See okay, re: Donnaâs original ending.
Things I donât have a problem with:
It being sad
Memory loss as a method of separation / narrative device
The absolute horror of Donna losing her memories to the point where she also loses the personal growth she gained while travelling
The Doctor and Wilf and Sylvia being sad and pained about this
Things I do have a problem with:
I actually donât mind that he does it against her will but I donât like that itâs framed as noble and tragic, rather than a very dark thing to do, a violation of trust and consent and a âI know bestâ pull typical of Tenâs more Time Lord Victorious moments
Like I get that weâre meant to believe that it was mindwipe or death, but the last thing we see Donna do is sob and beg the Doctor not to wipe her mind while he forces a mindwipe on her, then itâs framed as something that happened rather than a choice
Thereâs a lingering focus on his pain, his loss of her, his angst at having to wipe her memories and stop existing to her. This is understandable to a point, but it does sometimes feel like Donna losing her memories and some of her personality is something that happens to the Doctor, not Donna.
I actually quite like aspects of Star Beast but one of the problems I have with it and with the 60th specials in general is that they continue this framing of the mindwipe as Something That Happened rather than a choice the Doctor made, even if it was a choice that was dark but ultimately necessary to keep Donna alive.
Donna is granted stunningly little interiority about it when it comes to anything more complicated than âoh wow, a whole life I forgotâ. Sheâs never mad at him, not even in a âI get you had to do it and I guess Iâm glad you did but I still have to process the violation of trustâ way. Sheâs only mad that she gave the lottery money away because of her subconscious principles. And this from a character who has âhot temperedâ and âbossyâ as main traits. I fully expected a bit of resentment to come out more in Wild Blue Yonder and that would have been the perfect time to deal with it, but instead sheâs not even cross when he nearly leaves her behind (which, again, seriously?? Sheâs not even gonna give him a bit of lip over it? Donna âIâm not blinking flip jumping Iâm supposed to be getting marriedâ Nobleâs fate is to be platonically Taming-of-the-Shrewâd?).
I think itâs also buckwild to see the Doctor return to this companion whose memory he wiped and express no real guilt about having done it, when in the intervening years heâs seen the effects that memory/history tampering had on Amy and Rory, had his own memory wiped of Clara, and been called out by Bill on the whole âitâs fucked to go around wiping peopleâs memoriesâ thing. (This is also why I didnât like Thirteen wiping Adaâs memory and the like, but thatâs a side tangent and a much smaller quibble.)
#okay yes EXACTLY this is bar for bar how i feel about it #i think the fact that rtd saw moffat's critique/subversion of it in hell bent and the 60th is what he came back with says a lot #about the fact that he maybe still didn't understand the actual problem in the first place
#like let's look at what hell bent does to subvert it. #while it's obviously intentional that moffat chose to have the doctor forget #it's also intentional that clara forgetting was an option on the table that she consented to #more than the forgetting being the problem it's the fact that the narrative made it all about the doctor's feelings and not donna's
#and whereas hell bent has a huge amount of interest in clara's interiority and how she feels about her near-loss of agency #& in fact a big part of the point of the ep is that the doctor had been ignoring clara's feelings to drown in a sort of self-centred pain #the 60th STILL doesn't have any interest in donna's interiority or feelings #she never gets her 'i am entitled to that' moment. rtd still seems more interested in the doctor in the end
Tags from @aerithisms
Yes this! I find it wild enough from an in-universe perspective that this character goes through learning this lesson and then unlearns it, or at least doesnât express the things heâs supposed to have learned from it, but itâs âŚ? Bizarre? Fascinating? To see the writer either refuse to engage with how his successor built on these themes or just ⌠possibly fail to understand the deconstruction at all?
Like neither of those options are flattering to RTD as a writer. And I donât actually think heâs a useless writer, I think he has written extremely good things at his best. But he seems to get very stuck on things and not want to move on from them, whether thatâs from a nostalgia perspective or simply his own interpretation of his past work. And then I think, âwell, if you canât engage with outside perspective on your work enough to transform it, no wonder you come back to this show twenty years later and this happensâ.
Moffat once said of him âhe creates interesting characters and then melts themâ and this was in reference to his antagonists, but I think itâs in a weird way the most succinct summary of him as a writer. He creates interesting characters and then melts them because he doesnât know what else to do with them, because heâs always melted them before, because people seem to love it when he melts them, because this is the part where they get melted, because he doesnât seem to realise his own pattern of melting his characters.
The 60th anniversary should have been any writerâs dream, the chance to come back to a show with your original cast and tie up any loose ends or undo anything youâve regretted since. I thought at the time that he had possibly come to understand the flaws in how Donnaâs exit played out, had seen how memory erasure had been unpacked in the show since he left, and had come back ready to write an interesting story that, while not devoted to or preoccupied with the ramifications of what had happened, at least acknowledged them. I came away with the impression that he really only gave Donna her memories back because fans had begged for a Happy Ending for her, and heâd as usual learnt the wrong lesson.
You see, circling back to the âhe creates interesting characters then melts themâ thing, RTDâs response to that back in the day had been to change the ending of New Earth so that the cattle humans all got to live instead of being killed by the Doctor, who presumably would have been the one really suffering with pangs of guilt about the whole thing. If you remember the scene where the Doctor cures them all of their illnesses, itâs extremely âEverybody Lives from Moffatâs much-praised The Doctor Dancesâ. He didnât even take away the meaning being âhe creates original concepts then does unoriginal things with themâ, he was still reheating Moffatâs nachos when trying to change his pattern of repeating everything!
I donât know, I donât know if the 60th was like that because he couldnât conceive of anything else or just because he really doesnât like doing anything unsafe. Seems crazy to accuse Stuntcasting McGee of that. Perhaps âickyâ is a better a word. For a guy who loves to write about how dark the Doctor is, he seems squicked out by the idea of any of the Doctorâs friends having to work through genuine hurt or resentment for things heâs done to them. Which is insane, because some of his best moments have been exactly that (the weird tension between 10 and Jack, Jackie accusing the Doctor of endangering those around him, Mickey calling the Doctor out for everything). Heâs so in love with his own mythology itâs like he canât let his Barbie dolls fight anymore, and the 60th was slightly more boring than it should have been because of it.
Because thatâs my whole thing, I didnât want the 60th to necessarily fix everything with Donna bc you canât, it happened, Iâm never about making it unproblematic and in fact I think thatâs where RTD goes wrong a lot. But there was such an interesting story sitting there, ripened by fourteen years of storytelling.
The Doctor back with an old face - why, does he regret something? The Doctor after losing someone through memory loss, after being scolded for wiping memories without consent, after finding their whole life is a lie and they donât remember a whole bunch of it. That Doctor, going back to the friend whose memory he had wiped without her consent, the friend who was always brutally honest and stubborn and opinionated. The friend who saved the face whose lesson was âto hold him to accountâ, the face who got his memory wiped! It was all set up for him to bring it home and look splendidly clever.
And instead he melted it.
