Doctor Who: Partners in Crime

[purplecat]

I liked this. I'm not sure I have a great deal to add beyond that. My favourite bit was the scene between Donna and her grandfather in the allotment - to be honest right up until the moment Donna went all dreamy eyed about travelling between the stars. It occurs to me that there are a lot of these speeches sprinkled through NuWho and they only occasionally work because, frankly, they are just not the sort of thing people say and they break the down-to-earthness it strives for in its contemporary characters.

We missed the very start of the episode so I was a little unclear on the set-up. Was it ever made clear that Adipose (aside for the issues of consent and the fact they were killing folk that witnessed them) were harming their victims? The story came close towards the end to pointing out that these were not straightforward villains but didn't seem to have quite the courage to say so. But it was a clever counterpoint to the Runaway Bride to make this story also about alien children. My jury, I must admit, is still out on Donna. I can see how they've tried to mellow the character a bit but the end result was a little schizophrenic as if they weren't quite sure how to make her challenge the Doctor while at the same time wanting to travel with him. Hopefully this will settle down as the series progresses and once he has no choice but to have her with him.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

RTD's underlying vision for Who is rather dark and ambivalent about the Doctor, I think. The implication was that Adipose Industries' treatment would have left most of its victims alive and slimmer; but human life was, from Miss Foster's point of view, expendable should the Adipose be threatened.

I also appreciated the counterpoint to The Runaway Bride, and the underlining that the Doctor's cruelty in that story arose from his moroseness over his loss of Rose; his experiences since then have been restorative of his moral compass, but I do wonder if he is due to meet some not-so-innocent children soon.

[purplecat]

Hmm... I think the series likes to think it is ambivalent about the Doctor but I feel that ambivalence is a long way down its agenda so much so that it easily falls into the trap of appearing to peddle an "all aliens are evil" line which get people like Lawrence Miles so hot under the collar. The Doctor occasionally does questionable things and, even more rarely, someone says to him "that was a bit questionable", but the closest they've come to actually showing this (the idea that Saxon rose to power because of the void created by the departure of Harriet Jones) they backed out because accessibility comes higher up their agenda.

The end of series 1 they have the Doctor effectively say "I created all this" but in that situation his actions in the Long Game were considerably less questionable than many since. I think its very hard to truly question the Doctor's actions without being prepared to show consequences a bit more thoroughly and both Doctor Who and, I think Torchwood, suffer from an anxiety that showing ramifications from story to story will lose the casual viewer.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

My use of 'underlying' was meant to indicate that in this case the lying is very much under! You're quite right, but I didn't think the ambiguity was particularly muffled last night, though one's attention wasn't drawn to it either - no room for a Joan Redfern-like killing question in the first episode.

[(Anonymous)]

I disagree: I think that RTD's underlying vision for the Doctor is somewhere along the line to Lance Parkin's (ie, he's superman) but that he feels it gives the illusion of depth if he occasionally lurches in the other direction -- though he's careful not to be consistent in this or actually use it to bring any depth, because that will 'alienate the casual viewer': rather occasional lines like 'I think you need someone to stop you' are considered enough to point to as evidence of 'depth' before getting back to superDoctor.

[(Anonymous)]

I disagree: I think that RTD's underlying vision for the Doctor is somewhere along the line to Lance Parkin's (ie, he's superman) but that he feels it gives the illusion of depth if he occasionally lurches in the other direction -- though he's careful not to be consistent in this or actually use it to bring any depth, because that will 'alienate the casual viewer': rather occasional lines like 'I think you need someone to stop you' are considered enough to point to as evidence of 'depth' before getting back to superDoctor.

S.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

It depends which model of Superman you are referring to, surely, though I'm not an expert on the character. I think RTD sees the Doctor, and always has, as a variably dysfunctional god who can put on a song and dance for the viewers at home, but whose bad judgements, if underplayed and under-emphasised, nonetheless have consequences.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I don't mean 'Superman' per se, in that even Lance had never had the Doctor bounce bullets off his chest (shoot them out of the air, yes, but never bounce them off his chest).

I mean rather the view that sees the Doctor is an immeasurably superior lifeform, able to pull respiratory bypass systems and perfect vocal impressions out of his hat to deal with any situation, to take any amount of pain and to do any calculation or bring any bit of knowledge that might help the plot out of his head. And occasionally demonstrate superhuman strength too.

Of course, some of this is just bog-standard lazy plotting. You want to put your character in an impossible situation but then find you've you've painted yourself into a corner you aren't clever enough to logically somersault out of, so it turns out that he wasn't suffocated after all, or his sonic gun can magically make everything okay (or blast the enemy's sonic gun out of her hand).

But I think it goes deeper than just that: there is a strain of 'the Doctor can do anything we can do, better, he can do anything better than us'. I was watching 'An Unearthly Tribe of 100,000 BC' recently on a friend's DVD and was interested to see just how un-super the Doctor is. He knows much less that he pretends to; he's just as much at sea in the distant past as the schoolteachers are, and almost as much at sea as them in the TARDIS. His ideas are frequently wrong. He's much more of a character, much less of an icon (though of course it's because of him that the programme survived long enough to become iconic).

Davies's version of Doctor Who, it has been noted before, is stuck firmly in the seventies: the Pertwee era, with Earth being under threat every week, the Doctor getting into fist- and swordfights, and the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce; and the T.Baker era, which is where the Doctor's superpower inflation really set in, both in terms of his tools (first time the sonic screwdriver was introduced it was used to unscrew a screw, then to vibrate a mechanical lock open -- both by Troughton -- Pertwee was using it to activate mines, but I think it's T.Baker where it first leaves all narrative justification for what sound waves might be able to do behind and starts becoming a cutting torch, a welding torch, an electronic lockpick, and whatever else that meant they had to eventually destroy it). He's just taken that seventies Doctor to the next step, the one that -- to give JNT his due -- he avoided by deciding that after Baker they should go in the opposite direction and have a more vulnerable Doctor.

What makes the new, super-charged Doctor even more unappealing, of course, is not only that he's written as a god but that he's arrogant with it. The seventh Doctor, both on TV and in the New Adventures, liked rather to hide his abilities; but the tenth makes sure that every supporting character he comes across gets a good speech about how powerful he is, preferably (if the budget will stand it) with a fireball in the background.

S.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

It seemed to me that the Doctor disrupted a situation that would otherwise have ended well for all involved this time round.

Anyone want to painlessly remove my body fat while I sleep without doing any other damage at all, and using the body fat in what seems like a perfectly nice sort of way, is very welcome to it. I don't mind not signing a consent form!

[purplecat]

That was pretty much my feeling. I mean, there were issues about the Adipose, but they were a lot more complex than "look! evil alien! I will thwart your heinous plans!" and I'm not convinced a throw away remark about how it could have worked as a diet plan and a "You've changed" from Donna really washes as an acknowledgment that the Doctor's actions were morally rather murky. But I did wonder if I missed some initial set-up where it was revealed that the dieters eventually wasted away or something.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I don't think there was - in fact, it was explicitly stated that making Adiposes out of non-fatty tissue made the child-Adiposes sick. Which was rather an odd thing to include, now I think about it - if they had just not mentioned that bit, then the Doctor's actions would have made more sense as we would then have assumed that the reproduction would continue until the host died. Peculiar.

I caught a bit of the Confidential afterwards and Russell whatsisname was saying that he thought the Adiposes were sinister, so perhaps they were relying on the 'ick' factor to explain why this was considered so awful. I thought they were cute, personally.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

The details of what the Adipose were actually up to are irrelevant. Whatever it was, it must have been evil.

Allow me to demonstrate:

- The Doctor is the good guy.
- The Adipose are not the Doctor, and are not endorsed by the Doctor.
- They are therefore the bad guys.
- Therefore what the Adipose were doing was evil.
QED.

It doesn't matter whether they were making babies out of unwanted body fact, destroying the Earth, fixing global warming, or just humming the theme to the Archers. They must be stopped.

[purplecat]

Indeed.

This sort of default reasoning tied to the extremely cautious way the show chooses to display its ambivalence towards the Doctor is the sort of thing that upsets Lawrence Miles so much (though I think his "The Unquiet Dead is all anti-immigration hate propaganda" rant is no longer available for public consumption and I also think, on that occasion, that Miles was wrong).