#introspective character study (various amounts trauma and pining)

[gloriousfckingpurpose]

out of context notes on one of my current wips

[timeflies1007-blog]

Doctor Who Reviews by a Female Doctor, Season 3, p. 4

Please note: these reviews contain spoilers about various seasons of the reboot, and sometimes contain references to the classic series.

Season Three Overview: Smith, Jones, and Tyler

Going into its third season, the show had to contend with some fans’ doubts about whether it could retain its appeal without Rose Tyler. This was an important moment for the show, a chance to make clear that while the reboot was deeply indebted to Billie Piper, it wasn’t completely dependent on her. Some absolutely sensational episodes show that it certainly could get by without her, but Rose’s absence hangs almost suffocatingly over the season, suggesting a sense of total bewilderment about how to move on. It makes sense to give a lot of attention to the Doctor’s grief at her loss; Rose was such a hugely influential companion that I can understand the more long-term grief than what was typical in the classic series. The show invests so much into this perspective, though, that it comes across as defeatist, as if it’s admitting that “yes, you’re right, skeptical fans—no one will ever be as good as Rose.” The result is an interesting if frequently annoying look at the Doctor’s emotions, but it crushes a lot of the spirit out of what should have been a wonderful Doctor-Companion pairing, and this turns a potentially great season into just a good one.

Part of the problem is that the Doctor never really gets a chance to fight his own propensity for moping about the past instead of embracing the present. In next season’s “Partners in Crime,” he has clearly thought about the problems that he caused for Martha, and is putting some effort into avoiding a repetition of his mistakes. This introspection seems to have happened during the break between seasons, though, because there is very little evidence of him actually dealing with his problems here. He destroys the spider people in his first agony of post-Rose trauma, he’s not very nice to Martha, he gets a reminder of how cruel he was to Jack, and then he irritatingly gets to defeat the Master by embracing his role as the savior of mankind. A brief scene in “Gridlock” and the excellent conversation between the Doctor and Jack in “Utopia” are the only times that suggest he is confronting any of the massive flaws that we see in him this season, and after Season Two’s repeated glossing over of a lot of these same flaws, it’s getting awfully late in the game for him to remain so oblivious about his impact on other people. Granted, once he fully embraces a sense of his own problems, he becomes sort of an angsty mess, as can be seen in “Journey’s End” through the conclusion to his time on the show. Early Season Four, though, features the most likeable version of the Doctor, who is maintaining a positive, upbeat persona while thinking carefully about his behavior, and I wish that this season had built up to that a bit more instead of giving him a sudden leap in conscience once Donna turns up.  

Martha was a very good idea for a companion—perhaps, on paper, the best concept for a companion of the entire reboot. Not only is she the first person of color in this role, she’s also a doctor-in-training. There’s certainly plenty of value to showing the obstacles facing working-class people of color, but it’s important for television to have a range of characters of color, including highly-educated professionals, so I love the choice to make the first black companion an advanced medical student. She’s also very much not the “sassy black friend” stereotype that we’ve seen a lot on television, and I really appreciate that the show avoids that kind of cliché. There was so much potential here, but the show never really takes advantage of it. I don’t think that Davies has anything whatsoever against smart female characters—Rose, Martha, and Donna are all sharp, insightful, quick-witted people. He does seem a bit hesitant, though, to invest in knowledgeable female leads, and that really hurts this season. In the classic era, there were a lot of companions with vast amounts of scientific knowledge—Zoe could do anything with computers, Liz was a hugely accomplished scientist, Romana was a highly educated Time Lord, and so on. There were some companions whose advanced knowledge tended to get annoying, especially Nyssa and Adric, but I liked that the 26 seasons of the classic series had a good range of approaches to science, with some characters knowing very little and some knowing a huge amount. Martha is the most scientifically-accomplished companion of the new series, but she’s written as if Davies had taken to heart the criticisms one can find on the internet that Liz Shaw was “too smart” to be a companion. She gets to use her scientific knowledge a little bit on occasion, but the general formula seems to be that for every teaspoon of science/medical wisdom that she gets to display, we need a heaping tablespoon of “watch Martha make sad, jealous faces about the Doctor’s preference for her predecessor.”

Davies is very committed to creating relatable female characters, which is generally a good thing, but it can become a problem if it turns into minimizing the things that make a character unique for fear that they will become too distant from the average viewer. Most of the show’s audience is not going to have had the experience of going through most of medical school (or, really, of having that much education in any field), and so there are lots of things that Martha knows and can do that aren’t really part of most of our lives. It’s a lot easier to connect to a character on the basis of an unrequited infatuation, which is something that nearly everyone has experienced. It’s possible to see unrelatable moments, though, as an opportunity to let viewers empathize with experiences beyond their own, and I would have loved to see the show allow Martha’s background to inform her story a bit more. Someone in medical school would have had to study things like chemistry and biology, and the impact that encountering something like the TARDIS would have on someone who has put a lot of effort into studying how the physical world works is fascinating. The Doctor opens up new worlds for all of his companions, but this might be a more shocking experience for someone who had put a lot of time into figuring out the physical workings of life on Earth, and this creates a potentially fascinating character. It might pull her away a bit from being “just like us,” but it would make her different from the other companions and would give us insight into a mindset that many of don’t share. Instead of being centered on what it’s like for an almost-Doctor to travel in the TARDIS, though, Martha’s story is framed around her unrequited love for the Doctor, and this does a huge disservice to her character. With the lovely “Expelliarmus” moment in “The Shakespeare Code” as an exception, even her main contributions to the plot tend to take shape around the unrequited love dynamic. The kiss is a huge moment in “Smith and Jones,” she saves the day in “The Family of Blood” by declaring her love for the Doctor, and she saves the world in “The Last of the Time Lords” by traveling around and telling everyone to believe in how wonderful the Doctor is. She’s allowed small victories that make use of other facets of her character, but the big, climactic ones are all about her romantic feelings.

The lack of interest in Martha as a medical student also means that we get very little about her life on Earth. After “Smith and Jones,” she seems to have mostly forgotten that she’s enrolled in medical school, returning to the idea only in her annoyance with Joan’s racism in “The Family of Blood.” This means that the only sustained connection that we get to Martha’s regular life is her family, and none of them are written with as much depth as Rose’s family was. Francine is a charismatic presence, and her concerns about Martha traveling with the Doctor are portrayed very well, but there’s so little else to the character this season—really, the only other thing we learn is that she doesn’t like Martha’s dad’s ditzy girlfriend—that she doesn’t ground Martha’s story in a detailed reality in the way that happened with Rose. The rest of the family is just completely underwritten, including, sadly, the sister played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who could have been marvelous if the show had given her anything to do. I could picture what clearly what Rose’s life would be like without the Doctor, but it’s a lot harder to do that with Martha.

The biggest problem with Martha as a character, though, is the decision to make her mostly unwanted from the Doctor’s perspective. It makes sense that he is grieving for Rose, but even in “The Runaway Bride,” which is set seconds after his goodbye to her, he seems more willing to treat Donna as a person than he generally is with Martha for the rest of the season. There are moments in which he tries to get over this—the end of “Gridlock” sees him at least trying to talk to Martha on her own terms instead of seeing her as Not Rose—but there are far too many occasions this season in which he is very obvious about the fact that he wishes Rose was there instead of her. This leads to a lot of scenes of jealous moping from Martha, and it makes the Doctor look extremely insensitive. From his lament that “Rose would know what to do” in “The Shakespeare Code” to his almost total lack of acknowledgment of everything Martha did in “The Last of the Time Lords,” the Doctor never really appreciates Martha enough. By the time we get to “Utopia,” Martha is (understandably) pouting every time someone mentions Rose, and watching the main companion be jealous of her predecessor just doesn’t make for an enjoyable season of television. It also means that both of the two main black characters of the Davies era (Martha and Mickey) spend much of their time pining away for white people who reject them for other white people, which is not ideal.

The misguided Doctor-Companion dynamic this season is especially unfortunate because it mars a season that has some tremendously creative storylines and a plot arc that is impeccably set up, even if it does crash and burn in its final minutes. The early mentions of Harold Saxon introduce him as a vaguely threatening presence long before we realize who he really is, and the humanizing potential of the fob watch is integrated so smoothly into the season that I had no idea the concept would turn up again until we saw the watch in “Utopia.” The Master himself is very well portrayed, both by Derek Jacobi and by John Simm. Simm’s Master is going to go off the rails a bit in his return, but having to pretend to be Prime Minister for a while restrains him just enough that he generally works very well this season. He’s also having a terrific time, especially in his musical introduction of the Toclafane. He and Tennant have terrific chemistry, and watching him take over the world is an absolute delight. It’s disappointing that he comes across as intensely stupid in the last episode—the Master always gets crushed eventually, but Roger Delgado and Michelle Gomez managed to continue to look like geniuses even in defeat. Still, his interactions with the Doctor and his show-offy evil behavior are among the bright lights of this season. While there are plenty of frustrations this season, there really are some sublimely good pieces of writing, from the Doctor’s brief spell as a human to the Weeping Angels to the energetic new Master, and my frustration with the season’s problems stems mostly from the sense that if a few things had been written differently, this would have been an absolutely phenomenal season.  

Planets: There is some good work with contemporary Earth in “The Runaway Bride,” “Smith and Jones,” “The Lazarus Experiment,” “Blink,” and “The Sound of Drums,” all of which look much better than many of the modern-day scenes in Season Two. We get some really lovely historical scenes in “Human Nature/The Family of Blood,” some decent ones in “The Shakespeare Code” and the end of the universe looks smashing in “Utopia.” New Earth continues to be almost entirely without interest, New York looks like it was filmed by someone who had never directed anything before, and the moon is a bit of a disappointment in “Smith and Jones,” but on the whole it’s a successful season in terms of settings.  

Monsters, Aliens, Etc.: This is the main way in which this season is an improvement on Season Two. While it does make an absolute mess of the Daleks, probably more so than at any point in the show’s history, it also has some absolutely splendid villains. The Weeping Angels are magnificent, the Family is terrifying, the Judoon are fabulous Rhinoceros Police, the Master is giving a beautifully hammy performance, and the Toclafane are a horrifying depiction of the last remnants of the human race. Not everything works—the sun in “42” is an awfully odd villain, and the witches in “The Shakespeare Code” are awfully unsatisfying, but the monsters and aliens who do work well are more than enough to offset a few failures.

Female characters: I’m not sure whether this season is a step up or down from Two. On the one hand, it doesn’t use female authority figures as incompetent plot devices, and no one gets turned into a concrete slab. On the other hand, Martha’s potential as a character is mostly wasted, and the only real stand-out female guest characters are Donna, Sally Sparrow and Jenny/Mother of Mine. Joan does get some good material toward the end of “The Family of Blood,” but I still think of her as the weakest part of a generally excellent two-parter, and Chantho also gets a couple of good moments that don’t really offset the general lack of interest I have in the character. The actress playing Lucy Saxon has a good vacant stare, but she’s never quite as fun as I think she could have been, the women of “Gridlock” and “42” are massively forgettable, Martha’s relatives are underwritten, Tallulah and the Empress of the Racnoss are absolute messes, and generally female characters with anything resembling depth or memorability are few and far between. It’s a disappointing season for women, although that is about to get better. L

Overall: If Davies had figured out how to make the Martha/Tenth Doctor dynamic work better, this could have been one of the all-time great seasons of this show. There are some really great stories and some fabulous new monsters, but it can be so unpleasant to watch these two characters interact that the season is weaker than it should be. B+/B

Up Next: There are still plenty of problems, but there is also Donna, so everything gets better pretty much immediately. Davies has some absolutely brilliant ideas in his final full season as showrunner, and also some intensely bad ones, but the Tenth Doctor and Donna are one of the very best Doctor-Companion pairings of all time, and their wonderful friendship substantially raises the quality of the season.

 Episodes Ranked So Far:

1. The Satan Pit

2. The Doctor Dances

3. Blink

4. The Family of Blood

5. The Empty Child

6. Dalek

7. The Parting of Ways

8. School Reunion

9. Utopia

10. Human Nature

11. The Impossible Planet

12. The Sound of Drums

13. Doomsday

14. The End of the World

15. Father’s Day

16. Smith and Jones

17. Rose

18. The Unquiet Dead

19. Christmas Invasion

20. The Runaway Bride

21. The Girl in the Fireplace

22. Aliens of London

23. The Shakespeare Code

24. The Lazarus Experiment

25. Tooth and Claw

26. New Earth

27. The Age of Steel

28. Bad Wolf

29. Rise of the Cybermen

30. Boom Town

31. World War III

32. Army of Ghosts

33. 42

34. Gridlock

35. The Last of the Time Lords

36. Idiot’s Lantern

37. The Long Game

38. Love and Monsters

39. Evolution of the Daleks

40. Daleks in Manhattan

41. Fear Her