July 13th, 2008
by
Yonmei
I’m now watching the last episode of New Who’s 4th season finale for the fourth time – the BBC decided to do a repeat today – and for the sake of those who have not been watching it as obsessively, I’m cutting the rest of this.
Well, except to say: I’m not happy.
The Doctor has been portrayed by 11 actors over 45 years (all male, all white: for years I’ve been hoping for Penelope Keith (since 1984), while another friend is holding out for Shah Rukh Khan). But this is the core of the Doctor:
….still impulsive, idealistic, ready to risk his life for a worthy cause. He still hates tyranny and oppression and anything that is anti-life. He never gives in and he never gives up, however overwhelming the odds against him. The Doctor believes in good and fights evil. Though often caught up in violent situations, he is a man of peace. He is never cruel or cowardly. In fact, to put it simply, the Doctor is a hero.
I ran a poll on my journal in April 2005, just after New Who had started, asking people to give me three words defining what the Doctor is: and the answers I got were: alien, eccentric, hero.
It is one of these things that makes Doctor Who so watchable for kids: no matter what, you know the Doctor will always try to save his companions… and the world.
—
Let’s talk about Donna Noble. She’s played by Catherine Tate, who was not quite 40 at the time these episodes were being filmed: she’s presented as a slightly hopeless person, who still lives with her mother (and grandfather), who works as a temp, who is desperate to get married, who isn’t attractive. (Captain Jack, who’ll flirt with anyone – doesn’t even have to be mammalian – won’t flirt with Donna.)
The Doctor has had older companions, companions who already had careers, companions who left their real lives (Barbara and Ian, two of the Doctor’s first companions, were teachers at the local school). But mostly, he travels with young people: and mostly, young women. Donna isn’t young. (She’s my age, in fact, or a little younger.)
Donna meets the Doctor, realises that this is her chance for a life wider than the one she’s been dealt, and spends the next six months or so trying to meet him again and move into the TARDIS. (Uniquely among companions, she actually packs.) Having succeeded, she has a fabulous time – more secure than Rose, who spends quite a few episodes angsting about her relationship with the Doctor: happier than Martha, who unfortunately gets handed the role of being lovelorn.
She’s brave. She reaches out to people: even people who don’t look like people to her. Not as graceful as Rose running towards the TARDIS at the end of the first episode of New Who, not blonde delight running into a new world: but she’s seeing things she never expected to see, travelling in time and space, the perfect enchanted tourist. “I expected to spend the rest of my life travelling in the TARDIS,” she says to the Doctor at the end. “Don’t make me go back.”
Due to a piece of scientific metagrobalization, Season 4 ends with three Doctors: Time Lord mind in Gallifreyan body (that’s The Doctor, to you): Time Lord mind in human body (that’s a mysteriously “human Doctor”, who ends up with Rose in another universe): and Donna: Time Lord mind in human body, remembering everything the Doctor knows, the “Doctor Donna”.
Apparently, it’s OK to have a Time Lord mind in a human male body: no one seems worried that the human Doctor who ends up with Rose is going to die. The Doctor spends the last fifteen minutes or so of the episode staring at Doctor Donna with increasing sadness, finally telling her – as her voice breaks and she stutters like a broken robot, repeating “binary binary binary” – that she won’t survive.
And he mindwipes her. Then he takes her home, unconscious, hands her over to her mother and grandfather, and tells them to keep her ignorant for the rest of her life that she did, once, know an alien and she saved the world.
This was defended vehemently by many Whofans because “he didn’t have a choice!” which misses the point: two points, in fact.
First point: the Doctor always tries. He doesn’t stand around chatting and looking sad: the plot finale of S4 involved destroying the Dalek empire and towing the Earth back into orbit across time and space (which was the first wall banger moment for me: not so much that the TARDIS can tow the Earth back to its Sol III orbit, but that doing so causes enough actual shifts in the Earth’s crust to just knock dishes off shelves, without any other damage…) but after that, the Doctor stands around doing minor plot stuff and looking sad – aware that Doctor Donna is dying because her female body won’t stand up to Time Lord mind, but not actually doing anything to save her. He might have failed. He had to try.
Second: Russell T Davies set this situation up because Donna was to leave the series, and he has resolved (apparently) never to kill a companion. Destroying Donna’s memories of everything she did while she was with the Doctor apparently doesn’t count. It’s a variation on the trope of There Are Some Things Women Were Not Meant To Know. HumanDoctor can have a Time Lord mind and survive: Doctor Donna must die or be mindwiped.
Very much against her will – Doctor Donna realises what’s going to happen as her voice breaks into binary binary binary – the Doctor takes away all the things her female brain can’t handle. Every memory of hers that was more than being “best temp in Chiswick” – every memory that was more than being a slightly desperate, very lonely, very undervalued woman – is forcibly removed from her mind.
This could be a character reversal (indeed, one Whofan who I won’t link to happily came up with the idea that the Doctor really wanted to wipe Donna’s mind, out of his own sense of self-loathing and certainty that his companions were better off without him) but I think not: I think that just as RTD didn’t see what was wrong with Owen-the-serial-rapist from the first episode of Torchwood: he didn’t see why it mattered that the Doctor didn’t try to save Donna. After all, Donna lives – she just loses everything she did, everything she achieved, after she saw she could be more than the part alloted to her.
In other circumstances, I might also be mad at RTD for “resolving” the situation of Rose, who literally fought her way across universes to be with the Doctor, by telling her to stay home and take care of her man. I just don’t have room for that right now.
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- More blogging by
Yonmei at
http://yonmei.insanejournal.com
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Filed under TV & Film, Women in Space, female characters | Comments (15)
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Yeah fate worse than death. He should have killed her.
Yep. I was also irritated, and I am going to rattle on a moment to get past the “comment preview” blurbs on the side to avoid spoilage…
Right. I also saw the failure to try. I was at first angry because of the breakage of character in that the Doctor has at points been all “everything has a time and everything dies” but noooo, when Donna is all “No!” and consciously chooses to die rather than go back to what she was he ignores it… But then I remembered how he doomed a girl to a life as a paving stone, so I guess he is that kind of asshole. But really, all! of time and space and he can’t find a place to offload some of that Timelordiness? Come on.
And he doesn’t even save her life, he just puts off her death until he won’t be there anymore and makes certain her family will be broken with guilt that’s rightfully belongs to him. What, aliens all over Earth, Torchwood and Sarah Jane running around, and no word of the Doctor is ever going to fall into Donna’s ears? No one’s going to mention her fiancee? She’s not going to bull her way out of this mindwipe like she bulled her way out of the bug-back parallel universe?
It was a fun episode, except for the way the Doctor turned into a pathetic piece of mindraping scum. And yeah, you’re right that it was completely gendered.
I agree that it was a rubbish ending for both Donna and Rose. But I thought that the reason why human!Doctor is more stable than Doctor!Donna is because the former started out with Time Lord DNA that got changed enough that he has one heart and is now “human,” whereas Doctor!Donna had Time Lord knowledge written onto a fully human brain. I thought that it wasn’t a neat 50/50 human/Time Lord mix for both of them, but that human!Doctor was still mostly Time Lord (especially his brain) and Donna was mostly human.
No matter what, though, that detail doesn’t change the misogyny that governs the fates of both Donna and Rose. If the basic premise of feminism is that women should be able to make their own choices, this is the most anti-feminist ending I can think of.
This season has been filled with “there is no fate worse than death” scenes that are driving me CRAZY. The thing where the Doctor condemned his supposed future companion to eternity in a computer playing mommy to some cyberkids? Gee thanks for completely obliterating the sacrifice she made for you all. Granted they didn’t portray her as too upset about it….so okay. Maybe.
But mindraping Donna CROSSED THE LINE! It was just as creepy as that woman from “Love & Monsters” whose face he brought up out of the stone. Bloody creepy and perverted and……ugh. I feel dirty.
And I loved Donna as a companion! She stood up to him and didn’t have any romantic designs on him. She was smart and capable and confident enough in herself to question the Doctor at every turn. They should have just killed her. That would have been a more acceptable end.
Note: What was with Jack not hitting on her? She was definitely flirting with him. What is supposed to me monogamous now per he Torchwood boy-toy?
Thanks so much for writing this–I’ve had it sitting and stewing for over a frickin’ week, and haven’t had the time to sit down and scream my head off about it. You win at internetz.
When they did that “Everybody lives!” thing in The Doctor Dances, it worked, because for a change, all the people we’d thought were doomed, weren’t. When they did it again in River Song’s story, it didn’t work, because
- it’d been done
- did anybody really think all those people were dead? They’d so obviously been “saved” in the computer core
- it’s a lie. River isn’t alive, that’s a simulation. Donna survived because she was “saved” when teleporting; all the Doctor had to “save” River with was a data ghost.
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.
You know, if you’re going to distort and mischaracterize what I said, the least you could do is link to my actual posts so that readers can make up their own damn minds about what I meant.
Thanks for posting this – I didn’t catch it when I saw the episode live and I really didn’t like it enough to watch it again!
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.
To fill in some spoiler space, let me just say…
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.
[...] at FeministSF tells Russell T Davies what for in the way that I didn’t get to before things here broke loose. (warning: DW S4 spoilers, [...]
Spoiler space first — and, btw, there is no LJ-cut in your entry so the syndicated feeds on LJ, and LJ-like platforms not owned by SUP, are showing the spoilers in full.
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.
Laura, I didn’t link to your posts because I didn’t intend to pick on you particularly – I’m sure many other Whofans share your views. OTOH, if you’re okay with being linked to as an example of such views, I’m certainly fine with that.
Hi – thanks for posting this, it’s an interesting perspective…
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’ve had a terrible time attempting to put my finger on what bothered me about this episode. You’ve just managed to clear away all the mental cobwebs. Thank you.
This episode really disturbed me and made me uneasy. Now I know why! Thanks for the post.