Doctor Who: The Wide Blue Yonder
Dec. 3rd, 2023 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakSpecial the second, in which RTD taps into his Midnight/ Waters of Mars writing vein, with added „I have Tate and Tennant for these specials, and by God I‘m going to use them!“
Minus the dark view of the human race Midnight and some other RTD stuff has, I should add; but it does highlight he can do excellent bottle shows and the horror that comes with being locked in with something incredibly creepy, while also bringing on the fun and the character insight scenes. Not to mention the opening scene, only very losely connected to the rest of the episode, in which the Doctor and Donna run into (not yet Sir) Isaac Newton figuring out gravity (or rather, mavity) under an apple tree. And afterwards agree on his hotness, at which point the Doctor is canonically textually bi at last, though Donna has assumed it ages ago, naturally. It‘s RTD style silliness and fun that‘s just as much a part of his version of DW as when he does angst, and I loved it. (Also, I still want the Doctor to meet Emilie du Chatelet.)
The rest of the episode is set on a deserted (or is it, ominous drumroll) spaceship set beyond the „edge of the galaxy“ in complete starless darkness, on which the TARDIS dumps the Doctor and Donna before making off for the remaining episode, complete with the Doctor‘s sonic screwdriver, which neatly heightens the stakes. There are no guest stars, because after the creepiness of a deserted space ship (with the looooongest space corridor the Doctor and his Companion(s) have ever run through, surely) has been amply exploited and we finally meet the menace du jour face to face, those faces are those of the Doctor and Donna, and thus RTD gets to exploit Tate `n Tennant‘s acting skills, playing not one but two versions of their characters, and brilliantly they do it, too. The intercut sequence in which the audience and the characters slowly become aware something is off with the respective other is so incredibly well done. And later, the whole „which one is the doppelganger?“ gimmick is played through brilliantly and full of suspense, too, at least for this particular viewer, whose guesses, right or wrong, never were ahead of those of our heroes.
I also adored how we got the full spectrum of Donna and her relationship with the Doctor - yes, she‘s full of noise, but she also can be quiet and intense (right from her very first appearance - in „The Runaway Bride“, there is the rooftop scene between the Doctor and Donna that starts and foreshadows many of their later quiet moments of connection - and the special offers not one but two scenes of the type. That one of them features not the real Donna would have been disappointing if not for the fact that the Doctor later brings up the subject to real!Donna as well, and I thought their slightly different approaches also told us something about this fifteen years older Donna. Fake Donna knows everything already (because she‘s really the creature accessing both Donna‘s and the Doctor‘s memories). Real Donna does not, but she can guess the general gist, and she manages to hit that tricky middle ground between neither letting the Doctor deflect (like Thirteen did 9 out of 10 times with her Companions) nor coming across as invasive. Also? That scene while affirming that no, the Chibnall run isn‘t suddenly retconned out of existence, all these things did happen, did get genuine emotion about them across in a way that I think Chibnall did not manage to write for Thirteen (no reflection on Jodie Whittaker, who is a great actress), and not by giving the Doctor an emo monologue. (RTD, too, has matured. Now he‘s trusting David Tennant to do it with a sentence and facial expressions.) Mind you, it helps that off the two Chibnall canon addendums the first Doctor and Donna confidential scene brings up, the one which gets the narrative weight is NOT Gallifrey (RTD, of all the people, presumably knows that well has been milked dry, and then some), but the fact events in The Flux destroyed half the universe.
Lastly: loved all the small touches, from the daft looking robot who actually plays a key role in the denouement to the fact that the original (heroic and clever) captain of the spaceship whose dead body we see floating in space during the big figuring-it-out scene was apparantly of reptile origin - maybe a Silurian? -, not a human.
The tag scene, in which the Doctor and Donna have finally made it back to Earth and find Wilf waiting for them, is of course given Bernhard Cribbins‘ death impossible to watch without feeling both sad and glad for this last sight. I do hope for at least a bit more Wilf footage in the last special, but even if there won‘t be, at least we‘ve seen the character hugged by both Donna and the Doctor one last time.
In conclusion: if there is a retcon in these specials so far, allow me to theorize an older RTD is basically using this second chance to give us what the ending of season 4 and the ensuing three specials finishing the Tenth Doctor‘s run should have been: intermittendly joyful and scary stories, the Doctor and Donna team at its best, and (I presume) a fond departure from the TARDIS for Donna which leaves the character in a good situation while both she and the Doctor end up being the better for having travelled together.
Minus the dark view of the human race Midnight and some other RTD stuff has, I should add; but it does highlight he can do excellent bottle shows and the horror that comes with being locked in with something incredibly creepy, while also bringing on the fun and the character insight scenes. Not to mention the opening scene, only very losely connected to the rest of the episode, in which the Doctor and Donna run into (not yet Sir) Isaac Newton figuring out gravity (or rather, mavity) under an apple tree. And afterwards agree on his hotness, at which point the Doctor is canonically textually bi at last, though Donna has assumed it ages ago, naturally. It‘s RTD style silliness and fun that‘s just as much a part of his version of DW as when he does angst, and I loved it. (Also, I still want the Doctor to meet Emilie du Chatelet.)
The rest of the episode is set on a deserted (or is it, ominous drumroll) spaceship set beyond the „edge of the galaxy“ in complete starless darkness, on which the TARDIS dumps the Doctor and Donna before making off for the remaining episode, complete with the Doctor‘s sonic screwdriver, which neatly heightens the stakes. There are no guest stars, because after the creepiness of a deserted space ship (with the looooongest space corridor the Doctor and his Companion(s) have ever run through, surely) has been amply exploited and we finally meet the menace du jour face to face, those faces are those of the Doctor and Donna, and thus RTD gets to exploit Tate `n Tennant‘s acting skills, playing not one but two versions of their characters, and brilliantly they do it, too. The intercut sequence in which the audience and the characters slowly become aware something is off with the respective other is so incredibly well done. And later, the whole „which one is the doppelganger?“ gimmick is played through brilliantly and full of suspense, too, at least for this particular viewer, whose guesses, right or wrong, never were ahead of those of our heroes.
I also adored how we got the full spectrum of Donna and her relationship with the Doctor - yes, she‘s full of noise, but she also can be quiet and intense (right from her very first appearance - in „The Runaway Bride“, there is the rooftop scene between the Doctor and Donna that starts and foreshadows many of their later quiet moments of connection - and the special offers not one but two scenes of the type. That one of them features not the real Donna would have been disappointing if not for the fact that the Doctor later brings up the subject to real!Donna as well, and I thought their slightly different approaches also told us something about this fifteen years older Donna. Fake Donna knows everything already (because she‘s really the creature accessing both Donna‘s and the Doctor‘s memories). Real Donna does not, but she can guess the general gist, and she manages to hit that tricky middle ground between neither letting the Doctor deflect (like Thirteen did 9 out of 10 times with her Companions) nor coming across as invasive. Also? That scene while affirming that no, the Chibnall run isn‘t suddenly retconned out of existence, all these things did happen, did get genuine emotion about them across in a way that I think Chibnall did not manage to write for Thirteen (no reflection on Jodie Whittaker, who is a great actress), and not by giving the Doctor an emo monologue. (RTD, too, has matured. Now he‘s trusting David Tennant to do it with a sentence and facial expressions.) Mind you, it helps that off the two Chibnall canon addendums the first Doctor and Donna confidential scene brings up, the one which gets the narrative weight is NOT Gallifrey (RTD, of all the people, presumably knows that well has been milked dry, and then some), but the fact events in The Flux destroyed half the universe.
Lastly: loved all the small touches, from the daft looking robot who actually plays a key role in the denouement to the fact that the original (heroic and clever) captain of the spaceship whose dead body we see floating in space during the big figuring-it-out scene was apparantly of reptile origin - maybe a Silurian? -, not a human.
The tag scene, in which the Doctor and Donna have finally made it back to Earth and find Wilf waiting for them, is of course given Bernhard Cribbins‘ death impossible to watch without feeling both sad and glad for this last sight. I do hope for at least a bit more Wilf footage in the last special, but even if there won‘t be, at least we‘ve seen the character hugged by both Donna and the Doctor one last time.
In conclusion: if there is a retcon in these specials so far, allow me to theorize an older RTD is basically using this second chance to give us what the ending of season 4 and the ensuing three specials finishing the Tenth Doctor‘s run should have been: intermittendly joyful and scary stories, the Doctor and Donna team at its best, and (I presume) a fond departure from the TARDIS for Donna which leaves the character in a good situation while both she and the Doctor end up being the better for having travelled together.
