"What will you be?"

[khaosworks]

And here we are at the 11th episode of this season, Turn Left, which is the equivalent of Utopia from Series 3: that middling to so-so story that only picks up speed in the last five minutes or so, or in this case the last ten seconds or so. This is a prologue to the mega-crossover Infinite Secret Crisis War that will be the two-part season finale.

Unlike Utopia, however, the end of this was more of a teaser and a mystery than the pure awesome exuded by Derek Jacobi and John Simms. On the other hand, as befits a Davies-penned episode, the human element was very present in his portrayal of a standard SF trope: the inevitable alternate universe episode, seen at least once in nearly every science fiction series that's run long enough to make it this far. And sometimes not even then: Stargate SG-1 did it in its first season. Catherine Tate shows more of her acting chops, and while she's convinced me that Donna's a good companion and does the shrill thing a bit better than Tegan (who always came off as whiny, not strong), I think the contingent of people who hate her will never be convinced in any case.

But here's the problem. Here's two problems. The first one, that the episode is filler and we've seen it all before, isn't as big. As filler goes, it's actually more substantial than Utopia was, and the whole supporting cast - not just Tate - do admirably without Tennant around. You can complain about unoriginality about the trope, but on one hand, eventually every damn long-running series gets around to doing it anyway. On the other hand, the original idea for this episode, with the Doctor MIA and the companions Sarah, Rose, Martha and/or Donna having to save the universe without him, might have been a lot more interesting. But this is minor. My bigger problem with the episode is this: it isn't science fiction. It's fantasy.

Oh, you might argue that Doctor Who's science is dodgy anyway, but that's not what I'm talking about. Plot holes aside, there's always been a sense of consistency, of story logic behind Doctor Who, and one based if not on real science, on some degree of technobabble that assures the audience that there is some kind of cause-effect going on underneath it all, even if it boils down to "timey-wimey". In this episode, the plot holes are gaping, and Davies all but abandons any pretense of wanting to explain it away, and concentrates on just doing what he wants.

But more on Turn Left, after the cut.

Turn Left's basic conceit, that the universe can turn on small decisions - basically, the "for want of a nail" theory, is basic enough, and Davies is using it to underscore the importance of Donna. But the truth of the matter is, Davies doesn't really need to. We've already had a Companion as God scenario in Rose, and on one level this seems like another trope repetition. On another level, one suspects that Davies is not just trying, but insisting on a humanistic interpretation of Doctor Who.

I admit I'm struggling with a way to express this without sounding as if I completely hate what he's doing or saying that it's an invalid interpretation. For most of the series' history, we've had the Doctor as the main character, and while the Companion was created as the point-of-view character, the focus of the series has never really been from the Companion's viewpoint as such: the main role of the Companion is to provide a means for the viewer to relate to the series as well as to ask all the right questions so the Doctor can exposit and look very clever. Liz Shaw put it best (albeit off-screen): all the Doctor needs is someone to hand him his test tubes and tell him how clever he is.

The new series, however, for the last three seasons, has been hammering it into our heads (and this becomes more and more obvious as you look over Davies' tenure as a whole) that the Companion is also important, that they have lives, that they have significance, and that the Doctor is incomplete without their presence (The Deadly Assassin notwithstanding). That's all fine and good, but Davies has been overcompensating: it's not enough for him that the Companion is important, it's getting to the point where the Companion is becoming critical, and that's what Turn Left is all about. Rose was critical because she was Bad Wolf. Martha was critical because she was John the Baptist while the Doctor was locked up. And now Donna is critical because without her, the Doctor would have stood around like an idiot and drowned.

Yeah, I know that last one sounds harsh, but that's what Turn Left is telling us to swallow. The divergent point isn't that Donna turned left or right, but that nobody was there to tell the Doctor to "Leave now because the Thames is emptying into the tunnels, please."

Davies likes this "Companion is Important" or that "Humans are Important" theme. He really does. Where the classic series was content to let the Doctor wax poetic about how indomitable the human race is (The Ark in Space) or occasionally remark about how humans are his favourite species, Davies lets the humans do the heroic things. Now, unlike say, smallship1, I don't think this is out of malice or hatred of the Doctor: I just think that he's so in love with the novelty of the concept (which in Series 1 it was) that he's returning to it again and again. So Rose saves the universe, Martha saves the world, Donna is so brilliant that whole alternate universes coalesce around her, Jabe sacrifices herself, Gwyneth sacrifices herself, Pete Tyler sacrifices himself, Rose sacrifices herself, Kath McDonnell sacrifices herself, River sacrifices herself, Luke Rattigan sacrifices himself, Nameless Hostess sacrifices herself, Donna sacrifices herself in Turn Left... we begin to see a pattern (I'm not counting Jenny's sacrifice because that didn't really resolve the story). That's a lot of sacrifices to save the day in just 37 episodes. And to disagree with the Eighth Doctor, I don't think I'm seeing something that's not there.

Now, as I said, I'm not saying this is an invalid approach. But it's laying it on too thick, and it gets us further and further away from what the focus of the show should be (which is, surprise surprise, the Doctor), and leads to more and more irritation from people like smallship1. I don't agree with all that he says, but I do understand some of it, and some of his objections are not entirely off base.

But I digress. Back to my original thesis: how is Turn Left not science fiction but fantasy? Because in the end, what makes this divergent universe happen? Does this divergent universe even happen in the first place or is it just in Donna's head? What, in the end, was the point of this divergent universe? The great ending, with the ominous "Bad Wolf" repeated over and over again distracts you from examining Turn Left too closely, but when you do, you realize the entire episode doesn't really make sense.

Is that little bug actually changing history (that's one powerful bug, and dangerous)? How does that happen? If Donna's history is changed, then how does she end up in that fortune teller's hut to change history since she never ends up with the Doctor (paradox alert!). It's probably not in her head, because if it is, then how does Rose end up there and why is it so important that Rose ask her to change it back? More bizarrely, why does Rose tell the dying Alt!Donna to pass on the message? Doesn't Donna die? How does that memory and consciousness pass on to the other Donna? And why such a useless and non-specific piece of information as "Bad Wolf" when she could say, for example, "[Big Bad Villain] is coming"? What, ultimately, is the point of Donna's little side trip? She learns virtually nothing and it has no effect on the universe at large, since "Bad Wolf" shows up anyway, rendering Donna's passing on the message superfluous. It might actually make a bit of sense if this is all about Rose's jealousy and she's just screwing around with Donna and getting some sadistic pleasure by watching her die... but when I sit back and look at it, I do come out wondering, "So what?"

There are more plot oddities, but these are the major ones that don't fit the time travel/alternate history logic, and the memory transference can only really be explained by the magic of plot necessity. Oh, I could probably come up with something, but the point is that it's not at all apparent given the rules of the game set up in the episode... and Davies adroitly doesn't even set any rules so he can do anything. Science fiction has rules grounded in rationality, fantasy tends to dispense with them or reduce them to side issues, and these plot points are so central to the episode that to leave their basis or workings so vague is to really take it out of science fiction and into fantasy. And this is the first time I can sincerely say that this takes it out of bounds of what Doctor Who's about.

Some of the above questions may be explained next episode, but I'm laying bets that most of it won't because Davies will be too busy orchestrating the big booms. I'm confident we'll find the climax of Davies' tenure thrilling, and I'm sure the directing and acting will be top notch, but like nearly all of Series 4, I'm afraid it'll be an empty confection.

Comments

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Now, unlike say, smallship1, I don't think this is out of malice or hatred of the Doctor: I just think that he's so in love with the novelty of the concept (which in Series 1 it was) that he's returning to it again and again.

Which, in a professional writer, is incompetence. I'd accept that as an alternative explanation, possibly...except that I know RTD is a competent writer in other fields. So either his skill deserts him when it comes to writing nuWho, or he's doing it deliberately.

You're seeing in this episode things that I (and lil_shepherd, and inamac, and various other experienced fans) have been seeing on and off since "Rose." The plot holes, the slapdash approach to story logic, the insistence on thuddingly banal quasi-moral messages like "humans are brilliant yo", and above all the dumbing down of the main character so that he doesn't even know enough to come in out of the river...they've all been there from the beginning.

I really do wish--have wished for nearly four years--that this revival of Doctor Who could have been all that it should have been, something that I and others could whole-heartedly get behind and cheer. But it simply hasn't been that. And the reason for that is Russell T Davies. That he is also the reason it happened at all is just one of those sad ironies.

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

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.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Father's Day's logic was pretty clear cut. You change history, you create a wound in time which attracts Reapers like some kind of universal antibody (all this is pretty much explicitly stated). The vanishing-reappearing car is the universe trying to repair itself. You don't need a sentient universe for that; you can analogize it to, say nature abhorring a vacuum. It doesn't make any scientific sense but you can understand that's the reason, and that's because a concrete reason does exist.

Even why the Reapers didn't appear before in the series can be sussed out through the Doctor's remark about how the Time Lords, if they were around, could have fixed things (presumably before the Reapers arrived, or perhaps the Reapers now exist as a result of not having Time Lords to fix things - take your pick). Either way, you actually have explanations your mind can seize on.

Here, nothing in the script tells us how the beetle works. In her mind? Transport her into an alternate? Create an alternate universe enclosing her? Rewrite the current universe like a palimpsest? Any of these explanations, by the way, begs how each of these interact with Rose the All Mysterious, and what precisely she's doing.

Davies has set no rules - the beetle can do whatever the story demands of it, Rose can do whatever the story demands of her, ditto Donna. This is the essence of magic: we impose our will upon the world and things change by sheer will, no other explanation sought, no other explanation required. It might be different if being mysterious was the point, but it wasn't.

The transference of memories is even worse. Even if there was some transuniversal bleedthrough as you suggest, how did Rose know that was going to happen? She doesn't know anything about the beetle, so it can't be that she thinks, oh, okay, beetle dies, Donna gets some psychic splashover. And again, why such a completely useless bit of information?

The other thing is yes, the human race is doomed because the Doctor isn't there. But why isn't the Doctor there? Because there wasn't a human around to help him.

Your mileage obviously varies, of course.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Back when I was still trying to make sense of this, I theorised that the Reapers were what the Time Lords used to fix extreme cases. The logic being that the universe doesn't give a damn what happens to history, but the Time Lords do. Once the Time Lords were gone, there was no-one to control the Reapers, and presumably they chewed through the wire and got out.

The fact that history is changed anyway, because the car didn't hit Pete in exactly the same place and at exactly the same time, is what blows the whole thing to splinters. Nature abhorring a vacuum is one thing: nature deciding that oh well, it's technically a vacuum but we'll let it go this once is another. That kind of decision, the kind that says stopping the fall of Pompeii is changing history but saving one family who would otherwise have died isn't, requires some form of consciousness.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"That kind of decision, the kind that says stopping the fall of Pompeii is changing history but saving one family who would otherwise have died isn't, requires some form of consciousness."

Not necessarily. Depends on what interaction that family has with the rest of the universe therafter, and whether over the years/centuries their contribution is amplified or nulls out.

Basically, it's all about metastable equilibria.

Consider a ball sitting in a valley between two hills (in a two dimensional universe, for simplicity's sake): Push the ball slightly up one hill, then let go... it just wobbles back and forth a bit and after a time, it's sitting exactly where you found it. The original equilibrium is restored. This is called a "stable equilibrium".

The snag about a stable equilbrium is that in the real world, there's no such thing (except possibly the inside of a black hole, and the jury's still out on that one). The hills either side of the valley are not infinitely tall. Kickj the ball hard enough that it rolls as far as the top of the hill, and then starts to slip down the other side... The ball eventually settles (after some more wobbling back and forth) in some new location, a new "stable equilibrium". The world is permanently changed. (Or at least until someone nervously walks across to the next valley and says "can we have our ball back?") So in reality, what looked like a stable equilibrium is only *metastable*.

If you push the ball *just* to the top of the hill, and carefully balance it there, then you have an *unstable* equilibrium. It'll stay put... Until just the tiniest breeze blows, and off it rolls in one direction or another. This of course is the equivalent of the butterfly scenario beloved of chaos theory.

Now expand this simple two-dimensional scenario into a more complex terrain in 3D, and replace the ball with water, and you have the "river of time" analogy I've spoken of before. Same basic outcomes: Small changes *usually* null out after a period of oscillation, but in certain cases (unstable equilibrium cases) they can lead to much bigger changes. No consciousness is required, just simple laws of attraction that draw the flow of history toward certain preferred, low-energy states.

What it does require, though, is some kind of *explanation*... Which the show never bothers to give, preferring to either leave things "mysterious" or just hope nobody notices the issue 'cos they're distracted by the alleged "happy ending".