World Enough and Time

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 20: Prettiest scene.

We're back to "The Empty Child": Captain Jack and Rose dance on top of his invisible spaceship tethered to Big Ben.

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 18: Favourite Amy moment.

I'm not a great fan of Amy Pond; despite a great start and a few magnificent scenes, she doesn't have the emotional impact on me that Rose, Jack, Martha and Donna did, and I put it down to Steven Moffat's writing.

Her best moment was in her first episode, where the young Amy waited for the Doctor to come back. And waited. And waited.

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 16: Favourite Martha moment.

Every Martha moment is a favourite moment. I love her intelligence, her humour, her persistence, her courage, her loving spirit, and, most of all, her curiosity. The way she relates to everyone, and really listens to people when they speak to her. So my favourite "Martha" moments are pretty much whenever she talks to anyone.

I'm taking three choices here:

1. I love our last glimpse of Martha, in "The End of Time", as an adventurer with a gun, running for her life (and no doubt the safety of the universe) with her husband Mickey.
   
   
   - - -
   
   
2. From "Gridlock": I love it that Marthe pushes through the Doctor's façade and gets him to talk about himself - especially when it's a lie and a fantasy:
   
   
   The Doctor: How about another planet?
   Martha Jones: Can we go to yours?
   The Doctor: Nah, there's plenty of other places.
   Martha Jones: Come on, though. I mean "Planet of the Time Lords". That's gotta be worth a look. What's it like?
   The Doctor: It's beautiful, yeah... The sky's burnt orange, with the citadel enclosed in a mighty glass dome, shining under the twin suns. Beyond that, the mountains go on forever. Slopes of deep red grass, capped with snow.
   Martha Jones: Can we go there?
   [pause]
   The Doctor: Nah, where's the fun for me? I don't want to go home.
   
   
   
   
   - - -
   
   
3. Not a scene in Doctor Who at all, but in Torchood: I love Marthe's conversation with Gwen Cooper about sex with Captain Jack:
   
   
   Gwen Cooper: Um, so, you know Jack pretty well, then?
   Martha Jones: Oh, we were only together for a few days, but it was pretty intense.
   Gwen Cooper: You mean...
   Martha Jones: Oh, God, no, no! No! Not that sort of intense! No, nothing like that.
   [they laugh]
   Martha Jones: Why, are you and him...
   Gwen Cooper: No! No! Not at all!
   Martha Jones: We must be the only two people on the planet.
   Gwen Cooper: I know. What are we doing wrong?
   
   
   I love it that she liked Jack, and appreciated him, both in the sense of finding him intersting and attractive, and seeing him as a fell-companion whose life with the Doctor hadn't entirely run smooth.
   
   

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 14: Favourite Doctor moment.

Don't I even get Top Ten here...? No, to be fair, this whole meme is a sort of "Top Thirty" and I'll get to say more. So... top favourite Doctor moment?

I'll pick the moment that to me defined the Doctor, made sense of him, and clarified what he was all about. The scene was meant to do this: it was in the first episode of the first (new) series, "Rose", and it's the moment in which the Doctor describes himself and his perspective to Rose:

Do you know like we were saying? About the Earth revolving? It's like when you're a kid. The first time they tell you that the world's turning and you just can't quite believe it 'cause everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it. [He takes Rose's hand.] The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at 1,000 miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go... [He lets go of Rose's hand] ...

...That's who I am.

That was the moment that made me believe.

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 12: A scene or moment that made you giggle.

I don't giggle. I laugh. Okay, sometimes I guffaw. But I don't giggle.

A scene that makes me laugh... "Boom Town". I find the whole episode delightfully funny ("innuendo squad"?) but I particularly love the scene in which the Doctor takes Margaret Blaine out for dinner, and she tries to poison him, and he tries to stop her...

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 10: An episode that made you cry.

So many.

But I think the best of them was episode 2x13, "Doomsday".



"And I suppose... if it's my last chance to say it... Rose Tyler.."

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 8: Favourite series/season.

Since just about all my 'favourite' questions so far have answers occurring in the first new season, it's obvious that my favourite season is the one with the Ninth Doctor.



It is my favourite season primarily because I so loved Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor. But it also had a few other perks:

• It made me believe in Time Lords, Daleks, and so on - and believe me, I was a hard sell.
  
• It made me care about the Doctor.
  
• It made me care about Rose and her life.
  
• It had Doctor Jack at his very best. I prefer his appearances in this series to any of his other all too brief appearances on Doctor Who, and to any of his appearances on Torchwood.
  
• It had the best Dalek story ever.
  
• I liked the "Bad Wolf" theme.
  
• I loved the way the series built to a climax.
  

Note: This 'Doctor Who Series 1' picture is by *feel-inspired on DeviantART.

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 6: Least favourite character.

Lots of choice here. Two answers:

1. My least favourite character who made one appearance was Charles Dickens, played by Simon Callow in "The Unquiet Dead". See, I love Charles Dickens. Totally. But I didn't think Simon Callow looked, or sounded, or acted like my mental image of Charles Dickens, and I thought the story did a bad job of characterizing him. So my reaction to seeing this depiction - which was supposed, I think, to be favorable - of one of my favourite writers was extreme disappointment.



It didn't help that I didn't like the plot or other other characters in the story. This was the episode I liked least of season one. Or perhaps of all time.

2. My least favourite recurring character was Mickey Smith.



Now, I do like Noel Clarke, who is talented and intelligent. And in theory I like Mickey's story arc: he started out as a rather clueless coward and, thanks primarily to coming to know the Doctor, became a hero and then an action-hero superspy. I should - I do - love all that. And it's a nice parallel to the other transformations of various Companions, including Rose and Captain Jack.

But with Mickey I found it utterly unconvincing. They simply wrote Mickey as if he were a different person at different times.

I also didn't like it that he ended up with Martha. I didn't like it that the two primary black characters in the story married each other. Not to say that they weren't great together, in the brief glimpse we had... I wonder what happened to her Doctor Tom.

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 3: Favourite villain/alien/baddie of the week.

That's three questions. Okay...

Favourite villain - Mr. Finch, played by Anthony Head, in "School Reunion" (2x03). He has tough competition from Margaret the Slitheen played by Annette Badland (is that a real name?), in "Boom Town" (1x11).



Favourite alien - The Nanogenes and their gas-mask zombies, in "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances" (1x09 and 1x10).

Favourite baddy of the week - The Reapers, in "Father's Day" (1x08).

Given the format of the question, I am always tempted to add "least favourite villain" and so on... and hey, why not.

Least Favourite villain - Davros, played by Julian Beach, in "Journey's End" (4x13). What a disappointment.

Least Favourite alien - The Gelth, in "The Unquiet Dead" (1x03).

Least Favourite baddy of the week - Professor Lazarus, played by Mark Gatiss, in "The Lazarus Experiment" (3x06).

30 Days of Doctor Who: Question 1: Favourite incarnation of the Doctor.



Nine.

Why?

Because he convinced me that he could think in more than one dimension.
Because his love for Rose made me cry.
Because he ran.
Because he laughed.
Because he killed Gallifrey, and regretted it.
Because he learned from his mistakes.
Because he had a great leather jacket.
Because, with him, Rose was fantastic... and so was he.