The Next Doctor
Friday, December 26, 2008
I can encapsulate this Christmas special thusly:
It was Doctor Who - wonderful nonsense.
There. Done. Assorted fellow fans have griped about the ending, and I don't disagree with them entirely. Here's why:
The Cyber-King is pointless. It is just a huge stompy steampunk robot. The Doctor's babbled explanation that it's a dreadnought class ship with a conversion factory inside is mystifying because it comes out of nowhere - (however, see later for Amusing Fan Theory #23811) - these are Cybusmen, after all, and he doesn't know that much about them (however, see later for Amusing Fan Theory #431), and also the monster with the conversion factory is only useful if it stops to capture people to convert them. There are really two reasons to have the vast stompy robot.
1: It's impressive as all hell. Cyberzilla. This is pure spectacle, a triumph for The Mill, all very Iron Gianty.
2: It pulls the bad guys away from the humans and isolates them. The Doctor is forced to ascend to face Ms. Hartigan and is therefore also isolated. The human drama goes on at street level, while the gods duke it out up above.
The interesting stuff, for me, is that the clash of elements and concepts. The ending is very Heaven vs Hell. We have seen how the cybermen have been lurking in the sewers (again! is it a tradition with them? "We're in London, lads, let's hide in the sewers!"), which they have transformed into their base of steampunk operations, but this isn't the forge of Vulcan...it's closer to the scenes we saw in Isengard, or in some of Bosch's paintings. It's an underworld, it's Hell. Filling it with terrified innocents is rather a blunt metaphor for what happens when people seek revenge. Then the cybermen rise, with a scarlet woman riding the head of the Beast, and we're ini Revelations territory. Everything about the cybes at this point is about the Underworld - even the fact that they are steel, and riding a giant made of iron, Ms. Hartigan is wearing red (a ferrous colour, as well as the colour of flame and passion)... it's all biblical.
And it goes on!
Having risen, the CyberKing is confronted by the Doctor in a balloon. Here we have the element of air vs the element of Earth, or Heaven facing down Hell. Hell is legion, Heaven is just the one bloke. But we also know that the Doctor is more than a flesh and blood individual; more and more we've had it demonstrated that the Doctor is a set of ideas and principles; when Lake has his brain rewired by the infostamp, he absorbs the qualities of The Doctor and then becomes him. So the Doctor isn't necessarily a person, he can be a concept, an ethereal notion.
Then we get the Doctor's offer: come with me if you want to live.
He's got to make that offer. It's the Good Guy Rule. Only a villain or an anti-hero can kill without first offering the chance for redepmtion or peace. Even if the Doctor knows the answer before he makes the offer, he has to make it otherwise he's "just another alien threat". That we all know, as he does, what the answer will be is neither here nor there. Everyone believes he's the hero, he has to act like the hero. He also, as he points out, gets forced into being the executioner.
That's the price that the 10th Doctor has paid for his freedom. If the monsters have nightmares about the Doctor, it's because they force him to become the thing they fear the most. As fans, we know what the Doctor really wants. He wants to go and have fun, preferably with people he loves, and that is constantly denied him. He says that his companions leave because they find someone else, or because they have to, and he knows that his life - and the presence of the monsters, and what they make him into - is why his companions leave. The anger he shows in the moment before he zaps the CyberKing, is because yet again he's being forced to take responsibility for the actions of monsters; while the Doctor wouldn't ever turn his back on someone in need, he's becoming tired of the price he has to pay.
Which is why he accepts dinner. And why he hangs around for the applause.
The Amusing Fan Ideas.
How Does The Doctor Know So Bloody Much?
- like, how did he know about the CyberKing?
The answer is that he doesn't. The Doctor stumbles into a situation and stares at it for a few seconds, then starts talking. There are two possibilities here:
1: He's making it up. Who'd know the difference?
2: The TARDIS has all the answers, and is feeding them to him. After all, the TARDIS is alive and a vastly powerful time machine with telepathic circuits that can get into the heads of humans and aliens alike. There's no reason it couldn't have had a wander around in the Cyberleader's head, or the heads of the Cybermen when the Doctor met and spoke with them.
Let's not forget, the Doctor may not actually speak English. He might be speaking Gallifreyan and we're just hearing English because of the Tardis. This has to hold true for all of the monsters he meets too - the TARDIS has access to their brains because it's translating for him. If it can read the language centers, it can probably read everything else too - including memories.
Thus, when the TARDIS has information that it knows the Doctor wants, it supplies that information. However, the TARDIS has a sense of the dramatic; it never tells the Doctor the entire story and it never gives him all the answers he needs. Thus, it occurs to me that the Doctor is, in fact, being strung along by the TARDIS for the ship's own amusement.
Why Did The Cybusmen Build a CyberKing?
Mostly for all of the reasons in the main post above, I think, but here's another theory.
Since the events of Silver Nemesis the universe has technically been without Cybermen. These alternate versions, on entering the Doctor Who universe, have encountered a phenomena unique to that reality: the morphogenic field.
The Morphogenic Field is one of the things that binds the universe together and ensures that most aliens are humanoid and most of them speak to communicate instead of using lights, hand gestures, complex dances, smells etc. It also ensures that certain things keep happening; it's the source of Narrative Causality. In this case, for example, the reason that the Cybermen build a giant to go stomping over London is because of the following threads of Narrative Causality:
1: Godzilla. Giant monsters flatten cities after rising from improbably shallow bodies of water.
2: Gog and Magog, the giants and protectors of London.
3: The Cybermen of our universe might have created a Cyberking, and the Cybusmen are slowly being changed by exposure to the Morphogenic Field.
4: You've got to have giant robots. Where the technology exists to have a giant robot, a giant robot is the outcome. Humans of a certain type seem irresistably drawn to giant robots.
anyway, that's that.
10 comments:
I have often thought that the TARDIS chooses to land in places it knows The Doctor will find entertaining. However, because it is not quite fully sentient, and/or not very bright, it cannot tell the difference between entertaining and panrts-wettingly dangerous.
Very well argued. My main gripe with the Doctor's offer is purely that he has reached a point where he just goes through the motions. He has to be seen to be heroic as you rightly point out and makes an offer that to me doesn't seem logcal or perhaps even genuine. It's logical that he must make the offer but it's not done as a heartfelt thing. It's there as an excuse to become the executioner.
The Doctor as executioner is getting a wee bit tired as a concept now and it seems even the Doctor's getting weary of that role too. It doesn't quite come over in that ending but that's certainly the theme struggling to emerge from behind the stomping giant robot.
Loved your Biblical allusions too. Provides an interesting side reading along with the industrial/feminist politics stuff I was burbling about.
'Humans of a certain type seem irresistably drawn to giant robots...'
That'd be me, then.
Never mind moonbases, hovercars, and improbably white suits, it's the complete lack of giant robots in twenty-first century life I find most galling...
Cat: I entertain the notion that the TARDIS has a far better idea of what's going on than the Doctor. There's a disturbing line to take that, and it might well turn into a fic as soon as I can work out how to do it.
Gray: there are a few. I shall hunt a couple out.
Frank: the biblical allusions are there, as is a hermetic reading (even an alchemical one, if you want it).
I think The Doctor's Offer is his bulwark against cynicism, which really would be the death of him. Even the occasionally merciless 7th Doctor engineered things so his finger was never on the trigger, but the 10th seems much more trigger happy. I think, though, that this is because he's a grown up.
The loss of the Time Lords forced him to stop being a teenager and look hard at his actions. Now he's more the disaffected thirty-something who doesn't want the responsibility or the guilt but is being forced to accept it.
RTD might be delivering a subversive Xmas message here: you're celebrating your saviour, but what did salvation cost him?
I actually wondered if the Doctor recognized the CyberKing simply because he’d seen one before in another adventure, rather like your Point 3. Perhaps the two Cybermen are following a parallel evolution. As to why a giant Cyberman? Well, apart from giant Steampunk mecha being good fun, they doubtless see the Cyberman form as being the ideal. So what’s better than a Cyberman? A bigger Cyberman with more weapons. Flawed logic, but then the Cybers certainly aren’t above that.
Zoltar!
The morphogenic field thing is a fan theory. I.E. amusing rubbish.
The CyberKing doesn't make sense logically, tactically (all your eggs in one really hard to miss basket) or logistically. It's nonsense. But it's really tall, really fun nonsense. Any attempt to explain it reasonably or rationally is going to have to get past that.
Oh, it's perfectly fine with me that it's nonsense. Though I don't imagine they were expecting much resistance from the folks below, aside from them throwing eggs from their baskets. ;)
Yep. It was tall, it was fun. It did it's job.
More biblical allusions:
We saw a Nativity. Not just the Cyberking (which is more a Moonchild than a virgin birth), but Lake becoming the Doctor. As he struggles to come to terms with this (something that RTD wrote about first in The Second Coming) he finds himself a companion. Although it's not stated what she does for a living, Ms. Hartigan's barb "I bet he didn't pay you to talk" indicates that we're supposed to think she's a prostitute. As was Mary Magdelene. If we take Lake's comment that he "regenerated" at face value, was Rosawhatsername the first person to see him after that event? So would this combine Christmas and Easter in one fell swoop?
It's almost as if RTD had set out to get as much of the New Testament into that one story as possible.
Hey Dave!
Wow, I am really not qualified on any level to comment on Dr. Who stuff. I am only contributing my unworthy post to let you know that I have gotten my hands on the first 3 seasons of the most recent Dr. Who series and will begin watching them shortly. I'll let you know what I think.
Happy New Year!
((((((((((Dave))))))))))
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