Death and the Doctor

26 November 2014 in SIDRAT, 22 comments

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Craig here. It gives me great pleasure to post another blog by guest blogger – @cathannabel !

Sometimes everything you read or watch seems to have a connection, a theme that’s so clear it feels as though it cannot be mere coincidence, even though it is impossible for it to be otherwise. It’s been that way lately with death. Obviously once one heads into middle age and beyond, intimations of mortality come thick and fast. But it really isn’t just that.

The theme that has been so inescapable over recent weeks is not just mortality in general. It’s the blurring of the boundaries between death and life, about attempts to make the barrier between the two permeable. I’ve just finished reading Stephen King’s Revival, about which I can say little without risking spoilers, but which, suffice it to say, explores this theme in compelling and haunting fashion. And then there was Lynn Shepherd’s latest literary thriller, The Pierced Heart, after previous works drawing on, variously, Austen, Dickens and the Shelleys, this time turning to Stoker and the Dracula mythos, subverting the genre tropes without losing the chills. So when I picked up Peter Carey’s Bliss, and read the first sentence: ‘Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him’, I was tempted to say, enough already with the whole thing.

Especially as this season of Doctor Who has had such a preoccupation with death. Death and regeneration/rebirth, death and afterlife. These themes have percolated through the episodes, with varying degrees of intensity, culminating in the series finale, whose first part saw the highly disturbing notion that the dead maintain consciousness, aware of what is happening to their mortal remains, and that the message they want to convey to us, the living, is ‘Don’t cremate me!’. Of course, this was a con, but it was unsettling, to say the least, and the thought, once planted, may prove difficult to uproot. Part two showed us mortuaries and graveyards giving up their dead, now encased in cyberman armour and awaiting orders to destroy and/or assimilate the living.

Not only this, but the finale presented us with the deaths of Danny, Osgood and Kate, to name only those who have had the chance to embed themselves in the consciousness and affections of regular watchers of the show. (The body count in previous episodes has been high too, whether significantly higher than in previous series I will leave to other Whovians to assess.)

However for some, death proved to be less than permanent. Danny Pink reappeared as a semi-cyberman, retaining enough of his humanity to resist the orders of Missy and lead his cyber army to suicide rather than to victory. Is he now gone, for good? Kate fell to earth but her dead father saved her. Osgood appears, as far as we know now, to be simply dead.

Sci fi and fantasy take liberties with the boundaries between life and death, on a regular basis. In The Walking Dead all who die, unless despatched in a particular way, will reawaken as zombies (walkers). The living are engaged in a constant battle against the dead. French series The Returned gives us more mysterious revenants, seemingly unchanged from their living selves, and seemingly not out to harm the living (though we will see, in series 2, whether that is really the case).

In the context of Who, however, I’d suggest it’s more relevant to look at the way in which the Buffyverse handles death. @JimTheFish has already noted the nods to Buffy in the finale: ‘And again with the Buffy maybe? Plucky lone girl surrounded by gravestones as creatures rise from the grave. Not to mention tear-jerking goodbyes with her now-undead boyfriend.’

death-and-the-doctor

Clara rages about Danny’s death, that it should have been significant and instead it was mundane, ‘boring’:

It was ordinary. People just kept walking with their iPods and their shopping bags. He was alive, then he was dead and it was nothing. Like stepping off a bus.

This had echoes too, of the death of Buffy’s mother – a prosaic tragedy without supernatural cause and, particularly, of Anya’s speech about it:

I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she’s – There’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore. It’s stupid. It’s mortal and stupid. And – and Xander’s crying and not talking, and – and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well, Joyce will never have any more fruit punch ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why. (‘The Body’, season 5)

Osgood’s death, and Kate’s, whilst not mundane in terms of cause, are almost casual in presentation. No time for heroics, or farewell speeches. Joss Whedon despatches Anya almost casually – she dies fighting the uber vampires, but blink and you’ll miss it, it’s not highlighted or dramatised. Death’s like that. Arbitrary, stupid, pointless.

Except that there’s another strand, of death as chosen, heroic, self-sacrificial. In Death in Heaven, Danny gets a crack at a less boring exit. He’s given the chance to choose death second time around (and to make a speech about it).

Attention! This is not a good day. This is Earth’s darkest hour. And look at you miserable lot. We are the fallen. But today, we shall rise. The army of the dead will save the land of the living. This is not the order of a general. Nor the whim of a lunatic…. This is a promise. The promise of a soldier. You will sleep safe tonight.

The speech may appear to be aimed at his cyber-comrades but clearly its real audience is Missy, the Doctor and above all Clara. It’s – perhaps deliberately – classic eve of battle rhetoric – think Idris Elba cancelling the apocalypse in Pacific Rim, or Leonidas sending his Spartans into battle.

We await the Christmas special to find out Danny will have a third go at some sort of life. I kind of hope not. Not that I begrudge Clara a chance to make a better job of loving him than she did first time around, or Danny himself a chance to redeem his past through living rather than dying. But where death is chosen, self-sacrificial, does its reversal squander the emotional weight of the sacrifice? Not necessarily – Buffy’s return in Season 6 was shown as something itself painful and traumatic, rather than just the cancellation of the pain and trauma of her death in the finale of Season 5. It can work, but Buffy, after all, whilst mortal, is kind of a super-hero, and they play by different rules. Danny, as far as we know, is just a bloke.

Kate’s rescue seems to me to make Osgood’s less likely. Along with so many viewers, I really wanted Osgood not to die, and there was much shouting at the screen when we realised what was afoot. But I’m not sure that I want another death to be overturned.

There are a number of issues here. The first is common to all long-running TV dramas – how to keep real suspense and tension when the audience knows that certain characters cannot be killed off. When the Enterprise crew beams down onto a hostile planet, we know full well that it is the red shirts that will be zapped or otherwise despatched into oblivion, not the captain or any of his core crew. Occasionally that confidence is misplaced. But mostly, if one of the core characters appears to be dead, we are pretty sure that some plot device is in motion to bring them back (see Spock, Tasha Yar, Buffy, Loki, the Master/Missy…). And of course the sci fi/fantasy context means that a way can always be found, retro-engineered if need be into the cosmology of the show, to get around the problem of losing a character that is felt to be essential to its long-term success.

Not that the absence of timey-wimey or supernatural mechanisms prevents soap operas from playing fast and loose with death. News just in – Madge and Harold Bishop are back! Both of them have been previously killed off, but the writers are undeterred, it’s Neighbours 30th anniversary, and it wouldn’t be the same without them. And unless one has personally checked the corpse for vital signs and got a DNA match it would be unwise to believe in the demise of anyone on Hollyoaks. It might seem odd to claim a greater degree of realism for a programme whose protagonist is a two-hearted time travelling alien than for the soaps. But far happier to suspend my disbelief with regard to Who, Buffy and other dramas which play havoc with the laws of physics but at their best offer us emotional truths.

Doctor Who has the particular challenge of its status as a family/children’s programme. It’s never been just a kids’ show and certainly with each regeneration it has retained the children who first watched it into their adulthood and parenthood whilst gathering in their children, and so on. It is still a show that the generations watch together, but the adults are there not just to comfort and reassure their frightened offspring but to enjoy it for themselves. But the presence of the children is a constraint which Buffy did not have to work within. That’s why the deaths, when they occur, are off-screen, or else clean – people are vapourised rather than eviscerated. We rightly shield younger viewers from the kind of gore that The Walking Dead so delights in. We can’t and shouldn’t however skate around the issue of death.

Of course children’s stories have always brought us face to face with death. My own and earlier generations wept for Bambi’s mother, as my children’s generation did for Simba’s father. In fact, the child heroes of many of the classics had misplaced one or both parents, even if the manner of their loss was not dwelt upon. The generations contemporary with Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Lucy M Montgomery and their ilk were familiar with death, after all, with child mortality and perinatal maternal mortality at levels unimaginable to us today, at least here in the First World. Stories give us ways of understanding, of dealing with, the stuff that happens to us, and the best ones don’t just sugar the pill, cosying everything up, with rainbow bridges and happy ever afters, but acknowledge mortality in all its cruelty, that it takes whoever it wishes, pets, parents, friends.

I have no problem therefore with death – real, permanent, boring, pointless death – being part of the drama of Who, nor yet with the freedom that sci-fi/fantasy allows to take some of the sting of death away. But for the reversals to have any dramatic or emotional weight, we need there to be the possibility that this time it’s for keeps, that the danger is real, that we may lose someone we care for and that others we care for may be plunged into terrible grief.

We will not know until the Christmas special – if then – whether Danny Pink will return. We’ve been given the nod that things can’t be left as they were at the end of Death in Heaven. Quite right – that was bleak. Too bleak for the kids, too bleak for me. But I hope that there will be a different way of making things better, so that we can leave the Doctor and Clara in a more hopeful place, without simply erasing the loss and hurt that they’ve been through.

After all, what have we learned this series? OK, that there’s no such thing as an arboreal coincidence, which may or may not ever be a particularly handy bit of info. More importantly, we’ve learned that ‘stories can make us fly’. And we’ve learned about our ordinary human superpowers, not just the power to forget, but the most important one, fear. And all of the things that we fear come back to this – our own extinction, or the extinction of the people we love.

Fear is a superpower. Fear can make you faster and cleverer and stronger. … if you’re very wise and very strong fear doesn’t have to make you cruel or cowardly. Fear can make you kind. It doesn’t matter if there’s nothing under the bed or in the dark so long as you know it’s okay to be afraid of it. So listen. If you listen to anything else, listen to this. You’re always gonna be afraid even if you learn to hide it. Fear is like a companion, a constant companion, always there. But that’s okay because fear can bring us together. Fear can bring you home. I’m gonna leave you something just so you’ll always remember. Fear makes companions of us all.


22 comments

  1. @Cathannabel I think Osgood’s death was more horrible than many of the gory deaths you might see in The Walking Dead, personally, for sheer gratuitous toying on the part of Missy and cruelty on the part of the Moff.

    The Twelfth Doctor, I think, feels that he has been condemned to life by The Time Lords – to a whole new regeneration cycle after bearing so much during the Time War – his punishment-pardon is that he has to keep carrying the burdens of trying and often failing to save people.

  2. @cathannabel

    A great blog! I think you have captured something about this series with great perception. Maybe the issues you raise even go beyond this series. I think that the theme of Death has followed Clara ever since her first apprearance in Asylum of the Daleks. Like the rest of the crew of the Alaska she should be dead but she isn’t. And then it ends with her walking past her gravestone. Death has followed Clara ever since we first saw her.

    Like you, I hope the Christmas special doesn’t go to certain places, but I do hope it goes to a darker place than we might expect. I sort of hope the story of Clara is wrapped up in a way that emphasises tragedy and loss.

  3. OK, just re-watched Asylum of the Daleks and I realise it is at the end of The Snowmen that Clara walks past her grave. But my point about Clara and death remains.

    On the question of Clara Prime, I am starting to wonder if there is a Clara Prime after she enters the Doctor’s time stream.

    But it remains true (I think) that death follows Clara. I am not sure how Moffat will wrap up Clara’s arc, but I suspect that death will be central.

  4. @cathannabel — terrific blogpost. Really enjoyed reading that. Personally I hope they don’t wind back the bleakness of Death in Heaven too much. I thought it was an interesting place for SM to take the show and I’m not sure I want Danny to be another Rory, pulled back from the death to a happy ending. We all know SM likes everybody to live — and when this was the punchline of The Doctor Dances, it was actually a truly subversive moment in the show — but for that to truly mean something I think he also has to balance it with ‘but sometimes people die and stay dead’. So part of me is kind of hoping he does bum everyone out at Christmas.

    Good point also about the difficulty of killing off main characters in long-running series. I remember thinking Star Trek: TNG quite brave at the time it killed off Tasha Yar but then they ruined it by endless mawkish call-backs to her and sneaking the character back into the show in the guise of a Romulan doppleganger. Similarly, the BSG reboot messed up the death of Starbuck I think. But aside from Buffy (Joss Whedon is a master of character death, I think), The Sarah Connor Chronicles was pretty good at blindsiding you with unexpected and resonant character demise but the true masterclass in dealing with character death has to be, appropriately enough, the final season of Six Feet Under.

  5. @Juniperfish I agree with you – I can take any amount of horrid chomping and hacking and slicing on TWD in preference to the sadistic, callous but bloodless brutality of Osgood’s death. My point was I guess about the different ways in which you can show death on a programme that goes out pre-watershed and has a ‘family’ audience (my family actually watches TWD together, but we are all grown ups, before anyone calls Social Services).  It stops Moffat showing the physicality of death, but doesn’t stop him from showing its cruelty in far more subtle ways, that will stick in the mind of older viewers rather than (probably) giving the kids nightmares.  Was he cruel to write that scene for Osgood – perhaps, but then he’s writing a psychotic, cruel character, who will take all the more pleasure in despatching someone who’s valued and loved, someone good.

  6. @blenkinsopthebrave – 1. Thanks! and 2. yes, you are right, death and Clara seem to have a particularly close relationship.  I was relying on you lot to see the connections beyond this series which I have only a hazy recollection of.

    @JimTheFish – 1. Thanks! and 2. yes, I’d forgotten that ‘everybody lives’.  I always kind of heard that as ‘everybody lives – this time’.  Which is fine – we’re not talking Game of Thrones, every series doesn’t have to dispose of a significant proportion of cast members.  As long as sometimes everybody doesn’t live.

  7. Not sure where to post this, but on @cathannabel‘s excellent blog seems a good place.

    Bonkers theory:

    Just re-watched In the Forest of the Night and thought about the fact that it is set in 2016 (The Doctor explicitly says so). Now, what if, in light of Death in Heaven, Clara’s arc is resolved this way:

    Clara convinces the Doctor to re-set time back to 2014, before Danny killed the Afghan boy, but at the cost of her own life. After all, when she jumped into the Doctor’s time stream it was clear that that was the end of Clara. So, the resolution would be that Clara dies, but Danny lives (and actually maybe even Osgood lives) because, by re-setting the time line the Doctor has taken us all back to 2014–ie, before Danny accidentally shoots the Afghan boy, before Danny ever gets to know Clara.

    In other words, Clara’s arc will be resolved in a way that is consistent with @cathannabel‘s ideas on death and the Doctor–but it is Clara’s death that will demonstrate it.

    To be sure of my bonkers theory I have to go back and watch the end of The Snowmen where Clara walks past her gravestone, but Mrs Blenkinsop is about to put dinner on the table, so that must wait…

  8. @blenkinsopthebrave  Dinner? Never mind about dinner, when there are deliciously bonkers theories to be investigated!  I’d missed that Forest was set in 2016.  That is likely to give me a severe time-paradox headache.  In 2016 Danny is a teacher, going out with Clara, who’s travelling with the Doctor, when the arboreal non-coincidences occur.  But if you’re right, either in 2016 Danny is dead (twice), or Clara is dead.   So the Forest story would be either dream/fantasy or a third time line?   Could work (hope it’s not a dream – I have a particular loathing for stories that end – ‘and then I/she/he woke up’).

  9. @CathAnnabel – Thank you for a great blog – that was a very interesting read that very nicely summed up the key thematic element of the series. I found that this year I have enjoyed much more those stories that considered the weight of the events they portrayed as opposed to discarding them, or neutralising them with a handwave at the end (Robot of Sherwood and In the Forest of the Night fall into that category).

    @blenkinsopthebrave The time paradox does present some difficulties – is it certain that Dark Water and Death in Heaven are not set later than Forest? I’m not sure if I picked up on any explicit mention of a when (I’ve only watched each one once).

    I agree with @JimTheFish that the bleakness of the arc should not be retroactively diminished – especially by any resurrections from the tragic deaths. Somehow for me that would leach a lot of the impact and meaning from the story.

  10. @cathannabel, @BadWulf

    2016. At one point the Doctor says that a tree planted in 1795 would carry part of that year in 2016. It is implied that they are in 2016. So what I am suggesting is that everything that has happened since Danny started teaching has been happening in 2016. And that if the Doctor re-sets time (and he tells Clara at the beginning of Death in Heaven that it can be done, but only with very precise calculations (but it can be done) then it is possible for Danny to live, but, I suggest, in a world where he never met Clara.

    Of course, I offer this as more of a bonkers theory than as a prediction.

  12. Great blog, @Cathannabel, really enjoyed it.

    But my brain is now completely combobulated about @Blenkinsopthebrave‘s 2016 theory. Hmm, interesting. I certainly missed that watching the episode – rewatch is in order.

    But they can’t bring Danny back only for Clara to die. Not at Christmas!  Apart from anything else Danny would hate it, he’d do his best to undo it. Hell’s teeth, the Doctor would never allow it, he’d sacrifice himself first. DW might be going dark, but not that dark I think!

    The clue is Orson and his wearing a TARDIS spacesuit, I tells ya!

  13. Thanks so much for this post @Cathannabel (hope I did that right) I totally agree with the sentiment, I’ve just got so hung up on the thought that there is something more to Danny, that I don’t want it to be true 🙁  also mind blown re 2016, couldn’t see the dates on the actual jotters but seemed to be more than a throw away line.

    I’m still working on the theory that if you don’t make the “time and space” for family, you might be surprised by the places you find them. Not sure who they are yet but there are plenty of candidates…

  14. @Cathannabel

    I’ll join the chorus and say this is a great blog. Lots to chew over, and more than a few points to respond to.

    I think, with regard to death and exploring the themes involved in it, fantasy has always had a edge over science fiction and has been braver. To your own excellent examples I’d certainly add JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, because it’s particularly relevant to the kind of cross-generational audience that Doctor Who caters for. By accident perhaps, because I don’t think she ever intended to have an adult readership. It was one of those things that happened.

    She was remarkably unsentimental in her choices of who lived and died in those books. Ultimately, she invested some time in characters to make them likeable and then killed them, and explored the ramifications. Death and mortality are key ingredients in many of the character motivations. The ghosts who haunt Hogwarts because, as it turned out, they were afraid of the next step. Voldermort, who’d gone to extreme lengths to ensure he wouldn’t die (and I’m drawn again to my comparison with The Master in Doctor Who). The people who are unafraid to lay down their own lives in self-sacrifice to something greater.

    I’d probably also mention Terry Pratchett, and his anthropomorphic Death. The one character that’ll always make an appearance in cameo in his novels. A firm traditionalist (Skeleton in robes, scythe) who is constantly trying to get with it. To be more of a people person. The strand of novels that explore him and his realm and responsibilities are hugely imaginative and engaging. People die. It’s inevitable and what you do in the prolonged period before the inevitable is what is important. Again Terry often makes you care about the people that Death collects on his rounds. It’s good drama.

    I’m also much more keen than @JimtheFish on Battlestar Galactica. The conflict between the Cylons and humans is particularly interesting to me. Both are believers – one monotheistic and one polytheistic. The Cylons are driven to ape/become humans in form. They think it will bring them closer to their God. But they practice a “get out of jail free card” with a technique that allows them to download to another body. As the series goes on, you explore what that means. The fact that they remember the pain and sometimes can’t get over it. They go various shades of bugshit.

    Eventually the models of Cylon separate, and a faction join with the humans to end the reincarnation technique. Every death is a death. The duplicates of the models tend to extremes when facing the end. Some are vindictive and vengeful, some self sacrifice. They truly become more human with a real death as a prospect.

    A criticism of Battlestar was that it became more fantasy as time went on, I proclaim it similar to Doctor Who, in that it was always fantasy. And righly so.

    I think SM has made death more intimate. I don’t think he’s a cuddly writer who hates mass deaths. I just think he prefers it if you care. Someone made the point (could have been a criticism) that there have been an awful lot of “almost companions” in his series (for example Rita in God Complex). And there have been. But isn’t that better and more powerful than “second extra collapses writhing after being struck by the Death Ray”). If you have time to develop them, you should care about the people who die. It should have an impact, where possible. Rita would have been a great companion. As would poor Lorna Bucket in Good Man goes to War. With Dorium, the all too likeable rogue that he was.

    SM is the writer who had The Doctor ask “what would be the alternative – me standing over your graves?” to Amy and Rory in God Complex, as he appears to leave them, and then in the next year had him doing precisely that. Which wasn’t particularly cuddly. I think he suffused Eleven with a wistful melancholy that, if unintended, played directly into the idea that this was the last Doctor (from his perspective). SM only returned Amy/Amelia as the silent (and imagined) ghost of the companion who’d meant so much to him in Time of the Doctor. He didn’t overturn her death.

    I think it’s an important distinction compared to the fates of the RTD era companions in The End of Time. Sometimes the happiest ending can be that “we’ve lived a full life, and are now no more”. I think Danny certainly got that with his rousing speech to his dead comrades, and his decision to send someone else back from the dead. Someone he felt responsible for.

  15. @ScaryB

    “DW might be going dark, but not that dark I think!”

    Yes, agreed – Moff wouldn’t kill Clara at Christmas. I expect a love saves the day theme myself, but definitely a bad Santa of some description.

    On the theme of living and dying, I do think the Doctor’s longevity, as a Time Lord, has been explored throughout Nu Who, in terms of what that means for his affections for humans who are, after all, mayflies in the mortality stakes by comparison.

    We saw it in Ten’s constipated approach to his love for Rose and we saw it in Eleven’s hatred of endings, his tendency to tear out the last page of the book.

  16. @phaseshift — I actually have a lot of love for BSG. I just think it let the incredible promise of the first two seasons become somewhat diluted by the metaphysical aspect. I was glad it was there but I think it was overly dominant by the time we got to the finale. I like your assertion that it’s a fantasy show as much as Who is and think that you’re probably right. I just quite liked the political allegory aspects of the first couple of seasons and was sorry that they started to get lost a bit. And I do think that fudged Starbuck’s death a bit too much.

    @scaryb and @juniperfish — Yes, I don’t think they’ll go to too dark a place as Christmas. Although part of me kind of wants them to do so. I’m also heartened with reports that JLC could well be staying a bit longer. I’ve really liked Clara this year and don’t think her story is done yet. @bluesqueakpip posited over on t’other place that Christmas will be a ‘halfway out of the dark’ moment for Clara. That she’ll emerge still as Capaldi’s companion, but a little more damaged by the fact that Danny stayed dead. I like that idea and think it’s probably correct.

    Probably not strictly relevant to this thread, but it struck me that this year we’ve seen the very idea of Who monsters questioned. We’ve seen a good Dalek, good Cybermen and if you count Strax a good Sontaran. And if you take Missy into account are we heading towards a statement where there are no automatic goodies or baddies? Or at least not instantly recognisable ones? That there are no good or bad individuals, merely good or bad actions?

  17. @Phaseshift

    The ghosts who haunt Hogwarts because, as it turned out, they were afraid of the next step. Voldermort, who’d gone to extreme lengths to ensure he wouldn’t die (and I’m drawn again to my comparison with The Master in Doctor Who). The people who are unafraid to lay down their own lives in self-sacrifice to something greater.

    The first time I recall coming across this concept was In Peter F Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction (and the other 2 books in the series). I assume there must be an older reference than this ?

  18. @JimTheFish

    but it struck me that this year we’ve seen the very idea of Who monsters questioned.

    I absolutely agree. I think Moffat’s been heading in this direction for a bit. But I don’t think it’s the idea that there is no such thing as good or bad individuals. Rather, the opposite. There are good and bad cultures, but the fact that something is a bad culture doesn’t mean that you can’t find good individuals within it.

    So – Strax, Handles, Rusty et al.

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