I just finished watching Series 4 of Doctor Who and I was just wondering (forgive me if this has been addressed in an earlier thread)
There’s a lot of talk in the last 2-3 series about the Doctor causing a lot of destruction and problems wherever he goes. I’ve seen the show featuring Doctors 1, 3, a lot of 4, and a few 5, I missed the TV movie (fortunately), and then seen all episodes with Doctor 9 and 10 up until Journey’s End. I don’t recall a lot of talk about how the Doctor causes chaos where he goes in earlier incarnations, but I remember thinking it. Is this mentioned earlier? A very well done lead in to it was Turn Left, which showed how much the Doctor actually saves lives and what would happen if he didn’t.
Donna Noble. Is that good (storytelling) what happened to her or just a total boot to the head? While her actions after turning into Doctor Donna was pretty funny, it seemed like a bit of a deus ex machina to me. Then the Doctor has to mind wipe her and she can never remember what she did or she’ll completely burn up. It seems like Russell T Davies handed just about everyone happy ending but her. What’s up with that?
I don’t remember the answer clearly enough to #1, but let’s face it, where the Doctor goes people die. A lot. Invasions, alien brain slugs, whatever. Sure, if he wasn’t there it would be worse (except for the rare occasions where people are suffering because they’re close to the Doctor and he’s the target), but still, the man is an Unpleasantness Magnet.
As for #2, it was both. Donna Noble went from an obnoxious bitch hated by pretty much everyone, grew to become a lot of peoples’ favorite companion, and then got one of the hardest screw jobs imaginable. In the end she’s a tragic character, having transcended her insecure self-centered worldview (even before she became Doctor Donna) only to have it jerked away from her and forcing her to go back to being the shallow, miserable person she was before. She had become a really great companion to the Doctor long before the ‘Doctor Donna’ moments, and while she would have been awesome as an unstoppable Doctor Donna, she was great before that. And so she gets reverted all the way back.
In one of the Ninth Doctor episodes, someone brought up that point, showing someone pictures of Eccleston as the Doctor at various disasters and tragedies and saying, in effect, “When the Doctor shows up, people die.” It was probably the first mention of this – the earlier Doctors were portrayed as heroes, with some (Tom Baker, for instance) really opting for nonviolence as much as they could. It was always the bad guys killing, with the Doctor trying to stop them. Russell T. Davies looked at it from another point of view – the Doctor wasn’t responsible for the deaths, but they still happened when he showed up (there were only a handful of episodes where no one was killed).
Brilliantly good storytelling. The fact that Donna was heading for a tragic end was alluded to through the entire series (at one point, someone actually told her, “I’m very sorry for what will happen”). I suppose it’s not technically a tragedy – it wasn’t due to any tragic flaw – but it was a tragic and sad end, most notably because she had grown so much as a person and now had returned to her original, shallow (and somewhat stupid) self.
Not only does the Doctor tend to find himself in the middle of death and destruction, he often causes it. He has directly or indirectly caused the extinction of the Daleks - several times! He may have even destroyed his own planet, or at least not acted to prevent its destruction, in order to end the last time war. (I don’t think that’s a spoiler since it’s not shown in the series and may in fact be an incorrect inference on my part.)
Also, blaming the hero for the destruction around him is nothing new. It’s been happening in comic books for decades. (I think this is mostly the norm in Marvel, although it happens to Batman a lot.)
Donna’s exit was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen on Doctor Who (sorry, Rose), but it’s not hopeless for her, is it? Even if the writers stay true to their word and never reunite her with the Doctor, she can still do something with her life. In “Partners in Crime” she had the initiative and the intelligence to track down the Doctor, and in “Turn Left” she was capable of seeing the big picture and doing her bit to save the planet (with a lot of nudging, but not from the Doctor).
Yep; Clive in the first episode, ‘Rose’. He then proved his point by pegging it later in the same episode.
Don’t think much was made of the body count during the original series, but it has come up a few times in Who fiction - Timewyrm: Revelation springs to mind.
The Ecclestone Doctor was quite a bit darker than the Doctors I grew up with. The writers colored in the character with a lot of “post-traumatic stress” from the unseen “Time War” with the Daleks. Being the last one of your kind is another heavy weight to carry, as we saw in the climax of the Saxon arc with Tennant. The old Doctors weren’t so isolated, there were other Time Lords about, good, bad, and indifferent.
Didn’t he have a hand in their creation? and didn’t try to save them from extinction because he ‘knew’ in the future the Daleks would be a force for good in the Universe?
holmes: not exactly. He refused to destroy them early in their history, because despite the destruction they caused, history would be totally different without them, and many good things (IE races coming together to oppose them) would not happen. But not because the Daleks themselves would be a force for good.
He didn’t create them. He was sent back at one point to prevent their creation, and found himself in a position to kill the first batch of Daleks before they could be inserted into their robotic shells. He didn’t follow through, partly because he couldn’t bring himself to cause the extinction of a species, and partly because he knew that the threat the Daleks represented would cause civilizations that other wise would have been at odds, to work together to protect themselves.
Kind of a bullshit justification, if you ask me, but I’m not a Time Lord, so what do I know?
I stand corrected…there was a scene with the doctor coming out of the Dalek ‘hatching’ room with a Dalek wrapped around his neck trying to kill him, right; or is my memory even worst than I think it is?
At bottom, the Doctor asked himself whether, overall, history would have been better or worse without the Daleks. That’s a damn hard judgement call to make even for a Time Lord. It’s a little like asking “would history have been better if Adolf Hitler had never lived?” If one of the high-probability scenerios without Hitler would have been an atomic war between the US and USSR in the mid '50s, then how does that affect your answer?
Even for the Time Lords, it was an extraordinary, radical move. The Doctor’s going back to Skaro was prompted by a flux in the timelines that would have led to the Daleks conquering the universe if nothing was done. The Celestial Intervention Agency (as necessary but controversial to the Time Lords as our own C.I.A.) gave the Doctor the choice of destroying the Daleks OR modifying their nature to be less warlike if he could.
In the end, the Doctor preserved the status quo: he entombed the Daleks, preventing their premature emergence from the subterranean civilization we saw back in the first Doctor era, and giving the Thals a chance to survive to become one of the more important anti-Dalek factions.
And of course, post-Time War the Doctor probably kicked himself a thousand times for making the choice he did.
Regarding the Doctor vs. the Daleks, he did have a hand in their first “extinction,” back in his second televised adventure. Although the Doctor and his companions had been imprisoned, they had already escaped and were free to leave the planet. Instead, they convinced a group of pacifist natives to invade the city and exterminate the enemy! (In these episodes, far from being the threat to the rest of the universe they later became, the Daleks were depicted as unable to leave their city.) Of course the Doctor has evolved a lot since those days.
You have to know the context to really get it, but one of the strongest moments from the new series is when another character says, “Answer me this - just one question, that’s all. If the Doctor had never visited us, if he’d never chosen this place… on a whim… would anybody here have died? [Pause.] You can go now.”
I like that thought and it’s quite a bit better than people shouting “mindrape” across the internet.
Another interesting conclusion might be that the Doctor has to lock away that portion of her mind, but leaves everything else intact so she can remember her adventures and knows her potential, but doesn’t know how to reach that and is incapable of attaining it. What’s worse? Not knowing or knowing what you can do but be entirely without the ability to do it? I’ll send that to Russ and Steve to see what they can do with it.
On the flipside, has there been any episodes where someone *doesn’t * die? I can’t think of any offhand.
Some of us fondly remember the old 70’s stories like The Horror Of Fang Rock, in which the entire supporting cast plus both monsters are killed off {and Leela’s eyes change colour from a nuclear blast} and Tom Baker’s Doctor treats it all as a huge joke.
I seem to remember the Doctor celebrating the lack of fatalities at the end of The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. “Just this once, everybody lives!” All of the creepy gas mask people were returned to normal, including the little boy.
There’s precedent. In “The War Games” the Time Lords wipe the memories of the Doctor’s companions Jamie and Zoe before returning them to their respective times and banishing the Doctor to Earth. Kind of an unjust ending for Jamie in particular, who had been with the Second Doctor during his entire run.
As for the Doctor causing tons of death and destruction, it’s alluded to at various points during old-school Who (Earthshock, for example, and the Dalek episode where Tegan says her final goodbye), but it never really reaches the level that RTD likes to take it to. Except by Mary Whitehouse, of course! While I’d agree that old Who didn’t address the subject enough, new Who does it far too much and, well, generally in a hamfisted and overly emo way. Let’s hope Steven Moffat can find a middle ground.