pubs
The new series is most well encapsulated in the opening and the ending of The End of the World — all of the melancholy wonder there, that the series always seemed like it was trying to get across yet which had never before been so concentrated. About how fleeting life is, and how important it is to understand and appreciate what you, while you, can.
It really is the overarching message of the series — the new one, in particular. It’s kind of the message the Ninth Doctor gives us. Everything has its time and everything dies. He especially is doomed, by his own head and hand. And yet when Rose’s father figures the reason he’s never done anything important is that he was meant to die, he’s told that “it doesn’t work that way”.
The new series is doing a really good job of commenting on the nature of life by crossing it with the nature of time. Being and Time; Heidegger argues they’re the same thing. It’s not a bad argument, from a subjective standpoint. From a human one. From the only perspective we can know.
Which is, incidentally, the new perspective of the series — now that it’s focused on the companions again rather than the Doctor as-such.
Some people have expressed dismay at how they no longer can appreciate the original series as they used to, much to the derision of the hardcore. I think the problem is now there’s a frame of reference for the old stories. Before, they were all that existed — so it was easy to take them for what they were. Now you get to compare with the current production. You can’t help it, really — even if it’s not really a fair comparison. Since there is a “New Who”, the old who by nature becomes “Old Who” — with all the baggage that entails. One of those unavoidable details.
The question then becomes, how do we reconcile the distinction? It’s something each of us has to answer on his own, in his own way.
You know what’s the least dated? The black-and-white stories.
Really. It’s obvious they’re from another era. They’re old. They’re crackly. There’s a completely different headspace to black-and-white film, compared to color.
Check out Tomb of the Cybermen, for instance. It holds up nearly as well as, say, Lang’s Metropolis. There’s enough distance that you have no real inclination to compare it to the new material. It simply is what it is.
Once you introduce color, though, you run into a whole host of psychological problems.
The few times I saw snippets of Doctor Who on TV in my childhood—probably all Pertwee episodes—part of my reaction, besides being terrified by the Autons’ hands, was “It looks like a soap opera.” That oversaturated Seventies color video combined with the use of incidental music was probably what did it.
I’d argue that the original series ran long enough that you could already take it as several somewhat different TV shows in succession. When Colin Baker came on, the whole look of the show changed radically, all candy colors, as if it were trying to be hip in high Eighties style; it must have seemed like a huge and maybe dismaying discontinuity.
Is this your unreview of Mario 64?
Yeah, the production team turned over pretty frequently — often, odd as it seems, at roughly the same time as a change of Doctors. Part of the reason Pertwee’s era was as it was was due to the new producer. Then early Tom Baker and late Tom Baker. Then John-Nathan Turner came in during Baker’s last season and stayed until the end. Davison was “his” Doctor, and everything after that was Turner trying to be clever and different, and therefore fighting against his own judgment.
Have a feeling the series might have survived longer had someone else taken over after Davison left. No one could really work with JNT, from what I’ve read. He pissed off everyone who got close to him. So toward the end he didn’t really have anyone decent to work with and didn’t have anyone on his side. He often had to fill several positions himself.
The soap opera look is the thing I most associate with the BBC: too-bright interior sets with that “video look” and drab, dark, grainy film inserts for outside shoots. Going out-of-doors in the seventies was like entering a dungeon. The first time I saw Doctor Who, my first thought was “this looks just like Fawlty Towers!”
Whatever could you mean?
by Lang’s Metropolis do you mean Fritz Lang’s Metropolis? And how are you veiwing the new series? Do you receive a channel over there that shows it?
Have you seen Kino’s restored version? It’s pretty keen.
In today’s climate, there are methods to watch whatever you want to watch.
No, silly, it’s Mario Sunshine. Isn’t that obvious?
Rose’s eyes have been opened, but she lacks the wisdom needed to know what to do with it — and to know when it is OK to be selfish. There is potential for a very good character arc here.
Oh, and I just noticed upon rewatching the Parting of the Ways (on actual broadcast television, as chance would have it) how that “haunting female vocal motif” that’s shown up a couple of times (in this episode, when Rose sees all the Bad Wolf graffiti) seems to be, at its root, based on the opening theme.
More than that. Rose’s theme (as introduced in the opening montage to the first episode) is a variation on the Doctor’s theme. Or a response to it. It works on the same chord progression. I imagine you could layer them without too much trouble, to form something larger.
About Rose’s eyes opening — I wrote something on that, too:
I’m inclined to think Davies is going somewhere with this. We’ve had the upward swing of her character arc. Now we’ve got at least one more season for it to come back down again. For her to learn who she is, what it means to be human, how to bring all of this stuff she’s learned and seen into the context of everyday life. How to simply enjoy what you’ve got.
So far, she’s just been spoiled. She couldn’t appreciate what she had, so she’s been shown what else is out there. The moment she becomes truly big is when she allows herself to be small.
This running psychology is what really holds me in the new series. It’s kind of poststructuralist in the way that it changes our perspective, as viewers, in order to change the meaning of all that we once considered familiar. To look for something deeper, more significant to life, underneath the veneer of the series. It is in that sense that it works as successful sci-fi for me. People are looking in the wrong place when they complain about the “magical solutions” and lack of other worlds. That’s not what makes sci-fi. It’s what all of that means.
Right.
Ahh, yes. I had read that. I, perhaps, half-thought I was replying to that … without realizing that I wasn’t actually adding anything you hadn’t said.
“Selfish”, however, doesn’t seem quite right. A big part of the reason the Doctor and Jack consider her so special is because she’s actually so self-less; she fearlessly jumps in to help. (Perhaps because she doesn’t feel she has anything to live for outside of doing that.) Thus the Doctor’s … more than frustration; disappointment with her in Father’s Day. He was afraid he’d been wrong about her, and that when in came down to it she was just as greedy as Adam.
Yes, the Doctor has spoiled her, and she’s become selfish in the sense that she can’t imagine life without TARDIS-privileges. Bratty, even. But not really for ‘selfish’ reasons (if the PotW’s diner conversation is to be taken at face value); she just has nothing else that seems (to her) to be meaningful in her life.
You’re right. Though selfishness isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. It just needs context, is all.
Context that she has clearly lost.