#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
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 doesn’t express the things he’s supposed to have learned from it, but it’s …? 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 don’t actually think he’s 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 that’s from a nostalgia perspective or simply his own interpretation of his past work. And then I think, “well, if you can’t engage with outside perspective on your work enough to transform it, no wonder you come back to this show twenty years later and this happens”.
Moffat once said of him “he creates interesting characters and then melts them” and this was in reference to his antagonists, but I think it’s in a weird way the most succinct summary of him as a writer. He creates interesting characters and then melts them because he doesn’t know what else to do with them, because he’s 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 doesn’t seem to realise his own pattern of melting his characters.
The 60th anniversary should have been any writer’s dream, the chance to come back to a show with your original cast and tie up any loose ends or undo anything you’ve regretted since. I thought at the time that he had possibly come to understand the flaws in how Donna’s 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 he’d as usual learnt the wrong lesson.
You see, circling back to the “he creates interesting characters then melts them” thing, RTD’s 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, it’s extremely “Everybody Lives from Moffat’s much-praised The Doctor Dances”. He didn’t even take away the meaning being “he creates original concepts then does unoriginal things with them”, he was still reheating Moffat’s nachos when trying to change his pattern of repeating everything!
I don’t know, I don’t know if the 60th was like that because he couldn’t conceive of anything else or just because he really doesn’t like doing anything unsafe. Seems crazy to accuse Stuntcasting McGee of that. Perhaps “icky” 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 Doctor’s friends having to work through genuine hurt or resentment for things he’s 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). He’s so in love with his own mythology it’s like he can’t let his Barbie dolls fight anymore, and the 60th was slightly more boring than it should have been because of it.
Because that’s my whole thing, I didn’t want the 60th to necessarily fix everything with Donna bc you can’t, it happened, I’m never about making it unproblematic and in fact I think that’s 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 don’t 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 “to hold him to account”, 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.
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