Torchwood, Doctor Who, and The Wizard of Oz

[rusty_halo]

http://rusty-halo.com/wordpress/?p=2235

jaydk had the gall to go out of town for Easter weekend, so we didn’t get in nearly as much Doctor Who viewing as usual. But we did manage to meet at her place on Sunday night with a bottle of wine, takeout from Candle Cafe for me and sushi for her, and a big pile of DVDs. And we watched….

( Torchwood: Fragments )

( Old Who: two episodes of the Second Doctor serial Tomb of the Cybermen )

Army of Ghosts/Doomsday

* I had to drink a lot of wine to watch these. SO SAD OMG. This was the first time I got through them without crying, possibly because I’ve been negatively influenced by the wankery of fandom and was keeping my eye out for “smugness” and “misogyny.” (Nope, still don’t see any of it.)

* Mickey! His return is awesome. I ended up really liking Mickey. He started out as a character who annoyed me, but by the end he’d really grown into himself and become a hero.

* Yvonne Hartman is so cool. She’s a great three-dimensional one-shot character. And a really good illustration of how very likable and charismatic people can do awful things. (*cough*Jack Harkness isn’t much different*cough*). And I love that her incredibly strong will has its bad side–the horrible imperialism of Torchwood–and its good side–her ability to keep herself even after the Cyberman conversion.

* The Cybermen coming through the plastic! It’s a reference to Tomb of the Cybermen! Which we wouldn’t have known if we hadn’t just watched that episode. Hee!

* The Dalek/Cybermen bitchfight never ceases to amuse me. “Daleks have no concept of ‘elegance’.” “This is obvious.”

* And it was fun to watch this episode right after watching the Torchwood backstory one too. I love how flat-out awful Torchwood is portrayed in this.

* Jackie’s speech about Rose “becoming a different person” just blows my mind with its stupidity. I mean, look, I get Jackie. She’s been stuck in one emotional place ever since Pete died, living for her daughter, terrified of change, terrified of losing Rose the way she lost Pete. I feel sorry for her, but at this point its become pathological. She needs to stop living through Rose and find her own purpose. You can’t cling to your children forever, hoping they’ll never grow apart from you.

“And you’ll keep on changing. And in forty years time, fifty, there’ll be this woman - this strange woman… walking through the marketplace on some planet a billion miles from Earth. She’s not Rose Tyler. Not anymore. She’s not even human…”

OMG WTF!!?? Why would a parent not want their child to grow or change? How can you call that inhuman? And, dude, no matter where she goes or who she travels with, of course Rose will be a different person in forty or fifty years. Because she’ll have lived a life and people change.

It’s just… I hate this idea, that difference is bad, that knowledge and experience are bad, that it’s better to stay exactly where you are and never experience anything else.

I watched The Wizard of Oz this weekend, for the first time since I was a kid, and it was a lot of fun. But.

“I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with!”

and

“We’re home! Home! And this is my room - and you’re all here! And I’m not gonna leave here ever, ever again because I love you all!”

It’s like for men, there’s this hero’s journey arc that’s all about leaving home, finding adventure, learning and growing and becoming a totally different person, and it’s considered good. See, for example, the Luke Skywalker archetype. (No one ever said “But Luke, you shouldn’t become a Jedi, because Owen and Beru wouldn’t recognize you! Why not go back to Tattooine, continue their farm, marry a nice lady, have some kids, and settle down moisture farming?”)

But for women, the narrative arc is all about realizing that they don’t really want adventure and experience; they belong safe at home with their family. (Which is an obvious outgrowth of thousands of years of sexism and the idea that women “naturally belong in the home.”)

Which, y’know, is why I think there’s a whole lot of underlying sexism in the way people criticize Rose for wanting to travel the universe instead of stay home with mom. If she were a man in the same situation, I don’t think she’d inspire half the vitriol.

And this is also why I love that Rose doesn’t choose home and family. She knows what she wants and she stands up for it. And yes, in the end, she loses it anyway through no fault of her own, but I’m glad that the show acknowledges this as a tragedy instead of trying to pretend that it’s a good thing.

* (Also, Gallifrey looks just like the Emerald City.)

* I don’t like the Doctor trying to make Rose’s decision for her (yes, I still have major Buffy/Angel season three issues), but I understand why he does it. 1) He promised Jackie that he’d get both her and Rose out of this safely. 2) He’s just been hit with the very likely possibility that Rose is dead (alone in a room with Daleks) so his fear of her death is very fresh. 3) This is a bit fanwankery-ish, but I think he thinks she’ll chose the AU with Jackie and her dad. He’s seen her leaving him to chase after her dad twice now, and I don’t think he realizes how much she means her “forever.” He’d rather send her away himself than see her choose to leave him.

* I hadn’t realized quite how much effort the Doctor put into setting up Rose’s “happy ending.” The first time I watched it I was like “Why the hell is he match-making between Jackie and Pete? After all his talk about how AU!people aren’t the same?” but I get it now. He’s going against his own beliefs in an attempt to put together a happy family for Rose.

* It just kills me how happy the Doctor is when Rose comes back. He tries to be mad at her, but he can’t keep it up for more than a minute. Before you know it, they’re back to bantering about what an awesome team they make. (*sniffle*)

* And what is all this crap about Rose being a helpless victim who doesn’t get to make any choices? Rose chooses to come back. We don’t always get what we want, but she defies her family and the Doctor to choose her own fate.

And then, biggest choice of all. Rose chooses to sacrifice herself to save the world from the Daleks and Cybermen. The lever malfunctions, she looks, and you see her moment of decision, that it’s worth it to risk her life and fix it. She gets a reprieve thanks to Pete, but since she doesn’t know he’s going to pop in and save her, it doesn’t undercut the power of her choice.

And then once she’s in Pete’s World, she’s not some helpless victim who “can’t live without her man.” She’s working at AU!Torchwood, defending the earth. That’s actually a pretty damn awesome ending for her–she’s using all the skills she learned from the Doctor to protect her own planet.

* The Doctor’s devastation just kills me. David Tennant plays it so beautifully. The wall scene is the most subtle-yet-powerful performance of heartbreak that I’ve ever seen. Just the emptiness in his eyes… *sob*.

And the shallow: doesn’t he just look gorgeous in that blueish light in AU!Torchwood? And then somehow even more gorgeous in the beach scene where you can see his freckles and the lines around his eyes in the bright sunlight? *sigh*

* The music is so effective. So beautiful and sad. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a TV show where the music works this well; you usually only get it in movies.

Current Mood: productive

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