dr. who

[mimesere]

So...am I supposed to think that Nine and Rose are dicks?

Comments

[wemblee.livejournal.com]

Um... no? *helpful smile* Is this the one with the farting aliens? Because RTD... not so good with the plots.

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

You're supposed to think they're adorable. I think.

[mimesere.livejournal.com]

I like RTD, but wow, Who is just not working for me at all.

[mimesere.livejournal.com]

...seriously?

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

Their love is a thing of pure perfect beauty and cuteness. Didn't you know that?

[mimesere.livejournal.com]

I must have missed it while I was watching the bizarre emotional blackmail.

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

The bit at the end on the phone? Shippers find that adorable, apparently. And I'm like "...okay, you did not just steal a 19 year old from her mother by playing in the fact that 'time machine' as a concept seems to have entirely gone over her head. Please tell me that did not just happen."

And everyone will tell you that this is contexted in the next episode. In fact, they'll say the next one will convert you. This is the dogma of 'Dalek or bust'. (Which I'm sick of seeing thrown out to convert people even though it does sort of hit its stride at the mid-way point.) Sort of like when people say "Oh, you'll love Sheppard once you realise how flawed and post-modern he is. And that he's actually a woman."

But like the Murphy's, I'm not bitter.

[mimesere.livejournal.com]

*blinking* the clear and selfish manipulation was *adorable*? For serious?

And like, I'm willing to watch it. Because there is nothing else on for me to watch on Friday nights, but I'm sort of um. What's the word here...appalled. By Nine and Rose and their seeming lack of likeableness or sense or not being dicks.

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

*blinking* the clear and selfish manipulation was *adorable*? For serious?

Hell yeah. As was the "I could save the world and lose you. As opposed to everyone dying anyway because I'm too useless to, y'know, save the world." (Ooh! I still have Issues!) Umm. Yeah. You know what shippers are like sometimes. Anything, no matter how stupid or selfish or icky, is okay as long as it's done for OTP love. And Russell T Davies is a big Welsh romantic, so I can see why he himself might think it was adorable? So maybe it's cuter if you read it as "omg he love her SO MUCH that he cannot bear to lose her yayz!" except I'm far too much full of love for Jackie to think it was an okay thing for Nine to pull.

Nine does get a bit more likable as we get a bit more context on where he's coming from, but I honestly don't think I'd be as sold on him if I hadn't come at it already liking the Doctor. Rose from this point is... well, she's more confident from now on, but there's also them what say that if you don't like her by now it's downhill from here. The two of them felt a bit less creepy once we got to the gay bits, though.

[galadhir.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're supposed to approve of the way they walk all over people, I think you might have to see that they're dicks and then like them anyway because they're having such a lot of fun saving the world etc.

As for the whole Rose/9 OTP thing, well, it's not what Dr.Who is about and I tend to ignore it as not what I'm interested in in the programme. (OTOH, I'm completely behind the Jack/9 relationship, for some reason largely involving hormones.)

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

This is not that simple a universe, IMO. Rose and Nine are charismatic, but they're also flawed beings capable of making bad mistakes, of hurting people they care about, of disregarding people they don't. I don't think we're meant to give them a pass.

IMO, this is a morally complex universe. It's not quite on par with Buffy and certainly not with BSG, but it's far more so than the old Doctor Who shows, when the Doctor was always right. He's definitely not always right here. It's one of the things I love about the new series.

And while there is subtext aplenty, I don't think canonically that Rose and the Doctor are supposed to be in romantic love of any sort.

[mimesere.livejournal.com]

I'm just completely stuck on the part where Nine waffled on "I could save the world...but lose you!" WTF? I didn't like it when Buffy did it in S5, I hated it with a fiery passion when Angel did it for Connor (and the *world* wasn't even at stake there), I wasn't terribly happy when Adama drained the fuel reserves to save Starbuck, Oz took a hit when he chose Willow over the Box of Gavrok, and just. It's like my anti-kink.

Plus I am not impressed with the emotional manipulation or the being a dick to Mickey.

[mimesere.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Once again, I am out of step with fandom, then. I just think they are dicks (with weird priorities on top of that!) and I am stuck on mild dislike.

[mimesere.livejournal.com]

Oh, 'shipperness, how you make my head hurt.

And I trust you, so I shall keep an open mind on Nine. I fear Rose is just a lost cause.

[galadhir.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not in Dr.Who fandom. I like the show and find it amusing tea-time viewing for the whole family, but I'm not fannish about it. In fact my only moment of real squeefulness came in the Christmas special where the Prime Minister accused the Doctor of being another dangerous alien she would have to defend the world from - because he has got quite unbearably cavalier with everyone by then.

But he was never, in any of his incarnations, entirely trustworthy or entirely on our side. I think you're supposed to view him as an alien whose motives are obscure, but who seems to be the lesser of two evils, and as a trickster character - he'll make life interesting, and whether that's a good thing or a curse is up to you to decide.

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

So, this is a plot device that bugs the shit out of you. (:

See, for me it's all about whether the show insists that this choice, to throw over the world for the sake of one person, is the good and noble and right one. On Buffy, she was only challenged once, and briefly, for her choice -- in general, it was made to seem the right and noble thing. That makes me insane. Box of Gavrok thing, too.

On AtS, I don't think the show was saying *at all* that the mindwipe was an acceptable thing to do, especially when it came back to bite him on the ankles in the final season. IMO, if the cancellation hadn't happened, we would have seen even more ankle-biting.

Adama's behavior when Starbuck was lost was meant to reveal an aspect of his character: that he would constantly put his "family" ahead of any other considerations. This is a *weakness*, and I think the show is letting it be just that most of the time. It's a flaw, and a big one, especially for someone in Adama's position.

If I thought that the show wanted us to feel 100% okay about the Doctor's choices, I'd be just as annoyed as you are.

Re Mickey: he gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop, for sure. If the Doctor treated him with more respect, it'd be easier to bear, but not by much: either way, he's screwed. It continues to bother me, even though I like the show overall much more than you do.

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

*chimes in* Re: complexity, I'm... not actually sure. I've never got a hint from anywhere BBC-like that Rose could be anything less than sweetness and light, and while there's certainly a level where they're making the Doctor a bit shifty they're also cruising on the audience knowing that he's supposed to be the hero. The "they're in love!" thing actually seems to be presented as independant of the "he's all needy!" thing. In fact I think fandom just invented the neediness a bit so we could cope with it all.

But then I'm one of those people who watches Tom Baker go all "do I have the right" over killing a bunch of genocidal robot space nazis and goes "OF COURSE YOU FUCKING DO." Just... a bit of utilitarianism can be nice every once in a while, y'know?

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

He's a bit of a woobie. I just... *flaily-arms* I feel all weirdly usurped that every bloody thought he has is about Rose. I expect Ten will turn out the same, but at least I have a week left in which to pretend otherwise.

[mimesere.livejournal.com]

Hee. It is indeed a plot device that makes me nuts. Like, 90% of the time, it is a character dealbreaker for me; if I am wavering on like vs dislike for a character, if they put personal considerations ahead of the welfare of the group, I go apeshit. *Especially* when I'm supposed to a) admire them, b) like them, or c) think they are in any way, shape or form a hero.

With AtS, I want *so badly* to believe that the mindwipe would come back with ass-biting consequences and then I remember Wesley giving it a pass after the "Did it kill Fred? No? Then it's okay by me!" thing. I just don't trust, at all, where the show went when it decided to give up moral or ethical complexity in favor of "Big Business/Corporations/The Man is bad, mm-kay?" and the condemnation of Gunn's choice to go after the brain download as being The Wrong Choice on par with, say, babystealing or locking a dozen lawyers in a basement with two vampires. I don't *trust* season 5 and because of that I don't trust the show to have gone to a satisfying place with the consequences of the mindwipe.

And Adama...I *like* Adama, I genuinely do. Certainly, I like him a huge amount more than I like Lee (well, S2 Lee. I loved like burning mini-series Lee who was like, "Daddy's a poo head! VIVA DEMOCRACY!") But he put the fleet in danger for Starbuck and I'm just like, "Yo, I do not trust you now to make good decisions." Of course, I'm also like, "Um, seriously, you would rather have Baltar be president than have Laura feel bad about stealing the election? Oooh, you are about as much a long-range thinker as your son." And I *do* trust Ron Moore to actually treat that inability as a flaw, so I am hopeful on the BSG front.

I really don't know how to feel about Who. I love Jackie and Mickey for calling Nine on his shadiness and on that level, I'm happy with the show and the metacommentary on the characters. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to *like* The Doctor and Rose and I'm just...not. So I don't know. I continue to watch but with growing wariness about the whole thing.