...And he's wonderful!

Tim Latimer: He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night, and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and he can see the turn of the universe. And... he's wonderful.  --From Family of Blood 3x9

This is the episode that is beyond normal episodic TV. It is beyond the best episode of the X-Files, Torchwood, Being Human, Mad Men, Fringe, Dexter, Life on Mars,  The Walking Dead, True Blood, and Spartacus. I say this because I am into TV. I have watched many shows from the mundane to the sublime. I like to believe that I have pretty good taste but I know that I do not always. I have the Biggest Loser and the X-Factor set to record on my DVR and all six season's of Dawson's Creek on DVD. I am not immune to TV that is just for fun. But Doctor Who is different, they say it is just for fun and for children, except they hit you with this when you least expect it.  It asks you if you could change something would you.  And how would this change affect the rest of your life?

I will not get too in-depth as I want this to be the last Doctor Who post. I almost wish it could be a dissertation for a college paper. I will just call out what made this so amazing:
--The boys with guns in their hands ready to fire on straw men even through the fear and as the tears fell. John Smith looking unsure with a rifle in his hands and the dawning horror on his face as he watches the children do battle. He himself never fires a shot and is as overjoyed as the children when they realize they have killed no one and he decides to have them retreat.
--After the TARDIS is captured and John, Joan, and Martha view it from the bushes for the first time. John starts to panic and reiterates that he has never seen it before (although once again you see the truth in his eyes). Joan gently reminds him that he dreamed of a blue box and wrote about it in his journal. His face collapses and he starts to cry "Why can't I be John Smith? That's all I want to be, with his life and his job, and...(here he turns and looks to Joan) and his love. Isn't he a good man?" God this is a hard scene and his anger at the choice he has to make starts coming out as he lashes out at Martha, this won't be the last time.
--Finally, they find safety in an abandoned house and here is where it comes to an end. John once again lashes out at Martha because she doesn't know what to do. He yells what is she to him, what does she do for him. She says she travels with him because he is lonely, and John asks why she would want him to become that. She can't answer. Here Tim comes knocking, saying the watch drew him here, it wants to be opened and says so beautifully what the Doctor is in the quote that opens this post. After the family starts to bomb the village, John grabs the watch, and for a split second you want to cheer as the Doctor finally comes though and talks for the first time. The joy is short lived as John's face crumples and he is gripped by fear, "Is that him, is that how he talks?"  Left alone John and Joan say a goodbye that neither will admit to. They both know what must be done. Touching the watch together, we see the last temptation of John Smith as a beautiful, normal life flashes before their eyes. A simple life of love and children and the relief as he dies of old age before Joan. That, finally, he is the one to leave instead of being left.
--We don't see him change but we know that the John Smith who enters the Families craft offering the watch, just take "HIM" away and leave the village in peace is actually the Doctor playing John and it is so. He punishes them. A chilling voice over and quick scenes of their punishments follow,  and then we follow the Doctor as Joan meets him for the first time. Another powerful scene follows. And then it has one more ending. You just need to see it for yourself. It really drains you with the power of it.

This episode just seemed to open up the writers to explore every heartbreaking aspect of the Doctor.

Donna Nobles first trip with the Doctor followed with this quote:

The Doctor: Some things are fixed, some things are in a flux. Pompeii is fixed. Donna Noble: How do you know which is which? The Doctor: That's how I see the universe. Every waking second, I can see: what is, what was, what could be, what must not. That's the burden of a Time Lord, Donna. And I'm the only one left.

But she begs him, he doesn't have to save everyone, just save someone. PLEASE!

In The Next Doctor when he is traveling alone he admits that when his companions leave or he loses them that they break his heart. Maybe it is just easier to travel alone.

When in Utopia, I got so excited when I realized who Professor Yana was that I was jumping around the living room. I knew that John Simm (who gives DT a run for the money in the dishy department) was playing the Master but I did not know how he was introduced. Because of that I was delightfully surprised.

He has a heart to heart with Wilf in The End of Time, Part One. Wilf can see that the loneliness is tearing him up, that he is doing things, making mistakes that he wouldn't make if he had someone to care far. That Donna is so sad without him, even though she doesn't know why.

Scene after scene in episode after episode, he just breaks my heart the same way his companions break his. Just wonderful. As I was watching, marathoning huge chunks of it, I felt bad for those who had to wait weeks or months between episodes. Until now because that has come to bite me in the ass. Now, after only a few short months, I am not ready to say goodbye to David Tennant. I have yet to be able to bring myself to watch The End of Time, Part Two. I don't want to meet Matt Smith. I know I will. There are all new adventures for me to share with this new Doctor, but I will forever remember that David was my first Doctor in a way that none of the others were. I have been watching some of the older episodes and you can see where the well-spring is that David drunk so deep from. The melancholy, the back story, the depth of feeling, the emotion, the love of his companions, all there. It just needed the correct writers and the right actor to bring it life. So thanks David and Russell T Davies for bringing Doctor Who back to life... it has been a hell of a trip.

The Time Lord's Burden

Series Three started with the Doctor trying to go on without his rose. He has a rollicking adventure with a one of (at least here) companion, The Runaway Bride, only to find that a kiss awakens a sleeping beauty in Martha Jones, who dutifully follows her prince throughout the rest of this series.  Martha loves the Doctor, it is a useless love, like falling in love with the sun. It brings life and warms you but nothing you can say or do will make it love you back or even make it really see you. It doesn't break her though, this love, instead it makes her stronger.  There are some good episodes here. I quite liked Martha's introduction in Smith & Jones, we travel to Elizabethan England in The Shakespeare Code (which had a delightful call out to Harry Potter that had me giggling for five minutes), and we say goodbye to the mysterious Face of Boe and hear a secret in Gridlock.  So all in all, it was an enjoyable season thus far but nothing to write home about. Then they pulled out a two-parter that absolutely gutted me and which catapulted what was always a very good show into the stratosphere.  

I am talking, of course, about Human Nature/Family of Blood. This was a work of art, it is one of the best things I have ever seen on TV and that includes everything I have ever seen on TV (thank you Jacob for the words I couldn't find on my own). It starts out innocuously enough with the Doctor and Martha on the run from some nameless villain and then it changes. Suddenly, we meet a man named John Smith who wears the Doctor's face and his faithful servant who wears Martha's. It is 1913 and this place is a boy's boarding school in a small English village. John Smith is a headmaster and has strange dreams that tell of an extraordinary man who has amazing adventures in time and space. He writes these dreams down in a lovely journal filled with drawings and for the first time since the new series we see the faces of those who were the Doctor all the way back to the beginning. It is the circle. John Smith speaks slowly, is shy and stumbling with none of the grace or manic energy we have come to expect from the Doctor, he is a stranger.  As upper-class men of his time are wont to be, he is thoughtlessly cruel as he condones the beating of a boy named Tim Latimer. Latimer is special, frail and small for his age, but who can see things or just know things he shouldn't. He finds himself looking at a pocket watch in the Headmaster's room, a watch with strange designs, that contains voices that call to him, that show him a dangerous John Smith wielding a sonic screwdriver. Tim is confused by this and before he knows it he has stolen the watch. The school is disciplined and the boys are trained to fight with machine guns bigger than themselves. It is peopled with a young, entitled generation still retaining the glow of empire upon which the sun never sets. They don't know yet that all of it is about to blow away in a great conflagration made of mud and barbed wire. But, Martha knows. So things aren't quite what they seem.

It all becomes clear when Martha takes a bike ride to an old barn. She enters it and there sits the TARDIS looking sad, dusty and disused, almost forgotten. It makes Martha smile, all the racist slights and her status as a servant melt away. Here is freedom, here is the universe at her disposal but the man who controls the ride is gone. She enters and our questions are answered. The Doctor is in hiding as a human using the chameleon arch that rewrites his DNA and puts his Time Lord essence in a pocket watch. I found it interesting that when he was doing this he said he would set it to human, which means he could become anything with this device. Martha watches in horror as the man she loves screams in agony as his body is rewritten, who he is stripped away. His hurried instructions about how the TARDIS would give him an identity and pick a place for him to integrate flung out in an offhand manner. None of this for Martha though, she had to get by on her own as best she could, dependent on a man who does not know her or her importance, and worse yet her dependence on him. She watches the video left for her from her Doctor, last minute instructions, just to see him again. To remember who she loves. Now we see, we understand. John Smith is a disguise, the Doctor wearing a human cloak. But as the dreams leak through, we know the cloak is showing wear and fraying at the edge.

And then the worst and most wonderful thing happens. John Smith, this ordinary man with an ordinary life, falls in love, the one emotion that we humans encounter that is both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time . Her name is Joan Redfern and she is the school nurse. She is smart and kind, but with a shuttered vitality behind a plain face whose very plainness makes it all the more beautiful. She wants to know about John Smith, he awakens her again to love after her husband was killed in a war, ends the stasis she didn't even know she was living in. Her husband lost to another senseless war that churns up generations of men decade after decade, its hunger for human flesh never satisfied. He shares his journal with her, she wants him to ask her to a country dance, the hinting of such almost kills him as he tumbles down the stairs. But still it grows, a walk with Joan through the village, laughing and getting to know each other, and the Doctor peeks through, just for a moment. A baby is endangered by a heavy piano being lifted by a fraying cord. You can see the Doctor hidden but watchful, playing the future in his mind. A quick grab of a cricket ball, an expert throw, and disaster is averted. The Doctor saves the day again, but this is not the Doctor, this is John Smith, who is astounded at what he has just done. Giddy and excited, he is more than he thought, he is bigger on the inside, and this gives him the courage to extend the invitation Joan was waiting for. She would love to go to the dance as his escort.  He draws Joan's picture in his journal. It is lovely, he says that is the way he sees her, she is lovely. The intensity of the way he stares at her, makes me wonder if the Doctor were to stare at you that way, would it burn you up, could you stand it? They kiss, it is irrevocable . Martha watches it all in dismayed consternation, she can't look away. Her heart is breaking, how can he do this to her? The Doctor has no advice, he didn't even think of it as an option. Mistake number one, he didn't account for his human heart, only the DNA.

The family shows up, our villains. Deaths start occurring. A twit named Baines is possessed along with a portly man, a little girl (the red balloon she carries is the scary side of the transcendent red balloon of the movie of the same name) and Martha's only friend, Jenny. Martha has to save the Doctor, it is her imperative but the watch is gone. She is desperate and slaps him, he is angry and throws her out, saying never return. She is in the wilderness, but not lost, not her. She will find a way.  Part one ends at the dance. They tell John Smith that they want the Doctor. You can see in his eyes that he knows, even as his lips say that he does not know what they are talking about. A showdown, an escape and its over til part two.

I will finish this another time. This episode really inspired me and I have become quite wordy and this is only part one. As good as it was, part two is on a whole nother level.

What's your name? I'm the Doctor. Doctor who?

One of the main reasons that kept me from this newest Doctor was that I had heard that this one would have romantic interests. The Doctor previous to this had always been asexual and his companions were platonic. I thought doing this was a needless concession to modern culture which cannot seem to conceive of a man and woman who can travel together just as mates. I guess this would make me a purist in Doctor Who circles. The Doctor has traveled with many companions over the years and only one prior could it even seem hinted that he had more than friendship with and that was Romana II. But he was very close with some of the others most noticeably Sarah Jane Smith, Liz Shaw, and Ace who he became very like a mentor and father figure. Of all the Doctors, up until the supremely dishy Tennant, Peter Davison had been the youngest and most attractive Doctor. And still for the most part the show managed to be snog free. Rose changed all that. The beginning of series 2 saw how Rose reacted to the regeneration and her initial distrust of this new face of the Doctor. I really enjoyed the season but some episodes were stand outs. Including School Reunion where we meet Sarah Jane again and Rose see's the ghost of companions future.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Rose: I thought you and me were— Well, I obviously got it wrong. I've been to the year 5 billion, right, but this... Now, this is really seeing the future. You just leave us behind. Is that what you're gonna do to me?

The Doctor: No. Not to you.

Rose: But Sarah Jane. You were that close to her once, and now you never even mention her. Why not?

The Doctor: I don't age. I regenerate. But humans decay; you wither and you die. Imagine watching that happen to someone that you— [The Doctor breaks off]

Rose: What, Doctor?

The Doctor: You can spend the rest of your life with me, but I can't spend the rest of mine with you. I have to live on. Alone. That's the curse of the Time Lords.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     For sheer comic relief, New Earth was great. The possession of both Rose and the Doctor by flat Cassandra was extremely funny. This is also the first episode that intimates that Rose feels more than friendship for The Doctor. Gradually throughout this season the Doctor and his companion grow closer than we have ever seen happen in the past. There is barely suppressed jealousy on the part of Rose and the Doctor towards supposed rivals in several episodes, but especially in The Girl in the Fireplace. Reinette seemed more than a match for The Doctor and he seemed to genuinely fall for her. It is never made really clear what made Rose so different from all of his past companions that when she was separated from him at the end of series two in the 2-parter Army of Ghosts/Doomsday that she would come to haunt his dreams and she was mentioned often much to his next companions consternation. Rose didn't hide her feelings for him and her parting from him was extremely painful for her and hard to watch. Especially moving was her tearful confession that she loved him and her mother running to comfort her when contact was abruptly discontinued. So at the end of season two, we find the Doctor alone again without his Rose. She seemed to have an effect on him that no other companion could match, which I still find strange because he hooks up with some pretty extraordinary women in the next two seasons in the form of Martha Jones and Donna Noble (whose season I have just started). I will move into season three in an additional post because there is one two-parter that just absolutely floored me and has inspired this series of posts.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               **I had nothing to do with the beautiful picture at the top of this post (except for having the good taste to use it) and I would like to credit the maker but cannot remember where I got it from. So please forgive me.**

I Can't Believe it Took Me this Long!

This is going to be a long post and full of spoilers. So if you don't want to be spoiled read something else.

 I finally decided to watch this show because I knew that Captain Jack and Torchwood was a spinoff  and wanted to see his genesis on Doctor Who. The reason I didn't want to watch it before this was that I was such a fan of the original series and did not want this to spoil it for me. I was introduced to its original incarnation around 1989. My mum was a Moneypenny to a bunch of engineers at Boeing and one of them was a huge fan of the show and had all the episodes he could get on VHS tape. He loaned them to us and just like your first Bond (for me Roger Moore), you always have a special place for your first Doctor. Since I watched them in kind of a mixed up order, a sprinkle of Hartness, a dash of Baker, and a pinch of Pertwee, I liked them all. Eventually I found myself with a special fondness for Davison but in the end it was Sylvester McCoy who claimed the honor of Karen's favorite Doctor. So when this newest one started showing up on BBC America, I gave it a miss. Until just a little over a month ago. Miracle Day on Starz got me motivated to sit down and give it chance and, boy, am I glad I did. This show is something and I have not been able to stop watching.

The one thing that all the Doctor's in his various incarnations carry with him is a crushing loneliness. Some hide it better than others but all his faces carry it within, an invisible pall of darkness around his hearts. Seeing all the death and destruction that his life entails, hundreds of years of it, the loss of his planet, his past, that is not hard to understand. I think it is his companions in the end that keep him sane and able to carry on in his travels through time and space. He certainly does not like being alone, that is made abundantly clear. His thoughts and memories must hound him, never allowing him a moments peace. It is only when he can share himself with another that he can fully function. He is such an interesting character with such a rich mythology, it sometimes feels that you will never get to the end of understanding just who this man is, nor would you want to. He can act so shallow, but sometimes there is a look, an incident, and you can feel the depths, so deep you could never reach bottom. If you did it would be like looking into the time vortex that is the heart of the TARDIS and the understanding would consume you. Leaving the Doctor alone yet again with those sad and haunted eyes. Reinette from "The Girl in the Fireplace" called him her lonely angel. Lonely he most certainly is, but he is more God than angel, an immortal Time Lord. And like a God he is vengeful, unforgiving, full of wrath, wielding time like Thor does his hammer or Neptune controls the seas. But, like God as well, the Doctor wears two faces to match his two hearts. He can be loving, kind, and generous. He will sacrifice himself to save those he loves only to be reborn like the Phoenix and start the process all over again.

So starting with the first episode "Rose" with Eccelstone, it felt like I was in for an adventure. And, it has not disappointed. I really liked Eccelstone's portrayal of the ninth Doctor. Charming, witty, ingenious (as all the Doctor's are) with a deep pathos of guilt as the only survivor of the time war and an occasional uncontrollable rage (that Tennant finally allowed full vent to) he was fascinating and not a little bit scary at times. The stories were fast paced, interesting, and I enjoyed Rose who was so lively and excited about everything she saw. My favorite episodes of this season was the two-parter "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances." Not just because we get to meet Capt. Jack for the first time but because the story was so compelling. That scene with little Jaime walking alone down the dark and empty street, so small and vulnerable, going to his room, brought tears to my eyes. In the end, when everybody lives and the way the Doctor dances around like a child at Christmas had me up and cheering. And when the truth of the Bad Wolf is finally revealed at series end and winds up saving the world but destroying the Doctor I knew I would miss him. I didn't know how I would feel about this new floppy haired version, the tenth doctor. But this was Doctor Who after all, if you can't stand change you shouldn't watch.

To Be Continued---Whew, I think that I will  break this into two parts and move on to Tennant tomorrow. As always, comments are welcome.

Man this has not been a good year.

Andy Whitfield is dead at 39. Died of a horrible disease right when he was coming into his own as an actor. He was the lead on a fantastic show called Spartacus. The show was fierce and fabulous, made the more so by his strong and mesmerizing performance. Plus, damn if he wasn't hot in a loin cloth. When I heard he had cancer, I was stunned. The same kind that Michael C. Hall from Dexter had and beat. So I thought for sure someone who looked so healthy would be sure to pull through. Not so and now he is dead. I was devastated to hear that they ended up having to recast him due to his illness but I was still sure that he eventually would be well again. I think the show will be diminished without him. But this is beyond that and I actually cried when I read the news. It may seem silly crying for a man I never knew but I do that for people who make my life more enjoyable for the entertainment they bring. Here he joins the ranks of Jim Henson, John Ritter, River Phoenix, and others. Many people decry Spartacus as all sex and violence. It had plenty of both to be sure. It was not just that. It was compelling television peopled with amazing characters. It made me laugh, cry, turn away in disgust and cheer. In interviews he seemed like a quiet, sweet, and soft-spoken man and he battled his disease bravely. His wife and 2 small children must be devastated. Life is so short it seems. RIP Andy, thank you for bringing Spartacus to life You won't be soon forgotten.