#hmp42

shot from extremis, series 10, when Bill finds the TARDIS parked inside her bedroom halfway through a date, and there is LAUNDRY BASKET in the console room. and i'm thinking. the fuck is a white wicker laundry basket doing in the – oh no.

go to the shooting script

they STOLE her laundry basket.

Oh boy oh boy this is might get me anon hate

For me, it’s more of a heteronormative thing, there’s an insecurity in and enforcing of gender as well as sexuality. The Ninth Doctor seems quite secure in his gender expression, and he’s unbothered by Jack’s flagrant pansexuality. Ten, by contrast, acts like Jack’s sexuality is an irritant or an embarrassment, competes with every man around him, and randomly says weird shit. His mocking Mickey by comparing him to a girl (“I’m seeing pigtails, frilly skirt”) and the time he was observing the hairs standing up on his skin and said to Rose “look at the hairs on my manly hairy hand” come to mind. Emasculating his rival and asserting his own gender as “manly” is pure straight man behaviour - though the latter also reminds me of trans mascs jokingly affirming their own gender, something I have done myself.

The Doctor is often a character who likes to take charge of any room they walk into, but there’s something about Ten that - particularly in season 2 - reads as a need to prove himself. He has this faint macho impulse despite not being a typically macho kind of guy. His masculinity is the geekish kind which is rooted in assertions of intelligence and uniqueness over brawn and mediocrity. Not all of this is distasteful or even explicitly heteronormative, but what is revolves around desirability to the women around him: he throws out “I’m a Lord of Time” to the King of France in front of Reinette, goes out of his way to belittle and humiliate Mickey, and gets cranky when Jack flirts with Martha. Sometimes I think half his distaste towards Jack’s sexuality is just him fuming that he’s not the prettiest boy in the room anymore.

As a kid, and even as a Rose and Ten shipper back then, I found it quite jarring that the Doctor was suddenly saying things like “yeah, still got it” after his companion made out with him. The sudden participation in the modes of heterosexuality was noticeable and strange. I know the Doyleist explanation for this is just that the writers, particularly RTD, decided that Ten was going to be a ladies’ man. My Watsonian explanation is that the Ninth Doctor died out of love for Rose, and then regenerated into what the Doctor estimated to be her perfect man. It’s an extension of something RTD once said about Ten having a vaguely London accent because he “imprinted” on Rose.

This sounds like I’m saying it was all terribly romantic, but to be honest, I think it’s all terribly fucked up. The emphasis here is on “estimated”, because the Doctor didn’t actually regenerate into Rose’s perfect man, he regenerated into the picture his own neuroses and biased observations painted of Rose’s perfect man. He saw her admire dark-haired white men with pretty boy faces, two out of her three other love interests are characterised as geeks, and most importantly he saw her initial reaction to Jack’s queerness and he internalised it.

Quite apart from her should-be-infamous “you’re so gay [derogatory]” moment, Rose acts entry level homophobic when she finds out Jack is attracted to men. We see her obvious dismay even when the Doctor and Jack make it clear that Jack is also still attracted to women, and she’s never quite as interested in him after that. I do personally believe it’s a matter of Rose simply getting used to Jack (him not being a shiny new attraction anymore) and being more attracted to the Doctor, who is set up to be her monogamous primary love interest, but it’s worth noting that the Doctor witnesses how queerness makes Jack less desirable to Rose. I think Rose is nineteen and sheltered and grows out of her homophobia, but the Doctor internalises it.

Rose’s perfect man, based on what the Doctor saw she admired and disliked in Mickey, Adam, and Jack, is intelligent, a bit of a geek but still stylish, charismatic, pretty but absolutely not effeminate, boyish but still a man, and straight as a ruler. And that is what Ten constantly asserts himself to be throughout season 2. It gets off to an abrupt start too - the Doctor literally leaving the polyamorous pansexual guy behind them. The inconvenient thing about cutting out the third wheel character so you can focus on the two you’ve decided are solely love interests to each other now is that it will feel like the Doctor getting rid of the competition, or worse, getting rid of the guy he could not pretend to be straight around. Adding in a scene where the Doctor homoerotically stares at him through a window while he’s all sweaty, telling him “I can’t be around you because you’re an abomination and make me feel all weird”, isn’t going to beat the allegations.

Even his flirtation with Reinette is tinged with some amount of performance. Not the romance itself, but the scene where he gets back to the ship after the party and Rose reacts like he’s her philandering husband. Ten plays up to it, because within heterosexuality a man being desirable to other women makes him even more desirable. There is a hint of pride that now he’s the object of jealousy.

This posturing lingers on into much of season 3 because he’s still trying to impress and charm Martha. I know people vary wildly on what Ten wants from her and what he won’t allow himself to want, but it does seem undeniable that he wants to be desirable to her. It’s interrupted by the arrival of the Master, who so disrupts the Doctor’s performance of heterosexuality (already made shaky by Jack’s return and continued presence) that he pretty much permanently shatters it. I’d argue the Master himself is aware of this, given the fact that he mimics and mocks the Doctor by taking up with a white blonde girl, who the Doctor himself later jokes was a beard. (Doctor, you can’t really joke that the woman who was meant to parody your love interest was a beard without some implications falling back on you.)

Things I don’t 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 don’t mind that he does it against her will but I don’t like that it’s framed as noble and tragic, rather than a very dark thing to do, a violation of trust and consent and a “I know best” pull typical of Ten’s more Time Lord Victorious moments

Like I get that we’re 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 it’s framed as something that happened rather than a choice

There’s 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 “oh wow, a whole life I forgot”. She’s never mad at him, not even in a “I get you had to do it and I guess I’m glad you did but I still have to process the violation of trust” way. She’s only mad that she gave the lottery money away because of her subconscious principles. And this from a character who has “hot tempered” and “bossy” 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 she’s not even cross when he nearly leaves her behind (which, again, seriously?? She’s not even gonna give him a bit of lip over it? Donna “I’m not blinking flip jumping I’m supposed to be getting married” Noble’s fate is to be platonically Taming-of-the-Shrew’d?).