Torchwood, Doctor Who, and the infamous "Utopia" trailer...

[fajrdrako]

I've been thinking about the "Utopia" trailer that John Barrowman showed on Jonathan Ross, and enjoying the puzzle it represents.

Ever since I saw "The Parting of the Ways", I've pondering the question of why the Doctor didn't go back to collect Jack from the Game Station. My first guess was that the Doctor didn't know Rose had brought him back from the dead - but he clearly did know, as evidenced in "Children in Need", where they made a point of telling us so. And it was clear throughout Torchwood that Jack was looking for the Doctor, but even with a few close calls had failed to find him. So...

My conclusion was that the Doctor didn't want Jack to find him, but why? He liked Jack, and Jack had, first, changed his life for him, and then given his life for him - worth a little more, you'd think, than being abandoned. It looks cruel and arbitrary, especially when you look at the indications in Torchwood of Jack's love and loyalty - having his office decorated in Doctor memorabilia, his treasuring of the Doctor's hand.

The Doctor is seldom cruel and if he's often arbitrary, it isn't without having reasons. Like Jack, I have a lot of faith in the Doctor. Never doubted him, never will.

The thing about the "Utopia" trailer that was both horrific and encouraging is that it made clear how deliberately the Doctor wanted to avoid Jack - to escape him, even. Leaving Jack alone on the Game Station was a conscious decision.

This clip removed various theories I'd heard - that the Doctor really did think Jack was dead, and then lied to Rose about it, for example. Sounded possible but not plausible: the Doctor doesn't make that kind of mistake. He can see the motion of planets. He cares about his friends, and doesn't usually leave them to die alone. Not if he can help it.

My own theory has always been that the Doctor believed that when Rose rearranged the universe as she wished it to be - killing Daleks, saving Jack - she did something that shouldn't or couldn't be done. "You can't," he said, and she said, "I can." But when that kind of thing happens, there are consequences.

When the Doctor uses words like "can't", he means it. Remember how he said "you can't travel between the universes" to Pete and Jake, and they thought he was wrong? He wasn't wrong, though what he should have said was, "you can't travel between the universes without destroying them both". And because they travelled between universes anyway, they then had a problem that needed to be fixed - above and beyond the Cybermen and Daleks.

So I have been envisioning something like the Reaper situation in "Father's Day", where Rose's changing of history (even if it was history that at that point hadn't happened yet) set things in motion that were, are, or will be potentially disastrous. And that the Doctor is trying to avert it by keeping himself and Jack apart, rather like his attempts to keep Rose from touching herself as a baby in "Father's Day".

Of course, Jack and the Doctor will end up meeting again, we know that from the pictures we've seen in Starburst and online. And presumably there is a universe still in existence after they meet again. So my theory still has big huge black holes in it.

Cruel though the Doctor's apparent rejection of Jack is, I'd like to think it's painful for him, too. Not the way he wants things to be.

Still pondering the mystery....

Comments

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

it shows the Doctor noticing Jack in the monitor, and it shows the doctor pressing the lever to start the TARDIS, but the cutting is a little weird, a little too-fast, not showing the things it would show if that were the real chain of events.

True. Judging by what we see, it's difficult to follow the timing of events. We'll know better when we see the episode, of course!

I'm enjoying this as a conundrum in circumstance and motivation.