[ SECRET POST #5472 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5472 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 19 secrets from Secret Submission Post #783.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

02. https://i.imgur.com/xr8S5dC.png

[(Anonymous)]

Counterpoint: The reason people care about Donna's fate is because she was written so well.

I do have quibbles with the writing, but RTD wrote the best companion stories, imo.

[(Anonymous)]

Not the OP, but... no-one's questioning how well Donna or any other companion was written. It's not a secret about how good or bad RTD's companions were, it's about how intolerable a Doctor Ten became over the course of his run.

In the context of the secret, Donna's fate is an example of one of his particularly fucked-up decisions, not a diatribe about how good a companion she was and whether she deserved better.

[(Anonymous)]

Look, taste is taste, you don't have to like RTD, it's all good.

But to say that the show never acknowledged that he did harm is completely wrong IMO. The entire point of the specials is that 10 was hubristic, meddled too much, did too much harm, and had to be punished for it. The show absolutely gets into that idea.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I thought he got called on his bullshit effectively.

Not always to his face, but the consequences of his hubristic decisions *are* spelled out in the setting. The Master came to power because 10 scotched Harriet Jones's career in a fit of pique. Et cetera et cetera.


(As opposed to, what was it, 12 is appointed Emergency President of Earth? Hooboy... (I like 12, but *goddamn*))

[(Anonymous)]

What happened to Harriet is about her hubris, not the Doctor's. She spent the entire episode inviting him to the party, and when he negotiated a peace she didn't like she did something stupid, and then uber powerful alien she had demanded solve the issue solved her issue but good. You sort your own planet's problem's out, or you lose the right to complain about the resolution.

[(Anonymous)]

What he did to Donna was horrible (not just for her, but for him too because she'll never be able to remember him), but I don't think the show never acknowledged that he fucked up (The Waters of Mars comes to mind).

[(Anonymous)]

I disagree with this secret, but it does tie into one of the things I REALLY like about the RTD era of DW.

One of the things that RTD was really good at, imo, was having characters be messy and then just letting the audience sit with that messiness. My go-to example is the climax of The End of the World. It's the second episode of the show, you have everything set up for the villain of the week being hoisted by her own petard, and then Rose practically begs the Doctor to save the villain and 9 is super cold about it. And then... not much. It's an off-putting scene that doesn't get lampshaded or followed up on in that episode, and it's meant to be that way. It's meant to be a very clear indication to the audience that the Doctor in this semi-revived version of DW isn't to be 100% trusted, he's not a paragon of morality, and after that you're always going to be a bit on edge. It makes later moral dilemmas the Doctor gets into have more weight, and every time he succeeds it's much more of a victory because it wasn't a foregone conclusion.

IMO this continues very well throughout the rest of the RTD era. The Harriet Jones thing is a GREAT example of this, actually. You have this person who has previously been shown as a genuinely decent person and a great ally. The Doctor beats the baddie, they're retreating, and then - boom. Harriet Jones explodes a retreating spaceship. And she has good reasons for it - reasons that even people who disagree with her decision can agree are valid concerns. And then the Doctor destroys her political standing - and he has valid reasons as well. The audience has to sit in that discomfort, and the show doesn't really conclusively say which side you're supposed to see as The Right One.

And afterwards, though the exact actions are never really discussed between the characters, we do get to see how the Doctor's decision affected everything. If Harriet Jones had still been in office, would the Master have been able to become PM? Would the s3 finale have been half as horrifying? When Harriet Jones turns up in Journey's End, is her ending an indication that she agrees with the Doctor's actions, that she still disagrees yet forgives him, or something else entirely? There's a real sense of moral debate and ambiguity and allowing the audience to engage with it rather than giving clear answers in a lot of RTD's run, and it's one of the things I actually really like about it.

[(Anonymous)]

Allllllll of this done way more eloquently than I could have ever done.

[killnotic]

Well said.

[(Anonymous)]

"One of the things that RTD was really good at, imo, was having characters be messy and then just letting the audience sit with that messiness."

"There's a real sense of moral debate and ambiguity and allowing the audience to engage with it rather than giving clear answers in a lot of RTD's run, and it's one of the things I actually really like about it."

You said it so much better than I could.

[meadowphoenix]

This is an interesting secret because what I gathered during Ten's run was that he was a little bit of an egomaniac? Like, that was part of what people liked and disliked as compared to 9. I would consider that that was deliberate, and you just didn't like it, rather than it not being a calculated part of the narrative.

[(Anonymous)]

Unpopular opinion: I know deep down that I would do what Ten did if I were in his situation with Donna because my feelings would get the better of me, and I think a lot of people who hate it on the show would, too. It's an easy to look at someone else doing it and say "Oh, that's horrible, I would never!" situation where, if faced with it yourself, you absolutely would.

I could make this its own secret, but I don't feel like it.

[(Anonymous)]

Completely agree. I can't expect that anyone could look me in the eyes and honestly say they would willingly let their best friend die when the alternative is letting them live a long, normal life with their family.