Confession #10: I Wish the Doctor Wouldn't Lie About His Age

I'm hardly the first person to rant about this, but I have to say it's one of the things that bugs me most about the on-screen revival of the Doctor: he's constantly lying about his age.  Oh, sure, you can hide behind the old saw that he really has no clue - what with all his traipsing through time and space, I've no doubt that he's lost track exactly - but that's really no excuse.

Think on this.  There have been nearly a dozen occasions when the Doctor specified his age (I'm only considering televised episodes here - no spin-off media, since those bring in a whole extra level of complexity and continuity issues).  My research indicates he gave his age in the following episodes with the numbers indicated:

Tomb of the Cybermen:  450
Mind of Evil:  "several thousand years"
DW and the Silurians and Planet of the Spiders:  748
Brain of Morbius and Seeds of Death:  749
Robots of Death:  750
Key to Time (Ribos Operation):  756 759
Revelation of the Daleks and Trial of a Timelord:  "900, more or less"
Time and the Rani:  953

Two of these situations in particular lead me to believe the Time Lords, at least, had ways of keeping track of such things.  For starters, Romana has his exact age (759) on the tip of her tongue when the question of whether or not the Doctor is "old" is raised at the beginning of The Ribos Operation.  He corrects her ("756!"), but she claims he's "lost count somewhere," suggesting his age (or date of birth, even) is part of the "confidential" information to which Romana seems privy (what with details of his Academy record also blithely cascading forth).

My second piece of evidence along these lines is that in his first adventure in his new incarnation, Seven uses his age - 953 - as the door code to the Rani's lab (it's supposed to be her age, too; maybe it's something about those Academy records after all...).  At this stage, he's clearly still got an accurate count - at least by some calendar - on his age, since otherwise the number the Rani used would not have matched.  Somewhere within the next two incarnations, something happens to change that.

Maybe it's something to do with the Last Great Time War (though that seems a bit melodramatic); the loss of his home planet has completely thrown off the Doctor's sense of the relative passage of time.  That at least fits with the idea that other Time Lords knew how old he was - it might have taken their presence to keep him grounded (or honest, depending on how you see it).  Or maybe it's some unknown timey-wimey adventure that regressed his physical age by a couple hundred years, and he's decided that should count toward his overall stated age.  Frankly, any fan can come up with some vaguely plausible explanation to suit her or his own views on canon.

Personally, I think it's just the Time Lord equivalent of "39 and holding."  When he spouted off to Rose about "900 years of time and space," I think he was talking about the time since he'd first stolen the TARDIS.  When she called him on it, he panicked - or, thinking that there was no one left to disabuse her of the notion, decided quite deliberately that there was no harm in claiming it as his age.

From that point on, it's a bit of a different story.  In order not to be caught in a lie, especially now that he's gotten in the practice of popping back and having his various Companions meet each other, I believe he made a conscious decision to start trying to be consistent.  I'm sure he doesn't want his friends comparing notes and finding any more inconsistencies than they already do.  So once he gave the lie to Rose, he's decided to "play it straight" for a while and stick with the spurious personal timeline he gave her.

For those who know he gladly told an earlier Companion he was half a century beyond that age two regenerations before, it's irksome.  It'd be nice if he'd fess up that he shaved off a couple of centuries in there somewhere, even if he doesn't know precisely how old he really is.  He could call it a "new age for a new Age," or some such rot.  I suppose we'll just have to be satisfied that he's trying to be self-consistent with what he's been telling people since the LGTW, since we all know how likely it is that the Doctor will ever admit to that kind of prevarication.

After all, as Four once said, "there's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes!"

Confession #9: I'm Tired of Catchphrases

The Daleks just wouldn't be the Daleks if they didn't trundle around screaming Exterminate!, but before Nu-Who (or "the RTD era," as some would prefer the beginning of the Doctor's on-screen return to be called), they pretty much had the monopoly on catchphrases.  These days, everybody's got one, from the Cybermen (Delete!) to the Sontarans (Sontar-ha!) to the Doctor himself (the repeated use of Geronimo! is the one thing that really rubs me the wrong way about Eleven).  Even the Companions are getting into the act (Spoilers, anyone?).

Since when was having a clearly identifiable catchphrase cool?  Somehow "fantastic!" didn't sound as inane coming from Nine's lips, but perhaps I just wasn't yet inured to the idea of the same word popping out of the Doctor's mouth every other episode.  It gets much worse with Ten, who even goes so far as to consciously cultivate a catchphrase in Army of Ghosts:  "I like that: allons-y! I should say 'allons-y' more often."  And, of course, after that he does.  He even gets to uncork his self-proclaimed ideal catchphrase ("Allons-y, Alonzo!") in Voyage of the Damned.

It's getting out of control.  For a particular example, put yourself in the Doctor's place.  I mean seriously - you're about to sacrifice everything in a last-ditch effort to save the entire universe, you have one last chance to say something to your beloved friends, and you choose... "Geronimo"?!  What sort of shitty "famous last word" is that?  I mean, generally speaking, I dearly love Moffat's writing (The Curse of Fatal Death still puts me in danger of snorting my drink out my nose every time), but c'mon...

In a sense, there were also a few catchphrases Back When, but - when they existed - they were somehow cooler.  (Note a key difference here, too - each catchphrase in question is an actual phrase, rather than a single word.)  They were more like an Easter egg than anything; there was a bit of fan-service thrill to it.  Who didn't love to hear Two say, "when I say 'run,' run!" or, "oh, my giddy aunt"?  Most famous, of course, is Three's "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" (used just twice as the complete phrase, and more often as simply "reverse the polarity").  In its shortened form, it was also later uttered once by Four and twice by Five.  Even Ten claimed to have been out of practice to have taken so long to reverse the polarity of Lazarus' machine in The Lazarus Experiment.  It may, thereby, be the only catchphrase to span multiple Doctors (and the pre-/post-2005 eras).

Why can't there be more of those cool little sayings these days instead of one-word-character-definers?  Granted, there will always be "Exterminate!" but that's pretty firmly in the cool/terrifying camp - a shorthand, if you will, for "now you should be really, really scared!" - rather than the pithy utterances that have been cropping up in scripts everywhere since 2005, like literary daisies.  Eleven's "[insert item of clothing here] are cool" is a great step in the right direction - see, quotable whole phrases can't be that hard to concoct - but there needs to be a simultaneous reduction of the copious single-word memes in the scripts overall.

In other words, I'm really ready for the writers to Pith Off.

Confession #4: I Hate the "Standard" Regenerations

Warning:

This site (specifically, this post) contains profanity.  If you can't handle that, turn back now.

When Nine regenerated into Ten, Rose looked on in consternation as all the energy of the Time Vortex streamed back out of him as a bright, shining light pouring from his arms and head.  It was dramatic, it was beautifully done, and it was appropriate.  So what the hell was going on when the same effect turned the Jacobi-Master into the Simms-Master?  He'd just been shot, for shit's sake - why would he get all glowy?

Former Head Writer/Executive Producer Russell T. Davies (commonly known as RTD) would have us believe that there needed to be a sense of continuity about the regeneration process, or new viewers wouldn't understand that it was the way all Timelords change their bodies whenever they near death.  Give me a fucking break.  Are we really so stupid we can't figure out that a body change is still a body change?  How does it make sense to have all regenerations the same, no matter the cause?  If a Timelord dies of a paper cut, should his regeneration cause him to stand up from where he's collapsed and shoot golden light out of every orifice?  Hardly.  That's clearly something else coming out of one of RTD's orifices, if you ask me.

Who knows what current head honcho Steven Moffat (aka The Grand Moff) will decide to do when it's time for Eleven to become Twelve, but I sincerely hope he gives fans a bit more credit in the mental capacity department.  He always challenges us to pay attention to little details in order to get to the heart of one of his twisted plots, so I'd like to think he'll be willing to throw this RTD-era relic of "standard" regenerations in the bin where it belongs.  I advocate the return of the Unique Regeneration - a process that is specific to the place, time, and method of the Doctor's (or other Timelord's) death.

Just look back at the history.  From One through Seven, we witness each Doctor undergo regeneration from a new cause of death, and each time it's a little different.  Check out the details to see what I mean:

One to Two - Apparent ill health / old age
          morph while collapsed
Two to Three - Decreed by Timelords
          off-screen; new Doctor stumbles from TARDIS
Three to Four* - Radiation poisoning
          K'anpo "kick starts" process, morph where collapsed
Four to Five - Fell from a height
          Watcher merged with Four, became Five
Five to Six - Spectrox toxemia; antidote given to Peri
          Hallucinations, morph where collapsed
Six to Seven* - Cranial(?) trauma when TARDIS hijacked
          morph when rolled over by a Tetrap
Seven to Eight - Cardiac surgery gone wrong
          morph on slab in morgue fridge
*These are regenerations I've only seen in snippets on YouTube, rather than in full episode context.

Compare these to the Nu-Who regenerations we've seen so far:

Nine to Ten - Absorbed all the energy of the Time Vortex
          standing morph; golden light of Time Vortex shooting from head, arms
Jacobi-Master to Simms-Master - Shot by companion Chan Tho
          standing morph; golden light shooting from head, arms
Ten to Ten Point Two* - Shot by Dalek
          standing morph; golden light shooting from head, arms
Ten to Eleven - Extreme radiation exposure
          standing morph; golden light shooting from head, arms
*Hardly counts as a regeneration; merely setting the stage for the Timelord-human metacrisis.

Does anybody else see anything wrong with this picture? Why is there no correlation between the manner of death and regeneration in Nu-Who?  Worse, why is there a brilliant connection in the first case, and nonsensical repetition ever after?  Once again, this feels like a case where RTD's fanboy'er-than-thou attitude has gotten the better of him. In the land of Russell Knows Best, Classic canon has been chucked out the window (let's not review the Doctor's purported age too closely in that light, shall we?) and RTD's poorly-thought-out vision inflicted on all of us.  Let's just hope the Grand Moff sees the not-shooting-golden light.

Maybe I'm being a bit hard on RTD (lord knows I'm not the only one); he did, after all, do a lot of things right, not the least of which is bringing the whole shebang back to our screens and introducing a whole new batch of people to Doctor Who (THANK YOU!).   But I'm sticking to my guns on this one.  Regeneration is as individual as death; every person experiences it differently, and as we are all well aware, every Doctor is a unique person.  Let's do them each the honor of allowing their final moments to be truly distinct.

Confession #1: I Am a Neo-Whovian

My folks didn't watch a whole lot of tv when I was growing up, and when they did, it was mostly PBS (public broadcasting). I suppose that's why on very rare occasions, I'd come across my dad watching some unknowably ridiculous thing and have to ask what it was. A few times, it would be Star Trek, which - as an American - is a show I learned quite a bit about, eventually becoming a bit of a Trekker myself in college (where we watched new episodes of TNG religiously). On at least one occasion, though, I remember being really taken aback at the absurdity of the two minutes of something-random I watched with my dad. That was my first introduction to Doctor Who.

It wasn't a part of the American psyche the way it was - is - in Britain. I mean, sure, I'd heard of Doctor Who and its slightly... OK, very eccentric fans. For example, the Doctor Who Club in college tended to consist of shady figures who wore long woolen cloaks around campus (come to think of it, many of them were part of the campus Druids, too...), which didn't particularly inspire the uninitiated to jump right in and join the fandom. I didn't really know much of anything about the show, though. I'm a bit embarrassed in retrospect to admit that when my husband commented that the first little house we bought was like a TARDIS, he had to explain to me that he meant it was bigger on the inside.

Not until one of my friends nearly forced the "new series" (aka, Nu-Who) on me by showing me the first four episodes (which I thought were OK, but not exciting; thankfully he persisted) did I really catch the fever. And when I did, I caught it bad. In the course of approximately two weeks, I watched the end of Series 1, the entirety of Series 2 and 3, and caught up to the then-currently-airing Series 4 at about episode 6. I have watched every episode from S04E07 (The Unicorn and the Wasp) onward as they were broadcast.

Perhaps it was the intensity of this experience - 36 episodes in 14 days is nothing to sneeze at - that branded it on my soul and made me want more. Lucky for me, there were another 26 seasons' worth of backlog on which to catch up! Being the obsessive personality that I am, I immediately started looking for a way to get my hands on as much as I could (more on that in my next Confession).

I understand that there are plenty of Neo-Whovians out there (those who, like me, cut their teeth on Nu-Who) who have never warmed to the Classic Doctors. But I don't understand why. It makes the whole Nu-Who experience so much richer when you have that sense of history, of continuity. How can you not love it all the more when you recognize that Ten's drawling "well..." is a holdover from Four, or that Eleven sitting in a chair confronting a baddy with just a jaw-wiggling non-response echoes Three's mannerisms perfectly?

This love of the entire series - Nu-Who and Classic Who alike - has led me to try to share the joy of stories well-told with anyone who will listen. I managed to get several members of my pipe band hooked on Nu-Who, for a start. From there, I've moved on to the Gospel according to Classic Who, and am currently introducing some of those same people to the wonders of Doctors One through Eight.

So in reality, I'm not just a Neo-Whovian, though that's certainly where my roots lie. I'm an evangelical Whovian. C'mon in. Join the choir.