Doctor Who: "The Unquiet Dead"

[fajrdrako]

rosiespark and I have been discussing series 1 Doctor Who episode by episode. I started off with Rose, she followed up with The End of the World, and now it's my turn again here with The Unquiet Dead.

I might as well confess at the outset that "The Unquiet Dead" is my least favourite of all the episodes of Doctor Who I have seen. I can't entirely put my finger on why, though I think there are four reasons - five, maybe - all of which can be summed up as "Mark Gatiss' writing style". The fact that he himself refers to "the morbid, ebony-black grotesqueness of the nineteenth century" is not a good sign for his approach. I'll try not to dwell on the negative, because watching this again, I still enjoyed myself - it doesn't annoy me, or bore me, or make me want to watch something else instead. I still love the Doctor and Rose in it. It's more that I find the other characters dull and the story fairly weak - not really funny, not really scary.

Breaking it down into aspects:

1. Charles Dickens. I was disappointed by the way Dickens was portrayed. Yes, I know it's my own fannishness coming through here. It isn't that Simon Callow isn't a good actor - I've loved him in other things. It's the concept: Dickens as being old and jaded; or Dickens as a skeptic, despite the evidence of his own eyes; Dickens as a foil to the Doctor. I'd like to see him as smarter, snappier, wittier.
   
   On the plus side, I did love it that the Doctor is a fan, and happy to say so. (Despite Martin Chuzzelwit.) His fannishness didn't come across with the sincerity I saw in David Tennant's performance of the Doctor facing Shakespeare in The Shakespeare Code, and he seemed a little too willing to criticize Dickens.... If I were an eight year old who didn't know anything about Dickens, I wouldn't have been left thinking highly of Dickens from this.
   
   My favourite of his lines: "What phantasmagoria is this?"



2. The Story. The plot doesn't entirely make sense to me, though it's intriguing. I'm not very fond of Mark Gatiss' understated writing style; his characters seem to me a little smaller than life.
   
   But there are some aspects of the story I do like. One is the continuity between this episode and Torchwood; the Rift goes right through Sneed's house - does that mean his house was right on the site of what later became Roald Dahl Plass, with the fountain and the Millennium Centre? I like that. But the story implies that it has been only the Gelth trying to get through the Rift for many, many years - perhaps they blocked the entryway? When the Gelth say, "Open the Rift!" I thought of Bilis - and Owen. And when the Doctor said, "The Rift is getting wider," I thought; "That line was stolen from Torchwood!" Though I suppose it's really the other way round.
   
   As far as I know, this is the only episode of Doctor Who with a psychic character, aside from the Doctor himself.
   
   The Gelth reminded me of the Family in "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood", except that they inhabit the living, while the Gelth favour corpses. Because of the gas. The gas connections weren't entirely convincing to me; but that's okay, it wouldn't be the only Doctor Who villains who didn't entirely make sense to me.



3. Interesting to see Eve Myles play Gwyneth. She doesn't remind me of Gwen Cooper, which is a sign of Eve Myles' grasp of characterization. At the same time, I don't find Gwyneth very interesting. I do like her private conversation with Rose about the butcher boy's bum, but there remains something limited about her - it doesn't seem to me that Gwyneth has much personality.
   
   I love it that she mentioned "bad wolf".



4. Again, I love it that the Gelth mentioned the Time War - a phrase calculated to trigger the Doctor's sense of concern and guilt. Did they know that? What, then, did they know of the Doctor? Were they using a psychic conduit trick, through Gwyneth, to know what phrase to use? Or were they in fact victims of the Time War, just not very nice ones?



5. There are many clues here to reinforce my belief that the Doctor is already very much in love with Rose, even if he doesn't know what to do about it - except feel guilty. Is there any other point at which he says she's beautiful?



6. I might add that I think Rose has a beautiful personality, but I thought she looked awful in that dress and bonnet. The boots were good. I loved the boots.



7. The voices of the Gelth sounded like the fairies in "Small Worlds" and the petal-aliens in "Fear Her". Are there no other ways to do group-personality aliens?



8. Interesting that Rose thinks the bodies of the dead should be respected, and the Doctor doesn't. Is it that he thinks the needs of the living outweigh the needs of the dead? This episode skirts on some life and death issues that are very interesting, but never quite comes to grips with the articulation of any of them. It isn't that this is beyond the scope of a kid's show, since other episodes do it well. It's more that this particular episodes hints at meanings and then backs off.



9. The best thing about this episode was its discussion of time. There are some terrific quotes. For example:

   Rose: Think about it, though. Christmas 1860 happens once, just once, and then it's finished. It's gone, it'll never happen again. Except for you. You can go back and see days that are dead and gone. A hundred thousand sunsets ago. No wonder you never stay still.

   And despite my rude comments about Mark Gatiss a while back, I think that is a beautifully written passage, both for content and wording: a hundred thousand sunsets. It says a lot about Rose, and he intelligence and insight, not to mention her sense of beauty. It also conveys something about the Doctor himself; his sense of priorities, the way they dovetail with hers.
   
   I wonder, though: "You can go back and see days that are dead and gone." I assume he can't go back to the same day over and over - no Groundhog Day here? Or can he? Captain Jack implies he has gone back to Volcano Day and the Blitz more than once - is he carefully trying to avoid himself all the time, or is the timeline more complicated than that?



10. Other good aspects about that scene: the Doctor says, "Give the man a medal. Earth. Naples. December 24th, 1860." But it turns out it isn't. Presumably the controls on the TARDIS aren't very accurate. Or is the TARDIS lying to him? I like the notion that the TARDIS sees and finds its own trouble spots, and might have spotted the problem with the Rift and the Gelth from afar. Or maybe the TARDIS was trying to keep them out of trouble - it was clear that the Doctor hadn't a clue what was happening in Naples on Christmas Eve, 1860, but it seems to me that around that time Garibaldi was advancing on the city with his armies of liberation. The TARDIS might have been trying to keep them out of a war zone. - Oh, I just noticed: Garibaldi and those soldiers were actually in an early draft of this story. Heh.



11. And the following phrase strikes me as utterly romantic:

    Rose: ...It's Christmas.
    The Doctor: All yours.

    Which, in keeping with the overt tone of the show, is said lightly, but really has depths and layers: he's making a gift to her of time and space. Or, in fact, this time and this space, in all its unique specialness which she articulates so perfectly. And then the punchline, after her speech:

    The Doctor: Not a bad life.
    Rose: Better with two.

    ...And I can't help thinking, what perfect articulation of romance, or Romance with a capital R, worthy of the greatest of poets and writers, and delivered subtly and casually in a somewhat macabre horror story written so as not to bore the 8 year olds.
    
    This is echoed by the heroic dialogue later on:

    Rose: But we'll go down fighting, yeah?
    The Doctor: You bet.
    Rose: Together.
    The Doctor: Yeah. I'm glad I met you.
    Rose: Me too.

    It's anyone's guess as to the levels of self-awareness there, at least on Rose's part.



12. I love it that the Doctor calls Rose "Barbarella". But does he worry about what she wears in other episodes? Do fashion choices only matter in connection with the past, not the future? Personally I wish he'd dressed in some elegant fashion of 1860 because he's look terrific, but I like the way Nine dressed anyway. No complaints about that jumper from me.

Comments

evolution of a Time Lord

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I was just having a conversation with someone about the radiation scene in Utopia and she was talking about the intensity of the scene and...well, I didn't find it intense.

I don't know what I thought. I liked it when I first saw it. If "The Last of the Time Lords" had delivered a resolution, I'd probably still like it. I found the scene intriguingly ambiguous. At the beginning of that scene there is a gap - a chasm - between two people who had loved each other. One of them has been rather obsessively looking for the other for 138 years. The other has been elusive - both in terms of avoiding the other and avoiding the issue within himself. The conversation is meant to explain, explore and (possibly) repair that chasm by bringing the two characters to an understanding. Does it do that? I still don't know. On the basis of that episode alone, I'd have said 'yes', if only because of Ten's smile after Jack calls him prejudiced.

On the basis of the situation two episodes later, I'd say 'no'. I'd say it is a sort of detente, with everything frozen at a status quo - the Doctor willing to accept Jack but not to love him as Nine had; Jack willing to respect the Doctor's changed feelings, and step back.

Thinking of it that way helps me. That almost works.

It occurs to me now that throughout series 2, I was interpreting Ten as a continuation of Nine - extrapolating from that, as if they were one person. Because Ten insisted he was not a discontinuity, and convinced Rose that he was the same person. Or perhaps... seduced Rose all over again, so she didn't care whether it was the same man, and was willing to accept the fiction.

As you can see, I'm no longer sure I buy the explanation that Nine and Ten are the same person. It's a different person with the same memories. Series 2 and 3 make a lot more sense if I assume a discontinuity, a discontinuity that is more significant than the similarities, that the Doctor who loved Rose and Jack really isn't the same person or personality who re-emerged like a Pheonix, even if he has some of the same characteristics. It's as if the same personal background created different psychological damage that has to be dealt with all over again - and I don't just mean the Time War.

Re: evolution of a Time Lord

[nina-ds.livejournal.com]

A lull! For the first time in about 10 days... It's all about to kick up again on Tuesday, but at least there's time for laundry and a bit of LJ.

I found the [radiation room] scene intriguingly ambiguous.

I can see where you're coming from on all this - I do think that I expected it to go somewhere. It felt...tentative. I expected there to be some payoff in which the Doctor recognizes and gets over his prejudice. We all have prejudices, and the first step to getting over them is "admitting you have a problem." But that part of the conversation never really happened. I did sense the Doctor holding back, and Jack giving everything, offering everything (his "fantastic!" just killed me), but the Doctor didn't really respond to it. And that's what we got pretty much until the end of the series, from both Martha and Jack. It doesn't help my feelings that the Doctor, this incarnation especially, is selfish. I don't think he "doesn't realize", which is an argument I've seen. I do think he does, but I think he's an emotional coward.

As you can see, I'm no longer sure I buy the explanation that Nine and Ten are the same person.

This is a place I really see them as different - Nine would back down from a fight if it meant mindless death; but as an individual being, he was all about making connections; Ten is all "no second chances - for everyone except the ones I care about, and I'm gonna make arbitrary decisions, so there!", but he doesn't really give of himself. Even his desire to keep the Master with him was less about being the last of a species and more about "you are not alone". And I do think he was deluding everyone with Rose, at the same time he wasn't about to commit.

I have to wonder what would have happened at the end of POTW if it had been Ten.

Or perhaps... seduced Rose all over again, so she didn't care whether it was the same man, and was willing to accept the fiction.

This is how I read it. Well, close, anyway - I felt like she wanted it to be true so badly that she was sweeping aside anything that didn't fit and trying RLY RLY hard to convince herself that he was there and cute, whee! It felt desperate.

Series 2 and 3 make a lot more sense if I assume a discontinuity, a discontinuity that is more significant than the similarities, that the Doctor who loved Rose and Jack really isn't the same person or personality who re-emerged

I have to say, I felt the difference right away. I was actually reassured by the Pudsey Cutaway, but I felt his difference in TCI in his treatment of Harriet, but even more strongly in New Earth, T&C, and of course GITF. I do wonder if people are cutting him slack because they are reading through Nine, or just because they think Ten is cute, but it has bugged me all along that I *couldn't* read Ten as a continuation of Nine. And going back to other Doctors, as different as he is in dress and speech, Nine seems more in the tradition of the eccentric teacher than Ten, who has his delusions of Godhood. But then when SonOfMine gives his "he burns at the center of the Universe" spiel, it doesn't seem to fit Ten. He seem too...small for that kind of description.

It's as if the same personal background created different psychological damage that has to be dealt with all over again - and I don't just mean the Time War.

In some ways, what I regretted most about S2 was the negation of Nine. We never got to mourn him - and we should have. I know why they didn't, but it felt awful not to get any of that; could we not have seen Rose folding away the jacket, with a loving look? There's a reason that's a fanfic cliché. We needed it. And I'm really not thrilled with the whole alt!Pete issue. I don't like Rose being given her family back, although I can see why it was done. It's a bit too pat. I wanted her to go out with purpose, but instead she was positioned again as a child.

Re: evolution of a Time Lord, reply part 1

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

A lull! For the first time in about 10 days...

I've had trouble finding lulls, but now it's Monday morning and nothing has started happening yet. If I type fast, I may be all right.

I can see where you're coming from on all this - I do think that I expected it to go somewhere. It felt...tentative.

I think it was way too ambiguous: there are several ways it could be interpreted and no indication of which we are meant to go for. I think there has always been a touch of deliberate ambiguity in the Doctor/Jack relationship, which is fine, but here it left us out on a limb. On first viewing I thought they'd reached a stage of communication where they could carry on with the friendship. Since things didn't quite develop that way - or were we supposed to believe they did? - I'm not sure whether the conversation meant anything, or whether it resolved anything. The Doctor's smile - what did it mean? Did he acknowledge and put aside his prejudice, or simply consider the question? I'm sure sure now what we were supposed to make of it. Except that at last the Doctor both spoke to Jack, and looked at him. Through a window and a security door; the conversation broadcast to their friends and acqaintances.

that part of the conversation never really happened.

No. Non-resolution. If the Doctor had said, "I was wrong; forgive me," that would have been one thing... even if he'd said it veiled terms, as he might. But he said nothing. What does he feel about Jack, at that point? I have no real idea. The impression is: nothing at all.

I did sense the Doctor holding back, and Jack giving everything, offering everything (his "fantastic!" just killed me), but the Doctor didn't really respond to it.

"Aloof" is the kind word for it. At first, he was hostile and cold. After the Radiation Room conversation - well, Jack is useful to him, but - what more? Anything?

Re: evolution of a Time Lord, reply part 2

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I don't think he "doesn't realize", which is an argument I've seen.

That replaces one problem (that the Doctor is cold or cruel) with a worse one - that's he stupid. I'd rather believe in the cruelty.

I do think he does, but I think he's an emotional coward.

I think a few weeks ago I would have simply agreed with you. And I do. But... I see a little more than cowardice in it. He doesn't just run. He... attacks emotionally. Not just passive resistance, but real defensiveness, real... manipulation of those who love him. Maybe I see him offering and then withholding love, like a carrot on a stick. As if he's saying, "Come with me - stay with me - live with me - but don't get close." Like the repeatedly saying he was taking Martha home, but then not doing it. "One more adventure."

Even his desire to keep the Master with him was less about being the last of a species and more about "you are not alone".

I can only see the Doctor as being a little unhinged by then. He seemed to see the Master as a reflection of himself; the doppelganger, the other Gallifreyan, the alternate self. Which makes the love a kind of self-love. I'm not sure what to make of it but it's what I'm seeing when I try to decipher it. Perhaps the Master's existence assuaged the Doctor's guilt at being responsible for the deaths of all the other Gallifreyans, but does it make sense that he was willing to let the people of Earth be eradicated because of it? I suppose it makes sense, yes, but it's hardly heroic!

trying RLY RLY hard to convince herself that he was there and cute, whee! It felt desperate.

I wish I knew what was going through her head in the five and a half hours she waited for him in "The Girl in the Fireplace". That whole episode was surely a statement of non-commitment. And come to think of it, much as I believe in the Ten/Rose love, the theme over and over was her saying "I'll stay with you forever" and him saying, "Will you stay with me?" rather than saying he'd stay with her. I actually like this - commitment on his terms only - but that means I want him to be all the more kind, all caring about his friends, the Earth, Jack, whoever. What does it mean to Ten to say he's the Earth's Champion, when he let the Earth go to rack and ruin in "The Last of the Time Lords"? He fought to save Earth from the Sycorax, but wouldn't fight to save it from the Master. I don't mind the fact of this as much as the implications.

I have to wonder what would have happened at the end of POTW if it had been Ten.

First, I think he might have been more vengeful with the Daleks. Or more suicidal. Or both.

Re: evolution of a Time Lord, reply part 3

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I do wonder if people are cutting him slack because they are reading through Nine

I was. I did. After all, I didn't know any other versions of the Doctor. He said he was the same, and like Rose, I saw no option except to believe him.

or just because they think Ten is cute

I think Ten is charming. He's so far from the type I usually like that it's hard otherwise to judge... No, wait, just find the right words. I find him cute, charming, and adorable. But not usually sexy. Not that he's never sexy, which confuses the issue.

Nine seems more in the tradition of the eccentric teacher than Ten, who has his delusions of Godhood.

I liked the godhood notion with Nine. With Ten... it's as if the god has lost his concern for the mortals under his care. Nine grumbled, and then saved everyone. Ten doesn't grumble, but he doesn't save, either.

could we not have seen Rose folding away the jacket, with a loving look?

I would have liked that, but I think they didn't want to remind us.

I'm really not thrilled with the whole alt!Pete issue. I don't like Rose being given her family back, although I can see why it was done. It's a bit too pat.

I liked it, but it didn't seem like compensation - it looked like regression for Rose from woman to child again. In the beginning, I think it's fair to say that her heart's desire was to find or know her father. As she did the heroes' journey thing through the two seasons, she found her father, came to terms with him and his loss, and carried on - and her heart's desire was the Doctor. So she lost the Doctor and got her father in the end. Bitter irony. She can't just go back, that's one of the rules of Time and experience - it only goes one way. (This is all a long-winded way of saying "I agree with you." This is why I liked the Doctor's admission to Jack in "Utopia" that the fate of Rose was a tragedy, not a triumph. At the same time - it's about a year late to acknowledge that issue, and still sidesteps the issue of Jack. Who did his own hero's journey, and has his own emotional commitment to the Doctor as well as his moral commitment to the Doctor's (former) values.

I also have considerable trouble picturing Rose in alt!Torchwood.