Doctor Who: More thoughts on Fires of Pompeii

[butterfly]

Warning: It's Doctor Who season. This means that every other thought that I have is about Doctor Who. This will not change until the series finale airs (and then I start being on pins and needles for the Christmas special, but I will only think about it every tenth or twentieth thought or so). Just, you know, fair warning.

Again, like my deeper thoughts last week, these focus pretty heavily on Rose. I just don't want to mention that above the cut because of spoiler issues.

This episode had a lot of emotional callbacks to the first series of the new Doctor Who (as other folk have pointed out). There's the Doctor pulling the 'armless' pun. There's a big lever to push that will kill without prejudice. There's the Doctor having to choose knowing that he and his companion could die (and his companion letting him know that saving the world comes first). There's a huge ethical dilemma that the Doctor tries to convince his companion that he, naturally, is on the right side of by virtue of being a time-travelling alien (and her having none of it). The vibe between the Doctor and Donna is very similar to the testing, pushing, bantering vibe of the Doctor and Rose during their early episodes together. She isn't quite sure that she's fully on board with his way of doing things and he's not sure that she can wrap her head around the enormity of the problems that he deals with.

We know how Rose ends up dealing with that issue -- she swallows the Time Vortex, becomes Bad Wolf, and literally understands the types of choices that the Doctor makes with the same kind of vision and understanding that he naturally has as a result of being a Time Lord.

Before that, though, we have the episodes where she's trying to understand what makes up the Doctor and him being impatient about the fact that she doesn't understand right away ("It's a new morality. Get used to it or go home."). That same impatience also shows up in his early episodes with Martha. Even in first series, the Doctor was getting tired of explaining himself to people.

And so Rose, in one shining, perfect moment, completely and fully understands the Doctor... and he kisses that understanding out of her (to save her life). I see series two as Rose doing the Bad Wolf moment the hard way. She acts more and more like the Doctor as the series passes and understands him better and better (I felt quite vindicated when Billie Piper mentioned that she was acting more like the Doctor on purpose). Check out The Idiot's Lantern -- her wide, mad smile and her lean when she interrogates Magpie are nearly identical to the Doctor's. The most interesting thing about them is that she changes him in the same ways -- as she become more like him, he becomes more like her and adopts her family as his own. They end up mirroring each other (something that has lasted into their separation, as becomes apparent in Partners in Crime -- the look on Rose's face is dead-on close to the look on the Doctor's face in the moments when we have it confirmed that he's thinking of Rose, such as the dance scene in The Runaway Bride).

I also quite enjoyed the prophecy in The Fires of Pompeii  -- "She is returning," which I believe to be about Rose for three reasons:
1. Emotional importance to the Doctor (much as 'you are not alone' pretty much had to be about the Master, Romana, or the Rani for the strongest emotional impact... and of those three, most likely the Master as he's the best known)
2. Proximity. We just saw someone who appears to be in the process of returning.
3. The epic nature of Rose (as established by Bad Wolf and the show's callbacks to Rose over S3) which would warrant her being the subject of a prophecy. She's the 'stuff of legends'.

And there's the eerie thing that he said to Donna -- "There's something on your back," which I am not spoiled about and am happy to be surprised by when we find out what it means.

We've got humor, pathos, and a mystery. All in all, I'm very much looking forward to where this series will take us.