Welcome back to the second installment of my epic project, the NuWho Retrospective Review. I appreciate the feedback and discussion of the last installment. In this episode, we get a little darker in terms of the theme, but we get some of my favorite comic moments of the whole series. For those of you who weren't here last time, yes, I will read things into the episode that may or may not be there. It's the reason I signed up to be an English major. Feel free to read your own stuff into the episode and leave it in the comments.
Doctor... Who This Time?
Yes, granted, this is the same actor who we saw flicking his overly large ears experimentally, getting strangled my a plastic arm and pleading for understanding when the Nestene consciousness recognized him as a murderer. That was Series 1, Episode 1. I'm going to look at this revival of
Doctor Who as a relationship at this stage. Now we're on Series 1, Episode 2 and we're done with the first date. In my experience, the second date is the first date, only with a little more brutal honesty. You get the weird stuff from date 3 onward and we'll talk about that later. So, The Doctor is still funny. Still absolutely alien in some respects, but still oddly human in others. The way he strikes me is that he is Rose's annoying older brother at this point. Honestly, I wouldn't know, since my only brother is 4.5 years younger than me and my older sister is nothing like the Doctor. I do, however, have friends with husbands. By and large, they treat me as their very weird sister and I'm basing a lot of this observation one on "older brother" in particular. He's the one with whom I have such a weird sense of humor that we assume we'll have neighboring cottages in hell. (He, like me, considers the idea that Jesus might have been a Time Lord.) He's infuriated me frequently, but also made me feel like I'm his best friend in the world. I approved of him when he gave his future wife a subscription to the
Doctor Who magazine for Valentine's Day. And last year, he turned up at my Halloween party dressed as the 9th Doctor. You can see why I like him. The Doctor is such an older sibling and that is why I haven't been able to 'ship him and Rose in this incarnation. (For those of you who need clarification, 'shipping refers to having faith in a relation-SHIP.) He teases her for being part of a narrow-minded species, goads her into trying something much more dangerous than she could have imagined and lists her as his "plus-one." While that is the term for it, other Doctors do give their companions more respect. "Plus-one" sounds like she's the kid sister tagging along. He does annoy me when he doesn't come to Rose's defense when Jabe calls her a prostitute, but I think that action is more about testing her character than not caring. When things go wrong, he knows how to make it right, even if it's just by taking someone back to a world that they can still understand. He does show some fleeting signs of his respect for the human race. Even though he mocks our worry over dying from bad eggs or global warming, he admires that there's a New Roman Empire and the human race endures to the year 5,000,000,000. He dances along--very badly--to "Tainted Love." It is also nice to see that he's alien even to the aliens. Jabe is as confused by his assertion that trouble is "Fantastic!" as the rest of us. He's bizarre enough that he can get away with a gift of air from his lungs, which has to be my favorite moment of the whole episode. I'm trying that at the next birthday party I attend. I enjoy the Doctor in this episode because rather than the snarky action hero we saw in the first episode, we see his higher intelligence side. I'm sure I'm not the only one who heard "Adherents of the Repeated Meme" and wondered if they were some internet-based lifeform or just 5 billion years worth of lolcatz addicts. He sees through the titles to the truth. In reaching the shield controls, he abandons calculation and survives on instinct. This is the kind of man we can trust to lead us through danger without subjecting us to unnecessary peril. Yet he is the man who takes a Mace Windu approach to justice. Cassandra dies because she won't be able to stand trial and he decides independently that she's "too dangerous to be kept alive." I do not like that decision, even if I understand the motivation behind it.