Doctor Who: “A Death in the Family”

I listened to Big Finish’s A Death in the Family this past weekend. I’m not certain, but this may be my favorite Seventh Doctor story yet.

This is a complicated Doctor Who story. I’m never that person who ponders the PLOTS of Who, trying to figure out if they hang together or not. This frequently means that the more timey-wimey stories lose me at some point. This problem is exacerbated with Big Finish’s audioplays, as some scenes take me a moment to figure out where and when we are, and who is speaking to whom. But none of that interfered with my enjoyment of “A Death in the Family.” Nor did it interfere with my dread.

This story is a rollercoaster of inevitable, spliced with a funhouse of doublecross and time-space trickery. Yet the emotional beats come down like a freight train. It’s all here, the themes I most love in Who. The lies and manipulation and secrets of The Doctor. The faith of his Companions. How he abuses that faith. How the Companions are changed, inexorably and not always for the better. How lies start to run both ways, and love and faith are weak.

The Doctor I recognize, the one I see on screen or in the audioplays and say, “yes, that, that is my Doctor,” is this wry, dark, funny, sardonic old man. Sometimes bitter, sometimes exultant, but so very knowing. Playing a deep game that wears a coat of inadvertent contempt for other creatures. The Doctor treasures life, yes – but sometimes he forgets to respect it.

It’s not a spoiler to say that Evelyn is in this story — Maggie Stables is in the credits. And her scenes are fantastic. She embodies another of my favorite themes in fiction, the consequences of one’s past choices. Her conversation with The Doctor at the end of the story is one I devoutly hope the Eleventh Doctor remembers when he looks at Clara.

This Doctor is my Doctor. I don’t always like him, I don’t always trust him, but if the universe must have a semi-benevolent omnipotent creature interfering in its workings, I want it to be this one.

Unless …

Unless I can have whatever he’s turning Ace into, instead.

The Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Doctors have not always seen their Companions clearly enough. That lack of attention keeps coming back in ways The Doctor doesn’t like. You’d think that, eventually, he’d learn.

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Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge

Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge is one of Big Finish’s Doctor Who audioplays. It’s Seventh Doctor, Ace, and Hex, and it is a very good story.

The Big Finish audioplays are, in general, an excellent investment of time and money if one is in need of a Classic Doctor Who story. (I have listened to almost all of the Seventh Doctor’s plays.) This one is particularly good. The plot is tight — it’s complicated, with the two intertwining threads of any good Doctor Who story — and it is largely character-based. There’s not a lot of weird forces swooping in at the last minute to reveal something that would have made a difference all along. The production is quite good — all strange voice effects are used in moderation. Moreover, I could tell all the minor characters apparent without any difficultly.

The acting, though — that is very, very good in this story. I mean, Aldred and McCoy and Olivier are always good. But not only are they on fire in this story, the supporting cast is excellent.

If you want to try out a Big Finish Seventh Doctor story, Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge has joined the ranks of those I recommend.

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Recent media consumption

1. Doctor Who has resumed. I am enjoying the episodes so far, though I am not enormously invested in them. I don’t care much what The Great Mystery of Clara Oswin Oswald is one way or the other, I’m merely looking forward to finding out. And the actress is very good.

2. Game of Thrones is back! As far as I am concerned, this show is actually titled The Women of Game of Thrones, Plus Some of the Dudes Who Help Them. So I am very happy with the episodes so far.

3. Bomb Girls season two is quite fun. I am given to understand that the show was not renewed, so I hope they wrap it up gracefully.

4. Once Upon a Time is on hiatus for another week. I was explaining to some people this weekend that OUaT is really 30% of a good show, 40% of a perfectly acceptable show, and 30% What the HELL Were You Thinking. Moreover, the show either does not keep a comprehensive bible, or they don’t consult it often enough. But I am looking forward to new episodes anyway.

5. I tried watching more of Heroes this weekend. When the show aired I stuck out the first two seasons, despite a vast, simmering indifference towards over half the plots and characters. But this was SUPERHEROES on TELEVISION, and I am a person who not only watched every episode of Misfits of Science, I own bootleg dvds of same. So, you understand, it takes a LOT to make me stop watching a super-powers television show.

I watched Great American Hero, for pity’s sake.

I have watched Manimal.

Heroes is on NetFlix, so I am giving season three another try. I swear, though, Suresh and the Petrelli boys put me right to sleep. They may be even more tediously uninteresting that Fitz on Scandal. (Whose scenes with Olivia I now fast-forward through.)

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June 15 2012

1. Adventures in cooking continue apace. I bought some vegetarian fake sausages at the co-op yesterday, and made a chipotle-bean-tomato thingy that was REALLY good. And, even using pre-made fake meats, it is still lower in salt than, say, an egg cheese mcmuffin. The bread I make for myself is lower in salt than commercial bread. The beans I make for myself are lower in salt than commercial beans. If I could make cheese, I bet it would be lower in salt than the cheese from the store.

2. M is afraid of tornadoes. To deal with this he watches endless episodes of the tv show Stormchasers.

If we give nothing else to our son, we have given him the idea that the answer to fear is knowledge. However scary reality is — and tornadoes are plenty scary — it is less scary than wondering in ignorance. Everybody knows that the feeling you get when you finally see the monster in the movie is relief, not greater terror.

3. I rewatched the classic Doctor Who story “The Happiness Patrol” this week. There’s something odd in that story, something about the performance of femininity. The actual members of the Happiness Patrol are almost all women, and are attired in exaggerated — even for the 1980s — makeup and hair. Femininity as performance, as statement. And at the same time, compliance and fake smiles and getting along with others are the rewarded behaviors. Expressions of anger, or fear, or resentment are punished.

The whole thing smacks as a metaphor for a woman or child living with an abuser. In some ways. I’m not saying that’s what the writers meant, and the metaphor is not perfect. But there is some serious creepiness under all the pink and glitter.

Spoilery thoughts about Doctor Who

I saw “A Good Man Goes to War” this weekend. My thoughts on it are behind the cut-tag.

Catching up with Big Finish’s Seventh Doctor

I recently remembered that Big Finish Productions probably had more Seventh Doctor audioplays since the last time I’d checked. They did, and there were some I’d missed last time around as well. I bought six. I’ve listened to four.

Wow. So far? Really damn depressing.

SOME SLIGHT SPOILERS FOLLOW, NOT MANY.

Both “The Settling” and “Night Terrors” come early in Ace-and-Hex’s term as Companions. “Night Terrors” is Hex’s fourth adventure. (So far. Big Finish could always insert another story, I expect.) “The Settling” is his sixth. It’s not exactly clear how old Ace is when she and Hex meet in “The Harvest,” but the first sequence of adventures after Hex joins the TARDIS seem to happen fairly quickly.

I don’t have a, a coherent theory yet of the Doctor’s personality based on these. But they are dark, and Hex (a Companion introduced in the audioplays) is really quite angry about his helplessness, and Ace is a fair bit more cynical about “the Professor” than I’d gotten accustomed to.

I think it’s fair to say that in the television run of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, Ace is a teenager. Not naive, precisely, but lacking in a breadth of experience. This is swiftly rectified. In the audioplays, Ace and the Doctor travel together for quite some time. It’s never nailed down, that I remember, but from conversation and such it seems that Ace might be anywhere from twenty-two to as much as twenty-eight years old. A young adult, but one with years of her life spent with the Doctor.

In the audioplays set later in this career, Ace is much wiser. She isn’t cynical about her Professor, exactly, but she know that he will hide important truths from her, that he will bark orders that are only sometimes really important, that he plays games with absolutely everyone including her. Older Ace has accepted this. She also knows that he will always come for her. She has seen him lose, but has never seen him completely fail. Older Ace has learned to value the incremental successes as much — or more than — the big wins.

“Night Terrors” and “The Settling” fall between the show and the older Ace of, say, “The Shadow of the Scourge.” The naivete has worn off, but it’s not entirely replaced by trust.

I also listened to “Valhalla” and “The Death Collectors.” These both come much later in the Seventh Doctor’s life. In “Valhalla” the Doctor is specifically rejecting the whole idea of having Companions. Freeloaders, he calls them, always in need of rescue. This is long after he and Ace parted ways, after Bernice Summerfield, after Roz Forrester. I haven’t read all the Virgin New Adventure books so I don’t know what happens in them. Whatever it was, it seems to have left a bad taste in the Doctor’s mouth. He runs around Companionless for a while, and then picks up Elizabeth Klein.

We first met Klein ages ago, in “Colditz.” In that, the Doctor and Ace destroyed her entire possible future. The world and life she came from was erased because the Doctor deemed it an unacceptable abberation. Now, it was a world in which the Nazis under Adolf Hitler had won World War II. Many people would not consider its destruction a loss. But it was Klein’s home. And now she is stuck in our world. When the Doctor meets up with her again in “A Thousand Tiny Wings” she has been searching for a way to restore what was lost. And the Doctor kidnaps her, forces her to become his Companion so that he can keep her under house arrest.

This is dark, dark stuff.

I don’t know how much more Big Finish is planning to wedge in at this point in the Seventh Doctor’s career. As much as Sylvester McCoy is interested in producing, I expect. Similarly, I expect there will be more Ace adventures, and Ace and Hex, and Ace and Bernice. And the writing and plots and characterization will vary from one audioplay to the next, and nothing is going to be perfectly consistent given the nature of how these things are put in order. (I would NOT want to be the keeper of the Show Bible for Big Finish. That sounds painful.) But the arc of the Seventh Doctor seems … downward. A darkening.

Is this what happens, I wonder, when the Doctor isn’t killed and forced to regenerate every couple of years? Is this what happens to the Eighth, is this darker ending what we saw with the Ninth? We saw a handful of the Tenth Doctor specials in that last proto-season, and in them the Doctor got progressively more hubristic, darker, and out of control.

I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to make of it all.

Yet, as taken aback as I am sometimes at what the Seventh Doctor says and does, I quite like these audioplays. They don’t shy away from what I consider to be some of the most important things about the Doctor. He’s alien. He’s very, very old. He is not nice. He may be good — mostly, most of the time, at least as far as we can understand his actions it can look that way — but nice is different than good.

Non-spoilery thoughts on current Doctor Who

I’ve read some valid criticisms of Doctor Who‘s currently airing season. The two episodes we’ve seen, “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon” both have significant plot holes. Yet I find I am loving these two episodes more than I did almost anything in the previous season.

I agree with the plot holes that others have pointed out. And I’m trying to figure out why they largely don’t matter to me. I think it’s because I watch Doctor Who to get a feeling. And as long as I have that feeling, I don’t care what is happening on the screen.

So, Sigrid, what feeling is that, and how is it being generated by Doctor Who?

Vague descriptions of character interactions of the current season follow, with no plot specifics.

Doctor Who is a tragedy in the classic Aristotelian sense.

“The classic discussion of Greek tragedy is Aristotle’s Poetics. He defines tragedy as ‘the imitation of an action that is serious and also as having magnitude, complete in itself.’ He continues, ‘Tragedy is a form of drama exciting the emotions of pity and fear. Its action should be single and complete, presenting a reversal of fortune, involving persons renowned and of superior attainments, and it should be written in poetry embellished with every kind of artistic expression.’ The writer presents ‘incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to interpet its catharsis of such of such emotions’ (by catharsis, Aristotle means a purging or sweeping away of the pity and fear aroused by the tragic action).” (source CUNY Brooklyn English Department)

The course of The Doctor as we see it is tragic in this sense. He is a person of renowned and superior attainments. His fortunes, however often he triumphs in specific moments, are and have been a reversal or downward slide over many long periods of his life. He is alone, his people are dead, and the mistakes he has made in his life are vast, far-reaching, with galactic consequences. The plots have great magnitude; the stakes are always high. The stories arouse fear — great whacking amounts of fear, if you’re me — and pity. I pity The Doctor. I also pity his Companions. At the far end of every wonderful and successful adventure is a waiting end. Eventually, that specific Companion will no longer be there. Even in the rare cases whereupon the Companion leaves voluntarily and happily, a great sense of loss is felt by all parties. And the Companions don’t leave in that state very often.

I really, really like this particular Whovian form of tragedy. I get that catharsis at the end of the stories. Everything was terrifying and tragic, death and despair were all about, and then somehow The Doctor and his Companions pull out a save. I can live with the saves being so flimsy and jury-rigged as to be a nigh-literal deus ex machina. What I want is that child-like feeling of relief.

This is, after all, supposedly a children’s show. The Doctor is a parent. All-powerful, all-knowing, inexplicable, callous, ever-present yet unseen, reigning wrath and safety down in equal measure. He’s a sort of parent I hope to never be, yet I cannot ever know how my parental reign is viewed by my children. The Doctor doesn’t explain, he ACTS, and at the end you are warm and safe and ready for another adventure.

I crave those moments when The Doctor stands up straight, looking sad and noble and grimly determined, and casts yet another villain into the fate they have inadvertently wrought for themselves. I live for those moments when The Doctor effectively says, “if you weren’t a homicidal jackass you would not BE in this position, but you are and you are getting what you deserve.” Yet I also live for the moments when The Doctor is frightening, alien, and cruel. Because he is. Because what he is, what he does, is jerk everyone around. Best intentions, sure, but he leaves wrack and ruin in his wake. I never, ever, ever, want to heard the TARDIS. I like my life, I love my family and my children, and if I hear the TARDIS it means horror and death are right behind. I loved the Matt Smith Christmas special, “A Christmas Carol,” because it shows The Doctor at his most interferey and callous. He is doing it for the greater good, yes, certainly. But he is still re-writing a man’s life without that man’s consent. The hubris of it all is measureless.

And that’s The Doctor. I grin when he tells the villain that they have no idea how much trouble they are in now that The Doctor is angry. but I shudder, too. Because that much power in one man is … unconscionable.

I am liking the current season because Rory and River appear to be aware of this. They are willing Companions, yes. They love and respect The Doctor and are on his side. But they both understand he is a trainwreck in their lives. They are both perfectly aware that he will destroy them, by sheer accident, simply because he is there. And they are choosing, eyes open and understanding, to continue.

This, to me, is the true heart of the Doctor Who tragedy. All these smart, wonderful, vibrant people who are riding with Phaeton in Apollo’s chariot to devastation, of their own choosing. And this is why the current season is working for me despite the plot holes, why it’s working for me far better than last season. I never got the sense, last season, that Amy Pond ever really understood what was happening to her. I never comprehended her motives, she seemed a sort of black-box of Girl Adventuress. This season — so far — I have Rory and River. And they walk willingly forward into tragedy. I’m a sucker for that. And, who knows? Maybe Amy Pond will grow on me.

So, I’m optimistic so far. Optimistic that I, at least, will get what I love out of Doctor Who. Here’s hoping.

A random collection for your Sunday morning

1. I am legally watching the new season of Doctor Who, buying the episodes one day late on Zune. Thank you, BBC, BBC America, and Zune, for allowing me to do this cheaply and legally in the manner I prefer. I appreciate it.

2. The sermons from Unity Unitarian, the church where my kids go for choir, are available as a podcast. It updates irregularly, a batch coming through every month or so. If you like your religion/spirituality/philosophy to be thought-provoking, multicultural, and without too much of that “God” stuff, you might enjoy it.

3. I saw the movie Hanna on Friday. I’m not sure I have more thoughts, except, I quite liked it.

4. I am listening to A Game of Thrones on audiobook. One of my friends told me this is essentially a fantasy recreation of the Wars of the Roses, and now I am confusing events that happened in reality with events in the books, and trying to map out how the Starks and the Percys, and I don’t even KNOW that much about the Wars of the Roses.

I bought some books, arriving soon, to educate myself on same. In order that I might better make historical analogies in a work of fiction. Idek.

5. Everyone at my workplace is very het up and tense about the current FAA bad press. I am staying out of all possible conversations regarding same.

6. My very smart son realized that, since his mother is the Easter Bunny, the gifts and candy he receives on Easter morning must be hidden in the house. We hope that this will not engender unauthorized searches for candy and presents running up to future holidays.

7. In the most recent episode of The Vampire Diaries, Nina Dobrev dances around with a bottle of vodka to the tune “Get Some” by the band Lykke Li. I highly recommend you go check them out!

After the Hero’s Journey

Tiger Beatdown has a post up about Joan of Arc, and bravery, and what Joan is a saint of, and those who run towards the gunshots. This is fitting in very well with a conversation I was having with Caroline about a type of story and character exemplified by a phrase from the tv show The Wire. That phrase is, “giving a fuck when it is not your job to give a fuck.”

I like that sort of story quite a bit. A story about a character who is not involved in whatever bad thing is happening, who has the opportunity and the perfect excuse to walk away but chooses, instead, to give a fuck. I think, on reflection, this is why I like Doctor Who. The Doctor as I best know him — Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh — has made a career out of stepping into things he could just as easily leave behind. This is also why I like superhero stories. Superheroes are largely people who have chosen to make a career out of stepping into other people’s problems and doing what they can to help. I like those sorts of people.

It’s not the same thing as altruism. Altruism, I am suspicious of altruism. I prefer it when I can see that a stranger’s kind actions are motivated by self-interest. I feel I can rely on your self-interest more than I can on your altruistic whim. The GaF sort of people are not doing this because they love others so much. They do it because they need to feel good about themselves, and this is the way they accomplish that. The cops on The Wire need to think of themselves as po-leece. It’s how they get through the day. And part of being police is stepping into other people’s messes. The Doctor interferes because he feels guilty and responsible and interfering mitigates that. He also derives a sense of victory, of skill and mastery, from defeating others. And he gets companionship from those he saves. Superheroes are motivated by a variety of reasons, but part of designing the character is coming up with why they do it.

It’s knight-errantry, is what it is, and I like those stories. But the GaF character and story also goes a certain distance towards solving, or lessening, the Protagonist Problem.

I can’t remember where I read about this, probably on LiveJournal somewhere. The gist of the Protagonist Problem is this: If you base your story on the Hero’s Journey, then every supporting character in your story is really there only as a prop or obstacle in relation to the Hero. So how do you make complex supporting characters? The corollary to the Protagonist Problem, and the reason it interests me, is that the vast majority of protagonists in science fiction, fantasy, and comic books are straight white men. So all the women, people of color, glbts, children, elderly, and disabled are, if they appear in the story at all, props filling a role in someone else’s story. How do we fix this?

One commonly suggested solution is to make the protagonist something other than a straight white able-bodied young man. This tactic is valid and I endorse it. But it doesn’t always fit the story. Another approach is the GaF story. The GaF story isn’t necessarily about the protagonist’s journey. It can be about the community the protagonist enters. It can be about a web of relationships, about the tug of conflicting loyalties and demands. The GaF story can, in fact, almost completely ignore the heroic protagonist and tell the story of the people affected by his or her actions.

Greg Rucka’s Gotham Central is a GaF story on a number of levels. On one level it’s about cops, people who have chosen a profession that requires them to insert themselves into other people’s problems. On another level it’s the story of the community that suffers and benefits from superhero interference. And on a third level it’s the story of the network of relationships the cops have with each other, and how they are constantly balancing their desire to give a fuck about each other with their desire to respect each other’s privacy and autonomy.

Of course Gotham Central has protagonists. And there are character arcs, and possibly even a Hero’s Journey for some of the cops, if you squint and look hard. But the comic is not about growth and change; it’s about keeping on, about living every day, about small victories and medium defeats. It’s a comic about endurance, not accomplishment. It’s a comic for grown-ups who have figured out that they are not on a Hero’s Journey. No one is going to make them king.

But that’s the wonderful, lovely thing about the GaF stories — you don’t need a journey towards Super Specialness to be a hero to someone. You don’t need to have purple eyes, or a magic ring, or a mysterious
birthright.

This may seem to be an odd thing to say about a story type that I claim to find in superhero fiction. But while I did start reading superhero comics for the special powers, I no longer find that the powers and specialness are what I need out of the genre. I don’t read X-Men to find out how someday I will find the group of people who truly understands and appreciates how special and powerful I am, and how the things that made me weird and freakish are actually good. I read that story — I needed that story — when I was a teenager. But these days I read the story of a group of people who continually choose to attempt to do good in the world when they have every reason to leave it behind. I read and love Batgirl, and Birds of Prey, and New Avengers. What I love about these books isn’t the superpowers. It the choices. These are the people who run towards the gunshots.

All you need to be a hero, in these stories, is to give a fuck about somebody else when you could just as easily walk away.

This, too, is The Doctor

Big Finish Productions recently put out three new Seventh Doctor audioplays. I hadn’t gotten them right away since they didn’t feature Ace or Hex. Instead, the companion on these adventure is Elizabeth Klein, the Nazi scientist featured in the previous audioplay Colditz. (Now infamous for having David Tennant in the cast, playing a Nazi.) I had liked Klein okay, but not enough to rush out for the new adventures.

My mistake.

What I had not realized is that in these plays, Klein is not a willing Companion. Has that happened, before, much? Has The Doctor kidnapped someone who travels with him in resentful false camaraderie, biding their time until escape? The Doctor is . . . extremely sure of himself, when he forces Klein to come along. he is so damn certain that he can make her see his view. What hubris, sir. What titanic hubris.

I love that this, too, is part of The Doctor. I love, treasure, seeing his terrible ideas. When he forgets his own rules — that creatures get to make their own path as long as they don’t commit genocide, damage the timestream, or any number of other exceptions that seemed important at the time … Oh, wait. That’s right. If there are rules, they largely exist at The Doctor’s whim. And most of the time, mostly, that works out to everyone’s advantage. But sometimes, The Doctor is a flaming idiot. He needs that. We, the audience, need that. We need to remember that the soul of the show is the relationship between The Doctor and his Companions, not The Doctor’s infallibility.

(Also, the first story in this trilogy, A Thousand Tiny Wings, is one of the best-written, best-acted, and best-produced Big Finish plays I’ve ever heard.)