Doctor Who blogging: World War Three/Dalek

And even though I'm so ridiculously behind in sharing my reactions to each new episode as it has aired on Sci Fi, I have been living with them in my head in ways that, honestly, I haven't done with any show since the old Doctor Who. It's sorta pathetic, really -- I guess I thought I had outgrown the propensity to be so obsessed with something so silly and so wonderful, but obviously, this is not the case. But on the other hand, the old Doctor Who was so intrinsic to my origins as a creative person, so fueled my early efforts as a writer and editor, that seeing this new incarnation has been like having gasoline thrown on a fire that had been burning steady but low. It may sound bizarre, but I feel creatively invigorated by this new Doctor Who: yes, I've got tons of ideas for picking up the fan fiction I put down a long time ago, but much much more, I'm inspired to go back to my own original fiction. It's almost as if the show works as a kind of muse: You can step into the TARDIS of your imagination and go anywhere. There are no limits and no restrictions. Anything can happen.

On to the episodes:

Speaking of fan fiction, Davies is, whether he knows it or not, clearly a fan of the subgenre of fanfic known as hurt/comfort:

Oh my. I think the Doctor is physically tortured more in these two episodes that he has been in the entire 40-plus years of the history of the show prior. Of course, missing in these particular instances of the hurt/comfort equation is the "comfort" -- this part is, I suppose, left to the imagination of the viewer. Cuz that's the only reason why, in this sorta demented example of fannishness, you want to see a beloved character suffer: so that you can be the one to kiss the boo-boos away afterward. Rose would be the obvious dispenser of the boo-boo-curing kisses, except she isn't even aware, in either case, of the Doctor's suffering.

Unawareness, perhaps of the deliberate kind, seems to be characterizing this Doctor's feelings about Rose. I think this is the moment, in "World War Three"...

...when he really falls in love with Rose... or falls into whatever it is that he's feeling about her. She tells him, Do whatever you have to do to save the planet, their own safety be damned, and that's when he realizes how special she really is, how much like him she really is. And yet I don't know if romantic love really explains what's going on here. Would he invite Mickey along at the end of the episode if he wanted to be alone with Rose? Or is it more that he does truly find himself in love with her but doesn't want to be, knowing that such a relationship is hopelessly doomed? (Damn, I think I wrote that very line in one of my own Doctor Who fanfic stories!)

That moment, too, highlights the brilliance of Eccleston's performance: the subtle softening in his face right then is full of emotion and, more importantly, of mystery -- the inscrutability of Eccleston's Doctor is delicious. He's far more expressive than any of the Doctors have been before, which isn't a criticism of the other actors' performances so much as it's an illustration of how much more sophisticated this new Who is: in allowing the Doctor to be more effusive, Davies has made him more alien, because of course the way he reacts to things is not at all the way we might expect a human to react. And it also hints at the trauma the Doctor has been through: he's really afraid of the Dalek, in "Dalek," in a way that he never has been before:

And he's angry in a way he never has been before, too:

In fact, in what may be the single best episode of Doctor Who ever, this scene, this confrontation between the Doctor and the Dalek, is the single most extraordinary moment in the history of the show. The Doctor taunting an enemy? My God. The closest we ever came to this before when when Peter Davison's Doctor had the opportunity to kill Davros, the mad genius who created the Daleks (Eccleston's Doctor alludes to him here in "Dalek")

but he can't do it (and that was a shocking moment in the old Doctor Who, that the Doctor would even consider killing in cold blood even a bad guy). That kind of nobility and idealism has obviously been burned out of the Doctor by this great Time War of which he and this Dalek are, apparently, the sole survivors. Forget "best Doctor Who ever" -- this may be the greatest 45 minutes of self-referential SF TV ever. Our hero is cut down to size, reduced to nothing more than a carbon copy of his greatest enemy. "I am alone in the universe," the Dalek says to the Doctor. "So are you. We are the same." Oh, fuck. This is not your father's Doctor Who. It's a grand reimagining, one that acknowledges the past but isn't afraid to trash it if necessary. It's like everything you ever knew or felt about Doctor Who got twisted around and destroyed and rebuilt, and it happens for the Doctor at the same time.

Okay, like this: Never in a million years would I ever have guessed that I'd feel sorry for a Dalek. That mechanical Dalek voice, it leaves an empty hollow in the pit of my stomach -- exactly the opposite of the kind of thrilling feeling the sound of the TARDIS materializing prompts. (I would love to ask Christopher Eccleston if he cowered behind the sofa as an eight-year-old watching Jon Pertwee's Doctor fight evil aliens -- I wonder how much of the terror in his face in that image above was summoned from his childhood.) It is the sound of pure, amoral coldness... and yet, seeing the Dalek in chains was pretty uncomfortable:

But seeing the Dalek longing for one last glimpse of sunlight practically tore my heart out:

That's pretty fucking brilliant on Davies' part, that he could so make us feel this way about a Dalek. And this was another instance of Rose's specialness: she's not afraid:

She may not have the same experience of the Daleks that the Doctor does, or even that we have as viewers, but still... She's turning out to be an extraordinary person. And -- heh -- even the Dalek realizes this, taking her hostage and taunting, in turn, the Doctor: "What use are emotions if you won't save the woman you love?" The Dalek knows more about what the Doctor is feeling than the Doctor does himself! (As as my Mary Sue character Ayren told the fifth Doctor's companion Tegan about the Doctor in a story I never even got down on paper: "He may be a Time Lord, Tegan, but he's still a man" -- that is, frequently deserving of a knock upside the head from the clue bat. I told you Russell Davies was in my fannish head. It's terrifying, really.)

Random thoughts on "World War Three":

• I said "shades of 9/11" about the semidestruction of Big Ben in "Aliens of London," but damn: that was deliberate, the continuation makes pretty clear. All this stuff about the United Nations and lies about weapons of mass destruction and forcing a war... wow. If Jon Stewart wrote fan fiction, this is what it would look like.

The Slitheen with their zipper heads make me think of V and the lizard aliens who removed their human costumes at melodramatically appropriate times, and also of standup comic Fred Stoller, who used to do as part of his routine a bit (clearly inspired by V) about pulling one's fake human face off at just the right moment...

• I love Harriet Jones description of Rose as "all hormones and adrenaline." The writing is uniformly briliant throughout the new Doctor Who, like the Doctor's confession here: "This is my life. It's not fun, it's not smart, it's just standing up and making a decision because nobody else will." Or his multiple critiques of human stupidity in this episode, like: "You're happy to believe in something that's invisible, but if it's staring ya in the face, ya can't see it. There's a scientific explanation for that: you're thick."

• Downing Street blows up. Russell Davies blew up Downing Street. That's some cheek.

Very MacGyver, the pickles destroying the alien. Kitchen chemistry!

Oh, how I would love to see my cell phone tell me the TARDIS was calling! I wanna see plasma fires burning 10 million miles wide in the Horsehead Nebula. It's not fair, dammit!

Best line in "World War Three":

"Victory should be naked!" -- the Slitheen dude

Random thoughts on "Dalek":

Back in like 1993 I took a trip to London, and among the many things I saw at the time was an exhibit at a museum of TV and radio about Doctor Who. And there was a life-size Dalek and a life-size Cyberman and they were really creepy. And I bet Robert Shearman, who wrote this episode, saw that exhibit too and that's where this line of the Doctor's comes from: "The stuff of nightmares reduced to an exhibit. I'm gettin' old."

• The Doctor is, in that final scene before the Dalek destroys itself, left speechless by Rose and the Dalek, and wow, that just never happens: the Doctor always has something to say.

Best line in "Dalek":

"You would make a good Dalek!" --the Dalek to the Doctor

blogging Christopher Eccleston's 'Doctor Who':
• episodes 1 & 2: Rose/The End of the World
• episodes 3 & 4: The Unquiet Dead/Aliens of London
• episodes 7 & 8: The Long Game/Father's Day
• episodes 9 & 10: The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances [coming soon]
• episodes 11, 12 & 13: Boom Town/Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways [coming soon]
• DVD extras: Doctor Who Confidential [coming soon]