Ok, the excitement is building as we await the series final of Doctor Who. *No spoilers please.* So it’s probably a good time for another open Whoverse thread. We’re going to be somewhat Time Lord deprived for a bit. But at least there’s Cap’n Jack.
Maybe I could wile away the time writing me/Capn’Jack slashfic. Would that actually be slashfic? Do the time streams need to meet?
Oh, and since – spoilers notwithstanding – we know there’s going to be a regeneration, it might be time also for a bit of speculation on who will replace David Tennant.
Update: Tigtog has provided a thread for those who need to vent at Russell T. Davies (who wrote this episode). I can see the need.
I hear Howard’s out of a job.
Matt Lucas would be fun. Lots more scope for love interests….
Gotta go, trying to find a spare tape but the nasty, static charged NW here in the mountains is playing havoc with my reception. I’ll be lucky to see it, let alone record. What about Sarah jane last week? I pulled out some old b&w of her time and she’s aged well. I didn’t actually like her much at the time, my heart belonged to the Huntress, but she’s kept the Faith.
I remember being scared by the first series a long long time ago. No female Doctors yet.
I admire the perseverance, fortitude and strong stomachs that LP bloggers have shown for the new Dr Who.
Gender politics killed Doctor Donna. Not happy!
Well personally, I’m really glad we won’t have to put up with Catherine Tate yelling and overacting.
I liked her as Donna.
But it’s a really fucked story – she only finds fulfilment by assimilating all the Doctor’s *male* super knowledge so he has to wipe it and her memory and send her back to the family and being a temp.
Colour me disillusioned.
Good to see the Daleks being exploderated in the traditional hokey fashion.
I must despite the extra dollars on the sets, the extras and the hairdos, it lacks the grandeur of the old ones. And the Dr biting the scenery three times an episode doesn’t help.
Show me, don’t tell me!
I see your point Mark. I agree it was a really silly plot line. I think they’ve overstated everything too much on this series. I’ve found it a bit underwhelming.
Crikey! Did David Tennant strangle your cat or something?
It’s just barely possible there might be something worth investigating or appreciating in what is now — by a fairly wide margin — Britain’s most critically acclaimed and popular cultural product.
Fine, I’m also wondering why Other Doctor seemingly didn’t have the problems Donna had. Instead he got to live out a pseudo-idyllic future with Rose (poor Rose – didn’t she want to be an adventurer not get stuck in some isolated time spot – or is the assumption that she’s more motivated by lerve – not that she gets the dr she wanted!)…
Awful ending.
And why did the dr want to save Davros and not Dalek Kaan?
I loled at Cap’n Jack’s line about the three Doctors.
No, I don’t it is even barely possible.
Yep but poor old Capn Jack didn’t get his threesome!
Gender politics were awful. Donna can only “grow” by the deus ex machina of the doctor’s intervention, and when she overcomes her insecurities and approaches equality with him, he puts her back in her place (literally). Sucks.
No more Dalkes?
Update: Tigtog has provided a thread for those who need to vent at Russell T. Davies (who wrote this episode). I can see the need.
I am sure one Dalek will have survived in some corner of reality.
Well bit hard to top that story – saved not the earth, galaxy, universe, multi-verse but reality itself full stop.
I guess I think the ending was species-ist more than sexist – can we really believe that the plot could have played out any differently if the companion who took on the Time Lordy knowledge was a man rather than a woman (setting aside the problematic that in the current format, the primary companion is always female)?
We know from the series that Time Lord DNA is pretty wacky stuff, so it’s no surprise that Doctor 2 got off lightly compared to Donna (if you call a massively truncated lifespan ‘getting off lightly’).
There’s an interesting piece of footage cut from the beach scene, which shows Donna handing Doctor 2 a bit of coral to grow a new TARDIS, with the information that she figured out how to speed up the growth process. Cut for time, so I’m treating it as canonical
Yes, Nick, I strongly suspect that a male companion would not have been treated in this way, or if he was, he wouldn’t have had such a condescending journey from bimbo to enlightened back to bimbo that Donna was given.
I think the only relevant difference between Donna and Other Doctor here was the magical powers of his penis!
Then I quite genuinely feel sorry for you.
I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what kind of power the Doctor’s Trouser Time Lord has.
Ultimately, it really comes down to how much slack we’re willing to grant Russell T Davies: if a writer who vigourously exercises sexist tropes in his fiction gave us this storyline then I admit it would sit pretty uncomfortably with me.
Donna was one of the best companions evah.
I gonna miss her and hope that there is the usual plot twist to bring her back.
There seems to be a slightly better than zero chance that she’ll return, somehow: both Catherine Tate and Steven Moffat have given suitably vague and positive comments on that score.
That the knowledge of advanced beings doesn’t fit into a human brain long term is hardly a new concept – eg. what happened to Jack O’Neil in Stargate who went from tech-ignorant guy to super smart guy and back again in one episode.
Did he get his memory wiped, and get returned to his family to work in typing and filing?
I should mention I was enjoying the ep before the dumb arsed ending!
The juxtaposition of high tech and mumbo jumbo just did not work for me at all. As for the sexist stuff – he is a time lord and the last of his kind (well he used to be but remember that there is a daughter time lord swanning the universe somewhere- I wonder why she didn’t pop up in the final episode – being the end of reality and time after all), but sexist? Nope.
And have people noticed how down the Who-niverse is on mothers? Petty, carping, worrying and never quite realising how their children may be fulfilled as adults?
So when the Dr Who hybrid gets left with alt-Rose, Mum comes too. The ultimate secrifice.
The survivability of the Dr Who hybrid as opposed to the non-viability of Dr Donna suggests that the Time Lord brain connects the the cerebellum to the cerebrum through – the penis?
That said – I loved the exchange with Drs Donna and Who playing verbal games with the Tate argot.
Kim – well he wasn’t typing and filing before, and his family was all dead so that would be a little hard (only a little time travel for them!). But if you’re asking if he was returned to the same state as prior to exposure the “ancient knowledge”, then yes. Although he remembered the experience, did not retain any of the knowledge – back to his happily technologically ignorant state (thats essentially one of his roles in the team).
Similarly when Daniel was essentially returned from being an “ascended being” he lost all his powers and memories as well. So no, the ending was of no surprise to me.
PF @ 28 – hopefully she’ll be back in future episodes (or if we’re lucky there will be a spin off
I think the ending was full of inconsistencies. As you’ve pointed out Mark, why did the other ‘doctor’ survive to live happily with the lovely Rose.
Another thing I didn’t understand is that we kept being told that the Daleks were unbeatable, yet when Donna became half-doctor she vanquished them witout any trouble. It was just a matter of pulling a few levers.
I suspect the deus ex machina nature of the Donna/Doctor swap doesn’t work well as drama. It’s more a comedy trope, ‘Freaky Friday’ sort of territory. We’re given a huge build up to the final showdown, then it’s all solved by a convenient plot point, the Donna/Doctor meld. It’s unsatisfying because it doesn’t solve the dramatic problems that have been set up for us.
But the companion/mother relationships are weird. I get a bit sick of the whingy, carping mothers.
Kim, I think Captain Jack will get his threesome, just quietly. He got to ride off into the sunset with Martha and Mickey, very happily.
I reckon Donna/Doctor could very well somehow regenerate as the fully-fledged new doctor, somehow becoming a complete Time-Lord, and thus the first female Doctor, in the next series. At least that was my first thought at the end of the show. But I suppose some-one who knows more about the next series will post a comment telling me I got it wrong.
And I would have preferred it was Rose.
Dalek Kahn is such a cutie! My new favourite tv character. In the old ep where he first appears, and at the end commands the Doctor to EXTERMINATE him, I actually cried. I may have been coming down at the time.
The end last night was awful, after I had such high hopes.
Re: Donna – There will be an emergency of some kind, and Donna’s kindly doofus gramps will realise he has to break the Doctor’s vow o’ silence commandment, cos it’s the only thing to prevent the return of the Daleks/Cybermen enslaving humanity/Mickey releasing a single.
…There’s a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the Doctor Who season four final: Larvatus Prodeo, Hoyden About Town, and of course the live-blogging at Circulating Library…
Except Rose’s Mum was already living in the alt-Earth, with her not-dead-in-that-timeline husband and a brand new baby son. So not sacrificing much either this time or the first time she ended up there, actually. Jackie does rather well, really.
I was very disappointed with the ending too. If I was Donna, I would rather ‘burn up’ knowing that I had saved time and everything. Surely he only had to take away the Dr dna/knowledge not everything, too unfair, as well as rather sexist imo.
Withering review at Behind the Sofa:
http://www.behindthesofa.org.uk/2008/07/the-bollocks-ma.html#
Well, for what it matters, I liked it. Perhaps a little overdone, but then it was a season finale.
Actually it was reminiscent of a multiple doctor special. In the “old days” they would have yoinked a couple of ex-doctors out of the spacetime continuum and forced them to totter around with each other until one of them showed the others up and they all went back to pottering around the fringes of existence looking for celery or a new scarf.
At least this way you get a slightly more intersting cast – even if we have to put up with Harkness.
Sexist? You’re trying it on. Right?
“But it’s a really fucked story – she only finds fulfilment by assimilating all the Doctor’s *male* super knowledge so he has to wipe it and her memory and send her back to the family and being a temp.
Colour me disillusioned.”
Colour you daft and cynical, more like. 1. No “fulfillment” – the bloody opposite in fact. 2. Strong female characters regardless of metacrises. 3. “*male* super knowledge”. WTF!?!?!? What’s so bloody male about it? He’s a freaking timelord! If someone went and half-morphed with a male bat, would their new sonar be “male” as well. Or would it be a bat sonar?
Sheesh! Tardis-envy much?
Fine at #31 – the universe is pack full of inconsistencies. I hardly think Doctor Who can tie together ALL the knots in one go, especially in a short episode. And that’s half the fun – you never know when something will reappear and require running from. It’s brilliant!