Doctor Who: More thoughts on "The Next Doctor"

[butterfly]

The Christmas episode polling continues and continues to amuse me (seriously, I'm the only person so far who likes VotD. Hee!), but I still can't sleep and so I wanted to share a couple of other thoughts about the Doctor and Doctor Who.

So, RTD's been working on a few themes during his time with the show. One of them was the Doctor wishing for a 'day by day life', which may have climaxed with Ten II/Rose. Another really big theme has been how his companions become the Doctor and the toll that Doctor's life can take on people (how it isn't for anyone everyone).

Here, we have a man who literally becomes the Doctor. A companion who is the Doctor, at least for a while. Someone who, because of what he sees and knows about the Doctor, can extend the hand of friendship and get the Doctor to change his mind about leaving and instead say yes to Christmas dinner. The question that I'm currently wondering is whether or not this is the climax of the 'becoming the Doctor' theme or if we'll have more later on in the other specials.

Here, the Doctor does stick to the idea of not wanting any more companions. There's been, actually, a very interesting progression going on.

In "Rose", he's not initially interested in having a companion, but once Rose shows him how awesome she is, he extends her an invitation... twice. He invites Mickey along at the end of "World War III", once Mickey shows himself to be awesome. Adam doesn't particularly show any signs of being awesome, but Rose wants him along, so he gets an invite. Jack does show some awesome but, again, it takes Rose to get the Doctor to initiate the invitation. In "School Reunion", Rose has clearly encouraged him to invite Sarah Jane along and then Mickey asks for an invitation, which the Doctor accepts. He offers Reinette a trip to see a star.

He loses Rose and invites Donna along and she refuses. He's then much less open-ended with Martha -- she's offered a 'trip', more like Reinette than Rose or Donna (but then things escalate, as things with the Doctor often do and he offers her a proper invitation in "The Lazarus Experiment").

ETA: as reminded by thunderemerald, he invites Joan along at the end of "Family of Blood", which happens after he properly invites Martha and before people start leaving him in droves, so it fits in very well (and, of course, she not only refuses, she also is quite cold and cutting about it).

Jack and Martha both decide to leave him -- Astrid and Mr. Copper both invite themselves on as companions. The Doctor accepts Astrid's invitation and then she dies, leaving him in no fit state to say 'yes' to Mr. Copper.

And then with Donna, she reminds him of his earlier invitation and invites herself on, a bit, and he's initially resistant to the idea.

Next comes the massive exodus of "Journey's End". Martha, Jack, Micky, and Sarah Jane all walk out at (roughly) the same time, to go off and live lives of their own. He's forced to take away Donna's memories to save her life. And he leaves Rose behind so that she can have a happy ending (the happy life she could have with him; it's the ending that he dreads).

No wonder he doesn't particularly want to bring a companion on board, no matter how awesome they are. In fact, the more awesome someone is, the more likely they seem to be to break his heart (which, to take SitL/FotD as straight-forward canon, makes his decision in River's case not to have her travel with him suddenly make a lot of sense. Well-played, RTD, and curse your brilliance).

Given that RTD has stated that the specials will explore the Doctor being alone (and that each of them is a one-off), I expect this theme to get a lot of air time.

ETA: The unofficial overnight numbers for the show say that "The Next Doctor" got 11.7 million viewers, a share of 50.5% of the audience.

*bounces*

Yay for RTD, DT, and Who!

Comments

[nic]

Oh how interesting, that Rose and Donna are the only ones who got 'real' invitations right away.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

And they're the two that almost certainly broke his heart the most. Both of them are people that he instinctively connected with, too.

[shinyopals.livejournal.com]

Very good point about the different invites and not-invites.

I'm hoping that the exploration of the Doctor alone will include him realising, yet again, that he's stronger when he has friends.

It'd be nice to see him realising he can still count on Jack, Martha and Sarah Jane as friends, if not full time companions, but since we're moving towards a new showrunner, I won't count on it.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping that he will, but I think that Moffat may have said something about not doing a regular companion for S5 (can't think of where I read that, though). Which might mean that part of the reason RTD is doing this storyline is because he wants what Moffat does in S5 to make sense for the character (... good luck with that, RTD!).

[tijsmans.livejournal.com]

I love your theories/analyses.

This one is very interesting. Now I love DW the most when there's one or more regular companions involved, am not too keen on the last two Christmas specials largely because I couldn't connect to his one-off companions - I loved Donna though - but I'm curious how the Doctor'll cope with being alone. Perhaps RTD will yet prove me wrong.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Yes. He's been rather thoroughly beaten down by life, so I'm very interested in whether we're going to be moving toward healing that in the specials or just in hardening it.

[goldy-dollar.livejournal.com]

No wonder he doesn't particularly want to bring a companion on board, no matter how awesome they are. In fact, the more awesome someone is, the more likely they seem to be to break his heart

*nods*

I'm still surprised by how well RTD writes the Doctor - that is, how much he gets him, and how his characterization can really be explained by what we have from canon. The Doctor is *desperate* for connection, but every time he opens up to someone, he ends up with his heart smushed. He gets punished for caring, basically. So his mental state is very understandable even if it breaks MY heart.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Yes, so true. That's one of the things that I've enjoyed most about RTD -- he took a character where we'd only been allowed to see the surface of who he could be and really explored the life that the Doctor lives and how that would actually affect someone.

[thunderemerald.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, you forgot a very interesting invite: Joan Redfern. After he fell in love with her as John Smith and then became the Doctor again, he invited her to "travel with me" (as in, indefinitely), and he specified "as my companion." Interesting, no?

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Danke! I'll add that. And it is very interesting and specific (and kinda desperate, as I recall).

[thunderemerald.livejournal.com]

Ohhh VERY desperate. It's like he was clinging to the remnants of the feelings he had as John Smith, before they went away. SO sad....

[thehornedgod.livejournal.com]

It seemed likely that the specials would give the Doctor a character arc of healing enough to take a new companion. We'll see, but The Next Doctor doesn't dispel that expectation. The Doctor painfully acknowledging his heartsbreak out loud seems promising, and the Christmas dinner recalls Ten doing domestic in The Christmas Invasion; he wouldn't even do that for Donna the first time he was parted from Rose, apparently agreeing to come back while planning to escape in the TARDIS. In my head it's canon that regeneration scabs over the Doctor's psychological wounds enough to allow him to function. His family "sleep in his mind" by Tomb of the Cybermen, and it wasn't that long since he'd seen Susan.

*bounces with you about the ratings*