Entry tags:
Meta Café: The Star Beast (or: Evolution of the Doctor)
I guess this is the Meta Café opening back up. Please be aware that these are a whole bunch of scattered thoughts cobbled together in an evening because the next episode is TOMORROW. /o\
ETA: TEXT POST! :D
Many things happened in this episode.
As El Sandifer put it in their review:
[…] this is Davies taking a massive pile of Disney money and screaming “trans rights” on BBC One so loudly that Saudi Arabia won’t be able to edit it out.
However I’ll breeze straight past all of it (including the Meep and Rose and… everything) and focus on Donna and the Doctor.
Let’s start with Donna. I shall start with breaking from fannish convention and state that despite everything — despite the violation, despite Donna's family having to lie to her, despite Clara’s speech etc etc — I don’t think letting her die back then would have been the right choice. And not just because she has now got her memories back! :)
So let's delve in. And yes, there will be subheadings...
Who was the DoctorDonna?
All these years later, I still remembered an awesome essay by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
topaz_eyes:
Donna Noble's Midnight: Parallels, Foreshadowing, and "Journey's End"
(Please bear in mind that the essay was based onthunderemerald's "Donna Noble, the Doctor, and Parallel Stories" which should also be read for context, but no longer appears to be accessible.)
Tl;dr — if you don't want to read the whole thing, this is the money quote:
The "Midnight" parallel is strongest with the Doctor-Donna's ending. The Doctor half of Doctor-Donna begins to consume the Donna Noble half--just as the Entity overwhelmed the Doctor. Donna Noble, like the Doctor had been, is rendered increasingly helpless and increasingly without a voice. So just as the Hostess steps in to save the dying Doctor, the Doctor must step in to save the dying Donna Noble. He does this by removing the Time Lord's power as he did in Planet of the Ood. And like the Hostess, it destroys him in the process too.
(I would recommend reading the whole thing, it's very good. If you want to yell about it, yell at me, it’s a fascinating theory that I love to bits. It also makes Donna’s ending here parallel how Nine saves Rose in Parting of the Ways by removing the TARDIS’s power! He won't let companions die because of him.)
I bring it up because I like to poke at received fannish wisdom. ^_^ I know all the arguments for letting Donna die, but this is one of the only times I’ve seen someone argue that the Doctor did the right thing.
As Twelve said back at the end of ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’:
“Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones. But you still have to choose.”
And it wasn't just Donna’s fate which was in the balance then. There is no possible universe where the Tenth Doctor would have let Donna burn to death. (Certainly not after watching River die not long before.) He made the only choice he could, because Ten was incapable of letting go. And even then, it broke him.
Letting go
There is a wonderful Tumblr post which points out that the Regeneration Energy that Donna and Rose let go of is the same energy that Ten funnelled into his hand because he didn’t want to die.
Let's quickly jump sideways to the single best Ten fic ever written, Pendulum (written post-S3, and has the BEST Ten characterisation anywhere), and pull out a few choice snippets to illustrate our beloved Ten:
Much has been made of the unfortunate phrasing of ‘female presenting’ and the ability to let go, but I think it works best when viewed as Donna speaking solely from her own point of view. She knew Ten, knew how tightly he clung to everything and how incapable he was of letting go. In her head presumably this translates as ‘I’m a woman and I can let go. He couldn’t let go, so that’s presumably a male thing’. It’d have been better if she’d gone for a Time Lord/human distinction, but even so I think it misses the main point which is just how much growing and hard soul-searching the Doctor has done over the past 1000+ years, ever since Donna last knew him…
So, I shall circle back to a line fromtopaz_eyes' essay: ‘And like the Hostess, it destroys him in the process too.’
"It killed me. It killed me. It killed me."
There is a definite argument to be made for the fact that ‘killing’ Donna broke the [Tenth] Doctor also. Fourteen even says so.magnavox_23 made a gorgeous icon, for which I am eternally grateful as I don’t have the energy right now to make pretty graphics like I used to:
It’s notable that it’s after losing Donna that Ten refused to get new companions. And that he then goes Victorious — as she said, sometimes he needs someone to stop him and there was no one there. (If Ten had had a companion with him in Water of Mars, he would have been concerned about getting them to safety, rather than focussing on Adelaide.)
And there is something truly beautiful about the fact that the Doctor finds Donna again once he has done all the hard work…
So, let’s delve into the Doctor’s story in New Who, since we are now (FINALLY) back on track. I shall do a quick summary:
Nine — the outfit is black-on-black, there are no frills. He is very direct and suffering from deep PTSD from the Time War and everything he did. Emotionally battered and exhausted. But he died with a smile on his face, having saved Rose.
Ten — buttoned up and endless layers. Projected fun energy, but with deep deep cracks beneath the surface. Spiralled out of control. Utterly incapable of letting go. The definition of man!pain. (Also see The Price *g*). Sacrificed himself for Wilf (as unwilling to see Wilf die as Donna) but still chafing against it.
Eleven — more whimsical and eccentric (both in terms of outfits and personality), but also with more age, and with a deep well of kindness and compassion. Underwent centuries long family therapy with his Ponds. Found it hard to carry on after losing them until Clara appeared, but when he finally regenerated it was with peace and acceptance, having spent centuries in one place simply living and helping.
Twelve — all the layers are back, clothing-wise, but emotionally he strips one layer after the other. Twelve is the Doctor who has the distance and the maturity to look inside and take stock. He starts off asking ‘Am I a good man?’ (conclusion: ‘I am an idiot!’) and, when losing Clara, goes fully Victorious… Before running slap bang into where those actions lead and having to justify himself — and losing. Culminating in the beauty of S10 when he grapples with all the issues in a much more muted way. Note how he does not tear the world apart for Bill, how he pleads with the Master and Missy, but accepts that they leave. Twelve mastered the art of Stopping Himself. And notably (!) his final words are: “Doctor, I let you go.”
Thirteen — the most loosely dressed Doctor, floaty and colourful, and one that has been impossible to get a read on. However context is everything! We can see Thirteen as a reaction to Twelve, as taking a step back in every way. Just… pressing pause for a whole regeneration. Twelve became President of both Earth and Gallifrey — Thirteen likes a flat team structure. Twelve (like 9, 10 and 11) was deeply, painfully attached to his companions, Thirteen keeps her Fam at a distance (and notably they all leave happy, and of their own volition). Twelve, introspective to the last, agonised over his moral code, his choices, his actions — Thirteen has a few ironclad rules (no guns) but generally does next to no soul-searching. Twelve refused to regenerate until the very last minute — Thirteen simply smiles and says “Tag, you’re it” and hands on the baton.
To illustrate, here is a snippet from a delightful Paul Cornell Thirteenth Doctor story The Shadow Passes:
And so we end up with Fourteen. He looks like Ten and has some of the same mannerisms and yet… Just look at his outfit! He as a single button done up, and he spends loads of time in his shirtsleeves like it’s nothing? (The outfit is (of course) a reflection of the character.)
Here arepromethia_tenk’s thoughts:
Now to be fair, the Doctor fought in the most horrific war imaginable and killed his entire people. It feels fair that it should take six regenerations and 1000+ years to regain his sense of self. (Much like punching a wall harder than diamonds for billions of years works as atonement for destroying Gallifrey.)
So, returning to ‘It killed me’, then it struck me how fandom has gone on for 15 years about how Donna needed to be made whole again. But maybe the same could be said for Ten? To let him heal those scars of loss, because he was SO traumatised from what he had to do.
And so Fourteen gets another chance at the same kind of choice Ten had to face. I took me a few days to pin down the look on his face (the moment when he drops his head, before he starts to recite the key to unlocking Donna’s memories - this here - and in my icon), but then I realised what it was:
"I ran for a thousand years, and I still have to watch you die."
But, he isn’t Ten. Lovely tumblr post here laying it out, and will also quotepromethia_tenk again:
It took life-times, but… Let’s quickly quote Eleven:
”Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely. And if something can be remembered, it can come back.”
Donna came back. Their friendship came back. The Doctor got another chance.
And I don’t know that it would have been possible until he was ready. He was able to let Donna go — and because of that, this time she lived.
<3
ETA: TEXT POST! :D
Many things happened in this episode.
As El Sandifer put it in their review:
[…] this is Davies taking a massive pile of Disney money and screaming “trans rights” on BBC One so loudly that Saudi Arabia won’t be able to edit it out.
However I’ll breeze straight past all of it (including the Meep and Rose and… everything) and focus on Donna and the Doctor.
Let’s start with Donna. I shall start with breaking from fannish convention and state that despite everything — despite the violation, despite Donna's family having to lie to her, despite Clara’s speech etc etc — I don’t think letting her die back then would have been the right choice. And not just because she has now got her memories back! :)
So let's delve in. And yes, there will be subheadings...
Who was the DoctorDonna?
All these years later, I still remembered an awesome essay by
topaz_eyes:Donna Noble's Midnight: Parallels, Foreshadowing, and "Journey's End"
(Please bear in mind that the essay was based on
thunderemerald's "Donna Noble, the Doctor, and Parallel Stories" which should also be read for context, but no longer appears to be accessible.)Tl;dr — if you don't want to read the whole thing, this is the money quote:
The "Midnight" parallel is strongest with the Doctor-Donna's ending. The Doctor half of Doctor-Donna begins to consume the Donna Noble half--just as the Entity overwhelmed the Doctor. Donna Noble, like the Doctor had been, is rendered increasingly helpless and increasingly without a voice. So just as the Hostess steps in to save the dying Doctor, the Doctor must step in to save the dying Donna Noble. He does this by removing the Time Lord's power as he did in Planet of the Ood. And like the Hostess, it destroys him in the process too.
(I would recommend reading the whole thing, it's very good. If you want to yell about it, yell at me, it’s a fascinating theory that I love to bits. It also makes Donna’s ending here parallel how Nine saves Rose in Parting of the Ways by removing the TARDIS’s power! He won't let companions die because of him.)
I bring it up because I like to poke at received fannish wisdom. ^_^ I know all the arguments for letting Donna die, but this is one of the only times I’ve seen someone argue that the Doctor did the right thing.
As Twelve said back at the end of ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’:
“Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones. But you still have to choose.”
And it wasn't just Donna’s fate which was in the balance then. There is no possible universe where the Tenth Doctor would have let Donna burn to death. (Certainly not after watching River die not long before.) He made the only choice he could, because Ten was incapable of letting go. And even then, it broke him.
Letting go
There is a wonderful Tumblr post which points out that the Regeneration Energy that Donna and Rose let go of is the same energy that Ten funnelled into his hand because he didn’t want to die.
Let's quickly jump sideways to the single best Ten fic ever written, Pendulum (written post-S3, and has the BEST Ten characterisation anywhere), and pull out a few choice snippets to illustrate our beloved Ten:
But the truth - the shameful truth - is that forever is the only answer he wants, needs, clings to with fingers stretched by time. And worse, forever is the answer he expects from [Rose], the predictable lie that should be transparent (when he had other eyes, such lies were easy to spot, until he fell and began telling them himself) but here it is, laid out before him, a fib made flesh, and he clutches at it – clutches her hand – and finds it solid and real, if not quite right. Rose Tyler wants to stay with him forever. And he believes her.
~
The trap is sprung, and he is exposed for what he is: a man who can’t let go, who clutches whatever comes along and holds on forever (which is just another way of saying as long as he can). But this can’t be the full story, oh no. His tempter may have diagnosed his symptoms, but it hasn't found the cause. He hates letting go because he always must, clutches tightly because otherwise things slip away. He says hello as often as possible so he can ward off goodbye.
Much has been made of the unfortunate phrasing of ‘female presenting’ and the ability to let go, but I think it works best when viewed as Donna speaking solely from her own point of view. She knew Ten, knew how tightly he clung to everything and how incapable he was of letting go. In her head presumably this translates as ‘I’m a woman and I can let go. He couldn’t let go, so that’s presumably a male thing’. It’d have been better if she’d gone for a Time Lord/human distinction, but even so I think it misses the main point which is just how much growing and hard soul-searching the Doctor has done over the past 1000+ years, ever since Donna last knew him…
So, I shall circle back to a line from
topaz_eyes' essay: ‘And like the Hostess, it destroys him in the process too.’"It killed me. It killed me. It killed me."
There is a definite argument to be made for the fact that ‘killing’ Donna broke the [Tenth] Doctor also. Fourteen even says so.
magnavox_23 made a gorgeous icon, for which I am eternally grateful as I don’t have the energy right now to make pretty graphics like I used to:It’s notable that it’s after losing Donna that Ten refused to get new companions. And that he then goes Victorious — as she said, sometimes he needs someone to stop him and there was no one there. (If Ten had had a companion with him in Water of Mars, he would have been concerned about getting them to safety, rather than focussing on Adelaide.)
And there is something truly beautiful about the fact that the Doctor finds Donna again once he has done all the hard work…
So, let’s delve into the Doctor’s story in New Who, since we are now (FINALLY) back on track. I shall do a quick summary:
Nine — the outfit is black-on-black, there are no frills. He is very direct and suffering from deep PTSD from the Time War and everything he did. Emotionally battered and exhausted. But he died with a smile on his face, having saved Rose.
Ten — buttoned up and endless layers. Projected fun energy, but with deep deep cracks beneath the surface. Spiralled out of control. Utterly incapable of letting go. The definition of man!pain. (Also see The Price *g*). Sacrificed himself for Wilf (as unwilling to see Wilf die as Donna) but still chafing against it.
Eleven — more whimsical and eccentric (both in terms of outfits and personality), but also with more age, and with a deep well of kindness and compassion. Underwent centuries long family therapy with his Ponds. Found it hard to carry on after losing them until Clara appeared, but when he finally regenerated it was with peace and acceptance, having spent centuries in one place simply living and helping.
Twelve — all the layers are back, clothing-wise, but emotionally he strips one layer after the other. Twelve is the Doctor who has the distance and the maturity to look inside and take stock. He starts off asking ‘Am I a good man?’ (conclusion: ‘I am an idiot!’) and, when losing Clara, goes fully Victorious… Before running slap bang into where those actions lead and having to justify himself — and losing. Culminating in the beauty of S10 when he grapples with all the issues in a much more muted way. Note how he does not tear the world apart for Bill, how he pleads with the Master and Missy, but accepts that they leave. Twelve mastered the art of Stopping Himself. And notably (!) his final words are: “Doctor, I let you go.”
Thirteen — the most loosely dressed Doctor, floaty and colourful, and one that has been impossible to get a read on. However context is everything! We can see Thirteen as a reaction to Twelve, as taking a step back in every way. Just… pressing pause for a whole regeneration. Twelve became President of both Earth and Gallifrey — Thirteen likes a flat team structure. Twelve (like 9, 10 and 11) was deeply, painfully attached to his companions, Thirteen keeps her Fam at a distance (and notably they all leave happy, and of their own volition). Twelve, introspective to the last, agonised over his moral code, his choices, his actions — Thirteen has a few ironclad rules (no guns) but generally does next to no soul-searching. Twelve refused to regenerate until the very last minute — Thirteen simply smiles and says “Tag, you’re it” and hands on the baton.
To illustrate, here is a snippet from a delightful Paul Cornell Thirteenth Doctor story The Shadow Passes:
Yaz felt that. ‘[...] I sometimes think if we could see all you were, at once, it’d be too much. We couldn’t deal.’
The Doctor looked bashful and pleased all at the same time, which was another of Yaz’s favourite looks of hers. ‘Well, I certainly can’t. I’m a bit too much for me. I’m more than I knew about. Still processing all that. I sometimes think that’s why I change personality instead of just making my body younger. I need to switch myself off and on again so I can handle all the memories, so a lot of it feels like it happened to someone else. I get a different perspective on what I’ve done. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. There’s this girl in a mirror. Where I put her. That doesn’t suit who I am now. When we get out of here… Oh, this is getting deep and meaningful, isn’t it?’ Yaz was about to say that was fine, but the Doctor swung to include the others, suddenly pulling another surprise from her pockets. ‘Balloon animals!’
And so we end up with Fourteen. He looks like Ten and has some of the same mannerisms and yet… Just look at his outfit! He as a single button done up, and he spends loads of time in his shirtsleeves like it’s nothing? (The outfit is (of course) a reflection of the character.)
Here are
promethia_tenk’s thoughts:Ten had his shields up at all times. Everything was a performance. Everything was armour. Even his emotionality was its own armour. Fourteen feels so . . . artless. He's got this simple strength in vulnerability thing going on. Like, when Donna was giving him her 'why don't you try having friends' speech, he was obviously a bit uncomfortable with it, but he wasn't preparing a defense: he just sat with the discomfort and then admitted she was right. And it honestly does feel like we owe Thirteen something for this. Because she was also artless. She was a lot clumsier about it, more prickly, more opaque. She locked people out. But it wasn't the . . . production it was especially for Ten, but often for Eleven and Twelve as well. She didn't have elaborate defenses, she didn't perform unavailable, she just was. So maybe Fourteen is ready to just be something a little more.
~
ETA: On Radio Free Skaro, somebody picked out the interlude where he's consulting his floating info panel in the steelworks (before Shirley comes on) as really interesting. Because he's just . . . sitting there, thinking. Ten would have been wildly exclaiming even if he had to do it to himself.
~
Admittedly, I've not done an extensive survey of Eight, but he absolutely has the puppy dog thing of Ten and Eleven, and he's very sweet and unguarded, but most notably he has this level of emotional and social maturity unseen in any Doctor before or since. Like he has actual competence in these matters; it's wild.
Which is why it's such a tragedy that the Time War happened to this one. But maybe, maybe six regenerations later we're finally back? It's not all in quite the same tenor, but I feel like we're definitely in the ballpark, and it's weighted with far more experience and self-knowledge.
Now to be fair, the Doctor fought in the most horrific war imaginable and killed his entire people. It feels fair that it should take six regenerations and 1000+ years to regain his sense of self. (Much like punching a wall harder than diamonds for billions of years works as atonement for destroying Gallifrey.)
So, returning to ‘It killed me’, then it struck me how fandom has gone on for 15 years about how Donna needed to be made whole again. But maybe the same could be said for Ten? To let him heal those scars of loss, because he was SO traumatised from what he had to do.
And so Fourteen gets another chance at the same kind of choice Ten had to face. I took me a few days to pin down the look on his face (the moment when he drops his head, before he starts to recite the key to unlocking Donna’s memories - this here - and in my icon), but then I realised what it was:
"I ran for a thousand years, and I still have to watch you die."
But, he isn’t Ten. Lovely tumblr post here laying it out, and will also quote
promethia_tenk again:Also I have to compare him holding Donna to holding the Master in the Last of the Time Lords. Just . . . how self-centered he was really being there (and the Master punished him for it), and how Donna-centered he was here. Donna dying wasn't about him, it was about Donna and being there for her at the end.
It took life-times, but… Let’s quickly quote Eleven:
”Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely. And if something can be remembered, it can come back.”
Donna came back. Their friendship came back. The Doctor got another chance.
And I don’t know that it would have been possible until he was ready. He was able to let Donna go — and because of that, this time she lived.
<3