So Doctor Who is back. The first special with David Tennant’s Ten/Fourteen incarnation. Of course, Chibnall’s drastic character changes to the Doctor means our numbering system is a joke, now, but it’s what we have.
WARNING: Spoilers for The Star Beast to follow.
I was not terribly excited for the Chibnall era of Doctor Who, and I was not terribly exciting to see Davies return. I found his turn on the show, especially after Tennant took over, was to insert a bunch of useless “jokes” that involved gay people just to aggravate the bigots in the audience. The jokes never served the story or world building and felt like intrusions.
The Nu-Who era has touched on the historical cruelty to the companions, but hasn’t done the new companions much better. Rose was abandoned in an alternate timeline with a lookalike Doctor boytoy. Donna’s mind was wiped. Martha at least got to walk away and was only dragged back into the story completely written off.
Amy and Rory got their happy ending and for once (in Nu-Who) the Doctor was hurt by their departure more than they were. Clara got screwed over pretty bad with a fake happy ending. Bill was just plain killed off, as I recall.
Yaz, Ryan, and Graham suffered greatly. Their endings were bittersweet.
So in some ways I figure this is Davies attempting to undo the damage he did to Donna, who was given so much and had it all taken away. I have to wonder if she got it back cleanly, and if they solved the problem well.
And I don’t think they did.
The problem is Donna, running with Ten, absorbed regeneration energy that burned her mind out. The Doctor had to erase her memories to save her, leaving her family with “if she remembers, she dies.” So it’s not just Donna who suffers, but her mother and her grandfather as well. They’re lives are burdened with the knowledge that Donna’s life depends on her being ignorant. That was never going to turn out well.
Sylvia’s reactions to the Doctor were the best. She is really pissed off, and rightly so, and she doesn’t give damn that the Doctor has lived centuries dealing with what he did to Donna, or that he spent a millennia as a woman. None of that matters. He broke Donna, and then he came back, threatening to break her again.
Of course Donna has to remember everything. The situation forces the Doctor to unlock her mind and she experiences regeneration of a sort, then saves the day because Doctor Donna is truly fun to watch, and then has to deal with her impending death.
Which doesn’t happen.
The handwavium out is that when she gave birth to her son Jason, the metacrisis was shared, so when Donna went all regen-effect, so did Jason, who in the intervening years has become Rose. Apparently everything she did was affected by having this weird shared repressed memory with her mother. This allows allowed the potential danger to be shared, and somehow Jason becoming Rose fixed everything. I’m not sure.
I was worried when I heard Yasmin Finney was playing a character named Rose, only because the name comes with a lot of baggage. I heard Finney is a transgender woman, which means absolutely nothing to me. Her ability to act has nothing to do with that part of her life. The name she chose for herself makes sense, though, if she was dealing with these images hidden from her mother’s mind. Ten was very much stuck on Rose. Annoyingly so.
In the end I think naming the character Rose had good reasons, and Finney’s performance was fine. I suspect the character is a bit younger that Finney is herself.
But in the end, Donna and Rose decide to resolve the whole problem of the Time Lord deathtrap by “letting it go” which didn’t work for me. The crack about a “male-presenting time lord wouldn’t understand” makes no sense to say to a person who just spent a thousands years as a woman. It was one of those pointless pings that seem to be there only to aggravate a part of the audience.
It also didn’t make sense to me because in the women’s stories I’ve been listening to, women don’t get the option to “let it go.” They have to carry the burdens, take care of things, rebuild after disaster. The equivalent to the hero’s journey I’ve seen the most is the woman hero throwing away the lies she had been told her whole life and getting to be who she wants to be.
Which makes Rose a more difficult character.
Most transgender stories are on the theme of becoming exactly who you are, your truest self. Rose even says this in the fugue of being a Time Lord for a bit: I am finally who I am. Really? She’s gone through the transition process just to become Rose, and with this energy flowing through her she realizes this is who she is, and she saves the day because she’s got the extreme cleverness of a Time Lord, and she throws this away? To save her mother, sure. I get that. I just found it hard to believe that after becoming who she is (Rose) to something even more powerfully who she is (Doctor Rose?), she would toss it aside so willingly. I was also disappointed that she didn’t jump in the TARDIS at the end.
However, it was not all bad news for me. As much as I wasn’t bouncing with anticipation to watch the special, I did enjoy most of it. Part of it was the colors and pacing and Murray Gold’s score. It wanted to entertain me. It wanted me to have fun. Tennant and Tate are just fun to watch together. The plot was simple enough to follow, with only one big question of “what’s really going on” which was answered in an obvious way that didn’t really hurt anything.
I’m not fond of the new TARDIS but I suspect it was a cheap set to build and it will probably see its final form when the next incarnation takes over.
I’m not done with Doctor Who yet, but I’m feeling exhausted by all the franchises I’m watching. I seem to be fine when watching the show, but as soon as it is done, I’m dissatisfied.