tenlittlebullets | Happy flailing about a Ten/Rose episode, what is wrong with me.

Back from New York! And doing some more scattered out-of-order Who rewatches. Up recently: Aliens of London/World War Three (which I had not seen before, somehow, and eeeee Harriet Jones be my BFF and also character development for Mickey and Jackie and I wish RTD had built off of Nine and Mickey's awkward-dudebro-bonding moment at the end instead of falling back on "Mickey the idiot" and all the quasi-facetious trashtalking and--yeah). And then Impossible Planet/Satan Pit.

I HAVE FEELINGS ABOUT THOSE EPISODES. SO MANY FEELINGS. I DID NOT KNOW I HAD ALL THESE FEELINGS. They were, IIRC, the first ones I watched on my own after the weekly group Who-watching nights disintegrated, and at the time I was too caught up in frantic new-fandom fangirling to pick these out specifically, but in retrospect I am pretty sure they precipitated my headlong slide into watching three and a half seasons in two weeks. It is weird that a two-parter where half the cast dies gruesomely at the hands of a dodgy Satan monster should make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but it sums up so much of what I love about this show. Exploration, and belief, and there being more things in heaven and earth, and people--plain old human beings at their worst, at their best, people fucking up, people trying to put things right, people clinging to whatever gives the universe meaning for them. In this case, people at their best. Fallible, terrified humans pulling themselves together in the face of the unknown to become heroes, taking that leap just because it was there, using the last of their oxygen to say oh, I'm going to die down here, but if you could only see what I've found and how beautiful it is. And Ten and Rose, who all too often turn into adolescent brats as a team--here we see them making each other better people. And the sudden reappearance of the TARDIS has shades of Tolkien's eucatastrophe, the eleventh-hour act of grace that turns the tables just when it looks like everyone's about to die, without ever turning into a cheap deus-ex-machina trick because the characters are the ones who did all the legwork.

And mushy capital-R-Romantic stuff aside, they are just such great episodes. Okay, I still think the Satan monster is a bit dodgy, mostly because it's far too closely modeled on a very specific European concept of the devil, but this time around I'm willing to accept the "whatever it is, it's probably the origin of devil myths across the cosmos" handwaving. But I love the whole idea of the planet in impossible orbit around the black hole, I love the balance struck between explanation and leaving some things a mystery, I love how many plot and thematic and character-development threads are woven together at the same time and how none of them get dropped or mangled. I love the design, I love the gritty-future aspect, I love the soundtrack, I love the tone struck throughout, and on top of all that I am just a sucker for base-under-siege episodes. Can we please get Matt Jones to write more Who? Pleeeease? Impossible Planet/Satan Pit might now be among my favorite DW eps ever--they're certainly among the few saving graces of season 2. And IMO both Rusty and Moffat could take lessons from them in starting with an incredibly ambitious concept and then doing it full justice.

(Re: subject line: I love Rose and I love Ten's stupid face and I am not a huge fan of character- or ship-bashing and I do ship it, in a way, but that way is very very different from RTD's, and I have so many problems with how Ten/Rose played out in canon.)

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...You know what, you have just articulated something I've been trying for years to put better than "But I like them much more when the text acknowledges that they're fucked up!" Which is that -- the story in your head of Doctor/Rose is what s1 gives us, and the reason that I ship Nine/Rose with burning passion, and the reason that Ten/Rose often freaks me out. The specifics of the giggly adolescents and the treatment of Mickey also freak me out, but the fact that this is clearly a narrative about two fucked-up people being fucked-up together (which is basically my favorite kind of narrative ever) while pretending to be a Normal Adorable Het Romance, is fairly terrifying.

I have no idea how coherent that was, but mostly I want to gesture to all your feelings and go YES YES THAT.

the story in your head of Doctor/Rose is what s1 gives us, and the reason that I ship Nine/Rose with burning passion, and the reason that Ten/Rose often freaks me out

YES. My headcanon is full of quasi-platonic Nine/Rose UST that turns into glorious OT3 with the addition of Jack, and it mostly lines up with canon, and then as soon as s2 happened I started going "...this is not what I signed up for. Or even what you set up earlier." The sketchy part is not that they are codependent or have a tendency towards bratty immaturity or that they mistreat Mickey--I would totally have accepted those as character flaws if the text had acknowledged them instead of trying to paper over them.

But mostly I hate that Rusty of all people tries to sell it as a Normal Adorable Het Romance when it is nothing of the sort. He brings up HUGE ISSUES like the different life spans and what it means for concepts like "forever" and "long-term" and "exclusive" and then he just drops them, or treats them like plot obstacles to Rose and the Doctor getting a traditional happy ending (because clearly that's what they need, right?) rather than as something inherent to their relationship, and he goes and validates Rose's "it's not faaair that you've had companions before me and you'll have companions after me and I can spend the rest of my life with you but not the other way round" issues instead of making her work through them and come up with something mutually satisfactory.

Basically I am extremely unsettled that Rusty's solution to "this relationship inherently cannot work by traditional human rules (and is probably pretty fuckin' weird for a Time Lord too but we barely even get Ten's perspective on that)" is not "then we will redefine normal and find a way to make it work, even if it involves difficulty and compromises on both sides" but "OH NOES, this is an insurmountable obstacle to our otherwise-perfect Adorable Het Romance." Because it presupposes that "normal adorable het romance" is what this is about in the first place, and more than that, the very fact that the queerness of their relationship is introduced as a conflict and the end goal is not compromise but A Normal Life Together By Traditional Earth Standards either (a) implies some pretty nasty things about those standards being absolute, or (b) makes the whole thing about what Rose wants, and discards the Doctor's alien POV entirely. Rose is selfish and stubborn and fiercely loyal, and while it is great that those characteristics can be either a virtue or a flaw depending on the circumstances, the job of the narrative is not to unthinkingly validate her most selfish and unreasonable expectations, it's to challenge them or expose them as a flaw.

And those were pretty much my feelings going on s2 alone, even if I hadn't quite articulated them at the time. With the addition of Journey's End it becomes so horribly telling that Rusty's idea of a solution to Ten and Rose's problems is to pack her off with someone who is Totally Liek The Doctor U Guise except he can give her the kids and the white picket fence.

Okay, really sleepy now, should probably not be commenting, but YES AGAIN ALL OF THIS.

I do want to say, though, that I actually love the notion of Rose/human!Doctor, not because of what Rusty thought he was doing but because I see it as being a sort of -- leveling, maybe. Human!Doctor still has all of the proper Doctor's memories and hangups and alienness, but he also has to navigate an entirely different sort of life that Rose knows more how to deal with than he does. So the eventual goal is still a compromise, but it's one in which they both have something to teach one another and they might actually manage it this time.

Or anyway that is how I deal with it and don't run off screaming into the sunset. Tragically I have not found a similarly charitable reading for Donna's fate.

Okay, I have to runnnnn (actually, drive eight hours to Buffalo NY, but same difference), but yes, agree--one of the things that gets swept under the rug with Ten/Rose in canon is all the possibly sketchy implications of the power dynamic, so it is quite nice that 10.5 and Rose are closer to being equals! I just--wish somebody (cough, cough) had consulted either of them about it first, especially him. Gah.

But in a way, it's like Jackie and Alternate!Pete - Rose just ended up in a fucked up relationship pretty much like her parents.

Which could be awesome to play with, except it played out in the episode like some sort of creepy reward for Rose's loyalty or something, and that won't attract the right sort of people to play with it.

Plus bringing Rose back in felt like a sop to fanbrats. I kept screaming at the tv, "Billie Piper quit! Deal with it, people!"

Rose/Ten, and especially the way she kept trying to get back to him rather than figure out her life in the alternate universe, made perfect sense. Ten/Rose, however, never actually got supported. So 10.5 was not really gonna be all that much more helpful, actually. I sort of wonder if he's just an animate body pillow - the inanimate version would serve her just as well, I suspect. He'll inevitably be disappointing because there is no TARDIS, there are no adventures, and that's what Rose desperately wants (the sex was supposed to be a side dish to the adventure, not the main course).

Which is what brings us back around to Jackie/Alt!Pete. These aren't the people they married, but they're similar, and those similarities are what are going to be both most comforting and most maddening. And that'll be Rose's issue - he has the personality and the memories, but there's a whole gap of time they were apart, in which awesome stuff happened that she wasn't part of, and the future isn't going to be at all what she predicted/wanted out of the relationship. And it may be easier for Jackie and Pete, who in both timelines have the similar history and acknowledge that they aren't the same people as their previous spouses. 10.5 is supposedly 10, but this'll prove whether Rose was in love with the Doctor or the Time Lord. (and if 10.5 really is Ten in memories, feelings, etc., he has the same feelings for Rose and would have come up with the same idea, since he is Ten and would likely have the same thought processes, so I'm not sure there's a lack of consent there. Or more specifically, I'm not sure his consent needs to be voiced - I don't think that was the creepy aspect about it. He isn't a stranger in the image of Ten. I think it was lazy plotting and fucking stupid writing for him to exist, but I don't think he's getting sold by Ten as a Doctor-shaped sex slave to Rose.)

Happy flailing about a Ten/Rose episode, what is wrong with me.

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