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Mixed Memories

Review of The Doctor’s Daughter / The Unicorn and the Wasp

There are only two episodes in this month’s segment of my Series Four re-watch, and they make for an interesting contrast. While my pre-viewing memories of one were fairly clear and complete, the other episode was much muddier in my mind than I’d realized.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2008 BBC

If you had asked me a few months ago, before I started thinking about Series Four again for this review series, I would have told you that The Doctor’s Daughter included the Tenth Doctor, Jenny—someone grown nearly instantly from a genetic sample from the Doctor—and Martha. I don’t think I would even have remembered that Donna is in the episode.

I can’t pinpoint exactly why Donna’s role had so thoroughly slipped my mind. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, really, because her contribution is huge. But somehow my mind fixated on Martha’s relationship with the Hath soldier instead. [Spoiler alert] The death of Peg obviously struck me hard on first viewing, because along with all the images of Jenny tumbling through a laser field and of human and Hath soldiers fighting each other for “generations,” that is probably the single biggest detail that sticks in my mind from The Doctor’s Daughter.

It’s unfortunate that a quick moment of pathos overshadowed everything else, because Donna is—as usual—f’ing brilliant here. Her big human heart helps thaw the Doctor’s, showing him some of his own prejudices and getting him to open up a little bit about the pain of his various losses. Thanks to Donna, he eventually comes to accept Jenny, just in time to lose her.

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Confession #166: I Wonder How We’re Falling Short

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Doctor Who is all about looking at things from a different perspective, about how the universe—how we—might be different if we just stood in a different place or time. As the audience, though, we’re used to being the voyeurs into someone else’s situation. What might things look like, though, if we were to step back and view our own little pocket of spacetime from the outside?

We like to think about Doctor Who as a relatively progressive show, expanding the circle of inclusivity both in front of and behind the camera. Even if there is always more to be done, it makes us proud as fans to know that Doctor Who is doing its best to push the current boundaries. It’s great to see an ever broader cross-section of humanity represented on-screen.

But how well are we really doing?

This show has always pushed boundaries, from its very first episode. Yet all of us can look back on its history and find moments that make us cringe. Sometimes it has fallen short in terms of race, sometimes in terms of gender, sometimes in terms of sexuality—or any number of other marginalizations that could really have used better treatment from the Doctor (and the production staff). Even so, and to the show’s (and the fandom’s) credit, it keeps working to improve.

Yet in how many ways that we can’t even see yet is it falling short right now? That’s the thing that really bakes my noodle (so to speak). Even assuming this is the most enlightened show on English-language television (a questionable claim), there are things that our current society thinks nothing of that will almost certainly horrify our cultural descendants.

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Friends and Families

Review of Planet of the Ood / The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky

As I continue my re-watch of Series Four, I’ve reached our first two-parter. First, though, we revisit what at the time was still a quite new alien species, seen only once before (in Series Two) and glossed over as a “slave race” (so much side-eye): the Ood. At least it only took the production team two years to think better of that characterization and revisit the background of the species.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2008 BBC

Somehow, despite my overall poor recollections of Series Four, I seem to have retained Planet of the Ood pretty well; my pre-viewing notes seem to hit all the major points. Among the farthest-reaching of those details was “the Doctor Donna,” which, as we’ll see, comes back at the end of the series.

Although there are certainly parts of this episode that are difficult to watch, not only from a creepiness (or poorly-aged CGI) point of view, but from a humanitarian one, the fact that our heroes start off from the very beginning siding with the clearly mistreated Ood makes it bearable. And as someone who holds a lot of societal privilege myself, I have always really identified with Donna as she listens to the Ood song. It’s haunting and horrifying and she wants to do right by the Ood by listening, but she doesn’t have the fortitude to continue.

Donna (like me, like many of us) has the option to step away from the pain instead of to live it every moment like the Ood do. She can stop listening to the song, but to her credit, she doesn’t ignore what the Ood are going through. Maybe she’s not doing everything right, or taking every step she possibly can, but as she and the Doctor uncover new atrocities, she makes a concerted effort to help.

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Confession #165: I’m Still a Fangirl

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Every time we have a long dry spell between new episodes (which, let’s face it, is pretty much constantly the last five years or so), I find my mind wandering away from Doctor Who (as I previously outlined in great detail)—and I’m sure I’m not alone. And yet, when I do have the chance to watch again, even if it’s not new content, I find myself getting sucked back in.

For instance, as I started re-watching Series 4, I got all caught up in memories of my first experience with the series (the beginning of my fandom). Now I’m full of anticipation for the next installment—at least when I stop to think about it. Truthfully, my mind is full of all sorts of other things right now (aging parents, maturing children, various other sources of entertainment…), but given a moment’s mindshare, Doctor Who can still capture my attention.

That’s why I think it’s safe to say that I’m still a fangirl. Even though those moments when I’m drawn back into the Doctor’s world have been few and far between, the reentry is both rapid and natural. It’s one of those feelings of homecoming one gets, a comfortable mental or emotional state, when settling back into a frame of mind is like kicking off your shoes when you get home.

Similarly, when I think about the opportunity to meet up with friends and talk about all aspects of the show, and even to meet new-to-me cast and crew, I get a rush of energy and excitement. (Only another month or so until Gallifrey One starts announcing their first batch of guests for 2024…) The love I have for the show that forms the basis of my fandom is clearly still present. I doubt anything will ever be able to take that away entirely, even if (powers-that-be forfend) Doctor Who itself ever went away again.

And, of course, it never really will. Even should the televised show eventually face another cancellation, spinoff media of one sort or another will endure—I mean, whatever else, there will always be fanfic! The vast possibilities provided by the framework of the Doctor and their TARDIS traveling through time and space will spark the imaginations of fans for years and years to come. Whatever may happen to the formal franchise itself, fandom will remain.

That’s why, no matter how my interest waxes and wanes (as do new episodes), I will forever be a fangirl. I don’t care what others think of someone my age who claims that identity. It’s a label I’ll happily wear for the rest of my life.

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A Look Back on Looking Forward

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Review of The Runaway Bride / Partners in Crime / The Fires of Pompeii

It wasn’t until I sat down and started rewatching The Runaway Bride (which, if memory serves, I didn’t much like the very first time I saw it) that I realized how very much I’d missed Donna. And it wasn’t until Donna saw Rose’s jacket and accused the Doctor of abducting other women that I realized how very much I hadn’t missed this mopey Doctor.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2006 BBC

I will own up to my roots: I was a hardcore Doctor/Rose shipper (though I didn’t even know that was a term at the time) when I first started watching Doctor Who. After all, my first episode was “Rose,” and I binge-watched the Ninth Doctor and Rose falling for each other (it’s a perfectly valid reading, hush). It’s honestly part of what drew me into the show.

But this long after the fact, I don’t feel the same kind of emotional impact. Mostly, I feel annoyed at how much that one Companion/Doctor relationship influenced the two that followed immediately after it. And while I’ve come to appreciate Martha Jones more now than I did at that time, I have always appreciated Donna’s straightforward, no-nonsense approach to her adventures with the Doctor.

Well, almost always.

As I said above, I found her really abrasive at first. The way she was so outwardly selfish (witness the way she and her groom Lance got together, especially as misleadingly retold to the Doctor) really put me off. She was really unlikeable.

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Confession #164: I Need Novelty

I’ve long since stopped browsing most social media for Doctor Who news, so I really can’t even say for sure how many crumbs the production team has put out there to keep fans interested. Given the fact that almost nothing has filtered down to my corner of the internet, though, there can’t have been anything really big. Sadly, that makes it super hard for me to stay engaged with the franchise.

You see, one of the side effects of the initial COVID lockdown in our household was that we realized, one by one, that we are all ADHD here. Half of us have formal diagnoses, and the other half don’t (including me), but there are enough clues to be certain. For example, I’m led to understand that neurotypical people don’t simply forget to eat sometimes. (Sounds fake to me, but apparently it’s real.)

One thing about being ADHD is that without constant stimulation, I lose focus. I start to care less, even about things that once interested me deeply. Unless something is some combination of interesting, challenging, novel, or urgent, it’s unlikely to keep my attention. So when Doctor Who goes off the air for :checks calendar: thirteen months, it’s only natural that my brains skips off into the sunset to follow other pursuits. (That helps to explain why it’s been increasingly more difficult to maintain the blog, too.)

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Polyphase Avitron Wants a Cracker

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Review of The Pirate Planet (#99)

DVD Release Date: 03 Mar 09
Original Air Date: 03 – 12 Jan 1983
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana I, K9
Stars: Tom Baker, Mary Tamm, John Leeson
Preceding Story: The Ribos Operation (Four, Romana I, K9)
Succeeding Story: The Stones of Blood (Four, Romana I, K9)

Somewhat unbelievably, with this month’s entry in the Everything Else series, I’ve reached the end of my Classic reviews. Every extant story from Hartnell through McGann (as well as most of the modern era, with major gaps in Tennant’s and some of Smith’s tenures) should now have its own blog entry somewhere. Not a bad showing for twelve-and-a-half years’ work, if I do say so myself.

Given how many positive things I’ve heard over the years about The Pirate Planet, I’m sure some fans will wonder how this particular story ended up being at the bottom of my metaphorical barrel. That’s a valid question, though the answer is not very exciting: it has neither very high nor very low fan rankings, is part of the Fourth Doctor’s run (of which there are the most adventures), and just… never grabbed me.

I know a lot of fans like Pirate Planet (simply?) because it’s written by Douglas Adams, and anything Adams touched has gained near-mythic importance to a certain slice of fandom. There are certainly elements here that exhibit Adams’s style. In particular, it has a thinky and complex ending, which may or may not quite make sense, but certainly takes more intense concentration to parse than I was willing (or able) to give it during this viewing.

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Confession #163: I Am a Spoilerphobe

I made the mistake, as I was trying to decide what to write about this month, of searching for Doctor Who news (I really ought to know better by now). Luckily, the headlines that came up weren’t anything super revealing, especially for someone like me who knows pretty much nothing about British celebrities. However, it reminded me of how much I hate spoilers.

Long-time readers will be unsurprised by that statement; I’ve often talked about not wanting to know story details before I watch. Even casting news (despite my aforementioned cluelessness re: name-brand actors) often makes me twitchy. Official trailers are about the extent of foreknowledge I’m willing to accept.

Of course, that’s not a universal preference of mine. My spoilerphobia centers primarily on narratives, so I will sometimes go quite the opposite direction if it concerns something with a predetermined outcome, e.g., a sporting event that’s already ended.

For example, I’ve recently been watching a couple of K-pop survival shows (that is, competitions with eliminations) with a friend. For the first one, as with Doctor Who, I steadfastly avoided anything online that would’ve told me ahead of time which trainees got cut (thus breaking my heart when certain favorites didn’t get to move on). The finale aired mere hours before we could watch together. While my friend went ahead and looked at the results, I went in knowing nothing, and thus went through the same elation / heartbreak cycle as the live audience did.

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Draconian Approach

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Review of Frontier in Space (#67)

DVD Release Date: 02 Mar 10
Original Air Date: 24 Feb – 31 Mar 1973
Doctors/Companions: Three, Jo Grant
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Preceding Story: Carnival of Monsters (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: Planet of the Daleks (Three, Jo)

As I took this penultimate entry in the Everything Else series off the shelf, I realized I remembered almost nothing about it. The cover image gave me some clues (“Oh, yeah—the Draconians” [though I honestly didn’t even remember their name accurately]; “The Master? Ohhhh… Isn’t this Delgado’s last serial?”), but my recollections were so vague that I questioned the things that were jogged loose. A few of those general impressions turned out to have been based in reality, but there was precious little of substance.

Writer Malcolm Hulke is generally considered among the better writers of this era, so when I saw his name on the screen, I had high hopes. Among the things I remembered was that the Draconians were a cool species that I wish we’d seen more of. However, in the end I felt somewhat disappointed. It’s not that the story was bad, by any means. It just wasn’t particularly innovative. (I began to understand how this adventure ended up in Everything Else.)

To begin, there’s a bit of “everything but the kitchen sink” energy in this six-parter. First we get our new supposed antagonists, the “creatively”-named Draconians. When the TARDIS nearly collides with an Earth-ship and the Doctor and Jo are mistaken for Dragons (an equally “creative” epithet), the conflict seems to be between humans and Draconians. By the end of the first episode, though, we realize the Ogrons (introduced in the previous year’s Day of the Daleks, and last seen in cameo in the preceding story) are really to blame. It’s not until we get into the third episode that we discover it is the Master who is behind the Ogrons.

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Confession #162: I Barely Remember Series Four

My kids’ birthday is coming up. Birthdays often make me think of the old game where Whovians gauge each others’ age by what episode aired the week they were born (mine was in the Pertwee era, but my kids had Tennant’s Doctor). Then I got to thinking about what modern era stories aired “this week in history.”

As I looked through the Wikipedia article listing episodes, I had lots of “Oh yeah, that one!” moments. It was like a rusty old door opening in the architecture of my memory. Sadly, I think that door only opens partway now.

There was a time when I could just rattle off the episodes in any given “new Who” series—in order—with barely any pause for thought. That time has long since passed. If I hadn’t had the page open in front of me, as I looked over the dates and associated them with episode titles, I wouldn’t have been sure what position in the series any of those episodes held.

I found that oddly distressing, in particular for Series Four. That series has been on my mind a fair bit lately (more so than other RTD-era series, for sure), with the impending return of Donna and a Tennant Doctor. (I am going to be fighting calling that one the “Fourteenth Doctor” for a long time, I can tell.)

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