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THEME-O-METER

(Work in Progress)

4.1 - Partners in Crime
Contents:









Analysis:
The Doctor's doing his "I'm the highest court and I'm giving you one chance" routine, but what's interesting this time is how differently it's interpreted by those he's subjecting to it. Right to the end Miss Foster belives that the Doctor's here to arrest her and that his authority comes from the Shadow Proclaimation (which for the first time ever is spoken of as an actual organisation in its own right rather than some sort of treaty between organisations). 'Law' in this episode seems to come from the outer space equivalent of the United Nations, rather than 'Law' being whatever the Last of the Timelords says it is.

Miss Foster is a parody of celebrity childcare expert Jo Frost, with whom she shares her specs and suit. Foster performs the same handclaps and finger-clicks that Frost does in the credit sequence to her show, which is called Supernanny, a title that's thrown at Foster at one point. Even thier names are one letter away from being a thin anagram.
Jo Frost's show is of the 'expert tells you how to live your life' format in which someone comes along to tell people how to raise thier kids, how to clean thier house or how to eat. That, when the Adipose's real parents come home, Foster/Frost is shown to be totally disposable works as a satire on the assumed authority of this breed of celebrity know-it-all.

So many, "These...are...my children!" lines here that this one's a bit obvious. smile

Might also be something relevant going on here with the three cohabiting generations of Nobles, but I didn't really pick up on it on my first watching.




Donna asks the Doctor if he's going to blow up the Adipose and is told that you can't judge someone worthy of death because of where they come from.
She points out that this differs from his treatment of the Raknos children.





Very mixed messages about fat issues here. In the press conference scene then the episode seems to be criticising our culture for being so obsessed with weight issues, but by the scene where Foster is explaining why she chose Earth then the episode seems to be criticising our culture for actually being so fat.

The 'body=identity' thing is most starkly illustrated here by Stacy, who as soon as she's shed a few pounds now judged herself to be out of her boyfriend's league.

Sarah-Jane may say that life can be an adventure here on Earth, but that's not worked out for Donna. Even though she's tried to live a more expansive and adventurous life then for her it just couldn't compare to what she knows is out there. A package holiday to Eygpt ain't no Pyramids of Mars.







Two people, Miss Foster and Stacey, die in this episode.

Argueably, neither of them would have done so had the Doctor and Donna not interfered.



Penny, the journalist, is contrasted and juxtaposed with Donna on several occasions as if we're being invited to compare the two women. This is interesting because in many ways Penny is a much more typical 'Doctor Who Companion' than Donna. Except that she's rubbish. She learns nothing, accomplishes nothing and fails to hold it all together or to display any resourcefulness or comprehension.
Donna even says, "Some people haven't got what it takes, and some have" and that's what this character is asking us to consider. It seems not everyone gets to walk among the gods because not everyone's special enough. They only take the best.








4.2 - The Fires of Pompeii
Contents:








Analysis:
"That's what you do. You save people."
"Not this time."
It's the same trick as in Voyage of the Damned...visually portraying the Doctor at his most Christ-like (the heavenly light spilling from the TARDIS, the out-reached hand) while naratively portraying the Doctor at his most impotent. He only ever looks the part when he's being the opposite. I belive it was They Might Be Giants who sung, "I look like Jesus so they say, but Mister Jesus is very far away."


But ultimately the Doctor does offer salvation to Caecillius and his family, but there's a couple of things to note here. Firstly, that this act is at Donna's insistence and that having someone around to bully him into such acts is part of why the Doctor needs companions. Is this making a humanist point about Messiahs requiring people to generate them and to bestow thier status upon them?

Secondly...does saving that one family actually make things morally worse?



Singling out one wealthy, middle-class, slave-owning family for rescue; A cheap token gesture (of the sort Margret Slitheen would call the Doctor on) that insults everyone left to burn or a noble act since those four lives have meaning unto themselves? YOU DECIDE!

Either way, the Doctor's making just the sort of choice Mister Copper warned about. But that's not the biggie...


"That's the choice, Donna. It's Pompeii or the world."
Wow. It took Season One 13 episodes to get to this point, and this time we're here at episode two. eek
And this time, debatably, the Doctor appears to make the opposite choice.
What isn't debatable is that it is a choice. As soon as he learns the truth about Vesuvius the Doctor very clear that history doesn't make it happen. He and Donna do.



"You are a Lord, sir..." Evelina tells the Doctor, not long after sneering at Donna for calling herself 'Noble'. His nature and her name purport thier elevation over others.

And, of course, the episode ends with thier literal deification as they are made into the household's gods.



The joy of Not Knowing Things is illustrated both negatively and positively.
Negatively in that the Doctor's definate, concrete knowledge of which historical details are 'fixed' is portrayed as a terrible burden. Positively though the Doctor's delight at all the things he doesn't know.
"Is it raining? Yes it is. Said so. Takes all the fun out of life"
This is contrasted with...



The various prophets persue fixed, static knowledge of what is to come. Of what is set in stone. And thier bodies are becoming fixed, static and set in stone. It's another instance of the inner life being literalised through expression on the body.

(Another 'turned to stone' allusion is there in the reference to the Medusa Cascade, and you just know we're going to be hearing more about that one.)


The other thing to notice about prophecy is that it seems to be sexed.
Lucius tells us that the prophecies of women are limited and dull, and while there's probably a strong element of offical propaganda behind that idea, there does seem to be a marked difference between his brand of prophecy and the Sibylline's. Look at the scene with him and Evelina that's the divinatory equivalent of a rap battle. She's giving it all "so far away" this and "burns in the stars" that, and he comes in with "Gallifrey". The female seer is talking in the allusive and numious language of Fantasy and he's talking in the prosaic and solid language of Science Fiction, which fits with a traditional Male=Rational/Female=Emotional duality.



Since we're talking of that sort of essentialist bollocks, Venus (as in "...Women are from...") gets her second prominent mention in two episodes.






"Look at your sister! She's giving us...status."
Metella, whose main focus is the social elevation of her household, is also the character most concerned with the Gods and with their propitiation. Her thinking is relentlesly heirarchical - Life for her is about honouring those above you on the cosmic ladder, while trying to climb higher up that ladder yourself.


"Donna. Human. No."
But not everyone's playing that game. smile
Donna doesn't just disregard claims of being of a higher status, she's actively contemptuous of them. Pulling rank on her doesn't make anyone trying it seem bigger, it makes them seem smaller for thinking they could get away with such pomposity. Even when the Doctor starts angsting about being the only Time Lord left, she ignores that and insists on talking about the 20,000 humans who're about to cark it.


"And yet the son of the father must also rise."
Lots of fun here with the unsuprising discovery that the moody teenager is a historical constant.
Then there's the references to Donna's father and (more strikingly) to the Doctor's.
The Sybelline cult is also a story of generational succession, as apparently they've not turned out as thier 'mother' would have wanted.



The Pyrovile are reconstituting themselves as a "New race of creatures" because their home was lost. It was "taken."
Just like the Adipose Breeding world.
Hmm...




"Everyone here's dead," is one of Donna's first observations, even before she realises she's in Pompeii. What does mortality even mean for a time traveller when everyone you meet today could be considered dead or yet to be born from the perspective in which you might stand tomorrow?





The consolation that the Doctor offers the survivors is that future generations will remember Pompeii. The city has a foothold in the future not through direct descendants, since for everyone except Caecillius then the family line just ended, but through thier lives and deaths continuing to mean something to those who will come after them.



"It'll make sense one day. The veil will be parted, and you'll be a seer."

Getting through 'the veil' and obtaining a privileged view of reality isn't just about seeing things, but having the ability to contextualise them. That's why the Doctor gives Donna that "Welcome aboard" at the end of this, her third adventure. It's only through having seen something like this, and through making choices like this, that she's understood what travelling with the Doctor is.


4.3 - Planet of the Ood
Main themes:








Analysis:
Let's get the boringly obvious stuff out of the way first.
Humans treat Ood as lesser species (indeed as 'made in our image' - "What is an Ood but a reflection of us?" Treacherous PR Girl asks).
Nasty human thinks he has the right to 'cull' whole batches of Ood.
Nasty human turns into Ood.
Move along, move along...



"The fear, the wonder, the joy..."
The Doctor suggests that, after all this time, it's the excitement of just not knowing what's going to be outside the TARDIS doors that keeps him going.




"You had a life of work and sleep and rent and tax and takeaway dinners and birthdays and Christmases and two weeks holiday a year and then you end up here."
The Doctor delivers a sermon on how inferior are the lives of almost everyone watching his show compared to the life he's bestowed on Donna. Or at least he would do if it wasn't for some typically great Tennant-acting. Watch when he gets to 'birthdays and Christmases' and he gets this wistful note as if he's realising that the mundane lives he's dismissing nevertheless do have something he doesn't. We'll come to what that might be later.

The Ood are exemplars of having thier internal states manifested on thier outer bodies. Processed Ood who go a bit loopy have 'Red Eye' and Unprocessed Ood are probably the most literal example ever of the mind being displayed on the body - they hold external brains in thier hands!

Which makes Ood Sigma all the more interesting - the Ood who is the means of thier liberation is the only one whose body doesn't tell you what's going on inside it.

Why does Klineman Halpen do what he does? Because it's what his father did and it's what his grandfather did. To steal another phrase from Terry Pratchett, this episode is about 'Unoriginal Sin'. Everything terrible that anyone does here they do because they've inherrited the idea. Whether it's the mass cull that previously worked for foot and mouth or the whole economic logic of maintaining a people in 'slavery' that goes unchanged from Donna's day to Halpen's. Or back further to, say...Pompeii. Nobody being evil here is doing anything new - they're all just doing what mummy and daddy did.
Change, it seems, only exists as 'new and improved' advertising gimmicks. D'oh!



If you doubt it... typical lines of Halpen's dialogue include "My grandfather drew up this plan" and "Nothing ever changes".




Then again...while the logic of subjugation may not change over time, its specifics do. Whoever made Donna's sweatshop-originated clothes, I'll bet good money that thier skin wasn't white. Yet Double-O are notably multiracial.
Now look at the 'chain gang' scene where Donna goes all "OMG! IT'S SLAVERY!" Donna already knew the Ood were in slavery so what's the big wow here? The shock lies in that here the Ood's slavery looks like slavery. Our culture's single mental image of slavery is of a line of black men shackled together and that's what's evoked here. Except its a black man holding the whip. The singers change, but the song of captivity remains the same.

"All the better for seeing you..."
Would you want an Ood giving you seductive sweet talk? Probably not, because you can see them. But to thier users they've become invisible. That's why they're so comfortable having them standing around in the background when they know they could turn into killers at any time (same concept as Robots of Death). Double-O's clientele are blind to the physicality of the Ood so it doesn't sound to them like a come-on from a squid-mouth, because they're not seeing the squid-mouth anymore. It's just a disembodied voice, like that of the sat-navs this scene is parodying.


A bit of a week off from this sort of thing. Though there's a brief callback...
"I couldn't save them. I had to let the Ood die."
Again, it's a dangerously self-centred perception of reality that understands any tragedy as happening because "I had to let it".




"Say hello to daddy!" says Halpen as he shows Ood Sigma the big squashy brain thingy.
This is a story about children rescuing thier parent.
It may not be the last we see this year.




The Ood in the transport crates seem to be there to remind us of the images we see in the papers of people smuggling. Specificly the shot looks exactly like the back of the tomato freight container in which 58 economic migrants suffocated to death to 2000. By coincidence, 54 Burmese migrants died in similar circumstances this month.

We're shown these images at the exact moment that the Doctor starts talking about economic unfairness in Donna's century.


More questioning of why the Doctor needs companions. Donna's suggestion that it's to take cheap shots at seems like a diversion and a refusal to engage with the Doctor's criticism of her non-Fair Trade wardrobe, but in fact it is an answer to the criticism. She's pointing out that as the magic spaceman with the keys to the universe, he too benefits from a disparity in status.



Trapped in the container with the red eyed Ood, Donna tries to convince them that she's "Not like that lot" - the oppressors bossing them about.
Then we cut away, and when we cut back, she's attempting to give them orders.




Treacherous PR Girl joins the journalist from Partners of Crime in the 'not good enough' category. But where Penny's failure was one of competance, Treacherous PR Girl's was one of character and vision. Donna wears what she wears because she hasn't seen a child sweatshop in India, just like the Ood users back on Earth have never seen Ood production. They fail morally because they've never made themselves think about those things...but they're a step above Treacherous PR Girl who has seen and who does know that what she's doing is wrong.

The Ood, with the circle broken, are a species that share one third of thier mind with each other. Notice the way they continue to address 'DoctorDonnaFriend' - they can't even conceptualise that they're two seperate entities, rather than a group mind of two. The 'song' that they have resumed is thier union as a consumate collective. They're utterly together.




On the other hand, the Doctor is the consumate individual. As the series has pointed out once or twice, he's a bit on the lonely side. What the Ood are offering when they invite him to join their song is an end to loneliness. "There is room in the song for you" means room in the collective.

He doesn't take the offer of a place in the chorus as he's "sort of got a song of my own." He's a soloist. But this solo, apparently, is coming to an end.


Never mind the self being reflected in the body and the body in the self...Donna's taken it a step further and inferred a whole society from its members' physicality.
"They're born with thier brains in thier hands...that makes them peaceful"
The Doctor seems very impressed.

If Donna's logic is right, it makes the scene where Ood-Halpen voms up a brain strangely touching, as the change in his body has turned a killer into a pacifist.



Some people seem to be reading the Doctor's insistence that a servant race could never evolve as a direct endorsement of Richard Dawkins' 'Selfish Gene' theory. I wouldn't go that far myself, but we'll be hearing more about Dawkins later on, don't you worry.



"I can't tell what's right and what's wrong anymore."
"It's better that way. People who know for certain tend to be like Mister Halpen."

Last week the Doctor's scorn was for the prophets who had certain knowledge of events, this week the Doctor's scorn is for people who think they have certain knowledge of morality.



"Our children will sing of the DoctorDonna. And our children's children. And the wind and the ice and the snow will carry your names forever."

For the second week running, our heroes are turned into Household Gods.





4.4/5 - The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poisoned Sky
Contents:


Analysis:
Back in 70's Who then aliens often seemed to invade the Earth for no particular reason. This season though, what's striking is that they're all invading Earth for the exact same reason.
Miss Fost's using it to raise Adipose children.
The Pyrovile want to to breed a "New race of creatures."
The Sontarans want it as a spawning ground for thier clones.
Everyone out there agrees on what Planet Earth is for.
It's a cradle.

"Tom Milligan...he's in paediatrics."
Well, of course he is. What else?

Humanity itself is a child race as far as the Sontarans are concered - "These are toy soldiers. The weapons of children" - and engagement with them is play rather than war.




All these breeding going on...it's a wonder nobody's started talking about the prospect of the Doctor producing children. Oh, hang on! Donna did in the first episode ("You just want to MATE?"). But it's here that we first seriously look at the question of who should be considered the Doctor's children. Watch that scene where Martha's all dressed up in 'daddy's clothes' and lets slip that she now sees the Doctor as a father figure. Should we think of the Doctor's companions as his 'children'? After all, he raises them, develops them, instills them with his values and then sends them out into the universe to do wonderful things. Sounds like a pretty good parent to me. But then, what exactly are this strange species we call 'companions'...?

Brave and clever freelance journalist who gets in over her head investigating a Sontaran plot. Who am I talking about? Sarah-Jane Smith? No, you big silly! Good ol' Jo Nakashima, of course!
With all the companions buzzing about (Rose, Martha and Donna all apear in this story!) the series seems to be looking at "What Makes a Companion?" and to be doing this mostly by contrast. Penny from Partners in Crime seemed to have 'companion-ness' but lacked competance. Treacherous PR Girl from Planet of the Ood seemed to have 'companion-ness' but lacked morality.
Poor Ms Nakashima is lacking nothing except a break. She gets precisely the same intro that Sarah-Jane got in The Time Warrior, but one goes on to become fandom's favourite companion and star of a great kids' show and the other ends up a bloated corpse at the bottom of the Thames. What do companions have that Jo Nakashima doesn't? Better luck.

Just to rub this in, when we cut away from Jo fatally loosing control of her vehicle, we cut straight to a grinning and delighted Donna gaining control of her vehicle - as she learns to pilot the TARDIS.

Also, look at Private Ross in this regard. We're shamelessly directed by the Doctor to like him with a nice light flourish of metafiction (When the Doctor tells Rattigan that "We like Private Ross" then the 'We' is so obviously the Doctor and the audience). He's all set up as the new Sergeant Benton for this new iteration of the 'UNIT family'.
Then he's killed.
It's genuinely suprising. Not only are the people the show likes not safe, but the people that the structure of the show seems to need aren't safe.


Also striking is that in three of the four stories we've had so far the baddie has effectively been a company selling a product. Whether the product's been diet pills, Ood or Atmos the set-up has been very much 'Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with Commodity-based Capitalism'.
So far, so Marxist... but Fires of Pompeii sticks out like a sore thumb here...in that story the Doctor allied himself firmly with the forces of commodity (the marble traders are textbook Bourgeoisie).
If one saw Fires of Pompeii after seeing the other three stories one might expect the Doctor to leave Caecillius and his family to burn and to invite his slaves aboard the TARDIS instead.


There's another big difference between Fires of Pompeii and Everything Else. Of the first four stories it's the only one not to mention climate change (Unless it does and I missed it. Can someone check?).
Donna's from a soceity fixiated on its Immanenet Doom (as she points out in Planet of the Ood), while the people of Pompeii were oblivious to thiers. Their prophets didn't even have a word for 'Volcano', while our prophets (though we call them 'scientists' now) have plenty of words for global warming.
What does it do to a society when the people in it know that it's volcano day?


"Was that what you did to her? Turned her into a soldier?"
Well, let's look at the post-Doctor career options of Welsh Series companions so far. Rose - working for Torchwood. Jack - working for Torchwood. Martha - working for UNIT.
There's something very strange about the way that running around with an anti-establishment rebel seems to prepare people for a life working for establishment military organisations.


Martha puns 'Homeworld security' on 'Homeland security' just before Donna mentions Guantanamo Bay, bringing the whole security/freedom debate into things. It doesn't really go anywhere though, but it damn well should have done, given that the UNIT we see here are presumably the same guys who over in Torchwood told Tosh she had no human rights and intended to lock her up until her death with no legal process whatsoever had she not been saved by Jack coming along and smirking at her predicament. The 'geniuses' who've been taking orders from Rattigan are wearing orange jumpsuits though, so perhaps the point is that all too often we imprison ourselves.

"I'll have a salute."
After being engaged with the social heirarchies of Pompeii and the fluid heirachies of the corporate world, we're now in the very clear cut world of military heirarchies -both with UNIT and the Sontarans. One of Staal's first lines in "Remember your status, boy" and it's well worth noting that everyone in this story has a clearly defined status. Everyone knows exactly who thier superior is and who thier inferior is. Well, except for the Doctor and the Noble family (though again, note the name).
Donna, as she's been doing since the Doctor tried to pull rank on her back in Pompeii, mercilessly takes the piss out of all this and never misses a chance to expose how ridiculous all these 'Person A is worth more than Person B' systems are. Not least when she makes a breakthrough using the skills of a temp - a notably low-status career.

Of course the Sontarans themselves expose how ridiculous these systems are, they're just too daft to notice. These guys are a clone race who are, to all intents and purposes, identical. And yet they operate under a strict heirarchy. So that they all know which clone is better than which. It's almost beyond mockery...but the Doctor has a go anyway, dismantaling the logic behind Staal the Undefeated's name.


Mace scores an important point over the Doctor by pointing out that he can't stop him from saluting him without ordering him not to.
How possible is it to escape from power structures when the escape demands an assumption of power?




Nevertheless, the story's keen to punish those locked into thier status games. The UNIT soldiers who don't wait for back-up but foolishly investigate the clone tank alone do so because "We get first rights on this. That means promotion."
The first thing Staal does when he meets them is offer an evaluation, telling the promotion-seeking one that he "would rate him above average."
He then changes his mind and judges him unfit once the jokes about his height start, since...


..."Words are the weapons of women." Compare with the gendering of language in the 'prophecy duel' scene from Fires of Pompeii and with the fact that in that scene Evelina accuses the Doctor and Donna of turning words into weapons.
It's also interesting that the Sontarans still have enough of a concept of women to bother holding them in contempt. Women don't seem to be created for the war effort, so why would a culture have prejudices against a group it doesn't contain? Perhaps they look down on females as 'obsolete technology' - something embarassing from thier past that they think they've grown beyond.


Language is also the main battleground between the Doctor and Rattigan, and in many ways thier little games of oneupmanship over tenses and tautologies are the whole story in miniature (I'll say why at the end).
Names are back as powerful things - it's knowing the name 'Sontaran' that keeps the Doctor alive when he first meets Staal - but it has to be the right name at the right time. When Ross says, "I order you to surrender in the name of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce" it works as well as you might expect.

Plenty of religious language and imagery here, most obviously from the newsreader -"It's been likened to a biblical plague. Some are calling this the End of Days."
Also much discussion of the expectations placed on the Doctor between the members of Donna's family. Martha spells it out at one point with "He wonderful. He's brilliant. But he's like fire. Stand too close and people get burned."
Donna misses the point though as when Wilf asks if she's safe she replies, "He's amazing. Dazzling." Yep, he is. That's why you're not safe.
Oh, and obviously the fire/burning imagery gets literalised at the end.

Rattigan's World was to be established in Castor, which is the name of one of a set of mythical twins. Now I don't want to push this too far and end up talking Pollux, but in a story filled with clones, duplicates, effigies and parallels, we have to think about who stands as Rattigan's 'double'.
Lets see...A genius who, despite being a social outcast, offers a technological solution to the ecological crisis his world are facing, but is secretly planning to remake that world in his own image. Yep, Rattigan is just like Davros. But rubbish.


Then again...within this specific story he stands as a double for the Doctor. The dialogue stresses that they share the Terrible Loneliness of Seeing Things and both of them get speeches expressing thier contempt for the little people (The Doctor's "I'm stuck on Earth. Like an ordinary person. Like a human. How rubbish is that?" is probably the ugliest). It's because Rattigan can substitute for the Doctor symbollically that he can substitute for him literally once we get to Christ-like self-sacrifice time.

It's about family. "How's the family?" is the first question that the Doctor asks Martha, and he catches out her clone on the fact that she hasn't called them during the crisis. Martha and Donna bond over discussions of thier families, and by the conclusion seem to have understood that they share roles in the family the Doctor has chosen for himself. Everyone gets this except...



Rattigan. Who genuinely doesn't understand why his cotterie aren't excited by his Brave New World. Why won't they play? He's even devised a lovely breeding program for them! Problem is, he's trying to build Earth 2.0 without yet having understood how Earth works.
""We spent all our lives excluded," he tells them, "They laughed at us and pulled us down, those ordinary people."
But the others aren't excluded. When the crisis starts they've people they want to be with - thier families.

"Martha Jones is keeping you alive" the Doctor tells the clone as he removes Martha from the machine by which she's doing so. He's not just making a choice here that Martha will live and CloneMartha will die...he's talking CloneMartha through it so she understands that's what he's doing.

On the otherside of the spectrum, the reason the Doctor has to go to the Sontaran ship rather than explode it with a delay switch is because he says he's "got to give them the choice" as to whether they will live or die.

Despite deriding words as being the weapons of women, the Sontarans are entirely motivated by linguistics. Thier war with the Rutans is not for any material motive (See ya Marx! Thanks for helping out at the top of the post, but don't let the door slam your the way out!) but purely to attain the abstract concept of 'victory'. To be able to say "We won." Everything they do is "for the glory of Sontar." Doing X for the glory of Y is such a familiar phrase that its signifigance might just slip past us, so stop and think for a moment about what it is to bestow glory (or shame) upon a name. A name that acquires glory means something more prestigious after that aquistion, a name that acquires shame means something less prestigious after that aquistion. If everything the Sontarans do is to glorify Sontar then everything they do is simply to change the meaning of a word.

So if the whole situation is caused by names, how is it resolved?
Martha calls her clone by the name "Martha." This act of naming resolves the clone's identity crisis and alows her to act like Martha. In return she gives the Doctor the name of the gas flooding the Earth, and that name was all the Doctor needed to resolve the situation. Words might be the weapons of women after all, as the Sontaran plan is defeated by two women exchanging names and another talking on a mobile phone.
No wonder the Doctor kept telling UNIT to stop fighting. There was never any war here. There was only ever language.
Even the deaths are just translations; "He wasn't Greyhound 40. His name was Ross."






4.6 - The Doctor's Daughter








The ultra-prosaic title might be the most fannish in-joke the series has done so far (it's a play on The Doctor's Wife, a fake episode JN-T managed to convince fans he was making) but it's the title we're left with...so what does it mean?

Well according to the publicity it just means Jenny, and if you're boring then that's where you stopped thinking. In the episode itself then there's more than one "Doctor's Daughter" kicking around:



Daughter Number One: This World of Human and Hath.
"Make the foundation of this society a man who never would!"

Never mind saving the universe. This might be the hugest thing the Doctor's ever done. The Doctor's not just allowed this colony to be born, he's insisting that they take him and his values as that which thier whole way of seeing the world is to be based on.
He's just reproduced himself a million times over.

It's also interesting to compare this to the other times he's been 'deified' this season. Caecillius' family turn him into a god behind his back, then later he just politely accepts his place in Ood mythology. This time he's compelling people to build their culture around the teachings of thier saviour (him).

Throughout the episode the Doctor is typically dismissive of creation myths, jumping to the conclusion that Messaline's conceals a weapon. After Jenny's death, mythology becomes a weapon that he is prepared to use.

Daughter Number Two: Doctor Martha Jones.
We've all seen the 'Companion separated from the Doctor' scenario before (it was a great way of filling up time back when stories had four weeks to pad out) but what's apparent as soon as the tunnel collapses between our heroes is that we're not seeing that scenario here.

Martha, not technically a companion here and certainly not acting like one, gets straight into her own stuff, tending to the wounded Hath, a hero in her own right.
"I'm Doctor Martha Jones, who the Hell are you?"

This continues in the scene at the map where Martha and the Doctor are mirrored, taking each others roles as the episode cuts between them. Presenting them as interchangable. In the story that Martha is in, she's the Doctor. She's the one working out the dangerous "lets go over the surface" plan that nobody else can see.




She even takes a companion.
"You can stay down here and live your life in the shadows" she tells her hath friend, "or come with me and stand in the open air [...] It's up to you, but nothing's going to stop me."
It's the exact same chance to step out of the bromeliad that the Doctor offers to those he chooses.
But, like some of those, the Hath who steps out of the shadows dies.
In the previous story Martha said that the Doctor was, "wonderful. He's brilliant. But he's like fire. Stand too close and people get burned."
The future myths of the Hath may well say the same about Doctor Martha Jones.

Ah, yes. Doctor Martha Jones. Have a look at how they play that goodbye scene.
"Goodbye Doctor"
"Goodbye Doctor Jones."
It's like the Doctor is bestowing his name and his status on her. He's filled her full of his values and skills, given her his name and sent her off into the world. He's reproduced himself.
That's why she's so keen to get out of his television series and back into her own life - she's finished gestating now. Unlike Donna, a work in progress, who can't yet imagine a life away from the Doctor anymore than a foetus can imagine life outside the womb.

Daughter Number Three : Oh, alright then. Let's talk about Jenny.
Is Jenny the Doctor's Daughter? Big question. We'll have to break it up. First of all, does she think she is?
Her initial "Hello Dad" seems to be a 'cute' response to the Doctor calling her his daughter rather than any indication of what she considers him to be. Indeed, she acts as if she's making a witty comment by saying "Hello dad" and if the humans of Messaline do simply consider the people from whose tissue samples they're grown to be thier parents then there's no joke there for her to be cute about.

Do the Messaline humans really have a functional concept of the tissue donors as 'fathers'?
From what Jenny does next, it seems not. She defers at once to Cline rather than to her progenator, and intends to wait for a name to be 'assigned' to her by the military structure rather than by her parent.
Cobb talks repeatedly about the soliders as being 'Children of the Machine', suggesting thier culture sees the reproductive tech rather than the tissue donor as being the real parent. Everything implies that, until quite late, Jenny has no reason to think of the Doctor as her genuine 'dad' but simply as a skilled soldier from whom she can learn.

But is Jenny the Doctor's Daughter?
Well, what does the Doctor think?
The simple answer seems to be that at first he thinks no ("My daughter. Except she isn't") and later thinks yes ("You're my daughter, and we've only just got started"). But you have to decide why the Doctor's hesitating before saying "She's my daughter" in the pre-credit sequence. Is he struggling to find the closest word for what she is before settling reluctantly on the imprecise 'daughter', or does he know that 'daughter' is the right word but hesitates as he's reluctant to say it?
Is this a story about the Doctor overcoming 'being in denial' over fatherhood, or a story about him changing his mind?

And if he does change his mind, what causes him to?
After that inital, bewildered, reference to her as his daughter, the Doctor quickly switches into Science Mode to start qualifying it. To start explaining that she's his daughter in purely sci-fi technobabble terms.
"You can't extrapolate a relationship from a biological accident" he tells Donna.
"The Child Support Agency can" she replies.


The analogy here is with accidental fathering, and Donna's point is that in her culture a man who didn't intend to produce a child nevertheless has certain responsibilities to that child.
However, since Jenny wasn't produced by an 18th century condom splitting mid-dance with Reinette, but rather by being grown from a tissue sample taken at gunpoint then the comparison doesn't really work. Better analogies would be to either sperm-donation or to rape.
Of course, our own culture says that men who willingly produce children through sperm donation don't have any responsibilities towards them but that women who unwillingly produce children as a result of having been raped do. So all this really tells us is that our own culture is ******** insane.

Gamely though, Donna perseveres with her biological argument, demonstrating Jenny's connection to the Doctor by means of her two hearts.
He seems quite interested, but look at what he says when asked what makes someone a Time Lord...
"A sum of knoweldge. A code. A shared history. A shared suffering."
You'll notice there's nothing about biology in there.
Perhaps we should expect this from a 'race' who can arguably regenerate into other species, but it's nevertheless striking that the Doctor entirely defines his people in terms of cultural material to the complete exclusion of the biological. Bodies don't matter.

So what does?
It looks like Jenny isn't born the Doctor's daughter, she doesn't see it that way and neither does the Doctor, but instead she becomes the Doctor's daughter. As she starts to ask what the Doctor's for (I love what he's for), learns the joy of running, throws away her gun and absorbs the Doctor's values and methods.
At the end she heads off into her world to do all the stuff the Doctor does, just as Martha heads off into her world to be a hero there.
The Doctor has reproduced.



So what do all these instances of 'fathering' have in common?

The Doctor fathers the Colony, Martha and Jenny and all of this he does by spreading ideas rather than by spreading his alien seed. The idea seems to be that the Doctor reproduces mimetically rather than genetically. By distributing concepts rather than DNA.



Cobb almost seems to see the spread of ideas and the spread of biological material being as the same thing. He talks about there having been "an outbreak of pacifism" as if the concept was a virus, and later says "Don't think you can infect us with your peacemaking." The Doctor even uses the same language to express the opposite view, warning Jenny that becoming a killer "infects you."
On one level this story could be read as a straightforward 'nature versus nurture' tale, or perhaps more broadly as 'bodies versus minds' (Cobb asks the Doctor how he will stop his army, the Doctor taps his noggin). But what it really seems to be saying is that bodies and minds work in more or less the same way.

When you hear the baddies shouting things like "You're a child of the machine...it's in your blood!" and the goodies solemnly intoning things like "We always have a choice" then it's easy to think this episode is telling us to rise above the base and savage demands of our bodies and step into the freedom offered by the world of the mind.
But the body is often shown to be one step ahead...
"I don't know where we're going but my old hand seems very excited"


Watch the Doctor's reaction closely as he's 'processed'.
The bit where it takes a tissue sample gets a couple of mild "Ow!"s.
The bit where it extrapolates that data gets a string of genuinely pained "OW!"s.
Which is odd, because you'd expect someone to be able to feel a sample being taken but not to be able to feel the data from that sample being analysed. Have a blood test done and you feel the blood being drawn, you don't feel anything when the pathologists analyse that blood an hour afterwards.
But with our Mystery Man it seems the other way around. The concrete physical part of the process doesn't hurt as much as the abstract part where someone learns something definate about him. Stripping away the Doctor's secrets causes him direct physical pain. (Now go and watch The Two Doctors with this in mind)


Athletic blonde hottie who's the latest in thousands of generations of soldiers fighting an unwinnable war, but who learns to transcend the direction of the old guys telling her what to do and thus to change the rules.

Yep, even though she only dies once, Jenny's got a few things in common with Miss Summers. The big irony though is that Davies happily admits he modelled the format for Doctor Who's revival on that of Buffy. So while in narative terms he know has 'Buffy' for a daughter, in media production terms he now has Buffy for a mother.


"This is a theatre..." remember how in the Sontaran two-parter we saw that war was presented as being first and foremost a matter of language? Go back and have a read if you don't. It's quite important. That idea's extended here into war as a sustained linguistic performance. A staged conflict . A theatre of war.
The Doctor's too fixed on his own concerns to engage with this at first ("Maybe they're doing Miss Saigon," he says. A play which deals, of course, with children conceived in war) but eventally comes to end the war with an illocutionary act; "I'm the Doctor, and I declare this war is over"


For more linguistic warfare, see the Doctor's insistence that he's in the dictonary as the very definition of what will stop Cobb.
Then watch the cell scene in which Jenny translates every thing the Doctor does into military terms.
Which disempowers him by leaving him "speechless."












This adventure is a quest for the 'Source'...the creation myth. The thing that came first. Where do we come from? Nature or nurture? The meme or the gene? The idea or the body? What's the Source of us?
"Your whole history is chinese whispers," The Doctor tells the colonists, "Getting more distorted the more its passed on."
But is this a bad thing? Surely the bad thing is that the colony's culture has stopped. That it's got stuck at an artifically self-sustaining point. The Doctor knows this, as look at what his solution is - "A cocktail of stuff for accelerated evolution." Evolution works by things getting more distorted the more they're passed on. It doesn't matter if the information that comprises us comes from our bodies or our minds, what matters is that it keeps changing. That we don't get stuck as Sontarans, endless identical repetitions of the generation before us.
Mutating ideas. Mutating DNA. All passed on, all in flux.
What's the source of us? Chinese whispers.








4.7 - The Unicorn and the Wasp

4.8/9 - Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead

4.10 - Midnight

4.11 - Turn Left

4.12/13 - TBA/Journey's End

Thanks! smile


Davies was already my favourite British TV writer long before he ever took over Doctor Who, so sometimes perhaps I give him more credit than he's due. smile

In general though, it's more interesting to look at what's there in a story rather than worrying about who put it there, whether or not they meant to, and attributing credit or blame. Look at, for example, Season 18 of the English series. Every Single Story in the season is directly and explicitly about entropy, disolution, decay and things falling apart and so it stands as an incredible twenty-eight episode-long funeral for TomDoc, and a towering artistic acheviement.

But most of this is by accident. For example State of Decay, which fits the theme perfectly, is only in that season because it got bumped from an earlier run so as not to conflict with a high profile BBC adaptation of Dracula. And Tom Baker's mournful, subdued and restrained performance that holds the whole season together doesn't come from inspired direction or from the actor's engagement with the Big Idea - it comes from Tom having been seriously unwell and in a massive sulk with the new production team.

But from where we stand here in 2008...none of that stuff matters. How it got there and who meant it to get there is immaterial. What we're left with are the episodes themselves and when you watch them then Season 18 is an incredible twenty-eight episode-long funeral for TomDoc, and a towering artistic acheviement. End of story.

So...looking at Season Two of Welsh Who, then the Torchwood references are the 'through-line' on the narative level, but on the thematic level then what seems to me to be there is the question, "What does it mean for the universe to have someone like the Doctor in it?"

On the surface level of the text then every episode of Season Two is banging on about Torchwood, but underneath that what the show keeps returning to is, "Is Reinette right? Is it really worth a universe of monsters for the sake of one angel?"

That's what we come back to most insightfully in Love and Monsters. Elton's mother dies, but the Doctor is in his house at the time.

Sad news for everyone reading this but, if she hasn't already, your mother will one day die.

That's the sort of universe we live in. But, on that horrible, tragic, inevitable day then all the things the Doctor represents (kindness, freedom, joy...make your own list) still exist within the world. Your mother dies, but the Doctor is in your house. Your universe is a monstrous place, but only when you turn your eyes from the angelic. Kindness, freedom and joy can't make the bad go away. They can't and they won't stop mummy from dying, but they do make it all worthwhile. Reinette is right, and so is Elton.

Then, in a brilliant and brutal inversion, the series stops asking how much we need the angelic in the universe and instead asks what the angel needs. Then it takes her from him.

That, not the 'chase phrase', is the real story of season two. If that's the story RTD was trying to tell then cool, but it doesn't matter whether he was or not. That's the story we're left with.

Partners In Crime Theme-O-Meter
(edited into 2nd post)

The Doctor's doing his "I'm the highest court and I'm giving you one chance" routine, but what's interesting this time is how differently it's interpreted by those he's subjecting to it. Right to the end Miss Foster belives that the Doctor's here to arrest her and that his authority comes from the Shadow Proclaimation (which for the first time ever is spoken of as an actual organisation in its own right rather than some sort of treaty between organisations). 'Law' in this episode seems to come from the outer space equivalent of the United Nations, rather than 'Law' being whatever the Last of the Timelords says it is.

Miss Foster is a parody of celebrity childcare expert Jo Frost, with whom she shares her specs and suit. Foster performs the same handclaps and finger-clicks that Frost does in the credit sequence to her show, which is called Supernanny, a title that's thrown at Foster at one point. Even thier names are one letter away from being a thin anagram.
Jo Frost's show is of the 'expert tells you how to live your life' format in which someone comes along to tell people how to raise thier kids, how to clean thier house or how to eat. That, when the Adipose's real parents come home, Foster/Frost is shown to be totally disposable works as a satire on the assumed authority of this breed of celebrity know-it-all.

So many, "These...are...my children!" lines here that this one's a bit obvious. smile

Might also be something relevant going on here with the three cohabiting generations of Nobles, but I didn't really pick up on it on my first watching.




Donna asks the Doctor if he's going to blow up the Adipose and is told that you can't judge someone worthy of death because of where they come from.
She points out that this differs from his treatment of the Raknos children.





Very mixed messages about fat issues here. In the press conference scene then the episode seems to be criticising our culture for being so obsessed with weight issues, but by the scene where Foster is explaining why she chose Earth then the episode seems to be criticising our culture for actually being so fat.

The 'body=identity' thing is most starkly illustrated here by Stacy, who as soon as she's shed a few pounds now judged herself to be out of her boyfriend's league.

Sarah-Jane may say that life can be an adventure here on Earth, but that's not worked out for Donna. Even though she's tried to live a more expansive and adventurous life then for her it just couldn't compare to what she knows is out there. A package holiday to Eygpt ain't no Pyramids of Mars.






I know I'll think of more. You guys got anything?

Another meeting of The Society of Doctor Who Fans Who Don't Like Doctor Who Very Much?




To be honest, I got a bit nervous when I found out you've read The End of Mr Y, as now you understand post-structuralism then you're on to where I get about 90% of my usual waffle. ninja



Trouble is, you're so many squillions of heart -points in credit with me already that any economy that tried to accomadate you is an instant Zimbabwe.

Very interesting. I'll be sure to keep an eye out on this.

Also, that list of episode names is new to me. O_O.

I get that a lot. One of the big draws of Doctor Who for me is all the space it has for 'Perhaps', but its fandom seems to be stuffed with people pretending all the challenging bits aren't there so they can pretend it's full of 'Certainly'. sad


My thoughts on X-Men fandom may hold true here as well. 3nodding

"Nobody likes me because I'm special and different! They hate and fear me!"
"No. Nobody likes you because you make no effort to be friendly or to wash. Have a go at those things and you'll find that you can be as special and different as you like. People like special and different. That's why advertisers put those words on tinned soup."

It's the danger of any 'outsider hero' myth that it can encourage those who buy the myth to valourise thier own loneliness rather than do something about it. In Who circles it tends to go...

"Nobody likes me because I'm special and different! I'm a true eccentric who baffles thier tiny minds with my unconventional dress sense and unpredictable behaviour!"
"No. Nobody likes you because you make no effort to be friendly or to wash. Have a go at those things and you'll find that you can be as special and different as you like. They'll even let you show off a bit."


Got a link to the last podcast, BTW? Oh, and Kath gains further points for your collective from her being a World of Darkness survivor. smile


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Now playing: The Beta Band - Dry The Rain
via FoxyTunes

Oh, and we already knew The Doctor had a daughter.

Her name's Thursday. domokun heart