Meta: essay on Doctor Who
It's not really an essay-essay, but it's a cheap and easy sort-of-essay. I lack rigour.
Perhaps we can call it my crazy-fan meta post for DW series three. Assume spoilers for everything up to and including Last of the Time Lords.
I squee with the rest of you, because there is much to squee about, regarding the end of series 3: Martha being awesome, David Tennant making me cry like a little baby during the Master’s death scene (so affecting. oh my god. someone give that man a BAFTA), Jack being the Face of Boe (this cracks me up), etc. But what I really want to talk about are the major themes of the season and the way they were deployed and paid off in the last episodes. I’ll say up front that much of this is owed to eruthros, with whom I’ve been discussing the season all year long, and who first came up with the “twinning” theme. She is so smart! Many of these ideas come from her or were thought up in partnership with her.
So, themes:
Twinning/Duplicating/Hybridity:
As I say, eruthros called this one after watching “Smith and Jones,” the clever girl. She saw the Doctor-with-a-tie / Doctor-with-no-tie as a subtle hint that the rest of the series would be about “when the Doctor is not the Doctor.” In that moment, the Doctor doesn’t have knowledge of himself until he completes a little paradox (crossing your own time line is only used for cheap tricks, remember).
There’s twinning in the structure, too, by repeating the pattern from the last seasons - we do the historical episode (Shakespeare) followed by the New New York episode (Gridlock), etc. Except, in Gridlock, we’re trapped in the undercity, in the bits of the city we never got to see in New Earth. The cars look like TARDISes turned on their sides: boxes that are incapable of moving in time or space. They’re everything the TARDIS is (they support you, keep you alive, keep you connected to other people) except for the one most crucial, most identifying thing: they don’t move.
Also, the underside of the city has Pharmacytown, where the green moon-symbol doesn’t represent healing, but rather forgetting. All of the little medicine-badges that people wear on their necks might as well be Forget: the girl who comes in buys Forget, but the other ones that are being sold - Happy, Anger, Bliss - are just Forget in another form. Which is why the Doctor, at the end of the episode, has to remember by telling Martha about Gallifrey. Which is why the Jack-face of Boe’s long memory is responsible, at the end, for telling him that he’s not alone (that the Doctor has a connection to the past). Forgetting is just like healing (you feel better) except in the most crucial way (you aren’t healed).
So then there’s Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks, where once again we have the city/undercity dichotomy. Dalek Sek wants to be the ultimate Dalek (by conquering) but his method makes him lose his most essential Dalek-ness (genetic purity). Things are familiar, but not quite. Also, we have Laslo and Tallulah doubling for the Doctor/Companion relationship, as in this dialogue:
Tallulah: “Who are you?”
Laslo: “I was lonely.”
Tallulah: “Who are you?”
Laslo: “I wanted to see you.”
Tallulah: “Who are you?”
Laslo: “I’m so sorry.”
Lonely and sorry, that’s our Doctor. The middle bit is the bit he usually doesn’t say.
Obviously, the big moment for the “twinning” theme is in Human Nature/Family of Blood, where the Doctor is the Doctor but is not the Doctor. John Smith is casually cruel (when he allows the kid to be beaten) in the way that the Doctor would never be (he might be intentionally cruel, or casually kind, but never casually cruel). See where this is going? It’s the Doctor duplicated, but without the thing that makes him most the Doctor (which is, in this episode, the inability to love). As with the Daleks, we get the impression that the Doctor might be better off when he’s wrong, especially during the sequence where he traps the Family of Blood in their jail cells for eternity.
Twinning/Hybridity payoff in the last three episodes:
So, of course, this pays off with the Toclafane, who are humans in the way that the Doctor thinks is most important - they certainly have a will to survive - but they are not-human in the way that is, in the end, actually important: they lack compassion. Really, they lack maturity: they’re children, they’re the kid from Utopia with the skies full of diamonds. Like the Doctor in Gridlock, the Toclafane have regressed - forgotten what they were - instead of healing. They are humans, but with children’s minds, without memory, they are a grotesque parody of humans.
Secondly, we have the TARDIS-that’s-not-a-TARDIS. The TARDIS isn’t to be used for paradoxes (except for cheap tricks). It’s made into a grotesque parody of itself, of the thing it usually does. The TARDIS is so often used to facilitate survival, the survival of humanity especially, but in this instance it’s taken to the extreme, made horrible, made red and surrounded by a fence. Grotesque.
And, of course, the Master/Doctor twinning is evident enough that I probably don’t need to discuss it: the way the Master has the Doctor’s sense of humour and the Doctor’s mania, but lacks the thing that makes the Doctor the Doctor (again, love). The parallels between the two are manifold. I will mention, though, that Professor Yana is casually kind in much the way that John Smith is casually cruel.
eta:He says the same thing over and over in this season and in the last: "I'm sorry" and "I'm so sorry," of course. And he says those two things to the Master, but there's another thing he says, too: "I forgive you." I forgive you, unlike I'm sorry, admits that something has been done to cause the Doctor pain: it admits that there is something to forgive. It is a moment of proper healing, there at the end of Last of the Time Lords. It's the next logical step after "I'm sorry," and it's the one he's been trying to say throughout S2 and S3. To forgive means to acknowledge the memories that Forget seeks to repress./eta
Jack and Martha also get to be Companions-who-aren’t-quite-Companions, interestingly. Jack lacks the most fundamental companion quality: he can’t die. Companions are defined by the way they wither and age and die, as we find out in School Reunion in series 2; Jack’s inability to do those things freaks the Doctor out, even though it should be the thing he most wants. Martha is in love with the Doctor, which is the other defining companion-quality (which Jack has too, of course) but it’s a sober, mature sort of love. It's not a Rose-love, that sees him and forgets his faults (as in Tooth and Claw). It's a love that sees him and his faults, and forgives instead of forgetting. I couldn’t have loved her more during her last scenes in the TARDIS, by the way. Couldn’t have loved her more.
2) Theme Two: Words and Names
This is set up initially by Smith and Jones, where the ability to categorize you by your name (human/non-human) is key: the bad guy hides her name to keep herself safe. Then, of course, this is even more so in The Shakespeare Code, which is, as it proclaims, all about the power of words, and the old idea that naming something gives you power over it. “I name thee, carrionite,” the Doctor yells, and the bad thing goes away. When Martha yells it, it doesn’t have the same effect (she’s not at that point yet: she hasn’t learned how to wield the power of the name).
And of course this is the point of the whole series, because there's one name that we hear all through series 3: Saxon Saxon Saxon. The Master uses technology to get his name into everyone’s heads, to take people over, to make them stop thinking. Vote Saxon is the same as Forget, the same as Bliss. Trust me. Don’t think.
This is why the Master names the Toclafane after a Gallifreyan boogeyman. It’s important, how things are named. The Toclafane are absolutely the Doctor's nightmare.
So it’s inevitable that the saving grace (literally, grace) of the last episode should be the world chanting the Doctor’s name. The power of words, the power of The Word, in a blatantly (but somehow unoffensively) Christian metaphor. It’s all very Foucauldian: the means of oppression and the means of resistance are the same structure (the Archangel network).
3) Theme Three: Blogging and Human Connection
It’s all right there in Gridlock. These people are so cut off from anything that could speak to humanity, and yet there is that scene where they all sing a hymn together, and it lifts us up. There’s something about humans en masse that is beautiful and powerful, something about this technology-aided connection between everyone that creates something important. Maybe it’s the Doctor who saves everyone in that episode, but maybe it’s their singing. Maybe it's their "friends list" through which they can talk to other people. ;) At the end, their singing is the background to the moment when the Doctor decides to remember, to give up Forget and Anger and Happy and Bliss for a moment and heal. And we need Martha there for that, too: the importance is in connection.
In Blink, we learn that we have power over the things we watch - the things we watch closely. Blink is an episode about fandom/fannishness, in much the way that episode 10 was, last year (that was the Absorbaloff episode). One of the coolest things about Blink is that the angels don’t just stop moving when Sally or Kathy or Larry looks at them: the angels stop moving when WE look at them, when the camera looks at them. Watch the episode again: there are countless moments where the angels move, not because Sally has turned away, but because the camera’s eyeline has been blocked. Our attention matters. Our attention to DVD extras and easter eggs matters. Active viewership can save the world. Pay attention to stories, because they can hurt you. Pay attention to stories, because they have power (as we learned in The Shakespeare Code).
In Utopia, the Doctor takes Jack and Martha to task for “blogging” - by which he means, gossiping, by which he means, analyzing the patterns of the Doctor’s behaviour. And it’s a nice little joke about us, and about the thing that I’m doing right now, but it’s also important. Don’t be so quick to dismiss blogging, Doctor - it’s what’s gonna save you, two episodes later.
The Master uses viral marketing. He uses the power of the word - Vote Saxon - and the power of the word is turned against him in the end by Martha’s blogging, her spreading of the stories of the Doctor across the Earth. Also, more literally: Martha uses the countdown. Why does she know to use the countdown? Because the Doctor told her to, yes, but also: because she’s watched Doctor Who. Because she’s a fan. Because she can pay attention to the way the Master operates (which is to say, the Master, by his own admission, can’t resist a countdown). She defeats him by watching him, the same way that Sally and Larry defeat the angels in Blink.
This is twinning, too - Saxon is the Bad Wolf of the season: it’s the thing you fear most and it’s the thing that will redeem you. Archangel is the father, the master, the thing that holds you down, until you redeem it for your own purposes. There’s a parody of divinity in Archangel, until Martha uses faith and prayer to restore divinity to it: then it actually becomes an Archangel, invested with this power, and the Doctor actually becomes an angel, too.
And, as I say above, she does it by using the technology that has been put in place to oppress her (Archangel). She manipulates the technology to a new purpose, to bring humanity together rather than sunder it, and perhaps I’m crazy, but that’s the internet. That’s us. I mean, god - the Master uses the THEME SONG to control the world. He uses the Doctor Who theme song. The song that’s supposed to draw you in from the kitchen, the song that’s supposed to represent something that makes you better, he uses to shut you up, to make you stop thinking. So of course the theme song has to be redeemed at the end, and it is, because the theme song in the hands of a fan (Martha) is a force for good.
4) Theme Four: Survival and the Hollow Men
In The Lazarus Experiment, Professor Lazarus quotes Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.” The bit he quotes is the second-most-famous bit:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
and the Doctor comes in with the line that concludes the stanza: “falls the shadow.” There are, literally, hollow men (the stuffed men, headpiece filled with straw) in this season, the Scarecrows in Human Nature and The Family of Blood: that episode, like this poem, is about World War One, about the manner in which war empties the humanity of the enemy, and in doing so, empties the humanity of you. Public school boys fighting scarecrows is exactly, exactly the manner in which WWI was publicized in 1914; unfortunately, it wasn’t the reality.
Think of the following bit:
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
If there’s a better description of Ten than “between the desire and the spasm falls the shadow,” I don’t know what it is. I’m not going to go through the poem line by line - mostly because that would up the english lit geek quotient of this essay by about 700% - but I will say that it’s all about entropy, about the slow death of the universe: it’s full of images of dying suns, like the one in episode 7, “42,” and dying worlds, like the dead universe in “Utopia.” But go and read the whole poem (not just for this reason, but because it’s amazing). It’s got the whole season in it: deliberate disguises and stone images and hollow men and dying stars. Read "The Hollow Men." Even the awesome cop-guy from Blink is in there, because it's he who says, after taking the slow road: "Life is long and you are hot." Life is very long.
And think about survival in it: because survival is the thing we desire most and least, to Eliot: it’s the weariness (life is very long) and the fear of death (not with a bang but a whimper). This is the way the world ends: this is the way the human race ends, in “Last of the Time Lords.”
But ending with a whimper, in DW, isn’t quite the same as in Eliot, though they draw a lot of themes from him. In DW, ending with a whimper is precisely the thing that the Doctor has to learn to accept. When the Master refuses to regenerate - let me pause to say, again, that I cried so hard I thought I was going to cough up my heart - and the Doctor begs him to keep going, to survive, it’s really the Master who has the right idea. Things die. Things have to die (like Rose, like the Toclafane). Things have to end (even Jack, eventually, will die). The universe has to end. But it doesn’t make everything meaningless, the way that Lucy sees it (Lucy’s another twin, of course, an anti-companion) it makes everything important, in that old-school existential optimist way. If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do, to quote Joss.
The thing the Doctor most admires, throughout this series, is the human race’s ability to survive. He and Jack both say it explicitly, more than once, in Utopia, and it’s there in Gridlock and it’s the thing the Daleks want to learn in Evolution of the Daleks and it’s the thing the Doctor enables us to do. But survival, as in Lazarus, is only good so long as it doesn’t change the things that make you yourself. As soon as surviving means losing what you are (turning into an evil bug, turning into child-like metal spheres that literally destroy their ancestors, even the Doctor turning into a human) it’s no longer worth it. The thing that makes humans human is the thing that causes so much destruction, at the end of the season. Just humans out there at the end of the universe trying to survive. But the thing that makes humans human, in the end, is the thing that takes humanity away from humans.
S’pretty great.
Some random points, to wrap up:
a) When the Doctor came out of his little straw-floored tent (his fucking doghouse) at the beginning of the episode, it bothered me. I don’t just mean that it bothered me: I mean that it freaked me out. I couldn’t even look at it, it was so grotesque. And when he was all gollum-Doctor and trapped in a birdcage, I couldn’t look at that either. It made me feel terrible, throughout the first half of the episode. It made me feel nauseated to watch it, to watch the Doctor crawling out of his doghouse. And maybe that makes the ending so much better: because it’s my refusal to accept the Doctor like that, and Martha’s refusal, and the world’s refusal, that brings him back. It’s so intolerable that we all have to cry out with one voice to stop it. But...I can’t even think about it too much.
b) On Jack blowing up the TARDIS: poor Jack. It’s the companions in this episode that bear all the weight of this. It’s Jack who has to destroy the thing that makes us better, sets us free, enables us to move in time and space. Awful. And it’s Lucy who has to kill the Master: she too has to destroy something she loves, or loved, and it breaks her. Martha has to leave the Doctor, even though she loves him. It’s about growing up, but it’s also about Companions doing the thing that the Doctor had to do, pre-series: the Doctor destroyed Gallifrey. The Companions destroy the Doctor, and the Master, and the TARDIS. The end.
c) The Doctor clutching the Master’s dead body at the end was, as I’ve said and as you probably already noticed, heartwrenching. I love RTD for this: we don’t see the Time War, we don’t see that moment when the Doctor blows everything up. We just see this: the symbol for everything the Doctor’s already lost, dying once again. It’s so much better than seeing the Time War, because it’s so much more personal, the Doctor’s greatest enemy and old friend (husband). When David Tennant does that bit, it’s like he’s mourning for everything he’s been mourning for since series 1 episode 1, all over again, all concurrently. Life is very long.
d) On slash in Utopia/Last of the Time Lords. This is interesting, because I mean...we’ve got a big gay Welsh fanboy at the helm of this scifi show; why, then, does the show not move beyond implication and slashy vibes to outright homosexuality? And I mean...part of me sort of thinks that slash exists because homosex can’t happen on tv, but Doctor Who is a different example, as far as I’m concerned. RTD is right there with us on the Master/Doctor thing, says in the commentary to LotTL that they ought to have been husbands. So why do we still have slashiness, instead of doing what Torchwood does (have gay sex)? I mean, yes, it’s a family show, so it’s not like people could fuck on screen, etc., but...hm. I’m not explaining this well. What I want to get at is what Eve Sedgwick calls “the open secret,” and the power of the open secret. When it’s something that you and I know, and something that RTD knows, when it’s something shared between us that isn’t stated explicitly, part of the power comes from the fact that it’s not stated explicitly. And of course the secret is sexuality. (In the Doctor’s case, the secret of his sexuality is sort of that he has one, but anyway).
And this is an example of why I love scifi so much as a genre. Or, as Samuel Delany puts it, scifi as a reading practice. Because scifi is all metaphor, is all interpretation: it relies entirely on you to watch the DVD extras and keep your eyes unblinkingly fixated on the screen, and it relies on you to realise that you can reinterpret the meanings. You can reinterpret Archangel and make salvation out of repression. You can reinterpret the telepathic field that the Master’s cast over the earth. Scifi insists that we interpret and reinterpret and that we think. This, if nothing else, is series 3: we don’t forget. We don’t forget what we are to the point that we become a parody of ourselves. We don’t blink. We don’t stop watching. We don’t stop blogging (or singing). Because there is so much more power and meaning in something that is endlessly interpretable than in something that is explicitly stated. Because we are relied on to supply part of the meaning.
That’s the end of my long rant. It’s been building for months, so pardon me if I’ve rambled on in a crazy fashion. I just loved this series so much (so. much.) and this is me articulating that love. Feel free to squee, or talk, or articulate, as you like, in the comments. :)
Perhaps we can call it my crazy-fan meta post for DW series three. Assume spoilers for everything up to and including Last of the Time Lords.
I squee with the rest of you, because there is much to squee about, regarding the end of series 3: Martha being awesome, David Tennant making me cry like a little baby during the Master’s death scene (so affecting. oh my god. someone give that man a BAFTA), Jack being the Face of Boe (this cracks me up), etc. But what I really want to talk about are the major themes of the season and the way they were deployed and paid off in the last episodes. I’ll say up front that much of this is owed to eruthros, with whom I’ve been discussing the season all year long, and who first came up with the “twinning” theme. She is so smart! Many of these ideas come from her or were thought up in partnership with her.
So, themes:
Twinning/Duplicating/Hybridity:
As I say, eruthros called this one after watching “Smith and Jones,” the clever girl. She saw the Doctor-with-a-tie / Doctor-with-no-tie as a subtle hint that the rest of the series would be about “when the Doctor is not the Doctor.” In that moment, the Doctor doesn’t have knowledge of himself until he completes a little paradox (crossing your own time line is only used for cheap tricks, remember).
There’s twinning in the structure, too, by repeating the pattern from the last seasons - we do the historical episode (Shakespeare) followed by the New New York episode (Gridlock), etc. Except, in Gridlock, we’re trapped in the undercity, in the bits of the city we never got to see in New Earth. The cars look like TARDISes turned on their sides: boxes that are incapable of moving in time or space. They’re everything the TARDIS is (they support you, keep you alive, keep you connected to other people) except for the one most crucial, most identifying thing: they don’t move.
Also, the underside of the city has Pharmacytown, where the green moon-symbol doesn’t represent healing, but rather forgetting. All of the little medicine-badges that people wear on their necks might as well be Forget: the girl who comes in buys Forget, but the other ones that are being sold - Happy, Anger, Bliss - are just Forget in another form. Which is why the Doctor, at the end of the episode, has to remember by telling Martha about Gallifrey. Which is why the Jack-face of Boe’s long memory is responsible, at the end, for telling him that he’s not alone (that the Doctor has a connection to the past). Forgetting is just like healing (you feel better) except in the most crucial way (you aren’t healed).
So then there’s Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks, where once again we have the city/undercity dichotomy. Dalek Sek wants to be the ultimate Dalek (by conquering) but his method makes him lose his most essential Dalek-ness (genetic purity). Things are familiar, but not quite. Also, we have Laslo and Tallulah doubling for the Doctor/Companion relationship, as in this dialogue:
Tallulah: “Who are you?”
Laslo: “I was lonely.”
Tallulah: “Who are you?”
Laslo: “I wanted to see you.”
Tallulah: “Who are you?”
Laslo: “I’m so sorry.”
Lonely and sorry, that’s our Doctor. The middle bit is the bit he usually doesn’t say.
Obviously, the big moment for the “twinning” theme is in Human Nature/Family of Blood, where the Doctor is the Doctor but is not the Doctor. John Smith is casually cruel (when he allows the kid to be beaten) in the way that the Doctor would never be (he might be intentionally cruel, or casually kind, but never casually cruel). See where this is going? It’s the Doctor duplicated, but without the thing that makes him most the Doctor (which is, in this episode, the inability to love). As with the Daleks, we get the impression that the Doctor might be better off when he’s wrong, especially during the sequence where he traps the Family of Blood in their jail cells for eternity.
Twinning/Hybridity payoff in the last three episodes:
So, of course, this pays off with the Toclafane, who are humans in the way that the Doctor thinks is most important - they certainly have a will to survive - but they are not-human in the way that is, in the end, actually important: they lack compassion. Really, they lack maturity: they’re children, they’re the kid from Utopia with the skies full of diamonds. Like the Doctor in Gridlock, the Toclafane have regressed - forgotten what they were - instead of healing. They are humans, but with children’s minds, without memory, they are a grotesque parody of humans.
Secondly, we have the TARDIS-that’s-not-a-TARDIS. The TARDIS isn’t to be used for paradoxes (except for cheap tricks). It’s made into a grotesque parody of itself, of the thing it usually does. The TARDIS is so often used to facilitate survival, the survival of humanity especially, but in this instance it’s taken to the extreme, made horrible, made red and surrounded by a fence. Grotesque.
And, of course, the Master/Doctor twinning is evident enough that I probably don’t need to discuss it: the way the Master has the Doctor’s sense of humour and the Doctor’s mania, but lacks the thing that makes the Doctor the Doctor (again, love). The parallels between the two are manifold. I will mention, though, that Professor Yana is casually kind in much the way that John Smith is casually cruel.
eta:He says the same thing over and over in this season and in the last: "I'm sorry" and "I'm so sorry," of course. And he says those two things to the Master, but there's another thing he says, too: "I forgive you." I forgive you, unlike I'm sorry, admits that something has been done to cause the Doctor pain: it admits that there is something to forgive. It is a moment of proper healing, there at the end of Last of the Time Lords. It's the next logical step after "I'm sorry," and it's the one he's been trying to say throughout S2 and S3. To forgive means to acknowledge the memories that Forget seeks to repress./eta
Jack and Martha also get to be Companions-who-aren’t-quite-Companions, interestingly. Jack lacks the most fundamental companion quality: he can’t die. Companions are defined by the way they wither and age and die, as we find out in School Reunion in series 2; Jack’s inability to do those things freaks the Doctor out, even though it should be the thing he most wants. Martha is in love with the Doctor, which is the other defining companion-quality (which Jack has too, of course) but it’s a sober, mature sort of love. It's not a Rose-love, that sees him and forgets his faults (as in Tooth and Claw). It's a love that sees him and his faults, and forgives instead of forgetting. I couldn’t have loved her more during her last scenes in the TARDIS, by the way. Couldn’t have loved her more.
2) Theme Two: Words and Names
This is set up initially by Smith and Jones, where the ability to categorize you by your name (human/non-human) is key: the bad guy hides her name to keep herself safe. Then, of course, this is even more so in The Shakespeare Code, which is, as it proclaims, all about the power of words, and the old idea that naming something gives you power over it. “I name thee, carrionite,” the Doctor yells, and the bad thing goes away. When Martha yells it, it doesn’t have the same effect (she’s not at that point yet: she hasn’t learned how to wield the power of the name).
And of course this is the point of the whole series, because there's one name that we hear all through series 3: Saxon Saxon Saxon. The Master uses technology to get his name into everyone’s heads, to take people over, to make them stop thinking. Vote Saxon is the same as Forget, the same as Bliss. Trust me. Don’t think.
This is why the Master names the Toclafane after a Gallifreyan boogeyman. It’s important, how things are named. The Toclafane are absolutely the Doctor's nightmare.
So it’s inevitable that the saving grace (literally, grace) of the last episode should be the world chanting the Doctor’s name. The power of words, the power of The Word, in a blatantly (but somehow unoffensively) Christian metaphor. It’s all very Foucauldian: the means of oppression and the means of resistance are the same structure (the Archangel network).
3) Theme Three: Blogging and Human Connection
It’s all right there in Gridlock. These people are so cut off from anything that could speak to humanity, and yet there is that scene where they all sing a hymn together, and it lifts us up. There’s something about humans en masse that is beautiful and powerful, something about this technology-aided connection between everyone that creates something important. Maybe it’s the Doctor who saves everyone in that episode, but maybe it’s their singing. Maybe it's their "friends list" through which they can talk to other people. ;) At the end, their singing is the background to the moment when the Doctor decides to remember, to give up Forget and Anger and Happy and Bliss for a moment and heal. And we need Martha there for that, too: the importance is in connection.
In Blink, we learn that we have power over the things we watch - the things we watch closely. Blink is an episode about fandom/fannishness, in much the way that episode 10 was, last year (that was the Absorbaloff episode). One of the coolest things about Blink is that the angels don’t just stop moving when Sally or Kathy or Larry looks at them: the angels stop moving when WE look at them, when the camera looks at them. Watch the episode again: there are countless moments where the angels move, not because Sally has turned away, but because the camera’s eyeline has been blocked. Our attention matters. Our attention to DVD extras and easter eggs matters. Active viewership can save the world. Pay attention to stories, because they can hurt you. Pay attention to stories, because they have power (as we learned in The Shakespeare Code).
In Utopia, the Doctor takes Jack and Martha to task for “blogging” - by which he means, gossiping, by which he means, analyzing the patterns of the Doctor’s behaviour. And it’s a nice little joke about us, and about the thing that I’m doing right now, but it’s also important. Don’t be so quick to dismiss blogging, Doctor - it’s what’s gonna save you, two episodes later.
The Master uses viral marketing. He uses the power of the word - Vote Saxon - and the power of the word is turned against him in the end by Martha’s blogging, her spreading of the stories of the Doctor across the Earth. Also, more literally: Martha uses the countdown. Why does she know to use the countdown? Because the Doctor told her to, yes, but also: because she’s watched Doctor Who. Because she’s a fan. Because she can pay attention to the way the Master operates (which is to say, the Master, by his own admission, can’t resist a countdown). She defeats him by watching him, the same way that Sally and Larry defeat the angels in Blink.
This is twinning, too - Saxon is the Bad Wolf of the season: it’s the thing you fear most and it’s the thing that will redeem you. Archangel is the father, the master, the thing that holds you down, until you redeem it for your own purposes. There’s a parody of divinity in Archangel, until Martha uses faith and prayer to restore divinity to it: then it actually becomes an Archangel, invested with this power, and the Doctor actually becomes an angel, too.
And, as I say above, she does it by using the technology that has been put in place to oppress her (Archangel). She manipulates the technology to a new purpose, to bring humanity together rather than sunder it, and perhaps I’m crazy, but that’s the internet. That’s us. I mean, god - the Master uses the THEME SONG to control the world. He uses the Doctor Who theme song. The song that’s supposed to draw you in from the kitchen, the song that’s supposed to represent something that makes you better, he uses to shut you up, to make you stop thinking. So of course the theme song has to be redeemed at the end, and it is, because the theme song in the hands of a fan (Martha) is a force for good.
4) Theme Four: Survival and the Hollow Men
In The Lazarus Experiment, Professor Lazarus quotes Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.” The bit he quotes is the second-most-famous bit:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
and the Doctor comes in with the line that concludes the stanza: “falls the shadow.” There are, literally, hollow men (the stuffed men, headpiece filled with straw) in this season, the Scarecrows in Human Nature and The Family of Blood: that episode, like this poem, is about World War One, about the manner in which war empties the humanity of the enemy, and in doing so, empties the humanity of you. Public school boys fighting scarecrows is exactly, exactly the manner in which WWI was publicized in 1914; unfortunately, it wasn’t the reality.
Think of the following bit:
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
If there’s a better description of Ten than “between the desire and the spasm falls the shadow,” I don’t know what it is. I’m not going to go through the poem line by line - mostly because that would up the english lit geek quotient of this essay by about 700% - but I will say that it’s all about entropy, about the slow death of the universe: it’s full of images of dying suns, like the one in episode 7, “42,” and dying worlds, like the dead universe in “Utopia.” But go and read the whole poem (not just for this reason, but because it’s amazing). It’s got the whole season in it: deliberate disguises and stone images and hollow men and dying stars. Read "The Hollow Men." Even the awesome cop-guy from Blink is in there, because it's he who says, after taking the slow road: "Life is long and you are hot." Life is very long.
And think about survival in it: because survival is the thing we desire most and least, to Eliot: it’s the weariness (life is very long) and the fear of death (not with a bang but a whimper). This is the way the world ends: this is the way the human race ends, in “Last of the Time Lords.”
But ending with a whimper, in DW, isn’t quite the same as in Eliot, though they draw a lot of themes from him. In DW, ending with a whimper is precisely the thing that the Doctor has to learn to accept. When the Master refuses to regenerate - let me pause to say, again, that I cried so hard I thought I was going to cough up my heart - and the Doctor begs him to keep going, to survive, it’s really the Master who has the right idea. Things die. Things have to die (like Rose, like the Toclafane). Things have to end (even Jack, eventually, will die). The universe has to end. But it doesn’t make everything meaningless, the way that Lucy sees it (Lucy’s another twin, of course, an anti-companion) it makes everything important, in that old-school existential optimist way. If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do, to quote Joss.
The thing the Doctor most admires, throughout this series, is the human race’s ability to survive. He and Jack both say it explicitly, more than once, in Utopia, and it’s there in Gridlock and it’s the thing the Daleks want to learn in Evolution of the Daleks and it’s the thing the Doctor enables us to do. But survival, as in Lazarus, is only good so long as it doesn’t change the things that make you yourself. As soon as surviving means losing what you are (turning into an evil bug, turning into child-like metal spheres that literally destroy their ancestors, even the Doctor turning into a human) it’s no longer worth it. The thing that makes humans human is the thing that causes so much destruction, at the end of the season. Just humans out there at the end of the universe trying to survive. But the thing that makes humans human, in the end, is the thing that takes humanity away from humans.
S’pretty great.
Some random points, to wrap up:
a) When the Doctor came out of his little straw-floored tent (his fucking doghouse) at the beginning of the episode, it bothered me. I don’t just mean that it bothered me: I mean that it freaked me out. I couldn’t even look at it, it was so grotesque. And when he was all gollum-Doctor and trapped in a birdcage, I couldn’t look at that either. It made me feel terrible, throughout the first half of the episode. It made me feel nauseated to watch it, to watch the Doctor crawling out of his doghouse. And maybe that makes the ending so much better: because it’s my refusal to accept the Doctor like that, and Martha’s refusal, and the world’s refusal, that brings him back. It’s so intolerable that we all have to cry out with one voice to stop it. But...I can’t even think about it too much.
b) On Jack blowing up the TARDIS: poor Jack. It’s the companions in this episode that bear all the weight of this. It’s Jack who has to destroy the thing that makes us better, sets us free, enables us to move in time and space. Awful. And it’s Lucy who has to kill the Master: she too has to destroy something she loves, or loved, and it breaks her. Martha has to leave the Doctor, even though she loves him. It’s about growing up, but it’s also about Companions doing the thing that the Doctor had to do, pre-series: the Doctor destroyed Gallifrey. The Companions destroy the Doctor, and the Master, and the TARDIS. The end.
c) The Doctor clutching the Master’s dead body at the end was, as I’ve said and as you probably already noticed, heartwrenching. I love RTD for this: we don’t see the Time War, we don’t see that moment when the Doctor blows everything up. We just see this: the symbol for everything the Doctor’s already lost, dying once again. It’s so much better than seeing the Time War, because it’s so much more personal, the Doctor’s greatest enemy and old friend (husband). When David Tennant does that bit, it’s like he’s mourning for everything he’s been mourning for since series 1 episode 1, all over again, all concurrently. Life is very long.
d) On slash in Utopia/Last of the Time Lords. This is interesting, because I mean...we’ve got a big gay Welsh fanboy at the helm of this scifi show; why, then, does the show not move beyond implication and slashy vibes to outright homosexuality? And I mean...part of me sort of thinks that slash exists because homosex can’t happen on tv, but Doctor Who is a different example, as far as I’m concerned. RTD is right there with us on the Master/Doctor thing, says in the commentary to LotTL that they ought to have been husbands. So why do we still have slashiness, instead of doing what Torchwood does (have gay sex)? I mean, yes, it’s a family show, so it’s not like people could fuck on screen, etc., but...hm. I’m not explaining this well. What I want to get at is what Eve Sedgwick calls “the open secret,” and the power of the open secret. When it’s something that you and I know, and something that RTD knows, when it’s something shared between us that isn’t stated explicitly, part of the power comes from the fact that it’s not stated explicitly. And of course the secret is sexuality. (In the Doctor’s case, the secret of his sexuality is sort of that he has one, but anyway).
And this is an example of why I love scifi so much as a genre. Or, as Samuel Delany puts it, scifi as a reading practice. Because scifi is all metaphor, is all interpretation: it relies entirely on you to watch the DVD extras and keep your eyes unblinkingly fixated on the screen, and it relies on you to realise that you can reinterpret the meanings. You can reinterpret Archangel and make salvation out of repression. You can reinterpret the telepathic field that the Master’s cast over the earth. Scifi insists that we interpret and reinterpret and that we think. This, if nothing else, is series 3: we don’t forget. We don’t forget what we are to the point that we become a parody of ourselves. We don’t blink. We don’t stop watching. We don’t stop blogging (or singing). Because there is so much more power and meaning in something that is endlessly interpretable than in something that is explicitly stated. Because we are relied on to supply part of the meaning.
That’s the end of my long rant. It’s been building for months, so pardon me if I’ve rambled on in a crazy fashion. I just loved this series so much (so. much.) and this is me articulating that love. Feel free to squee, or talk, or articulate, as you like, in the comments. :)