rionaleonhart | Flinging The Lives Of Your Companions Around For Fun And Profit.

So. 'The Girl in the Fireplace'. Definitely not one of my favourite episodes, mostly because the ending infuriated me.

I was kind of hoping that someone would mention Captain Jack, seeing as they were in his home century, but no. Alas.

"It's a temporal hyperlink!"
"What's that?"
"No idea. Just made it up. I didn't want to say 'magic door'."
Hee!

...so, er, did the Doctor and Madame de Pompadour dance?

"Why can't we use the TARDIS?"
"We're part of events now! The TARDIS won't help us!"
THAT IS THE LAZIEST REASONING THAT I HAVE EVER SEEN. SOMETHING THAT MAKES SOME DEGREE OF SENSE PLEASE.

I'm glad Madame de Pompadour didn't become a companion. I mean, I know, very sad and all that, but, er, I found her rather irritating.

You know, it's kind of interesting that there was a huge suspenseful tragic love story on Madame de Pompadour's side, lasting for most of her life, but from the Doctor's point of view he knew her for less than a day.

I still love Mickey. Awww. ("You're not keeping the horse." "I let you keep Mickey!" Hee!)

And now for the main focus of this post: that 'OH I WILL GO OFF TO SAVE MY NEW LOVE WITH NO WAY OF RETURNING AND LEAVE MY COMPANIONS BEHIND' bit. Oh yes. A lot of people seem to have been expressing their anger about this and saying 'HE WOULDN'T LEAVE ROSE THERE HE IS IN LOVE WITH HER'. I have to say that my view is 'HE WOULDN'T LEAVE ROSE AND MICKEY THERE HE IS A HALFWAY DECENT BEING'. Love has nothing to do with it.

Okay, Doctor, I am so not happy with you right now. Seriously, you didn't know about the Deus Ex Fireplace. How, exactly, did you think you were going to get back to that spaceship? What if you didn't manage to survive another three thousand years? Even if you did, how would you have got up there? Did you think about any of these things?

As far as I can tell, you just abandoned Mickey and Rose on a fifty-first-century derelict spaceship. In jumping through that time window, you destroyed all the other exits into a remotely habitable world. Neither of them could fly the TARDIS. You knew this.

From the finale of the previous series, it seems that you are capable of operating the TARDIS remotely via sonic screwdriver. You could have sent Rose and Mickey back to Earth, so that they, y'know, wouldn't starve to death on an abandoned spaceship. If you were being really sensible, you could have sent them back to a year or so after the point you were heading to, met them and carried on with your time-travelling life. You did neither of these things.

Okay, perhaps you can't operate the TARDIS remotely - perhaps you could only activate the pre-programmed emergency protocol, which you have now disabled because you thought 'oh, well, I am sure that I will never need this program for sending Rose back to her own timeline again'. This would be a stupid thing to do, but let's say you did it.

You still don't abandon your companions. That is just Not On. Starving to death on an empty spaceship doesn't sound like fun to me. You should at the very least have sent them through one of the working Time Windows before you destroyed them all. Maybe they wouldn't be able to get back to their regular lives, but they'd have more of a life in eighteenth-century France than on that ship. Or you could have figured out a way of bringing them through the Time Window with you. Maybe you could have all managed to fit on the horse, if you sat very close. You could have done something, not just left them there, you git.

You know, I just think you get some sadistic pleasure out of dumping your companions on abandoned space stations. Jack, Rose, Mickey - do you just have something against all of my favourite characters?

Seriously. RAGE. The fact that they are not actually stuck there forever in no way makes him any less stupid.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't know; Nine's series did begin to have an emphasis on consequences towards the end (in particular the consequences of the Doctor's interference in 'The Long Game' coming back to haunt him in 'Bad Wolf'). The difference is that, let's be honest, that would have been a very difficult thing to predict. You just don't think 'okay, we've destroyed the broadcasting station, what if a century from now everyone's watching evil reality shows?' The consequences of jumping through that time window were staring him in the face. He knew that it would break the link - he said so, and if he had time to worry about the consequences of that for himself and decide to value Reinette above them, you'd think that he would have considered what would happen to his companions.

The problem with the "impressions" I get is that I have no idea where I get them from. They're just gut feeling. e_e So let's see if I actually had any idea what I was talking about.

I think what I said about the consequences thing I meant primarily for the Tenth Doctor. I can't vouch for how much personality usually changes between the Doctors prior to Nine, but I know there is some, at least, and this might be something that changed between Nine and Ten. On the other hand, remember 'Dalek'? Nine chose to shut the door without guarenteeing that Rose would escape. That wasn't about not knowing the consequences, but it was about putting history/current situation over himself/Companions. Granted, it was an entire country/world at stake then as opposed to a single woman, but the Doctor also probably knows better than we do how drastic the results of messing with the history of even one person could be on everything that ever happens following (ie: how much would Reinette's premature death screw the rest of history?).

And I don't know, it was something about the way he said that he knew he wouldn't be able to get back that gave me the impression that he KNEW, but he hadn't really THOUGHT about it. It was just kind of a knowledge in the back of his mind, because he really was in a hurry and sort of flustered in getting organized to go through the time window. Going back to what I said earlier, I do think Ten is less... level-headed? less concerned, perhaps? more nonchalant - about, well, everything than Nine was. Nine was more emotional; Ten seems more... eh, shallow - but on purpose, I think. I liked his bout of emotion in 'School Reunion' when he was explaining to Rose why it's so difficult for him to have Companions and why he'd never mentioned Sarah Jane before ("Humans decay, and I don't, Rose - you don't have any idea how hard it is to watch that happening," or something along those lines). I felt it showed that that was more his real feelings and the flightiness was sort of a cover - whereas Nine wore it all out on his sleeve.

But maybe that's just me looking for REPRESSED ANGST OMG.

Hahaha I contradicted myself in that second big (third actual) paragraph! XP What I meant was that he is sorta flighty to cover AND not have to deal with angsty inner feelings - it's a facade that's also a way of thinking, as it's as much a barrier from himself as from others. Thus, he does things like know consequences and not THINK about them, because he's flighty (need new adj wtf) like that. But not really on the occasion that he looks inside himseeeelf! AND WOW LOOK AT ME GO! YAY OVER-ANALYSIS. I bet you guys are gonna totally tear me to shreds now. XD

WAIT I'M NOT TOTALLY CRAZY CUZ WHEN REINETTE READ HIS MIND SHE'S ALL "OMG YOU'RE SO LONELY OH NOES!" SEE I'M RIGHT IT'S CANON REPRESSED ANGST YO.

hahahaha ow my head.

Flinging The Lives Of Your Companions Around For Fun And Profit.

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