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The Tragedy and Death of the Lonely God and the Rise of the Trickster. Or: How Moffat re-booted DW
The meta café is back! (And no one's around. Ah well, that's life. *g*) Before we start, a little background for this particular meta:
A while ago I re-watched one of my favourite RTD-era vids of all time:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hollywoodgrrl’s Marble House. It is utterly stunning visually and the editing is incredible (the first minute is... unlike anything else), but it is also extremely hardhitting, brutal and very manipulative. I even wrote meta on it once. Now I hadn’t watched it for ages - not since before S6 - and, as I watched, the most extraordinary thing happened: I didn’t understand it. I mean, at all. It was like it was asking what direction is yellow. Or what shape is ‘up’. It completely didn’t compute. Which puzzled me immensely (because it is an AWESOME vid and I pretty much know it by heart...). So I started thinking and analysing and this meta is the result. Well - this is how it started. Since then I’ve had a lot of other thoughts and it’s all been siphoned into this. But in essence: The Moff rebooted the show so thoroughly that it is a completely different thing. And he didn’t do it just by taking every single issue that RTD left him with, addressing it, and fixing it - any showrunner taking over would have to do this, because Ten, bless his cotton Timelord socks, had more issues than I can count - but by changing the basic vocabulary of the show [back to what it used to be]. S6 was at the heart of this, and the changes this season brought cannot be overestimated. Follow me under the cut, and I’ll explain what I mean.
SPOILERS for all of New Who, including the most recent Christmas Special.
(Btw, this is NOT a ‘RTD is awful, Moffat is God’, essay. I find what RTD did v. interesting, and will look at it in detail.)
Anyway, for those who don’t fancy reading the whole thing - and as a nifty little intro - I summed up the whole thing in two images. *g* (The quote is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is used to describe Angel, her broody vampire boyfriend.)
Doctor Who?
You can see New Who as the Doctor trying to work out who he is now, what with a) Being the murderer of his own kind and b) If he's the only Timelord left, then what a Timelord is is up to him. Ten searches high and low for something to be, some kind of self, some sort of definition (Rose's Love, Martha's Hero, Donna's Friend, The Timelord Victorious) but in the end can only be what he is: The Doctor ("It's my honour"). And so S5 and 6 is the story of trying to find his way back, step by difficult step, re-learning what makes him him. And although he's going in the right direction, there are wrong turns and many pitfalls (Ten was *so* screwed up), until he manages to finally be back where he was: The Doctor. Just the Doctor.
Or, to quotemalsperanza (from this post):
You see how perfectly this fits with the most basic concept of Doctor Who? To quote Moffat:
But RTD changed that - during the Specials he placed the Doctor squarely in the centre of everything (and this had been building for quite some time). Which means that in order to become himself again, the Doctor needed to step out of the spotlight and become the Withheld Hero/Trickster once more. Which proved to be an interesting and rather unusual journey, actually...
Let’s begin with how the Doctor ‘went wrong’. I think it’s generally acknowledged that RTD *broke* the Doctor, and Moffat’s been putting him back together, and here I am interested in the *how*. Because I think that was RTD did was to turn the Doctor into a Tragic Hero. I’m not saying he did this deliberately (or even consciously), but that was the end result. Allow me to illustrate:
I’m not even going to do my usual thing of illustrating stuff with images, because it doesn’t need it. It’s that obvious. Now the funny thing is that this is actually what I've been saying all along. Ten is a hero, Eleven is a wizard. And the Doctor ought to be a wizard. He even calls himself Gandalf. But I'm getting ahead of myself - let’s look at what KIND of Tragic Hero Ten is...
The Lonely God
There is a theory - and I think it’s right - that what Ten wants, is to be human. (A point I won’t elaborate on, but which I think is fairy obvious.) Except - and oh, the irony of this is immense - the only way he can fit is as a god-like figure: Someone even more removed from humanity than an alien. Because the human world has rules and patterns, and someone with a Timelord's abilities can never be 'ordinary' and indeed he chafes at it, when he tries - he loves them, even as he is unable to be them. We see this in Family of Blood/Human Nature where he delights in turning himself human - and yet won’t go back.
So, focussed on fitting into their world, he ends up as humanity's god (both literally and narratively), and it is something of a thread going right through RTD’s Who...
Humanity prays/calls out to him, and he answers. They believe, and saves them. (Interestingly S2 is the only finale where this doesn’t apply, but then that is focussed squarely on the Doctor’s loss of Rose.) In the end he tries to set himself up as god of the whole universe (hello Mars!), and Ood Sigma may be the ultimate sign of this: The universe asks for his help to defeat Gallifrey (the Ood were given the gift of seeing through time and the ability to reach out to the Doctor, so he could save them...)
And the Doctor (not surprisingly with so much encouragement) sees himself as having to sacrifice himself to save the world (hello there god-complex, thinking we are Jesus?), because that is the pattern, that is the story he wants to fit into. He even gets a Requiem... (“The universe will sing you to your sleep.”)
And this is why Marble House accuses him: ‘If you are our God, our Saviour, then WHY DON'T YOU SAVE US [from ourselves]? ‘
Also this is why he has to be lonely - the pattern he tries to fit into is a monotheistic one. [Disregarding *actual* Christian theology - it all gets too complex there. /understatement ] But from a simplistic perspective, then he is a Lonely God.
Following on from this we can see why turning his companions into himself is so deadly, and has such terrible consequences. Both Rose and Donna literally become him, and it [almost] kills them (although he manages to save Rose - but not before she has created Jack). Trying to cram the knowledge of a Timelord into a human by force - both Rose and Donna absorb the ability to see all of time the way the Doctor does - is deadly, and nearly burns them up.
Martha gets a better deal by becoming his prophet/apostle, preaching the Good News - yet it is in many ways a thankless task, since he can never love her the way she wants him to. (And indeed, his love could be fatal, so she probably counts herself lucky in the end.)
But Jack, trying to model himself into the Doctor mould (and the whole of Torchwood, generally) is another cautionary tale: This sort of power/responsibility is too much for humans. Sarah Jane gets off better, but even she loses the love of her life, because of what she chooses to be. With great power comes great responsibility, and this both Jack and Sarah Jane learn to their cost.
And the problem is that this is not who the Doctor is. Ten is caught between worlds, denying his real nature, and the compromise tears him apart. Basically - by reaching for power that is wrong for him (like diesel in a petrol engine), he ends up destroying instead of healing.
We see this most clearly in Waters of Mars which is... anti-Doctor Who? I will bring out 'Intellect and Romance Triumph over Brute Force and Cynicism' a fair bit, but the resolution to Waters of Mars is every inch brute force and cynicism winning. After all, how else could you describe Adelaide's suicide?
Now the Doctor's story in New Who so far is really quite astonishing. When I say that RTD broke him, I really mean that. But to be able to go there - naturally, organically - and then [with Moffat] Back again... Damn that's impressive. Here, have a bunch of quotes to show what I mean:
See what I mean? There and back again... How on EARTH did RTD break the show so seamlessly that it seemed inevitable? How did we reach a point where a hero had to commit suicide in order for the Doctor to start caring? I guess in part it's the inevitability of it... He is told that he is The Lonely God, so that is what he becomes.
Now, apart from all the other problems with Godhood, the specific problems with the monotheistic approach Ten had was that a) That sort of god is omnipotent (which the Doctor, well, isn’t) and b) That sort of god can have no fellow deities. Other powers are either false gods or demons. There can be angels and apostles and all kinds of different followers, but people are either for him, or against him, and it makes the morality both more simplistic and more complicated. The Doctor has to be ‘good’, because otherwise the whole thing collapses, but what happens when he does something morally questionable? Water of Mars is straightforward, actually, because there he is a Fallen God, but otherwise the show tends to give him unequivocal evil to fight against (Daleks, Cybermen, the Master, Evil Timelords) - they are evil, ergo he is good. Which is... difficult to work with, because he is so clearly flawed.
The Mad Man With A Box
Now what Moffat has done so brilliantly is that (apart from dismantling The Lonely God, as previously shown) he didn't throw the 'god' idea out of the window (because the Doctor does have powers that far outweigh any human's and to deny that would be foolish), but just changed it radically. Moffat (re-)turned the Doctor to a world of fairy tales and myths and magic. (Also see this whole post.) A world where every tree and every shadow might be alive, where the cosmos is filled with all kinds of powers, small and large, each with their allocated space, each with their own purpose, and governed by their own rules (and often a lot of symbolism - see hand-tying). Here, the Doctor's Trickster-character fits in. To quotemalsperanza (I do that a lot):
I think the important thing is that while the Doctor might be god-like from a human POV, in his own [green]world, he is quite simply being who/what he is supposed to be. He works with magic/science [‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'], and just operates on a different level to our world. His role is different to that of a human - just like a faun or centaur or dwarf or elf or fairy occupies a different role to a human, and has different powers and strengths. Neither better or worse, just different.
Let me throw in another quote - this one bylonewytch and it’s about CAL's symbol (which is just like Kazran's clock!):
Now the Doctor still occupies a somewhat god-like role, but it’s not one that puts him above humans in any way. Because mythical gods are fallible. The stories of the pagan gods (from any culture, really) are full of love and betrayal and war and trickery, as well as the gods interfering in human affairs - and not always doing so in a good way. Expecting 'perfection', or even inherent 'goodness', from the gods is invariably foolish. Not that the Doctor isn't good, but he is as prone to screwing up as anyone else. He acts from his own personal moral code, and this is sometimes different to humans’. Or other people’s. In both S5 and S6 we have forces fighting the Doctor, and although their methods are questionable, they themselves are acting from motives every bit as pure as the Doctor’s. To quote the Moff himself:
And this is why the common thread in Moffat’s Who so far isn’t ‘Save us’, but quite the opposite:
The Doctor quite simply can’t do it on his own. Now you can point out (and you’d be right to) that this is also the lesson from the Ten era. But Ten’s story is about the Doctor trying to do it on his own, and the folly therein, whereas Eleven (so far) is about learning to ask for help. (And the Christmas Special is the final piece - but I’ll get to that.)
Hades and Persephone
Of course River is pivotal in this since he isn't alone anymore - he has someone to hold him accountable, someone to challenge his presumptions and arrogance - a mirror, a helpmate, someone to balance him out. Much like the CAL/Kazran symbol, it’s about balance. And River is not someone abruptly gifted with Timelord powers - she is the Child of the TARDIS, as well as having been manipulated by the Silence, something she - and everyone connected to her - pays for dearly. But she is what she is - she can’t be undone, her powers cannot be taken from her, because they are an organic part of her.
I remember Promethia saying when watching The Big Bang, that the moment when the Doctor reappeared with River (after having saved her from the exploding TARDIS) her instinctive reaction was:
'Mom and Dad are home and everything's going to be alright now.'
And that truly is their role! Rather than a whole world (Gallifrey), aloof and remote, to watch over the universe, we have a Mother and a Father figure - very hands-on, but also elusive and mythical. Fairy tales, or myths, made real. And of course they're married. Notice that in the last two images in my composite picture (those from LKH and TWoRS) the Doctor is directly asking River for help. He is slowly learning that he can’t do everything by himself, and asking for help is beginning to be instinctual.
A straightforward love story is always inward looking, the characters caught up in each other. But the Doctor and River focussing only on each other is actually dangerous (unstoppable force/immovable object - also see the Master). They need to be side-by-side (or back-to-back), focussing all that energy out. Because the heart of Eleven's story in S6 is about restoring order, and the marriage is the final piece. To quotelonewytch again:
And now, isn't that just 'Intellect and romance triumph over brute force and cynicism' at its most basic? Here’s one I made earlier:
And this is why I made it. Really, thinking about it, then the Doctor getting married is the most Doctor-y thing he has ever done, and something which re-enforces everything the show stands for.
♥ ♥ ♥
But, to briefly touch on the actual heading for this, I shall quote the brilliantjanie_aire:
I am not going to go into detail re. Hades and Persephone, but for anyone interested, I’d urge you to go look up the myths. Here’s a very brief summary, courtesy of Promethia:
Because this is the territory we’re in now - myths and legends and fairy tales. I’m not saying this is deliberate on Moffat’s part, just that what he taps into is vastly different to RTD’s writing. Notice that the finales to both S5 and S6 have taken place in a greenworld (parallel worlds of unstable nature, wherein all the normal rules have gone topsy turvy and the Doctor’s madness is sanity). Symbolism is often paramount, rather than an added nifty touch. Or, to quotemalsperanza:
Trees! Forests! There's so much there... Anyway, this is also why motherhood and fatherhood and children and marriage - the archetypes of men and women - are the ones Moffat plays with. Like T.S.Eliot talking about The Wasteland (218):
So very, very much of Doctor Who in that... As in, all the women can be seen as one woman, and all the men as one man - the mirrors are deliberate. And the Doctor can in many ways be seen as Tiresias - he is the storyteller, standing outside the story, observing. (And then in turn, River is his storyteller...) Anyway, this brings me to my final point (which was also my first).
ETA: Briefly going back to the point about RTD changing the show, then props where props are due: The Moff gave the Doctor a wife (as well as a human family and a sex life!), and he did it with such slow and careful steps that this momentous, world changing development wasn't something which made people sit up and yell 'YOU CAN'T DO THAT!', but instead has them arguing over the legalities of getting married in an AU without the Doctor telling River his name... I think Moffat might be the master of smuggling elephants into a room without anyone noticing.
The Rise of the Trickster
I talked about S6 and how it changed everything. Now a lot of people have found it difficult to reconcile Ten and Eleven - how did the one turn into the other? Well, I think we were slightly misled...
S5 was our introduction to Eleven. He’s very different in temperament to Ten, reacts differently, behaves differently. But, as was still evident, the scars - and a lot of the bad habits - from the past were still there. By nature he no longer focussed on himself and his own pain, but that did not mean that those issues had gone away, nor that deeply ingrained behaviour or old traumas suddenly vanished.
Because in S6 we saw all of it return. We saw the Oncoming Storm in all his glory. The beginning of A Good man Goes To War is entirely filled with people talking about the Doctor, and his impact on others. Commander Strax, Madam Vasta, Dorium, Kovarian, all the soldiers... the Doctor goes to war, and he is a fearsome enemy. I believe that we saw part of the fallout from this in The Pandorica Opens - friends and enemies gathered to save the universe from him. Because what he had become, slowly, over the years, was A Great Warrior.
And S6 is about unlearning that - rediscovering who he really is and what his purpose is.. Essentially he is re-writing himself... Because he is not the man who leads armies into battle, no. He is... a Trickster (read the whole post, seriously!):
Now the thing that really made me sit up and take notice, is how the Doctor gets out of his unavoidable death: He cheats. Yes he has already made up his mind to go through with it, and thus learns a valuable lesson about not holding himself above the Laws of Time (also see Abraham sacrificing Isaac re. this), but when the opportunity presents itself... he straight up cheats. Cons the universe. It’s beautifully elegant, actually, and very much ties back to Seven (who is my darling) and his essential manipulativeness. And it couldn’t be further from Ten, and his need to step in and be the focus ("Look at me! Look at me!" <- Ten was 'Handlebars' all the way...). Consider all Ten’s Christmas Specials... In every one (sort of bar the one with Astrid), it is the Doctor who stands firm and saves the day. Everything hinges on his decisions... And oh, how far we’ve come from that, by now. Remember this?
THE DOCTOR: Actually, that's not true. Christmas is a time of -- of peace and thanksgiving and...what am I on about? Christmas is always like this.
With Eleven Christmas truly is a time of peace and thanksgiving. Because here is another thought: I believe that Eleven’s Christmas Specials bookend the development of S6.
First of all, A Christmas Carol set out where the characters were currently at, and laid out the story & themes to come through Kazran & Abigail. (See this post for more a indepth analysis.) For now I want to point out that the Doctor saves the day in a very Trickster-y way, but the story still hinges heavily on his actions, and he throws down the gauntlet when he argues with Kazran without a moment’s hesitation.
So A Christmas Carol - quite literally - marks the point where the Doctor is ‘halfway out of the dark’: In the middle between the darkness of Ten, and the new light at the end of S6.
Because Kazran is changed so much that he can no longer operate the machine that controls the skies, and indeed, the Doctor is now so changed that it is hard to look on Ten and believe it is the same man...
Which brings us to this year’s Christmas Special, where we take a step back and have a look at what the consequences are of this season. Where has our Doctor ended up? The answer: A pure Trickster, more or less. (The Doctor is of course too complex a character to fit into any category completely.) But, like I said before, his role in this episode is as ‘the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling’. Indeed, he starts off needing Madge’s help as he falls to earth - ‘a spaceman, possibly an angel’ she describes him as, and her husband huffs and talks about how she always brings home strays... (A clue if ever there was one that she is being paralleled to the Doctor.)
And then, throughout the episode, he is the guide, the one who explains what is going on (the teller of the tale: “Your mother is flying a forest through the time vortex, be a little impressed!”), but he is not the one who saves the day. He merely helps people save themselves... as well as a whole bunch of trees! :)
But there is a final lesson. We saw that in A Christmas Carol that he was now (once more) bringing others into his own world, taking Kazran and Abigail to wonderful Christmasses everywhere (and once joining in theirs), no longer desperately seeking refuge in loneliness as he once did. From The Next Doctor:
[Why am I alone and without companions?] “They leave. Because they should. Or they find someone else. And some of them... some of them forget me. I suppose, in the end... (pause) They break my heart.”
However, this is a very, very self-centered worldview. And Moffat turns round and, through Madge, tells the Doctor in no uncertain terms that other people’s heart matter too: How dare he let his friends - the people who love him - think he’s dead at Christmas?
Now this is not something I’m going to blame RTD for particularly, although he certainly took it as far as he could. Because the Doctor has always been kind, but... aloof. This is, after all, the man who locked his own granddaughter out of the TARDIS before saying goodbye...
He's mellowed as he's gotten older (he now adores people and is always ready with a hug), but he invariably keeps a personal distance - reluctant to let anyone close, and the Time War obviously only made this worse. He is getting better, but River had to basically hold the universe hostage before he'd marry her/let her in, and it clearly chafed that she should have such demands.
But then (*cheers for Madge*) he gets told that it’s not about him. His pain isn’t more important than other people’s (here - help me dance on the Lonely God’s grave, will you?) and he goes off to spend Christmas with the Ponds. And then we get a proper Christmas miracle...
Because - of course - the Ponds are not just friends. They’re family. And the Doctor learns a final lesson, which was foreshadowed all the way back in Victory of the Daleks:
DOCTOR: Good. Remember it now, Edwin! The ash trees by the Post Office and your mum and dad and losing them and men in the trenches you saw die... Remember it! Feel it, because you're human. You're not like them. You are not like the Daleks!
BRACEWELL: It hurts! Doctor, it hurts so much!
DOCTOR: Good! Good! Good! Brilliant! Embrace it. That means you're alive! They cannot explode that bomb, you're a human being! [...] It's not working, I can't stop it!
[...]
AMY: Hey... Paisley. Ever fancied someone you know you shouldn't?
BRACEWELL: W... What?
AMY: Hurts, doesn't it? But kind of a good hurt.
BRACEWELL: I really shouldn't talk about her.
AMY: Oh. There's a her.
‘Kind of a good hurt’. Crying when you’re happy. What makes humans human isn’t pain - it’s love. If River’s lesson in TWoRS was that he is worthy of love, then this is the point where he understands what that means in practical terms: He is loved, and so he has a responsibility towards those who love him. And it has nothing to do with saving them, or watching over them, but about quite simply being with them. Sharing time with them. Letting them in, and allowing himself to be a part of them in return.
And so, romance and intellect triumph over brute force and cynicism one last, final time - because, paradoxically, by making the Doctor as Doctor-y [Trickster-y, alien] as possible, he has become more human than he ever was.
I shall finish with a quote bythe_royal_anna, because it is one of my favourites ever, and fits so perfectly that it takes my breath away. What a wonderous message for Christmas Day, and one the Doctor finally understands, I think. I can't wait to see where we go from here.
We don't stop being human when we lose our hearts; nor when we lose our heads. And every last vestige of humanity can be drained from us, but as long as somebody, somewhere cares, we are not dust.
♥
A while ago I re-watched one of my favourite RTD-era vids of all time:
hollywoodgrrl’s Marble House. It is utterly stunning visually and the editing is incredible (the first minute is... unlike anything else), but it is also extremely hardhitting, brutal and very manipulative. I even wrote meta on it once. Now I hadn’t watched it for ages - not since before S6 - and, as I watched, the most extraordinary thing happened: I didn’t understand it. I mean, at all. It was like it was asking what direction is yellow. Or what shape is ‘up’. It completely didn’t compute. Which puzzled me immensely (because it is an AWESOME vid and I pretty much know it by heart...). So I started thinking and analysing and this meta is the result. Well - this is how it started. Since then I’ve had a lot of other thoughts and it’s all been siphoned into this. But in essence: The Moff rebooted the show so thoroughly that it is a completely different thing. And he didn’t do it just by taking every single issue that RTD left him with, addressing it, and fixing it - any showrunner taking over would have to do this, because Ten, bless his cotton Timelord socks, had more issues than I can count - but by changing the basic vocabulary of the show [back to what it used to be]. S6 was at the heart of this, and the changes this season brought cannot be overestimated. Follow me under the cut, and I’ll explain what I mean.SPOILERS for all of New Who, including the most recent Christmas Special.
(Btw, this is NOT a ‘RTD is awful, Moffat is God’, essay. I find what RTD did v. interesting, and will look at it in detail.)
Anyway, for those who don’t fancy reading the whole thing - and as a nifty little intro - I summed up the whole thing in two images. *g* (The quote is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is used to describe Angel, her broody vampire boyfriend.)
Doctor Who?
You can see New Who as the Doctor trying to work out who he is now, what with a) Being the murderer of his own kind and b) If he's the only Timelord left, then what a Timelord is is up to him. Ten searches high and low for something to be, some kind of self, some sort of definition (Rose's Love, Martha's Hero, Donna's Friend, The Timelord Victorious) but in the end can only be what he is: The Doctor ("It's my honour"). And so S5 and 6 is the story of trying to find his way back, step by difficult step, re-learning what makes him him. And although he's going in the right direction, there are wrong turns and many pitfalls (Ten was *so* screwed up), until he manages to finally be back where he was: The Doctor. Just the Doctor.
Or, to quote
malsperanza (from this post): To me that is rather interesting, and I think is connected with the idea of the Withheld Hero, though I'm not sure how. Sometimes heroes do not grow, learn, become better people, blah blah, because they don't need to. Odysseus doesn't need to "learn" anything; there are no moral lessons for him in the end. What he needs is to Get Home; he is the same man at the beginning and end of the poem. Ditto Jack Sparrow--in contrast to the young romantic hero of PotC, who undergoes a radical transformation from polite working-class fellow to law-breaking pirate and thence to member of the upper class (by marriage).
You see how perfectly this fits with the most basic concept of Doctor Who? To quote Moffat:
The story happens to the companion, not The Doctor. It’s only when he’s got someone to show off to that its happening. That’s why I think the story starts again every time a new person takes that decision to go into that blue box.
But RTD changed that - during the Specials he placed the Doctor squarely in the centre of everything (and this had been building for quite some time). Which means that in order to become himself again, the Doctor needed to step out of the spotlight and become the Withheld Hero/Trickster once more. Which proved to be an interesting and rather unusual journey, actually...
Let’s begin with how the Doctor ‘went wrong’. I think it’s generally acknowledged that RTD *broke* the Doctor, and Moffat’s been putting him back together, and here I am interested in the *how*. Because I think that was RTD did was to turn the Doctor into a Tragic Hero. I’m not saying he did this deliberately (or even consciously), but that was the end result. Allow me to illustrate:
The Tragic Hero
- the protagonist suffers
- the protagonist stands before a decision
- the protagonist decides in an "unnatural" way, denying personal emotions and urges
- the protagonist endures more than s/he deserves
- the protagonist has a dark/bad fate from the beginning but is unable to accept responsibility for her/his flaws/weaknesses
- the protagonist is of noble descent but in a way that the audience is able to identify
- the protagonist has to see and understand her/his fate as well as understanding that her/his behavior will be her/his doom
- the hero story should combine fear and empathy
- ideally, the protagonist is a king or leader who draws his people into the abyss, too, while they're the witnesses
- the protagonist has to be intelligent and able to learn from mistakes
- tragic virtue
(Friedrich Schiller, 1759 - 1805)
I’m not even going to do my usual thing of illustrating stuff with images, because it doesn’t need it. It’s that obvious. Now the funny thing is that this is actually what I've been saying all along. Ten is a hero, Eleven is a wizard. And the Doctor ought to be a wizard. He even calls himself Gandalf. But I'm getting ahead of myself - let’s look at what KIND of Tragic Hero Ten is...
There is a theory - and I think it’s right - that what Ten wants, is to be human. (A point I won’t elaborate on, but which I think is fairy obvious.) Except - and oh, the irony of this is immense - the only way he can fit is as a god-like figure: Someone even more removed from humanity than an alien. Because the human world has rules and patterns, and someone with a Timelord's abilities can never be 'ordinary' and indeed he chafes at it, when he tries - he loves them, even as he is unable to be them. We see this in Family of Blood/Human Nature where he delights in turning himself human - and yet won’t go back.
So, focussed on fitting into their world, he ends up as humanity's god (both literally and narratively), and it is something of a thread going right through RTD’s Who...
Humanity prays/calls out to him, and he answers. They believe, and saves them. (Interestingly S2 is the only finale where this doesn’t apply, but then that is focussed squarely on the Doctor’s loss of Rose.) In the end he tries to set himself up as god of the whole universe (hello Mars!), and Ood Sigma may be the ultimate sign of this: The universe asks for his help to defeat Gallifrey (the Ood were given the gift of seeing through time and the ability to reach out to the Doctor, so he could save them...)
And the Doctor (not surprisingly with so much encouragement) sees himself as having to sacrifice himself to save the world (hello there god-complex, thinking we are Jesus?), because that is the pattern, that is the story he wants to fit into. He even gets a Requiem... (“The universe will sing you to your sleep.”)
And this is why Marble House accuses him: ‘If you are our God, our Saviour, then WHY DON'T YOU SAVE US [from ourselves]? ‘
Also this is why he has to be lonely - the pattern he tries to fit into is a monotheistic one. [Disregarding *actual* Christian theology - it all gets too complex there. /understatement ] But from a simplistic perspective, then he is a Lonely God.
Following on from this we can see why turning his companions into himself is so deadly, and has such terrible consequences. Both Rose and Donna literally become him, and it [almost] kills them (although he manages to save Rose - but not before she has created Jack). Trying to cram the knowledge of a Timelord into a human by force - both Rose and Donna absorb the ability to see all of time the way the Doctor does - is deadly, and nearly burns them up.
Martha gets a better deal by becoming his prophet/apostle, preaching the Good News - yet it is in many ways a thankless task, since he can never love her the way she wants him to. (And indeed, his love could be fatal, so she probably counts herself lucky in the end.)
But Jack, trying to model himself into the Doctor mould (and the whole of Torchwood, generally) is another cautionary tale: This sort of power/responsibility is too much for humans. Sarah Jane gets off better, but even she loses the love of her life, because of what she chooses to be. With great power comes great responsibility, and this both Jack and Sarah Jane learn to their cost.
And the problem is that this is not who the Doctor is. Ten is caught between worlds, denying his real nature, and the compromise tears him apart. Basically - by reaching for power that is wrong for him (like diesel in a petrol engine), he ends up destroying instead of healing.
We see this most clearly in Waters of Mars which is... anti-Doctor Who? I will bring out 'Intellect and Romance Triumph over Brute Force and Cynicism' a fair bit, but the resolution to Waters of Mars is every inch brute force and cynicism winning. After all, how else could you describe Adelaide's suicide?
Now the Doctor's story in New Who so far is really quite astonishing. When I say that RTD broke him, I really mean that. But to be able to go there - naturally, organically - and then [with Moffat] Back again... Damn that's impressive. Here, have a bunch of quotes to show what I mean:
DOCTOR:
Rose - there's a man alive in the world who wasn't alive before. An ordinary man, that's the most important thing in creation. The whole world's different because he's alive.
Father's Day
DOCTOR:
Adelaide, I've done this sort of thing before, in small ways, saved some little people. But never someone as important as you. Oh, I'm good!
ADELAIDE:
Little people? What, like Mia and Yuri? Who decides they're so unimportant? You?
Waters of Mars
DOCTOR (about Abigail):
Who's she?
KAZRAN:
Nobody important.
DOCTOR:
Nobody important? Blimey, that's amazing. Do you know, in 900 years of time and space, and I've never met anyone who wasn't important before.
A Christmas Carol
See what I mean? There and back again... How on EARTH did RTD break the show so seamlessly that it seemed inevitable? How did we reach a point where a hero had to commit suicide in order for the Doctor to start caring? I guess in part it's the inevitability of it... He is told that he is The Lonely God, so that is what he becomes.
Now, apart from all the other problems with Godhood, the specific problems with the monotheistic approach Ten had was that a) That sort of god is omnipotent (which the Doctor, well, isn’t) and b) That sort of god can have no fellow deities. Other powers are either false gods or demons. There can be angels and apostles and all kinds of different followers, but people are either for him, or against him, and it makes the morality both more simplistic and more complicated. The Doctor has to be ‘good’, because otherwise the whole thing collapses, but what happens when he does something morally questionable? Water of Mars is straightforward, actually, because there he is a Fallen God, but otherwise the show tends to give him unequivocal evil to fight against (Daleks, Cybermen, the Master, Evil Timelords) - they are evil, ergo he is good. Which is... difficult to work with, because he is so clearly flawed.
Now what Moffat has done so brilliantly is that (apart from dismantling The Lonely God, as previously shown) he didn't throw the 'god' idea out of the window (because the Doctor does have powers that far outweigh any human's and to deny that would be foolish), but just changed it radically. Moffat (re-)turned the Doctor to a world of fairy tales and myths and magic. (Also see this whole post.) A world where every tree and every shadow might be alive, where the cosmos is filled with all kinds of powers, small and large, each with their allocated space, each with their own purpose, and governed by their own rules (and often a lot of symbolism - see hand-tying). Here, the Doctor's Trickster-character fits in. To quote
malsperanza (I do that a lot):The Trickster is often not the protagonist or hero, but the other fellow--the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling. And sometimes even tell the story.
I think the important thing is that while the Doctor might be god-like from a human POV, in his own [green]world, he is quite simply being who/what he is supposed to be. He works with magic/science [‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'], and just operates on a different level to our world. His role is different to that of a human - just like a faun or centaur or dwarf or elf or fairy occupies a different role to a human, and has different powers and strengths. Neither better or worse, just different.
Let me throw in another quote - this one by
lonewytch and it’s about CAL's symbol (which is just like Kazran's clock!):While we're on norse mythology, I have to comment on the library/CAL's symbol. In the world tree and in many branches of shamanism, this world, the physical one we live in “middle earth” or Midgard meaning “the middle enclosure”, lies at the centre. Above we have the upperworld usually associated with the gods, and underneath, the underworld usually associated with the ancestors. CAL's symbol mirrors this concept nicely, the upper swirl and the lower swirl are reflections of each other, cupping the upper and lower worlds, while the circle of Midgard is at the centre.
Now the Doctor still occupies a somewhat god-like role, but it’s not one that puts him above humans in any way. Because mythical gods are fallible. The stories of the pagan gods (from any culture, really) are full of love and betrayal and war and trickery, as well as the gods interfering in human affairs - and not always doing so in a good way. Expecting 'perfection', or even inherent 'goodness', from the gods is invariably foolish. Not that the Doctor isn't good, but he is as prone to screwing up as anyone else. He acts from his own personal moral code, and this is sometimes different to humans’. Or other people’s. In both S5 and S6 we have forces fighting the Doctor, and although their methods are questionable, they themselves are acting from motives every bit as pure as the Doctor’s. To quote the Moff himself:
...but I remember one morning that Russell and I had a long email discussion about the banality of evil. Before we got bored! But I think it's boring to say that something is just 'evil' - it's bad writing. 'Evil' is just someone who has reasoning you don't understand, and I think it's bad for the Doctor to oppose that - the Doctor is able to decode the universe from the other guy's perspective and understand what it means from his point of view.
And this is why the common thread in Moffat’s Who so far isn’t ‘Save us’, but quite the opposite:
The Doctor quite simply can’t do it on his own. Now you can point out (and you’d be right to) that this is also the lesson from the Ten era. But Ten’s story is about the Doctor trying to do it on his own, and the folly therein, whereas Eleven (so far) is about learning to ask for help. (And the Christmas Special is the final piece - but I’ll get to that.)
Of course River is pivotal in this since he isn't alone anymore - he has someone to hold him accountable, someone to challenge his presumptions and arrogance - a mirror, a helpmate, someone to balance him out. Much like the CAL/Kazran symbol, it’s about balance. And River is not someone abruptly gifted with Timelord powers - she is the Child of the TARDIS, as well as having been manipulated by the Silence, something she - and everyone connected to her - pays for dearly. But she is what she is - she can’t be undone, her powers cannot be taken from her, because they are an organic part of her.
I remember Promethia saying when watching The Big Bang, that the moment when the Doctor reappeared with River (after having saved her from the exploding TARDIS) her instinctive reaction was:
'Mom and Dad are home and everything's going to be alright now.'
And that truly is their role! Rather than a whole world (Gallifrey), aloof and remote, to watch over the universe, we have a Mother and a Father figure - very hands-on, but also elusive and mythical. Fairy tales, or myths, made real. And of course they're married. Notice that in the last two images in my composite picture (those from LKH and TWoRS) the Doctor is directly asking River for help. He is slowly learning that he can’t do everything by himself, and asking for help is beginning to be instinctual.
A straightforward love story is always inward looking, the characters caught up in each other. But the Doctor and River focussing only on each other is actually dangerous (unstoppable force/immovable object - also see the Master). They need to be side-by-side (or back-to-back), focussing all that energy out. Because the heart of Eleven's story in S6 is about restoring order, and the marriage is the final piece. To quote
lonewytch again:This is sealed by their marriage at the end of The Wedding of River Song where they are re-enacting the Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Marriage. This is a concept prevalent in myth and in rituals from different cultures, that of either symbolically or physically enacting the unification of the God and Goddess into One. The Doctor talks about the two of them being at either pole of the event which has caused time to collapse and that it is union of these poles through touch which will save the universe. This is fundamentally the union of masculine and feminine, of intellect (the Doctor in TWoRS) and Heart (River - who is fully acting from Love in the ep).
And now, isn't that just 'Intellect and romance triumph over brute force and cynicism' at its most basic? Here’s one I made earlier:
And this is why I made it. Really, thinking about it, then the Doctor getting married is the most Doctor-y thing he has ever done, and something which re-enforces everything the show stands for.
♥ ♥ ♥
But, to briefly touch on the actual heading for this, I shall quote the brilliant
janie_aire:Remember! Again, we get the juxtaposition of remembering and dying, which has been thematic throughout Eleven's run. In the Ancient Greek myths, the souls of the Dead were ferried across the River, where they would meet the Lord and Lady of the Underworld: Hades, Lord of Desire, who is the husband to and the end of Persephone, Goddess of Change, who is wife to and the end of Hades. The end of desire and the end of change (time) are complementary. They are each others' ends.
I am not going to go into detail re. Hades and Persephone, but for anyone interested, I’d urge you to go look up the myths. Here’s a very brief summary, courtesy of Promethia:
Persephone was the daughter of Demeter (goddess of grain and the harvest) by Zeus. Hades, god of the underworld, stole her away to be his wife, causing Demeter to throw fits of grief and cause famine throughout the land. Eventually the famine forced Hades to give her back (I think maybe Zeus intervened to make his brother give her up?), but while in the underworld, Persephone had consumed six pomegranate seeds and, what with the way these things work, it meant that she was never able to fully leave the underworld again. So basically Hades and Demeter worked out an arrangement whereby Persephone spent six months of the year with him and six months on earth with her mother, and when Persephone is in the underworld her mother mourns and we have winter, and when she's back we have summer and the harvest. Thus Persephone is both queen of the underworld and a goddess of growth and fertility and, therefore, a goddess of change (time).
Also gratifying to note that, while the Olympians in general where really rubbish at being married and basically plagued their spouses to no end, Hades and Persephone, despite the inauspicious start, are pretty much considered to be the only happy couple in the lot.
Because this is the territory we’re in now - myths and legends and fairy tales. I’m not saying this is deliberate on Moffat’s part, just that what he taps into is vastly different to RTD’s writing. Notice that the finales to both S5 and S6 have taken place in a greenworld (parallel worlds of unstable nature, wherein all the normal rules have gone topsy turvy and the Doctor’s madness is sanity). Symbolism is often paramount, rather than an added nifty touch. Or, to quote
malsperanza:These sorts of tropes, together with talking dolls and marionettes and ventriloquists' dummies, belong to classic folktales and horror stories, rather than sci fi per se. They establish the key point that the division between what is living and what is a thing is permeable. Moffat is much given to statements like "Don't blink. Blink and you're dead" and explaining that houses have rooms that you can only see out of the corner of your eye, and that the cracks in walls are rifts in time-space. Here Be Monsters. Things that appear to be inanimate have lives (often not happy ones) and thoughts (often not nice ones), and therefore we should take the universe a lot more seriously than we do.
This is Tolkien country, where there is a willow grows aslant a brook not in order to be picturesque and pastoral, but to eat you if you are so foolish as to come too near. As Gandalf says, there are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world. And deep space is one of those places; the human heart is another. In Rivendell, Frodo notes, there is the memory of ancient things; in Lorien the ancient things still live on in the waking world. And as Hamlet remarks (perhaps because he is familiar with the ways of willow-trees), there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of a rationalist. Moffat knows that the scariest things are not chainsaws and tentacles but shadows and cracked plaster, and that the scariest things are also the most wonderful, wonderful and yet again wonderful. He knows because like most good British writers, he learned about enchanted forests from Arden and the woods near Athens; about trees that imprison mysteries from a cloven pine; about the magical transformations that occur in the deep places from the tolling of a sea-nymph's bell. The Shakespearean echoes are all over Doctor Who.
Trees! Forests! There's so much there... Anyway, this is also why motherhood and fatherhood and children and marriage - the archetypes of men and women - are the ones Moffat plays with. Like T.S.Eliot talking about The Wasteland (218):
Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.
So very, very much of Doctor Who in that... As in, all the women can be seen as one woman, and all the men as one man - the mirrors are deliberate. And the Doctor can in many ways be seen as Tiresias - he is the storyteller, standing outside the story, observing. (And then in turn, River is his storyteller...) Anyway, this brings me to my final point (which was also my first).
ETA: Briefly going back to the point about RTD changing the show, then props where props are due: The Moff gave the Doctor a wife (as well as a human family and a sex life!), and he did it with such slow and careful steps that this momentous, world changing development wasn't something which made people sit up and yell 'YOU CAN'T DO THAT!', but instead has them arguing over the legalities of getting married in an AU without the Doctor telling River his name... I think Moffat might be the master of smuggling elephants into a room without anyone noticing.
I talked about S6 and how it changed everything. Now a lot of people have found it difficult to reconcile Ten and Eleven - how did the one turn into the other? Well, I think we were slightly misled...
S5 was our introduction to Eleven. He’s very different in temperament to Ten, reacts differently, behaves differently. But, as was still evident, the scars - and a lot of the bad habits - from the past were still there. By nature he no longer focussed on himself and his own pain, but that did not mean that those issues had gone away, nor that deeply ingrained behaviour or old traumas suddenly vanished.
Because in S6 we saw all of it return. We saw the Oncoming Storm in all his glory. The beginning of A Good man Goes To War is entirely filled with people talking about the Doctor, and his impact on others. Commander Strax, Madam Vasta, Dorium, Kovarian, all the soldiers... the Doctor goes to war, and he is a fearsome enemy. I believe that we saw part of the fallout from this in The Pandorica Opens - friends and enemies gathered to save the universe from him. Because what he had become, slowly, over the years, was A Great Warrior.
And S6 is about unlearning that - rediscovering who he really is and what his purpose is.. Essentially he is re-writing himself... Because he is not the man who leads armies into battle, no. He is... a Trickster (read the whole post, seriously!):
Trickster is not always a nice fellow, to say the least. He has something in common with bad guys--liars and thieves and confidence men; cheats. In Norse mythology Loki is a Trickster; so is Rumplestiltskin. [list of examples] He is a shape-shifter, and as such has a lot in common with the androgyne, the cross-dresser, and the masker. In his most powerful form, he is a god, and can reshape not only himself, but nature itself.
Now the thing that really made me sit up and take notice, is how the Doctor gets out of his unavoidable death: He cheats. Yes he has already made up his mind to go through with it, and thus learns a valuable lesson about not holding himself above the Laws of Time (also see Abraham sacrificing Isaac re. this), but when the opportunity presents itself... he straight up cheats. Cons the universe. It’s beautifully elegant, actually, and very much ties back to Seven (who is my darling) and his essential manipulativeness. And it couldn’t be further from Ten, and his need to step in and be the focus ("Look at me! Look at me!" <- Ten was 'Handlebars' all the way...). Consider all Ten’s Christmas Specials... In every one (sort of bar the one with Astrid), it is the Doctor who stands firm and saves the day. Everything hinges on his decisions... And oh, how far we’ve come from that, by now. Remember this?
THE DOCTOR: Actually, that's not true. Christmas is a time of -- of peace and thanksgiving and...what am I on about? Christmas is always like this.
With Eleven Christmas truly is a time of peace and thanksgiving. Because here is another thought: I believe that Eleven’s Christmas Specials bookend the development of S6.
First of all, A Christmas Carol set out where the characters were currently at, and laid out the story & themes to come through Kazran & Abigail. (See this post for more a indepth analysis.) For now I want to point out that the Doctor saves the day in a very Trickster-y way, but the story still hinges heavily on his actions, and he throws down the gauntlet when he argues with Kazran without a moment’s hesitation.
So A Christmas Carol - quite literally - marks the point where the Doctor is ‘halfway out of the dark’: In the middle between the darkness of Ten, and the new light at the end of S6.
Because Kazran is changed so much that he can no longer operate the machine that controls the skies, and indeed, the Doctor is now so changed that it is hard to look on Ten and believe it is the same man...
Which brings us to this year’s Christmas Special, where we take a step back and have a look at what the consequences are of this season. Where has our Doctor ended up? The answer: A pure Trickster, more or less. (The Doctor is of course too complex a character to fit into any category completely.) But, like I said before, his role in this episode is as ‘the catalyst or outsider whose unexpected arrival and unpredictable behavior turn the world upside down and get the story rolling’. Indeed, he starts off needing Madge’s help as he falls to earth - ‘a spaceman, possibly an angel’ she describes him as, and her husband huffs and talks about how she always brings home strays... (A clue if ever there was one that she is being paralleled to the Doctor.)
And then, throughout the episode, he is the guide, the one who explains what is going on (the teller of the tale: “Your mother is flying a forest through the time vortex, be a little impressed!”), but he is not the one who saves the day. He merely helps people save themselves... as well as a whole bunch of trees! :)
But there is a final lesson. We saw that in A Christmas Carol that he was now (once more) bringing others into his own world, taking Kazran and Abigail to wonderful Christmasses everywhere (and once joining in theirs), no longer desperately seeking refuge in loneliness as he once did. From The Next Doctor:
[Why am I alone and without companions?] “They leave. Because they should. Or they find someone else. And some of them... some of them forget me. I suppose, in the end... (pause) They break my heart.”
However, this is a very, very self-centered worldview. And Moffat turns round and, through Madge, tells the Doctor in no uncertain terms that other people’s heart matter too: How dare he let his friends - the people who love him - think he’s dead at Christmas?
Now this is not something I’m going to blame RTD for particularly, although he certainly took it as far as he could. Because the Doctor has always been kind, but... aloof. This is, after all, the man who locked his own granddaughter out of the TARDIS before saying goodbye...
He's mellowed as he's gotten older (he now adores people and is always ready with a hug), but he invariably keeps a personal distance - reluctant to let anyone close, and the Time War obviously only made this worse. He is getting better, but River had to basically hold the universe hostage before he'd marry her/let her in, and it clearly chafed that she should have such demands.
But then (*cheers for Madge*) he gets told that it’s not about him. His pain isn’t more important than other people’s (here - help me dance on the Lonely God’s grave, will you?) and he goes off to spend Christmas with the Ponds. And then we get a proper Christmas miracle...
Because - of course - the Ponds are not just friends. They’re family. And the Doctor learns a final lesson, which was foreshadowed all the way back in Victory of the Daleks:
DOCTOR: Good. Remember it now, Edwin! The ash trees by the Post Office and your mum and dad and losing them and men in the trenches you saw die... Remember it! Feel it, because you're human. You're not like them. You are not like the Daleks!
BRACEWELL: It hurts! Doctor, it hurts so much!
DOCTOR: Good! Good! Good! Brilliant! Embrace it. That means you're alive! They cannot explode that bomb, you're a human being! [...] It's not working, I can't stop it!
[...]
AMY: Hey... Paisley. Ever fancied someone you know you shouldn't?
BRACEWELL: W... What?
AMY: Hurts, doesn't it? But kind of a good hurt.
BRACEWELL: I really shouldn't talk about her.
AMY: Oh. There's a her.
‘Kind of a good hurt’. Crying when you’re happy. What makes humans human isn’t pain - it’s love. If River’s lesson in TWoRS was that he is worthy of love, then this is the point where he understands what that means in practical terms: He is loved, and so he has a responsibility towards those who love him. And it has nothing to do with saving them, or watching over them, but about quite simply being with them. Sharing time with them. Letting them in, and allowing himself to be a part of them in return.
And so, romance and intellect triumph over brute force and cynicism one last, final time - because, paradoxically, by making the Doctor as Doctor-y [Trickster-y, alien] as possible, he has become more human than he ever was.
I shall finish with a quote by
the_royal_anna, because it is one of my favourites ever, and fits so perfectly that it takes my breath away. What a wonderous message for Christmas Day, and one the Doctor finally understands, I think. I can't wait to see where we go from here. We don't stop being human when we lose our hearts; nor when we lose our heads. And every last vestige of humanity can be drained from us, but as long as somebody, somewhere cares, we are not dust.
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(And what fun to see my thoughts stitched into yours! It's a wee bit like having overlapping brains, like we're all part of one big Doctor Who brain meld synergy thing.)
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:D Thank you! And have fun with your New Years stuff.
(And what fun to see my thoughts stitched into yours! It's a wee bit like having overlapping brains, like we're all part of one big Doctor Who brain meld synergy thing.)
It's a LOVELY feeling. <3 (I should probably have credited you, but there are thoughts in there from all over the place and someone would feel left out... Suffice to say that your post was one of those that made me go 'Well that is EXACTLY what I have been trying to get at! Hurrah, into the meta it goes!' Thank you again.)
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x
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And I look forward to your thoughts! :)
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This meta is so wonderful! I don't know what add! I think that the main difference between Tenth and Eleventh is that Eleventh isn't a tragic hero. And, basically, this is the reason why I love him so much. I enjoy tragic heroes, I mean I love Angel! (The quote is just so funny! XD) but this concept of the Trickster is so exciting, interesting, fascinating.
And, also, believe that Matt Smith is sexy.
I have to quote everything you say about asking help, about the marriage of River Song ...
I find very interesting the concept of sacred marriage.
The myth of Hades and Persephone is, maybe, my favorite greek myth.
It's so much about growing up, experimenting darkness and depression, complementary opposite and focus on the power of the woman.
Persephone is just "kore" (Girl) at beginning and becomes herself gradually, becomes the "Queen of both worlds" (meaning of her name)
I can picture River becoming a queen. A queen moved by love, compassion, a perfect companion of her Doctor, caretaker and warrior at the same time.
(OT: I can see this kind of relationship even between Buffy and Angel. She's the girl, kore, in love with her dark king, who became both queen of the underworld and the spring, beginning of everything)
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Awwww. <3
This meta is so wonderful! I don't know what add! I think that the main difference between Tenth and Eleventh is that Eleventh isn't a tragic hero. And, basically, this is the reason why I love him so much. I enjoy tragic heroes, I mean I love Angel! (The quote is just so funny! XD) but this concept of the Trickster is so exciting, interesting, fascinating.
I remember when I first came across the Trickster, and I just flailed for days... (Not that I don't love Angel too - that quote was BEGGING to be used - but the Doctor isn't supposed to be tragic.)
And, also, believe that Matt Smith is sexy.
Oh yeah. When he dresses up, he is... damn sharp.
Re. the Doctor and River and marriage, you might like to read my [enormous] post on the S6 finale: The Doctor’s Final Lesson, courtesy of River Song. :)
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Jokes aside, it is an excellent, well structured, and thought-provoking essay. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. I definitely hadn't thought of it that way, and it's definitely helped me pin down some vacuous feelings I've been having about Rusty vs. Moffat's versions.
Thanks for this piece of awesomeness.
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That is early for meta! :)
Jokes aside, it is an excellent, well structured, and thought-provoking essay. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Yay!
I definitely hadn't thought of it that way, and it's definitely helped me pin down some vacuous feelings I've been having about Rusty vs. Moffat's versions.
Oh that makes me happy, since that's what I was trying to puzzle out. Because you can't really judge them on the same terms - they operate in completely different ways, and to compare one to the other without taking that into account can only end badly.
Thanks for this piece of awesomeness.
Thank you for reading! :)
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and a thought: if we take the RTD arc AND the Moffet arc together as one story -- and don't leave Nine out of it, what then?
Seems to me there is a very interesting emotional line between Nine, the man who ended the time war at great cost, through the narcissistic heights and flaws of Ten, to the world of love and play that is Eleven.
Nine is the man struggling to not be broken by what has happened. He's too raw to be depressed. He's more in shock, angry, desperate, but also in a kind of altered state that we can only presume was required of him to end the time war in so terrible a fashion, by obliterating his own people from Time. A terrible lucidity. I would say in this he is the archetype of the King, in the most ancient way, doing what is terrible and necessary.
Rose represents Spring to him, and he needs her to bring him back to the world of the living, but he is not ready to embrace her fully, not until she nearly dies of him. She comes to him, to his reality. He is not yet able to arrive into hers, the human world.
Ten and Rose are something else -- on the surface more like a regular couple. He's play-acting at "human", but is brought down by all the grief Nine carried, still unresolved, but without the lucidity of shock, of being in the moment of those terrible decisions. He's depressed, which is stuck grief, and his consciousness narrows down accordingly, which is why he thinks it's all about him.
Eleven opens with topsy turvy, the Tardis literally up-ended. From there, fish fingers and custard are inevitable. How much do I love the silliness of the opening food scene with young Amelia! He is reborn as a child, and yet so much more integrated than Ten, so that his child qualities include, as well, how very old and tired he is. He's beginning to get the inkling of knowing his need for others, and the narcissistic approach has shown itself empty, so he's just... new. Open. Try anything. Fish fingers and custard.
For Biblical parallel, see the story of when Elijah gets depressed (after his greatest triumph, defeating the prophets of Baal in a contest of religious magic), and goes into the wilderness seeking death. "I am no better than my fathers, it would have been better if I had never been born." An angel of the Lord shows up with food and drink, and tells him to get up because he has work to do. There's no resolving Elijah's issues -- it's simply time to move on (which then leads right into the "still small voice" encounter on the mountaintop). There's no resolving Nine's grief and shock, or Ten's depression. The answer is not about the questions that come in grief, shock, or depression, but about a shift in consciousness to one of love and play.
Or as you so beautifully laid out, the Trickster and the Lover -- Eleven and River. Heiros Gamos, indeed.
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I'm running out the door, so just very, very quickly: LOVE tying everything together into one narrative. That is exactly what I try to do (although I am not all that familiar with mythology on the whole). Because it *is* the story of one man, and making it all fit together is beyond satisfying.
And then you wend and brought Elijah into it and well - I nearly fell off my chair! :)
Thank so, so much for this! ♥
Elijah: time lord,y/n?
Re: Elijah: time lord,y/n?
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I love your distinction between "save us" and "help me," it so perfectly encapsulates the difference between RTD's era and the current one.
To put it in the terms of Campbellian Myth, both utterances are the Call to Adventure. But notice who's doing the calling: for Ten, the Call comes from *us*, and he is led into the Heroic Journey. But when it's Eleven making the Call, then he isn't on the outside of the Special Place looking in, he is inside the Special Place, enticing Heroes to go on their Adventures.
However, I'm not sure it's so dichotomous as that. I was reading Tolkien's essay on fairy-stories, and there's an interesting bit on how the Heroic Journey is inverted for those who live on the Other Side: men tell fairy-stories of escaping Death, but fairies tell human-stories of escaping Deathlessness.
So the Doctor is on a Heroic Journey of his own, but it's back-to-front. For him, the Ordinary World is the Special Place, and the Wild is simply the field of human relationships, of family. His Call to Adventure is to participate in the ephemeral and the temporary, not to walk in eternity.
And like a proper Hero, he is *reluctant.* He knows at some level that this is the antithesis of who has been. He is going to *feel,* he is going to be connected, he is going to have a place set for him. How funny... there's always been an Empty Chair at Amy's table.
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I can't believe I've finally posted it. I've had it sitting around/been working on it for so long...
I love your distinction between "save us" and "help me," it so perfectly encapsulates the difference between RTD's era and the current one.
That was absolutely my central idea and the thing that really struck me - then of course I had to build the meta around it. (And it's interesting how S2 is so different to the other RTD finales - you have Torchwood capturing the Doctor, which of course works beautifully when what you want is to have the audience emphasise with him as he loses Rose - the more 'ordinary' he can be, the better for that story.)
So the Doctor is on a Heroic Journey of his own, but it's back-to-front. For him, the Ordinary World is the Special Place, and the Wild is simply the field of human relationships, of family. His Call to Adventure is to participate in the ephemeral and the temporary, not to walk in eternity.
Oh I *like* it. And it makes perfect sense of the Doctor's fascination with human life... From Father's Day:
Doctor: "I've travelled to all sorts of places. Done things you couldn't even imagine, but... you two... street corner. Two in the morning. Getting a taxi home. I've never had a life like that. Yes. (smiles) I'll try and save you."
And like a proper Hero, he is *reluctant.* He knows at some level that this is the antithesis of who has been. He is going to *feel,* he is going to be connected, he is going to have a place set for him. How funny... there's always been an Empty Chair at Amy's table.
Oh that's just lovely. *claps*
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But (oh, you knew it was coming *g*), I think there's much more to the Ten/Eleven divide than just Lonely God/Trickster. Hope you don't mind if I ramble?
There is a theory - and I think it’s right - that what Ten wants, is to be human.
I'd widen that theory to say that what Ten wanted, was to belong somewhere. The Doctor is truly on his own after destroying Gallifrey. In Classic Who the Doctor might have held Gallifrey in disdain, but it was home, to return to if he chose. It's no longer there so he has to find a way to belong wherever he is. And where's the first place one belongs?
RTD placed a huge emphasis on family in his series, though I'd say it's mainly in the subtext, while Moffat's made it explicit. I started a meta last year about Ten and family (buried somewhere on my hard drive now). One of the things I noted--thanks to Jacob at Television Without Pity touched on, and someone else but I can't remember who--was that when Ten lost Rose in "Doomsday," he lost his human family too. Notably, he lost Jackie, who was pretty much a surrogate mother. What's really neat is how Ten's unraveling was all foreshadowed in Jackie's conversation with Rose in "Army of Ghosts":
JACKIE: What happens when I'm gone?
ROSE: Don't talk like that!
JACKIE: No, but really. When I'm dead and buried, you won't have any reason to come back home. What happens then?
ROSE: I don't know.
JACKIE: Do you think you'll ever settle down?
ROSE: The Doctor never will, so I can't. I'll just keep on travelling.
JACKIE: And you'll keep on changing. And in forty years time, fifty, there'll be this woman - this strange woman... walking through the marketplace on some planet a billion miles from Earth. She's not Rose Tyler. Not anymore. She's not even human...
RTD always insisted on grounding the companion with a family, because the Doctor's grounded by the companion. And Moffat's done the same thing with Amy and Rory: with River, they keep Eleven grounded. It's also interesting, where Eleven is now, is where Ten began in "The Christmas Invasion," i.e. with a home and a family to return to if he chooses. It's like he's come full circle again.
It's no surprise to me that Ten began to unravel in S3 without his adopted family to ground him. Martha tried, of course, but another of Ten's foibles was that he never noticed what he had until it was too late. "Human Nature/Family of Blood" wasn't just about Ten-as-human vs Ten-as-God--it was about family as universal constant, and how hell is being separated. (And it's fascinating in retrospect, how Martha came from a broken family, and Ten's actions reunited them.)
With Donna, Ten found another family--Donna was his sister and Wilf became his father figure. Then of course, Ten wiped Donna's memories and effectively destroyed his 3rd family. Three strikes and you're out? It's no wonder he chose to go it alone after that, even though Sarah Jane points out that he has the biggest family in the universe so he doesn't need to be lonely. Then we got the slow unraveling that led to WoM, because he doesn't belong anywhere, viz Jackie's statement in "Army of Ghosts."
And "The End of Time" is all about Ten's family at heart--his Time Lady mother, his human father Wilf, his Time Lord brother the Master, his human sister Donna. And Ten's last act was to help his human family one last time. IMHO RTD pretty much laid the family groundwork that Moffat ran with. Moffat--and RTD--both define humanity by having a family.
The Doctor quite simply can’t do it on his own. Now you can point out (and you’d be right to) that this is also the lesson from the Ten era. But Ten’s story is about the Doctor trying to do it on his own, and the folly therein, whereas Eleven (so far) is about learning to ask for help.
Yes, I agree. I think it's this family aspect which ties their respective stories together: rejecting one and going it alone, vs embracing one and accepting help. I think that's the key difference between Ten's Lonely God and Eleven's Trickster. Eleven can be a Trickster because he's grounded; he doesn't have to worry about losing everything.
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*curtsies* Thank you! :)
But (oh, you knew it was coming *g*), I think there's much more to the Ten/Eleven divide than just Lonely God/Trickster. Hope you don't mind if I ramble?
This LJ is MADE for rambling!
I'd widen that theory to say that what Ten wanted, was to belong somewhere. The Doctor is truly on his own after destroying Gallifrey. In Classic Who the Doctor might have held Gallifrey in disdain, but it was home, to return to if he chose. It's no longer there so he has to find a way to belong wherever he is. And where's the first place one belongs?
I'll get to your points, but first of all I'd say that Earth is, without a doubt, his adopted home, and has been for a long time. It's the place Barbara wanted to goo, and - although he wasn't too impressed - humans won him over, and (certainly after Three's enforced stay) it became his default destination... Always on the outside looking in, maybe, but he was looking in on humans, specifically, more than any other species. They fascinate him, and although he can't understand them, they have qualities he cherishes dearly. (And, of course, he can pass as human if he doesn't talk too much... which Midnight explored in tragic detail. But - humans are the people he turns to, time and again.)
RTD placed a huge emphasis on family in his series, though I'd say it's mainly in the subtext, while Moffat's made it explicit.
This is a very good point, and RTD can't be thanked enough for deciding to focus more on Companions and their family as part of the story.
One of the things I noted--thanks to Jacob at Television Without Pity touched on, and someone else but I can't remember who--was that when Ten lost Rose in "Doomsday," he lost his human family too. Notably, he lost Jackie, who was pretty much a surrogate mother. What's really neat is how Ten's unraveling was all foreshadowed in Jackie's conversation with Rose in "Army of Ghosts":
Oh very neat. Yes. And it ties in beautifully with that final quote of mine - we all need people.
RTD always insisted on grounding the companion with a family, because the Doctor's grounded by the companion. And Moffat's done the same thing with Amy and Rory: with River, they keep Eleven grounded. It's also interesting, where Eleven is now, is where Ten began in "The Christmas Invasion," i.e. with a home and a family to return to if he chooses. It's like he's come full circle again.
*nods* I love all your thoughts about how he keeps losing families - seeing patterns and how it all fits together in one story is what I always want to do, although my post might have come across differently... What I was aiming for was more to establish the idea that RTD and Moffat write in very different ways, so shouldn't be judged by each other's standards. However, the family theme is definitely a strong on, even as Rusty broke it and Moffat re-instated it.
I think that's the key difference between Ten's Lonely God and Eleven's Trickster. Eleven can be a Trickster because he's grounded; he doesn't have to worry about losing everything.
Plus, Eleven has a lot longer to work out who and what he is... Those 200 years ground him in ways Ten was never able to, and one reason he can do it is because of all the mistakes/pain he went through as Ten. Plus, of course, he has River to smack him around the head.
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Amyway, thanks for sharing...and for inspiration! It was a good night to commit fic:
The Crowning of the Year
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:)
Though I am sad that any meta on new episodes will be so far away. I'll have to clicky all the links above because I'm sure there's some I've missed.
Well I've got more, I've just not finished it yet. And fic. I've got HEAPS of unposted fic...
And I see that fic happened for you too!
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Totally agree with and loving the way you have broken down and identified 9/10 as the tragic hero. Wonderful.
And I’m not sure I can add anything to your analysis of 10 as Godlike being, specifically from a monotheistic approach, because it’s a complete and comprehensively perfect analysis. Thank you.
I’m fascinated by the idea you identify that Moffat has taken the Doctor from the role of monotheistic god, to the role of pagan god/fairytale character – because this is really the archetypal role he originally occupied.
The irony of 10 is that the monotheistic approach has that separation of spirit and matter as a fundamental principle. Even though man is made in the image of god [or god in the image of man], there is a disconnect there in the basic theology/mythology
[Which is basically what you said, but I’m just thinking out loud. ]
The thing about pagan gods and the pagan mythic approach is that supernatural characters are in the world in a way that the monotheistic god isn’t. They are woven through the real world, through matter.
I think the important thing is that while the Doctor might be god-like from a human POV, in his own [green]world, he is quite simply being who/what he is supposed to be.
*nods profusely*
And that truly is their role! Rather than a whole world (Gallifrey), aloof and remote, to watch over the universe, we have a Mother and a Father figure - very hands-on, but also elusive and mythical
And that’s such a wonderful thing. I’m so glad Moffat took it here, because if you’re going to draw on the mythic structure of paganism rather than Monotheism, then a balancing and union of the energies of God and Goddess is the ultimate and logical conclusion.
Now the thing that really made me sit up and take notice, is how the Doctor gets out of his unavoidable death: He cheats.
I read so many people moaning about this when it happened, on the forum I frequent. Moaning that it was a cop-out and a cheat, that they felt like Moff had pulled the wool over their eyes with a cheap trick. But that’s totally misunderstanding where Moff has taken the Doctor up to this point.
Elisi, your meta is so wonderful that it’s blown my mind a little and I really can’t form many coherent thoughts to add. I think I’m going to be thinking about this for quite a while!
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I wrote some meta on Angel a while back, and someone posted that list in response. I looked at it, and my jaw literally dropped.
And I’m not sure I can add anything to your analysis of 10 as Godlike being, specifically from a monotheistic approach, because it’s a complete and comprehensively perfect analysis. Thank you.
*blushes* Thank you - that is high praise indeed.
I’m fascinated by the idea you identify that Moffat has taken the Doctor from the role of monotheistic god, to the role of pagan god/fairytale character – because this is really the archetypal role he originally occupied.
Oh it really is. I've been watching Seven recently (I'm not done yet, and I've watched a bit of Four too), and it's AMAZING. People complain that they can't see how Ten and Eleven join up, but I now know that this is because Ten is such an atypical Doctor. Eleven is like Seven (manipulative, secretive, kind, always 500 steps ahead in his mind) and Four (mad, rambling, completely dotty) put together. I can trace the line from the older Doctors to Eleven perfectly. With Ten... I often have to scratch my head.
The irony of 10 is that the monotheistic approach has that separation of spirit and matter as a fundamental principle. Even though man is made in the image of god [or god in the image of man], there is a disconnect there in the basic theology/mythology
[Which is basically what you said, but I’m just thinking out loud. ]
Thinking out loud is very much encouraged, and your point is a very good one! I think one of the differences between RTD and Moffat is that although they're both atheists, RTD is much more... aggressive? He is deliberately showing us that the Doctor *isn't* god, whereas Moffat just wants him to be a madman with a box who gallivants around having fun. He's not interested in saying that the Doctor isn't god, because that's sort of pointless. (Look, I'm rambling now!)
The thing about pagan gods and the pagan mythic approach is that supernatural characters are in the world in a way that the monotheistic god isn’t. They are woven through the real world, through matter.
Exactly! :)
And that’s such a wonderful thing. I’m so glad Moffat took it here, because if you’re going to draw on the mythic structure of paganism rather than Monotheism, then a balancing and union of the energies of God and Goddess is the ultimate and logical conclusion.
I love it so much. <3
I read so many people moaning about this when it happened, on the forum I frequent. Moaning that it was a cop-out and a cheat, that they felt like Moff had pulled the wool over their eyes with a cheap trick. But that’s totally misunderstanding where Moff has taken the Doctor up to this point.
*nods* And (again) It's a very Seven-y kind of resolution. Seven has no interest in the spot light. He'll step up, if necessary (and he's very good at it!), but he's much happier just pulling strings from behind the scenes, and then having a nice cup of tea.
Elisi, your meta is so wonderful that it’s blown my mind a little and I really can’t form many coherent thoughts to add. I think I’m going to be thinking about this for quite a while!
:D :D :D Please come back and talk to me if you have more thoughts - I love your brain! :)
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I really love the fact, though, that Moffat has actually returned the Doctor to his classic self but, as you've pointed out, has also made him grow to the point where he can ask for help. That's quite something, to have him return to such a familiar character and yet lose a bit of that pride that used to frustrate me so much. I think your comment about Moffat sneaking elephants into the room is spot on. Like RTD before him, he's changed so much, and yet done it so well that it all feels completely natural!
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:D
The 'billowy coat king of pain' pictures made me laugh out loud because they are *so* perfect! I'm still chuckling a little now!
I was SO PLEASED when I thought of it! The Doctor out-angsts EVERYONE, even Angel. *nods firmly*
I had already worked out that Moffat had somehow made the Doctor feel much more like the classic one (which for someone who grew up with the classic one makes him feel much more familiar, even if RTD's Doctor made me *feel* a lot more), but I hadn't managed to work out how RTD had changed him so much in the meantime. I hadn't realised what it was that had changed. So thank you for clearing that up for me. :-)
My pleasure! :) And that was indeed my own motivation too... Far too many people just complain about something being 'not right' - far more interesting to try to find out what and why and how.
I really love the fact, though, that Moffat has actually returned the Doctor to his classic self but, as you've pointed out, has also made him grow to the point where he can ask for help. That's quite something, to have him return to such a familiar character and yet lose a bit of that pride that used to frustrate me so much.
*nods a lot* And it very cleverly builds on everything Ten went through - Ten took that pride to new and dangerous levels, which might be what was needed in order for him to then begin to learn a little humility, and to get past that natural reserve. *draws hearts*
I think your comment about Moffat sneaking elephants into the room is spot on. Like RTD before him, he's changed so much, and yet done it so well that it all feels completely natural!
It's all timey-wimey! He introduced River all the way back in 2008, this complete mystery who very much behaved as if she was the Doctor's wife, and then kept playing on this 'is-she/isn't she' conundrum for three years... So people were conditioned into thinking of her as the Doctor's maybe-wife (as well as maybe-killer!), so when it turned out that she *was* his wife, it felt more like validation than something new. Basically Moffat's patience is ridiculous!
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Thank you! <3 <3 <3
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I must rewatch EoT some time in the light of all this, because I think if you read it as the necessary death of "the wrong kind of Doctor" many of the things I hated will begin to make sense. In particular I'm thinking of Ten's petulant rant after he found out he'd have to die to save Wilf. "I could have done so much!" he cries. And if he'd survived, it would have been awful, with every step taking him closer to the Batshit Warrior with a God complex, and away from the playfulness of his true nature.
One thing intrigues me - the Doctor we got with Nine and Ten was an aberration but perhaps that was the only way for RTD to reboot the show with a hero that would appeal to contemporary sensibilities.
You've inspired me to put together a few of my own thoughts - hopefully within a day or two!
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As you are one of the people who inspired this - you were the first one to talk about how Ten wanted to be human I think - I am very flattered. I remember you (and others) struggling with the change, but it was only now, post S6, that things came together for me properly... S5 was such a delightful rollercoaster, but it didn't really deal with any of the Doctor's issues upfront. Now, however, he's had to take a very long hard look at himself, and he's finally resolved all his issues. Which is nice. :)
I must rewatch EoT some time in the light of all this, because I think if you read it as the necessary death of "the wrong kind of Doctor" many of the things I hated will begin to make sense.
Having watched a few of Four's episodes, and about half of Seven's, the RTD years really stand out as the aberration. I can draw clear lines from the older Doctors and straight to Eleven (he's like an older, dottier, grandfatherly Seven), but Ten (especially) is just out there on the periphery. An oddity. Not bad, just unlike the rest of them. Looking forward to what you'll make of EOt in the light if this - 'The Doctor needs to die...' Hmmm.
In particular I'm thinking of Ten's petulant rant after he found out he'd have to die to save Wilf. "I could have done so much!" he cries. And if he'd survived, it would have been awful, with every step taking him closer to the Batshit Warrior with a God complex, and away from the playfulness of his true nature.
Oh that is a FASCINATING thought. I shall have to mull that over.
One thing intrigues me - the Doctor we got with Nine and Ten was an aberration but perhaps that was the only way for RTD to reboot the show with a hero that would appeal to contemporary sensibilities.
It might very well have been. A brooding hero with a giant heap of guilt on his shoulders will always be popular... (Plus, since he decided to get rid of Gallifrey, RTD couldn't not deal with the consequences.)
You've inspired me to put together a few of my own thoughts - hopefully within a day or two!
\o/ Looking forward to it!
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I'm floored by the fact that you used the story of Hades and Persephone as a metaphor for Eleven and River's marriage. I once wrote a fanfic where I used the Hades/Persephone story to resolve Ten Too's struggle with loss of godhood following Journey's End. I never thought to apply it to River, but she definitely has the two worlds time-share thing going on. She's splitting her time between Stormcage (gloomy imprisonment), the Ponds (family), and the TARDIS (otherworld/adventure). As a metaphor, it fits River pretty well.
I don't know that I agree that RTD "broke" the Doctor, so much as he pushed the pendulum out further than it had ever gone but still on an arc that would eventually have to swing back to the middle.
Okay, Midnight definitely breaks the show in the sense that there has never been a more clear example of cynicism and brute force triumphing over intellect and romance. The Doctor's three main tactics (1. Be the smartest person in the room, 2. Dazzle people with the gift of gab, 3. Rely on the kindness of strangers) backfire spectacularly. The cross-section of humanity present on that bus represents a pessimistic view of human nature that is alien to the more charitable world-view championed by every other episode of the show, and that is what makes it truly scary.
And, yeah, okay, Waters of Mars breaks the Doctor in the sense that he becomes more terrifying than any of the monsters he fights. (He who fights monsters should beware, lest...) So, maybe you are right about Series 4.X. RTD tried to push the boundaries on the definition of what the show could be, and heaven help us, he certainly found where those boundaries are, by walking right up and sticking a toe over.
The thing that amazes me most about Series Five and Six, is the palpable sense that the Doctor is learning from his past mistakes and changing because of them. On paper, it seems like that should be impossible. The show has been on since 1963. The hero is 900, no... excuse me, 1100 years old. You would think that he has already learned all the life lessons that he's ever going to know, yet this is not the case.
Eleven's behavior in Series Five is a direct reaction to the lessons he learned from the mistakes Ten made in Series 4.X. You can see it in the way he surrounds himself with people, the way he engages with his own anger and grief differently, the way he treats Rory different than Mickey, et cetera, etc. Even more impressively, Eleven's actions in TWoRS are a direct reaction to the lesson he learned from his own mistakes in AGMGtW. Even after 49 years, he's still changing and evolving in a naturalistic way where you can see cause to effect.
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This is where I realise that I forgot to mention that half of this belongs to
I'm floored by the fact that you used the story of Hades and Persephone as a metaphor for Eleven and River's marriage.
Case in point being this, which is one of the only things in this meta which are almost exclusively Promethia's... (She rather disappeared down a rabbit hole. *g*)
I once wrote a fanfic where I used the Hades/Persephone story to resolve Ten Too's struggle with loss of godhood following Journey's End.
Sounds clever!
She's splitting her time between Stormcage (gloomy imprisonment), the Ponds (family), and the TARDIS (otherworld/adventure). As a metaphor, it fits River pretty well.
*nods* I don't think its intentional, but subconsciously Moffat must be drawing on a lot of this stuff.
I don't know that I agree that RTD "broke" the Doctor, so much as he pushed the pendulum out further than it had ever gone but still on an arc that would eventually have to swing back to the middle.
Oh definitely, but I do think he literally broke him too - I'll get to this further down.
The cross-section of humanity present on that bus represents a pessimistic view of human nature that is alien to the more charitable world-view championed by every other episode of the show, and that is what makes it truly scary.
I'd forgotten about Midnight... (Which means that maybe I'm getting better at suppressing it?) Anyway, yes that's a perfect example, and interestingly one that is a far better representation of RTD's actual view of humanity than the normal tone of the show. Which makes sense of a lot of things - esp when viewed in contrast to Moffat who loves nothing better than a happy ending. (I can back all this up with quotes, I've just not got the time to go hunt them down.)
And, yeah, okay, Waters of Mars breaks the Doctor in the sense that he becomes more terrifying than any of the monsters he fights.
I think he definitely breaks - or has a nervous breakdown, or whatever it's called. (Also see this post which predicts this perfectly! Money quote: 'I think a full-out Time Lord meltdown would bring down galaxies and that's always lurking just below the surface with this Doctor.')
RTD tried to push the boundaries on the definition of what the show could be, and heaven help us, he certainly found where those boundaries are, by walking right up and sticking a toe over.
Perfect description!
[need to cut comment in half, I'm too wordy!]
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I really enjoyed this new meta. I am one of those (few?) people who really struggled with understanding Ten in relation to other Doctor's. As a kid, my parents brought me up on old VCR Who and ironically Seven and Four were my favourite Doctors so I was used to The Doctor being more of a Trickster or a moral grey area- definitely alien, sometimes insensitive and grouchy, definitely not perfect or a saviour figure. I enjoyed Nine and Ten but I found them hard to reconcile with old Who and often I enjoyed the companions more than Nine and Ten.
I have been trying to make sense of this for awhile and reading your meta and the comments has sort of solidified my thoughts. I think the destruction of the Time Lord's made it impossible to have a trickster type Doctor- at least to start with and the weight of being 'last of his kind' brought about the lonely God complex and this was actually necessary. We needed The Lonely God to deal with the "last of kind" stuff in order to get back to The Trickster. So even though I get all ragey at Ten and just want him to let people in and stop acting like the centre of the universe- I now sort of see it as a necessary evil. He had to fall that low in order to learn his lesson. That people matter to him (which Nine and Ten both knew) but also that the very fact that they matter can be enough when you are lonely to keep on going. Eleven couldn't have experienced the ups without having first experienced Ten's depressive lows.
Because this is the territory we’re in now - myths and legends and fairy tales. I’m not saying this is deliberate on Moffat’s part, just that what he taps into is vastly different to RTD’s writing.
I love this about The Moff as I write fantasy myself and love the fantasy element that has crept into New Who. Of course, since 2005 the show has been more fantasy than pseudo sci fi but the fairy tale element since s5 really appeals to me. To me, RTD era who was more grounded in a kind of earth bound reality- a kind of fantastical found in ordinary places where they shouldn't be (whereas Moffat is ordinary things being fantastical and thats ok) hence the background's of the companions being explored, the aliens always hiding out in and around earth, the Rose/Doctor story etc. Now Who has become a kind of mythological epic and the emphasis has shifted to the collective as strength, rather than the individual (ie The Doctor). Characters have epic titles that they've earnt themselves. Amy is The Girl who Waited, Rory The Lone Centurian/Boy who Waited, River "Hell in High Heels," Melody Pond "the super hero," The Doctor "mad man with a box." Even the emphasis on song to tell stories eg AGMGTW rhyme, the children singing at the end of episodes leading up to TWORS, Abigail's Song is very epic in the tradition of say Homer.
To me Eleven acts more as a Mirror for his companions. He enables them to see how they can make choices for themselves to make themselves great. He raises them up by giving them the agency to unlock the powers they already had but hadn't yet discovered. In contrast, to me, Ten did the deeds himself because he cared about humanity, he did things because he thought, he really, really thought, that he was the only one capable of saving them. He never saw that sometimes, humanity could save itself. He did realise that humanity should be valued and he did value us very much, but he never learnt from us the tougher lessons.
I know that Eleven is a very childish Doctor in many ways but emotionally I see Eleven as being wiser and more mature than Ten. Eleven learnt from his mistakes. By the end of s6, he took advice and followed through with it. He learnt that he didn't have to be strong all of the time. Sometimes he had friends to be strong for him and that was OK. He realised by the end of the christmas special that it's not OK to be a lonely God if that means you hurt the people you love.
I am really very excited to see where Eleven goes in s7.
Sorry for how long this comment got.
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Hello! *waves*
I was recc'd your River meta after TWOFRS by others on my blog (Promenthia?) and it helped me digest the finale and even all of s6 to a much greater capacity than I would have been able to do so without having read your meta.
Oh that makes me so happy! I love sharing the love. :)
I really enjoyed this new meta. I am one of those (few?) people who really struggled with understanding Ten in relation to other Doctor's.
I think there quite a sizeable number, to be honest. I know that I've done a lot of work joining the dots (the first few episodes of S5, f.ex, are full of Ten-ish traits, which Eleven is helped to overcome). Of course the Doctor is the Doctor is the Doctor, but the gap *is* great, and the changed EVERYTHING at the same time - Doctor, Companion, TARDIS, themetune... So there was nothing to carry people over, as it were.
As a kid, my parents brought me up on old VCR Who and ironically Seven and Four were my favourite Doctors so I was used to The Doctor being more of a Trickster or a moral grey area- definitely alien, sometimes insensitive and grouchy, definitely not perfect or a saviour figure. I enjoyed Nine and Ten but I found them hard to reconcile with old Who and often I enjoyed the companions more than Nine and Ten.
Mmmm. It's interesting because I didn't grow up with the show, so as far as I knew Nine and Ten WERE the Doctor. And it wasn't until Eleven turned up that I had what can best be described as a lightbulb moment - or that magical moment when you suddenly see the hidden 3-D image in a picture - 'Oh so THAT'S who the Doctor is supposed to be!' And it was only then that I went back and watched some Old!Who which confirmed all my instincts.
I think the destruction of the Time Lord's made it impossible to have a trickster type Doctor- at least to start with and the weight of being 'last of his kind' brought about the lonely God complex and this was actually necessary. We needed The Lonely God to deal with the "last of kind" stuff in order to get back to The Trickster.
*nods a lot* My thoughts exactly.
He had to fall that low in order to learn his lesson. That people matter to him (which Nine and Ten both knew) but also that the very fact that they matter can be enough when you are lonely to keep on going. Eleven couldn't have experienced the ups without having first experienced Ten's depressive lows.
Word. Like another commenter says above - how extraordinary is it to see character development for a show that's almost 50 years old?
To me, RTD era who was more grounded in a kind of earth bound reality- a kind of fantastical found in ordinary places where they shouldn't be (whereas Moffat is ordinary things being fantastical and thats ok) hence the background's of the companions being explored, the aliens always hiding out in and around earth, the Rose/Doctor story etc.
This is a lovely way of putting it! <3
Now Who has become a kind of mythological epic and the emphasis has shifted to the collective as strength, rather than the individual (ie The Doctor). Characters have epic titles that they've earnt themselves. Amy is The Girl who Waited, Rory The Lone Centurian/Boy who Waited, River "Hell in High Heels," Melody Pond "the super hero," The Doctor "mad man with a box." Even the emphasis on song to tell stories eg AGMGTW rhyme, the children singing at the end of episodes leading up to TWORS, Abigail's Song is very epic in the tradition of say Homer.
Everything is STORIES. I love it. :)
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ps: I wrote a fic at the end of TBB last year called The Wizard where Amy narrates the tale of River, The Doctor and herself and Rory as a child's fairy story. Even though I was way off about River's identity, it still creeps me out how much s6 confirmed how I saw Eleven.
There was even this: "He was not a good wizard. He was not a bad wizard. Just a wizard content to be who he was in his blue crystal cave."
"But what was he like?"
"He was very old and he was very kind and he was the very last of his kind. There was no magic left. He was the last miracle."
"Why did he stay on earth?"
"Because he couldn't stand to see humanity cry."
And later this:
Once upon a time there was a mad man with a box
And no one was quite sure if he were a good wizard, a lonely old man, an eccentric misfit, a genetic mistake or somewhere out there, somebody's Prince from a fairy story.
Sometimes I amaze myself. This fic is one of those times. Especially as you referred to Eleven as The Wizard.
pps: Did I mention I love this meta? Did I?
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Oooh, how neat. Although it completely confirms my view: If you follow the metaphors, you can't go wrong. (Have you read
Sometimes I amaze myself. This fic is one of those times. Especially as you referred to Eleven as The Wizard.
He totally is. (And do you have a link to your fic?) Looking back through my old posts, then I've talked about the Doctor re-writing himself before (pretty short post btw). Oh and re. the issues of age, then this sums it up perfectly.
Anyway, *I* am rambling now...
pps: Did I mention I love this meta? Did I?
You're very welcome. And I have plenty more! :)
ETA: Oh and I found the post I was looking for re. Eleven being a wizard. \o/ Here's what I wrote back in June, 2010: My Doctor.
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*sniff* Fantastic and, really, a very cool inversion!
Finally got around to reading (though the comments might have to wait for tomorrow). Predictably, I've nothing much to add by this point, but it's a wonderful read, and I cannot believe how much you crammed in there and how well you made it all fit.
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It really is. ♥
Finally got around to reading (though the comments might have to wait for tomorrow).
The comments are goooood! *is ridiculously pleased*
Predictably, I've nothing much to add by this point, but it's a wonderful read, and I cannot believe how much you crammed in there and how well you made it all fit.
And I'm going 'Darn, should have made that point clearer!' and 'Should have totally mentioned such-and-such'... *g* Thank you dear! *hugs*
(This is my new default. Isn't it GORGEOUS?)
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I've had this post bookmarked since you first posted it, but put off reading it for ages, because I knew it would break my brain with its awesomeness, (which it did) But I've finally read it, and THANK YOU for putting everything so wonderfully clearly. I had a whole bunch of meta-y Thoughts post-Christmas Special, but I kind of splurged them in several emails to such_heights, (the other half of my brain) and now I can't call to mind anything remotely coherent or interesting to say here....which is a shame, since you seem to enjoy discussing interesting stuff with people in the comments. Maybe I'll get back to you. Anyway. Just wanted to leave feedback, because it's nice to get :-)
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♥ ♥ ♥
I've had this post bookmarked since you first posted it, but put off reading it for ages, because I knew it would break my brain with its awesomeness, (which it did)
*blushes*
But I've finally read it, and THANK YOU for putting everything so wonderfully clearly.
Well it has been a work in progress for a good few months, which really helped put everything into focus.
I had a whole bunch of meta-y Thoughts post-Christmas Special
Ooooh, did you read
but I kind of splurged them in several emails to such_heights, (the other half of my brain)
Heh.
Maybe I'll get back to you. Anyway. Just wanted to leave feedback, because it's nice to get :-)
Well if you think of anything, please come back! (And like I said, this took me a good while to put together, so I know how thought can take a good while to percolate.)
ALSO - since you are here, and you and
*tiptoes away*
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...
"CLARA: You've been asking a question, and it's time someone told you you've been getting it wrong. His name, his name is the Doctor. All the name he needs. Everything you need to know about him. And if you love him, and you should, help him. Help him."
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ETA: I tried to reply to your message, but LJ wouldn't let me (it's to do with your privacy settings?). This is what I wrote:
I posted that dialogue (the cut lines) in this post.
And you're right. That's exactly it.
Iiiiiinteresting.
Thank you SO MUCH for thinking of me what you needed to share! <3 <3 <3
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I still have to get into Moffat Era properly so have to stay away from those pieces of your meta, but there's so much goodness on Ten/RTD here that I just can't help but jump in.
Because I think that was RTD did was to turn the Doctor into a Tragic Hero.
Yes! And yes to examples of Odissey or Jack Sparrow who just need to stay themselves.
And I finally understood what was meant by Lonely God vs. Trickster: different journeys, different burdens.
Doctor is not supposed to be broken, or suffering - well, even when he is in trouble, he's not supposed to be changed/broken by it, he's supposed to trick himself out of it and move on. That's his place in the story, in the world, it was so in the Classic Who.
And incidentally, I finally got why so many people were irritated with Spike's journey on "Buffy", and why so many were "evilistas": they saw Spike as a trickster and turning him into a tragic hero who suffered and changed profoundly because of that was felt by them as betrayal of his character.
But for me he was never purely a trickster to begin with - for me he was always more about desperately loving Dru than messing with Angel. And he never stopped being somewhat a trickster throughout his journey.
My view of the classic and new Doctor, from what I've seen, is somewhat like my view on Spike. I.e. I don't think Doctor's purely a trickster. There was always something tragic about him.
Why did he run away with his granddaughter, why did he steal TARDIS? What is he running from? What happened to his other family - his wife, children? Something happened to them before the Time War - in "Curse of Fenrik" 7th reacts with pain when he's asked whether he has a family, he says, bitterly, that he doesn't know.
But he's always that man who, like that lady-vamp said to Ten, "laughs at the darkness", who doesn't dwell on it, and moves on from the dark past... or runs from it? For me there's always this ambuiguity.
And Ten - he never lost that trickster side either, right till the end. I don't see him qualitatively different from other Doctors - classic ones, or Eleven. Just quantitatively.
Good vs. evil, us vs. them, wrong vs. right - he was as appreciative of other views or lifeforms as a Doctor should be, and while combative and rush with some opinions, was pretty easy to sway and accept being wrong.
Remember his zen about Ood turning their abuser into their kind, and his answer to Donna's confusion on what the heck just happened and how to judge it - better not judge at all, sometimes things just happen, and folks who judge everything right or wrong can be scary. That's a trickster's answer. Ten never lost that.
And the 4th season arc with Martha, Sontarans and Doctor's daughter - it was about challenging Doctor on his hypocrisy about soldiers, salutes etc. UNIT general, Martha, his daughter kept challenging him and in the end he accepted being wrong, he accepted his daughter, new Martha's role. The end of season 4, End of Times - he saluted folks and accepted salutes from them.
"That's why I keep traveling - to be proven wrong". That's what Doctor is about, and that's Ten.
Yes, balance with him shifted too much to desire to fix everything, to moral authority, to being affected by people and events of his life. With Eleven it had to swing to the other way, to restore the balance. But still, same man, same qualities, just in different proportion.
OK, better split into the next comment.
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And I am FINALLY here.
I still have to get into Moffat Era properly so have to stay away from those pieces of your meta, but there's so much goodness on Ten/RTD here that I just can't help but jump in.
I will try to tip-toe!
Yes! And yes to examples of Odissey or Jack Sparrow who just need to stay themselves.
And I finally understood what was meant by Lonely God vs. Trickster: different journeys, different burdens.
See this is why I write. Because I stumble across stuff and then things make sense and I have to share!
Doctor is not supposed to be broken, or suffering - well, even when he is in trouble, he's not supposed to be changed/broken by it, he's supposed to trick himself out of it and move on. That's his place in the story, in the world, it was so in the Classic Who.
Again there are of course caveats - RTD had to do something drastic, and NOT dealing with the fallout of Gallifrey's destruction would have been worse than piling it all on poor Ten. And RTD has very particular strengths as a writer, and often struggled to find the right tone for DW. (Oooh, The Writers Tale. ♥)
And incidentally, I finally got why so many people were irritated with Spike's journey on "Buffy", and why so many were "evilistas": they saw Spike as a trickster and turning him into a tragic hero who suffered and changed profoundly because of that was felt by them as betrayal of his character. But for me he was never purely a trickster to begin with - for me he was always more about desperately loving Dru than messing with Angel. And he never stopped being somewhat a trickster throughout his journey.
It's funny, because I am
arguingdiscussing this very thing with some of my friends at the moment. And I'm absolutely with you - yes he was a good Trickster-character, but the other side of him was far more interesting.My view of the classic and new Doctor, from what I've seen, is somewhat like my view on Spike. I.e. I don't think Doctor's purely a trickster. There was always something tragic about him. Why did he run away with his granddaughter, why did he steal TARDIS? What is he running from? What happened to his other family - his wife, children? Something happened to them before the Time War - in "Curse of Fenrik" 7th reacts with pain when he's asked whether he has a family, he says, bitterly, that he doesn't know. But he's always that man who, like that lady-vamp said to Ten, "laughs at the darkness", who doesn't dwell on it, and moves on from the dark past... or runs from it? For me there's always this ambuiguity.
Oh yes:
“We must never know the Doctor’s name, what happened to his wife and family, and the real reason he left Gallifrey. These are secrets too tremendous for the mortal mind. And he’s only allowed to tell hot French chicks.”
Steven Moffat
I think it's important that we don't know. That there are secrets at the heart of him.
And Ten - he never lost that trickster side either, right till the end.
Except for Waters of Mars.
I don't see him qualitatively different from other Doctors - classic ones, or Eleven. Just quantitatively.
*nods*
Good vs. evil, us vs. them, wrong vs. right - he was as appreciative of other views or lifeforms as a Doctor should be, and while combative and rush with some opinions, was pretty easy to sway and accept being wrong.
I think there is, at the heart of Ten (and I've mentioned it in meta, possibly this one?) a huge conflict - he needs to be right, because if he's wrong, then what if he was wrong before? What if he was wrong to destroy Gallifrey? What if, what if, what if? But End of Time gives him the choice again, yet even more stark, and he chooses the same way. Re-affirming to himself that he was right. I don't know how far you've watched in Eleven's era, but the second episode (The Beast Below) is hugely important (it's a flawed episode in many ways, but oh, the things is does...) Anyway, it's too complex for right now. :)
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There is a theory - and I think it’s right - that what Ten wants, is to be human. Except - and oh, the irony of this is immense - the only way he can fit is as a god-like figure
YES! Nail on head! He wanted to be with humans, to be loved by humans, to keep them safe - he would jump to every call to help, he would try to fix every wrong, to fight every cause - and in the end, burned out, and abused his powers.
And when I saw your juxtaposition of "Save us" vs. "Help me" - I almost jumped up and down!
I was going to make a gifset of Ten reacting to "help me" vs. folks reacting to Ten's "let me help" (which usually is run away or tell him to go screw himself :D), and Eleven's "help me" is just a perfect contrast to that!
For Ten, "help me" were two words he couldn't resist, two words he lived for, something which could absolve his guilt and give his life meaning for a time. When people believed in him, he sprang to life, he existed in full.
They believe, and he saves them. (Interestingly S2 is the only finale where this doesn’t apply, but then that is focussed squarely on the Doctor’s loss of Rose.)
Oops, have to protest here, it applies perfectly to S2 finale too, and it's NOT solely about the loss of Rose. :) Doomsday is so much more than that, it's brilliant, one of the best RTD episodes and definitely his best finale, IMHO.
(I should write about Doomsday, how it makes a coda to Father's Day and Christmas Invasion, and to Satan's Pit too. How it resolves Harriet/Ivonne/Torchwood/Doctor stories.)
What happens in S2 finale is very similar to what happens in S4 - or rather the other way around. Doctor reaches nadir and loses hope when he's cut off from Rose, Torchwood being invaded by Cybermen, Ivonne and Jackie taken away. He's stuck in a fugue state (like in Stolen Earth after getting to bee's planet and finding nothing).
But folks from Pete's world breaking out to him return him hope ("hope is a good emotion") , and then Pete's words to him - "Help us. I believe you can save us" - they give him belief. "Defeat Cybermen and the Daleks? You really think I can do it?" "Ah, OK then!" - and off he goes to pull it off. Fits the pattern just right.
What breaks from a pattern a bit is S3. Yes, there's a call "Doctor, save us", but it's this call which saves the Doctor. Doctor in S3 finale puts his fate into hands of Martha and humanity, gives up his power because his power is the same nature as Master's, and lets humanity save themselves. And yet - same thing as in S2 and S4 finales, it's people's call for help, signal from the people, which brings him to life, gives him strength.
But again, this contrast to Eleven... Ten was happy and would hate himself less when he was needed, when he thought he was helping someone. Asking for help, admitting his own need - you need maturity and inner serenity and surety to do that. That's what Eleven gained. This is great! The rest of this meta I'm saving for after watching all of Moffat's era.
And this is why Marble House accuses him: ‘If you are our God, our Saviour, then WHY DON'T YOU SAVE US [from ourselves]?
I think me still not watching this video is a right decision, I still need to grow thicker skin for that. :) And in general, I have little patience with the view that someone has a duty to save you. You have to do it yourself, it's in your own hands. If someone does it for you, it's a miracle, you're thankful for it but don't expect it on a regular basis and don't throw a fit when it doesn't come on schedule. :D
It's the same argument as why the eagles didn't carry Frodo and Sam to Mordor, or why Valar didn't interfere and didn't order eagles to do that. Because when gods interfere and fix everything, they take free will away and are in danger of overstepping their powers (see Saruman).
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There is a WONDERFUL (new) Moffat quote that I shall drag out now:
"In Matt Smith’s final episode he spent a thousand years on a planet watching everybody else age to death, while he ages very slowly. The Doctor is being taught a lesson. He’s not a human being, however much he larks around pretending he is. He is different and it’s time to stop play-acting. He goes back to being the trickier version of the Doctor, the fiercer alien wanderer. He’s not apologising, he’s not flirting with you - that’s over. That’s what the Doctor was like after the Time War but he’s not like that any more. He’s gone back and he’s changed it. Now he can go back to being a bit more Time Lordy." --Moff
And when I saw your juxtaposition of "Save us" vs. "Help me" - I almost jumped up and down!
:D :D :D
I was going to make a gifset of Ten reacting to "help me" vs. folks reacting to Ten's "let me help" (which usually is run away or tell him to go screw himself :D), and Eleven's "help me" is just a perfect contrast to that! For Ten, "help me" were two words he couldn't resist, two words he lived for, something which could absolve his guilt and give his life meaning for a time. When people believed in him, he sprang to life, he existed in full.
*nods a lot* Tinkerbell Doctor. :) (This is not just Ten, though. The Doctor does need someone there to 'dance' for, that's part of who he is. Ten just took it to an unhealthy extreme - and Eleven sort of does the same, but in a different direction.)
Oops, have to protest here, it applies perfectly to S2 finale too, and it's NOT solely about the loss of Rose. :) Doomsday is so much more than that, it's brilliant, one of the best RTD episodes and definitely his best finale, IMHO.
*blinks* Well I really hope you write about it, because I would have placed it... Well, I'm not sure. S2 is definitely the least strong season, but the finale is certainly better planned than either Journey's End or End of Time. Personally I'd be torn between S1 (a very solid season, if flawed), and S3 (because the Master). But do write! I will listen. I'm always happy to find out something is better than I thought. :)
But folks from Pete's world breaking out to him return him hope ("hope is a good emotion") , and then Pete's words to him - "Help us. I believe you can save us" - they give him belief.
Huh. Well it HAS been forever since I watched it. Although to be fair, it's not the whole world, just a handful of people. Anyway, good point. Thank you.
But again, this contrast to Eleven... Ten was happy and would hate himself less when he was needed, when he thought he was helping someone. Asking for help, admitting his own need - you need maturity and inner serenity and surety to do that.
It's difficult to compare the two, to be honest, because the whole structure & vocabulary just change so much. But I'll wait for you to get there before I ramble more.
I think me still not watching this video is a right decision, I still need to grow thicker skin for that. :)
If you coped with Handlebars, I think you can cope with Marble House. Completely different, but just... *waves hands* Just watch the first minute, OK? Until Earth shows up. It'll be unlike anything you've ever seen in a vid, I promise you. And you can just bathe in beauty.
It's the same argument as why the eagles didn't carry Frodo and Sam to Mordor, or why Valar didn't interfere and didn't order eagles to do that. Because when gods interfere and fix everything, they take free will away and are in danger of overstepping their powers (see Saruman).
Oh totally. It is also the point made in Waters of Mars. (Marble House predates that episode.)
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Because he is not the man who leads armies into battle, no.
Three years on, now almost to the word, yeah?
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Late comments are my favourite! :)
Three years on, now almost to the word, yeah?
I'd forgotten I'd written that line. Damn that's neat. This is what I love about Moffat - he tells us what he's going to do, and then he does it.
Thank you for your comment, and for taking the time to read! ♥
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I was reminded today of how much of my Doctor opinions are still built on the foundation of this post, and I thought I should let you know too.
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