Doctor Who Season Four Final
There’s a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the Doctor Who season four final: Larvatus Prodeo, Hoyden About Town, and of course the live-blogging at Circulating Library.
It’s fair to say that this is NOT a spoiler free zone, just in case you haven’t seen it as yet (it aired last night in Australia).
A lot of the discussion has centred on the fate of Donna Noble, the Doctor’s most recent companion. Through a series of events too complicated to rehearse here, Donna receives the Doctor’s intelligence, education, and memory: a level of knowledge that a human brain cannot hold without destroying itself. Despite “doctor/donna” saving not only the universe, but the whole of reality (Russell T Davies thinks big), the Doctor has no option but to remove all of himself from Donna’s memory, including all memory of the events of season four.
Many commenters on the blogs have objected to this for a number of reasons, but largely in terms of the gender politics. Kim commenting at LP says:
Gender politics were awful. Donna can only “grow” by the deus ex machina of the doctor’s intervention, and when she overcomes her insecurities and approaches equality with him, he puts her back in her place (literally). Sucks.
Not sure that I agree, and I certainly don’t know the reason Catherine Tate was written out of the show (and there is an increasing tendency for single-season companions), but the thing I picked up on in Kim’s comment was the bit about the deus ex machina. Certainly, the doctor/donna thing was the apotheosis of Donna’s development over the season, but that wasn’t the main part of her transformation—simply being with the Doctor changed the loud, brash, but fundamentally insecure girl into—literally—the most important woman in the universe. Possibly another of the messianic themes in this new incarnation of the classic show.
Below, I’ve reproduced with permission a comment I posted on Circulating Library back in July when we saw the final for the first time. On second viewing, I haven’t changed my mind about this.
The thing that struck me most about the Donna thing was that while she really annoyed all of us in “The Runaway Bride,” as she developed as a character, we all grew to like her.
The character in “The Runaway Bride” was a self-obsessed, disinterested (“I was in Spain”), semi-educated shrew who—probably intentionally—set my teeth on edge. We can speculate whether it was viewer feedback, or deliberate character development, but the character in the fourth season was different: she deciphered the codes in “The Doctor’s Daughter”, she might have been “only a temp”, but she was good at what she did.
And the difference was the Doctor. Like every other companion, time spent with the Doctor developed the character, helped them realise their potential. Donna went from an insecure nobody, desperate to get a man, to the most important person in the universe, with assurance and real strength of character. And when the Doctor lobotomised her (and really, what choice did he have?) that is what she lost. The whiny chav on the phone at the end of the episode was the Donna from “The Runaway Bride”.
In “School Reunion” Sarah Jane said something to the effect that travelling with the doctor was dangerous, and heart-breaking, but completely worth it. Mde La Pompadour said that the Doctor was worth the monsters. And it is that privilege that Donna has lost. And that is what was tragic about the final.
Your Comments
Catriona writes:
John, I’m also uncertain, as I think I’ve said elsewhere, that what happens to Donna is sexist.
We can’t draw that conclusion, in my opinion, on the evidence that we have.
Yes, the second Doctor manages to contain the Time Lord brain inside a human body, but that is, to my mind, a different proposition. He still has—organically and naturally—a Time Lord brain.
Is he unaffected by the human-Time Lord meta-crisis? Of course not. He’s going to die after a single lifetime. The happy-ever-after conclusion with Rose prevents us from seeing that as a disaster, but it is: he’s a Time Lord with 900 years of experience but without the Time Lord powers of regeneration.
That said, the effects of the meta-crisis on the second Doctor were physiological. He can survive them—briefly. Say, for about fifty years or so.
The effects on Donna were psychological. The Doctor mentioned in an earlier episode that he can see all of time; that alone is enough to destroy a human brain. It happened to Rose, but the Doctor was able to reverse the effects by sacrificing one of his own regenerations. (Whether he was unable to do that for Donna, because of the differences between absorbing the Time Vortex and experiencing a meta-crisis, or whether he was simply unwilling to do it is a different point of debate.)
I’ve said before and I’ll say again that I think what the Doctor does to Donna is the single cruelest thing that we’ve ever seen him do; the fact that she knows what’s happening and is crying and begging makes it intensely difficult to watch.
But I don’t think we can call it sexist.
I don’t think we can say with any certainty that this wouldn’t have happened with a male companion.
And using the second Doctor’s experience as opposed to Donna’s is disingenuous: the meta-crisis effects are too different for that to be a fair comparison.
Posted: 29 09 2008 - 12:07 | Permanent link to this comment
tseen writes:
I’ve had a quick skim around the links (thanks, John), and only watched the ep last night. Totally agree with Catriona about the ‘species’ gap – commentators seem to keep forgetting (either obtusely or otherwise) that the whole point of the Doctor is that he’s a Time Lord. He’s NOT human; he has an affection/affinity with humans. The readings that I’ve read that cry ‘sexist sell-out’ are, IMO, simplistic and knee-jerk. Having wandered through an almost-major in women’s studies, I remember the days of judging and attributing purely on the basis of genitalia (i.e. “He gets to be all assertive cos of his PENIS”). Please. I’d like to think we’ve moved beyond this.
As has been said, the most tragic thing is that she’s lost the time/experiences she had when travelling with him (and that he was forced to commit a most cruel act that does not leave him unscathed). Going ‘back’ to who she was, in my mind, does not make her less of a person the way everyone seems to be hyperventilating about.
Perhaps they think that being a temp in Chiswick (sp?) IS the worst thing that could happen to a person…?
Posted: 30 09 2008 - 09:43 | Permanent link to this comment
Nick Caldwell writes:
Tseen, good point about the state of ‘tempness’ – a really important moment in “The Runaway Bride” was when Lance taunted Donna for the smallness of her horizons and ambitions; we were clearly not meant to be sympathetic to his point of view by that point. And isn’t one of the overriding themes of the new Doctor Who that a harmlessly quotidian life is worth celebrating and protecting? The Doctor flat out says that in “Father’s Day” that he envies such a life because he can never have it.
Posted: 30 09 2008 - 11:33 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
Good points, Tseen and Nick. I’m trying to remember Rose’s line in season one about there being more to life than working in a shop and eating chips: a line that gets interpreted by Mickey and Jackie as elitist, but she is simply saying that there should be more to life.
Not sure what this says to the Donna thing…
Posted: 30 09 2008 - 11:44 | Permanent link to this comment
Lisa writes:
Rose: “It was a better life. And I don’t mean all of the travelling and seeing aliens and spaceships and things – that don’t matter. The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. You know, he showed you too. That you don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand. You say no. You have the guts to do what’s right when everyone else just runs away . . .”
Posted: 30 09 2008 - 12:17 | Permanent link to this comment
tseen writes:
Thanks for the quote, Lisa – gave me goosebumps, as many moments in the new series have. John: I think the notion of expanding one’s horizons as a general good is retained by the new series, but I feel that a lot of the howling disappointment from fans about Donna’s ‘fate’ springs from a range of things (inc thinking that temping is a hideous state of being…).
Nick – yes, the normality that’s sacrificed when one becomes the Dr’s companion is something that he’s v. aware of, but the companions aren’t (necessarily) for quite a while. I find it a bittersweet and ambivalent set of emotions: they can’t wait to take off with him, and he really wants them there, but he knows what it can mean. Viewers project about being ‘the chosen one’ in the Tardis, and I can’t help thinking that’s where a lot of the gnashing of teeth comes from.
Not many people have mentioned the important role of Donna’s grandfather, or the incredibly poignant exchange they had as the Dr was leaving the house (looking to the stars every night, remembering him, etc). I liked how that left us with a messy set of ‘endings’, esp the knowledge of the impermanence of human memory about the deed that had cost so much.
Posted: 30 09 2008 - 13:45 | Permanent link to this comment
Lisa writes:
Good point, Tseen. The Doctor has made a positive difference to the Grandfather’s life and even though he cannot talk to Donna about the Doctor he can support her to recover some of that better way of life. The raw material had to be there in the companions to start with. Jackie and Micky both found a better life also, even though Jackie never really travelled with the Doctor and Micky did so only for a short time.
Posted: 30 09 2008 - 14:18 | Permanent link to this comment