Ecclesthon

I spent last Monday watching every single episode of the recent season of Doctor Who, from Rose through to The Parting of the Ways. I was taking notes for the purposes of my Greenbelt talk, meaning that although the season is just under ten hours of TV, it ended up taking me from 10am to 10pm to complete.

I also ended up with the BBC1 station ident music going round and round in my head -- the rave version, mostly, although sometimes the Bollywood one for variety. (For something else Who-related which you might like to have going through your head, try clicking here.)

Among the insights I derived from the whole experience (some of which have previously been posted to Doctor Who lists over the past week) are as follows:

1. It's fascinating to watch the development of the Doctor / Rose relationship, as she goes from finding him exciting but dangerous and being very wary of him, to trusting him so absolutely that he can deceive her (in order to save her) with hardly any effort at all.

The Doctor's own development is subtle and complex, but there's just as clear a progression from "killer" to "coward" during the course of the series, as Rose reawakens the emotions he's been holding back. (It's particularly clever the way this final choice the Dalek Emperor offers him picks up on the accusations made earlier by the solitary Dalek in Dalek and Margaret the Slitheen in Boom Town -- accusations which are the opposite of the behaviour he displays in those episodes.) The man who was prepared to torture the Dalek to death while it was chained becomes the man who's willing to give even Margaret a second chance.

2. This was the first time I'd rewatched either episode of Aliens of London / World War Three -- I'd intended to rewatch the two parts as a single story, but been so utterly unenamoured of the second half that it just didn't seem worth it. In the event, Aliens / Three was just as boring to watch again as I'd anticipated, in a way which even Boom Town wasn't. Definitely the least appealing story of the season.

3. "Never underestimate the importance of plumbing": a very prevalent theme -- far more so than it ever was in the old series -- is the unnaturalness of body-altering technologies.

Virtually all the enemies this season were unholy flesh/tech hybrids of one kind or another: the Autons ("living plastic" capable of mimicking human beings), Cassandra (a human altered through technology and reliant upon it), the Slitheen (aliens masquerading as humans through a particularly icky combination of flesh and technology), the Jagrafess (plumbed into a space station, and presiding over an empire where people have computers in their heads), the Empty Child (flesh warped into machinery through the mediation of body-altering technology) and, obviously, the Daleks. The only monsters who don't fit the pattern are the Gelth (who could be seen as a rather limp steampunk transform of the same idea, given their affinity with gas lights) and the Reapers (who really don't fit at all).

There are also strong hints, in the continuity of The Long Game and the final two-parter, of a continuum between the relatively harmless chip-in-head technology and the excesses of the cyborg monsters, which at their most extreme involve taking humans and mutating them into utterly inhuman mechanical supersoldiers.

(This is why I think it's dramatically important that the Doctor's dumping of Adam and his modifications in 2012 is seen to have some repercussions in the long run. It's why the Cybermen seem like a particularly fruitful enemy to bring back next season. It's also the main point where The Long Game differs from classic cyberpunk, as it sees the body / technology interface in, albeit mildly, negative terms, rather than being indifferent to it as a given of the world's background.)

The urban settings mean that technological hybridisation is rarely contrasted explicitly with the natural world -- the closest we come is with Jabe and her Forest, who respect the Earth and don't get on with "metal-minds" -- but perhaps the alternative is to be found in the series' concentration on families. This is probably clearest in The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, where the mother / child reconciliation results directly in the reversal of the monstrous hybridisation.

4. The season's structural symmetry goes even further than I realised.

The script draws clear parallels between Cassandra, the villain in The End of the World, and the God-Emperor of the Daleks in Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways. Both are extensively modified flesh / tech hybrids; both are (or have been) the last of their kind; both dismiss other species as impure but have fatally compromised their own purity. There are even design parallels, in the suspended jar which holds the visible brain of each.

Among the elements shared by the non-bookending two-parters, Aliens / Three and Empty / Dances, are alien spaceships being used in confidence tricks, and actual borrowings from "Bad Wolf" folklore (the Doctor chasing the pig, Nancy's comment about how large his facial features are), as opposed to simple repetition of the words.

The Doctor's observation in The Parting of the Ways that what Rose experiences as a goddess is what he sees "all the time", clearly harks back to his speech in Rose about feeling the motion of the Earth.

The first and last episodes lack pre-credit sequences (although The Parting of the Ways has a "previously on Doctor Who" segment which Rose, thank heavens, didn't), and, oddly, the third and antepenultimate episodes -- The Unquiet Dead and Boom Town -- are the only two whose pre-credit sequences don't feature the Doctor. Whether that's significant or not, I haven't a clue.

5. There's something odd going on with the sun. In Dalek, the Dalek finds peace when it's eventually able to bask in the sunlight. In Bad Wolf, solar flares can block the Daleks from monitoring the Game Station. In Father's Day, Pete was planning to harness solar power, an ambition which his new life will allow him to achieve. The expansion of the sun destroys the Earth in The End of the World, and it's the sun's intense light which forms the most immediate danger throughout that story.

The sun is an ambivalent symbol, benevolent and yet so powerful as to be highly dangerous. If the series wasn't created by an atheist, I'd say it symbolised God -- particularly since the deity within the TARDIS is also represented by intense light. Eventually, of course, the Doctor himself is reborn in a blaze of light.

6. Rebirth and / or resurrection are overriding themes of the season, to an extent which indeed seems almost obsessive at times -- but then, the programme's very existence in 2005 is an embodiment of the same motif. Early episodes show the theme mostly in parodic or negative form, with the victims of the Gelth and the Slitheen being brought back to grotesque false life, and the Dalek's resurgence of life being a truly terrifying event. Even here, though, Dickens undergoes a spiritual rebirth, and the Doctor hints that under Harriet Jones's premiership Britain will experience the same.

Meanwhile, the Doctor himself is finding new life through his association with Rose. Father's Day plays extensively with ideas of death and resurrection, and Empty / Dances follows up a series of parody-resurrections with a genuine, and supposedly universal, restoration at the story's end. "Margaret"'s rebirth is the spiritual kernel of Boom Town, and by the final diptych the theme is getting out of hand, with Rose, Jack, the entire Dalek species and eventually the Doctor returning variously from the dead.


And that's it for now, I think. One thing's for certain: this is a series which really rewards repeated viewing. A number of times during its first broadcast I argued that it would only be possible fully to judge the episodes themselves (and especially those written by Russell Davies) in retrospect, once the shape of the whole season had become apparent. The more I consider the labyrinthine and complex structure of the Eccleston era, the clearer it becomes that if anything this was understating the case.