#i see why i remembered rtd's run so much clearer

[bardinthezone]

Watching Making myself sit through Moffat's Who, trying to give it a decent chance and I can't stand it already. Y'know why?

The stupid fucking love triangle.

Because not only is it just generally annoying as a trope, but it is so poorly written here. It takes over the show in a really obnoxious way and completely flanderizes characters who, in the first episode, were decent people.

Rory is portrayed as a fool for being... concerned that his fiance is cheating on him with the not-actually-imaginary friend she's been obsessed with since childhood, who she ran off with and kissed (A normal thing to be concerned about!!). And just generally, he's portrayed as a bumbling idiot. As the one who just gets confused and makes one-liners about being insecure. And both Amy and the Doctor just brush him off, leave him behind! Mocked by the woman who's supposed to be there for him and abandoned by the Doctor who's meant to keep him safe. He's being reduced to basically just comic relief here, and it sucks.

The Doctor is so.. aloof. More so than 10 and DEFINTELY moreso than 9. He's a silly, childish man who often fails to recognize the emotional consequences of his actions. He has his emotional moments, yes, but a lot of his writing falls victim to what I call "Sherlock Syndrome." When Moffat just writes an aloof super genius and expects the audience to fawn over him because he has good outfits and witty one-liners. Matt Smith is a fantastic actor and he carries a lot of his run, but putting glitter on a turd doesn't stop it being a turd.

Amy is yet another victim of the "every woman falls madly in love with the Doctor" pitfall. Worked with Rose, got old with Martha and after that almost every one-off woman who flirted with him just made me roll my eyes. Her obsession and anger with the Doctor didn't have to be romantic, but Moffat just couldn't resist writing a "strong female protagonist" who's sexy and she knows it, who loves having all the boys fawn over her and flirts without a care in the world. Who's a brash girlboss in charge of her boys, but who also turns into a sobbing damsel in distress at the slightest sign of danger.

All three of these characters are so blatantly characatures of themselves right now that it takes me out of it. They're all just quippy one-liners of their smartness or their brashness or their insecure foolishness. Can these types of people exist in real life? Yeah. But the way they're written about here is just obnoxious. I'm willing to accept that later Moffat seasons might be better than this (at least on the interpersonal conflict side of things), but it's season 1 and he's already dropping the ball so hard.

We could've gotten something truly marvelous, with a PLATONIC conflict based on the Raggedy Man from her childhood finally coming back and offering her freedom from a boring adult life. She's enamored with him, but doesn't entirely trust him because hey, he massively fucked up once already. Maybe Rory is concerned about his place in Amy's life, and Amy tries to be comforting. Maybe she messes up, maybe she says the wrong thing. Maybe she says the wrong thing right before losing Rory to the crack in space and time. But she has to try, because why should I care about a relationship where one person doesn't care about the other's happiness, at least a little? And right now it just feels like she doesn't.

I'm not saying shows shouldn't have interpersonal conflicts and flawed protagonists. They should! But to pull that off well, you have to make us want to see these characters grow. You have to give us a reason to enjoy watching these characters interact, even at their low points. And revisting Moffat's run as an adult, I don't feel enjoyment. I just feel annoyed.

#also all the flashbacks to the cracks in time. like sir we're not stupid #we can remember that thing that happned two episodes ago without visual reminders #also we don't need the doctor and amy to exposition monologue about how scary the crack in time is every damn time they see it #we know that its a crack in space and time and that its scary #also i feel like he overrelies on the Epic Monologue #they can be really impactful and cool #but already they're feeling overused #matt and karen and arthur tried their damn hardest and i don't blame them #but wow moffat just wrote a really tropey muddled season #i see why i remembered rtd's run so much clearer #because there was so much more worth remembering #doctor who #new who #11th doctor #matt smith #amy pond #rory williams

[ileolai]

Ok so… I like the idea of Missy's arc being analogous to an addict going sober... it actually makes a bit more sense of what bugged me so much about early Simm!Master, now that I think about it.

Everything Is About The Time War ramblings.

It always felt so off to me that RTD's characterization of the Master was so completely manic and obnoxious, in a way that classic Master wasn't. He was like... a wall street exec on an eight-ball or something, with the over-sexed, frenzied energy and the misogyny and what have you... and it's hard to see that dude being the same character as Delgado. He's so odd, like an optical illusion or something-- I recognise aspects of the Master there, but it's somehow not adding up to what the Master actually is. But that is the point... this is his response to the war, to the abuse at the hands of the Time Lords that goes back to his childhood. I mean- that was laid out in TEoT, but the Doctor and Missy's post-war arc kind of makes it clearer and more resonant, I suppose.

Simm Master is all wrong and broken from the war, kind of like the War Doctor... but unlike the Doctor, the Master is all surface. He lacks the ability to have a big, internal, self-shattering, moral struggle over what was done to him, like the Doctor. So his defense is to act outward-- 250 mph batshit, and goes on an all-out murder-bender instead, with no regard for consequences. Becoming a more exaggerated, hedonistic, recklessly destructive version of himself... that is oddly sympathetic and seductive and fun to watch at first, as those type of addicts can be.

And I suppose you can see the ~drums thing as like... a sort of... clumsy analogy for the experience of a PTSD-driven addict, and the sense of helplessness over being compelled to do things by your own brain that you can't stop or ignore.... And it's a torment, but it gets wrapped up in his own self-image, he doesn't know what he'd be without it.

And Ten... doesn't really get that? He's too wrapped up in his own stuff, too focused on his own pain … which he needs to be at that point in his own recovery … but it's no use to the Master. Ten thinks he can fix it with a big ol' Care Bear Stare or something, but the Master doesn't want or need that... so they just damage each other more.

[side point: this is why the Master going apeshit on the Time Lords isn't his redemptive moment, as I've seen people argue post-TDF while criticizing the Master's characterization in it... It is entirely right to blame them, bc they're a bunch of child abusing assholes who used him as pawn as much as they did the Doctor... but turning your anger on the right people is a step in the recovery process, not the end of it. He still has a long way to go from there.]

So by TDF... the war is long over, the drums [and therefore that part of his self-image] are gone, and all the glamour of being a 24/7 party monster has worn off. He's trapped on a ship with a black hole threatening to eat him, and he can't even save himself, bc he's too busy acting out his power fantasies to extract himself from the wreckage of his own decisions. He's no longer seductive or sympathetic or fun to watch-- he's just an asshole burn-out, who got kicked out of home and crashed his car on the interstate. And the Doctor isn't coming at him with big sad eyes and hugs and kisses anymore. He's over it, he's too far past the war and the damage for the Master to be an all-consuming emotional priority. He's just a nuisance now, really. He's got no more excuses or justifications for his sociopathy... no enablers, no audience to play to and feed it. And finally, his last big scheme to set the Doctor off and Get The Party Started backfires in his face ...  immediately. He's utterly powerless over the Doctor, and everything else.

But he still can't bring himself to stand and fight with the Doctor, even if it would save him from this mess, because this entire Disco Bloodbath personality is a trauma defense mechanism. It was constructed specifically to avoid fighting. In a way, there's a twisted sort of integrity in it… he's refusing to submit to what must look like-- from his warped perspective-- a trap, what the Time Lords and their abuse had destined for him to be.

[quick note: there's some interesting Night of the Doctor parallels here...]

So, copying and pasting from an entirely different meta, because I'm lazy, but it's relevant to Time War stuff:

Nine and Ten bear the brunt of that PTSD from the War. And this is the thing with PTSD. It’s not really the trauma you’re left with that’s the problem. It’s actually the coping mechanisms you relied on to survive it. They formed to deal with a specific situation and they helped you survive it-- but you come to rely on them so much that once you’ve escaped the situation, they become destructive and don’t help you at all.

Missy fully understands what it means for the Master to be stuck here, because it's her own experience. She can give him the closure he needs to move past his trauma, and let go of the defense mechanisms [with love and stabbing]. And that closure is something the Doctor never could offer... As much as they go on about how they're both the same-- and their childhoods are parallel, both expected to be warriors from a terribly young age-- their response to trauma is too fundamentally different... it's irreconcilable. So a tender kidney-gouging from Missy it has to be.

And her younger self wakes up in the middle of this mess her former self created... alone. She literally can't remember how she got there, an entire decade is blanked out. Why is everything on fire now, where did these Cybermen come from, and how did I get this circuit? On some level, as much as the Master went out kicking and screaming, she has to realize she can't do this shit again... this is low as she can possibly fall. Like waking up in a trashed hotel room with a murder-hangover or something, idk. So she starts fumbling towards reconciliation from then on, dismantling the 250 mph murder-party-all-the-time aspects of herself every time she faces situations where they don't work anymore… until she hits the wall where her own resources run out, and she needs the Doctor. And he is finally far enough past his own PTSD that they can actually grow together instead of just feeding into each other's issues.

It's not so much a ''redemption'' arc… it's not about giving Missy a ~moral soul, or whatever, because that would just be narrative apologism--  she's a child killer after all, which is irredeemable in Moffat Who. She's done too many terrible things at this point to ever be Good, and she knows that, and she owns it. It's a matter of self-directed trauma/addiction recovery... And that's why it works, and makes sense, and doesn't feel like some sort of sanctimonious quest to woobify her [as redemption arcs often do]...  

She has the self-awareness the Master was too clouded by defense mechanisms to have...  the Time War after-party is over, and what she had to be to survive that doesn't work anymore, and there are mortal consequences for it now... and the narrative allows her to grow and adapt to that, while still maintaining her sense of self, and making no apologies for the decisions that ultimately are what kept her alive until this point.

TL;DR: the whole Doctor/Master arc is a big allegorical story about two people coming to terms with the fallout of child abuse, and healing together in their own ways, bc Bad People can self-actualize too.

#doctor who #doctor who meta #dr whomst #the master