My opinions on the new Doctor Who are kind of different (honestly, I’ve been more or less disappointed from day one), but I do feel like there’s a trend of bad writing that explains part of what I’ve seen being discussed about this.

Maybe (MAYBE) in RTD’s mind, the Doctor had all these choices, and he DID try to save her.. In this magical plot that exists in RTD’s mind, where it was the perfect execution of this story where the Doctor has to do something he doesn’t want to do – he has to admit that he can’t save her, and has to basically euthanize her in a way. It’s not impossible to imagine that such a story could be written….

But if you screw it up in execution, it just seems like the Doctor didn’t try. I’ve seen a lot of episodes where the idea seems to be “wouldn’t it be great if….*some idea*”, and then the episode really seems to perform the barest minimum to have that idea as its plot… The executions never seem as thought out as they should be…

I don’t know if any of that made sense – I think what I’m trying to say is that “bad writing” in general is partly to cause for this stuff.

I don’t think that letting Donna physically die would have been a better alternative, for her own sake, but it might have shown more narrative integrity, and it certainly wouldn’t have had the Doctor taking away her agency so despicably.

Spiralsheep coined the expression “deus ex machinathon” to describe “Journey’s End”. It was so full of contrivances that the only thing I can take away from narrative decisions like setting up Donna for a mindwipe is not a sense of tragic inevitability but disgust, negating much of the joy I was able to get out of other gratuitous aspects of it and leaving me disaffected with the new series in general. As Yonmei points out, the Doctor wasn’t even shown to attempt to prevent Donna’s situation once she’s become part Time Lord. Which is… consider the following!

The only past Doctor whom the Tenth Doctor met, in the charity special “Time Crash”, was the Fifth Doctor, and here are that Doctor’s own words, from “The Five Doctors” by Terrance Dicks, on getting parts of his past ripped away from him (against his will), which caused him physical pain (he cried out and clutched at his hearts when it happened), distress and anxiety (“cosmic angst”):

“Great chunks of my past, detaching themselves like melting icebergs. (…) I am being diminished. Whittled away piece by piece. A man is the sum of his memories, you know, a Time Lord even more so.”

Annhilitating such a chunk of Donna’s existence is indeed tantamount to destroying her, and he’s doing it to the DoctorDonna, Time Lord-human who, by that logic, is even more defined by her memories (than a human, or in the sexist view, than a woman), effectively killing the DoctorDonna incarnation of Donna as much as the person whom Donna had become before her. And by killing the DoctorDonna, and exiling the other Doctor to Rose’s universe, the Doctor is also in effect repeating the genocide of the Time Lords, even as he’s saying Rose needs to “fix” his male, half-human clone because he’s just committed a genocide! There is nothing heroic in this Doctor, and it isn’t even as a result of good writing and character-exploration that might make it possible to relate to such an alteration to the series’ protagonist, and that makes me wish I were not a fan. I want to engage with the show, instead of being driven to disengage with it because those aspects of it which might mitigate the nasty aftertaste of some narrative decisions are being thrown to the wind.

…some final words:
Donna Noble: the Demolished Woman.

Captain Jack, Captain Jack, Captain Jack
Harkness, Sparrow, Aubrey. S’all good.

Is that enough spoiler-space? I didn’t count how many lines the comment feed shows.

Anyway, I was mulling this over myself after I watched it. Rose absorbs the heart of the TARDIS and can’t handle it. The Doctor can’t really handle it either when he takes it from her, since he dies. Well, mostly dead.

Now Donna can’t handle the knowledge of a Timelord.

And it made me think of the ending of the Indiana Jones movie. Which is a different spoiler altogether, so I’ll leave it at that.

So I tried to think of examples in Doctor Who where men couldn’t handle all this sudden knowledge/power. And the Doctor did have a sun in him and he couldn’t handle that very well. He was going to die.

So.. at least there’s that, I dunno..

Getting boring having series enders end the same way though.

I remember Owen’s activities from the first episode of Torchwood because my partner and I watched in stunned disbelief as rape was played for laughs. Since then I’ve had a very low opinion of the calibration of RTD’s moral compass.

This last episode was paying off River Song’s reaction to Donna; I hoped it wouldn’t happen so soon, but they just have to tie up those loose ends dammit. Why couldn’t he put her in stasis until he could figure out how to reconstruct her memory without the data her brain can’t handle? Using the computer record at the Library perhaps? This needs to come back to bite him on the ass – Donna had grown, and he wiped that out because he, apparently, hasn’t.