(no subject)

[solitary_summer]

My sister originally invited me to celebrate New Year with them, but since we're all sick to various degrees we decided to call it off, which is why I'm sitting at home, sipping herbal tea, blowing my nose every two minutes, and randomly surfing the internet on New Year's Eve. All of which isn't exactly newsworthy, I know, I know. However, in the midst of all this aimless surfing around I stumbled across this:

green_maia writes here:

I think I've figured out why I dislike Steven Moffat's writing.

In RTD-verse, the universe is bigger than the Doctor.

In Moffat-verse, the Doctor is bigger than the universe.

I'd have commented there, but she disabled comments on this entry; I hope I'm not breaking lj-etiquette quoting her here, but I really love this thought, because I've been trying to figure out why S5 left me feeling so meh, but without much success so far.

I don't agree with her post only insofar as for me the point of Waters of Mars is that Adelaide kills herself to stop someone who really has the power to fundamentally subvert the laws of the universe and change the fate of humanity; if Ten merely had delusions of grandeur, then her death would be rather meaningless. For me the parallel that is too obvious to ignore is The Second Coming: Stephen Baxter isn't a fraud, he really is the son of God; it's precisely because of that that Judith convinces him to kill himself in order to give humanity responsibility and freedom.

So IMO Ten is only morally wrong in Waters of Mars, not factually wrong. I'm not a hundred percent sure this is entirely consistent with the way RTD wrote the Doctor before, because right until the end of S4 the Doctor struggling with and against a universe that has Daleks and death and loss and generally doesn't work according to his wishes is such a big, recurring theme. The idea that he actually could change that, not because of something like the solution of the Skasis Paradigm in School Reunion, but simply because he is a Time Lord, only creeps in at the end of S3 when the Master says he has the right to change history, and the Doctor concedes that.

But regardless, for me the premise of Waters of Mars is that what he claims is true, that there really is nothing he can't do any longer, just as the Time Lords would really have abolished time if he hadn't stopped them. Ten's arc at this point effectively becomes something of a theological problem. RTD built up Ten as a sometimes genuinely benevolent and helpful, sometimes wilful and capricious sort-of God not to replace God, but to deconstruct the concept, to show that even being saved is too high a price to allow someone to have power over life and death.

The story of The End of Time is that Ten acknowledges this and voluntarily gives up this power again for the benefit of the universe, and for his own salvation.

In the end green_maia is absolutely right, the underlying idea of RTD's DW is that even if the Doctor can be bigger than the universe, the universe absolutely should be bigger than the Doctor. And while I'm not sure I'd describe Eleven as a God in his tiny universe (I've watched S5 so cursory that I'm reluctant to make any definitive statement about it), she's also right that in S5 the universe did feel a lot safer and more controllable. Memories can be rewritten and time can be changed to achieve a happy ending, whereas in the RTD era the fact that time could be changed wasn't a guarantee for safety—rather the opposite: 'Nothing is safe' (The Unquiet Dead).

And I miss that. I miss the sense of wonder at something big and mysterious and essentially uncontrollable that for me was still absolutely there in the 'Everybody Lives' at the end of The Doctor Dances, but wasn't there any longer when the ghost of River Song was resurrected on a computer HD and we were being told that this was a blessing. Death, of course, is part of the uncontrollable. Death is still the ultimate uncontrollable. In The Doctor Dances Nine says, 'Everybody lives, Rose. Just this once. Everybody lives!' and the 'just this once' made all the difference. That's why, even though I only wanted to write about the deaths I also ended up rambling so much about life and being human, because it's part and parcel of the same thing. It's in DW, and it's also in TW, although there the balance between the wonderful and the terrible is even finer and more precarious.


And there's something else that I think is very, very true and that hope green_maia won't mind me quoting:

Sometimes it seems like people don't choose their stories, stories choose their people. When a story takes over your imagination, it doesn't exactly give you a feeling of agency. The story swoops down and grasps you in its talons and flies off with you and all your frantic struggling is for naught. Or, the story takes off with someone else and you watch as they sail away, scratching your head and wondering what, exactly, they see in it.

Comments

[solitary-summer.livejournal.com]

I wrote my own ramble about what I perceive to be some of those differences a while back - about half way through S5, so some of it might be a bit out of date now.

Oh, this is brilliant. Very good post and a fascinating discussion. I think you're very right about the head/heart distinction, and I especially love your Bach/Beethoven comparison. I'm not a musician, so it's not one I can make myself, but when you say that you miss RTD's Sturm und Drang... I always thought that in some ways his writing is almost... old fashioned, maybe, in its idealism, in the themes it touches, in its directness and complete lack of self-irony or cynicism. There's an odd mixture of rationalism and an unabashed—can one call it romantic?—enthusiasm. Does any of this make sense at all? What I'm certainly not getting from his writing (but do get from Moffat's) is the sense that he's trying to be clever.

On a personal level, the part of the RTD vs. SM debate that I found most enlightening is how much of it comes down to feelings we have such a hard time defining. I guess this is incredibly naive of me, or maybe it's a side effect of having a background in history , but for the longest time I thought that surely there are objective criteria for judging and analysing, if not the overall quality of a work of art, then at least its themes and messages. Torchwood's Children of Earth was the first real eye-opener in this respect, and this discussion is very similar.

[caz963.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the kind words.

I'd definitely agree that Rusty is a "romantic" in the true sense of the word, which is what, for me, made Beethoven an obvious choice for an analogy. And Ludwig got a few name-checks through the RTD era, so maybe he's a fan!

What I'm certainly not getting from his writing (but do get from Moffat's) is the sense that he's trying to be clever.

I agree. Someone commented over at my LJ that to an extent, all writers (and I'd go further and say that it could be applied to anyone who creates things) are trying to impress us, but as the response to that says, there's a difference between wanting to move and entertain and setting out to show off how clever one is - and I do get a definite sense of that, not only from Moff's writing, but from his general demeanour in interviews.

Interesting that you've a background in history - I remember that one of the first books on my reading list as an undergrad music student was E.H Carr's What is History?. I was a bit puzzled at the time, but later came to realise that it was to make me think about the different ways in which art is presented and the nature of "subjectivity". /random.

[solitary-summer.livejournal.com]

I studied archaeology and ancient history, not that I'm doing anything with it now. Obviously you do realise that the interpretation of facts changes with time, but ultimately in a way you still believe that you're working towards a better and more correct understanding of them, and that there is a truth to be found of how things happened, and why. You might still be a long way from finding it, but it's there...

I guess this is why on some level I'm still sometimes struggling with the 'all opinions and interpretations are equally valid' approach of fandom.