[ SECRET POST #2204 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2204 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 091 secrets from Secret Submission Post #315.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[riddian]

Huh, interesting. Any theories as to why? I would have thought it would be the other way around.

[(Anonymous)]

not OP, but my theory would be that Old Who fans carry around a whole bunch of years of continuity, plus all the old fandom wanks and arguments, wereas New Who fans probably have the approach that New Who is canon and not all of Old Who is. Which considering how big and sprawling OW is, might have some truth in it. New Who fans who then watch Old Who can probably pick out fresh insights and approaches and the like without getting as bogged down in details.

[tenlittlebullets]

FWIW, I started with New Who too and my approach to Old Who is that it's all canon, but it's so huge and the stories work well enough as standalones that you don't have to have watched all of it to consider yourself a fan--you can skip around and leave giant holes to be slowly filled in later if you want.

That, and New Who kinda gives you the attitude of "Details not quite meshing up? Fuck it--wibbly-wobbly canony-fanony stuff." (Plus it's my opinion that, far from New Who being all canonical, everyone has the right to excise one Christmas special from their personal headcanon. A friend of mine refuses to acknowledge the existence of Voyage of the Damned, and I just did not understand until I saw A Christmas Carol and instantly tried to pretend I hadn't.)

[(Anonymous)]

I still have no idea what they were thinking with Voyage of the Damned. Just...WHY? Why have an episode so nastily depressing and bleak for no reason and then have it be completely irrelevant and never get brought up again? On CHRISTMAS no less? Not to mention Titanic ripoffs were overdone years before that episode aired.

Actually, that reminds me once again how much I wish a copy of The Feast of Steven from One's era existed. Because from what I've heard, it was glorious bizarro crack plopped right in the middle of a really epic long serial.

/completely pointless tangent

[tenlittlebullets]

My biggest problem with Voyage of the Damned is that it marks the transition from "Ten is a prickly ball of angst" to "Ten's manpain eats the world." Otherwise it's just a moderately crappy one-off for me, haha. Christmas Carol, though, is FUCKING CREEPYPASTA being sold to us as heartwarming--rewriting events is one thing, rewriting people? Against their will, while making them watch? DNW DNW DNW.

Damn, I didn't even know The Feast of Steven existed (or... didn't exist) until just now. *sighs wistfully* And earlier tonight I stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for Doctor Who scripts that were written but never produced--some of the One serials had me making grabby hands of longing at the screen.

[(Anonymous)]

See, if Voyage of the Damned gave any indication that it was actually a Really Big Thing With Legit After-Effects, I'd give it more leeway. It just felt like it was all aiming at some big important point that no one ever bothered explaining to the audience. But nope, the next episode was adorable little fat-babies and Ten and Donna running around all merry and carefree.

And...eh, I just saw A Christmas Carol as...basically the same thing that happens in every single Who time travel story ever, just with a different perspective. I mean, if the Doctor goes back in time (or hell, even just interferes in the present, since he's not exactly from our "present" either!) and avoids one possible outcome of a major event, like the world becoming a nuclear dystopia or humans getting enslaved by invaders, he "rewrites" all the people involved in it too. We just don't see their alt!futures onscreen.

So old!Kazran Mark I was technically indistinguishable from the possible alt!futures that characters get saved from all the time. The narrative just framed it differently from how alt!futures are usually framed (they're usually not seen at all, or when they are, they're George Bailey-esque nightmare sequences, or destroy everything like "The Wish" episode of Buffy). Which was kinda really cool and I wish the idea had been explored again in a more serious context.

The heartwarmingness was kinda dissonant though, yeah, since the narrow intent made it a tad Harriet Jones-y, but I admit that maybe I just wasn't bothering to care since the whole "1 douchebag's miserable life <<<<<<<< 4000 innocent people" was pretty much in the forefront of my mind the whole time. My biggest issue with the episode was Kazran being able to experience his memories changing in "real time." That was just very "but but but wait what hang on how does that even work?"

[tenlittlebullets]

IDK, man, doing things that have ripples and might end up changing people's lives is way different from going in and deliberately engineering a person into becoming someone else for a specific end.

[(Anonymous)]

Hm, that's a good point. I guess I'd have been more bothered if it had actually changed Kazran into someone else than what actually happened, which was...he was basically the same, just with another set of issues and perfectly aware of what happened to him, and he ultimately changed more in real time than via memories.

I suppose the scenario definitely has the potential to be deeeeeeeeply creepy if the specifics were tweaked a bit though. I mean, from later in the season...I've heard some people going "omg the Doctor and the Ponds are such selfish jerks they should've tried to rescue bb!Melody" and I'm like WHAT WHAT WHAT NO THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE River would have flipped five hundred lids if they decided to wipe out her entire timeline!!! Not to mention Ten kinda promised her on her deathbed not to rewrite a single line of her life...

And now that's starting to make me remember how when it was revealed that the Doctor/River timelines were actually inverse-parallel, not just out of order, it conveniently avoided the fact that it would be almost subconscious-level easy for River to manipulate and groom him into becoming exactly who she remembers given that he's guilt-trapped into never taking the "hightail it the fuck out this relationship" emergency option after what happened in the Library. Huh. Funny how a little difference in situational context and specific details can make a concept SO different...

[tenlittlebullets]

It just seems like a giant moral line in the sand that the show skipped merrily over without more than a passing nod to how dodgy it was--the whole "you will have empathy whether you want to or not," and using time travel to rewrite someone's whole life and make them into the person you want them to be because you don't like the person they are. Or because the person they are is inconvenient to you--jesus, the implications of that are spine-chilling. The original Christmas Carol was very much "this is your life, these are your choices, this is the effect they're having and the effect they will have if you don't change course," and ultimately the choice lands right in Scrooge's lap; in Moffat's version Kazran doesn't have anything like that kind of agency, the Doctor just decides to make him a better person and give him a different set of life experiences to work with, and while this is acknowledged to be a pretty extreme measure, it's never really dealt with as an incredibly creepy violation of who Kazran is as a person.

Like you said, the parallels with River are obvious, but why are the situations reversed in that case? Just because the Doctor likes her? Or because personally rewriting someone's life with foreknowledge of how you're changing them, even to erase a tragedy, is an inherently terrible thing to do, and the fact that the Silence custom-tailored River into the person they wanted is what makes them the bad guys? I have similar issues with Donna's mindwipe--it's not that inflicting terrible creepypasta on beloved characters is inappropriate for a kids' show, the baddies do it all the time, but if you're going to make the Doctor do it, the full creepy terribleness needs to be dealt with and it needs to be established as 5000% necessary in the plot. The one thing you can't do is treat it lightly and try to gloss it over.

(Are the Doctor and River really reverse-parallel? At some point River mentions they are, but that seems to be a general trend rather than them meeting in strictly reverse order. In any case, Moffat does seem to be aware of the free will issues with this one, which is why they're so strict about the diaries and Eleven is so upset about the predestination paradoxes in Angels Take Manhattan. They know, in a general sense, that they're going to be important to each other, but avoiding spoilers means that whatever happens when they meet isn't "scripted" by foreknowledge and they can make their own decisions.)

[(Anonymous)]

Hm...I see what you mean, but I think the reason I can't see the big line in the sand is that I can't see why doing a "this is your life, these are your choices", as you say, would somehow be valid to do to old!Kazran but not valid to go back and do to young!Kazran. Young!Kazran is just as much a person as old!Kazran. If episode had instead introduced us to young!Kazran going about in real time and then meeting the Doctor and then was shown that he could become this "hypothetical" (from his perspective) old man who's so awful that he'd let a spaceship full of people die because he couldn't be bothered, I can't see how it would be a violation of "who Kazran is as a person" if young!Kazran went "hell no I don't want to become him!"

And if the Doctor did it to old!Kazran, it's also not THAT different from rewriting even-older!Kazran. Which, again, doesn't exactly fix those grey areas, I just don't think they're all that different from anything involving time travel. Or that bug-thing from Turn Left. Or even not involving time travel at all -- who's to say you're not totally rewriting a hypothetical future version of yourself right at this moment?

It's not identical of course: there's the fact that the Doctor has specific foreknowledge, yeah, which does put a different spin on it, but...I dunno what exactly the alternative was. It's not like he had time to sit around wheedling old!Kazran into being better, or could erase his memories of old!Kazran and fling himself into the past blindly with the expectation that he'd accidentally somehow make Kazran better.

The issue, for me, is that the portrayal of how that kind of thing works, especially with Kazran remembering both sets of memories, kind of randomly breaks a bunch of pre-established rules and norms about how time travel works in the Whoniverse. But that's Moffat for you. *bangs head against wall repeated re: Angels Take Manhattan*

[tenlittlebullets]

Except "nebulous future!Kazran" and "future!Kazran whom the Doctor has already met" are different, because the show goes to great pains to establish that foreknowledge of events, or going through events in your own timestream, makes them real in a way that glimpses of possible futures aren't. Meeting young!Kazran and asking him to look at his life, look at his choices, via some magic device that shows you possible futures but doesn't fix any of them in reality, would be way different from meeting older!Kazran and then going back in time just to manipulate younger!Kazran into choosing a future whereby that guy will never have existed.

It's like... it's like "The Girl Who Waited," which is already dark as all hell because it takes that scenario seriously instead of trying to pass it off as heartwarming. The only reason it's not even darker is because older!Amy agrees to give her younger self a shot at a better life than she had, and when it becomes clear that the two Amys can't coexist, she ultimately tries to comfort Rory and the Doctor by agreeing to sacrifice herself so they're not straight-up murdering her. If it hadn't been voluntary, it would've strayed into "way too fucked-up to be on Doctor Who" territory. A Christmas Carol gives me the raging heebie-jeebies because it's basically TGWW with older!Amy kicking and screaming the whole time, and it's trying to pretend it isn't.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

The only place VotD really shows any after effects is in Turn Left, where we saw what happened if the crash wasn't averted (along with all the other things that weren't averted).