Doctor Who 7.02 & 7.03

[sophia_sol]

I love Doctor Who. I have loved it for five years; I have WATCHED it for five years. And I think y'all know how unusual that is, given my general inability to watch more than a few episodes of any given tv show. Doctor Who is important to me, and special to me, beyond any of my other fandoms! And...and currently I'm feeling that I have lost it.

There are some very specific reasons why I fell in love with this show, and while some (many?) are still to be found in it, not all are.

I love this show because it is about a person who finds the wonders of the universe to be endlessly amazing. I love it because it's about a person who cares deeply and platonically for other people. I love it because it's about a person who really genuinely wants to be able to fix what's wrong with the universe, save the people who are in trouble and find redemption for those who have made mistakes, and always, always with as little violence as can possibly be managed, and with grief for those (on any side!) who he cannot save. I love it because it's about a person who is lonely and hurting and has made mistakes but is still a good person deserving of love and he GETS that love.

I love this show because it's silly and clever and full of people caring about each other and the universe.

That's the show I've always watched. And I don't know whether it's me that's changed or the show; I don't know whether I used to read my own desires and opinions and feelings into what was there and wilfully ignored stuff that disagreed with it. I don't know. But this evening I watched a few episodes of Doctor Who with friends, and I got legitimately upset.

Oh, much of it I loved. Rory and his dad! Amy being all doctory with Nefertiti and Edwardian Hunter Lestrade as her companions! DINOSAURS IN SPACE! The Doctor being punched in his Time War feels by the alien doctor/war-criminal, and subsequently having to figure out what the good response ACTUALLY IS to the situation! All sorts of delightful little moments of humour and warmth and wonderfulness!

But. But wow, in the subsequent discussion with my friends about some things, I found myself to be entirely opposed to the prevailing opinion and entirely alone because there was actually no canon to back up my opinions. My opinions about the Doctor are flat-out wrong according to canon, apparently. And I -- wow.

Part of what has allowed me to successfully stick with Doctor Who so long is because so many of my friends love it too, and being able to squee about things with other people does a remarkable job in sustaining one's affections. I love being able to talk about Doctor Who with my friends. But the Doctor Who they're squeeing about these days is more and more divorced from the Doctor Who that lives in my head, the one I love, and I can no longer participate.

I just -- I love this show, okay? And I love having it as a point of connection with my friends. And now I feel like I am losing both of those things in one fell swoop this evening, and it hurts.

Comments

[justice_turtle]

*hugs you*

I hit that point a while ago, and I agree: it stinks. :P

I wish I had something more cheerful to say. *hugs*

[sophia_sol]

*hugs back* Thank you.

[tei]

Yes. This. All of this. I wish I still loved this show-- actually, I wish I still had the motivation to watch this show at all, because Doctor Who got me into fandom and Doctor Who changed my entire outlook on popular culture and I just... cared so much. And now I don't even remember what happened in the last episode I actually watched because I was so bored and exasperated with it.

And losing Doctor Who feels like losing fandom because it was just a constant thing, a default fandom to care about when I didn't have the time or the inclination to invest in anything else...

[sophia_sol]

Yeah. Yeah.

For me too, Doctor Who has been the one constant fandom in my life, the one I know will never leave me, and now....

[calvinahobbes]

I really don't think you're alone in this. I love the show for those exact reasons you state, and I really do feel like that is not the show any more? I didn't think "Mercy" had one single funny line or cutesy character moment. I feel like the whole show is so dark these days, just getting darker and darker and no one is ever really happy or enjoying themselves any longer? Including me, I guess!

Could you explain the bit about "no canon" to back you up?

[sophia_sol]

Well, I'm glad to hear I'm not alone. Mostly when I hear people talking about losing interest in Doctor Who, it's because of Moffat's sexism and so forth -- which certainly bothers me! But that alone isn't what's making me break up with the show.

I suppose I should have said "no new canon" or "no canon anymore." But then some of it has been going on for YEARS. Like the asexual!aromantic!Doctor thing. The grand romance with River is what made me finally decide the show doesn't see the same Doctor I do, but I am told fairly authoritatively that the relationship with Rose was coded in romantic ways. I totally missed that because I can be oblivious, but it's an indication that the Doctor through the entirety of New Who is not who he is in my head.

Or the thing about second chances and violence and killing. In Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, the Doctor puts the signal in Solomon's spaceship and sends him out alone to certain death, because the Doctor thinks he deserves it, and he doesn't seem to even feel a little bit bad about it at all. And then in A Town Called Mercy, the Doctor threatens Jex at GUNPOINT, and throws him out of town to be killed. To me, the Doctor hates violence and death even when it is the death of someone he thinks is a terrible person, but the Doctor on screen is not that. And if I think back to earlier episodes, this is actually a pattern with him. Like with the Racnoss, and if it weren't for Donna he was going to let them die. Or as someone pointed out last night, he could have saved Cassandra's life but he deliberately chose not to.

So. I WANT the Doctor to be asexual and aromantic and nonviolent, but the show disagrees with me.

[calvinahobbes]

Sorry for the late reply. Work ate me whole.

Moffat's sexism is definitely a part of why I am angry with the show a lot, but I really agree with you about losing my faith in an ace!Doctor. It may be true that his relationship with Rose was coded that way, but I still feel like there was more room for at least an ace interpretation previously. Of course I understand that the 'real' narrative will always be of a *sexual Doctor, but I felt that there was as much potential for asexual subtext in this show as there were for homosexual subtext in other shows. I'm not hating on River, but yeah -- I'm sad, too.

And I completely agree with your sadness regarding the Doctor's idea of justice killing. I guess I said pretty much the same thing in my Mercy reaction post. My Doctor isn't like that, but yeah apparently The Doctor is :o(

I wish it wasn't a problem for me to have a different idea of it than the show runners themselves, but the truth is I almost always reach a point where subtext-never-text or disparate characterizations just make me sad and unwilling to engage with the show. I don't know if I'm reaching that limit with Dr W; I honestly can't tell yet.

[sentientcitizen]

*hugs* I'm really just... sorry. :(

[sophia_sol]

*hugs back* thanks. I really appreciate it.

[michelel72]

I liked the show well enough during the Nine years; I happened to be reading analyses that teased out stuff I didn't see and tied it all together. Then Ten came along, and at about the same time I found that I was excited to watch. Sometimes the show followed existing (Classic Series) canon; sometimes it flat-out contradicted; but it still felt linked to its history and it had heart.

But then came the Long Goodbye. The Looooooong Goodbye. By the end of that year of specials, I felt tired and jaded and just kind of exhausted.

And ... it never really got better. I think Matt Smith is a smashing actor, but I've never connected with the character of Eleven, at all. Each season has gotten worse, to the point that I've been actively annoyed by several episodes, particularly including 7x01 and 7x02. I don't look forward to it anymore. I don't bother to keep current or read much by way of meta or really talk about it with anyone. It's really a shame.

(I actually rather liked 7x03, but that's in no small part because I watched it right after 7x02, which I kind of hated.)

I could point to specifics of what I haven't liked, but that heads even further into bummer territory, and I don't want to take you down that road. I do have at least some sympathy for what you're going through, though, because I miss the silly show I used to enjoy so much.

(That said ... I personally thought the Ten/Rose stuff, at least, was coded super-romantically. I rolled my eyes at it, because I had liked the whole platonic thing myself.)

So, 7x03. How about that Sheriff, huh? Honestly, if I came into the episode having never seen any other Eleven stuff, I might have thought he was the Doctor, with his dedication to protecting those who had done good and commitment to the idea of second chances. And my recognizes-every-actor-ever friend totally didn't recognize the actor, which made for a great deal of fun once I looked him up. I liked him a lot. And they did eventually remember to throw in a few background women who weren't prostitutes; and the over-the-top laudatory narration wasn't about the Doctor at all but about a reformed war cyborg; and they casually built a whole new (rather beautiful) theology for the alien race in a way that motivated a character's actions without being an obvious contrivance. I definitely liked several elements from this one!

[melannen]

It is very sad when this happens. Hugs, and hopes that you can find the love again sometime.

(I have fallen out of love with Doctor Who... four? I think four times at last count. Including this one, which has lasted most of Smith's tenure. But Doctor Who canon keeps going on, and eventually it always turns back into a fandom I can love, and in the meantime there are always people around who also dislike current canon and are willing to join me in pretending it doesn't exist! The bad thing about a old, massive fandom is that it will be full of canon that hurts you *right there*. The good thing though is that it will also be full of people willing to deny that particular canon exists, because that's the only way to last it out.)

[lettered]

Oh man, this. All of this, but especially the part about violence, and about the wonders of the universe.

I actually started watching Who because I was flipping through channels (which I never do) back in 2007 and there was this crazy guy, this goofy guy, and he was just so excited and full of awe about everything happening around him, even though the shit happening around him looked actually horrible like everyone might die. There were aliens trying to kill him and he was like, "Oh neat, aliens; look at these ones they're so interesting!" At first I thought he was just an idiot, but then it turned out he knew everything ever; he understood they were dangerous and trying to kill him, but he still found them fascinating. It happened to be the episode "Rose".

I stopped watching after S4 because I felt like that Doctor was long gone. :o(

[sophia_sol]

Yeah. In retrospect I should have stopped watching at that time too, but... I just couldn't leave my show, I just kept on trying to keep loving it as much as I always had, because I needed to. And then I hit a breaking point and had to completely abandon ship

[lettered]

Yeah, I totally get that. *hugs*