Hell Bent

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  • #54715

    @missrori

    As a general note, we have a section for fanfic. This isn’t it.

    #54717
    MissRori @missrori

    Sorry about that @pedant.  (I had thought it would just come out as a little text link for anyone who might be interested, given the discussion, not a whole image to click on.  In hindsight I should have just moved it over upon seeing that.)

    #54758
    Missy @missy

    Everyone.

    I recently watched a comic.com from the USA.  On the panel were Matt Smith, Jenna Coleman and Alex Kingston.

    They all had plenty to say and I enjoyed listening to them, but I thought that Alex (River) explained the series popularity in very simple terms.

    She made it very plain that she is a huge admirer of Steven Moffat, whom she considers a genius, saying that the secret of The who’s success, is that SM writes about ‘love.”

    Spotonski!

    Missy

    #55165
    ichabod @ichabod

    Just came across this — another fascinating commentary by Rachel Talalay, this time on the making of “Hell Bent”:

    http://www.radiofreeskaro.com/2016/06/19/radio-free-skaro-534-to-the-end-of-the-universe/

    The interview with Ms. Talalay begins at about minute 35 in from the beginning.  Seeing the episode from her p.o.v. and her approach is refreshing and enlightening, I think, and a firm rebuttal to all the damn fools who whine and moan about how the writers and show runner for some inexplicable reason spend all their time conspiring together to “ruin” the show.  The devotion she describes on the parts of all the participants rings completely true, to me.

    This is how you make something you love, with people you respect and admire, *not* how you (Steven Moffat in particular) can show off how ridiculously clever and superior you think you are.

    God, fans can be so stupidly unimaginative sometimes!  An indicator of their problem is that they’re too stuck on themselves and their own “superior” opinions to ever go find this kind of material for themselves — or pass it on if they do.  It makes me so angry I could spit — willful, block-headed stupidity that people use to *limit themselves* and their own understanding and appreciation of the world outside of themselves.

    Never mind; just me ranting, late and tired.  Enjoy!

    #55172
    janetteB @janetteb

    @icabod there was an article in the Guardian a few weeks ago, (Sorry for not putting up a link at the time) with Beryl Virtue  HERE. It shows that the production of Sherlock is a collaborative affair, and a man who works for both his wife and his mother in law can hardly be the monster of arrogance that BTL trolls would claim.

    It is nice to have somewhere where we can “rant” (though your posts never come across as rants) when we need. It seems that the internet is rapidly being overrun by right wing trolls like the rest of the world.

    Cheers

    Janette

     

    #55175
    ichabod @ichabod

    @janetteb   With regard to political trolling, the Right has substantial monetary power and uses some of it to hire moral imbeciles to do Right Wing trolling on line, as loudly and ubiquitously and frequently as possible, in order to amplify their “message” and make support seem much greater and more widespread than it is.  I don’t think anybody on the Left does anything like that, at least in the US — US liberals are funneling their spare cash to people like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU and women’s rights organizations, to finance legal challenges to bad judges, juries, and laws.  We don’t have as much to spend, so we have to try to make our contributions go where they can really count.

    As for the DW Haters, that’s some kind of weird psychological tangle that I’m not qualified to sort out; but I know vitriolic hysteria (and — testesteria?) when I see it.   The real arrogance is theirs, of course.  Typical aggressive projection.

    And thanks — I try not to rant, but I do get carried away — well, that’s how rants happen, isn’t it?!

    #55177
    Missy @missy

    Janette: Hear, hear again.

    @ichabod: You are so right. My view si that the cimments say a lot more about the ‘complainers” than it does about their victims,  SH and DW.

    I, on the other hand do rant when a thing annoys me, but as i have a tendency to go overborad I try to keep it down.

    Missy

    #55323
    MissRori @missrori

    (hmmm)  I’ve been thinking about this story again in the last few days…

    @thane15, among others, pointed out that the Doctor needed to let Clara go because he had become preoccupied with her and it was getting in the way of focusing on his own health and the needs of others.  The Doctor devotes himself to saving as many people as he can, after all.

    But his misery in the Series 9 endgame came precisely because he cared about others besides himself and Clara and was tired of losing people — not just her, although it certainly colored his melancholy.  Think of how much better things would have been if he’d let Ashildr die, accepted that nothing could be done, as he had with O’Donnell in the previous episode (it would have been nice for the Doctor to defend himself over that).  After all, battles come with losses.  But the Doctor chose to live up to his name — and she proved unworthy of his kindness, his concern.

    The Doctor could have chosen, given the information he had at the time, not to save Anah and thus let himself be trapped.  But he did because Anahson needed her mother and (as far as he knew) Rigsy was in danger.  How did they repay him?  They did not even whack Mayor Me on the head and let him escape back to his TARDIS with his key!

    And of course, the Time Lords proved backstabbing monsters.  The “small” people of Gallifrey may have appreciated him, but would they have fought for him to save Clara had he asked?  Would they have filled the empty space in his hearts her loss left?  The Doctor may have broken every code he ever lived by in “Hell Bent”, but perhaps it’s because he realized that they were wrong.  “To Hell with you!”  😀

    Perhaps Davros was right — compassion is a weakness.  I’ve certainly been feeling that way the past few days, as I’ve been chewed out by others and watched others get chewed out for not agreeing with the powers that be over what should become of the “little people” of the world, for being compassionate.  In the real world, those who show compassion for everyone will never be powerful…but doomed to an existence of trying to help others for little or no reward or appreciation, of brooding over all that can’t be done.  I suppose it’s not surprising that the Doctor suffers this way too.  Why should he be any better off than the rest of us?  😉

    #55341
    Anonymous @

    @missrori

    Yes, I see your point. I think these episodes are very telling. Perhaps they are suggesting a ‘probable’ future for the Doctor? And a probable future for us? What I’m getting at is that you could see just how the Doctor should and does behave. It’s fiction, yes. So in this fictional place the Doctor is explaining, how, even when things go really wrong -maybe because of what he did -that this is how he MUST behave.

    I think the Doctor would have been upset if Rigsy got too involved with Ashildr ? He has a wife and baby. The Doctor fought to protect the children on Gallifrey.

    Also he has an immense life span. I think he gets terribly sad but he isn’t human. He can’t and doesn’t feel things the way we necessarily do. I always go back to Deep Breath when we first met him -this insane (almost) and compassionate man who then became harder, less malleable (new word for me -could have got it totally wrong) for a long time and then became a little softer as Clara and Danny made inroads into their understanding of him?

    But I understand your points.

    Thank you for reading,

    Thane.

     

    #55351
    Missy @missy

    @missrori

    Compassion will never be a weakness, as long it has common sense as a companion.

    #55361
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missrori  Perhaps Davros was right — compassion is a weakness.

    I think compassion is a strength, and the heroic backbone of “goodness” itself — to do what you know and feel is right *in spite of* also knowing that your action won’t fix things forever and might even have terrible spin-offs in  future (Ashildr, as noted above); and with no expectation of or desire for gratitude.

    “Who was that masked man?”  It’s the tradition of the hero who does good deeds and vanishes from the scene before anyone can say “Thank you!” (“Do good and disappear” — from “The Nun’s Story”, as I recall, have never forgotten it).  I think it’s a new-ish idea, if we start with the Ancient World’s concept of grabbing as much glory (and gratitude) as you can so that people will keep you alive in memory; it was gods and angels who did good and disappeared in those days (if you were lucky).

    Now we’ve got the Doctor and his tendency toward busting up the problem and then zipping away in the Tardis, which has been charmingly played as just not having the patience to hang around he help clean up the mess, as well as unease with strong human emotions.  And he’s easily bored and inclined to melancholy and neuroticism when he has too much time to reflect.  Maybe there’s a lesson in that, too: a balance of outward and inward focus is healthier than an over-abundance of either.

    @thane15   I think he gets terribly sad but he isn’t human. He can’t and doesn’t feel things the way we necessarily do. 

    Hmm; that’s a question to mull over, isn’t it?   Yes, he’s alien; but TLs and humans are supposedly related, and the TLs certainly seem to have very similar emotions to humans (negative ones, at any rate), as when we see them conferring over the Doctor’s actions, excoriating him for this or that, commiserating (well, Ohila does that, and she’s not, strictly speaking, a TL — ?), mocking (Missy!).  And that speech of Missy’s about the long TL lifespan making it impossible for TLs to really relate to humans as humans relate to each other (“you’re the puppy”) or as TLs relate to each other — I found that very intriguing to think about.

    But judging by the way the Doctor reacts to negative events and actions — violence, arrogance, hatred etc. — his anger and his condemnation seem very similar to those reactions in humans.  That, though, could also be a result of his recurring close contact with humans — recalling that attempt of his to bash in the head of an inconvenient cave man, way back in the series, is pretty telling re the emotional range the Doctor started out with, compared to that of humans.

    So does he have a capacity for human emotion that all TLs have, and his initial rebellion was in protest against the TLs choosing *not* to act on those emotions (not to interfere with evil for fear of messing up Time)?  Or did he run from Gallifrey out of fear of being/becoming the destructive “hybrid” that the Sliders told him about in the cloister? Has he learned human emotion from us and values it so highly that he keeps hanging around us to keep refreshing his own understanding of it?  Does his very long life span limit his capacity for merely short-term human feelings, as Missy says?  His intense (TL-intense but non-sexual, as per Missy’s comments?) connection with Clara did, in fact, turn him briefly into a destructively selfish person (for Clara’s sake, of course, but still — ).

    What saved him?  Clara’s assertion of her autonomy, her refusal to be reduced to the “object” of his obsession, a thing he could just memory-wipe and then tuck safely away so he wouldn’t have to worry about her.  What is he left with?  He will never forget that he once remembered her, because, as he says, he never forgets those he’s lost.  Is that a human feeling; or a TL feeling (all those long lives); both?  The lack of a satisfactory hard-and-fast answer keeps the question open and interesting.

    SPOILER

    I just came across another example of a sort of love not normally associated with human emotion.  In the movie “Arrival”, a linguistic specialist decodes the language of aliens who perceive time in its entirety, and this changes her own perception so that she begins to “remember” events that haven’t happened yet in her own life (the short story the film is made from is called “The Story of Your Life”).  She remembers the lifetime of a child she is going to have, and that forward-memory brings her joy and sorrow — but she chooses to bring those events into being anyway, because (IMO) she’ll gladly take the joy she foresees even at the cost of the inevitable loss and sorrow that will end it.  In the movie, she’s aware of all this through alien concepts of time.  Is the love she feels for the doomed child that she chooses to have even knowing that it’s doomed a human emotion, or an alien emotion she’s absorbed from an alien perception of time?  Both?

    Could an alien being seek out the company of humans in order to expand or deepen its own emotional spectrum because it’s worth it, despite the inevitable losses that come with that expansion?  Could a long-lived alien being get  caught up in and addicted to the compressed depth and sharpness of human emotions that it experiences with and around us?  I’ve often thought that our fiction about these issues is absurdly species-centric (o look how wonderful we are, some aliens would find us fascinating and adorable {and delicious with butter sauce, but never mind that bit}). Now I’m thinking that we could be onto something here, as a sort of corollary to the idea that humans could find a very long-lived, powerful alien both fascinating and lovable.

    Sorry to wander on for so long, but damn, it’s a long time til mid-April . . .

     

    #55369
    Missy @missy

    @ichabod: Sorry to wander on for so long, but damn, it’s a long time til mid-April . . .

    Yes, it is, so you are allowed . As they say over here, “Go for your life.” One thing, our Doctor showed considerable ‘human’ emotion in the final scene of “Doctor Mysterio,”

    Missy

     

    #55374
    MissRori @missrori

    @ichabod, Deep thoughts indeed!  Another work that discusses the idea of a long-lived alien learning from/adapting to humanity and its messiness is Walter Tevis’ novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, most famously, if freely, adapted as a 1976 film in which David Bowie played the title character.  (It was his first major film role.)  “Thomas Jerome Newton” is an alien who, in disguise, can pass as human.  He comes to Earth with amazing technology from his homeworld, and becomes a tech billionaire to rival Gates or Zuckerberg.  His grand, secret plan is to fund construction of an ark that will bring the rest of his people to our planet, for theirs is dying of terminal drought, and once they assimilate into society they will be able to set humanity on a better path than the one that destroyed their world.  He has decades to work on this.  It goes well at first, when he’s still a recluse ala Howard Hughes.  Alas, he is introduced to often-painful emotions and vices on Earth once he starts really getting to know other people.  Slowly he becomes addicted to television and alcohol, and in the film enters a romantic relationship as well.  He becomes more emotive, more human, but it also sets him up for betrayal, abandonment, torment, and in the end tragic failure.  He ends the story a lonely wreck, living out life with no purpose — but he’s not bitter, feeling that his kind might have done the same things to a human had the situation been reversed.  (One of the Big Finish Eighth Doctor audio dramas, The Zygon Who Fell to Earth, is a deliberate variation on this story in which the main character is defying his people by choosing to give up galactic conquest in favor of a human life and love — which is to say, a more typical “humans are special” story.)

    #55376
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missy  Oh, they play those moments, those glimpses into deep feeling, brilliantly, don’t they?  Have we ever seen another TL show those kinds of feelings?  If we have, I don’t remember it; and in S8-S9 we do see the Doctor yanked back from what seems to be a default TL setting of no positive emotional involvement (“She cares so I don’t have to”) by Clara.  So, do all TLs have that capacity but learn to stifle it?  Or is it something the Doctor has learned (since the caveman incident) from his human companions?

    @missrori  I remember that movie well — thanks for reminding me!  That’s an excellent summary, brings it all back — that shot, late in the film, of his previous home on a dried out world, deserted and dead —   It’s stayed in my memory all these years.  Humanity as — a corruptive force, to others as well as ourselves?  Or only to others already sufficiently like us (“We’d have done the same — “)?

    We’re saved, essentially, from ever seeing the Doctor fall into drug addiction, alcoholism (or some variant of it), some sexual morass or other vice, because the show is mandated to appeal to young kids, so that stuff is *out* for DW.  However long he lives, he (or she) isn’t going to be shown onscreen shooting smack or passed out in a bar.  Even as the Valeyard, should that come round again, he’s not going to be corrupted in *those* ways, is he.  In DW, the great corruptor is power over others, power to bully, destroy, abandon, imprison, exploit, and enslave.  He is tempted by that, sometimes, the way that good people are tempted to accept the corruptor and use it to wipe out corruption — a doomed enterprise.  The early episodes were full of villains exclaiming “Once I get the control the McGuffin, I shall have ABSOLUTE POWAAAAHHHH!  Yar har har har haaaa!”  That’s something kids know a lot  about.  In our early years most of us are more or less in the power of our elders and older sibs, our teachers, kids bigger than we are at school, etc.

    In fact, it’s a sort of absolute power that the Doctor exercises in Hell Bent, isn’t it?  The power of his personality; the power of his intelligence to outwit the TLs; and the power of his guilt over Clara’s death and his obsession with rescuing her — to then delete himself from her memory and stash her in a safe place, like putting away a favorite toy in the closet.  What he wouldn’t accept from Missy (she’s actually pathetic in her completely off-the-mark offer of an army of zombies because the offer shows how completely she misunderstands him for all her “best friend/enemy” status) he does accept, in a more limited, focused form, with regard to Clara: the power, the casual power (“I’ve done it before; it won’t hurt much this time” — I mean, *really*!) to permanently alter her consciousness for his own ends, *not hers*.  It’s only Clara’s outraged refusal to be reduced to a piece of memorabilia on the mantlepiece that wakes him up from the spell of power and prompts him to “make amends” for being such a dork in the first place.

    Not being able to maneuver the Doctor into some Lost Weekend of alcoholic stupor etc. because of the age of the target audience, has meant that the writers have had to be truly ingenious in finding ways to tempt him onto a left-hand path, to *grow* him — not Superman, or The Ghost, or the Master, but the Doctor.  Maybe we are his addiction, because we make him recover the sympathy, the empathy, the need to care, that TL culture suppresses?  Not because we’re so “wonderful”, but because the best of us manage to straggle along *without* super-powers or cold detachment, and to both give in to and survive the temptations of plain old emotional and political power over others?

    (This is the kind of thing that happens when I forget to have breakfast, so . . . )

     

     

     

     

     

    #55379
    Mudlark @mudlark

    @ichabod

    in S8-S9 we do see the Doctor yanked back from what seems to be a default TL setting of no positive emotional involvement by Clara.  So, do all TLs have that capacity but learn to stifle it? Or is it something the Doctor has learned (since the caveman incident) from his human companions?

    Presumably many of them do have the latent capacity, though clearly they have their equivalent of sociopaths and psychopaths, but the general sense conveyed is that for much of their existence their policy of non-interference was underpinned by a deliberately cultivated sense of detachment from other species – possibly their training includes conditioning to that end  –  and their power and great knowledge has fostered an arrogance which tends to be reinforced and hardened to callousness by their longevity.

    The Doctor is not and clearly never has been entirely typical of his kind but, as you note above, in his earliest appearance on this planet he certainly displayed some of that arrogance and callousness, and he can still at times revert to detachment. His travels through the universe and his interest in all that it contains have helped develop in him a concern for and sympathy with many of the beings who inhabit it, but I think it is indeed his companions, whether human or of other species, who bring out his latent capacity for empathy.

    In his case empathy means the capacity to feel what humans are feeling though clearly it does not entail the ability always to understand their thinking or to parse their behaviour.  To some extent that is true of all of us, I suppose, but in the Doctor as alien it stems from fundamental difference and is therefore more obvious – and in Moffat’s hands it is a source of comedy as often as pathos..

    In DW, the great corruptor is power over others, power to bully, destroy, abandon, imprison, exploit, and enslave.  He is tempted by that, sometimes, the way that good people are tempted to accept the corruptor and use it to wipe out corruption

    Which is the central theme of TLOTR*, of course, where absolute power is embodied in the Ring.  Speaking of which, (and yes, I digress) one of the principal failings of the film, or so it seemed to me, was that Jackson and the writers of the screenplay hadn’t fully grasped the more subtle implications of this. If they had, they wouldn’t have monkeyed about with the characters of Faramir and Denethor in the way that they did.

     

    * a formative text, for me. I first read it in late 1956 or very early 1957, before the county library had acquired a copy of the very recently published third volume, so that I had to beg them to order it for me.  The Head of my school was a Tolkien fan, and four years later, at the end of my final year there, I was presented with a copy which I still have, the binding of each volume stamped with the school crest.

     

    #55380

    @missrori

    but would they have fought for him to save Clara had he asked?

    Yes, clearly. This was spelled out in the text. “They’ll kill you”, followed by soup. That by itself tells us, but their refusal to step aside when the fighter-jet pilot practically begged them to underlined it. At no point did he ask them to stay, because he knew he didn’t need to.

    They did not even whack Mayor Me on the head and let him escape back to his TARDIS with his key!

    Because he pretty much told them not to. He wanted to find out who was behind things.

    He let O’Donnell die because it had already happened (just as, in the end, he had to let River go to the Library. That was, literally, the first thing he knew about her). But with Ashildr he knew he had a choice. She was dead because of him and he has, since practically 1963, been willing to roll the dice on history.

    I’ve certainly been feeling that way the past few days, as I’ve been chewed out by others and watched others get chewed out for not agreeing with the powers that be over what should become of the “little people” of the world, for being compassionate.

    It is the people who are chewing you out that history will damn.

    • I know you have received orders from our commandant, which he has received from his superiors, to dispose of the population of this camp. Now would be the time to do it. Here they are; they’re all here. This is your opportunity. Or, you could leave, and return to your families as men instead of murderers.
    #55385
    Missy @missy

    @ichabod:

    Yes they are. I was taken aback by the Doctor in his Tardis. His eyes red rimmed, shirt undone and a look of almost madness from grief  on his face.  It really got to me, and made me wonder if any other actor could have done  that scene better than PC – don’t think so.

    (This is the kind of thing that happens when I forget to have breakfast, so . . . ) *Big hug*

    Missy

    #55387
    ichabod @ichabod

    @mudlark   I do believe that is the only book (the second volume, I think) that I actually stole from the library.  After I’d read it, I felt so guilty that I took it back, under my coat, and furtively replaced it on the shelf . . . It was just too wonderful to keep to myself.   I must report, though, that I began to read the trilogy again, found myself skipping through it, and finally had to stop.  That stately pace and (almost) all-male cast that had entranced me back in my late teens just isn’t for me any more, although I have the boxed set on my shelf yet.

    @missy  made me wonder if any other actor could have done that scene better than PC – don’t think so.

    Not, I think; that intensity is his meat.  I found a truly startling quote from him a few months ago, out of some interview with him.  Someone asked him what he was afraid of.  He said, “I’m afraid of my acting.  I’m afraid of my hair.”

    Yeah, well, you should be stuck with *mine*, pal, see how you feel then . . . I’m 77 years old, and it’s about 125.

    But breakfast — and hugs! — always help.

    #55390
    Missy @missy

    @ichabod

    Beat you by one year!

    Missy

    #55392
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missy   Dang.  Guess I’m just a loser, then!

    #55396
    Mudlark @mudlark

    @ichabod  @missy

    I like you; you make me feel young 🙂

    In reality I don’t feel old most of the time. Arthritis and other recent health problems are just a trick that time has played on me; inside, and very close to the surface, there’s a 25 year old who insists on being heard.

    #55403
    Missy @missy

    @ichabod:   You will never be a loser ichi.

    @mudlark:  Good for you,  but down on the arthritis. In my case, it’s more a 12 year old insisting to being heard. *winks*

    Missy

    #55406
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missy  @mudlark  I think my interior, emotional age is maybe 30 — but then, I don’t really remember more than just fragments of having been a child; maybe I got a late start of some kind.  Raising my younger sister (my mother worked full time, plus half-time free lance work) might have something to do with it; but that aside, I think my situation might be pretty much common, more or less, to most bookish kids with introverted natures.

    Okay, back to our moutons: some fans were disappointed from early on with Doc 12 because they saw him as having a “parental” relationship with Clara [instead of the (IMO) oddly adolescent (early) sort of thing with Clara and 11], which certainly made sense given the Doctor’s apparent age and Clara’s youth.  Missy alluded to something akin to that with “You’re the puppy”, but with the added sting that puppies never grow up to be people, let alone Time Lords.  I saw something else, but I suspect that I’m the extreme demon of over-thinking re DW, in terms of psychology anyway, so that’s just me.

    BG seemed (as I remember it) to be mostly about friends traveling together, one much more experienced and authoritative and the other bringing a warmer, fresher p.o.v. to matters.  So I’m wondering, is that where BBC means to go with S11, do you think?  Or even to some degree with S10, really, rebounding from what I regard as the “high” of depth, eccentricity, and maturity of S9 to more of a default, rackety adventure setting?  Somehow I am *not* seeing that as Chibnall’s forte, not after Broadchurch, that festival of the dour, the predictable, and the dull.

    At sea, here, regarding the near future and the farther one.

     

    #55409
    MissRori @missrori

    Hey everybody!

    I do think S10 may well be going back to the old-school Doctor/companion relationship you mention, @ichabod.  There are nice things to a partnership with equals as Twelve had with Clara, but it was becoming too much of a distraction for him by the end.  @pedant, He could, with sadness and shame (if only he’d stood his ground…), accept poor O’Donnell’s fate in “Before the Flood”, and before that had accepted his own death in both this story and “The Magician’s Apprentice”…but in both cases, as soon as he realized Clara might be next to go he decided to try and defy the fates no matter what the danger might be.  That pesky “duty of care”!

    Before Moffat revealed to Doctor Who Magazine that Twelve/Clara was the Hybrid (and that the TARDIS’ knowledge of this, given her ability to see all things, was why she didn’t like Clara at first — knowing the sorrow that would eventually come), I wrote a one-chapter short story, “The Hybrid Hearts”, working from the idea that the Doctor was the Hybrid all along and all alone.  Basically, he was able to be the Hybrid all along but never felt the need nor desire to use it (he was scared!), but when he was finally all alone in that confession dial he felt helpless enough to call upon it.  Why doesn’t the universe start falling apart when he “saves” her?  That’s the Hybrid’s power — if he burns enough hearts, say a few billion, he can hold the Web of Time together.  For a while.

    In the climax, he thinks about forcing not only a mind wipe on Clara to give her the safe life he felt he took from her as the Doctor, but fixing everything to give her the happiest life possible (give her back her mother, give her back Danny…).  He’ll burn billions and billions more hearts, other hearts, to do it, it will all be worth it…but he can’t.  So he tells a lie about the mind wipe device and gives up his memories and power.  As a friend put it when she read it, he chooses to be the better man again.

    As for S10, it’s been interesting to read BTL comments on the news of Capaldi’s coming departure this week.  Some commenters, and even article writers, are arguing that we never truly got to “know” Twelve because so much of his story so far has been working out loose ends of Eleven’s (namely his relationships with Clara and, to a lesser extent, River), and he supposedly never got to carve out a personality of his own in the process the way Ten and Eleven did.  Others feel Capaldi was just let down by bad scripts.  There doesn’t seem to be the outpouring of laments I thought there would be for his departure — more head-shaking over wasted potential instead, with some wanting Chibnall to hurry up already and save the show.

    It’s strange to see how many viewers seem to have missed/not appreciated how complex Twelve is.  Has his character arc been too subtle?  I still cringe to think of the “Doctor Who Ultimate Fan Panel” at last year’s Wizard World Chicago convention where half the room was no longer watching the show and even one of the panelists hadn’t seen Series 9.  I detected the foul smell of ageism there.

    It will be interesting to see where S10 and the followup Christmas show go, as Twelve’s last season.  He is a man without a planet, without a sweetie, without a people.  What is his journey leading up to?  And how will Miss Bill Potts factor into it?

    #55410
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missrori  That’s a good story — thanks for bringing it here!  And I’ve always wondered why the Tardis was snarky with Clara sometimes.  It never occurred to me that she foresaw where her connection with the Doctor was going.  So you posited the Doctor having this secret hybrid identity as a potentiality that would make him very close to being a god himself, and the extreme opposite of the other TLs and their non-interference stance; a TL “interfering” with Time’s flow in such a massive way that — he would end by blowing the whole universe to hell and gone (while “losing” her anyway, by taking away her memories)?

    The hybrid as you approach it sounds like a sort of inverse of Missy’s offer to give him an invincible Army to use to defeat evil: all the power of a god, but it must be used to destroy worlds and peoples instead of defend them but with a specifically focused purpose — making amends to Clara at the cost of everybody else.  Your friend would be right, I think: better a good man walking away from someone he loves than a bad man murdering the universe for her . . .  so, because he’s the Doctor, he declines the hybrid potential (permanently?  If it’s been in him all along, do you write him as expelling or obliterating it from himself?).

    It would work for me — provided Clara does get to make her stand against having her life “managed” for her by the Doctor, although she wouldn’t need to know the entirety of what he initially proposes (the restoration of her old life, not just forgetting the new one with him).  I see that as a crucial correction to the “Flowers for Algernon” resolution imposed on Donna against her will.

    Did you assume that he’s a human-TL hybrid, then?  Or a TL-hybrid with something else?

    The character issue with 12 — well, if the response you saw is more typical of the fandom than reluctance to see Capaldi go, then I’d say that between them, Moffat and Capaldi indeed did what Moffat said at one point — they matured the Doctor out of the range of its younger, more super-hero teenromance-hero oriented fandom.  That would be both a hell of an achievement, given the limitations built into the show, and a reach too far, given the limitations of too many of the fans.

    Which is very sad for those of us who’ve been waiting for the deeper character development that had been avoided til now.  But the story’s not over yet (S10 awaits), and I think the passage of time will change some perspectives on Capaldi’s run in future.  Still, I am completely baffled by claims that the scripts were inadequate and 12 didn’t develop a character that we could “know”.  As a grown-up, I think I “know” CapDoc better than any other Doctor, and appreciate what the scripts have shown us of him.  Too subtle and complex?  Yes, for much of the fandom, or at least some more vocal sectors of it.  I agree with you on that.  It would be entirely fitting, IMO, for Capaldi, having given us his adult Doctor complete with complex depths and emotions, to use S10 to return to the fandom his version of the Doctor he himself knew and loved as a child — flatter, funnier, more predictable (because more simple), more accessible to kids of all ages — the Doctor that, perhaps, he himself loved but has long since outgrown.  If it’s true that the majority of fans demand a simpler Doctor, I can see that Capaldi himself might not  find delivering that, over and over for a few more years, enough of a challenge to stick around for.

     

    #55417
    Missy @missy

    @missrori: @ichabod:

    What a read, from both of you!  I enjoyed every word and idea, and can add nothing to them. PC was MY Doctor and River’s and I shall miss him.

    Missy

    #55425
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missy  Thanks!  PC is my Doctor, and I don’t expect to see his like again — but on the other hand, I don’t *need* to.   He’s thrown himself into the project of growing up the Doctor with everything he’s got, and and it’s been wonderful.  Here’s a “motto” that I saw on a mammy lorry (a truck delivering goods and people, often to an open air market, in Nigeria):  “Let them Say!”

    Let them say, indeed.  I know what I’ve seen, and what a gift it’s been.  And here comes another season, with whatever it brings.

    I am a melancholy doggie, but a happy one, too, because of the goodness that sometimes comes our way.

    #55432
    MissRori @missrori

    @ichabod, Thanks for the compliments!

    In “The Hybrid Hearts” I posited that the Doctor was a Hybrid of a Time Lord and a far, far more ancient Gallifreyan race that never had a name — Lovecraftian creatures that could exist in every moment of Time and Space and destroy armies with but a word, feeding on the energies of their conquests.  But Time and Space grew too big for them; they realized it too late.  They snapped like rubber bands pulled too taut…scattered to the four winds.  They tried reforming themselves but now they were hardly more than protozoa physically.  And to add insult to injury, as they stewed in primordial soups trying to heal, the lifeforms that eventually evolved into the Time Lords came to be…the shadows of this race, and that’s how they ultimately managed time-space travel in their own way.

    The old creatures grew resentful of the Time Lords and decided they would give up physical forms, become one gestalt Power, possess an unknowing woman’s body, and wait for an innocent babe to be conceived in her womb.  That turned out to be the Doctor, the Hybrid of cross-breeding between dimensions, purely Gallifreyan by blood but not by Time and Space.  He knew he was different than others, but never knew why until, troubled by what he’d heard about a certain prophecy, he ventured into the Cloisters and learned that one day he would be the one to fulfill it.  Oh, the Power wasn’t influencing him — but one day he would choose it of his own free will and become a god capable of rewriting and “fixing” time to his satisfaction, provided he constantly fed.

    When The Hybrid saved Clara, it was with the hope that he would have more time with her before he did the “inevitable” mind wipe, but something in him kept telling him not to do the easy thing and start destroying others to feed his already-gnawing hunger (as the “meal” of all his confession dial selves could only last so long), but to try…more Doctor-ly solutions, i.e. traveling to the end of time.

    When Clara made her stand for her memories, not knowing what he had become (she wondered why his smile was growing more feral, the skin of his hands tougher, but…) he thought about revealing to her what he was now capable of: He could reshape the whole universe into a happy place by burning up all those corrupt places and peoples, and he could give her a perfect life, and of course this would be the act of a loving and merciful selfless god because he wouldn’t keep her, as much as he wanted to…

    But he just couldn’t, because it wasn’t what she wanted.  Love is a promise, after all.  And he will never hurt her.  Realizing his pain and passion made him desperate enough to become the Hybrid, he chose to lose those deep feelings so he could be the Doctor again.  The Doctor can’t get rid of the Hybrid’s power altogether.  It sleeps in him, awaiting the day when all hope is gone.  But he was a strong man before, perpetually able to resist the temptation against insane odds — because there’s always a better route to take, he’s clever! — and he can be strong again.  😉

    Anyway, my personal head-canon aside, while a “simpler” Twelve might be pleasing in S10, I would rather see his personality continue to deepen and evolve, and I think it can with the setup of this season.  There’s no pleasing all of the fans even some of the time, so you’ve got to please yourself, to paraphrase the Eagles.

    And I agree that with time, his tenure will be looked upon more kindly.  Already, many professional critics have been happy with his tenure thus far, especially S9.  And once Twelve has breathed his last, and the fans start picking over Thirteen, there will inevitably be comparisons between eras that will express nostalgia for Twelve that they didn’t realize until it was all too late!  😉

    #55454
    Missy @missy

    @missrori:

    You should write an episdoe – why not?  Another good read. As you say a thing is often not appreciated until it’s gone.

    Missy

    #55458

    @missrori

    That think about there being a forum for fanfic…

    #55459
    MissRori @missrori

    @pedant  Sorry about that again.

    Going back to the episode itself, and specifically the ending: I was looking at Cracked.com today and there was an interesting discussion on the sad truth that good people succeeding because they do good things only happens in stories.  That in real life, people can’t hold to their principles and get everything they want.  This unhappy realistic situation seems to happen a lot to Twelve.  He decides to be the Doctor and give up Missy’s gift of the army, and ends up not getting to bring peace to the universe (and later, loses Clara for a while too).  He decides to be the Doctor and save Ashildr, and she backstabs him and Clara ends up dead on top of that….

    He decides to be the Doctor and accept Clara’s death, and he loses even his right to grieve her due to the lost memories.  Sure, he held to his principles, but where’s the reward?  How come the Doctor no longer gets situations like in “The Day of the Doctor”, where he holds to his principles and brings the Time War to an end?  Is it just a move by Moffat and company to make the show more realistic and sad?

    #55463
    ichabod @ichabod

    @pedant   There are several good sites for DW (and other) fanfic that I’ve seen (I think I linked to one here a while ago).  A forum, as in a discussion site, probably exists too, maybe several.

    @missrori  On mixed resolutions rather than happy and rewarding ones:  Is it just a move by Moffat and company to make the show more realistic and sad?

    Well, Moffat said he wanted to grow the Doctor up with Capaldi.  To me “growing up” includes crises with ambiguous outcomes, facing those alternatives you have to choose among even though they’re all bad ones, and figuring out how to enjoy your wins while dealing with your losses as best you can.  It’s an honest take on life on any scale, and it worked beautifully for me in S8-9.  But it has upset some fans, so I think we’ll be seeing softer landings in S10 (and gods know what from ChibChurch in S11).

    #55464
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missrori  He decides to be the Doctor and accept Clara’s death

    But I don’t think he did accept Clara’s death; he accepted being “transported” by Ashildr to the Confession Dial because he was looking for someone to punish (and perhaps to bargain with for some way to get Clara back alive); punished himself instead; took over Gallifrey *to get her back*, and finally did accept not her death but her departure, into a life without him and a life for him without her.  He did his grieving for Clara in the Confession Dial (her portrait hung in the castle to remind him, and her “ghost” reminded him in his mind-Tardis).  She *was* dead during all that time, he had no real plan yet to try to get her back.  We saw that grieving and its associated penance there, and it went on for a freakishly long time, as befits a bereaved Time Lord.

    When he brings her semi-zombie self back, the grieving is done; she’s got as much of a life back as is possible, and she must leave in order to avoid the pursuing TLs.  What’s left for the Doctor to do?  The mourning for the life they had together that’s now over, and the loss of *that* is what he gives up along with her continued companionship.  Accepting losing even the living memory of her is part of his “making amends”.   That’s okay, IMO.  It acknowledges an old wrong (Donna) that he meant to repeat with Clara; it releases an apprentice who no longer needs a Master; and it liberates the Doctor from more anguish over her.  Those results are all rewards for right action — realistic ones, bittersweet.

    When they promised us that 12 would be “darker”, this is what they meant: not bloody destruction and blowing up worlds, but personal conflagration resolved in loss, but bringing peace and freedom to both of them.  The doomed relationship ends, but its members survive with open futures.

    #55466
    Anonymous @

    @missrori

    I read that whole story thinking it was Hell Bent.

    Then I realised it was another episode, was it?

    I dunno.

    Thane is confused 🙂

    Yep @ichabod the Doctor didn’t accept Clara’s ‘departing/passing/death  and then later, did, by giving her that happy ending which I thought was perfect classic greek comedy -it really WAS! But still ALSO dark. I mean, isn’t that pretty obvious to everyone. Reading back the last 3 pages there’s a lot of going back and forth and ending up in  the same place. I guess that’s learning or “rinse and repeat.”

    Anyway, late for school, hassling the computer back to the Mother so she can watch Q&A (Aussies will know that show on Monday nights).

    Bye for now. 0_0

    #55467
    Anonymous @

    @ichabod

    forgot -not sure if it was you or someone else due to the extended script length, but I WANT a mature, dark doctor. And I’m a kid. So if we get some young, hunky, big ‘unit’ kind of guy (not UNIT) I don’t want him.

    That’s my bad angel speaking. To me, like Plato there are ‘forms’ of the Doctor. 12 and 11 both exist as ‘perfect forms’ -anything else is not as close as possible to those ancient ideas of ‘forms’ and ‘perfect ideas of.’

    I know, bit deep. 🙂

    #55468
    Mudlark @mudlark

    @thane15   Not so much ‘deep’ as perceptive 🙂

    #55469
    MissRori @missrori

    @thane15  Sorry to confuse you with explaining my personal head-canon/interpretation at length up there!  And for going in circles too.  My fussy autistic mind tends to do that, I’m afraid.  😉

    Yeah, Clara got a relatively happy ending…it just didn’t feel that way on the Doctor’s side.  I still can’t help but think he got a raw deal in Series 9, and I want that fixed in S10!  😀

    #55471

    @ichabod

    There are several good sites for DW (and other) fanfic

    That is a matter of opinion, but there is a section here and it ain’t in an episode.

    Remember: Twilight started as fanfic. That should be warning enough.

    Headcanon is just that, in the head where it belongs: mine is that Toby took a bullet for someone else, probably CJ, because after six years of character development there is no way that Toby would have acted as the writers had him act. That it is also Richard Schiff’s headcanon pleases me, but I have no inclination to write a huge story to ‘correct’ the writers. What’s on screen is in the episodes, is the story, is canon.

    On the – annoyingly infrequent – times I write, I like to use characters of my invention, in a universe of my invention. Because they are, you know, not somebody else’s.

    #55474
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missrori  I guess the difference is that I see it as the Doctor *choosing* the strong possibility of a raw deal because — he’s the Doctor.  And I love him for it.

    @pedant  Twilight started as fanfic. That should be warning enough.

    It is, it is — who could forget?!!  But — as a writer, I have admire the passion and the inventiveness that some amateurs bring to their fanfic, and the fact that to me it’s a sort of validation of the power of creativity to spread itself.  I’m not talking about quality now, but about having the personal courage to go beyond taking an author’s blue print — the authentic text — and playing it out inside their receptive minds.  That step beyond is to dare some creative effort of your own, using other people’s inventions as a jumping off place.

    The boundary of both legality and ethical behavior here is exactly the one Whatsername overstepped when she published her T fanfic as original material, for profit.  But fanfic writers who write for their friends remind me of the people I used to see in the art museum, learning by copying, studying and learning, and then going home and trying to do original work with what they’d learned.

    The secret at the heart of this situation is, to my mind, that many of the published authors I know *began* writing, as kids, by writing their own made-up stories about (in my time) Tarzan, the Lone Ranger, Nancy Drew, this or that girl-and-her-horse, Captain Nemo, or Superman.  That’s how some of us start learning our craft and gain access to our own imaginations, by giving ourselves permission to write the stories we want to read about established characters we love.

    Truth?  I did this myself, making my own Tom Mix comics complete with pictures.  My first published novel was originally a western, using characters I stole from a late 19th c adventure story, and put through so many drafts and permutations that they became unrecognizable — became mine.  Happily, publication came late enough to capture them at that point, not earlier, so they went public with my name (and their new names and more twisted psychologies) legitimately attached to them.

    I guess I have a bias . . . or just a sentimental tolerance for labors of love .

     

     

    #55475
    Missy @missy

    @ichabod:

    I guess I have a bias . . . or just a sentimental tolerance for labors of love .

    No shame in that,  and if there is, I’m a club member too.

    Missy

     

     

    #55477
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missy  Thumbs up, then — !  Yer in.

    #55481
    MissRori @missrori

    @ichabod wrote:

    I guess the difference is that I see it as the Doctor *choosing* the strong possibility of a raw deal because — he’s the Doctor.  And I love him for it.

    As do I…(sniffle)

    But let’s hope he gets the long straw in Series 10 anyway!  😀

    #55484
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missrori  Sure!  Goodness knows, he’s earned it!

    #55488
    ichabod @ichabod

    @thane15   A bit deep, yeah — but a great take on the subject!  Perfect forms — for me, Tom Baker’s Doctor, and CapDoc.  Madness in one, desperation in the other, if a darker undercurrent suits you (as it does me).  I like a bit of constitutional extremity in a hero, a grounding sense of limitation.  And some pretty young man with soulful eyes won’t work for me, not right after our gaunt and glorious 12 at any rate.  Your bad angel is also a very smart angel.  I’d keep it.

    I have to ask — what kind of guy is a “unit kind of guy (not UNIT)”?  Sounds like a lego guy — rectangular, with rounded corners.

    #55503
    Missy @missy

    @missrori: Indeed he does. Lovely man, I’m really going to mis PC *reaches for the tissues – again*

    Missy

    #55535
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missy  Me, too.  The weird thing is, CapDoc already makes me miss two years of my life that I would otherwise gladly just gloss over and forget (health problems, mainly, piling up after years of neglect); because there’s this wonderful excitement and mystery associated with it — “Who is this Doctor?  What’s he like?  He said what?!  (‘She cares, so I don’t have to.’)  What’s he gotten himself into now, and how the hell is he going to get himself, and his bright and complicated companion, out of it again?”

    Just the sort of stuff we ask with each regeneration, but somehow it signified so much more to me this time around — maybe because I really did need an escape that was also a sly way of focusing exactly on those painful issues that I needed to escape from . . . and I know I’m far from the only one that’s been true for, regarding other portrayals of the Doctor too.

     

    #55564
    Missy @missy

    @ichabod: Sorry for delay, we had a friend staying making it difficult to post.

    You are not the only one. This Doctor has acted on me like Valium, I can escape in the evening from all the dreadful things going on in the world and health troubles.  Into the Tardis and off to wherever he likes. PC, SM and MG have been God sends.

    Missy

    #55570
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missy  I just read an article in this or that place, interview with — Chibnall?  Said Peter Capaldi was hovering for a long time over the decision to stay or go, and Chibnall almost had him persuaded —

    God Damn It!  I am gnashing my teeth and tearing my hair.  Well, metaphorically.  But really — DAMN it!

     

    #55574
    Missy @missy

    @ichabod: Gird your loins, I am about to be very cross verbally! Said by we British and Australians with feeling when severely annoyed.

    Bugger, bugger, bugger! *sigh*

    Missy

     

    #55579
    ichabod @ichabod

    @missy  Yep, that’s pretty much the feeling.  I had persuaded myself that I was all right with this — three season, okay, pretty standard — but reading about *this*, I’m snarling.  Wish Chibnall had kept his mouth shut about it, frankly.

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