Wow, I had almost exactly the opposite reaction -- the way things go so badly wrong so quickly without the Doctor there{*} gave me a nasty sense of "humanity can't cope without divine intervention" and the contrast between this Donna and our one, and her discussion with Rose about being "brilliant because of the Doctor" and so on a sense of "a human's worth is entirely bound up with their relationship with the weakly godlike entity". (Incidentally, I think the S1 version of the humans being the heroes is different to the later stuff, mainly because Nine and Ten are so different as Doctors. Nine's unspecified Time War damage renders him useless incapable of making certain key decisions and so he only gets by because he's catalysed the supporting cast's latent heroism. With Ten on the other hand it's all unbalanced because he's proactive as well, except when he's not.)
On the other hand, I thought that as wibbly wobbly timey wimey-ness goes, this ep was one of the best treatments of same in the new series, less "fantastic" than, say, Father's Day (which has nonsensical monsters that have never appeared anywhere else, and a Sapphire-and-Steel like version of Time with enough consciousness or at least intentionality to make the car that "should" have killed Pete reappear). Admittedly, the mechanism by which the beetle makes the change is unexplored (though it's clearly something to do with psychic stuff as it only worked once !Chantho had made Donna remember that key decision) but once it did it all made sense (so, yes, I think it is very powerful, powerful enough to be its own internal paradox machine [or maybe it doesn't need to be; seeing as it seems to feed off that sort of thing paradox might be its natural state -- note Rose talking about it being "in flux" even if she is just bluffing]). The idea of it feeding off different possibilities is only a little different from the Reapers or the Weeping Angels.
So I'd argue that it is all very real, the beetle is massively powerful{**}, and far from being pointless that was a story of desperately trying to put the universe back on track using a lash up of mirrors and wired-up jackets. All of which does work as an SFnal plot, for me -- Donna only just manages to reverse the initial change. The memory transfer is definitely a handwave but it's a fairly standard one as these sorts of stories go (and having recently rewatched Inferno I could make an argument that Section Leader Shaw's quick acceptance of the Doctor's story could be some sort of transuniveral psychic bleedthrough from our Liz), and again I'd wave my hands around about psychic feedback from the beetle as it's defeated, or something.
{*} Yes, he should have known better than to get out of the river, but he was clearly in a bad place in that scene at the end of tRB. I can just about buy it as a suicide (which makes sense of the not regenerating, as seen with the Master at the end of last season).
{**} Possibly far more powerful than it itself realises. If we go with a chaos theory of history where most changes damp down but for some there's a very sensitive dependence on initial conditions (which I buy for the Whoniverse out of a combination of personal preference and the stuff about the structure of the Spiral Politic in The Book of the War but anyway), then it's probably never encountered someone whose decisions can cause such massive change as a companion who never meets the Doctor.
no subject
uselessincapable of making certain key decisions and so he only gets by because he's catalysed the supporting cast's latent heroism. With Ten on the other hand it's all unbalanced because he's proactive as well, except when he's not.)On the other hand, I thought that as wibbly wobbly timey wimey-ness goes, this ep was one of the best treatments of same in the new series, less "fantastic" than, say, Father's Day (which has nonsensical monsters that have never appeared anywhere else, and a Sapphire-and-Steel like version of Time with enough consciousness or at least intentionality to make the car that "should" have killed Pete reappear). Admittedly, the mechanism by which the beetle makes the change is unexplored (though it's clearly something to do with psychic stuff as it only worked once !Chantho had made Donna remember that key decision) but once it did it all made sense (so, yes, I think it is very powerful, powerful enough to be its own internal paradox machine [or maybe it doesn't need to be; seeing as it seems to feed off that sort of thing paradox might be its natural state -- note Rose talking about it being "in flux" even if she is just bluffing]). The idea of it feeding off different possibilities is only a little different from the Reapers or the Weeping Angels.
So I'd argue that it is all very real, the beetle is massively powerful{**}, and far from being pointless that was a story of desperately trying to put the universe back on track using a lash up of mirrors and wired-up jackets. All of which does work as an SFnal plot, for me -- Donna only just manages to reverse the initial change. The memory transfer is definitely a handwave but it's a fairly standard one as these sorts of stories go (and having recently rewatched Inferno I could make an argument that Section Leader Shaw's quick acceptance of the Doctor's story could be some sort of transuniveral psychic bleedthrough from our Liz), and again I'd wave my hands around about psychic feedback from the beetle as it's defeated, or something.
{*} Yes, he should have known better than to get out of the river, but he was clearly in a bad place in that scene at the end of tRB. I can just about buy it as a suicide (which makes sense of the not regenerating, as seen with the Master at the end of last season).
{**} Possibly far more powerful than it itself realises. If we go with a chaos theory of history where most changes damp down but for some there's a very sensitive dependence on initial conditions (which I buy for the Whoniverse out of a combination of personal preference and the stuff about the structure of the Spiral Politic in The Book of the War but anyway), then it's probably never encountered someone whose decisions can cause such massive change as a companion who never meets the Doctor.