Doctor Who 7.09 and 7.10

[selenak]

Actually I haven't got anything to say about Cold War because I found it, like many a Gatiss script (why won't the man stick to acting?) very bland. But Hide I really liked.



First of all, I was completely distracted from the story for a moment when squeeing about the blue crystal from Metabilis III. You know, as in: THE BLUE CRYSTAL FROM METABILIS 3. LIke the one the Doctor gives Jo as a farewell present, Jo sends back while travelling the Amazon for safe keeping by the time Sarah Jane is the Companion, and it ends up triggering the events from Planet of the Spiders and thus Three's death and regeneration into Four?

I am not sure why this particular nod to the past, other than the obvious 70s connection ("it's the 70s, companions are called assistants"), but if it wasn't just a bit of nostalgia thrown in, it could be interesting foreshadowing.

Secondly: we've got several parallels going again, the Doctor and Alec, obviously (or rather the Doctor and the Professor, which is what Ace named the Doctor), but also the Doctor and the "monster" of the episode ("what does every lonely monster want? A companion!"). As opposed to last week, when Clara was written by Gatiss as Generic Companion X, this week we had follow up on everything previously established and character stuff. The Doctor is still investigating her. (Though, btw: it occurs to me he doesn't need an empath to "read" Clara. If he asks and she's willing, he could offer to use his own telepathy. Though, hang on, I think that particular ability hasn't been used in the Moffat era so far and on a Watsonian level you could say the Doctor doesn't want to because the last two people he did the Time Lord version of mind melding with were Donna and the Master.) Emma doesn't sense anything unusual - though she senses the slice of ice in the Doctor's heart, which is a fairy tale image scriptwriter Neil Gross pinched directly from The Snow Queen, which begs the obvious question - is the Doctor Kay or the Snow Queen herself, and is Clara Gerda or the Robber Girl? Otoh the TARDIS still has issues which remind me of her reaction to Jack post immortality. (You know, the one half of fanfiction swears the Doctor lied about, projecting his own issues on her. Not that the issues weren't his own, but that doesn't mean she didn't/doesn't have them, also. Hm. If what makes Clara occur in several time periods is related to Jack's transformation, though obviously not identical, it may have been/will be triggered by the TARDIS at a future point, which would make additional sense of the reluctance - future paradox, or something like that.)

The Doctor figuring out the identity of the ghost through taking polaroids through the entire life cycle of Earth, and Clara's reaction to seeing this is the kind scene I loved in End of Days (Rose and the dying Earth) and The Runaway Bride (Donna sees Earth begin). Because this is really something major, and the Companions responding to it brings home their own emotional reality. Also note: "Everything dies". Which is the thing Moffat in all his episodes during the Davies era and in his own era went up against with his "everyone lives" theme. Clara asking the Doctor whether she (or any other human beings) are ghosts to him has several layers. Ghosts are the ones already dead and (that's what Clara means, in any case), not real: but in this episode, the first ghost is actually not a dead woman at all but a very much alive one, and a time traveller who was simply trapped and needed to freed, and the "monster" wasn't a monster but Treebeard an Ent a creature looking like a walking gnarled tree looking to reunite with the mate we've seen at intervals crawling around at the house.

(And then the Doctor quotes Cole Porter. I approve.)

Pinched, err, paid homage to from a famous Haunted House classic, in fact, THE Haunted House classic: Clara assuming the Doctor is holding her hand when it turns out he's not is directly from The Hounting of Hill House when Eleanor assumes Theodora is holding her hands while there is knocking and knocking and then Theo switches on the light and is on the other end of the room, and obviously whatever held Eleanor's hand wasn't Theo at all.

The Doctor going bananas, no pun intended, over the 70s instruments made me smile. He had stuff very much like it when he was Three, you know.

Lastly: so it's canon know human will invent their own methods of time travelling at some point?

Comments

[legionseagle]

The time agency would have to have invented their own methods of time travel>

There's a famous science fiction story whose name I've been trying to remember which has that image of the person trapped in a moment of time who's trying to run home.

Anyway, I was also pleased to hear the ice in his his heart line given that I'd referenced ot Snow Queen on the Christmas Special

[selenak]

Very good point, although I never believed the time agency was exclusively staffed by humans. :)

Kudos for the Snow Queen reference!

[legionseagle]

I've found the story I mean; it's The Man Who Walked Home by James Tiptree.

[kerrypolka]

which begs the obvious question - is the Doctor Kay or the Snow Queen herself, and is Clara Gerda or the Robber Girl?

Yes, I was thinking about this! I don't think we know enough about Clara yet to be able to tell, but one of my favourite things about the Doctor is that he isn't a ruler, a director or a mastermind (or at least, he shouldn't be), and I like him best when he's a bit put-upon. Which is to say, I have no idea what the show will do, but I prefer him to be Kay.

[selenak]

I'm voting for Kay as well.

[legionseagle]

The TARDIS might be the Snow Queen. After all, as I said in the note, the Snow Queen isn't presented by Andersen as inherently bad.

[kerrypolka]

And it fits with how she picked him to run away with - the TARDIS performed the transformative act on the Doctor, not vice versa.

[legionseagle]

Incidentally, largely speaking I don't think Gatiss can write his way out of a paper bag (his Lucifer Box story is one of the few books I've found too boring to get past the first two chapters in) though I didn't mind what he did on Sherlock. I agree about Cold War, though; the only mildly distinguished bits about it were the scenes between Clara and the Professor.

[kalypso]

Clara was written by Gatiss as Generic Companion X

In Cold War, she kept reminding me of Ace - not the way she was written, but something about her hair being tied back, and I suppose the presence of Soviet officers and the sea and the 1980s brought back The Curse of Fenric. Last night I got excited by the thought that they were both made about forty years after the events shown - well, 46 in the case of Fenric - but then I realised I'd muddled the dates of Cold War and Hide, and Cold War was a mere thirty-year gap.

Also I keep expecting someone else to mention, on the theme of the Doctor reflecting this week's adversary, the dark glasses he was wearing as he fell out of the TARDIS, not at all unlike the lenses in the Ice Warrior's helmet.

[kalypso]

we've got several parallels going again, the Doctor and Alec, obviously (or rather the Doctor and the Professor, which is what Ace named the Doctor), but also the Doctor and the "monster"

Interesting, because I am now looking for the Doctor's mirror in each episode, but in this one I think I'd have picked Hila, the time traveller living her life at a different pace from the rest of us. If she had any sense of us flashing by as she ran through the wood, we'd be the ghosts to her - and indeed we would be anyway, as we all died long before she was born. And at the same time she was here long before us.

I originally thought the "monster" would be Clara, in a somehow reversible accident caused by taking the TARDIS into an extreme situation. I was rather annoyed that there didn't seem to be any consequences at all of that (unless they're being saved up for next week), as they seemed to be there longer than ten seconds. (The only explanation I can think of is that Emma's intervention slowed down time in the pocket universe to match ours, therefore giving them more time, but I'd have liked to have that spelled out. It did appear to be important that Emma intervened again, even though the rescue was done by TARDIS.) But though the creature evidently wasn't Clara, I'm still not convinced by the Doctor's reading that the love calling from universe to universe had to be boy-girl - on analogy with Emma and Hila, I think it's as likely to be a blood-tie: mother and child, or some more distant ancestor and descendant.

I was a bit surprised that they didn't do more with Palmer's guilt over sending others into danger (even though he seemed to have gone into danger himself); I expected him to try to stop Emma agreeing to launch the second rescue, and for Hila to have to persuade her instead. Or perhaps some parallel with Clara persuading the TARDIS to risk death. As you can tell, that was the incident that kept nagging at me. I was happy about the TARDIS ultimately deciding to risk all for the Doctor, but, unless next week proves otherwise, the fact that they seemed to get away with it unscathed and without explanation was annoying; it just suggested the TARDIS was ridiculously over-cautious and wrong (and Clara significantly braver and right), which I don't accept.