I'm going to be sitting down in a bit to put
The Poison Sontaran Sky Stratagem through the ol' lemon squeezer, but I've noticed that there's a couple of themes I've been using that I haven't defined yet.
So, mostly as a procrastinatory activity, I'll spell them out now and edit them into the first post. And just for Ana and Willow, there'll be a
Buffy reference in here somewhere.
Doctor Who has had a thing going on about Knowledge and the Absence of Knowledge for a long time. In fact, since just before the first ever episode. This theme started as soon as anyone read the title of the show.
Doctor = One who has a doctorate, a significant body of knowledge.
Who = One whose identity is not known.
Doctor Who = Knowledge meets the Absence of Knowledge.
Traditionally, the Doctor's always been on the side of Knowing Things. Aside from in the Christopher Bailey stories his point of view has seemed to be that so well expressed by Douglas Adams "I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
Since
The Satan Pit though, the Doctor's been talking an awful lot about how much fun it is
not to know things, and by
Planet of the Ood then we've reached the point where he thinks ignorance is a morally superior position.
Tricky thing the boundary between the self and all the other people around it. I blame society.
People studying genre often note that stuff aimed at men tends to feature 'outsider' heroes who operate externally to the society with which they become involved - they turn up in the town, save the day, then ride off into the sunset. Meanwhile, stuff aimed at women tends to feature heroes who operate within society, often manipulating it. Think of the way everyone in a Jane Austen novel is always bouncing around off one social boundary or another. Outsider heroes versus Insider heroes. Clint Eastwood versus Carrie Bradshaw.
Some of the most interesting genre stories have been those that've messed with this format, depicting characters that genericly should be one sort of hero but instead insist on being the other (When Buffy's told that she has to be an Outsider hero, that the Slayer can't walk in the world, she replies "I walk. I talk. I shop. I sneeze. [...] There's trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don't sleep on a bed of bones" firmly asserting her connection to society). The Doctor though has always been happy to fit neatly into the 'Outsider hero' mould. Dematerialising the TARDIS is the ultimate form of riding off into the sunset, and he's never had any real place within any of the societies he's saved.
Then, one day in 2005, he picked up a copy of
heat magazine and became a part of the Powell Estate.
This theme's about where we draw the line between the me-stuff in our heads and the them-stuff out there. The Ood have thier song, and so does every community ever established. Can anyone really exist outside one?
New Who makes a very big deal out of the power of words and names. One might have thought that the end of
Last of the Time Lords (which somehow fandom manged to convince themselves came out of nowhere
rolleyes ) was the high-watermark for all this, but no it's still going strong into Season 4.
What is the connection between names and things? Bernard of Cluny wrote in the twelfth century that "Yesterday's Rose stands only in name; we hold empty names" suggesting that names almost replace the things they refer to. The name of the rose replaces the real thing and stands as a Baudrillardian simulacra - a copy with no original.
Shakespere
(pretends) to disagree and says the name has no effect on the thing it describes - that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. While for Gertrude Stein there's no division between the name and the object - the object is the word and the word is the object - her most famous and important line of poetry reads "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
I mention all this so that people don't think I'm just going all super-shippy by using a pic of Rose for this theme's icon.
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