life without a plot

I wasn't really planning on getting into this discussion, in fact I was planning to keep out of discussions about SM's DW entirely, but. (Why does there always seems to be a 'but'?) IMO it's not so much what happened, it's how it happened. I don't think anyone is seriously trying to argue that Nine or Ten never killed anyone, considering that the fact that they did was a huge leitmotif during both their arcs.

But as I see it RTD tried to make a point of giving every death a certain weight, even if it was the death of the villain. Ten especially almost always had a moment where he found something beautiful even in the monsters trying to kill him. You were always aware that what ended was a life with all its possibilities and complexities, even if it was a life with a lot of wrong choices and few chances to get it right to begin with. Margaret Blaine was probably the best example of that, and going by The Writer's Tale he originally tried to put more of Davros's backstory in Journey's End, making the parallel between him and Ten, the war background in both their lives, more obvious. Almost every death was accompanied by the regret that things hadn't gone differently. Even with enemies like the Daleks, who don't have free will or individual thought, and no purpose but to hate and to kill, killing was never entirely off-hand or without consequences. Of course Nine and Ten killed. But they also both struggled with the consequences of that throughout their arcs. Nine in some ways recalls Stephen Bannerman from RTD's The Grand, coming back from the trenches of WW1, struggling with what he'd seen, the guilt of what he'd done, the guilt of having survived, and how killing had changed him; incapable of just picking up the life he'd known before the war, incapable of leaving the war behind. Dalek was all about the danger of becoming what you're fighting, and so was Boom Town and The Parting of Ways. Ten, and this, I think, comes out strongly especially towards the end of his arc, was so extremely distrustful of guns and violence because he didn't trust himself. He'd seen what the Time War had done to the Time Lords, how it perverted them so much that he had to kill them all along with the Daleks, and consequently he saw the seeds of that everywhere, especially within himself.

Sometimes there was no other solution, but it was very obvious that killing should not ever become something one should get used to or desensitised to. As far as I remember it was never portrayed as cool or stylish, or used as the butt of a joke, and I don't think that over the run of RTD's DW it was ever treated this... casually. If anything, RTD took it to the other extreme. The Doctor kept getting pitched against creatures like the Racnoss, the Carrionites, the Sycorax, the Daleks, or the Sontarans, who were determined to destroy or enslave the entire human race, had basically no individuality, very little complexity and very obviously absolutely no interest in the Doctor's offer. But even so, even then, there was a moment when you pitied them, when you were supposed to pity them, where you were supposed to realise that this might have been necessary, but was nothing to be applauded. It's probably no coincidence that even on the less family-orientated TW in CoE Jack, for whom killing had become something of a non-issue over all that time, is confronted with what exactly it means to take a life when it isn't someone nameless or faceless.

Which I think is a good thing. The older I get, the less fond I am of the casual, aestheticised violence we get in movies and on TV all the time, and the occasional break from that was nice.


( Spoilers for 6.01 & 6.02 )

# DW: Silly plot, sillier monster, but a few quite touching moments that made me actually warm up to Eleven a bit, especially the scene with Amy in the end when she realised that they hadn't changed history after all. I guess you could call it over-sentimental, but this season I'm happy when I'm feeling anything at all, so I'm not really complaining. OTOH, jokes about cubism and eyes on either side of the face in 2010? Coming from a Time Lord? Seriously? *facepalms so, so hard* And the whole 'greatest artist of all time' theme was definitely overdone.

I can't really put my finger on it, much less put it into words, but there's a kind of naivety in S5 that stops me from getting really emotionally invested in the stories. Maybe it's the fairytale theme and the fundamental distance it creates? The frustrating thing is, I'm watching these stories, and I keep thinking I could care for them if they were just told a little differently, but I couldn't say how. Gah.

On a (I guess) somewhat related note, what I found really interesting is how suicide is clearly linked to mental illness/depression in this episode, while in TW or even in DW with Adelaide in WoM every single time it was presented as a mostly rational choice. It already stood out in SitL/FortD, but there are two very different philosophic angles behind RTD and SM's writing.

# Bike has a flat tyre, which means I'm finally going to buy a new one since it's pretty much falling apart everywhere and I already decided last September that there would be no further repairs. I'm actually surprised it lasted another eight months. But why does this happen every time M. is on holiday and I'm stuck with either the underground or walking for the whole next week?

# Sore throat is still/again kind of sore after it got better for a bit? And no time for a doctor's appointment either next week for reasons mentioned above? *sigh*

# Survived another dentist appointment on Friday, this time without chemical help. I think the hard fact of local anaesthesia and that It Doesn't Actually Have To Hurt finally managed to get through the haze of panic the whole braces experience left me with. Also, I think I've finally found the coping mechanism that puts even a bit of pain in perfect perspective. Er, thank you, CoE? I guess?

# And speaking of TW, maybe I shouldn't have rewatched Dead Man Walking Friday evening after dentist, work & Russian lesson when I was pretty much cross-eyed with tiredness, but has it always been this excruciatingly awful? There are a couple of Owen moments that make it maybe somewhat bearable, but from the beginning with Jack tip-toeing through the completely random weevils to the glove developing a life of its own, Owen wrestling a smoke-wreathed CGI skeleton and JB, who should just stay far, far away from the resurrection glove because it really doesn't bring out his best acting, it's really rather dire. The plot makes no sense whatsoever on a literal level, although maybe a bit more on a metaphorical one, especially looking at Owen and Jack's respective S1 arcs. But still. I'll take Random Shoes over this any time. From Out of the Rain. Small Worlds. Anything, everything. Although I guess part of it can be blamed on the hasty rewriting, since the hospital setting especially wouldn't really have worked for Ianto and must be new...

Actually, I'm still curious what the original story with Ianto's death would have been like. Owen's arc, Ianto's arc, Ianto's reaction to the whole situation, Jack and Ianto, who would have died in the end...

( Amy's Choice )

( ETA )



In Old New Who news, still writing, and what drives me kind of crazy (mostly in a good way, except when I'm actually trying to analyse the text, in which case it's really annoying because it makes me feel so stupid) is the scope of ambiguity RTD's writing sometimes has. The moral dilemma of the S1 finale is still relatively clear, although the implications of the Doctor's decision are still problematic, but (I think) intentionally so, in order to balance the deus ex machina solution, and S2 is even less complicated, because it's all about the Doctor and Rose. But the S3 finale already confuses me especially with its use of religious themes (Good? Bad? The conclusion of Ten's arc certainly suggests the latter. And can forgiveness be wrong?), and as for the S4 finale, while the whole thing with the moving planets is a bit over-blown and ridiculous, I've already changed my mind at least a couple of times about the implications of Davros's words about the Doctor's soul being revealed and the all the deaths. Am I stupid? Or am I for whatever reason missing something crucial that is obvious to everyone else? These scenes work incredibly well on an emotional level, probably precisely because they evoke such complex feelings, but once you try to untangle them logically... *sigh*

So, yesterday's DW. Hm.

( The Beast Below )


It's strange, really. I don't think I ever realised just how subjective judgement can be about something like this until CoE.