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Doctor Who 172: "Rise of the Cybermen"/"The Age of Steel"
I increasingly feel like my starting with Ten did Rose a great disservice (as well as, obviously, Nine. Sorry, Christopher Eccleston! It's your lot in life).
She is…not very sympathetic at times in these episodes! She does not treat Mickey very well! The Doctor doesn't treat him well either, to be fair, but the Doctor is a) an idiot b) clearly not very smart, emotionally speaking. It's clear that on some level the show is about the Doctor grappling with his relationships with other people, and he's clearly very bad at it, which given his whole everything means I am inclined to grade him on a curve. I grade Rose on a curve too, given that she is young, but even as a young 20-something idiot, her behavior to Mickey is shitty and her behavior towards the Doctor, which clearly arises out of deep-seated insecurities about her feelings for him and his feelings for her (which both is and isn't justifiable), is also kind of shitty at times, particularly the random petty jealousies. You are the one in the TARDIS with him, girl! That has to count for something! You should know that it does count for something!
All that said, I deeply enjoyed that they went into the party as waiters, and Ten's extremely "oh shit" face in the background of the shots with the President and the Cybermen. And just in general the brilliance of the parallel worlds conceit cuts so many ways--Mickey seeing an alternative way of being himself, the audience seeing that he has more to him than we've seen so far, Rickey being the leader of the Prophets as the parallel to Mickey being the only one with genre savvy--it's a really great way to set up everything. Rose, by contrast, doesn't come off so well: her parallel mother is a jerk to her (perhaps understandably, but still a jerk) and she tries to treat Peter Tyler as her dad when, well, he isn't, which to his credit he recognizes, even if it's unintentionally cruel.
The thing about Ten is that as much as he is an idiot about feelings and emotions, he also…isn't? He's very good at managing people in certain ways, and he's good in a crisis, even if he is just making it up as he goes along, as Mickey (Mickey!) correctly points out in this episode. He's got a groove, and he knows how to work it. And that mixture of competency and extreme idiocy is what makes him interesting, even as his speech in 171 about how everybody dies and leaves him alone does sort of lead to the question of how he hasn't become a sociopath or a megalomaniac. Let's put a pin in that one for now.
All that being said, if all the Time Lords were like the Doctor, the idea of them flitting between parallel universes to wreak havoc as they pleased is rather horrifying. Ten says at the end of this episode that they won't ever be able to come back to this universe, but consider: perhaps that's actually a good thing. It might be for the best that there are limits on his sphere of influence. And perhaps this universe already has its Doctor.
She is…not very sympathetic at times in these episodes! She does not treat Mickey very well! The Doctor doesn't treat him well either, to be fair, but the Doctor is a) an idiot b) clearly not very smart, emotionally speaking. It's clear that on some level the show is about the Doctor grappling with his relationships with other people, and he's clearly very bad at it, which given his whole everything means I am inclined to grade him on a curve. I grade Rose on a curve too, given that she is young, but even as a young 20-something idiot, her behavior to Mickey is shitty and her behavior towards the Doctor, which clearly arises out of deep-seated insecurities about her feelings for him and his feelings for her (which both is and isn't justifiable), is also kind of shitty at times, particularly the random petty jealousies. You are the one in the TARDIS with him, girl! That has to count for something! You should know that it does count for something!
All that said, I deeply enjoyed that they went into the party as waiters, and Ten's extremely "oh shit" face in the background of the shots with the President and the Cybermen. And just in general the brilliance of the parallel worlds conceit cuts so many ways--Mickey seeing an alternative way of being himself, the audience seeing that he has more to him than we've seen so far, Rickey being the leader of the Prophets as the parallel to Mickey being the only one with genre savvy--it's a really great way to set up everything. Rose, by contrast, doesn't come off so well: her parallel mother is a jerk to her (perhaps understandably, but still a jerk) and she tries to treat Peter Tyler as her dad when, well, he isn't, which to his credit he recognizes, even if it's unintentionally cruel.
The thing about Ten is that as much as he is an idiot about feelings and emotions, he also…isn't? He's very good at managing people in certain ways, and he's good in a crisis, even if he is just making it up as he goes along, as Mickey (Mickey!) correctly points out in this episode. He's got a groove, and he knows how to work it. And that mixture of competency and extreme idiocy is what makes him interesting, even as his speech in 171 about how everybody dies and leaves him alone does sort of lead to the question of how he hasn't become a sociopath or a megalomaniac. Let's put a pin in that one for now.
All that being said, if all the Time Lords were like the Doctor, the idea of them flitting between parallel universes to wreak havoc as they pleased is rather horrifying. Ten says at the end of this episode that they won't ever be able to come back to this universe, but consider: perhaps that's actually a good thing. It might be for the best that there are limits on his sphere of influence. And perhaps this universe already has its Doctor.