Happy Tenth Anniversary everyone!! Today over on my Tumblr account I'm blogging the moments from Doctor Who that make me smile. (The artwork is all made by much more talented people than me!) All the New Who moments that put a big fat grin on my face. Because yeah, there are amazing themes and arcs and characters, but Doctor Who is just pure fun as well.

Some shows hold a special place in your heart, and Doctor Who is one of those for me. I live with multiple chronic illnesses and chronic pain, and I rely on film and TV to distract me when it all gets too much. Escapism isn't a bad thing, especially if it reminds you of the good things in the real world, and Doctor Who is fantastic escapism. It has made me smile so many times, through a lot of otherwise shitty days and nights, sometimes when nothing else could cheer me up.

Doctor Who has inspired me to take writing seriously, and to try to become a better TV and film reviewer. And it's been a conversation-starter with so many unexpected people. One day when a hospital clinic nurse called to assess me for an appointment, we got talking, and I soon found out that he was a huge Classic Who fan, and wanted to know whether New Who was worth watching. So we talked about the Autons, and whether the Cybermen are scarier than the Daleks - as you do when you've just met someone! Doctor Who has this great way of connecting enthusiastic people with each other. I love that.

I'm so grateful for this brilliant show and for all the people who made it happen. It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Russell T Davies - I love his work and if he hadn't decided to revive Doctor Who over ten years ago, we wouldn't all be here. So thanks, RTD, for getting the party started again. We owe you a lot.

For me, this day is dedicated to that magnificent dork, the Tenth Doctor, who made me fall in love with the whole thing in the first place. Some characters grow on you over time, but as soon as that cheeky madman in his pyjamas used a satsuma to save the world, I was gone; I knew right then I'd be absolutely enchanted by this character. I love all the Doctors (they are the same person, after all), but it was Ten who started it all for me - my brave, dark, sparkling, "fun-footed" Doctor. (And David Tennant's phenomenal acting talents might have had something to do with that too. Thank you a million, dear sir.)

Thanks, Doctor Who, for all the laughter, tears, artistic inspiration, and pure joy. Let's hope the next ten years of New Who are even more amazing.

“Just . . . . be magnificent.”
“I think I will be.”

 Bad Wolf is pretty much my ideal for a season arc.

I love the pure, simple concept of Bad Wolf. I love that it’s such a keenly visual motif, and that it’s become such a recognisable meme through the fandom and far beyond. I love the elegant ontological paradox it contains: the way Rose in her god form is calling to herself before she even knows what’s happening. I love the romanticism of it: someone risking their life to become a god and save the person they love.

The words are commonplace yet alien: they sound like a child story-book; they’re expressed in unglamorous graffiti; yet they echo with an amorphous fairytale menace. The elemental contrast between Rose and Bad Wolf is stunning: the Earthling and the universal force, the shop girl who likes chips and the goddess made of gold and fire and the fabric of time.

Bad Wolf signifies the potential of Rose the ordinary woman: she has no idea what she will become. And she creates Bad Wolf through her ferocious determination and her love for the Doctor. “I want you safe, my Doctor”: she becomes his cosmic protector. She brings closure to the Time War, ending it with an act of life to counterpoise its terrible destruction.

Rose as Bad Wolf doesn’t just save the Doctor in The Parting of the Ways, she also sets up Bad Wolf’s ongoing relationship with the Doctor. In light of the tragedy of Rose and the Doctor’s love story (the original Doctor, that is), it’s a stunningly beautiful thing to imagine that even if he’s lost forever, a universe away from the one he loves, that she has scattered an echo of herself through that whole universe and every universe, as his cosmic protector and guardian.

There’s an eerie echo of this in Tooth and Claw: the Doctor is trapped in a room, while a wolf roams outside, trying to get in to him. It’s a beautiful and bittersweet foreshadowing of Doomsday. And the Doctor’s Big Bad Wolf eventually does find him. My inner romantic likes to think that she’ll always be out there, haunting him, ready to drop those two words in his ear when the time is right and he needs her most.

For today I chose the tiniest moment - a gesture so brief that if you looked away you'd miss it.

It happens in The End of Time part 2, in one of Wilf and the Doctor's main scenes together. They're stranded aboard a creaky tub of a spaceship, as the Master runs rampant on the Earth below. The Doctor is fiddling with wires and gadgets, trying to get the power going again, and his concentration is disrupted by Wilf, who sits down beside him and starts talking.

And then a very small but crucial thing happens. The Doctor sighs, mildly irritated at the interruption. He takes off his glasses, turns his mind away from saving the world, and gives his full attention to the old man sitting beside him.

In the wider context of the episode, this small moment is seemingly insignificant. The stakes are high. The Master has possessed the human race, perhaps permanently, and the Doctor himself is reeling from his decision on Mars, still in the middle of a struggle for his own soul. More crucial things are going on than Wilf's delight at realising his lifelong dream of travelling to space.

But the Doctor gives Wilf his undivided attention. And then they trade some of the most beautiful lines in Doctor Who:

"Nine hundred years... We must look like insects to you."
"I think you look like giants."

And that's why the Doctor doesn't become the Master. Why the Tenth Doctor is able to end his life well, after all his mistakes. He keeps in touch with the best of him - the human race. The people who keep him aware of the small details upon which everything rests. The people who give him hope. The human race needs the Doctor to save the world, obviously, but equally he needs them. They remind him that although saving the world is important, human dignity and small kindnesses are even more essential.

That's what I love about Doctor Who, even more than the time travel and the monsters and the thrills - I love the humanism, the hope, the dignity. The reminder that an ordinary person really is the most important thing in the universe.
 

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Day 2 of the Countdown Challenge is difficult. Choosing a single favourite episode...how do you do that?! It can only be an extremely subjective exercise. So today I've chosen Planet of the Ood, a New Who episode that is dear to me for a very unique and personal reason. It's a great example of how, in my world at least, art isn't just a hobby or a luxury. It interweaves itself with every aspect of our lives - what we love, our self-awareness, our development as a person.

Planet of the Ood is, I think, a very under-rated episode. The musical score is sublime. The story is simple enough, sure, but it has heart. It cleverly picks up a throwaway alien race from The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, gives them personality, and sets them in their own world. The Ood are a magnificent piece of design and writing. I love them. They are so physically repulsive that their kind and gentle nature is a total surprise. And one of the underlying messages of the episode is that appearances are deceiving. The Ood are so, so ugly, and yet when they're not in unbearable pain, they're beautifully peaceful and forgiving by nature. The humans of the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, on the other hand, are externally familiar to us, but they're pretty ugly inside - either actively engaging in the brutal exploitation of an entire race, or turning a blind eye, happy to be complicit as long as they get the cheap labour of the Ood. The parallels to slavery and human trafficking are very clear. Enter the Doctor and Donna, bent on righting wrongs. Hooray.

The Ood's suffering and their need for justice is the heart of the episode, and the Doctor is uniquely able to understand their plight, because of a certain ability he possesses. He has a type of telepathic ability that enables him to listen in to the Ood's empathic hive mind, a realm of reality that is closed to us and to Donna until the Doctor opens her (and our) mind to hear, through the medium of music, the terrible reality of the Ood's suffering.

If you've watched the episode you'll no doubt remember the poignant moment when, after Donna's mind has been opened to hear the Ood's song, she weeps. And then after her mind is closed again she says to the Doctor, in dismay, "But you can still hear it..." "All the time," he answers quietly, and we see for a brief moment how very lonely it must be inside the Doctor's mind. Having a brain that's open to things other people don't perceive isn't always as fun as it sounds.

I said this would be a personal essay. I'll never forget the moment when I watched the scene I've just described, and I realised, "But that's what I hear. I hear that sort of thing in real life, all the time." And that started a wonderful and strange little journey for me, as I realised that I'm what is called an empath. It's not a terribly rare ability - the odds are that you know an empath - but the nature of this ability isn't widely understood. An empath (also called a clairsentient) is someone who hears or feels the emotional energy of other living beings, like an antenna picking up signals from everything in proximity. When an empath passes someone on the street who is angry, they feel that anger as if it is their own. I receive all sorts of information from my empath abilities, from the mundane to the horrific. It all sounds incredibly woo-woo or, well, sci-fi - something that should exist only in the realm of fiction - but it's real. And for me, I've never known any different. I understand what the Doctor means when he complains that it's so noisy inside his head - being an empath is like listening to ten radio stations at once. The sheer volume of information is overwhelming. And so it was an incredibly strange - and reassuring - experience for me to recognise such commonality with, of all people, an alien using his weird alien abilities. How completely bizarre. And wonderful.

But that's what Doctor Who has done for so long, isn't it? The reason the show has traditionally had such a big following among queer people is that the Doctor will always have something in common with anyone who feels different or out of place in their world. Geeks relate to his consuming enthusiasm. Idealists relate to his code of ethics that constantly clashes with the injustice and suffering he sees around him. Neurodivergents of all kinds can understand the feeling of having a brain that works differently than other people's.

Not only that, but the Doctor is good at being different. He loves it. No wonder he's such a beloved character. The Doctor's difference - his alien-ness - doesn't make him a victim. It makes him lonely, for sure, but he transcends that. His difference makes him strong. He uses it to make the universe a kinder place. That's truly inspiring. The Doctor loves being the kid who never quite fits in. And we love him for it.

It's Day 1 of the Celebrating New Who Countdown Challenge, started by this great Tumblr blog, and I'm thrilled to be taking part. In just a week it will be ten whole years since the revived Doctor Who first aired on British TV. How much has happened since then! and how many new fans of the show (me included) have been made! It's the perfect time for me to spend a week talking about how much I love this show and how much it means to me artistically and personally. Woop!
The theme for today's challenge is "Favourite Season", so here I go. 

It's tough for me to choose which NuWho season is my favourite, but I have to go with Season 4. NuWho almost has a tradition of having one clunker episode per season, but in Season 4 the episode quality is consistently good, and often outstanding. And Donna Noble. Need I say more? It was a bit of a risk to pair the Tenth Doctor with a companion who's even more bonkers than he is, but it pays off. Donna is a main female character who's over 25 years of age - something you don't see all the time - and she's not at all overawed by the Doctor. Tennant and Tate's comic (and dramatic) chemistry is second to none, and since it was high time to have a Doctor-companion relationship with no romantic feelings in the mix, it's a refreshingly new dynamic. Everything works. Plus, there's the heart-stopping teasers of Rose's return. The strands of fate drawing together toward the DoctorDonna. The exploration of the darker side of human nature. The return of my favourite NuWho creatures, the Ood, and a great treatment of classic Who monsters, the Sontarans. There's so much to love about Season 4. Here's a few thoughts on each episode.


Partners in Crime: It's not the strongest opening episode in NuWho history, but Tennant and Tate get some great scenes to establish their outrageous, screwball comedy dynamic. And the Adipose are pretty damn cute too.

The Fires of Pompeii: A brilliant historical episode combined with big ethical decisions. The Doctor and Donna's choice of whether to change history is a reminder of the Doctor's destruction of Gallifrey and also a foreshadowing of his coming dilemma on Mars.

Planet of the Ood: A personal favourite of mine, and an unusual episode in that the human beings (not the scary-looking Ood, a design triumph) are the actual monsters here. The morality is extremely clear, and the Doctor's in top form as an ethical crusader, but the episode's none the worse for that. And the musical score still brings tears to my eyes after multiple re-watches.

The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky: A fantastic Classic Who villain race are resurrected here, and it's done brilliantly. They really do look like potatoes. We have two companions in the TARDIS, and Martha Jones has come into her own, as the Doctor's relationship with the military and violence is explored.

The Doctor's Daughter: The presence of not two but three dynamic companions (we count Jenny, don't we?) smooths over some of the weaknesses of the story. A well-paced episode with some imaginative touches. Drives home, again, the foreboding message that the Doctor loses everyone he loves in the end.

The Unicorn and the Wasp: Historical episodes can be tough but this is extremely entertaining, with brilliant guest writing and the Doctor-Donna dynamics at their funniest and most screwball.

Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead: An enjoyably mind-bending two-parter. The amorphous Vashta Nerada are an exciting new villain, and River Song is a tantalising and well-acted new character at her strongest. "Yes, she's dead. Help her" is one of my favourite lines and a reminder of the Doctor's alien-ness.

Midnight: an episode Russell T Davies wrote in 48 hours and nearly scrapped. Thank goodness he didn't - it's one of his most unusual and striking episodes, and Who psychological horror at its finest ("bananas-creepy", as David Tennant called it). Notable for the outstanding ensemble cast, and for the lack of special effects or visible monsters. Touches again on the theme of humans as monsters, as we see for the first time the Doctor at the mercy of the worst of humanity. Chilling and outstanding.

Turn Left: A companion-centred episode that works. Explores the tantalising question "what would the universe be like without the Doctor?". Donna and Rose continue the RTD-era theme of ordinary people stepping up and filling the Doctor's place in his absence.

The Stolen Earth/Journey's End: A huge, spectacular finale where so much happens. Rose returns and leaves again with-and-not-with the Doctor. Donna meets her gutwrenching end (of which I usually don't speak...). The Daleks. My favourite DW villain, Davros, is resurrected from the Classic series with great respect - he's a chilling and commanding character, and his psychological games with the Doctor are gripping. All the companions of the RTD era come into their own as Doctors in their own right. And on a melancholy final note, the Doctor is left alone, ready to descend into hubristic madness in the 2009 specials.

Season 4 has so much going for it. It's a steady descent into darkness for the Doctor himself, but it manages to keep the gloom balanced with humour and enough action-romp episodes that it doesn't take itself overly seriously. Catherine Tate drew more depth out of the insecure, abrasive, courageous Donna than anyone expected, and the scripts were carefully sequenced and well-realised. I remember Season 4 as the season where Doctor Who really started to grip me. I'd been relatively engaged through my binge-watch of the previous seasons, but I remember chewing my nails through The Stolen Earth and suddenly realising how much I had begun to love this show. And the more I watch Doctor Who, the more I love it. That's not something you can say about every TV show that comes around.

New Earth is such a rewarding episode. In contrast to the following episodes, which are either character-driven or pure adventure fun, it introduces a lot of important issues that define the Tenth Doctor's journey, and that makes it a particular favourite of mine. New Earth is arguably the Tenth Doctor's real debut, after his eleventh-hour appearance in The Christmas Invasion. That episode established the vast poles of his personality - that lightning switch from bouyant swashbuckling to vengeful arrogance - but New Earth works on a deeper level, setting out the themes that Russell T Davies chose to define the Tenth Doctor's arc, and with which the Doctor would wrestle for the rest of the Davies tenure. When you view this episode in the light of the end of Ten's story, it really becomes clear how solidly those major issues and themes were sitting there, in plain view, just waiting to blossom in a year or two's time.

The whole episode is concerned with life and death in its many forms. The Doctor is new-born, seeing the universe with innocent, enamoured eyes; the Lady Cassandra is alive, but by rights should have been dead long ago - she is a parody of life. The Flesh are living death itself, bearing so much disease and suffering that their life is a contradiction; the cat nuns are physically alive but, in the Doctor's view at least, morally dead or worse than dead through their utilitarian brutality.

And it's clear that the Tenth Doctor is very much on the side of life. He fights for Rose's life; he takes explosive joy in saving and healing the Flesh. Others might well have written off this new life form, but the Doctor invests himself in their flourishing: "I'm the Doctor and I cured them!". The approaching hubris in this remark is hardly subtle, but he's so baby-faced and exultant, and so very innocent in this remark, that a time where that statement might be backed up with real arrogance seems very far off.

It's also clear that if there's beauty and joy in the beginning of life - the Tenth Doctor's and the Flesh's - then there's a right and proper time to die as well. "I don't want to die," Cassandra whimpers, and he replies, "Nobody does." Which of course includes the Doctor himself, and if we flash-forward to The Waters of Mars and The End of Time we see that the Doctor isn't really much better at taking his own advice in this respect than are other people. At the end of his own life it takes him time, and more human damage, and more crushing regret, for him to face up to the inevitability of his own demise, compounded as it is by his guilt and fear for the mistakes he's made. He rages against the dying of the light like everyone else, except, like everything else he does, it's somewhat more spectacular.

Of course it's not all bleak - he gives Cassandra a truly meaningful experience before her death, gives her a moment of real living in his sense of the term ("You're so desperate to stay alive, why don't you live a little?"), and that experience gives her the strength and dignity to face up to her demise. In much the same way, Wilf's companionship to the Doctor in The End of Time, and the wider legacy of Rose and his other companions, enable the Doctor to master his fear and regret enough to make a good end, giving his life to save an "insignificant" old man. And because he's the Doctor, and because he basically succeeds in living up to his own values, it's a tremendously selfless and moving end, proving that while he gets it wrong - sometimes spectacularly so - ultimately he lives up to his moral values and his concept of what a life well lived should look like. He dances with joy to see the Flesh "completely, completely alive" because he, too, is so vibrantly alive, and his childlike delight stems from the quality of a life truly lived.

Despite his fierce dedication to preserve life, no matter the species, the Doctor doesn't advocate life at any cost. He has extremely clear ideas of what constitutes a meaningful life. That's not to say he's without compassion - the very opposite, in fact - but it explains why his discovery of the Flesh's exploitation is met not only with compassion or sorrow but with explosive anger. "If they live because of this, then life is worthless." The Doctor sees very clearly inside his own head what constitutes a meaningful life. His moral compass is well-defined and absolutely rigid, and anything that clashes with it brings out an unbending anger that belies his happy-go-lucky exterior. This is, of course, one of his greatest strengths (his instinctive anarchism, his firm resolution to resist structural power and control, enables him to refuse the Krillitane in School Reunion) and also a significant weakness. In New Earth we're inclined to side with his anger - experimenting on humans is clearly wrong - but in the previous episode his moral line in the sand, while very clear to him, likely evoked a more ambivalent response from us. Was he right to depose Harriet Jones? Even if he might have been justified, should he have done it? They're open questions, and a reminder that while the Tenth Doctor defines himself as this earth's champion, he doesn't prioritise human life over that of other species. He might be utterly humane, and the model humanist, but he's not human.

Next time it's one of my favourite guest-written episodes, Vincent and the Doctor. 


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