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shadowkatWatched the last three Doctor Who specials back to back more or less. Waters of Mars and End of Time, Part I on Friday, and End of Time, Part II. Was rather impressed by these, far better than the last two specials. Although I did enjoy Planet of the Dead. Also watched a bit of the David Tennet/RT Davies special where they more or less explain what they were thinking when they made these episodes.
From wiki :
As a Time Lord, the Doctor has the ability to regenerate his body when near death. Introduced into the storyline as a way of continuing the series when the writers were faced with the departure of lead actor William Hartnell in 1966, it has continued to be a major element of the series, allowing for the recasting of the lead actor when the need arises. The serial The Deadly Assassin established that a Time Lord can regenerate twelve times, for a total of thirteen incarnations (although at least one Time Lord, the Master, has managed to circumvent this). To date, the Doctor has gone through this process and its resulting after-effects on ten occasions, with each of his incarnations having his own quirks and abilities but otherwise sharing the memories and experience of the previous incarnations.
The main theme of the last group of Doctor Who episodes is mortality, although this is hardly a spoiler - since that is an ongoing theme of the series. Relating back to a quote by Joss Whedon at the Cultural Humanist Q&A, where Whedon states something to the effect that the thing we are all the most afraid of is death, and how it is also what unites us, what makes us human, makes life worth something...bucking death, becoming "immortal", circumventing it forever - is evil in a way, because it belittles life, the process. We need both.
Reminds me of a quote I heard recently from the writer of the Life of Pi, who states that death is a grinning skull that mocks him, it grips at life, envious of it, envious and jealous of its beauty, its vibrance, and clutches at it, possessive and obessive, half-in love and half-in hate, but life laughs and jumps over...even in death, always moving forward from it.
Doctor Who is the longest running science-fiction television series in the world, partly because of the fact that it can literally regenerate itself - and that is due to the nature of the medium from which it was given birth. If it had originated from a film, book, or comic - I seriously doubt they'd have come up with the idea of regeneration. Doctor Who is a creature of tv. Specifically serial/horror/sci-fi tv. It would not exist without it. And, of all the explanations I've seen for recasting, it by far is the most innovative. But then, that is in part the nature of the genre.
I have a love hate relationship with Doctor Who that goes back to its premiere on PBS in the late 1970s/early 1980s - when I viewed it as a show that had monsters, was scarey, and therefore best to avoid. (Had a similar love/hate relationship with 1999 and Star Trek back then. I was about 12 and easily scared, plus an overactive imagination...which is not always a good thing, when one is trying to sleep.) Now, my love/hate relationship is mostly due to the camp factor, which can be quite high on occassion. It is after all meant to be a children's show, even if some of the episodes are clearly not for kids. Much like BTVS, it seems to straddle the kid and adult spectrum equally, hence its appeal. And no, I have not seen all of it. I've only seen all of the present day episodes or at least 85-95% of them.
**WARNING: I don't have any time to edit this. It was written off the top of my head. I have not re-read it. So it is bound to be filled with typos, misspellings, grammatical errors and other annoyances. I may go back and edit at a later date. Also it's a musing, so will be sort of stream of consciousness in places. Plus major plot spoilers for all three episodes.
Sometimes I think Time Lords Live too Long - musing on Waters of Mars, End of Time Part I & Part II.
Waters of Mars - is the episode where The 10th Doctor starts to show his age. He begins to bend beneath the weight of the losses. Here, he meets the extraordinary Adeliade,
portrayed by Lindsey Duncan. Captain of the first Earth settlement on Mars. Things go horribly wrong as they often do and the Doctor spends the first half of the episode attempting to leave, because he knows the team is doomed, that time is fixed, and he can't do anything to change the events. If he does change them - he could destroy other fixed events and unravel the history of humankind. Captain Adelaid is meant to die on Mars. She activates the self-destruct button - which destroys her crew and station, but saves Earth from a killer zombie-like virus in the martian water. But...but...he has lost so many people and can't he help them? He tries to avoid telling her the future, but he does. And he tries to leave, he is literally walking away...when the weight of it hits him full force between the shoulder blades and he turns back, desperate to fight death to be victorious. To circumvent the grim reaper's plans.
And he appears to accomplish his task. He flies Adelaid and her two remaining crew members home, back to earth, the same day. Landing in front of her house. And Adelaid asks - but why?
What of my granddaughter who was inspired by my sacrifice to explore the stars? What of the things she grows up to do? Don't I have to die for that to happen?
No states the Doctor, you can inspire her in person. Be the same.
How do you know?
The Doctor admits he doesn't. But it doesn't matter. He is victorious. He has changed time.
He has beaten death. He is a timelord and has the power to beat death back to a standstill.
He is god.
And Adelaid looks at him in horror and disbelief. Who is to stop you? What gives you the right? No one. And I give me the right. He tells her.
Fearful, she enters her home at his beckoning and then, to his horror, takes out her weapon and vaporizes herself... she dies. And he is horrified at what he has done.
It is mere prelude to what he must do...and why his time as the Doctor must come to an end.
Why does he fear death? Why is he running so desperately from it from the moment he hears about it? And why does he fear regeneration, when he doesn't appear to fear it before?
I asked myself these questions watching these episodes. Remembering the ones that came before, where other characters did horrible things to avoid death - either of their own race or themselves. Family of Blood - does horrible things to continue their species. And in Human Nature...The Doctor himself encounters what mortality, living a mortal life may feel like.
He is fearful, yet at the same time...almost envious of it afterwards. It provides closure.
He has been regenerated 10 times. He has two more left, before his time is up, unless of course he finds a way to circumvent it. And over the course of those regenerations, he has lost and gained...so many companions. People who have sacrificed their lives...sometimes for his. Such as Doctor River Song in the library.
Like a cat with 9 lives, whose expended seven...he knows he's over the hump.
Enter The Master, in End of Time, a timelord who regenerated his body from death and can only exist as long as he devours life. He is the living embodiement of the death metaphor from the writer of Life of Pi. The grinning skull clasping, grasping life to his bosum, attempting to sustain his own. Bouncing, eating, screaming...ravenous...and crazed and in pain. The tick tock tick tock of a timelord's heart imbedded in his head. As John Simms, who portrays the Master, states - wouldn't you be insane if you had a constant tapping in your skull...the sound of drums. A sound he is able to share, albeit briefly with The Doctor. A sound we learn was embedded there by the Time Lords locked away, back in time, on their dying planet, in their eternal hell - wishing to destroy the universe, in order to ascend beyond material form themselves, to go to heaven, into the light of consciousness, out of the material realm.
The battle that the Doctor relates to Wilford Brimley and to the Master...reminds me a great deal of another sci-fi battle - in Babylon 5 between the Vorlons and the Shadows, here it is between the Dirleks(sp??) - a race of human computers and the Timelords...during which the Time Lords did things that corrupted them, that made them megomanical, wishing to live forever, to defeat time and space, to exist outside the boundaries of both. Ultimate power.
They'd become too powerful, lived too long.
As the Doctor tells Wilford, when Wilford asks him to take the gun to kill the Master, something The Doctor refuses to do. That's how the Master got that way, that's how it started.
No. And I'm hardly blameless, hardly innocent here...I've taken lives. And when I haven't directly, I've done worse, I've gotten clever, I manipulated people into taking their own.
But the entry of the old TimeLord's through the gate of immortality - changes his mind.
And he takes up the gun. Why...because, sometimes I think a time lord lives too long.
They are worse he tells Wilford than any of my enemies.
They don't want to die. They want to live forever. To ascend upon the ashes of others.
Death leaping over life.
We all die, says the Doctor. Even I can die. If someone kills me before I have time to begin the regeneration. And I don't want to die. Even though I've lived forever, 906 years.
We must seem like insects to you, answers Wilford. No, says the Doctor, Giants.
For humans are mortal beings. They face death constantly. And fight against it. Yet in the end go into its arms. As well as individuals, each unique and separate. Great in their diversity of choices. The Master does the unthinkable and changes all the humans through the gateway device into himself on the cellular level except for Wilford locked safely in the cage and Donna - protected by The Doctor's sheild, inserted long ago to protect her from remembering the part of him lodged inside herself and losing her mind as a result of the onslaught of too much memory.
End of Time Part II introduces the ancient race of Time Lords, the race that the Doctor had to stop...and inevitably destroy, in order to save the universe...his people.
Without whom, he is alone. Racing from one place to the next. Chasing time down multiple rabbit holes.
It's not really all that important what happened way back when, so much as why. The head Timelord, played by Timothy Dalton, expresses his megalomanical desire to live forever...to defeat time. He is not interested in The MAster's dream of making everyone look like himself, be himself, a thousand, million Masters, or a thousand million Timelords...immortality through material replication until they all burn themselves out...no, he wants to defeat time itself, unravel it, end it. No longer chase it. But overcome it once and for all - so that he is its master.
A desire that we saw briefly echoed in the Doctor's eyes at the end of Waters of Mars. The insanity in Dalton's eyes is an uncomfortable reflection of that glimmer in the Doctor's own and perhaps the Doctor senses it. As does The Master, when he realizes the source of his insanity, the tick tocking tapping drums came from Dalton's Time Lord. You made me like this, he hisses - after the Doctor kills the link. And the Master and The Time Lord destroy each other. Leaving the Doctor lying the ruins of their mayhem, momentarily intact, relieved. I've survived, he thinks. The prophecy is wrong. The Master knocked four times and I'm still alive, no regeneration, no death...
But then, Wilford taps the glass door, the box that the Doctor's had told him to stay within until the fight was over, so he would be safe. It is locked and he taps lightly four times to get the Doctor's attention. And the Doctor rages - it had to be you. You had to be stuck.
You couldn't get out. You couldn't leave. I don't want to go. But it was always you, from the beginning...
And Wilford states lightly, you don't have to help. Please don't. I'm an old man. I've lived a good life. You're...
I'm older than you, the Doctor must be thinking. But he says You're inconsequential, unimportant, whereas I...and he bows his head in resignation and enters the other cubical, pushes the button so Wilford can leave, locking himself inside with the radiation - which he asborbs, much as the 9th Doctor absorbed the radiation from Rose Tyler ages before, knowing he will either die or begin the regeneration...into what he is never quite sure.
The cage that protected them from The Master's celluar regeneration, that protected Wilford from the Timelords is ironically the very one that kills the tenth Doctor...not that moment of course. He has time to check on his friends, to say goodbye. And he works backwards, first with Martha, then with Donna, Wilford and Donna's mother, then Sara Jane, Captain Jack and finally...Rose Tyler...leaving each with a token, however slight of his affection. Then he goes back to the Tardis and regenerates...a process that is painful and is a type of dying.
He emerges from the light, which almost destroys the tardis, a new man, younger, with no eyebrows (damn it), and as frenetic as usual, desperate to stop his collison course with earth...
Time charges on. The Doctor is neither a lord nor master of it, he merely chases it through holes, living and playing on its whim, much like the rest of us. Circumventing death by riding the rollercoaster of life...but just barely. Immortality is overrated, perhaps, but that does not mean we don't all chase it. And time is mere moments...that we clasp to our chests wishing to hold on to forever, yet still disintergrate within our grasp.
There are no absolutes, no ever after, just time. Only time. Unchangable, unknowable, and uncontrollable, yet on-going...fitting episodes for a new year, as we begin the saga of death, rebirth and reknewal all over again.
From wiki :
As a Time Lord, the Doctor has the ability to regenerate his body when near death. Introduced into the storyline as a way of continuing the series when the writers were faced with the departure of lead actor William Hartnell in 1966, it has continued to be a major element of the series, allowing for the recasting of the lead actor when the need arises. The serial The Deadly Assassin established that a Time Lord can regenerate twelve times, for a total of thirteen incarnations (although at least one Time Lord, the Master, has managed to circumvent this). To date, the Doctor has gone through this process and its resulting after-effects on ten occasions, with each of his incarnations having his own quirks and abilities but otherwise sharing the memories and experience of the previous incarnations.
The main theme of the last group of Doctor Who episodes is mortality, although this is hardly a spoiler - since that is an ongoing theme of the series. Relating back to a quote by Joss Whedon at the Cultural Humanist Q&A, where Whedon states something to the effect that the thing we are all the most afraid of is death, and how it is also what unites us, what makes us human, makes life worth something...bucking death, becoming "immortal", circumventing it forever - is evil in a way, because it belittles life, the process. We need both.
Reminds me of a quote I heard recently from the writer of the Life of Pi, who states that death is a grinning skull that mocks him, it grips at life, envious of it, envious and jealous of its beauty, its vibrance, and clutches at it, possessive and obessive, half-in love and half-in hate, but life laughs and jumps over...even in death, always moving forward from it.
Doctor Who is the longest running science-fiction television series in the world, partly because of the fact that it can literally regenerate itself - and that is due to the nature of the medium from which it was given birth. If it had originated from a film, book, or comic - I seriously doubt they'd have come up with the idea of regeneration. Doctor Who is a creature of tv. Specifically serial/horror/sci-fi tv. It would not exist without it. And, of all the explanations I've seen for recasting, it by far is the most innovative. But then, that is in part the nature of the genre.
I have a love hate relationship with Doctor Who that goes back to its premiere on PBS in the late 1970s/early 1980s - when I viewed it as a show that had monsters, was scarey, and therefore best to avoid. (Had a similar love/hate relationship with 1999 and Star Trek back then. I was about 12 and easily scared, plus an overactive imagination...which is not always a good thing, when one is trying to sleep.) Now, my love/hate relationship is mostly due to the camp factor, which can be quite high on occassion. It is after all meant to be a children's show, even if some of the episodes are clearly not for kids. Much like BTVS, it seems to straddle the kid and adult spectrum equally, hence its appeal. And no, I have not seen all of it. I've only seen all of the present day episodes or at least 85-95% of them.
**WARNING: I don't have any time to edit this. It was written off the top of my head. I have not re-read it. So it is bound to be filled with typos, misspellings, grammatical errors and other annoyances. I may go back and edit at a later date. Also it's a musing, so will be sort of stream of consciousness in places. Plus major plot spoilers for all three episodes.
Sometimes I think Time Lords Live too Long - musing on Waters of Mars, End of Time Part I & Part II.
Waters of Mars - is the episode where The 10th Doctor starts to show his age. He begins to bend beneath the weight of the losses. Here, he meets the extraordinary Adeliade,
portrayed by Lindsey Duncan. Captain of the first Earth settlement on Mars. Things go horribly wrong as they often do and the Doctor spends the first half of the episode attempting to leave, because he knows the team is doomed, that time is fixed, and he can't do anything to change the events. If he does change them - he could destroy other fixed events and unravel the history of humankind. Captain Adelaid is meant to die on Mars. She activates the self-destruct button - which destroys her crew and station, but saves Earth from a killer zombie-like virus in the martian water. But...but...he has lost so many people and can't he help them? He tries to avoid telling her the future, but he does. And he tries to leave, he is literally walking away...when the weight of it hits him full force between the shoulder blades and he turns back, desperate to fight death to be victorious. To circumvent the grim reaper's plans.
And he appears to accomplish his task. He flies Adelaid and her two remaining crew members home, back to earth, the same day. Landing in front of her house. And Adelaid asks - but why?
What of my granddaughter who was inspired by my sacrifice to explore the stars? What of the things she grows up to do? Don't I have to die for that to happen?
No states the Doctor, you can inspire her in person. Be the same.
How do you know?
The Doctor admits he doesn't. But it doesn't matter. He is victorious. He has changed time.
He has beaten death. He is a timelord and has the power to beat death back to a standstill.
He is god.
And Adelaid looks at him in horror and disbelief. Who is to stop you? What gives you the right? No one. And I give me the right. He tells her.
Fearful, she enters her home at his beckoning and then, to his horror, takes out her weapon and vaporizes herself... she dies. And he is horrified at what he has done.
It is mere prelude to what he must do...and why his time as the Doctor must come to an end.
Why does he fear death? Why is he running so desperately from it from the moment he hears about it? And why does he fear regeneration, when he doesn't appear to fear it before?
I asked myself these questions watching these episodes. Remembering the ones that came before, where other characters did horrible things to avoid death - either of their own race or themselves. Family of Blood - does horrible things to continue their species. And in Human Nature...The Doctor himself encounters what mortality, living a mortal life may feel like.
He is fearful, yet at the same time...almost envious of it afterwards. It provides closure.
He has been regenerated 10 times. He has two more left, before his time is up, unless of course he finds a way to circumvent it. And over the course of those regenerations, he has lost and gained...so many companions. People who have sacrificed their lives...sometimes for his. Such as Doctor River Song in the library.
Like a cat with 9 lives, whose expended seven...he knows he's over the hump.
Enter The Master, in End of Time, a timelord who regenerated his body from death and can only exist as long as he devours life. He is the living embodiement of the death metaphor from the writer of Life of Pi. The grinning skull clasping, grasping life to his bosum, attempting to sustain his own. Bouncing, eating, screaming...ravenous...and crazed and in pain. The tick tock tick tock of a timelord's heart imbedded in his head. As John Simms, who portrays the Master, states - wouldn't you be insane if you had a constant tapping in your skull...the sound of drums. A sound he is able to share, albeit briefly with The Doctor. A sound we learn was embedded there by the Time Lords locked away, back in time, on their dying planet, in their eternal hell - wishing to destroy the universe, in order to ascend beyond material form themselves, to go to heaven, into the light of consciousness, out of the material realm.
The battle that the Doctor relates to Wilford Brimley and to the Master...reminds me a great deal of another sci-fi battle - in Babylon 5 between the Vorlons and the Shadows, here it is between the Dirleks(sp??) - a race of human computers and the Timelords...during which the Time Lords did things that corrupted them, that made them megomanical, wishing to live forever, to defeat time and space, to exist outside the boundaries of both. Ultimate power.
They'd become too powerful, lived too long.
As the Doctor tells Wilford, when Wilford asks him to take the gun to kill the Master, something The Doctor refuses to do. That's how the Master got that way, that's how it started.
No. And I'm hardly blameless, hardly innocent here...I've taken lives. And when I haven't directly, I've done worse, I've gotten clever, I manipulated people into taking their own.
But the entry of the old TimeLord's through the gate of immortality - changes his mind.
And he takes up the gun. Why...because, sometimes I think a time lord lives too long.
They are worse he tells Wilford than any of my enemies.
They don't want to die. They want to live forever. To ascend upon the ashes of others.
Death leaping over life.
We all die, says the Doctor. Even I can die. If someone kills me before I have time to begin the regeneration. And I don't want to die. Even though I've lived forever, 906 years.
We must seem like insects to you, answers Wilford. No, says the Doctor, Giants.
For humans are mortal beings. They face death constantly. And fight against it. Yet in the end go into its arms. As well as individuals, each unique and separate. Great in their diversity of choices. The Master does the unthinkable and changes all the humans through the gateway device into himself on the cellular level except for Wilford locked safely in the cage and Donna - protected by The Doctor's sheild, inserted long ago to protect her from remembering the part of him lodged inside herself and losing her mind as a result of the onslaught of too much memory.
End of Time Part II introduces the ancient race of Time Lords, the race that the Doctor had to stop...and inevitably destroy, in order to save the universe...his people.
Without whom, he is alone. Racing from one place to the next. Chasing time down multiple rabbit holes.
It's not really all that important what happened way back when, so much as why. The head Timelord, played by Timothy Dalton, expresses his megalomanical desire to live forever...to defeat time. He is not interested in The MAster's dream of making everyone look like himself, be himself, a thousand, million Masters, or a thousand million Timelords...immortality through material replication until they all burn themselves out...no, he wants to defeat time itself, unravel it, end it. No longer chase it. But overcome it once and for all - so that he is its master.
A desire that we saw briefly echoed in the Doctor's eyes at the end of Waters of Mars. The insanity in Dalton's eyes is an uncomfortable reflection of that glimmer in the Doctor's own and perhaps the Doctor senses it. As does The Master, when he realizes the source of his insanity, the tick tocking tapping drums came from Dalton's Time Lord. You made me like this, he hisses - after the Doctor kills the link. And the Master and The Time Lord destroy each other. Leaving the Doctor lying the ruins of their mayhem, momentarily intact, relieved. I've survived, he thinks. The prophecy is wrong. The Master knocked four times and I'm still alive, no regeneration, no death...
But then, Wilford taps the glass door, the box that the Doctor's had told him to stay within until the fight was over, so he would be safe. It is locked and he taps lightly four times to get the Doctor's attention. And the Doctor rages - it had to be you. You had to be stuck.
You couldn't get out. You couldn't leave. I don't want to go. But it was always you, from the beginning...
And Wilford states lightly, you don't have to help. Please don't. I'm an old man. I've lived a good life. You're...
I'm older than you, the Doctor must be thinking. But he says You're inconsequential, unimportant, whereas I...and he bows his head in resignation and enters the other cubical, pushes the button so Wilford can leave, locking himself inside with the radiation - which he asborbs, much as the 9th Doctor absorbed the radiation from Rose Tyler ages before, knowing he will either die or begin the regeneration...into what he is never quite sure.
The cage that protected them from The Master's celluar regeneration, that protected Wilford from the Timelords is ironically the very one that kills the tenth Doctor...not that moment of course. He has time to check on his friends, to say goodbye. And he works backwards, first with Martha, then with Donna, Wilford and Donna's mother, then Sara Jane, Captain Jack and finally...Rose Tyler...leaving each with a token, however slight of his affection. Then he goes back to the Tardis and regenerates...a process that is painful and is a type of dying.
He emerges from the light, which almost destroys the tardis, a new man, younger, with no eyebrows (damn it), and as frenetic as usual, desperate to stop his collison course with earth...
Time charges on. The Doctor is neither a lord nor master of it, he merely chases it through holes, living and playing on its whim, much like the rest of us. Circumventing death by riding the rollercoaster of life...but just barely. Immortality is overrated, perhaps, but that does not mean we don't all chase it. And time is mere moments...that we clasp to our chests wishing to hold on to forever, yet still disintergrate within our grasp.
There are no absolutes, no ever after, just time. Only time. Unchangable, unknowable, and uncontrollable, yet on-going...fitting episodes for a new year, as we begin the saga of death, rebirth and reknewal all over again.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-04 04:48 am (UTC)I really enjoyed the finale; it didn't change my life with it's deep meaning and powerful metaphors... but it was very involving. I cared a lot about the Doctor & Donna's Grandfather, and I loved the way the Doctor & the Master ended up protecting each other from the Time Lords (or tried to at least). Was that woman Time Lord our Doctor's Mum?
I'm excited about the Doctor #11, but I think the Doctor #9 will always be 'my Doctor'.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-05 05:33 pm (UTC)Much as I will miss David Tennat, I'm looking forward to Stephen Moffat's run. I adore Stephen Moffat's writing for Who.
His episodes are the ones that I remember (Blink, the Doctor Song arc, Family of Blood, Human Condition), while the vast majority of Russell T. Davies written episodes tend to leave me...cold. (With the possible exception of Torchwood: Children of Earth - which I think may well be Davies sole masterpiece.)
I admittedly will miss David Tennant, he grew on me and I found myself becoming rather attached to him in the role during the Dr. River Song arc and Donna Noble arc. Before that arc, I was ambivalent about the actor and the show in general, except of course for Blink, Family of Blood, and the Human Condition.
But that was, again, in part due to Stephen Moffat who wrote a good portion of those episodes.
Much as I love Christopher Eccleston and his turn as Doctor Who 9, I can't remember the episodes that well. Haven't seen them since they aired. So my memory is foggy. The only one's I remember are Captain Jack's death/rebirth and the murder mystery with the oldest earthling who is nothing but skin.
Not sure what I think of the new guy. Took me a while to warm to Tennant, because I was a huge fan of his predecessor and watched Doctor Who to see that actor perform it.