Thoughts on DW 6x02

[annissamazing]

I've finished making all my flashcards and I've outlined two of four essays. I took a couple of hours off in order to watch the newest Doctor Who episode with flydye8. I love watching these episodes with her! It's neat to see her reactions come through as I'm typing mine.

I've enjoyed these first two episodes more than I did most of Season 5, but there was something in "Day of the Moon" that stopped me cold.


I didn't mind River's jump in the pool. I actually kind of liked it despite the cheesy splash of water coming up out of the TARDIS.

What the Doctor does to stop the Silence... He just implanted the suggestion to murder every single one of them on sight in the minds of every human being for the rest of time. He basically ordered the human race to commit genocide and judging from Canton's bow-tie fixing, most people won't have any choice but to murder the Silence any time they see one, even if the aliens are not doing anything bad. Did this strike anyone else as extremely out-of-character?

Comments

[redknightalex.livejournal.com]

I didn't notice it as first, mostly because my head was reeling from all the stuff that was going on at the time, but it is and isn't OOC for the Doctor, although maybe for Eleven.

Eight destroyed the Time Lords and the Daleks because all of creation was at stake. Ten repeated the measure in EoT. Eleven was doing the same thing just he wasn't the only pulling the trigger. Very much the coward, in a way, like Nine was in PotW.

Then again, many Doctors, like Four (he couldn't stop the creation of the Daleks, correct?), wouldn't do such a thing. So...I guess it depends on the incarnation of the Doctor you're viewing.

Still, Eleven plants the seed and lets everyone else do his dirty work. That's very much the Doctor (unless it's the Master).

[annissamazing]

Yes, I remember the Dalek/Time Lord genocide. It also nearly destroyed him to do it, which is why I don't think he would have done it again.

Someone over at doctor_who had a good explanation for why it wasn't genocide. It made me feel better about that part.

[highway-west.livejournal.com]

It was exceptionally chilling and an extreme situation.

He also gave them the chance to surrender and run.

[annissamazing]

I must've missed him giving them a chance. There was so much going on, though, that's not surprising.

[garillama.livejournal.com]

Eh, it was his usual "You've got us surrounded and no reason to think we have the upper hand, but you should totally surrender and run now! No? Okay, keel you all." Not exactly an informed decision.

He also let River shoot up the place, and seemed almost admiring. Compare that to Nine swapping Jack's gun with a banana and finding another way out, or Ten getting super tense every time he saw a gun.


I really liked the episode. It was really well put together, and every hint seemed to support my theory on who River killed (though I'm guessing we'll have to wait until season finale to find that out). I know I'm going to have a hard time watching the moon landing, knowing that a message might be flashing by and I'd never remember... Now I'm wondering if we're meant to notice this character shift of the Doctor's, or if we're supposed to be too repulsed and scared of the aliens to notice that it's genocide.


Hmm, I may need an eleven icon, all of mine are horribly outdated :-)

[annissamazing]

Yeah, I noticed he didn't seem to mind River shooting the place up so much. But since the Silence (or is that Silents?) were going all vacuum cleaner on them, I didn't worry about it.

I've got a couple Eleven icons you're welcome to.

[caz963.livejournal.com]

I've got mixed feelings about it. I feel cheated that we didn't get ANY answers to anything at all - not just the biggies that of course we'll have to wait until the end of the series for.
I don't think the Doctor's actions re. the Silence are all that OOC - I mean, Seven was a manipulative bugger and got the Daleks to destroy themselves using their own technology, didn't he? But I'm pretty uncomfortable with the thought that he's as good as turned the human race into a race of killers "on sight". Davros may have taunted Ten about the way he turned his friends into weapons, but those friends were at least acting of their own free will.

My reactions are here (http://caz963.livejournal.com/443429.html) if you're interested.

[annissamazing]

This: "he's as good as turned the human race into a race of killers 'on sight'."

That's what made me uncomfortable. Someone over at doctorwho said that it wasn't technically a genocide, because all the Silents would need to do is leave Earth and stay away from mankind. I can deal with that. But I'm still a little squicked out by the idea of every human being automatically killing the Silents as though they were spiders in the bathtub without any thought or reason as to why they were doing it.

I've got other questions as well, but I'll go read your reaction post first!

[develish1]

I'd say it's OOC for the Doctor as a whole, when you consider how horrified previous ones have been at so much as the sight of a gun, but not for the Doctor as he exists in Moffat's twisted mind it seems.

Sadly, if the Moff keeps this up, he'll be losing this long time DW fan, and many more I suspect.

[annissamazing]

This makes me sad because I think you're right. My enthusiasm has definitely waned over the past year and a half. I still find the show enjoyable, but I don't feel as passionately as I did between 2006 (when I started watching) and 2009. Some of that may be natural burnout, but I think most of it has to do with the changes that I don't feel are for the best. This is an extreme example of that. I've always admired the way the Doctor abstains from using guns. Which is not to say he never uses weapons and I also don't buy that he's a pacifist. But guns are an easy solution in tv writing and I liked that Doctor Who was always more clever than that.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Yayyyyy, I've finally caught up and can read what people are saying!

OK, so my negative reaction is to the "threaten the women and children" trope which got ground into me in the horror movies lit crit class. Usually Doctor Who doesn't go for it in its purest form, with the sniffling and the pregnant lady and the whimpering little girl. I found that distracting because it was both obvious and further cheapening of Amy's character.

My positive reactions are that for some reason River's growing on me more and more, that this episode is totally WAILING on the timey-wimey, and that I'm enjoying leaving the whole "Schroedinger's baby shoots the Doctor dead" arc for a longer and more complex resolution.

(My current money: the version in which "positive" is correct is the one in which the Doctor dies, but there is a toggle in the fabric of Things and we need to go to the version of the toggle that is "negative." There will be ensuing wreckage in the timeline what with figuring out how the Silence gets resolved in the reality split, but whatever.)

So, about guns............

(Yes, that's a longer ellipsis than usual. I have a lot of thinking to do in that space.)

It might be from having watched so many years of face changes. It might be from being a really forgiving television watcher and looking for a Watsonian explanation for nearly anything, because I'd rather stay in the story. Uh, caution, that's a TV Tropes link. I'll see you 25 tabs from now.

The only thing I've ever not resolved into my understanding of the Doctor is the half-human bullcrap and instant gearshift into smooching a companion and getting all relationship schmoopy after a few hours acquaintance. Both were in the fresh hell known as the Fox TV Movie. Everything else, I've fit into a very large, very misshapen and contradictory puzzle.

He won't unmake the Daleks. He will genocide them 10 times, but he won't make them not have been. He will let terrible things slide because hey, it's history, and then he'll go all shouty on some legal Happiness dealers in a slum, or depose the relatively ethical PM because she's not as omnipotently benevolent as he is, or make some of his enemies immortal so they'll be miserable longer. What. The. Hell. Doctor.

Sometimes he wakes up in a new face and has to come to terms with having been a complete git for the last one. Sometimes he learns better, sometimes he backslides, sometimes a situation's just more desperate than that, sometimes he's having a lousy day and he's scared and he can't think of another way.

When a friend was talking about non-violent philosophy in her journal, and I brought up the Doctor's contradictions and what seems like very shoddy pragmatism for a pacifist, she said this:

"Non-violence is for me a commitment to search for better solutions. At every level."

He has openly welcomed Jack showing up with a massive Dalek-exploding rocket launcher. That was just not a situation with any obviously better solutions. And sometimes he is tired, and out of options, and human mortal.

It took them three months in a straitjacket, on the run, writing on their faces in marker, to even be absolutely sure the parameters of what they were dealing with. He took the tools he had in the opportunity he was given. He may regret this later. He may regret it deeply.

I mostly just hope that when he does, he remembers that he deposed Harriet Jones for exactly the same action.

[annissamazing]

I could literally read your thoughts on DW all day long and be perfectly content. I love how your mind works and I love reading what you think.

Regarding the "threaten the women and children trope": I totally missed it and now I'm shocked that I did. You're absolutely right. And right now we don't really know why it was done. And I'm kind of terrified that they might go with an alien rape story line to explain the pregnancy. I love scary, but that truly crosses a line.

I don't believe the Doctor is a pacifist. While I think that he wants to come up with peaceful solutions to the dilemmas he faces, it isn't always possible, hence his "one chance" policy.

I didn't understand what the deal was with the beginning of episode 2. Why were they being chased by Canton? Why did they have to pretend to die? Why was the Doctor in a straitjacket having a cell made from materials human beings had no reason to have had access to built around him? It made for an exciting beginning, but if it was to establish that they'd been studying up on the Silence that whole time, I think they could have been more clear.

Ah, TV tropes... I'll be back in a few hours. ;)

[gement.livejournal.com]

Ooh, ooh! I can explain the last part!

The Doctor was being unavoidably(?) arrested. Yes, I know, he breaks out every other time, but for some reason the Secret Service is much better at this and they're keeping him at Roswell or something. He manages to have a quiet word with Canton, though, and enough of it sticks that Canton follows through on the Doctor's plan.

The Doctor's plan, which is more convoluted than usual, involves his three teammates running around like crazy documenting where they end up with hashmarks all over their faces. Apparently none of the Silence ever bother to suggest "destroy all your notes." I'd suggest they were uploading to the cloud, but 1969, so I'll just call that a plot hole you could drive a truck through. :)

Canton gets the Roswell team to pull out the big guns on Doctor Containment, not go anywhere near him, and build a nasty box around him, which a Silent probably really wouldn't want to get trapped in. He does a very convincing job of "killing" the teammates for containment, and presumably fed his staff and superiors some overarching story about how these people had some power going on that only one person should get contaminated with, which was why he should handle all the shooting and body bag stuff personally, then pack them into the containment area? Ahem.

They now have an actually Silent-proofed area to work in, which gives them unobserved TARDIS access. Now they can go party with no Silent following them around to say "Stop that." ... Until they walk out again, which is another plot hole you could drive a truck through, but hush. I'm gonna stop thinking about the problems with that subplot, because I'm a TOTAL sucker for watching people act like they're in a life or death situation, especially when it turns out to be a Totally Clever Plan.

I mean, presumably the Doctor's spent a great deal of time blinking and ignoring these damn things. He's spent a LONG time on Earth. If he'd ever become aware this was a problem to work on, he'd have been writing all over his arms 500 years ago. The only reason it came up now was they were in the time and place where this spooky little girl was making noise. He is grabbing this chance with both hands before it gets wiped out of his mind again.

A point I'd been noodling on but heard someone else articulate first is that the core horror trope here is loss of memory. And it's paired with River's relationship troubles, which are heavily analogous to loving someone with Alzheimer's Syndrome. Yeowch.

[gement.livejournal.com]

I had a thought about his thing with River, and it has to do with cowboys.

There's a particular Look that goes with traditional cowboy sex appeal. Big duster, big hat, craggy face, ice blue eyes, slow drawl. I was all wibbly over Doc Holiday in Tombstone.

A friend in college said, when I mentioned it, that he actually knew a guy who had the look and the accent to totally attract anyone who was into that. When I perked up, he said, "Sadly, you'd never want to date him, because he actually has the habits that go with the attitude. He drinks like a fish and smokes two packs a day."

Sometimes people compromise on startling things when hormones are involved. River is absolutely the Doctor's version of a cowboy fetish. Someone actually as free-wheeling as the Doctor, someone who can give him a real challenge and get into plenty of trouble on her own, is more than likely to be good with a gun. Even in this episode, when she flattened the room, she followed it with something like, "Uh, did he see that? He gets upset about these things."

If they'd met in the right order, they might have steered clear of each other over this, but they didn't. Each swept the other up in the sheer drunken exhilaration of paradox romance. "Oh, and she uses a gun, which kinda freaks me out, but apparently I keep putting up with it, because here we both are."

Anyway. Noodling now that I have the luxury of being caught up.

[annissamazing]

Hence the massive appeal of Malcolm Reynolds. All the cowboy goodness, none of the horseshit.

It's an interesting situation. I don't yet know enough about River to decide whether or not I like their relationship. I was disappointed about the kissing (I think I need to adopt the word "snogging." The American equivalent, "making out," just doesn't sound as good) because it narrows their relationship down to a romantic one and I was hoping that we would be surprised by something different.