DW: "The Name of the Doctor"

[usuallyhats]

Vidukon was awesome! I am thinking about doing a proper write up post, but in case I don't get round to it, I want to acknowledge its awesomeness here. :D

One thing I decided not to do at Vidukon was join the Doctor Who finale watching party, and, having seen it, I am v. glad, because it would probably have made me grumpy. Here, have some bullet-points on why.

• Let's face it, I am the sort of person who would vastly prefer "the Doctor never tells us his name, it's probably Jeremy or Hyacinth or something" to "the Doctor never tells us his name, it must be Important and Meaningful and Doom Laden", so this episode was never going to work all that well for me. (And now I am picturing Matt Smith yelling "it's JEREMY, all right?" and am very sad that didn't happen.) (Disclaimer: I quite like the name Jeremy, but it's not really considered cool, is it?)


• Fundamentally I just hate it when New Who gets all portentous and mythic. I just want it to be about the Doctor wandering around the universe making friends and trying to help people. I also dislike the arcy stuff because it just doesn't work with the format of the show. RTD just about got away with Bad Wolf, but that's it.


• This episode made me really worried about the anniversary special, because all the theories I've read about who the John Hurt Doctor is just make me go "NO NO NO NO NO". Maybe Moffat will pull something out that I don't hate... but on current form, I am not optimistic.


• Blah blah dark Doctor angsty angsty blah angst is so much deeper and more important than happytimes doncha know.


• OK, yes, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but that's not the same as "sufficiently advanced technology is BASICALLY magic so we can do what we like and be all mystical and not bother with even paying lip service to rules or explanations or anything".


• Oh which note... why is a time traveller's grave the one place they must never go? Why is it so dangerous? I genuinely do not understand this AT ALL. Surely the most dangerous place a time traveller could go is the day they set off?


• From an in story point of view, I am OK with Clara sacrificing herself to save the Doctor (and, let's not forget, all of time and space). It makes sense as a choice she would make and on the terms the story has set up (...which don't make sense themselves, but whatever). From an out of story perspective... meh. Look, there's a gender imbalance at the heart of the show, which isn't going to change until/unless we get a female (or canonically non-binary) Doctor, but there's no need to make it worse by having all the women's lives revolve round the Doctor, ok? Or the bits of them we see, anyway, because there's an assumption implicit in the choice to show some parts of a character's life rather than others that the bits we see are the important bits, and the other bits, although cool, are the less interesting bits, because if they were that good, they'd be right there on the screen. Clara's had all these lives and experiences now, and I would LOVE it if the series acknowledges that later on and has her remember them all, but right now all those lives were all about facilitating the Doctor's life. SIGH.


• Loved seeing Gallifrey, hated that we have even more evidence for the "almost all Time Lords are male" theory. (Were they both white, too? I thought so but I was watching on the tiny iPlayer screen and also texting at the same time.)


• What was with everyone dying and coming back to life every five minutes? THIS ISN'T COMICS, PEOPLE.


• So I love River, and I quite like Doctor/River, but I do not like it being actualfax no denying it canon. Because I feel like at this stage making anything definite canon about the Doctor's sexuality is just closing off possibilities that we've been playing with for years. Plus, all the Doctor-centric romancy stuff in the new series has been so heteronormative (with the exception of Jack), I would rather not have it at all if that's the way it's going to be.


• Minor thing, but though I liked the idea of the Doctor's friends having a way of getting together to talk, I didn't like calling it a "conference call", that just irritated me. It's a bit "our current time is the default time" for my taste.


• I didn't hate everything! I loved seeing the classic Doctors, even if I didn't like why we were seeing them. Ditto River and the Paternoster gang. (Strax's ongoing inability to get the hang of conventional human gender markers is entirely delightful.) And it's Moffat, so there were lots of funny bits, and Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman have excellent faces and everything. It was just all the stuff around that that I didn't like.

I feel the need to add that a few reservations aside I really loved "The Crimson Horror" and "Nightmare in Silver". Just... can we stop having arcs now, please? I don't like being unhappy with Doctor Who.

Comments

[alwaystheocean]

I always appreciate your Who opinions such a lot. Like we don't always 100% agree but pretty close. Like I'm sorry the finale didn't work for you but I suspect if I watched it I'd agree with a lot of this.

Also glad you didn't watch it Saturday.

Vidukon seems so far away already!

(Still listening to Titanium on loop...)

[usuallyhats]

Aw, thanks! ♥ With this episode I feel like more than anything it's the culmination of lots of trends I've not been keen on, rather than the episode itself per se?

Vidukon seems so far away already!
I knooowwww. Must be time for the next one, then, right? Right?

(Still listening to Titanium on loop...)
It's basically permanently lodged in my brain now. :D

[zurcherart.livejournal.com]

We tend to agree on our reviews.

I loved how seamlessly they worked the former Doctors in. I wished they managed some dialog form Hartnell and Susan. Even a "Come along child" and "Oh Grandfather". Glad they DID show Susan leaving with him. But Susan was in the TARDIS he didn't take! So presumably he got her before he left … but that's not how it looks. Clara: This TARDIS is more fun. Doctor: OK cya bye. Oh wait a minute was my Granddaughter supposed to come with me? That would have been a time to insert a "come along child" and and "Oh Grandfather".

[usuallyhats]

Me too! The actual effects were a little wobbly but perfectly acceptable, I thought.

Aw, that would have been lovely, I'm sad they didn't do that.

[zurcherart.livejournal.com]

Oh I just realised. Only the renegades have chosen names. And there's can't be that many renegades. So how is there a whole "thing" about the name you chose is a promise.

Eh? Well I'm sure there's lots of possible explanations, I can think of at least 2 right now. But I also much prefer Jeremy. I mean they named his Granddaughter so it seems unlikely the Doctor's family went in for complicated names like Romanadvoratrelundar.

[usuallyhats]

I think Gallifreyan naming conventions are such a mess, it's probably better that the show just leaves them alone!

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

why is a time traveller's grave the one place they must never go?
I...am not sure, actually. I mean, if it has your death date on it, perhaps it's bad to know your future? Like when the Ponds saw their own graves? Elsewise, maybe it's just a more advanced version of meeting yourself and it's too paradox-y?

What was with everyone dying and coming back to life every five minutes?
I think Jenny and Strax kept dying because they had been dead previously (Jenny earlier in the episode, Strax...like a season ago?) and if the Doctor hadn't been around they would still be dead.

[usuallyhats]

Elsewise, maybe it's just a more advanced version of meeting yourself and it's too paradox-y?
I suppose it must be something like that, but don't see why knowing when and possibly where you died could cause more problems than anything else, and especially why it would automatically cause problems. Oh well!

Yeah, it's just getting a bit ridiculous, the number of times people die-except-not in Doctor Who at the moment!

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Predestination paradoxes, maybe? Who knows. It made sense to me until the Doctor said he had time traveled the most so his grave was the most dangerous, at which point any explanation collapsed into "time-energy nonsense explanation." :P

Right? It's like in comics, when you just get bored when people die, and you're like, how long do I have to wait until you un-die? Unless they are relatively minor characters, in which case they might, sadly, be properly dead.

[usuallyhats]

at which point any explanation collapsed into "time-energy nonsense explanation." :P
*g* yep, that's basically it!

*nods* and the time it'll take them to come back is inversely proportional to how much you like them. :(

[betawho.livejournal.com]

I agree with this whole review. I too don't think Doctor Who is made for series arcs, not the kind they're doing now where they try to shove a separate story into each standalone story. Which, by how they've done it so far, just feels fake, doesn't really work, and the finale rarely has anything to do with what the arc was set up as anyhow. (How did this episode have anything to do with the Silence or what Dorian prophecied?)

As for "a time traveler shouldn't see his grave." That actually makes a bit of sense to me. If you knew how you died wouldn't you be tempted to prevent it? Paradox. If you knew where you died, wouldn't you at least want to go see how it happened? Again, even just being there could cause a paradox. And who wants to know how they die anyway? Wouldn't that lay a huge burden on a person?

On the other hand, if a Time traveler already knows where he dies (in order to avoid it) wouldn't he then deliberately try to avoid it when it was time? Bit of a Catch-22.

I can see it being a Time Lord rule never to witness your own death or grave.

In-story, the reason it was supposedly so dangerous was because it created a rift into all his timelines and, considering how much he'd done and effected the universe, that made it a potential weapon in the wrong hands. Doesn't explain why the Doctor would be forbidded to go there (other than psychological reasons) but it did at least explain why some bad guy would want to find it. Other than just to have a last "Nya-nya!"

(Of course, this does raise a bit of a problem considering he thought his death was supposed to take place at Lake Silencio last season.)



Sometimes I don't think Moffat ever actually watches his own DVDs.

[usuallyhats]

I too don't think Doctor Who is made for series arcs, not the kind they're doing now where they try to shove a separate story into each standalone story.
No, they need something that's both big enough to follow them round and then produce an Epic! Finale!, but not so big it makes us wonder why the Doctor hasn't stopped to investigate it. Bad Wolf mostly worked because we saw it more than the characters did!

True, lots of potential for paradoxes and general unpleasantness, but it wouldn't necessarily cause a paradox automatically, would it? I'm blanking on examples but I'm sure I've read/seen stories where someone finds out about their own death and either is resigned to it or finds that the thing they've done to avoid it has just made it happen. In fact, the former is pretty much what happened to the Doctor at the end of season six, right?

[lycoris.livejournal.com]

My sister and I have decided the Doctor's real name should be "Randy Brad." He slurs it together to try and make it sound alien "Randibrad!" but everybody knows really. ;) (although I like Jeremy. The image of the Third Doctor being called Jeremy really entertains me! He's just not a Jeremy person. The others, I could kind of buy it but Three? No.)

[usuallyhats]

Ahaha, yes. "It is a very old and respected Gallifreyan name! Stop sniggering!"

He's really not! (Also he had a companion called Jeremy, didn't he? That could get confusing.)