#i can abide by gimmicky science pseudo psychology and even preaching but i can't swallow hollow philosophy

[roxannepolice]

Grandiloquent ramblings about Power of the Doctor, das Selbst and simulacrae

I have been struggling with myself on whether to write this stream of consciousness for some 24 hours, because, surprise, it can come off as negativity, which I genuinely don't like plopping on other people's dashes. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate POTD. By Chibnall standards it's well written, the actors put their all into performances and their all is a lot, there are some amazing character moments and on the whole I enjoyed it. But I couldn't shake off the sense of something being wrong with this episode, I couldn't shake it off so much I had problems sleeping for two nights in a row, and not in a fun way. It's like a rock in a shoe but for your brain. Idk, I can only imagine this is what the TARDIS feels like about Jack Harkness, you know it's good for what it is, you know there is no good reason to hate it but you still feel an atavistic sense of wrongness. So, hoping that cutting the post under the title and adding proper tags will prevent it from upsetting anyone, and also that I will finally sleep well and get a good warm up for productive writing, here goes nothin'.

Basically, I felt like POTD had a hollowness at its core. Or maybe not hollowness, but more like instead of a solid, hot, dense core that keeps a spheric entity together, there was a very nice hardened glass ball with a core of roughly the consitency of a shower jelly dropped into warm bath. And that frustratingly though prettily slipping through your fingers core is - what exactly does the episode have to say about being the Doctor? And is it a purely simulacric self-referential w?nk in front of a 60 year old mirror, or is there actual reverberance with the rest of, for lack of better terms, collective consciousness and unconsciousness?

And, let's put it bluntly - NuWho has been suffering from navel gazing from the very beginning, and it's not anything inherently wrong. DW is a mass culture phenomenon like few others and post-modern self-reflexivity can be beneficial to the text. I would say, though, that where RTD's w?anking was more about the Doctor as the last of the time lords - i.e. the only person in all of existence that has a glimpse of multiple pasts and futures at once and has been left unsepervised as to what to do about it - Moffat went textual with the Doctor's name becoming a universal secret and so on. But where Moffat stayed purely simulacric with his questions being more important than answers and mysteries that don't really matter, Chibnall continued this explicit navel gazing but tried to make it more grounded. Which was not a good idea, because it lost the lightness that it had under Moffat, at least initially. Now, we have the idea that the Doctor has always been the Doctor, and in fact is the reason the word "doctor" means what it does, and the TARDIS always looked like a police box, and for all we know this may have been going on since before the first of the universes came to exist, because why not.

Which leads to one of the key questions of contemporary philosophy: essence or existence? Both words have been used, abused and misused in different contexts, but generally speaking they mean, respectively, a belief that the essence of a person (a soul, a disembodied consciousness stuffed in the synapses, etc.) comes before their conscious existence, and a belief that is the existence (the choices, the interactions, etc.) that "make" the essence. At the extremes, the former has a thoroughly religious meaning, in that you existed before you were born and will go on existing after you die, be it in a god's soul repository or some reincarnation cycle, and the latter boils down to tabula rasa, the idea that a newborn can be completely shaped by its surroundings. By now, with psychiatry and neurosicence, it is pretty much agreed that neither is 100% true. As my psychiatrist put it, my problems are a result of both my traumas and two proud lines of people with fried nerves. So as far as thinking about actual animals with nervous systems and suchalike is concerned, the answer the unsatifying but only productive "both". But in fiction, especially science fiction which at its best can serve as a sandbox for all sorts of thought experiments, the question remains: what is the Selbst make up of your hypothetical beings in the world roughly obeying known mathematics?

A linguistic note: I think the german word das Selbst is more appropriate for the analysis than any English word. It is is usually translated as "self", and indeed the latter derives from the Germanic root, but I think das Selbst has maintained a more objective/objectivizing connotation, whereas "self" has slipped a bit too close to subjective/subjectivizing for my liking. Case in point: self-explanatory gives most agency to whatever explains itself, while selbsverstandlich (translated as self-explanatory but really closer to self-understandable) keeps a passive/objective/outside vibe.

And the matter of das Selbst as something determined by/determinable from outside seems... well, crucial for POTD. The case in point is that I'm not sure if the case the episode makes for what makes the Doctor the Doctor is that the Master ascended from Heath Ledger's Joker insanity to Terry Jones' Simon Zinc-Trumpet-Harris, married to a very attractive table lamp and managed to club himself unconscious with the butt of his gun, insanity to think he can make the Doctor regenerate into himself because what really matters is the magic of friendship existence/interaction with others, or that his plan was bad but at least not self-contradictory? Anyway, in the best case scenario there were supposed to be a few additional lines of dialogue that CC kinda forgot to include and they live in the same limbo as the explanation that no, the Doctor doesn't think suffocation/starvation with maybe some nice cannibalism phase is more humane than shooting, she had a plan where to take those spiders once they've been contained.

Intermission/digression: it's kind of interesting to consider if recognition of das Selbst functions different among time lords than with humans. Evolutionarily, that would have been helpful. Historically, we have examples both in favour (Utopia where the Doctor recognizes the Master in the person looking 100% the same as Yana the moment their eyes meet across the room) and against (The Five Doctors, Dark Water, where the Doctor can't even tell Missy's species until she has him grab her boob, Spyfall). And that's fine, I don't ask or even want strict consitency in 60 year long text. Though you'd think when it starts asserting self-awareness it would at least bring that up.

Returing and starting from the thing that first put me on track of why the core of the story is... wobbly. The point is, the message kind of tries to promote existence/interactions being more important for the make up of das Selbst (as Yaz explains to a person who you'd think knows more about regeneration process than her, or most of the time lords for that matter considering how they've been dragging on in the most outlandish ways imaginable), while relying on essentialism for the stakes to even exist. What exactly are the implications of the Doctor being forced to regenerate into the Master? Ok, it erases their existence for the future, but what about the past? It sure as hell hasn't just popped out of existence, or else the companions might be at least ackonwledged to have Amy-like memory problems. So far, so good, das Selbst is determined by the existence. This could even be argued to be well symbolised by the Doctor's continued presence in the story as the TARDIS's memory interacting with companion's memories.

Aye, but there's the rub. Memories. Shouldn't the regeneration of the Doctor into the Master imply he now has their memories, which can be described as the internal side of existence as building das Selbst? I mean, the reference to the Doctor's forced regeneration is, correct me if I'm wrong, the Two-Three time, and Three more or less remembered everything Two knew, putting aside messier that usual post-regenerative stress. So, does the Master now have all of the Doctor's memories? That would be the logical answer, right?

So why is he not affected by them?

If existence, internalized as memories, is more important to das Selbst than the essence, then why does he not even have a Lady Cassandra-after-being-in-a-conscious-tissue-resource's-brain moment? Or am I supposed to wallpaper Dhawan's acting over the gaping hole and say, he totally had. Offscreen. Incidentally, if you're upset about Thirteen regenerating into Tennant then perhaps you'll be interested in my headcanon that atron nergy was affected by her subconscious screaming maybe we should go back to giving the Master nonconsensual hugs.

Is it because, you know. The Master is bad? I mean, of course, it's a text, that's his purpose and only moral context. But again, it's the text that started flaunting its navel gazing as self-awareness first, I'm just asking for being consequential about it. Because in a self-aware text that relies on existence and magic of friendship to be Selbst-determining it's not the case that the Master can't be the Doctor because they're bad only they're bad because they weren't collecting friends that would shape their existence into a good person that could be the Doctor!

EXCEPT IF SO THEN, AGAIN, WHY IS HE NOT AFFECTED BY THE DOCTOR'S INTERNALIZED EXISTENCE?!!!

TLDR of the above: the Master's plan to force the Doctor into regenerating into him so he'll be the Doctor is fundamentally flawed because das Selbst is made more by existence than the essence. Except he is not affected by that existence in any meaningful way, so there's a core contradiction: das Selbst is shaped by existence but the existence-as-memories doesn't shape das Selbst.

EXCEPT NONE OF THAT MATTERS BECAUSE APPARENTLY HE DOESN'T HAVE THE DOCTORS MEMORIES, OR ELSE HE WOULD KNOW WHO RUTH!DOCTOR IS!?????????????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, this is the point where there's likely a page of the script rolling around CC's house, unionizing with the one from AITUK about pest control. Establishing that somehow forced regeneration would erase the Doctor's memories. Which, may I point out, would have been a very solid stake. But it's not there in the text.

But if that's the indended reading, and please tell me if there's something I missed, then the Master's Don't let me go back to being me is. hollow. It aches me to say that but that's the conclusion. Because the narrative lacks a solid core about what das Selbst/being is. There is no actual difference between the Master being the Master and the Doctor being the Master, because das Selbst has not been affected by internalized existence. At least as far as I can see, feel free to point me in its direction, but again, I have been mauling over it for 24 hours. Or, the Master lost it completely and is now a solid candidate for the Upper Class Twit of the Year. And also thought Sheev's plan in The Rise of Skywalker was great writing.

#cultural ramblings #tw: negativity #chibnall critical #i don't tag it anti chibnall because believe me this is good faith getting rid of a shoestone in your brain #i'm not even putting it anywhere in the main tags because i really don't want to upset anyone #but if someone felt the same hollowness then i hope i put the feeling into words #i can abide by gimmicky science pseudo psychology and even preaching but i can't swallow hollow philosophy #long post #meta