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selenakI am looking forward to Jodi Whittaker’s Doctor, but last week it hit me really badly how much I’m going to miss Peter Capaldi, and I promptly started a Capaldi era rewatch, and fell in love with the Twelfth Doctor and Clara (and Missy, and (almost) all the storylines and themes) all over again. This was when Moffat-DW really clicked for me. I like the Eleventh Doctor, I like Amy, Rory, and of course River, but individual episodes aside, I was never in love during that particular era. And that’s okay. With a canon spanning more than 50 years, you really don’t have to be all the time. But it’s really great when it happens.
It also means you’re going to handwave a great deal more. For example: my favourite of the RTD Who years is undoubtedly the fourth season due to the wonderful Ten & Donna combination, but I’d never claim this was the overall best written of the Rusty seasons. (If pressed, I’d say that was the third one, which I also loved, but which suffered from landing Martha with the unrequited love storyline. But I’m also open to arguments about s1, not least due to having to reinvent the show for a new audience without alienating the old one.) Similarly, this most recent season of DW had with the Twelfth Doctor, Bill and Nardole a wonderful team TARDIS, then there’s Missy, and all the interactions are made of win, but yes, definitely not the best season, and Moffat’s exhaustion is at times showing. Which is also true for the Eleventh Doctor’s last season, especially the later post Ponds-half when Clara’s individual voice was not yet found and Eleven mostly felt as if he was stalling, but I’m not that keen on the first half, either. My point, though, is: quality-wise, it’s not worse than RTD’s fourth season or now Moffat’s. It’s just that I don’t love Eleven-Amy-Rory plus River and Eleven-Clara with the same fervor I do Twelve-Clara and Twelve-Bill-Nardole plus Missy, or Ten-Donna. And so I’ve never felt the urge to rewatch seasons 7 (or 6, for that matter, but my issues with season 6 are many and not so much abut an average-level of episodes).
Some rewatch of s8 & s9 observations: that sense of exhaustion during Eleven’s last season of which I spoke? Is completely vanished in Twelve’s first. Probably because playing around with a new Doctor helps invigorate a writer, but also: Moffat is really in fine form. The figuring out your identity theme is set up from the get go, both in comedic scenes (“who frowned me this face?”) and serious ones; the Doctor’s little speech to the automaton controller about him having replaced so many parts of himself over and over again that you have to wonder whether there’s anything of the original left is pointedly about both of them, even without the visual aid of the plate also functioning as a mirror that the Doctor holds up between them. The question both who he is and whether who he is now is a good man in one of the themes of the eigth season. (Which is why it’s the perfect season for Moffat to bring back the Master in a new regeneration, the character who more than any other has always been the Doctor’s counterpart.) And simultaneously, you have Clara’s arc which is kickstarted with her having to wonder whether the Doctor is still the man whom she befriended and decided to travel with but less and less about that as the season continues and more about who Clara herself decides to be and turns into. Clara has never been bad at improvising, but just compare her holding her breath and pretending to be an automaton in Deep Breath to save her life with the next time she’ll bluff Cyborgs, which is in the season finale when she pretends to be the Doctor and is so successful at that despite the Cybermen reading her as human they’re confused and convinced enough that they’re stalling and can be taken out (by Danny Pink, as it turns out, but if Clara hadn’t maintained her bluff for as long as she did, he’d have been too late). What Clara does in the eighth season opener is incredibly brave but her fear is palpable, and she’s not able to carry it off for long. What she does in the season finale comes with a confidence of that’s not quite human anymore.
Mind you, Clara becoming her own Doctor is an arc across two seasons, of course, and the ninth shows us the price that comes along with this. I do wonder, btw, how s9 would have played out with Jenna Coleman hadn’t reconsidered and had left with the Christmas Special (in which case Clara would have died as an old woman after one last adventure with the Doctor). Because I can’t imagine her s9 storyline working with Bill; not only are their respective relationships with the Doctor different, but the two women are. It would have needed different storylines for s9, basically. (Because yes, on the one hand Clara taking off with Ashildr/Me and her own TARDIS and Bill taking off with Heather/the Pilot are similar, but on the other you couldn’t simply switch Ashildr with Heather; Ashildr was very much another Doctor counterpart and consequence, which Heather wasn’t at all.
Clara being a teacher is so instrumental to her characterization, which is a big contrast to Amy, whose various professions weren’t really important to her overall story. Donna’s various temp experiences came in handy on occasion, as did Martha’s medical knowledge, but (arguably) these respective jobs didn’t define them as much as Clara’s teacher-ness defines her. (Bill being a student-against-the-odds, otoh, is again crucial to her characterization, and her relationship with the Doctor.) So are her flaws, which (in the Twelve but not the Eleven era) aren’t the generic “pretty” type of flaws (i.e. stubbornness) that are really meant to be virtues; biggest among them her propensity to lie. (Which of course she shares with the Doctor.) That she’s such an excellent liar doesn’t just come in handy when confronting the monsters of the week, it also seriously burdens and threatens to destroy her relationship with Danny, because she tends to fall back on it even when there’s no need. And her increasing recklessness, which, coupled with a human instead of a Gallifreyan physiology, can have such fatal results. Then there’s the way in which Clara while maintaining her compassion (that quintessential Companion trait) also increasingly is able to display big-picture-mentality in dire situations, or, as Danny (not meaning it as a compliment) would put it re: the Doctor, officer mentality; compare Clara in Mummy in the Orient Express (when she grits her teeth, though she still brings Maisie to the Doctor believing this to be Maisie’s death) to Clara in Under the Lake in s9 (convincing Lunn he needs to go out and retrieve the phone with no Doctor necessary to give her that idea, and a very angry Cass asking her whether she learned that from him to which she replies she learned to do “what needs to be done”.
Rewatching Missy’s appearances in s8 and s9 reminded me that when she first shows up, the degree of witty insanity, callousness and cruelty actually isn’t that different from Simm!Master’s. A prime example is Missy killing Osgood simply because the Doctor showed some sympathy and admiration for Osgood before and thus is likely to be pained by her death. Even later, that stunt she pulls off with Clara inside the Dalek armor, trying to get the Doctor to unwittingly kill Clara, is easily as evil and emotionally devastating (had she succeeded) as what the Master does to Bill. The big difference between the Simm and the Gomez incarnation of the Master is that Missy is the first regeneration since Delgado to being vocal about not just wanting to torment/defeat the Doctor but to wanting him back as a friend. Delgado!Master’s version of this were “let’s rule the universe together” offers; Missy’s first attempt comes with trying to get the Doctor to admit he’s just like her by giving him universe-ruling powers, and her last is trying the reverse, in a way – not being like the Doctor – though she plays at that for a laugh – but being with him on his terms. I wouldn’t call it a redemption arc per se, not least because the motivation remains consistently about her relationship with the Doctor, but it’s still worth pointing out that the Missy who kills her own minions for the LOLZS in Dark Water (never mind everyone else she kills) is a far cry from the Missy who responds to the not yet recognized Razor when he irritates her by NOT killing him (despite the Doctor not being present to impress, I might add). And another thing: her killing the Master wouldn’t have been necessary if the goal was simply to get him off ship (he needed to survive for her to exist in the first place). But by killing him (and thus triggering his regeneration into herself) she ensures that the only version of the Master around in the universe at that point is hers, aka the one who in a pinch will prioritize the relationship with the Doctor over burning the world(s). Since at this point it’s quite likely the Doctor will die (and so will she when she goes back to him), ensuring that Simm!Master isn’t let loose on the cosmos again probably counts as a responsible act as well.
Unless the Christmas Special is unlike any other Christmas Special, Heaven Sent probably counts as the last Stephen Moffat episode where he unites horror, character exploration and brilliance to come up with a classic. (The others being Blink, The Girl in the Fireplace, the s1 two parter originally introducing Jack Harkness and Listen.) It’s arguably a deeper horror than any of them. Moffat is probably the DW writer using the possibility of time travel most creatively in both his and RTD’s run, but here it’s not time travel, it’s time horror – “the long way around” indeed as the Doctor has to live through 4,5 billion years of burning himself to death over and over again once he realizes what he’s trapped in and how to get out. Incidentally: rewatching this and the s9 finale still leaves wondering whether
a) All that happens in the confession dial – i.e. the 4,5 billion years – happens in a physical reality, which would mean the Doctor who eventually emerges on Gallifrey is the nth billion copy by teleporter and the time lord whose adventures we’ve been following died off screen between Face the Raven and Heaven Set (since the first time we see the Doctor in Heaven Sent it’s already 7000 years after the previous episode’s ending from his pov) , or
b) All that happens in the confession dial happens in the Doctor’s mind only, a la the DS9 episode Hard Time when O’Brien undergoes decades of imprisonment within an hour due to a memory implant device. Not that the torment would be less for the Doctor, since it was real for him, but it would mean the Doctor who emerges on Gallifrey physically the same person who got teleported away in Ashildr’s Trap Street.
Argument for the former: “bigger on the inside”, i.e Time Lord technology is capable of creating the castle within the confession dial.
Argument for the later: the Doctor in the s9 finale says that the function of the confession dial as originally intended is for a dying Time Lord to come to terms with his past before his mind (!) is uploaded onto the Matrix on Gallifrey. Which would argue for a mental exercise, not a physical one, especially since dying Time Lords probably aren’t fit to do much physically in normal circumstances.
Also: does Missy still have a confession dial with her? If so, will Thirteen receive it? (Probably not since I don’t think Chibnall will bring back any version of the Master in his first season, though he might later, but let’s stay Watsonian for a moment.) Because in the s9 opener she clearly states that you send a confession dial to your best friend in the event of your impending death, and since she’s ostensibly dying for good in the s10 finale…
Another Heaven Sent question: when the Doctor tells his Head!Clara that “I remember, I remember everything” (during his “why can’t I just stop, why do I have to go on” outburst), does he mean his life in general or does he mean remembers each of those 4,5 billion years? Or do we assume that when he emerges on Gallifrey, he “only” remembers the last and successful time he had to go through that torture?
Speaking of “why can’t I just stop?” : earlier in the season, in the episode where he ends up making Ashildr immortal, he tells Clara that he’s so tired of losing people. Now you can take his refusal to regenerate at the end of the s10 finale as him not wanting to change anymore, but my rewatch makes me feel it’s more that in this particular moment, he’s just sick and tired of living, full stop. From his pov, he’s failed and lost Bill to Cyberfied death (since he doesn’t know she’s survived), he’s ultimately failed to get through to Missy, the longest relationship of his entire existence (since he doesn’t know she did want to stand with him), he’s lost Clara (and while he can’t remember her personality or the emotions he felt for her anymore, he knows she was important to him, and he lost her to death. River is gone, the Ponds are out of reach, etc., and that’s before we factor in however much he remembers from the 4,5 billion years of self immolation. Gallifrey is back (and promptly reminded him why he stayed away for most of the time), so there isn’t the mixture of guilt and hope related to the Time War as a motivation anymore, either. So I think what the Christmas Special will remind him of is not so much of why it’s okay to change but why he wants to continue living.
And it’s fit that this will happen through an encounter with his earliest self. For Missy, meeting her literal past had her tempted by it (it was much easier being this way) only to ultimately reject it but also be destroyed by it. As I wrote in my earlier reviews, since any multi Doctor episode has the various regenerations first bickering and sniping at each other but eventually team up and thus achieve their goal, it made sense that the first multi Master episode would have the incarnations of the Master acting entranced by each other only to end up literally stabbing each other in the back. And if her past ends up destroying the Master (or trying his best to, at any rate – the Master is never forever gone from this show) , it makes sense that his past will end up revitalizing the Doctor and giving him the courage to regenerate into a new self.
It also means you’re going to handwave a great deal more. For example: my favourite of the RTD Who years is undoubtedly the fourth season due to the wonderful Ten & Donna combination, but I’d never claim this was the overall best written of the Rusty seasons. (If pressed, I’d say that was the third one, which I also loved, but which suffered from landing Martha with the unrequited love storyline. But I’m also open to arguments about s1, not least due to having to reinvent the show for a new audience without alienating the old one.) Similarly, this most recent season of DW had with the Twelfth Doctor, Bill and Nardole a wonderful team TARDIS, then there’s Missy, and all the interactions are made of win, but yes, definitely not the best season, and Moffat’s exhaustion is at times showing. Which is also true for the Eleventh Doctor’s last season, especially the later post Ponds-half when Clara’s individual voice was not yet found and Eleven mostly felt as if he was stalling, but I’m not that keen on the first half, either. My point, though, is: quality-wise, it’s not worse than RTD’s fourth season or now Moffat’s. It’s just that I don’t love Eleven-Amy-Rory plus River and Eleven-Clara with the same fervor I do Twelve-Clara and Twelve-Bill-Nardole plus Missy, or Ten-Donna. And so I’ve never felt the urge to rewatch seasons 7 (or 6, for that matter, but my issues with season 6 are many and not so much abut an average-level of episodes).
Some rewatch of s8 & s9 observations: that sense of exhaustion during Eleven’s last season of which I spoke? Is completely vanished in Twelve’s first. Probably because playing around with a new Doctor helps invigorate a writer, but also: Moffat is really in fine form. The figuring out your identity theme is set up from the get go, both in comedic scenes (“who frowned me this face?”) and serious ones; the Doctor’s little speech to the automaton controller about him having replaced so many parts of himself over and over again that you have to wonder whether there’s anything of the original left is pointedly about both of them, even without the visual aid of the plate also functioning as a mirror that the Doctor holds up between them. The question both who he is and whether who he is now is a good man in one of the themes of the eigth season. (Which is why it’s the perfect season for Moffat to bring back the Master in a new regeneration, the character who more than any other has always been the Doctor’s counterpart.) And simultaneously, you have Clara’s arc which is kickstarted with her having to wonder whether the Doctor is still the man whom she befriended and decided to travel with but less and less about that as the season continues and more about who Clara herself decides to be and turns into. Clara has never been bad at improvising, but just compare her holding her breath and pretending to be an automaton in Deep Breath to save her life with the next time she’ll bluff Cyborgs, which is in the season finale when she pretends to be the Doctor and is so successful at that despite the Cybermen reading her as human they’re confused and convinced enough that they’re stalling and can be taken out (by Danny Pink, as it turns out, but if Clara hadn’t maintained her bluff for as long as she did, he’d have been too late). What Clara does in the eighth season opener is incredibly brave but her fear is palpable, and she’s not able to carry it off for long. What she does in the season finale comes with a confidence of that’s not quite human anymore.
Mind you, Clara becoming her own Doctor is an arc across two seasons, of course, and the ninth shows us the price that comes along with this. I do wonder, btw, how s9 would have played out with Jenna Coleman hadn’t reconsidered and had left with the Christmas Special (in which case Clara would have died as an old woman after one last adventure with the Doctor). Because I can’t imagine her s9 storyline working with Bill; not only are their respective relationships with the Doctor different, but the two women are. It would have needed different storylines for s9, basically. (Because yes, on the one hand Clara taking off with Ashildr/Me and her own TARDIS and Bill taking off with Heather/the Pilot are similar, but on the other you couldn’t simply switch Ashildr with Heather; Ashildr was very much another Doctor counterpart and consequence, which Heather wasn’t at all.
Clara being a teacher is so instrumental to her characterization, which is a big contrast to Amy, whose various professions weren’t really important to her overall story. Donna’s various temp experiences came in handy on occasion, as did Martha’s medical knowledge, but (arguably) these respective jobs didn’t define them as much as Clara’s teacher-ness defines her. (Bill being a student-against-the-odds, otoh, is again crucial to her characterization, and her relationship with the Doctor.) So are her flaws, which (in the Twelve but not the Eleven era) aren’t the generic “pretty” type of flaws (i.e. stubbornness) that are really meant to be virtues; biggest among them her propensity to lie. (Which of course she shares with the Doctor.) That she’s such an excellent liar doesn’t just come in handy when confronting the monsters of the week, it also seriously burdens and threatens to destroy her relationship with Danny, because she tends to fall back on it even when there’s no need. And her increasing recklessness, which, coupled with a human instead of a Gallifreyan physiology, can have such fatal results. Then there’s the way in which Clara while maintaining her compassion (that quintessential Companion trait) also increasingly is able to display big-picture-mentality in dire situations, or, as Danny (not meaning it as a compliment) would put it re: the Doctor, officer mentality; compare Clara in Mummy in the Orient Express (when she grits her teeth, though she still brings Maisie to the Doctor believing this to be Maisie’s death) to Clara in Under the Lake in s9 (convincing Lunn he needs to go out and retrieve the phone with no Doctor necessary to give her that idea, and a very angry Cass asking her whether she learned that from him to which she replies she learned to do “what needs to be done”.
Rewatching Missy’s appearances in s8 and s9 reminded me that when she first shows up, the degree of witty insanity, callousness and cruelty actually isn’t that different from Simm!Master’s. A prime example is Missy killing Osgood simply because the Doctor showed some sympathy and admiration for Osgood before and thus is likely to be pained by her death. Even later, that stunt she pulls off with Clara inside the Dalek armor, trying to get the Doctor to unwittingly kill Clara, is easily as evil and emotionally devastating (had she succeeded) as what the Master does to Bill. The big difference between the Simm and the Gomez incarnation of the Master is that Missy is the first regeneration since Delgado to being vocal about not just wanting to torment/defeat the Doctor but to wanting him back as a friend. Delgado!Master’s version of this were “let’s rule the universe together” offers; Missy’s first attempt comes with trying to get the Doctor to admit he’s just like her by giving him universe-ruling powers, and her last is trying the reverse, in a way – not being like the Doctor – though she plays at that for a laugh – but being with him on his terms. I wouldn’t call it a redemption arc per se, not least because the motivation remains consistently about her relationship with the Doctor, but it’s still worth pointing out that the Missy who kills her own minions for the LOLZS in Dark Water (never mind everyone else she kills) is a far cry from the Missy who responds to the not yet recognized Razor when he irritates her by NOT killing him (despite the Doctor not being present to impress, I might add). And another thing: her killing the Master wouldn’t have been necessary if the goal was simply to get him off ship (he needed to survive for her to exist in the first place). But by killing him (and thus triggering his regeneration into herself) she ensures that the only version of the Master around in the universe at that point is hers, aka the one who in a pinch will prioritize the relationship with the Doctor over burning the world(s). Since at this point it’s quite likely the Doctor will die (and so will she when she goes back to him), ensuring that Simm!Master isn’t let loose on the cosmos again probably counts as a responsible act as well.
Unless the Christmas Special is unlike any other Christmas Special, Heaven Sent probably counts as the last Stephen Moffat episode where he unites horror, character exploration and brilliance to come up with a classic. (The others being Blink, The Girl in the Fireplace, the s1 two parter originally introducing Jack Harkness and Listen.) It’s arguably a deeper horror than any of them. Moffat is probably the DW writer using the possibility of time travel most creatively in both his and RTD’s run, but here it’s not time travel, it’s time horror – “the long way around” indeed as the Doctor has to live through 4,5 billion years of burning himself to death over and over again once he realizes what he’s trapped in and how to get out. Incidentally: rewatching this and the s9 finale still leaves wondering whether
a) All that happens in the confession dial – i.e. the 4,5 billion years – happens in a physical reality, which would mean the Doctor who eventually emerges on Gallifrey is the nth billion copy by teleporter and the time lord whose adventures we’ve been following died off screen between Face the Raven and Heaven Set (since the first time we see the Doctor in Heaven Sent it’s already 7000 years after the previous episode’s ending from his pov) , or
b) All that happens in the confession dial happens in the Doctor’s mind only, a la the DS9 episode Hard Time when O’Brien undergoes decades of imprisonment within an hour due to a memory implant device. Not that the torment would be less for the Doctor, since it was real for him, but it would mean the Doctor who emerges on Gallifrey physically the same person who got teleported away in Ashildr’s Trap Street.
Argument for the former: “bigger on the inside”, i.e Time Lord technology is capable of creating the castle within the confession dial.
Argument for the later: the Doctor in the s9 finale says that the function of the confession dial as originally intended is for a dying Time Lord to come to terms with his past before his mind (!) is uploaded onto the Matrix on Gallifrey. Which would argue for a mental exercise, not a physical one, especially since dying Time Lords probably aren’t fit to do much physically in normal circumstances.
Also: does Missy still have a confession dial with her? If so, will Thirteen receive it? (Probably not since I don’t think Chibnall will bring back any version of the Master in his first season, though he might later, but let’s stay Watsonian for a moment.) Because in the s9 opener she clearly states that you send a confession dial to your best friend in the event of your impending death, and since she’s ostensibly dying for good in the s10 finale…
Another Heaven Sent question: when the Doctor tells his Head!Clara that “I remember, I remember everything” (during his “why can’t I just stop, why do I have to go on” outburst), does he mean his life in general or does he mean remembers each of those 4,5 billion years? Or do we assume that when he emerges on Gallifrey, he “only” remembers the last and successful time he had to go through that torture?
Speaking of “why can’t I just stop?” : earlier in the season, in the episode where he ends up making Ashildr immortal, he tells Clara that he’s so tired of losing people. Now you can take his refusal to regenerate at the end of the s10 finale as him not wanting to change anymore, but my rewatch makes me feel it’s more that in this particular moment, he’s just sick and tired of living, full stop. From his pov, he’s failed and lost Bill to Cyberfied death (since he doesn’t know she’s survived), he’s ultimately failed to get through to Missy, the longest relationship of his entire existence (since he doesn’t know she did want to stand with him), he’s lost Clara (and while he can’t remember her personality or the emotions he felt for her anymore, he knows she was important to him, and he lost her to death. River is gone, the Ponds are out of reach, etc., and that’s before we factor in however much he remembers from the 4,5 billion years of self immolation. Gallifrey is back (and promptly reminded him why he stayed away for most of the time), so there isn’t the mixture of guilt and hope related to the Time War as a motivation anymore, either. So I think what the Christmas Special will remind him of is not so much of why it’s okay to change but why he wants to continue living.
And it’s fit that this will happen through an encounter with his earliest self. For Missy, meeting her literal past had her tempted by it (it was much easier being this way) only to ultimately reject it but also be destroyed by it. As I wrote in my earlier reviews, since any multi Doctor episode has the various regenerations first bickering and sniping at each other but eventually team up and thus achieve their goal, it made sense that the first multi Master episode would have the incarnations of the Master acting entranced by each other only to end up literally stabbing each other in the back. And if her past ends up destroying the Master (or trying his best to, at any rate – the Master is never forever gone from this show) , it makes sense that his past will end up revitalizing the Doctor and giving him the courage to regenerate into a new self.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-14 07:59 pm (UTC)M met Michelle Gomez at Chicago Tardis last year, and has a wonderful photo with her where they are standing back to back in front of the Tardis, both looking thoroughly cool and evil. Inspired by this, I foolishly offered to write a "Missy and Marty adventure" as a giftfic, and I'm still being reminded of said promise on a regular basis. I wonder if authorial spousal insertion is as much looked down on as self-insertion. ;-) (And it's not a play on Marty Stu -- Marty is actually M's name.)
no subject
Date: 2017-08-15 09:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-14 08:20 pm (UTC)Because I can’t imagine her s9 storyline working with Bill; not only are their respective relationships with the Doctor different, but the two women are.
Yeah, if Jenna Coleman had left, they'd either would've had to have a completely different plotline for the season or a a different companion. That's why I like all of Twelve's companions because they all have their unique relationships with him.
he’s just sick and tired of living, full stop
This the way I see it as well. Ten didn't want to change because he considered it as bad as dying, but Twelve seems to consider death being the preferable option (I mean, he was quite willing to throw his future incarnations under the bus to be able to read the Veritas in "Extremis").
no subject
Date: 2017-08-15 10:05 am (UTC)Yes, which feeds into my grand theory of Doctor-Companion-combinataions.
Re: Twelve having something of a death wish at this point, to play devil's advocate for a moment, it was his simulation self in Extremis, no? But the general point stil stands.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-16 04:10 pm (UTC)Yes, but if it was supposed to be a perfect simulation of him (and the simulation itself did seem to think of himself as the real thing), then presumably the real Doctor would have acted the same way in the same situation.
no subject
Date: 2017-08-15 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-15 10:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-15 02:35 am (UTC)(And some not so great stuff, but that's true of all Doctors.)
no subject
Date: 2017-08-15 10:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-08-16 01:58 am (UTC)