The Time Lord Victorious, from WoM onwards.

[elisi]

So, I do NOT have time to write this, but it suddenly attacked me and demanded to be written down.

First of all, however, re-posting something I wrote in a comment in a previous post. It's essentially 'Rusty Who in 25 words' I guess. *coughs discreetly*

EVERYONE IS A MONSTER, EVEN THE DOCTOR. EXCEPT HE IS WONDERFUL, BECAUSE HE'S THE HERO. [error error does not compute and Bowie Base One explodes]

Basically it's about how Rusty's main issue (the thing he ALWAYS writes about) is [humanity's] monstrousness, and obviously this spilled into DW in increasing amounts.

So, thoughts about Victoriousness under the cut. The main complaint I've heard re. WoM is that it never went anywhere - Ten went all 'The Laws of Time Are MINE!' but then 'snapped out of it'. My question is - did he?

Here's the thing: Adelaide kills herself, and yes, it stops Ten in his tracks. 'I've gone too far!' he says, and then sees Ood Sigma there to summon him for (he presumes) his death. (Considering that he's an atheist, he's surprisingly quick to jump to the conclusion that *someone* wants to punish him for his behaviour. I have... issues with WoM/EoT on this score, as the Watsonian and Doylist blends far too much.) ANYWAY. People see this as him coming back down to Earth - but note it's only momentary. He goes into the TARDIS, but he does not go where the Ood are summoning him. Quite the opposite - the Time Lord Victorious says "No!" and goes off to have adventures - as we see at the start of EoT. And just how wrong does he come across then? The forced cheerfulness grates, because it's unnatural. He's still not himself, he's not chosen to let go of that Victoriousness. It's not shouty anymore, just ticking away underneath everything else.

He then gets sidetracked by what the Ood tell him, and of course the idea that the Master is returning makes him run as fast as he can... Because that crack which was always there in his his personality broke open, and it doesn't close. Saving the people on Mars became all about him. Ditto, the Master. He runs and he searches and he initially dismisses Wilf (after crying on his shoulder a little), and finally finds what he wants: The Master. I was always torn over that scene in the Vinvocci spaceship where he refuses Wilf's gun, because he would rather keep the Master than save the Earth - but it makes perfect sense if he's still Victorious. As does his standoff against Rassilon and all that, because it's perfectly logical that *he* should hold the world's fate in his hands... (After all, he won the war. The Laws of Time are his. No wonder he guesses what the Master planned - to turn all the Time Lords into copies of himself - because it's exactly the kind of mindset he's nurturing: It's all about him. He won the war the first time round, he'll win it this time too.)

This also brings into new focus his rant against Wilf: The Time Lord Victorious is indeed being handed the death sentence he initially suspected - and he is just as unwilling to accept it as he was then. But - he needs to die, as is plain to anyone with eyes: He's a clear and present danger. (I'll get back to this further down.) But he doesn't accept that. At all. Oh he goes into that booth in order to save Wilf, but I don't think he ever accepts that he needs to die. Indeed he then goes onto visit EVERYONE, and it's not just a goodbye, it's an absolute refusal to acquiesce to his death sentence. Even that last line ("I don't want to go") is... *light bulb moment* Ooooooh it's like Donna. You could almost say that the Time Lord Victorious took over the Doctor, and WILL NOT DIE, and so has to be exorcised. This is why he talks about regeneration as 'death', why Donna's loss of memory is referred to as a 'death' also - they both become something they shouldn't be, something *wrong*. (Re. Donna, then see this excellent essay: Donna Noble's Midnight: Parallels, Foreshadowing, and "Journey's End". But in a nutshell - this is Donna talking just before she begins to falter: "Brilliant! Fantastic! Molto bene! Great bit of universe packed into my brain." <-That? Is not Donna. Remember the nameless monster in Midnight that stole the Doctor's voice? Here, it is Donna speaking with the Doctor's voice, not her own. Similarly, Ten in those last episodes is... not himself. And the thing wearing his face needs to die. Notice that both Donna and the Doctor are themselves afterwards, however they need to 'die' in order to get rid of the thing that's taken over over. Because there is always a price. ETA: It was... like a cancer, and needed drastic surgery. That's a better way of looking at it than 'taken over by alien force'.)

Of course this is only looking at one aspect, one layer, of the overall story, and I'm deliberately ignoring all the other stuff. But I think it's a useful thing to keep in mind - it certainly makes sense of a lot of Ten's behaviour in those last two episodes. My main problem is that I can see the writer's hand far too clearly - Rusty created a monster, but couldn't control him and had to kill him off rather brutally. There wasn't time to examine the damage in any detail, nor to redeem the monster:

The Doctor: He destroyed the Daleks. He committed genocide. He's too dangerous to be left on his own.
TenToo (confused and a little angry): You made me!
The Doctor: Exactly, you were born in battle - full of blood and anger and revenge. (to Rose) Remind you of someone?
~
Wilf: But I’ve heard you talk about your people like they’re wonderful!
The Doctor: That’s how I choose to remember them! The Time Lords of old. But then they went to war! And endless war! And it changed them. Right to the core. You’ve seen my enemies, Wilf. The Time Lords are more dangerous than any of them!

The Time Lords went bad, and had to die. The Doctor went bad and had to die.

(And then Moffat took over the reigns and took everything apart, examined it in great detail, fixed the broken parts, put it back together and now it all works again and there is no bad.)

Comments

[solitary-summer.livejournal.com]

I can't really comment coherently because I'm still thinking my way through all this myself, but...

because he would rather keep the Master than save the Earth

I think at this point it's rather that he's simply afraid of becoming the next Master himself. ('That's how the Master started') He knows he already fucked up badly once, and he's just doesn't trust himself any longer. I don't think of the Time Lord Victorious as something alien that had to be exorcised but as an experience that Ten couldn't unlearn, however much he might have wanted to, that had become part of him.

Ten's last line... I think part of it is that RTD doesn't like for his characters to go in despair, to give them the comparatively easy way out of a glorified suicide, or risk having their deaths misunderstood as that. If you look at Jack in MD -- he was only allowed to make the decision to die after he'd realised he didn't want to after all, and after getting a good look at his life and appreciating it. And even then it was Gwen who made the decision in the end, not Jack himself.

Rusty created a monster, but couldn't control him and had to kill him off rather brutally. There wasn't time to examine the damage in any detail, nor to redeem the monster

I don't think he ever intended or wanted to, because he'd written that story before and it ended the same way, with almost the same words. I think that despite his fanboyishness he saw something in the Time Lords, their power, their way of cheating death, their non-humanness, that made him connect them and his Doctor to The Second Coming and explore the themes addressed there further. Ten had to die because he'd become too much of a god.

[(Anonymous)]

Ten got *very* messed up in the head, it has to be said. He tried to be so many different things that he wasn't meant to be that he didn't know what he was anymore, and he was constantly seeking approval from his companions, (i.e. "Look at me! Look at me!") And then, by the time he's Eleven, he suddenly knows who he is: Gandalf. Sort of a Space Gandalf. Or the little green guy from Star Wars. Woooom!

One thing I always thought was interesting was the fact that Ten seemed okay with dying on many occasions. In fact, during The Next Doctor, he seemed rather fascinated by his 'future' incarnation, and seemed rather hopeful for some banter, (i.e. "Not as young as you were when you were me!")

~ srmcd1

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

I.

Love.

You.

All of you actually. This...this whole meta and the comments supporting and clarifying and hashing out ideas and thoughts on said meta. Just...wow. It is helping me to remember and understand aspects of those episodes that my brain had struggled with and rejected before. Just beautiful.

Thank you...

[topaz-eyes.livejournal.com]

The main complaint I've heard re. WoM is that it never went anywhere - Ten went all 'The Laws of Time Are MINE!' but then 'snapped out of it'. My question is - did he?

How could people take Ten's rant at Wilf as anything but the Time Lord Victorious re-emerging?

I think we can interpret this quote another way:

Wilf: But I’ve heard you talk about your people like they’re wonderful!
The Doctor: That’s how I choose to remember them! The Time Lords of old. But then they went to war! And endless war! And it changed them. Right to the core. You’ve seen my enemies, Wilf. The Time Lords are more dangerous than any of them! (bolding mine)

Ten's describing himself here too. Up to JE Ten was, more or less, the Doctor of old. What tempered the Doctor of old were his companions, and his memories of what happened to the Time Lords. Then he chose to explicitly reject his companions in JE. The Time Lords went insane with no one to stop them, and Ten recapitulated that process on a micro-scale. Then, once the Time Lords were forced back in the Time Lock, with the Master no less, Ten had nothing left to keep him back from TLV. Except Wilf, the wise old man almost at the end of his life, ready to sacrifice himself, embodying the essence of the Doctor. With Wilf's scenes we see the Doctor's musings on "Sometimes I think the Time Lord lives too long," followed by "Lived too long."

In that vein I think the Time Lord Victorious died when Ten stepped into the radiation chamber, because to me he seemed more humble afterwards. Ten's Farewell Tour was more that of a father saying goodbye to his children rather than refusing to acquiesce to his death sentence. Like a dying person holding on for one last holiday, wanting to give one last gift. I think we'll have to agree to disagree here. "I don't want to go" could be interpreted as one last gasp from the TLV, but I don't think it is.

Also: ooooh, thank you! I'm surprised how relevant "Midnight" actually was to the mytharc, especially considering the Time Lord Victorious. I like your cancer metaphor for Ten; it's appropriate, because the Time Lord Victorious was always a part of him, slowly mutating and growing beneath the veneer. (I have to disagree with using that metaphor for Donna, though. Doctor!Donna was imposed on her, more akin to an infection than a cancer.)

[promethia_tenk]

Have just realized why I have basically nothing to say to this or your other post, which is:

So, thoughts about Victoriousness under the cut. The main complaint I've heard re. WoM is that it never went anywhere - Ten went all 'The Laws of Time Are MINE!' but then 'snapped out of it'. My question is - did he?

Wait, what, people think that?

But I usually have to lump all of Ten into one bin labeled "Ten" and The Christmas Invasion doesn't look that fundamentally different from Waters of Mars or EoT or anything else along the way. And I'll admit sometimes you start talking RTD with other RTD people and my brain goes la la la and imagines little Adipose dancing through the streets and Gwen blowing things up. Not the Adipose. Those images are separate.

It's also possible that it is Monday and I am tired and a milkshake and wine does not actually count as dinner . . .