Entry tags:
- doctor who,
- meta,
- moffat,
- rtd
December Talking Meme: Jackie and Rose Tyler
With Doctor Who everywhere for the anniversary, literally on a global level, it's perhaps easy to lose sight of the fact that in 2005, when the show was relaunched, it was by no means guaranteed it would find a new audience. Especially considering the previous attempt to bring back Doctor Who - the movie of doom - had failed miserably. And the treatment the BBC had given the show during the 80s before cancelling it had been extremely shoddy. Now fandom and critics alike credit a lot of factors for the fact that the Russell T. Davies launched revival took off the way it did - the casting of Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor, the way the scripts were careful to be accessible both to people who never ever heard of Doctor Who and old time fans alike, Bilie Piper as Rose - but RTD's eventuall successor at the helm seems to be firmly convinced that one key factor that made New Who into the success it became was the fact new Companion Rose did not come on her lonesome into Doctor Who, but with her mother, and with her relationship with her mother treated as an important part of the narrative. Quoth Steven Moffat:
"Russell, with his incredible knowledge of all modern television - because as far as I can see he does nothing except watch television! - he knows exactly how to fit this show in. The creation of the Tyler family, and positioning the Doctor as the 'troublesome relative' - which is what he is, he's the worrying uncle or family friend who turns up after a long while and takes the daughter away - that is so brilliant, it's a brilliant bit of writing. (...) Russell's writing is at such a high level... there's a line in the first episode which you could lecture on, it's so brilliant. It's in a conversation between Rose and Jackie - Rose says something about getting a job at a butcher's, and Jackie says 'It will be good for you. That shop was giving you airs and graces'. And in that one line, I submit, there isn't anything you don't know about these two people, or about that life, or about that world. You know everything about limited ambition, about the relationship between the two of them, about the envy and the crushing absence of horizons. It's a phenomenal bit of writing."
(There is a passage later in the same interview that's both funny in the light of recent developments and illuminating, particularly given fandom's tendency to play out Moffat versus Davies - something the two of them never did, because as far as anyone can tell, they seem to be in a mutual admiration society, stubbornly refusing to do their respective fans the favour of feuding; Moffat gets asked how he would have handled the relaunch, if he'd been in charge of New Who from the start. Whereupon he replies: "I'd have done a certain number of things exactly the same. I would definitely have got rid of the Time Lords, that was an overdue lopping-off; I would have got rid of the posh Doctor, all that stuff. The thing that I can't put my hand on my heart and say 'I'd have done that' about was the whole Tyler family thing, which is what makes it brilliant.")
Davies himself, in the collection of emails amd memos that became the book The Writer's Tale, says after discussing an autobiographical scene from Queer as Folk (the overdose in the kitchen): "But I have to write like that. Funny, sad, all at once. That's how life is. You can have a pratfall at a funeral. You can laugh so much that you choke to death. (...) Jackie Tyler makes us laugh, but I knew that I'd uncover something sad at the heart of her. Her sadness over her absent daughter is there as early as Aliens of London, but you don't really get to see it properly until Love & Monsters. Idiots will say, 'Ah, that character is developing now' - what, like you were going to play it all in the first 30 seconds? - but that capacity was always there. It had to be. Even in Rose, when Jackie is ostensibly 'funny', telling her daughter to get a job at the butcher's, Jackie is one of the things that's holding Rose back - and that's quite dark, at it heart. 'Funny' is hiding a lot of other stuff."
Fannish sympathy for Jackie and Rose switched places, as I recall. During their first season, there were a lot of comments on Jackie being annoying. During the second season, when Rose lost a lot of sympathies, she was called an ungrateful daughter in addition to everything else, which sometimes came with the added complaint of "Rose Tyler: Class Traitor". Now back then I thought it was time for Rose to leave the show and I liked Jackie, but I never thought their relationship could be divided into black and white, one party eternally the giving and the other the taking, or in the right and in the wrong respectively. And yes, the mother-daughter relationship and the way it was used in the show was interesting to me. To stay on the Doylist level for a bit longer before getting into Watsonian arguments, have another Moff-on-Rusty/Rusty-on-Moff quote:
"Russell reckons it’s all about parenthood with me. It’s his view that every writer has one story that they go on re-telling and that being a father is mine."
(In The Writer's Tale, there is a great exchange of emails between Davies and Moffat when they realised Moffat's two Library episodes and Davies' Turn Left would be aired directly after another - this was later changed so Midnight came in between - which meant Donna would be stuck in two alternate realities in a row. So they had to make sure the two alternate lives for Donna didn't resemble each other, which was why Davies, who had originally given her a marriage and children in Turn Left, altered his script to write them out, telling Moffat who'd offered to do the same: "Ooh, no, that's brilliant. You have the kids. You've got kids! You do better kids!" )
I can see what he means, of sorts. Which got me thinking, because Davies' writing includes a lot of family relationships as well, including three key mother-daughter relationships - but one big difference is that it's not children in the sense of infants who interest him in this. Rather, it's parent-child relationships (and sibling relationships) after the children have already grown up. How adults relate to their parents (more often or not their mothers) and vice versa. This can happen in an extremely dysfunctional way (Donna and Sylvia) or in a mostly harmonious way (Martha and Francine); Rose and Jackie are solidly in between. (Not by coincidence, the moment Davies starts to write for Torchwood again - which he didn't after writing the pilot, he left the day to day helming to Chris Chibnall for the first two seasons - you get family relationships between adults suddenly front and center of the emotional narrative in Children of Earth: Jack and his daughter Alice, Ianto and his sister Rhiannon (and his brother-in-law). Scenes like Rhiannon bringing the laptop to her on the run brother and her support of him intermingled with a terse exchange about their childhood and father are very clearly from the same brain that wrote the Rose-Jackie-Mickey scene in Parting of the Ways. ) The way family can get under your skin for good or ill, the intermingling of the need to escape and the need to be close, the emotional power a family member can have to compell you to do things even though you're both adults, those are aspects that Davies' writing keeps coming back to, and he certainly put it front and center with Jackie and Rose. They love each other deeply; they're also capable of hurting each other, not deliberately, but they do. Rose with her absences and her tendency to take Jackie for granted; Jackie with the fear that the airs and graces comment betrays, the idea that Rose having a better job could mean Rose moving out of her life, so if keeping Rose means seeing Rose lose chances, so be it. There is a self centredness in them both. And yet they're also capable of so much more. Jackie ends up participating in saving the world business (and putting up with the Doctor) with great courage, and when the chips, no pun with Rose's favourite food intended, come down she helps her daughter even if that could mean losing her. For Rose, not returning to her mother through her adventures is not an option. She doesn't idealize Jackie the way she does the dead father she didn't know (until time travel strikes), but Jackie is the one she always comes back to. Her horror when eventually encountering an Alternate Universe version of Jackie who doesn't know her and hence has no love for her and disdains her is palpable. And while I have some quibbles with the way Rose's storyline ended (and then kept on not ending), what I most definitely approve of is having Jackie with her daughter in the Zeppelin world. Never mind the Doctor, I can't imagine Jackie and Rose being separated forever by alternate dimensions.
Jackie and Rose weren't the first mother and daughter relationship on Doctor Who involving a Companion to matter narratively; I think that honour belongs to Ace, who has really huge Mommy issues and then gets confronted with a baby version of her mother in Curse of Fenris. But other than in baby form, we never meet Ace's mother. She never gets a life and opinions on her own. Whereas Jackie Tyler, no matter whether you love her or find her irritating, absolutely blazes with life and very much has her own point of view on just about everything. (And starts the proud New Who tradition of mothers slapping the Doctor.) I can't imagine the Whoverse without her.
"Russell, with his incredible knowledge of all modern television - because as far as I can see he does nothing except watch television! - he knows exactly how to fit this show in. The creation of the Tyler family, and positioning the Doctor as the 'troublesome relative' - which is what he is, he's the worrying uncle or family friend who turns up after a long while and takes the daughter away - that is so brilliant, it's a brilliant bit of writing. (...) Russell's writing is at such a high level... there's a line in the first episode which you could lecture on, it's so brilliant. It's in a conversation between Rose and Jackie - Rose says something about getting a job at a butcher's, and Jackie says 'It will be good for you. That shop was giving you airs and graces'. And in that one line, I submit, there isn't anything you don't know about these two people, or about that life, or about that world. You know everything about limited ambition, about the relationship between the two of them, about the envy and the crushing absence of horizons. It's a phenomenal bit of writing."
(There is a passage later in the same interview that's both funny in the light of recent developments and illuminating, particularly given fandom's tendency to play out Moffat versus Davies - something the two of them never did, because as far as anyone can tell, they seem to be in a mutual admiration society, stubbornly refusing to do their respective fans the favour of feuding; Moffat gets asked how he would have handled the relaunch, if he'd been in charge of New Who from the start. Whereupon he replies: "I'd have done a certain number of things exactly the same. I would definitely have got rid of the Time Lords, that was an overdue lopping-off; I would have got rid of the posh Doctor, all that stuff. The thing that I can't put my hand on my heart and say 'I'd have done that' about was the whole Tyler family thing, which is what makes it brilliant.")
Davies himself, in the collection of emails amd memos that became the book The Writer's Tale, says after discussing an autobiographical scene from Queer as Folk (the overdose in the kitchen): "But I have to write like that. Funny, sad, all at once. That's how life is. You can have a pratfall at a funeral. You can laugh so much that you choke to death. (...) Jackie Tyler makes us laugh, but I knew that I'd uncover something sad at the heart of her. Her sadness over her absent daughter is there as early as Aliens of London, but you don't really get to see it properly until Love & Monsters. Idiots will say, 'Ah, that character is developing now' - what, like you were going to play it all in the first 30 seconds? - but that capacity was always there. It had to be. Even in Rose, when Jackie is ostensibly 'funny', telling her daughter to get a job at the butcher's, Jackie is one of the things that's holding Rose back - and that's quite dark, at it heart. 'Funny' is hiding a lot of other stuff."
Fannish sympathy for Jackie and Rose switched places, as I recall. During their first season, there were a lot of comments on Jackie being annoying. During the second season, when Rose lost a lot of sympathies, she was called an ungrateful daughter in addition to everything else, which sometimes came with the added complaint of "Rose Tyler: Class Traitor". Now back then I thought it was time for Rose to leave the show and I liked Jackie, but I never thought their relationship could be divided into black and white, one party eternally the giving and the other the taking, or in the right and in the wrong respectively. And yes, the mother-daughter relationship and the way it was used in the show was interesting to me. To stay on the Doylist level for a bit longer before getting into Watsonian arguments, have another Moff-on-Rusty/Rusty-on-Moff quote:
"Russell reckons it’s all about parenthood with me. It’s his view that every writer has one story that they go on re-telling and that being a father is mine."
(In The Writer's Tale, there is a great exchange of emails between Davies and Moffat when they realised Moffat's two Library episodes and Davies' Turn Left would be aired directly after another - this was later changed so Midnight came in between - which meant Donna would be stuck in two alternate realities in a row. So they had to make sure the two alternate lives for Donna didn't resemble each other, which was why Davies, who had originally given her a marriage and children in Turn Left, altered his script to write them out, telling Moffat who'd offered to do the same: "Ooh, no, that's brilliant. You have the kids. You've got kids! You do better kids!" )
I can see what he means, of sorts. Which got me thinking, because Davies' writing includes a lot of family relationships as well, including three key mother-daughter relationships - but one big difference is that it's not children in the sense of infants who interest him in this. Rather, it's parent-child relationships (and sibling relationships) after the children have already grown up. How adults relate to their parents (more often or not their mothers) and vice versa. This can happen in an extremely dysfunctional way (Donna and Sylvia) or in a mostly harmonious way (Martha and Francine); Rose and Jackie are solidly in between. (Not by coincidence, the moment Davies starts to write for Torchwood again - which he didn't after writing the pilot, he left the day to day helming to Chris Chibnall for the first two seasons - you get family relationships between adults suddenly front and center of the emotional narrative in Children of Earth: Jack and his daughter Alice, Ianto and his sister Rhiannon (and his brother-in-law). Scenes like Rhiannon bringing the laptop to her on the run brother and her support of him intermingled with a terse exchange about their childhood and father are very clearly from the same brain that wrote the Rose-Jackie-Mickey scene in Parting of the Ways. ) The way family can get under your skin for good or ill, the intermingling of the need to escape and the need to be close, the emotional power a family member can have to compell you to do things even though you're both adults, those are aspects that Davies' writing keeps coming back to, and he certainly put it front and center with Jackie and Rose. They love each other deeply; they're also capable of hurting each other, not deliberately, but they do. Rose with her absences and her tendency to take Jackie for granted; Jackie with the fear that the airs and graces comment betrays, the idea that Rose having a better job could mean Rose moving out of her life, so if keeping Rose means seeing Rose lose chances, so be it. There is a self centredness in them both. And yet they're also capable of so much more. Jackie ends up participating in saving the world business (and putting up with the Doctor) with great courage, and when the chips, no pun with Rose's favourite food intended, come down she helps her daughter even if that could mean losing her. For Rose, not returning to her mother through her adventures is not an option. She doesn't idealize Jackie the way she does the dead father she didn't know (until time travel strikes), but Jackie is the one she always comes back to. Her horror when eventually encountering an Alternate Universe version of Jackie who doesn't know her and hence has no love for her and disdains her is palpable. And while I have some quibbles with the way Rose's storyline ended (and then kept on not ending), what I most definitely approve of is having Jackie with her daughter in the Zeppelin world. Never mind the Doctor, I can't imagine Jackie and Rose being separated forever by alternate dimensions.
Jackie and Rose weren't the first mother and daughter relationship on Doctor Who involving a Companion to matter narratively; I think that honour belongs to Ace, who has really huge Mommy issues and then gets confronted with a baby version of her mother in Curse of Fenris. But other than in baby form, we never meet Ace's mother. She never gets a life and opinions on her own. Whereas Jackie Tyler, no matter whether you love her or find her irritating, absolutely blazes with life and very much has her own point of view on just about everything. (And starts the proud New Who tradition of mothers slapping the Doctor.) I can't imagine the Whoverse without her.
