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Arggghhhh!

I'm pleased that Fires of Pompeii seems to fit so perfectly with everything...but that Every Single Line is relevant means I'm going to have to spend a whole evening writing all this up! scream crying

In the meantime, here's some loose change from Partners in Crime...





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.

Oops.


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.

Right then. Let's be having you...



"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's 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.

That's your lot for now. There's also a lot of interesting stuff about the power of words and names. If this were season three, I'd be leaping on all that, but it's such a can o' worms I'm going to hold off for now until we've got an idea of how generally relevant it might be.

Also, I need sleep.

Part of me would like to say that I'm now watching Doctor Who and thinking "Ah, this bit's an example of..." any one of the categories. But I'm glad that my thought processes while watching the show are still mainly along the lines of "Cor, this bit's brill!"

Though one thing I did say to my girlfriend at the end of the episode was that I'd realised that one of the things I like about Doctor Who in all its media forms is that it isn't safe. The Doctor does have to face choices that are so difficult that the majority of people would go nuts rather than deal with. But he does deal with them, and, and this is the reason it works for me, he doesn't get all angsty about it afterwards.

I was forced to read a hell of a lot of teenage fiction in school, and speaking as one who came dangerously close to getting a flat with walls that bounce, I was constantly irritated by the protagonists of these books who stumbled around, wringing their hands and gnashing their feet at the injustice of life and how dreadful it was, and all the while I wanted to shake them and say "For God's sake, buck your ideas up or you'll go through life a self-centred prannet that no-one will talk to."

I'm by no means advocating the "Wahey, let's blow up some planets!" view as espoused by some people I know, all I hope for is that the Doctor will continue to find himself slap in the middle of the tough decisions, and having made them, continue to run around being brill and cracking wise with alien despots. It makes him someone to invest faith in, despite the fact 'e's not the....well, you know the rest.

I will say that I don't half wish the Welsh Who had been around when I was a teenager. I'd have written a lot less godawful poetry. emo

That rather depends on which Arthur Dent he was talking about... ninja

My first thought about "Doctor's Daughter" was Thursday Next. That would just make so much sense to me... was it Thursday's dad who kept popping up and asking about whether historical things had actually happened? (I really need to re-read those books)

This thread is AMAZING, by the way. Big congratulations to you for thinking it up and actuallly thinking about it that much!

Since we're here, I thought I'd put together a few notes on what various sources have told us about the Doctor's family. I've drawn on on televised and untelevised material, but hopefully I've been clear about what comes from where so anyone can ignore the bits they're inclined to and we can avoid a canon debate. Though if you do want one of those I've a thread here for that sort of thing.



The English Series - The Sixties.
The Doctor has a Grandaughter called Susan who invented the word TARDIS. Behind-the-scenes documents tell us they're survivors of a cosmic war in the 51st Century which may have destroyed thier own world.

Of course, once the Time Lords and, later, Gallifrey were introduced then all that untelevised "last survivors/cosmic war" backstory went out of the window. Who knows though, maybe someone will find a use for that angle someday? wink

The Doctor has a wider family but something, implictly (but by no means certainly) thier being dead, prevents him from being with them. He remembers them fondly but the rest of the time they "sleep in his mind"

('Sleep in my mind' is a very interesting turn of phrase once we learn in The Deadly Assassin that dead Time Lords can be stored as data and once we learn in The Gallifrey Chronicles that such data can be stored in the minds of other Time Lords. With those two facts in play it almost sounds like the Doctor is saying he carries 'back-ups' of his family. eek )

TV Comic

Sixties licensees of Doctor Who seem to have had to have paid out individually for the different bits of Doctor Who intellectual property they wanted to use rather than getting the whole format as a package. Those making the Doctor Who strip for TV Comic didn't fancy shelling out for the series changing roster of companions, so instead stuck with thier own creations...

John and Gillian, the Doctor's grandchildren.

A bland and anodyne pair, John and Gillian were much younger than any TV companion and seem more to me like Enid Blyton characters of the sort of infuriatingly wet kind that I always wished would fall off thier 'Magic Wishing Chair' or from the top of thier 'Magic Faraway Tree' and snap thier well-scrubbed necks.

They travelled with both the first and second Doctors never noticing that he'd changed, or if they did notice never judging it worthy of comment. Eventually he managed to ditch them by packing them off to university on the planet Zebedee.

In the continuity of the novels then these comics have been established as having occured in the Land of Fiction, and in the continuity of the DWM comic then they've been established as having been a dream the Doctor had. However, there's a continuity reference to these stories in The Infinite Quest, so for all we know John and Gillian might still be working on post-Doctoral studies at Zebedee University.

The English Series - The Seventies and Eighties (Except the last two seasons. We'll get to them later.)

Time and the Rani suggests he has a notably idle uncle.

In Planet of Fire The Master dies one of his many comic-book pretend deaths with a "How can you do this to your own..."

As the sentance was left unfinished then lots of people seem to think the missing word was 'brother'. They've been watching too much television. Lance Parkin mischeviously points out that 'husband' also fits. More boringly, so does 'kind'.

Another possibility relates to what Barry Letts, producer of the Pertwee era, had planned for the Third Doctor's swansong. 'Regeneration' as we think of it now hadn't really been invented in the early 70's (despite two transformations which were later retconned as having been 'regenerations') so the plan for the birth of the Fourth Doctor was to reveal the 'truth' about the Master - that (*drumroll*) he and the Doctor were two halves of the same person - and have them merge to become one entity.

It's probably for the best none of that made it to the screen, but there's a tiny hint of it in Logopolis where the Doctor says of the Master, "In many ways we have the same mind."

There's a fleeting mention of 'The Braxiatel Collection' in City of Death - This will be important later.

The Brain of Morbius establishes that the Doctor's life goes back further than the guy we the think of as being 'The First Doctor'. This is subsequently contradicted by The Five Doctors - This will be important later.

The American Telemovie and the Leekly Bible.

Oh dear.

The American Telemovie was the end product of a complex series of different scripts and documents, all of which were pants. Most horrifying of all of these is the so called 'Leekly Bible', which would have been the series template had the American Telemovie gone with a 'reboot' and managed to go on longer than eighty-five minutes. As, thankfully on both counts, the American telemovie neither rebooted Doctor Who nor went on longer than eighty-five minutes then little of this stuff got on screen. But a few crumbs of it did, and it's all there lurking inside the script's DNA.

Before we get into it, here's the quick guide to Hollywood's relationship with Joeseph Campbell or, as I call it, "Why Mainstream Fantasy and SF Have Been s**t For Decades"

The Quick Guide to Hollywood's Relationship with Joseph Campbell
or
Why Mainstream Fantasy and SF Have Been s**t For Decades

• Bloke called Joseph Campbell writes book proving that all the myths of the world are really just versions of the same story. He achevies this using the startlingly effective method of ignoring all the tricky bits which show they aren't.
  
  
• Bloke called George Lucas adapts Joseph Campbell's 'mono-myth' into a film. Calls it Star Wars.
  
  
• Star Wars does quite well for itself.
  
  
• Hollywood thus comes to belive it has found the 'formula for myth'.
  
  
• Scriptwriting classes pound these ideas into the heads of creative people until generations of writers are produced who belive that thier sole job is to reiterate Campbell's 'one big story' in various different forms.
  
  
• Everything goes to hell to the extent that people like J. Michael Straczynski are mistaken for talents.
  

Doctor Who had, thus far escaped any attempts to make it 'fit' into anything. But it's number was up. The Leekley Bible was a wholesale attempt to make the story fit into the monomyth. After all, that's what all stories are really, aren't they? Just some naughty stories like Doctor Who don't know that yet. They need to be taught how to behave.

So Doctor Who becomes a big dynastic epic in which the Doctor is the Chosen One, foretold since the time of Rassilon as he who would find the Lost Scrolls and lead his world out of darkness. Hardly suprising since he's now a direct descendant of Rassilion. rolleyes

No, wait. It gets worse. He's descended from Rassilon via his grandfather Borusa (Borusa!). As is his brother...(*drumroll*)...The Master! You saw that one coming, right? Some people watch too much television.

A new addition to the family tree, rather than an old character unconvincingly grafted onto is, is Ulysses, the Master and the Doctor's new daddy. It seems that after fathering the Master, Ulysses got an Earth-woman up the duff and produced a half-human/half Time Lord kiddy which he sent back to Gallifrey to be raised as the Doctor. He then got lost the depths of time. Most likely to avoid paying child maintenance while he gads around impregnating Bandrills, Slitheen and Voord if you ask me.

Anyway, Doctor Who is turned into this big 'brother versus brother' feud, while the Doctor's travels in space and time are explained as him searching for his missing daddy. Oh, and grandpa Borusa becomes a ghost who lives inside the TARDIS.

Happily, not too much of this makes its way onto the screen, but it's because of all this backstory that the Eighth Doctor starts claiming to be half-human on his mother's side and tediously remenisicing about his dad.


The Cartmel Masterplan - The Last Two Seasons of the English Series and the New Adventures

Despite the last two seasons of the English Series obviously coming before the American Telemovie, I've a good reason for writing about them now. The key writers of that era (Cartmel, Aaronovitch and Platt) began a storyline in the TV show that, after cancellation, they continued and concluded in the New Adventures novels. The timing of this meant that the ending to that storyline (Lungbarrow) had to swerve to accomadate the telemovie's "I'm half-human" stuff.

So come with me now, back to Rememberance of the Daleks, to the novelisation as much as to the episode since it gives much more detail. That's the begining of what fans call 'The Cartmel Masterplan', perhaps unfairly since the ideas were mostly Platt's. It's a storyline that works a lot better when its revealed slowly over twenty-eight episodes and sixty novels than it does when sumarised in a few paragraphs on an internet forum, so be kind.

The universe was originally a place of superstition, magic and irrationality and at its heart was the Empire of Gallifrey, ruled by a line of witch-queens and seers called the Pythia.

The Pythia came to be challenged by an alliance of three pioneers. Rassilion, Omega and a mysterious 'Other', a traveller not native to Gallifrey.

Rassilion overthrow the Pythia and implemented a new order based on reason and science. As she died the Pythia cursed Gallifrey's new Lords to infertility. Their lifeless and sterile science would be rewarded with a lifeless and sterile world.

The Time Lords adapted by granting of thier Houses a 'Loom', a genetic database that would produce an alloted number of cousins for each House. Time Lords were not born, but Loomed and had no mothers, fathers or brothers - all the members of a House considered each other to be Cousins.

When Omega appeared to sacrifice himself to allow the Gallifreyans to truly become the Lords of Time, Rassilion's rule began to turn despotic and tyrannical. The Other sought to escape Gallifrey, but with all the exits sealed his only option was to throw himself into the Looms and await eventual rebirth.

Fast forward ten million years.

A Time Lord who will become know as the Doctor is Loomed to the House of Lungbarrow.

One of fourty-five cousins, the Doctor is eventually disowned by the House for a number of reasons. Not the least of being that certain genetic iregularities suggest he's not a member of the House of Lungbarrow at all.

The First Doctor eventually flees Gallifrey, the Hand of Omega boosts the power of the rubbish old TARDIS he's stolen and sends him, impossibly, back along Gallifrey's timeline. Back ten million years to the time of Rassilon. There he meets Susan, the granddaughter of the Other. Except she seems to think that the Doctor is her grandfather. And he somehow knows her name without being told. She joins him aboard the TARDIS and...well, and then the whole of the English TV series happens.

673 years later, the Seventh Doctor returns to the House of Lungbarrow. Lots happens. The most important thing though is that President Romana overturns the Pythia's curse of sterility on Gallifrey. Time Lords are sexual again - just in time for Eight, Nine and Ten to start kissing thier way across the cosmos.

The first child concived on the newly fertile Gallifrey is that of Andred (a Time Lord) and Leela (a human). The Doctor instructs that this unusual child be named after him.

Right, so the story that's being implied here is pretty clear. There was this bloke called the Other who chucked himself into a Loom thingy. Ten million years later he gets 'reLoomed' as the Doctor. A child who's half-human (on his mother's side) is born, who someday travels back in time to become the Other.

But here's the thing... that's never actually said. All this might seem like bad fanfic when condensed down to these few terse paragraphs, but Lungbarrow is a very well-written novel and its best trick is that it manages to give satisfying answers to the questions raised over the previous twenty-eight episodes and sixty novels without forcing anyone to accept those answers as definative. The producers of LOST would do well to study Lungbarrow before sitting down to write thier final script.

Sure there's a solid story there of how Leela and Andred's son became the Other who in turn became the Doctor, but all of that is revealed by deductions, dreams, and even by puppet shows. There's plenty of space there for it to be possible that it didn't happen that way at all.

In fact...there's the outstanding matter of the Doctor's belly-button. Lungbarrow makes much of the fact the Doctor's got one which, if he'd been Loomed at all, he shouldn't. It's never been explained but it certainly seems to suggest that the Doctor had a natural birth.

As the Seventh Doctor tells the House of Lungbarrow as they disown him for a second time, "I have other families."

The Parkin Masterplan.

Those faces of pre-Hartnell Doctors from The Brain of Morbius?
Well obviously under the 'Cartmel Masterplan' they're supposed to be the faces of 'The Other'. Lance Parkin seems to be having none of this however, and in the Missing Adventure Cold Fusion suggests that there simply were pre-Hartnell Doctors.

One of these previous incarnations was apparently married to a Time Lady called Patience, and the family tree that builds up around them recurrs in Parkin's EDAs and PDAs and in those of Kate Orman and Jon Blum.

Patience was a very ancient womb-born Gallifreyan, who had previously been married to Omega (which I find a bit creepy) and also been the Doctor's nursemaid (which I find very creepy). A pre-Hartnell Doctor married her and they had thirteen children together. It seems the 'Pythia's curse' was as much political propaganda and social control as a real curse, as the Presidency clamped down on non-Loom births.

It was a time of great unrest. The Capitol was burning and mobs were storming the Panopticon. The President ordered that the Doctor's family home be searched for womb-born and his thirteen children were dragged out and his granddaughter about to be executed.

Where was the Doctor during all this? We don't know, and neither does he. Something's erased his memory of the whole thing. But who should come to the rescue again? Yes, it's the 'First' Doctor! Once more travelling naughtily back along his timeline. The 'First' Doctor gets Patience to safety and sends his earlier self's granddaughter back into the ancient past.

So now it looks like what happens is...
- The Other lived on Ancient Gallifrey.

- The 'Pre-First' Doctor lived in Gallifrey's recent past.

- The Doctor lost his memories of this life and was somehow Loomed, or somehow faked his Looming, to be born to the House of Lungbarrow as 'The First Doctor'.

- The 'Pre-First' Doctor had a grandchild, Susan who was placed in danger.

- Fleeing Present Gallifrey, 'the First Doctor' rescued baby Susan from Recent Past Gallifrey and took her back to ancient Gallifrey to be raised by the Other.

- The 'First Doctor' then revisited Ancient Gallifrey sometime later, after the 'death' of the Other, and is rejoined by teen Susan.

All perfectly simple. How could anyone find that convoluted? wink

Now, here's the other thing. This 'Pre-First' Doctor. He's definately not Loom-born. We even know who his mum and dad are. The Doctor's Mum turns out to be Penelope Gate, a rather awesome human 'steampunk' Victorian time-traveller who first appears in Kate Orman's New Adventure The Room With No Doors.

And the Doctor's dad is...brace yourself...he's that bloody Ulysses from the telemovie backstory! There's some nice wordplay this time round though as when he turns up in a story he's going under the alias of 'Joyce'.

Right then, onto Miranda. She's the child of some sort of future space emperor guy who the Eighth Doctor raises as his own daughter in the novel Father Time. Well that's nice and simple. Except that Miranda's real dad from the future...the two things we know about him are that he was the last of his species and that he had two hearts. So it seems that although not the child of the Doctor who raised her, she was nevertheless the Doctor's daughter. Probably. I don't know. She's dead now anyway, having snuffed it under circumstances to stoopid for me to go into And I went into the circumstances of the Leekly Bible, don't you forget.


Braxiatel
Owner of the famed collection, Braxiatel first appears in the New Adventure Theatre of War. He goes on to feature in the First Doctor MA Empire of Glass, and to be a very major character in the Bernice novels and audios and in Big Finish's three seasons of Gallifrey audios.

The novel Tears of the Oracle pretty much establishes that he's the Doctor's brother and the later Bernice stories often add further evidence for this.

The Welsh Series
The Doctor had a dad.

The Doctor has been a dad.

The Doctor had a brother (interestingly, the line that established that went out in an episode that shared the same script editor as the novel which told us Braxiatel was the Doctor's brother).

Everyone's dead.

Well, that was simpler than I thought.

Thanks!
It's occured to me that, if I'm able to keep this up, by the end of Season 4 I'll have written the equivalent of a small book. sweatdrop



Well...that's another thing I've always wondered about Miranda's parenthood.

Her real father sounds from the details (two hearts, last of his species) as if he's a future incarnation of the Doctor. But then on the other hand, he's also a (possibly tyrannical) Space Emperor. That bit doesn't sound very much like the Doctor at all.

Hmm...so how could someone's dad be both a future Doctor and a megalomaniac baddie? wink