Doctor Who 8.06

[selenak]

Operation Catch Up With TV continues with a round of WHAT ABOUT THE BRIG?



You know, we've had the Doctor being initially downtalking to boyfriends of his companions before. (Mickey and Rory lived to tell the tale.) We've got the Doctor having soldier issues before. (Though never to this extent.) (I'm trying to remind myself not to idealize the Three and Brig relationship; Three could be a jerk to the Brig, too - in Inferno and The Daemons, for example - but this ewas the exception, not the rule, and also came about as part of an argument, not as a conversation opener.) Here the two united in spectacularly unpleasant and over the top fashion, which constantly distracted me from enjoying the episode, and I usually do enjoy a Gareth Roberts romp. (Can't tell you how often I rewatched The Unicorn and the Wasp in which Ten and Donna meet Agatha Christie.)

The Doctor refusing to believe an ex soldier could be a math teacher (which was long before he found out Danny was Clara's boyfriend) just makes no character and continuity sense whatsoever. For starters, and ad infinitum: WHAT ABOUT THE BRIG? (Who did spend an interlude as a math teacher when the Doctor was in his fifth regeneration.) On a Doylist level, Moffat having invented the character of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, the Brig's daughter, to pay homage to him one would think the Brigadier's bio was on his mind even if Gareth Roberts should have forgotten.

You know, there were things in the episode which otherwise I'd have enjoyed a lot. Jenna Coleman's ability to do comedy faces. (Which reminded me of Eve Myles in Gwen's wedding episode over at Torchwood.) Courtney the Disruptive Influence, whose throwing up reaction to space made me realise this was bound to happen at SOME point - most travellers the Doctor takes on board usually aren't trained astronauts -, and whose interaction with the Doctor throughout was delightful. Even the Doctor automatically assuming Clara went for Adrian the Eleven clone (in looks) - because he would - and Danny calling him out on the aristocrat and officer thing would normally been great character moments.

But I kept thinking "Doctor, the Brigadier would be so horribly disappointed in you", and thus I couldn't.

Comments

[kalypso]

Well, the whole "I hate soldiers" thing is obviously being set up as an issue about the Doctor's self-image to be resolved (presumably) by the end of this season, though as astrogirl2 says it's getting clunky. But I'm waiting to see what's said at that time.

Steven Moffat is clearly very interested in the clash between the Doctor's desire to be a man who brings peace and healing and the awkward fact that he keeps finding himself responsible for many deaths (eg River's speech about "Doctor" coming to mean "mighty warrior" in A Good Man Goes to War, Simeon's rant in The Name of the Doctor, etc etc). A lot of people are suggesting that this is a reaction against the Time War, but I'm not convinced that the war is behind the particular intensity of the Capaldi Doctor's reaction - from his point of view, that was centuries ago, and since then he's helped to fix the Time Lords' escape. Or if it is about the Time War, then it's because he's caught up with my reaction, which altariel summed up as "What about the Dalek children?"

I'm still finding Into the Dalek the most interesting episode of the season to date, despite the flaws (I should probably go and watch it for a fourth time). I think it's a key moment in the formation of this Doctor's character, because, very late on in the episode, he suddenly seems to grasp the potential of a good Dalek - a really good Dalek, not in the horrifying sense of a Dalek who wants to kill other Daleks, which he used earlier on. He told Clara that one good Dalek would make "all the difference in the universe, but it's impossible"; then, after Clara challenged that view, he changed his mind.

I think that's where the apparently forgotten Oswin comes in; he can't explain to Clara (I assume that she doesn't consciously remember her other lives, and that he can't bear to tell her about that one), but he recalls that he first met her in the form of a good Dalek. So he sets out to do "something better" with this Dalek, only to fail, because it responds to his hatred of Daleks, and by implication his success in killing them - the soldier, not the doctor. The irony is that he succeeds in achieving the "good Dalek" in the wrong sense, a soldier set on what is probably a suicide mission to kill its own kind, just when he has raised his sights to achieving a really good Dalek. I think that the Dalek's statement that "You are a good Dalek" is intentionally ambiguous, and that it may well understand what the Doctor wanted, but that the Doctor doesn't recognise that, and thinks he's being told that he's a killer - a soldier. So he responds by running away from Journey Blue, even though she has the potential to make the change which the Dalek didn't, to become a well-digger or a maths teacher like Danny.

And if they don't bring Journey and Rusty back to demonstrate all this, then there's some great fic to be written.

Despite my take on where they're going, I was very disappointed that Danny saved the day by doing something PE-ish rather than through brilliant mathematics. And I've sympathy with the view that it's unfortunate the two boyfriends who've encountered active hostility from the Doctor have been non-white. (Though I think Danny was right about the Doctor wanting to be sure he's good enough for Clara - weren't she and Adrian discussing The Tempest, which features a father with magical powers treating a potential son-in-law unkindly in order to test his worth?)

[selenak]

Re: Tempest reference, well spotted, and I can see the Doctor as Prospero. Also I like your Dalek thoughts a lot. If this is how it all works out in the end, I withdraw my objections, but until then, it just rubs me the wrong way, very much so.

[nenya_kanadka]

I've also heard people remarking that the most recent big war for Twelve would be Eleven's lengthy hopeless last stand thing on Trenzalore. Which episode failed to engage me really at all, so I've mostly blanked it from my memory, but it does make more sense to me that he'd be reacting against that rather than the Time War, if the Doctor having a hard time with the soldier side of himself is what's going on. And it was, what, umpty-hundred years he got stuck on Trenzalore? I suppose that might put the Brig somewhat further back in his memory than the Doctors I'm familiar with. But still--Kate Fucking Stewart was in the 50th special, guys, it's not that long ago...

The Doctor's rudeness is kind of getting old pretty fast for me, but some of the character interactions were pretty great in this episode. I kept thinking the other teacher in the bowtie looked a lot like Eleven, so for once the assumption that character A looked like character B made sense to me and made me laugh.

I definitely do want to see Danny do more maths. The whole "Time Lord" thing was fascinating, too, and for once a situation where two guys both have strong feelings about a woman and react warily to each other didn't ping me in that "arguing over her without her input" way that usually drives me up the friggin' wall. Clara had clearly chosen both of them to be in her life for different things, and I liked that Danny assumed she was an alien ("You said you were from Blackpool! He's...your dad??") before he assumed that Twelve was romantic competition. And that his worries for her at the end were that she'd get swept up and end up doing something against her principles. Though I am not looking forward to them putting her in a situation where that turns out to happen with the Doctor, I feel like that's a totally reasonable thing for Danny, ex-soldier and clearly decent guy with a difficult past, to worry about.

[kalypso]

I'm not really convinced it's a reaction to Trenzalore either; that may be more recent in the Doctor's timeline, but from what we saw in The Time of the Doctor it wasn't anything like the bloodbath Simeon suggested, so I think that timeline changed. Until the final fireworks when the Doctor used his regenerative energy to fight off the Daleks, it felt as if his role on Trenzalore was defensive, so I don't think it's enough to have turned him off war and soldiery in itself. But it does tie in with Into the Dalek - no surprise that the Dalek found hatred for its race in his mind when this Doctor came into being through an act which destroyed an entire Dalek fleet. And it's interesting that the Eleventh Doctor carried that out after ageing into a figure looking very like the First Doctor, because the Twelfth Doctor later tells Rusty that he was effectively defined by his initial encounter with the Daleks on Skaro.

Also, I agree absolutely about Danny calling out the Doctor on being officer-class, which really put him on the back foot.

[neotoma]

This episode hit my embarrassment squick *hard* and thus I fast-forwarded through most of it. Danny put up with the Doctor's horrible behavior very well in the scenes I could stand to watch.

[selenak]

I facepalmed along with you. Though not in fast forward.