tenlittlebullets | (no subject)

Back home! Have spent the past few months slowly rewatching all the Tenth Doctor episodes with housemate

coyotegestalt, who's never seen them and is remarkably tolerant of my overinvested, oft-snarky commentary. Rewatch continued tonight wiiiith... The Stolen Earth / Journey's End. Which I don't think I've ever rewatched in full. So I had totally forgotten that The Stolen Earth and the first fifteen minutes of Journey's End are made of THE MOST GLORIOUS CRACK and I don't even care that the plot is spread thinner than that last half-spoonful of jam. GLORIOUS ALL-STAR TEAM CRACK.

And then the bottom falls out and it's just... shockingly bad. You can almost see RTD sitting there going "And ALL THE TIMELINES CONVERGE ON DONNA because... uh... because I'm supposed to make all the lines of narrative converge on Donna right now and--oh, fuck it, I'll just write that into the text." And... oh god I could just sit here rattling off all the empty plot resolutions and the circle-jerking of Ten's manpain, but I wouldn't be able to cover all of it and anyway, the only thing interesting going on there is the utter self-loathing Ten takes out on his clone. (Particularly the WAY he does it--identifying Handy's more violent acts with post-Time-War Nine, whom he can safely dissociate from and pretend he's a better person now, instead of with his rather more recent string of genocides, most of which were committed on much slimmer pretexts than "it was literally the only way to save all of creation from a bunch of omnicidal pepperpots". Um, Ten, baby, you are SO fucked up.)

Also Donna's ending is EVEN WORSE THAN I REMEMBERED. I mean... holy shit, there are so many things wrong there. Starting with Donna--Donna, of all people!--not having any agency in her big moment of saving the day, passing right through all the ways the memory-erasure scene is bad and wrong and icky, and ending with... that is actually a really crap way to save her life if it can be undone by a single mention of her adventures as a companion! Not a robust solution at all, FFS. Doctor, you have a device that can rewrite biology and selectively suppress memories, either make her a Time Lord or stick the Time Lord-y memories in a fob watch and be done with it. (Oh! Oh! That reminds me! Just for EXTRA ICK FACTOR, the music playing over Sad Forever Alone Ten as he leaves Donna's house and the credits roll? "Dream of a Normal Death," first heard in Family of Blood when John Smith glimpses the life he could've had if he chose to remain human. Yeah--Ten is not only taking his "no more dead companions!" issues out on Donna without her consent, he is forcing his id fantasies of erasing his Time Lord side and living out a mundane human life on her as well. GROSS. Remind me again of why we're supposed to feel sorry for him, except in a "wow, you poor thing, you are too fucked up to be allowed out without supervision" sort of way?)

So in conclusion, I want the fic where Martha actually manages to blow up the Earth just as the Daleks teleport her out, Handy succeeds in blowing up the Daleks but Team TARDIS are the only survivors of the human race, Ten flips his shit and enters into a critical meltdown of Gallifrey feels, Martha powers through the remainder of the episode on shock and adrenaline but collapses into a post-traumatic puddle after Ten starts screaming at her, Rose finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having to take up Martha and Handy's defense and get it through to her Doctor that he's the one making everything worse, and Martha doesn't snap out of her catatonia until Donna starts breaking, because wow, three Time Lord brains in the room and she's the only one to remember the Chameleon Arch. And then... oh god my brain just filled in "and then Martha and Handy have angsty h/c sex," which is deeply horrifying to the part of me that can't ship Martha with Ten at all, but feels oddly appropriate for an AU where they each reenacted half of the destruction of Gallifrey.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I love you...this post...I love you...

*HUGS*

*hugs!*

FUCKING TEN. FUCKING RTD. Seriously, the end of season 4 is why I epically side-eye folks who put RTD up on a pedestal and claim that he's leaps and bounds better than Moffatt.

I really want that fic. I don't know if I could write it, but damn it, I want it.

Yeah, RTD... is admittedly better than Moffat at making me care, but as far as shit writing, emotional dissonance, skeevy -isms, and mistreatment of awesome companions who deserved better, neither of them is really any better or worse than the other. Which is to say they both do it, but not all the time. I seriously side-eye people who claim to acknowledge RTD's flaws while loving him anyway, but insist on viciously finding fault with every single thing Moffat does or says, ever.

What I find really bizarre and dissonant is that RTD wrote both Midnight and Journey's End. In Midnight (as in several other episodes of s4), the idea of some other entity stealing your individuality, wresting control away from you, and crawling around in your head forcibly rearranging the furniture is played for total skin-crawling horror; and then suddenly in Journey's End all the disturbing undertones are glossed over and the mindwipe is treated as pure unfortunate tragedy. s4 is infuriating because over and over, we get gratuitous Ten angst for all the wrong reasons when more compelling, more character-appropriate reasons are sitting right there unused; Ten crying in the rain because Donna got a sad ending and he's Forever Alone, without even a nod to being horrified with himself at what he just had to inflict on her, absolutely takes the cake there.

Have ZERO time, so all I'll say is: Read The Writers Tale.

It's in the mail! Ordered it from Amazon, but shipping is taking forever.

Donna's ending makes me so sad :(

I knowwww. :( It's not even writers being evil to their characters in satisfying ways, it's just... pointlessly cruel and way more disturbing than the text seems to be aware of.

Ahahaha, I think I would read that AU

It would be an awesome AU. As long as you could get Jack to shut up about the question of repopulating the human race.

Augh, Journey's End, man.

I suppose I should be glad it was as awful as it was, for all the reasons you note here and then some, because that ep basically press-ganged me into fanfic-writing and thus into fandom. (Thanks, RTD!)

That mindwipe scene makes me ill. There's no ambiguity there -- Donna's just flat-out saying "no," and it's painful to watch.

Yeah, those are just The Reasons I Felt Particularly Cheesed Off About This Time, there's a whole boatload of things wrong with it. (And then RTD made a plot point out of "all the timelines are converging!" again in EoT. You get one free pass for unexplained mystical ~destiny~ bullshit, Rusty. One. On special dispensation because s4 was reportedly hell to bang into shape. Thereafter you have to show us how the timelines are being tampered with, not reuse your most bullshit series arc ever as though it were a good thing. With a big dollop of "prophecy!!!1" on top, played so 100% straight that the ancient Greeks would've been wondering where the twist was, on a show about time travel. Ye gods.)

Glad I'm not the only one viscerally unsettled by the mindwipe scene. It's one of those things where you have to wonder whether RTD even realizes what he wrote or how it comes off as filmed--it is, to put it very bluntly, a rape scene veiled in sci-fi metaphor. Making the Doctor do that to a companion is way too dark for Doctor Who. Even removing the loaded subtext, ending a companion's run by making the Doctor do something that terrible to her is still too dark for televised Doctor Who and arguably way out of character for the Doctor. But I'm not sure Rusty groks how horrifying it is, just that it's super sad.