The Name of the Doctor
May. 18th, 2013 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daibhidcEpic!
The opening scene - the First Doctor steals the TARDIS and Clara's there! The Forrest Gumping of Clara into the Doctor's life was very well done (although for some reason Simeon looked a bit more "obvious CSO effect" when his turn came). And if we're getting this much Past Doctor action now, what's the aniversary special going to be like?
It's not clear how the guy at the start came by the knowledge about the Doctor's secret. Presumably the Whispermen and Dr Simeon passed it to him as part of The Plan. (It's also not especially clear how the Whispermen can casually jaunt everyone through time to Trenzalore, but there you go.)
(I like the ironic touch that the very similar Whispermen and Silence -- similar names even -- have exact opposite goals. And the Whispermen are brilliantly creepy!)
And it turns out the important thing is the Doctor's tomb. Hmm. You know, back when The Pandorica Opens" was broadcast, Lawrence Miles objected that Moffat had nicked the central conceit of Alien Bodies (where everyone in the galaxy is after the Doctor's dead body from the future). When "The Impossible Astronaut" was broadcast, it was suggested on radwm that the Moff had thought "If Mad Larry's going to accuse me of stealing his idea, then sod it, I'll actually do so." And now, well...
The River in the mental connection is the datastick River from after "Silence in the Library"? Didn't see that coming. It's very rare I say "are the kids going to follow this?" but I wonder if anyone would grasp the implication that both diaries are now filled (and therefore Live River and the Doctor can no longer meet) if they haven't read Steven Moffat's comments on the subject in the DWM interview. (Or maybe I'm off-base and the diaries aren't filled, in which case the Doctor's pain comes from knowing River will never see him again, but not the other way round.)
"On the fields of Trenzalore, where no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer..." We're just ignoring that, are we? Ah, well.
Not clear why Strax reverted to an unreconstructed Sontaran warrior, but Vastra didn't revert to the lizard woman living in the London sewers and eating people. Maybe she knew the Doctor for longer, or something.
And yes, the whole Clara thing makes sense, and doesn't make "this" Clara any less real, which I was strongly expecting. In fact, it goes out of its way to establish 2013 Clara's realness, doubtless mindful of how much we all hated the Sam Jones thing.
I anticipate a lot of complaints that the "revelation" of the Doctor's name was a cop-out, but it was always going to be a cop-out, and this is at least an elegent one: the only name of the Doctor that's relevent to anything is "the Doctor", and the important bit becomes the incarnation who rejected that name. During the bit where he's in shadow I suspected, as I believe I was meant to, that the reveal was going to be Michael Jayston, but instead it's John Freakin' Hurt! Awesome! (Although I suspect the name he goes by is still going to be the Valeyard, given that Dr Simeon made a point of bringing it up.)
Six months? Aaargh!!
The opening scene - the First Doctor steals the TARDIS and Clara's there! The Forrest Gumping of Clara into the Doctor's life was very well done (although for some reason Simeon looked a bit more "obvious CSO effect" when his turn came). And if we're getting this much Past Doctor action now, what's the aniversary special going to be like?
It's not clear how the guy at the start came by the knowledge about the Doctor's secret. Presumably the Whispermen and Dr Simeon passed it to him as part of The Plan. (It's also not especially clear how the Whispermen can casually jaunt everyone through time to Trenzalore, but there you go.)
(I like the ironic touch that the very similar Whispermen and Silence -- similar names even -- have exact opposite goals. And the Whispermen are brilliantly creepy!)
And it turns out the important thing is the Doctor's tomb. Hmm. You know, back when The Pandorica Opens" was broadcast, Lawrence Miles objected that Moffat had nicked the central conceit of Alien Bodies (where everyone in the galaxy is after the Doctor's dead body from the future). When "The Impossible Astronaut" was broadcast, it was suggested on radwm that the Moff had thought "If Mad Larry's going to accuse me of stealing his idea, then sod it, I'll actually do so." And now, well...
The River in the mental connection is the datastick River from after "Silence in the Library"? Didn't see that coming. It's very rare I say "are the kids going to follow this?" but I wonder if anyone would grasp the implication that both diaries are now filled (and therefore Live River and the Doctor can no longer meet) if they haven't read Steven Moffat's comments on the subject in the DWM interview. (Or maybe I'm off-base and the diaries aren't filled, in which case the Doctor's pain comes from knowing River will never see him again, but not the other way round.)
"On the fields of Trenzalore, where no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer..." We're just ignoring that, are we? Ah, well.
Not clear why Strax reverted to an unreconstructed Sontaran warrior, but Vastra didn't revert to the lizard woman living in the London sewers and eating people. Maybe she knew the Doctor for longer, or something.
And yes, the whole Clara thing makes sense, and doesn't make "this" Clara any less real, which I was strongly expecting. In fact, it goes out of its way to establish 2013 Clara's realness, doubtless mindful of how much we all hated the Sam Jones thing.
I anticipate a lot of complaints that the "revelation" of the Doctor's name was a cop-out, but it was always going to be a cop-out, and this is at least an elegent one: the only name of the Doctor that's relevent to anything is "the Doctor", and the important bit becomes the incarnation who rejected that name. During the bit where he's in shadow I suspected, as I believe I was meant to, that the reveal was going to be Michael Jayston, but instead it's John Freakin' Hurt! Awesome! (Although I suspect the name he goes by is still going to be the Valeyard, given that Dr Simeon made a point of bringing it up.)
Six months? Aaargh!!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-05-18 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-18 08:45 pm (UTC)So I'm not clear on the very end. John Hurt is the new Doctor, or a piece of mythology I'm not familiar with?
no subject
Date: 2013-05-18 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-19 12:03 pm (UTC)The worst part is that it makes no sense to put a sparkly column in your tomb that someone can walk into and corrupt your timeline. It doesn't matter how hidden or protected it is (nowhere near enough, it would seem), there is no conceivable reason why the sparkly column has to exist AT ALL. Giving a character the ultimate vulnerability just so you can have a story about the character having the ultimate vulnerability is bad storytelling.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-19 01:24 pm (UTC)(Though now I put it that way, I do have to wonder who knew enough about the Doctor to build the door that only the Doctor could open...)
no subject
Date: 2013-05-19 03:55 pm (UTC)I think the root problem is that Moffatt doesn't think of the Doctor as a character. He thinks of the Doctor as mythology, and characters in mythologies aren't so much individuals as metaphors or something. The sun god doesn't have to make sense, as Terry Pratchett shows in _Pyramids_. Moffatt wanted to tell a story in which having access to the Doctor's tomb gives someone the power to change his past, so he hacked together a mythology to fit that pattern.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-20 06:59 pm (UTC)So in order to be a Doctor Who fan, I've got to conclude that "made up timey-wimey crap for the sake of the story this writer wants to tell" doesn't bother me. (In general. I reserve the right to be annoyed by future examples if I don't think the story justifies the timey wimey crap.)
And as far as mythologising the Doctor goes, becoming a column of time energy on his death is an improvement on becoming a glowy superbeing thanks to the power of everyone believing in him...
no subject
Date: 2013-05-19 04:42 pm (UTC)But the Doctor isn't the only one who could open it, as evidenced by the fact that someone who else actually did - and regardless of her "current" situation, it seems within the bounds of possibility that she could have been present at the Doctor's death, given the non-linearity of their relationship.