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  • Locked thread
jng2058
Jul 17, 2010

We have the tools, we have the talent!





2house2fly posted:

My strategy of voting with letters representing my general opinion of series 6 (B-A-D-B-A-D-B-A-D etc) is surprisingly effective so far.

My "As and Fs Only" strategy is not. :negative:

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And More
Jun 19, 2013

How far, Doctor?
How long have you lived?

Sighence posted:

Yeah, still in the anti-lead by a full gently caress-up. My reign of shittiest overall guesser is intact.

I'm coming for you. :mad: It's a race to the bottom from here on out.

That pirate episode really blindsided me. I had no idea people actually liked badly-lit, unsympathetic, grimy pirate adventures.

BSam
Nov 24, 2012

And More posted:

I'm coming for you. :mad: It's a race to the bottom from here on out.

That pirate episode really blindsided me. I had no idea people actually liked badly-lit, unsympathetic, grimy pirate adventures.

Maybe if The Doctor met some pirates and there was some singing...

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

BSam posted:

Maybe if The Doctor met some pirates and there was some singing...

IIIIIIIII~~~

ThePlague-Daemon
Apr 16, 2008

~Neck Angels~

jng2058 posted:

My "As and Fs Only" strategy is not. :negative:

We should have reversed the strategy. We'd have easily been tied with Sighence.

edit: Actually there's no reason to not have done that this season. Sighence's strategy is the same, just backwards. I should have thought this through better.

ThePlague-Daemon fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Mar 30, 2015

Calamity Brain
Jan 27, 2011

California Dreamin'

Wait, so if the grade is B and I guess F, that's 4 points, not 3? Is there an extra punishment for going as low as an F?

Pocky In My Pocket
Jan 27, 2005

Giant robots shouldn't fight!






DetoxP posted:

Wait, so if the grade is B and I guess F, that's 4 points, not 3? Is there an extra punishment for going as low as an F?

Oh balls I forgot to do the jiggery with the letters

(I calculate scores by telling the spreadsheet to count guessesas hex numbers the subtract them from the actual one. I just have to remember to change all f's to e's. Doh)

Calamity Brain
Jan 27, 2011

California Dreamin'

Little_wh0re posted:

Oh balls I forgot to do the jiggery with the letters

(I calculate scores by telling the spreadsheet to count guessesas hex numbers the subtract them from the actual one. I just have to remember to change all f's to e's. Doh)

Oh, haha, that's ok. I just thought there was some sort of new extra risky system where an F is two spots away from D and I missed the announcement.

fatherboxx
Mar 25, 2013

Bicyclops posted:

What does this hateful bullshit even mean?

~~Goodnight Batman and don't forget to make good art ~~

Sighence
Aug 26, 2009

And More posted:

That pirate episode really blindsided me. I had no idea people actually liked badly-lit, unsympathetic, grimy pirate adventures.

Yeah this is where knowing Occ's 'judge it for what it tries to be' comes in. I personally give this an F but if you go with Occ's take - and take into account his grade inflation, because let's face it, if this episode happened in Season One it'd not be a B at all - and my decision here was an easy one.

NieR Occomata
Jan 18, 2009

Glory to Mankind.

Doctor Who
"The Doctor's Wife"
Series 6, Episode 4

Very recently I rewatched Max Landis' fantastic youtube short film, "Wrestling Isn't Wrestling". In a mere twenty-four minutes, Max recounts the loose oral history of famous WWE wrestler Triple H. The story of Triple H's rise-and-fall-and-rise-again to power is fascinating in and of itself, and the way Max recounts the narrative makes the story unbelievably engrossing, even to someone like me who does not and has never given a poo poo about professional wrestling.

But what's most important, and most relevant to Doctor Who, is the button Max himself puts on the short: As he excitedly explains, the story of Triple H isn't great because it's "real", it's because it's just that- a story. Wrestling is absurd! It's insane! At one point he fights an undying wizard brought back from the dead via blood sacrifice with a mother loving sledge hammer! But the point of it is, the particulars don't matter- the story of Triple H is ultimately about a man who always felt that everyone viewed him as inadequate, and wanted to prove them wrong- but in so doing ended up, bitterly ironically, proving his own inadequacy. The details are simply impressions in the larger painting that is Triple H's twenty-year-plus career, informing the larger narrative of the storylines of the WWE.

Wrestling and Who are very much alike in this way- they've both ran for so long, and have their own created universes and metanarratives and devout, divisive fandoms, and they're both appealing for the exact same reasons- Wrestling is great when it's great because it's this mythic, massive story that's run forever and will continue to run forever, full of intensely layered characters with differing motivations. So it doesn't matter that it isn't "real", it doesn't matter that it's full of silly poo poo like The Undertaker et al, because it's formed on this base that is grandiose, practically operatic. It's the reason WWE fans stick through it even when it's terrible: it's so much bigger than any one of them, its scope so immensely large and far-reaching that it's breath-taking, awe-inspiring in its enormousness. "Now don't get me wrong, a lot of wrestling sucks," Max admits at the end of the video. "But when it's good, it's loving great."

"The Doctor's Wife" is as incredible episode because it translates the fifty-plus years of Who stories into a single, beautiful hour. It's able to honor and to pay off its own expansive backstory in such a way as to stun the viewing audience, literally stun them.

Who is The Doctor? I'm not being cute, I'm not trying to make a terrible pun, I'm not trying to be all philosophical. It's not a rhetorical question. I'm asking who The Doctor is as a literary character]. Much like how "Wrestling Isn't Wrestling" is about the backstory of Triple H, "The Doctor's Wife" ends up being about the backstory of The Doctor, so let's examine The Doctor as a work of fiction.

We know everything about The Doctor's character- he's a genuinely good-hearted, optimistic, time-travelling demi-god -so let's ignore that for now. What are The Doctor's motivations? Well, he ended up stealing a time-travelling spaceship from the society of demi-gods that he belonged to and then went cruising the universe righting interstellar wrongs. Eventually, that same society of demi-gods was destroyed- by him, in a desperate attempt to save the universe.

So what does that mean for The Doctor? A clear major defining arc of his character is attempting to reconnect with the society he left behind. We've seen, time and again throughout the revival, that The Doctor will break the universe in half if it means meeting another Time Lord- he consistently attempted to forgive and change The Master, even after it was deathly evident that he was a murderous psychopath who'd never stop trying to destroy everyone and everything around him. The Doctor did and does these sorts of things- including how the entirety of "The Doctor's Wife" is built around him literally leaving the universe to answer a Time Lord's summon -is due, to me at least, to his crippling loneliness. The Doctor desperately wants to find some vestige of the home he abandoned, literally wandering the galaxy in search of a place to stay, that reminds him of the planet he left- and most sorrowfully of all, ended up destroying.

The Doctor is a wanderer, in the most literal sense of the term; he never stays in one place or even time for too long, in constant search for a place that he knows doesn't exist- somewhere like Gallifrey. He's on a continuous Hero's Journey, which explains his exploits, his prime motivation as a character- trying to proceed through a road of trials to hopefully, but knowingly ineffectually, return to some remnant of the home that no longer exists, having grown and changed.

This sort of endless wandering radiates back onto his character, as the other major defining characteristic of The Doctor is his incessant loneliness. Literally the last of his race, he's a time-travelling demi-god who's able to reincarnate endlessly, who's explicitly smarter and more brilliant than everyone else in the known universe. So what does that mean? He's alienated and Othered from everyone he meets, friend and foe alike. His enemies fear and hate him, and his friends are constantly impressed and wowed by him. But nobody ever understands him, there's nobody he can really relate to on the level he wants and needs to because, as a matter of course, his brain works in fifteen dimensions and he lives forever. This is why, of course, he has Companions- as a stopgap to ground him, to on some at least surface level rein him in, but it's all just that- a stopgap. It's all impermanent. Even if a Companion ever could truly comprehend the enormousness of The Doctor, which they simply cannot, it wouldn't matter because eventually all of his Companions leave him, whether it be from having gone through their own versions of The Hero's Journey and left of their own accord or from some other inciting event- death, injury, love, etc -that forces the issue.

What one realizes when having watched a lot of Doctor Who is that The Doctor's character is the most tragic of all; by the very nature of it being a fifty-plus year run of a television show about the titular Doctor, the audience realizes that The Doctor simply can't ever have an arc that ends. I said way back at the end of Series Four that Ten's character ends depressingly, because he realizes in his final moments that he's never been able to have the personal breakthrough he needed to understand who he truly is; that's true. But even beyond that The Doctor, in general, can't ever go through trials and emerge out the other side, having changed, because then the show is over. There's always another enemy to fight, always another world to save. And The Doctor will always be brilliant, and unknowable, and complicated, and lonely, and bored, because if he was ever truly satisfied then Doctor Who ends. In a way, the character of The Doctor and his journey on Who is this almost Faustian tragedy, a shouty alien space man condemned for fifty-plus years to never be genuinely content.

These are the two main motivations of The Doctor- he wants a Home to go back to, and a Person to share it with. Not necessarily a romantic interest, just someone who truly understands him and he can relate to fully.

And thus explains the TARDIS. In the absence of having either Home or Person, The Doctor has turned the TARDIS- the single largest reminder of the planet he annihilated, and the only thing that is as complex and unique as himself- into both things. We've always seen that The Doctor treats the TARDIS as real- despite that fact that it's literally a sentient organism (as "The Doctor's Wife" inarguably illustrates), to him it's a combination of home and confidante. Eleven saw the new TARDIS console in "Eleventh Hour" and called it "sexy"- that wasn't just a joke or an interesting character quirk of Matt Smith's Doctor, it's indicative of the level of affection he has attached to it.

The communication and interaction has always been almost entirely one-way. Despite the importance that Eleven attaches to it, it's still a phonebox spaceship- it has no voice, no physical avatar for itself, is unable to converse with The Doctor on any deeply intellectual level.

Which is what makes the introduction of Suranne Jones' Idris to this episode and the decades-long canon of DW so inherently powerful. The TARDIS finally, finally gets a voice, a body, if only for one hour, and it turns out that Idrs is exactly the sort of person who can relate to and understand The Doctor, the person he's so desperately been searching for all these years. Idris' mind, replaced with the TARDIS' sentience, operates on the exact same wavelength that The Doctor's does- able to make the same deductive leaps that The Doctor so often does while still operating on multiple levels and even dimensions simultaneously. Idris and The Doctor relate and grow close in a way no other character and The Doctor has ever had, simply because the TARDIS, with a body, is so very similar to The Doctor, and most importantly has known and worked with him for so long she understands him better, in some ways, than he understands himself.

The introduction of TARDIS-as-Idris to the story is so important because it finally closes The Doctor's own expansive, decades-long journey- but only temporarily. He's finally found a person that he can share with and relate to fully- it's no mistake that the episode is titled "The Doctor's Wife". It, too, makes the end of the episode all the more tragic, because "Wife" provides The Doctor with a brief glimmer of the life he could've led, the way his story continues when he's finally able to settle down with the one soul in the universe that could truly, unequivocally understand him. The ending of "The Doctor's Wife" is, in its own way, one of the most tragic endings the show has ever had, because The Doctor's arc finally closes, his motivations finally put to rest before fate's cruel hand snatches the possibility away from him.

The particulars of this story matter, but they also don't. I understand, conceptually, the arguments against this episode- the TARDIS was never/should never have been alive, Suranne Jones was a clear HBC knockoff, the writing was at times almost self-consciously twee and whimsical -but even if I hated all that stuff (which I, to be clear, absolutely didn't, I loved it), what's most important and most striking to me is what "Wife" represents. Just like how the story of Triple H was built around the character concept of a man trying to achieve greatness and in the process, ironically revealing his own weakness, the story of The Doctor is built around the concept of the wanderer, the great and powerful demi-god who everyone can relate to but, ironically, can't relate to anyone himself. Over fifty years- fifty years -Doctor Who, just like the WWE, built up The Doctor and really explored every aspect of who he is and why he does what he does, what his goals are. The show then produced an episode that only works because The Doctor is such an old, such a clearly-defined character. The show produced an episode that only works because the audience knows how integral the TARDIS is to him. The show produced an episode that only works because it provides a glimpse- but only that, a glimpse- of the kind of show Doctor Who would be if The Doctor found what he has been desperately searching for this entire time.

"Wife" in large part is as powerful as it is not just in spite of how bad DW often is, but because of it- It's a peak that only happened because of the myriad valleys beforehand, from the sheer length and breadth of material and content and informed narrative the show has produced leading in to it. It's a powerful episode because it stands in such stark contrast to how bad the show often is, how it takes the forced stalling and practical inability to progress the arc of the main character and spins that into a positive, imagines a world where the progression does, indeed, happen. And it's only possible because DW, much like WWE, has run for so long and has such a hardcore fanbase that it's able to pay off a plot mechanic that was literally decades in the making. Essentially:

Don't get me wrong, a lot of Doctor Who sucks. But when it's good, it's loving great.

Grade: A

Random Thoughts:

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

A Doctor Who review by analogy to wrestling.

That's a new one on me, I'll admit.

Diabolik900
Mar 28, 2007

Toxx, you may or may not be aware of this, but there's a lot of overlap between the people who post in the Doctor Who and pro wrestling threads. I don't think that's just a coincidence.

M_Gargantua
Oct 16, 2006

STOMP'N ON INTO THE POWERLINES

Exciting Lemon
I almost expected that review to be a max character length essay on how each individual piece of this episode was a culmination of decades of buildup. I'm not saying i'm disappointed by the succinctness, just surprised. As for the wrestling analogy, wow, well played.

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

While the ending definitely has that element of the tragic to it, I do find it rather beautiful and uplifting as well. This closing shot always leaves me with a smile on my face:



He may be lonely, but he'll never truly be alone :unsmith:

zzMisc
Jun 26, 2002

Toxxupation posted:

The Doctor's character is the most tragic of all; by the very nature of it being a fifty-plus year run of a television show about the titular Doctor, the audience realizes that The Doctor simply can't ever have an arc that ends.

This is an interesting way to look at the Doctor that I hadn't before, and reminds me of something from Discworld. At one point early on in Jingo, Vimes stops to talk to a fiction author and asks him why all his books always have happy endings; in real life, squabbles don't always resolve, the 'good guy' loses (or there isn't one), good people die. The author simply tells him the books don't reflect reality because the people who sell them want to go on selling them. Everybody important lives specifically so that there can be more books about them.

With the Doctor we have exactly that concept twisted on its head. He's a tragic character trying to make the best of what you could possibly describe as his own personal eternal hell, which can't be properly resolved simply because the series can't really be brought to an end. Other shows, even very long-running ones, will still end at some point; eventually vital cast members of the Simpsons will pass or retire and the show will come to some sort of conclusion, but that simply can't happen here. The essence of the Doctor demands that the character be tortured endlessly for our entertainment. And he'd drat well better be optimistic throughout.

Edit: or did I just make all that up? I could've sworn it was in Jingo as a precursor to the trousers of time stuff but maybe I'm confusing it with a quote about fortune cookies from feet of clay, as I can't find it now.

zzMisc fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Mar 31, 2015

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

Diabolik900 posted:

Toxx, you may or may not be aware of this, but there's a lot of overlap between the people who post in the Doctor Who and pro wrestling threads. I don't think that's just a coincidence.

As well as superhero comics, another long-running soap opera whose greater-than-the-sum-of-its-frequently-awful-parts quality is in abundance.

Oxxidation
Jul 22, 2007
I'll level with you, folks - I've been working 10 hour days for the past 2 weeks and I can barely think straight. I think it'd be better for everyone involved if i risk this writeup going a little late then trying to grind it out while my eyes are drifting in two different directions. Expect it tomorrow night, probably.

Thunderfinger
Jan 15, 2011

Oxxidation posted:

I'll level with you, folks - I've been working 10 hour days for the past 2 weeks and I can barely think straight. I think it'd be better for everyone involved if i risk this writeup going a little late then trying to grind it out while my eyes are drifting in two different directions. Expect it tomorrow night, probably.

Sleep is God, go worship.

Regy Rusty
Apr 26, 2010

Oxxidation posted:

I'll level with you, folks - I've been working 10 hour days for the past 2 weeks and I can barely think straight. I think it'd be better for everyone involved if i risk this writeup going a little late then trying to grind it out while my eyes are drifting in two different directions. Expect it tomorrow night, probably.

Toxx failed, rip

thexerox123
Aug 17, 2007

Toxxupation posted:

He's alienated and Othered from everyone he meets

Ahahaha. Have you been reading up on the Cartmel Masterplan, or was this a happy accident?

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

Maybe DoctorWhat has been encoding it into his posts somehow and this is how Occ ended up expressing it.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
Look, I've never encoded anything into anything. Often enough, I have trouble getting audacity to spit out mp3s! Occupation's probably just using that capital letters thing to express importance. Many people, especially writer-y folks, do that thing nowadays. S'not that weird.

NieR Occomata
Jan 18, 2009

Glory to Mankind.

thexerox123 posted:

Ahahaha. Have you been reading up on the Cartmel Masterplan, or was this a happy accident?

What

thexerox123
Aug 17, 2007


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_%28Doctor_Who%29


quote:

The Other first ensured that his granddaughter Susan (the last child to be naturally born on Gallifrey) was safe, sending her to the spaceport to get off the planet. Then, in a last gesture of defiance against Rassilon's rule, he committed suicide by throwing himself into the Looms, mixing his genetic material into the banks.

Eons passed, and the Looms became integrated into the great Houses of Gallifrey. Eventually, a new Cousin was born to the House of Lungbarrow, who would become known as the Doctor.

(Script editor Andrew Cartmel wanted this to be The Doctor's backstory, but thankfully never got it into the show... but references to it made it into some of the books in the years before the show came back.)

NieR Occomata
Jan 18, 2009

Glory to Mankind.

That's the single dumbest loving thing I've ever read

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Toxxupation posted:

That's the single dumbest loving thing I've ever read

drat straight

I can’t loving stand the idea that the Doctor - or anyone - is “destined for greatness”. gently caress that noise. The magic of the Doctor - where his moral authority can be argued to come from - is that he rejects the privileged society from which he came as morally bankrupt and uses those resources to help the downtrodden.

When you make the Doctor into the reincarnation of a GOD, suddenly that doesn’t really hold true. The Doctor becomes a moral authority not because of his actions, but because of his privilege - an accident of birth. “You can’t be like the Doctor,” suggests Lungbarrow, “unless you happen to be the genetic reintegration of a powerful white dude from millions of years ago.”

gently caress that. That’s gross. I’m not hating on Marc Platt or on Andrew Cartmel. That obviously wasn’t the intention of the Masterplan plot - all they wanted to do was introduce more mystery to a world that was rapidly getting “overexplained”. And to Platt’s credit, he claims he now regrets introducing that mythology. But that doesn’t make the final message any less grotesque. It only serves to amplify the already iffy “white man’s burden” theme that constantly threatens to subsume Doctor Who already.

thexerox123
Aug 17, 2007

Toxxupation posted:

That's the single dumbest loving thing I've ever read

You can see why that one capitalized word made me burst out laughing and immediately make a post in the middle of reading your review. Haha.

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

Toxxupation posted:

That's the single dumbest loving thing I've ever read

One of the incredibly few things most correct-thinking Doctor Who fans agree on!

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Jerusalem posted:

One of the incredibly few things most correct-thinking Doctor Who fans agree on!

Don't get your hopes up. There's been a surge of pro-Masterplan sentiment among, of all people, the younger/Tumblr-ier Who fandom over the past couple of years.

An abject horror that one of those pro-Masterplan loons will become a major influence on Doctor Who has loomed over me for some time.

Party Boat
Nov 1, 2007

where did that other dog come from

who is he


DoctorWhat posted:

loomed over me

Boo this man.

fatherboxx
Mar 25, 2013

DoctorWhat posted:

pro-Masterplan loons

Just read it as pro-Masterplan looms, your dumb nerd show has finally corrupted me :smithicide:

Obsessive continuity patching is the worst thing in franchise fiction, especially when the franchise in question prides on being silly and very moment-based.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?

Party Boat posted:

Boo this man.

fatherboxx posted:

Just read it as pro-Masterplan looms, your dumb nerd show has finally corrupted me :smithicide:

Entirely intentional.

DoctorWhat posted:

Look, I've never encoded anything into anything. Often enough, I have trouble getting audacity to spit out mp3s! Occupation's probably just using that capital letters thing to express importance. Many people, especially writer-y folks, do that thing nowadays. S'not that weird.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!

DoctorWhat posted:

Don't get your hopes up. There's been a surge of pro-Masterplan sentiment among, of all people, the younger/Tumblr-ier Who fandom over the past couple of years.

It's a sort of plot point that's become pretty common in media in the years since the Masterplan was initially thought up, so it probably quite appeals to the generation that grew up with those. In particular I wouldn't be surprised to hear that a lot of these people would be Homestuck fans, it always sounded similar to the ectobiology origins to me.

While I've got nothing against 'chosen one' or reincarnation character origins, I'd agree that one definitely doesn't work for the Doctor, and especially not that one. Even Homestuck's, again, would work better; there's honestly no part of it that makes the kids from Homestuck 'special' or 'better', they're still regular people.

DoctorWhat
Nov 18, 2011

A little privacy, please?
I mean, there's the obvious Messiah/Christ parallels. but for instance: one of the most recent incarnations of Transformers straight-up lifts the Cartmel Masterplan for the backstory of Optimus Prime.

Pwnstar
Dec 9, 2007

Who wants some waffles?

The best part of this episode is when the Doctor explains that the TARDIS is now a woman, Amy's first question is if he wished really, really hard.

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

It's symptomatic of a general problem nerds and creators alike of all fandoms have-- an instinctual need to take iconography and mutate them into some form of dogma.

On the creator end this is often symptomatic of a work-for-hire team tasked with remaking or "rebooting" an older franchise and the easiest way to appease a certain segment of long-time fans is to repurpose key iconography as though it was somehow sacred to what made the original media work (sometimes true, often not), crossed with the fact that "chosen one" narratives sell really really well to idiots/autistics/manchildren and are overall easier to produce. Good examples of this are NuTrek, the Total Recall/Robocop remakes, and Man of Steel (which arguably gets a pass, but that's more because Superman has been a victim of his own legacy for more than half a century now).

In the Cartmel Masterplan's case however the reason is primarily a case of over-mythologizing a character and the "scale creep" that's inherent to such a narrative--the overall best example of "scale creep" would be Dragonball and Dragonball Z where the protagonist goes from struggling against fighting ordinary dudes to literally meeting and impressing God with his cosmic-level strength. A side effect is that characters who were often much more everyman or at least down-to-earth are suddenly key figures far beyond their original scope ever would have suggested and vastly overstate their importance in ways that downright contradict earlier stories and appeal of the property. Another good example is an episode of Futurama much later into its run which revealed that Hermes had been Bender's "father" the entire run of the series in spite of all evidence to the contrary. This is inevitable the longer a work runs without some serious slate-cleaning and even by the 80s Doctor Who was already one of the more venerable science fiction franchises of the 20th Century.

On the fandom end, well a lot of people adore any property wherein someone ordinary turns out to not only be extraordinary but extraordinary in a way that implies a higher order wherein justice and power will be given on their terms. Harry Potter and Star Wars kick the ever-loving poo poo out of Lord of the Rings and Star Trek in terms of profitability, because in both there's an explicitly spiritual path that highlights 1 individual as preordained to greatness and thus automatically elevates everyone around them to the level of dogma, which is ironic because while LotR and Star Trek both have that quality in spades they're simply not as immediately explicit and there is no obvious protagonist besides arguably Frodo and Sam while everyone else is some form of idealized role model or supporting character. Ender's Game is a work that can't be ignored because of its excellent twist, but be honest here most kids and manchildren adore it because it's porn for their egos and the twist allows them to project that guilty pleasure without fear of reprisal. Given how a lot of children who grew up with the Who Revival it's not hard to imagine how they'd swallowed a lot of the grandstanding about how wonderful he is--especially during the Tennant years--at face value and are eager to deify him even further.

ewe2
Jul 1, 2009

mind the walrus posted:

Harry Potter and Star Wars kick the ever-loving poo poo out of Lord of the Rings and Star Trek in terms of profitability, because in both there's an explicitly spiritual path that highlights 1 individual as preordained to greatness and thus automatically elevates everyone around them to the level of dogma, which is ironic because while LotR and Star Trek both have that quality in spades they're simply not as immediately explicit and there is no obvious protagonist besides arguably Frodo and Sam while everyone else is some form of idealized role model or supporting character.

Precisely why Q is problematic for TNG and why looking too hard at the Silmarillion is like reading the wrong D&D books. When in doubt, nobody knows. Unexplained vistas are crucial to the story breathing, and equally important to Who as everything.

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

I also think one of THE most important things about the character of the Doctor is that what makes him special, what gives him his moral compass/sense of right and wrong/his desire to meddle and interfere etc is due to the humanizing influence of his human companions, starting all the way back in 1963 with Ian and Barbara. I'm not saying it was intentional, but it was a happy coincidence that the departure of those characters (and his granddaughter Susan) from the show meant that the Doctor by default had to become the central character of the show and be more of a "moral" character, and this created the sense that the Doctor had been changed for the "better" by his exposure to a new way of thinking and feeling about life, the universe and everything.

To try and suggest that he was somehow born "special" and destined/"chosen" (ugh, Chosen One stories :gonk:) to be some super-special messiah/hero etc just completely misses the point of what makes the Doctor the person he is, and how important it is that he got that way because of the "good" influence of the "normal" people who traveled with him.

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mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

ewe2 posted:

Precisely why Q is problematic for TNG and why looking too hard at the Silmarillion is like reading the wrong D&D books. When in doubt, nobody knows. Unexplained vistas are crucial to the story breathing, and equally important to Who as everything.

Again, any series that runs too long runs into this problem, and even the original creators are as prone to loving things up as anyone. That's the reason why DC and now Marvel reset their superhero universes to keep things in check and why scholars can make lifetime careers sorting out "official" mythology of the Greeks, Norse, Hindu, and yes Judeo-Christians. There really is a value to knowing when to tie a bow on things and say "the end." Doctor Who cheats this far far better than most fiction, but it's far from immune.

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