Doctor Who 9.06 The Woman Who Lived
Oct. 26th, 2015 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakAn episode which I loved despite there hardly being any Clara in it. (This obviously was the annual Companion-lite episode, which makes me wonder whether the next one will be the Doctor-lite ep.) Also, before I get to the actual content, an embarrassing (for the BBC) drumroll for the fact that Catherine Treganna, who wrote some of the best Torchwood episodes (Out of Time and Captain Jack Harkness in season 1, Meat and Adam in season 2), with this episode becomes the first female scriptwriter in the Moffat era. (The RTD era wasn't exactly stellar re: female scriptwriters, either, but Rusty did have Helen Raynor on DW and both Catherine Treganna and Helen Raynor on Torchwood.) Before I saw Catherine Treganna's name, I hadn't known she's written for this season, since I try to stay spoiler free in all regards and thus avoid the publicity. It was a very welcome surprise and a very fitting assignment, given the obvious thematic parallels between this episode and especially Out of Time. And a last above cut remark: Maisie Williams really rose to the task of her character, which was a different one than last episode.
Last episode, she played a young girl; this episode, she had to convey an immortal with centuries of experience and a completely different attitude because of it, and yet had to show some flashes of the Ashildr that was. She pulled it off admirably. When Ashildr said she kept the journal pages about her dead children to remind herself not to have any anymore, I really believed that in her young form was a woman who'd gone through this harrowing loss (several times) and wasn't prepared to do so any longer.
The whole highwayman malarky inevitably reminded me of the Sixth Doctor audio Curse of the Doomwoods, which btw was a welcome memory. I thought Treganna's script and the actors did a great job of balancing the comedy moments with the immortality angst, and the whole sequence of the Doctor reading Ashildr's diaries of her life through the centuries was harrowing especially because it started deceptively light hearted. And even before that: when Ashildr said she couldn't remember her village anymore, the very community she'd once loved above all, it was a punch in the gut. Which of course made the solution so appropriate - what reconnected Ashildr to emotions wasn't one single person but a community under attack, which she wanted to protect and save. (Which was how the girl she once was would have died, but I'm glad immortal Ashildr didn't, more about that in a moment.)
(Sidenote: my opinion on the "is Sam Swift now immortal, too?" question is that the Doctor's improvised theory on the device and the portal beam cancelling each other out - i.e. Sam's still a normal human - is probably correct. Unless Sam's the hybrid and/or the War Minister, which I doubt because this episode for all its harrowing depiction of what immortality means is more optimistic than that, and because he's the symbol of how mortality enables you to love life to the fullest in this narration.)
During the episode itself, I mentally composed a theory on why the Doctor shies away from travelling with other de facto immortals now (I think, not counting anything but tv canon, the last one was Romana back in Fourth's day?) but expected the episode to frustrate me by not providing any on screen explanation, but lo and behold, it did, and it was the very thing I thought. Now there is of course a contradiction between the Doctor originally leaving the second immortality inducing device with Ashildr so she could make someone else immortal in order not to be alone, and his explanation in their final scene together as to why he refused to take her with him. (BTW, loved that she DID ask for the reason in that final scene, and that he gave her an honest answer.) But not if you take the Doctor's reason as something applying personally to him, not necessarily to all other immortals (though it might). And for him, the fear that to be with another de facto immortal all the time would make him lose perspective, that he needs to care for people with a short life span, and that he needs them as a moral corrective, is both grounded in canon and real. (And it's also why no regeneration of the Doctor other than Ten at his most desperate suggested to the Master that they'd travel together, I'd wager. That the Doctor fears this wouldn't result in the Master becoming less callous but in himself more so makes sense to me.)
And then, as ice cream on the top, we did get that Jack Harkness reference I grumbled about as not being there last episode, by the Doctor, just where it's appropriate to be. Trust the Torchwood writer to do this.
As with last episode, we get both the parallels and the contrasts between Ashildr and the Doctor, with the biggest contrast still, only now in another way, being that he's the man who runs and she's the woman who stays. Declaring herself as the one taking care of the debris (or simply results) of the Doctor's actions both goes back to the core of Ashildr in the past - the community protector - and defines it as something she can only do as who she is now, not as the girl she used to be. It's basically the reply to "Who watches the Watchmen?" (or "Watchman", in this case) as "I do", and a far better solution to the Harriet Jones constellation back when, with Ashildr and the Doctor respecting each other even in their differences.
Trivia question: this was the third two parter. Not that I object per se, but will their ever be single episodes this season?
Speculation: Ashildr will probably not be back until the season finale, but I do expect her to be back then. And not as a villain, given she's already gone through her moral crisis. Also, have we just been handed a character ideally suited for historical crossovers or what? (And of course encounters with Jack, as the Doctor predicted.)
In conclusion, though: this season rocks. Bring on more!
Last episode, she played a young girl; this episode, she had to convey an immortal with centuries of experience and a completely different attitude because of it, and yet had to show some flashes of the Ashildr that was. She pulled it off admirably. When Ashildr said she kept the journal pages about her dead children to remind herself not to have any anymore, I really believed that in her young form was a woman who'd gone through this harrowing loss (several times) and wasn't prepared to do so any longer.
The whole highwayman malarky inevitably reminded me of the Sixth Doctor audio Curse of the Doomwoods, which btw was a welcome memory. I thought Treganna's script and the actors did a great job of balancing the comedy moments with the immortality angst, and the whole sequence of the Doctor reading Ashildr's diaries of her life through the centuries was harrowing especially because it started deceptively light hearted. And even before that: when Ashildr said she couldn't remember her village anymore, the very community she'd once loved above all, it was a punch in the gut. Which of course made the solution so appropriate - what reconnected Ashildr to emotions wasn't one single person but a community under attack, which she wanted to protect and save. (Which was how the girl she once was would have died, but I'm glad immortal Ashildr didn't, more about that in a moment.)
(Sidenote: my opinion on the "is Sam Swift now immortal, too?" question is that the Doctor's improvised theory on the device and the portal beam cancelling each other out - i.e. Sam's still a normal human - is probably correct. Unless Sam's the hybrid and/or the War Minister, which I doubt because this episode for all its harrowing depiction of what immortality means is more optimistic than that, and because he's the symbol of how mortality enables you to love life to the fullest in this narration.)
During the episode itself, I mentally composed a theory on why the Doctor shies away from travelling with other de facto immortals now (I think, not counting anything but tv canon, the last one was Romana back in Fourth's day?) but expected the episode to frustrate me by not providing any on screen explanation, but lo and behold, it did, and it was the very thing I thought. Now there is of course a contradiction between the Doctor originally leaving the second immortality inducing device with Ashildr so she could make someone else immortal in order not to be alone, and his explanation in their final scene together as to why he refused to take her with him. (BTW, loved that she DID ask for the reason in that final scene, and that he gave her an honest answer.) But not if you take the Doctor's reason as something applying personally to him, not necessarily to all other immortals (though it might). And for him, the fear that to be with another de facto immortal all the time would make him lose perspective, that he needs to care for people with a short life span, and that he needs them as a moral corrective, is both grounded in canon and real. (And it's also why no regeneration of the Doctor other than Ten at his most desperate suggested to the Master that they'd travel together, I'd wager. That the Doctor fears this wouldn't result in the Master becoming less callous but in himself more so makes sense to me.)
And then, as ice cream on the top, we did get that Jack Harkness reference I grumbled about as not being there last episode, by the Doctor, just where it's appropriate to be. Trust the Torchwood writer to do this.
As with last episode, we get both the parallels and the contrasts between Ashildr and the Doctor, with the biggest contrast still, only now in another way, being that he's the man who runs and she's the woman who stays. Declaring herself as the one taking care of the debris (or simply results) of the Doctor's actions both goes back to the core of Ashildr in the past - the community protector - and defines it as something she can only do as who she is now, not as the girl she used to be. It's basically the reply to "Who watches the Watchmen?" (or "Watchman", in this case) as "I do", and a far better solution to the Harriet Jones constellation back when, with Ashildr and the Doctor respecting each other even in their differences.
Trivia question: this was the third two parter. Not that I object per se, but will their ever be single episodes this season?
Speculation: Ashildr will probably not be back until the season finale, but I do expect her to be back then. And not as a villain, given she's already gone through her moral crisis. Also, have we just been handed a character ideally suited for historical crossovers or what? (And of course encounters with Jack, as the Doctor predicted.)
In conclusion, though: this season rocks. Bring on more!
no subject
Date: 2015-10-26 09:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-26 09:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-26 12:43 pm (UTC)I was certain we'd get a Jack reference out of Treganna, who seemed fond of him in her Torchwood eps. Now that Big Finish are allowed to use at least some stuff from the new series, I hope they'll give us an audio meeting between him and Ashildr at some point. (And also Rex. They have enough people for an immortal humans tea party now!)
no subject
Date: 2015-10-26 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-26 02:47 pm (UTC)Also, you know that Big Finish rumor? It's not a rumor any more! And here is a thing that is relevant to your interests.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-27 09:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-27 02:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-27 05:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-27 07:23 pm (UTC)Maisie Williams did an amazing job. The line about children is what got me, too. You could feel that she kept trying it, maybe even kept forgetting how much it hurt when they died until the moment they did die. That was her best moment, IMO.
I'm thrilled that we'll see her again :-)
no subject
Date: 2015-10-29 04:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-29 03:07 am (UTC)The obvious question was "Why didn't she use it to save one of her children?" She specifically says "I could not save you," and the details she gives about them clutching their toys doesn't suggest that she failed because she wasn't there at the right moment. My tentative guess is that she couldn't choose. I was initially puzzled by the three cradles - I wouldn't expect three siblings to be cradle-sized at the same time - but it's possible they were triplets, or twins and a single born within a year - anyway, my thought is that the closer the three were the more difficult it would be to pick just one. Then again, maybe it was because she did fall sick before recovering, and wasn't strong enough to cross the room and get to one of them in time.
Although I'm happy with two-parters in general, I thought it was bad planning to go back to Ashildr immediately. In an ideal world, her story would play out over several seasons, but I can see that's not practical in a television world where everyone moves on, and even River was mostly crammed into one Doctor's lifetime. I would have preferred Ashildr's episodes to be scattered across the season, though; never mind the eight centuries that had passed for her, even the Doctor had lived through enough time to have spotted her running a leper colony while he was doing something else, so it seemed artificial for the viewers to jump back into her life without drawing breath.
no subject
Date: 2015-10-29 05:13 am (UTC)Absolutely. Re: children, both your theories would work, or might have been the children died within a day of showing symptoms - unless I misremember my Black Death, that WAS possible - and she hadn't realized yet there would be no time, or how lethal it was, if it was her first encounter with the illness. (Then again, the Black Death didn't reach England until after it had already ravaged the continent, so she should have known - but maybe I'm overestimating medieval means of communication.
Re: logic of three cradles, I fear it's probably just Doylist, i.e. powerful visual instantly signalling "dead children" to the audience chosen over likelihood. Though they might have been triplets! Since the device keeps repairing Ashildr's body, it would probably make her pregnancy safer than most women's of the period.
(Then again, I'm reminded of some speculation in Highlander fandom about why Immortals are sterile, and one theory was that since the body keeps repairing itself to what it was at the moment of the first death, when immortality kicks in in the HL-verse, the female Immortals are unable to get pregnant - their immune system keeps rejecting the *insert English term for fetus before it's even a fetus, when it's just a few cells*. Which made sense to me back then, which was why I automatically transferred it to Ashildr and first was surprised she had children at all before recalling every 'verse is different. *g*)
I would have preferred Ashildr's episodes to be scattered across the season
I see your point. And wonder how much is due to changed viewing habits, the demands of instant gratification for a set up etc. Admittedly I've been known to complain about two of Moffat's season long mysteries - the crack in s5 and the little girl in s6 -, but my problem with either wasn't that it wasn't instantly resolved. (With the first, it was that the crack was always universe threatening in arc episodes but in stand alone episodes the Doctor didn't seem concerned at all, and struck me as having your cake and eating it. And with the later I'm still not over the Doctor not investigating not-yet-Melody-or-River's fate and handwaving it as "ah, well" at the end of the s6 opener. (The obvious Doylist reason is that if he'd tried and succeeded to find the girl, there wouldn't have been River as we knew her, but on a Watsonian level it was ooc for the Doctor not even to try, especially Eleven since the show made a big deal out of the Eleventh Doctor being unable to let a child suffer. Now if later in the season after the big reveal we'd gotten a flashback to River telling the Doctor "if you trust me, don't search for the girl" or something like that, it would have worked, but nada.)
no subject
Date: 2015-10-30 02:49 pm (UTC)I think Ashildr is a different case from Melody - especially as the Doctor might argue that he did check up on her ("Last time I saw you, you were founding a leper colony. I was so proud of you."). It's not spelled out whether he was there by accident or to see how she was (if the former, he might argue that it turned into the latter) but it sounds as if he felt confident that she was doing well and could leave her to get on with doing well. If I rewatch the season, I'll hold this episode back to get a better sense of how it falls within the Doctor's timeline.