Which makes my obliviousness even more embarrassing to me. Oh like we don't alllllll have those moments. This is what the fandom hive-mind is for: we are smarter together.
I never noticed the "he's a monster" part, (or maybe I just chose to ignore it, because I never thought of him as a monster, even if he did monstrous things) Good call, frankly.
I definitely noted the "he's lived too long" bit. The "OMG I'm terrible, why don't I just die" suggestion is a bit too Emo Kid for me. I found watching Rusty Who, and particularly Ten, for the first time an infinitely trying experience (I got into the fandom with Eleven, and watched Rusty as season five was airing as it was immediately obvious to me that this was going to be one of ~those shows and I would need the background, no matter how much I had to pull my hair to get it.) The thing that finally . . . contextualized it all for me and let me watch with a bit more equanimity was River showing up and going 'dear god, you're hard work young'--effectively taking three seasons of epic angst and just cutting it off at the knees. It was like thank you, finally.
Of course, Stolen Earth/Journey's End came up immediately afterwords and I literally died of eye-rolling. But! It was nice there for a second.
I remember nattering to elisi about the Doctor is a monster who's lived too long thing when I rewatched The Lazarus Experiment after having seen The Timeless Children because TC improved TLE immensely for me, so I went and found it:
So, in the episode as it's written, there is a parallel made between Lazarus, who is pursuing immortality without regard for any suffering or other moral considerations that might apply, with the Doctor who may regret his quasi-immortality but is not actually, so far as we know/knew, doing anything in contradiction of his natural-born biological nature or surviving by killing other people (I know there's some grey here, but he's not sucking people dry and leaving their corpses to keep going ETA: If the Doctor is surviving at the expense of other people, it is a consequence of the way he chooses to live his life, not of any inherent biology and the fighting thereof. If the Doctor went off to live in a cabin the woods, it's not like he'd wither up and die unless he kept sacrificing people to keep himself young. If people are dying for the Doctor's sake and if he is at fault for this, his own lifespan has nothing to do with it). The Doctor finds his long life to be tragic, but this is the result of circumstances rather than a matter of his biological nature being inherently tragic, damaged, or morally wrong. The show and possibly the Doctor try to ask us whether the Doctor is a monster because of his extended lifespan (not that his extended lifespan and the Doctor's angst over it isn't a contributing factor to Ten becoming a monster, but they are not, in themselves, monstrous.) So while I find the Doctor's commentary on his own experience of long life to be interesting, I feel like the episode itself is setting up a faulty parallel? Not that there isn't value to be drawn from contrasting them as well, but it's just always sat wrong with me, much like the 'is the Doctor a god?' stuff. No, he isn't, next question. (I have more patience with Twelve questioning these things because he, as far as we all knew, did now have an unnaturally prolonged life. Well, ok, I'm not actually annoyed with Ten for thinking these things either, but I dislike the show giving it much credence.)
But with knowledge of The Timeless Children we have instead someone who is conducting harmful and cruel experiments in order to prolong his own life talking to someone who was themselves the subject of similar experiments and who has seen an entire civilization transformed by them and irrevocably warped. Not that the Doctor knows that's what's going on, of course, but it gives the whole thing this undercurrent that sizzles. For once when the Doctor gets all judge-y, a part of me is going, ok, fair enough, you do know. Even if he also doesn't know . . .
It's a bit of an extension of Moff's policies of fixing Rusty's mistakes by making things literally true? The Doctor has been made into the very principle of immortality itself. A bit, in a way, of a god. The only one who does have license to make absolute statements on the subject. Not entirely sure how I feel about that still, but if you're going to do something, frankly, do it right.
WRT Jack, I'm just annoyed that he brought Jack back without doing a damned bit of anything with him at all. And I worry, now that the Barrowman blowback doesn't seem to be dying anytime soon, that we'll never get Jack again. Damn it. This! Alas. I mean, Jack was infinitely better served by Torchwood than he ever was on DW, but ONE COULD HOPE. And now, as you say, any future returns seem increasingly unlikely.
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Oh like we don't alllllll have those moments. This is what the fandom hive-mind is for: we are smarter together.
I never noticed the "he's a monster" part, (or maybe I just chose to ignore it, because I never thought of him as a monster, even if he did monstrous things)
Good call, frankly.
I definitely noted the "he's lived too long" bit. The "OMG I'm terrible, why don't I just die" suggestion is a bit too Emo Kid for me.
I found watching Rusty Who, and particularly Ten, for the first time an infinitely trying experience (I got into the fandom with Eleven, and watched Rusty as season five was airing as it was immediately obvious to me that this was going to be one of ~those shows and I would need the background, no matter how much I had to pull my hair to get it.) The thing that finally . . . contextualized it all for me and let me watch with a bit more equanimity was River showing up and going 'dear god, you're hard work young'--effectively taking three seasons of epic angst and just cutting it off at the knees. It was like thank you, finally.
Of course, Stolen Earth/Journey's End came up immediately afterwords and I literally died of eye-rolling. But! It was nice there for a second.
I remember nattering to elisi about the Doctor is a monster who's lived too long thing when I rewatched The Lazarus Experiment after having seen The Timeless Children because TC improved TLE immensely for me, so I went and found it:
So, in the episode as it's written, there is a parallel made between Lazarus, who is pursuing immortality without regard for any suffering or other moral considerations that might apply, with the Doctor who may regret his quasi-immortality but is not actually, so far as we know/knew, doing anything in contradiction of his natural-born biological nature or surviving by killing other people (I know there's some grey here, but he's not sucking people dry and leaving their corpses to keep going ETA: If the Doctor is surviving at the expense of other people, it is a consequence of the way he chooses to live his life, not of any inherent biology and the fighting thereof. If the Doctor went off to live in a cabin the woods, it's not like he'd wither up and die unless he kept sacrificing people to keep himself young. If people are dying for the Doctor's sake and if he is at fault for this, his own lifespan has nothing to do with it). The Doctor finds his long life to be tragic, but this is the result of circumstances rather than a matter of his biological nature being inherently tragic, damaged, or morally wrong. The show and possibly the Doctor try to ask us whether the Doctor is a monster because of his extended lifespan (not that his extended lifespan and the Doctor's angst over it isn't a contributing factor to Ten becoming a monster, but they are not, in themselves, monstrous.) So while I find the Doctor's commentary on his own experience of long life to be interesting, I feel like the episode itself is setting up a faulty parallel? Not that there isn't value to be drawn from contrasting them as well, but it's just always sat wrong with me, much like the 'is the Doctor a god?' stuff. No, he isn't, next question. (I have more patience with Twelve questioning these things because he, as far as we all knew, did now have an unnaturally prolonged life. Well, ok, I'm not actually annoyed with Ten for thinking these things either, but I dislike the show giving it much credence.)
But with knowledge of The Timeless Children we have instead someone who is conducting harmful and cruel experiments in order to prolong his own life talking to someone who was themselves the subject of similar experiments and who has seen an entire civilization transformed by them and irrevocably warped. Not that the Doctor knows that's what's going on, of course, but it gives the whole thing this undercurrent that sizzles. For once when the Doctor gets all judge-y, a part of me is going, ok, fair enough, you do know. Even if he also doesn't know . . .
It's a bit of an extension of Moff's policies of fixing Rusty's mistakes by making things literally true? The Doctor has been made into the very principle of immortality itself. A bit, in a way, of a god. The only one who does have license to make absolute statements on the subject. Not entirely sure how I feel about that still, but if you're going to do something, frankly, do it right.
WRT Jack, I'm just annoyed that he brought Jack back without doing a damned bit of anything with him at all. And I worry, now that the Barrowman blowback doesn't seem to be dying anytime soon, that we'll never get Jack again. Damn it.
This! Alas. I mean, Jack was infinitely better served by Torchwood than he ever was on DW, but ONE COULD HOPE. And now, as you say, any future returns seem increasingly unlikely.
Indeed. Heh.
I was also deeply amused by this:
https://theoneandonlytruejack.tumblr.com/post/663310176367132672
because I'm pretty sure the chain of retconning means that now Rusty has to bring Gallifrey back, and isn't that a delicious irony?