation.
"Rose," he said, with all the compassion and empathy and love he could put into the single word. He closed his eyes and drew her close to him again, feeling her heartbeat hammering in her chest and her breath coming quick and shallow. Did she think he would reject her, or hate her, or condemn what she had done? He, who had sent countless people and even species to their deaths in the name of Time?
He's a very loving hypocrite. Isn't this exactly what he seems to do with most everyone except Rose?
"Sometimes -" The platitudes were dancing on the tip of his tongue. He knew them so very well, because he aimed them at his own conscience often enough. Preserve the timeline. Prevent the paradox. Protect the greater good. They were bitter enough consolation when he tried to use them on himself, and he couldn't spout any off for Rose, not today, not anymore. He offered what he knew to be truth. "I understand."
I think this is the most important part of the story, right here. He's acknowledging how hollow those statements ring, even inside his own skull. In a way, he's forgiving himself in the same way he forgives Rose.
Rose let out a long, juddering breath and collapsed against him. "Thank you. Thank you. I had to tell you."
Confession is good for the soul.
"I know," he said softly. "There's something I need to tell you, too." He felt dazed, unsteady. He knew it would hurt her to hear this, but he couldn't keep it from her, not forever, and he felt that he could burst with the not-telling. "Donna's not with him anymore. Her mind can't handle the metacrisis. There are two choices, either to let her die or to take it all away, and I know what I would have done."
He hadn't intended to tell her - was actually making an effort not to tell her even though it hurt him, because he wanted to protect her. I think he would have eventually, but her revelation about what she did to Donna opened something up inside him, and it wasn't going to stay hidden.
"What do you mean, take it away?"
"Erase her memories and hide all that knowledge away. It would be like she'd never met me."
Rose's mouth made a perfect O. "But that - that's like erasing her! She'd never let him do that!"
Rose gave Donna information and pushed her to a decision. The Doctor kept information from her and made the decision himself. She facilitated Donna's death for the greater good. The Doctor kept Donna alive for just her own good. I know which one I'm more comfortable with.
"No. She wouldn't."
He could read the horror on her face and waited for the ensuing outrage. Rose continued to stare at him open-mouthed. Twitching with discomfort, he resisted the urge to flee, to find something to do in the loo or the kitchen or maybe the small office down the hallway. He deserved every bit of outrage she could level at him and the least he could do was to face it like a man.
"Would you have done that?" she asked.
More questions about the kind of man he is.
"To save her life? Yes." He felt rising pressure inside him and fire in his eyes, and this time, the breaking dam was inside him. He leaned into Rose and felt her arms come around him as he stifled a sob.
"It's all right," she whispered. "I've got you."
He clutched at her as if she might be snatched away from him otherwise and gasped with the agony of his grief and guilt. Rose held on, and as he had done earlier, she soothed him with words of love and comfort. He sobbed over most of them, but he heard the intent.
This is a lot like the grief and guilt he cried though following the Master's death, but this time, he has Rose to hold him though it, just as he did for her earlier.
When he quieted, she had one hand pressed against his back and one stroking his hair. He felt shaky, almost newborn, and he turned his head just enough to kiss her shoulder. "Look at the pair of us," he said, trying for casual and succeeding only in sounding gruff to his own ears.
"I think it's normal," Rose said.
"Oi, who wants normal? I think we both confessed to killing the same woman."
Ouch. Not exactly true, on either count, but it's protective gallows humor.
"Don't joke."
"It's a defense mechanism," he protested. "I need to have at least one of them left." He released himself from her embrace and lay back on the bed.
"You don't have to defend yourself from me," she said, settling down beside him.
"It's not you I'm worried about."
He's always been his own worst critic, but he clearly was worried about how Rose would react.
They were quiet for a few minutes. "Are we going to be okay?" she asked finally.
"Oh, yeah," he said with relish. "We're going to be more than okay. Well, as long as the therapy bills don't drive us to ruin." She sniffed. "I heard that. It was a bit of a laugh, wasn't it?"
"Tell me about her," she said instead of answering.
He smiled. It still hurt, would always hurt, but he had to try to reconcile what he had loved and lost with what he still had. "She hunted me down," he began. "She said that she didn't want to travel with me but then she changed her mind and went looking." Both of them had found him, hadn't they? His best mate and his love. "You should have seen all the luggage she brought. And a hatbox! Oh, you'd love this - we solved a murder with Agatha Christie!"
Rose, smiling, listened.
I wanted both of them to come away with this with some healing, to be able to talk freely about his best mate and those times. There's a lot of grief and tragedy in his life that Rose doesn't know about, and he's resolved earlier in this story to share that. It's good to give a little of the bad, and then remember the fun times. Also, it's true - Rose would have loved the adventure with Agatha Christie.
In the wee hours of the night, the Doctor became fuzzily aware that Rose had untangled herself from him. Still more asleep than not, he shifted to settle into the warm spot her body had made, and he would have drifted back into dreams if it hadn’t been for the sound. He sat bolt upright, blinking to clear his vision and see her where she perched on the edge of the bed.
I like the image of them sleeping in the same bed, and the Doctor being just familiar enough with that to adjust when she moves.
The sound came again, and it tore at him. He put a hand on her bare back and felt the trembling there. "Rose," he said softly.
"I’m all right."
"You’re crying."
"It’s nothing - I just -" Her next sob was louder, half hiccup, like she couldn’t quite hold it in.
"Here," he said, turning both of them so he could wrap his arms around her. He kissed her hair and waited for the dam to break, and when it did, he held her and whispered to her. She burrowed into his shoulder and cried without words while he rocked her back and forth.
I don't think this is evidence of a new, new, new Doctor. He's always been pretty good at offering quiet comfort. He's just terrible at talking through it.
In time - a seemingly very, very long time but only moments in reality, which he wondered at - her sobs stopped. Every few breaths, she sniffed and caught her breath. When she spoke, her voice was lower and full of feeling.
I don't like that aside in the middle of the first sentence and I wish I'd cut it out.
"I didn't think about him tonight," Rose confessed into his shoulder. "Not once. I always did, before. Before I went to sleep, I thought about what you were doing, if you were all right. Tonight when we - I didn't even think about him at all."
This hearkens back to the first time the Doctor saw Rose's brown pinstriped bed in the third part of The Private Universe. The Doctor could easily visualize Rose in that bed, dreaming about him on the other side of the Void. She, of course, did just that.
The Doctor's new life was filled with comparisons and contrasts, but his thoughts had been focused on the changes and not the welfare of his doppelganger.
Bless him, but he is a bit self-centered.
"I'm afraid I'll forget him," she continued. "You're right here, and it's so easy to forget because I - I love you so much, but he's still out there - you're still out there and I'll never know. Will you know when he … you know, when he regenerates?" She sat back and looked at him. Her tear-streaked face was full of both fear and hope, and he couldn't lie to her, not even to assuage her grief and guilt.
The pronoun scrambling in that paragraph is quite deliberate. Rose is talking about the Doctors individually and as a collective.
"No."
I wrote this well before The End of Time, but naturally Ten's regeneration was on my mind. Really, it doesn't matter how he regenerates for the purposes of Ten II and Rose. I've seen a lot of stories with poignant scenes where one of them somehow knows or senses the regeneration, but for purposes here, I wanted them well and truly cut off. Ten II knows it. This is final.
"Would you even tell me if you could?" she bit back.
That stung, even if she had good cause to doubt his truthfulness when it came to protecting her feelings or her welfare. "I would." He thought he meant it.
The Doctor avoided the question of whether or not he'd leave her behind for her own good in The Quiet Chamber. With this question, I think he means it, too. He hasn't told her any lies, other than the one of misdirection about Donna, which he deals with later on here.
They were both quiet for a moment, looking away from one another. "I'm sorry," Rose said in a soft voice.
"You don't have to be sorry, not ever." He met her eyes and gave her a smile that he knew was weak. "I won't know. It could be years and years anyway." That wasn't a lie. It could happen that way, although he rather thought not. He wished he could offer consolation that someone would be looking out for his double, but the insinuations that they both had made on the beach about Donna's continued presence were disingenuous enough.
Yep. Lying Doctors and the lies they tell.
"It could have happened yesterday," she said. "And what if - what if you're both wrong again? What if he shows up tomorrow?"
The Doctor ran his hand through his hair, hating the aching pain writ across her face. "I won't make any sweeping statements this time, but I do know one thing for certain." He swallowed. "He doesn't intend to come back."
I believe he didn't intend to come back the first time, either. Rose found him, not the other way around.
She cried harder at that, and he felt he had no right to hold her, but he did. Her body shook and she didn't try to hold in her anguish this time, which he thought at once was very positive and oh, so terrible. It was impossible to hold himself at an emotional distance from her when he had given in to intimacy between them, and a small voice inside him noted that he had been very right to keep those walls in place before. He cringed at what he might have done for her now, faced with her grief. He'd have gone as mad as Dalek Caan and broken the universe in just as profound a way.
I like the comparisons to Dalek Caan more in hindsight, even. TWoM showed us a bit of what that kind of Doctor could be like. If the Doctor had snapped in the same way right after Doomsday, he would have been exactly like Dalek Caan.
It was easier now that he didn't actually have that choice to make.
He's got a lot less pressure on him. He's brilliant, and he can still save the world with a shoestring, charisma, and his gob, but he's not equipped with the power of his TARDIS and the consequences of that power. I fully intend to explore the idea that Ten II feels as much responsibility for the universe as he ever did, but it's not quite the same thing and he's acutely conscious of that.
"I know something else, Rose. I'm here," he said, as much for his benefit as for hers. "I'll stay. Forever."
"Forever" being relative, of course.
When she stopped crying this second time, he kissed her and skimmed her face with his fingers, tracing the shadows under her eyes and the moist tracks of her tears.
"I need to tell you something," she whispered into the space between them. "I did - I did something awful, and I think I had to, but it was still awful."
Turn Left shows a hard, determined Rose - still compassionate, to be sure, but very Doctor-like in her resolve to set things right. Jackie's worry about her becoming the Doctor was quite well placed, but it turned out that the separation from him is what drove it. At any rate, the responsibility of what Rose decided weighs on her.
"You don't have to -"
"I need to," she interrupted, putting her finger across his lips. "I need you to know. I kept jumping, and no matter where I landed, I almost always found some reference to Donna. I met her for the first time when the ship with all the fat blobs took off."
"Adipose," he corrected automatically from behind her finger.
He's pedantic even in dramatic, emotional moments. Rose ignores him.
"I thought I'd found you then. I thought for sure you'd be there and you were, I'd just missed you by a few minutes. It made me - God. I didn't recognise her until later, after we started seeing her all over the place." She shivered, and her hand slid down to rest limply on his shoulder. "When I found her again, it was all wrong. You were -" She swallowed and continued, her expression darkening with resolve. "You had drowned under the Thames. It wasn't supposed to happen that way, and then it got worse for everyone, so much worse. There was this horrible future and the only thing that had changed was Donna. She didn't meet you."
I think Rose's desire to change the outcome seen in Turn Left is not simply about her need to find the Doctor. It's a horrible future for the Earth, and she's compassionate enough to want to change that.
He didn't want to talk about Donna, not when he was trying so hard not to tell Rose the truth about what had happened. Instead of running, or changing the subject, or anything that he might have done to avoid the conversation, he waited and listened.
"I killed her," Rose said.
That's a fairly harsh assessment, but I think from Rose's POV, it's how she would feel.
Stunned, the Doctor blinked, frowned, and squinted at her face. She was utterly serious. "What?"
"In that other universe, I mean. We had the TARDIS, because you were gone, and I told her she had to die so the other her would meet you. I made her trust me, and then I sent her back to die. I killed her."
She's discounting the fact that Donna chose her fate, but even so, it's terrible to be the messenger in that situation.
"Rose," he said, with all the compassion and empathy and love he could put into the single word. He closed his eyes and drew her close to him again, feeling her heartbeat hammering in her chest and her breath coming quick and shallow. Did she think he would reject her, or hate her, or condemn what she had done? He, who had sent countless people and even species to their deaths in the name of Time?
He's a very loving hypocrite. Isn't this exactly what he seems to do with most everyone except Rose?
"Sometimes -" The platitudes were dancing on the tip of his tongue. He knew them so very well, because he aimed them at his own conscience often enough. Preserve the timeline. Prevent the paradox. Protect the greater good. They were bitter enough consolation when he tried to use them on himself, and he couldn't spout any off for Rose, not today, not anymore. He offered what he knew to be truth. "I understand."
I think this is the most important part of the story, right here. He's acknowledging how hollow those statements ring, even inside his own skull. In a way, he's forgiving himself in the same way he forgives Rose.
Rose let out a long, juddering breath and collapsed against him. "Thank you. Thank you. I had to tell you."
Confession is good for the soul.
"I know," he said softly. "There's something I need to tell you, too." He felt dazed, unsteady. He knew it would hurt her to hear this, but he couldn't keep it from her, not forever, and he felt that he could burst with the not-telling. "Donna's not with him anymore. Her mind can't handle the metacrisis. There are two choices, either to let her die or to take it all away, and I know what I would have done."
He hadn't intended to tell her - was actually making an effort not to tell her even though it hurt him, because he wanted to protect her. I think he would have eventually, but her revelation about what she did to Donna opened something up inside him, and it wasn't going to stay hidden.
"What do you mean, take it away?"
"Erase her memories and hide all that knowledge away. It would be like she'd never met me."
Rose's mouth made a perfect O. "But that - that's like erasing her! She'd never let him do that!"
Rose gave Donna information and pushed her to a decision. The Doctor kept information from her and made the decision himself. She facilitated Donna's death for the greater good. The Doctor kept Donna alive for just her own good. I know which one I'm more comfortable with.
"No. She wouldn't."
He could read the horror on her face and waited for the ensuing outrage. Rose continued to stare at him open-mouthed. Twitching with discomfort, he resisted the urge to flee, to find something to do in the loo or the kitchen or maybe the small office down the hallway. He deserved every bit of outrage she could level at him and the least he could do was to face it like a man.
"Would you have done that?" she asked.
More questions about the kind of man he is.
"To save her life? Yes." He felt rising pressure inside him and fire in his eyes, and this time, the breaking dam was inside him. He leaned into Rose and felt her arms come around him as he stifled a sob.
"It's all right," she whispered. "I've got you."
He clutched at her as if she might be snatched away from him otherwise and gasped with the agony of his grief and guilt. Rose held on, and as he had done earlier, she soothed him with words of love and comfort. He sobbed over most of them, but he heard the intent.
This is a lot like the grief and guilt he cried though following the Master's death, but this time, he has Rose to hold him though it, just as he did for her earlier.
When he quieted, she had one hand pressed against his back and one stroking his hair. He felt shaky, almost newborn, and he turned his head just enough to kiss her shoulder. "Look at the pair of us," he said, trying for casual and succeeding only in sounding gruff to his own ears.
"I think it's normal," Rose said.
"Oi, who wants normal? I think we both confessed to killing the same woman."
Ouch. Not exactly true, on either count, but it's protective gallows humor.
"Don't joke."
"It's a defense mechanism," he protested. "I need to have at least one of them left." He released himself from her embrace and lay back on the bed.
"You don't have to defend yourself from me," she said, settling down beside him.
"It's not you I'm worried about."
He's always been his own worst critic, but he clearly was worried about how Rose would react.
They were quiet for a few minutes. "Are we going to be okay?" she asked finally.
"Oh, yeah," he said with relish. "We're going to be more than okay. Well, as long as the therapy bills don't drive us to ruin." She sniffed. "I heard that. It was a bit of a laugh, wasn't it?"
"Tell me about her," she said instead of answering.
He smiled. It still hurt, would always hurt, but he had to try to reconcile what he had loved and lost with what he still had. "She hunted me down," he began. "She said that she didn't want to travel with me but then she changed her mind and went looking." Both of them had found him, hadn't they? His best mate and his love. "You should have seen all the luggage she brought. And a hatbox! Oh, you'd love this - we solved a murder with Agatha Christie!"
Rose, smiling, listened.
I wanted both of them to come away with this with some healing, to be able to talk freely about his best mate and those times. There's a lot of grief and tragedy in his life that Rose doesn't know about, and he's resolved earlier in this story to share that. It's good to give a little of the bad, and then remember the fun times. Also, it's true - Rose would have loved the adventure with Agatha Christie.