#hmp42

[teacupsandcyanide]

I always thought the twelfth Doctor’s guitar looked weird to me because I didn’t know enough about guitars but apparently no it is on record everywhere as “weird fucking little guitar” and Peter Capaldi picked it up secondhand in a shop because he thought it looked like “a Fender Stratocaster had been described to someone who had never seen one”

[teacupsandcyanide]

[teacupsandcyanide]

i was obsessively cataloguing screencaps of the twelfth doctor's tardis interior, like a normal person, and i noticed this:

shot from extremis, series 10, when Bill finds the TARDIS parked inside her bedroom halfway through a date, and there is LAUNDRY BASKET in the console room. and i'm thinking. the fuck is a white wicker laundry basket doing in the – oh no.

go to the shooting script

they STOLE her laundry basket.

you come home with a cute girl and then the pope is bursting out of your bedroom (you're gay) and you find that your queer elder teacher has parked his house in your room (in the middle of your gay date) and he's got a bunch of cardinals with him and they're all wandering around your laundry basket like lost pigeons

[teacupsandcyanide]

Not to bring up something you said literally ages ago but I think once you said something like the tenth Doctor is slightly homophobic because he designed himself to appeal to Rose Tyler? Since I desperately want an explanation for why he acts like such a straight man in season 2 can you please elaborate on that I'm very fascinated by the concept of the Doctor having internalized homophobia

Oh boy oh boy this is might get me anon hate

For me, it’s more of a heteronormative thing, there’s an insecurity in and enforcing of gender as well as sexuality. The Ninth Doctor seems quite secure in his gender expression, and he’s unbothered by Jack’s flagrant pansexuality. Ten, by contrast, acts like Jack’s sexuality is an irritant or an embarrassment, competes with every man around him, and randomly says weird shit. His mocking Mickey by comparing him to a girl (“I’m seeing pigtails, frilly skirt”) and the time he was observing the hairs standing up on his skin and said to Rose “look at the hairs on my manly hairy hand” come to mind. Emasculating his rival and asserting his own gender as “manly” is pure straight man behaviour - though the latter also reminds me of trans mascs jokingly affirming their own gender, something I have done myself.

The Doctor is often a character who likes to take charge of any room they walk into, but there’s something about Ten that - particularly in season 2 - reads as a need to prove himself. He has this faint macho impulse despite not being a typically macho kind of guy. His masculinity is the geekish kind which is rooted in assertions of intelligence and uniqueness over brawn and mediocrity. Not all of this is distasteful or even explicitly heteronormative, but what is revolves around desirability to the women around him: he throws out “I’m a Lord of Time” to the King of France in front of Reinette, goes out of his way to belittle and humiliate Mickey, and gets cranky when Jack flirts with Martha. Sometimes I think half his distaste towards Jack’s sexuality is just him fuming that he’s not the prettiest boy in the room anymore.

As a kid, and even as a Rose and Ten shipper back then, I found it quite jarring that the Doctor was suddenly saying things like “yeah, still got it” after his companion made out with him. The sudden participation in the modes of heterosexuality was noticeable and strange. I know the Doyleist explanation for this is just that the writers, particularly RTD, decided that Ten was going to be a ladies’ man. My Watsonian explanation is that the Ninth Doctor died out of love for Rose, and then regenerated into what the Doctor estimated to be her perfect man. It’s an extension of something RTD once said about Ten having a vaguely London accent because he “imprinted” on Rose.

This sounds like I’m saying it was all terribly romantic, but to be honest, I think it’s all terribly fucked up. The emphasis here is on “estimated”, because the Doctor didn’t actually regenerate into Rose’s perfect man, he regenerated into the picture his own neuroses and biased observations painted of Rose’s perfect man. He saw her admire dark-haired white men with pretty boy faces, two out of her three other love interests are characterised as geeks, and most importantly he saw her initial reaction to Jack’s queerness and he internalised it.

Quite apart from her should-be-infamous “you’re so gay [derogatory]” moment, Rose acts entry level homophobic when she finds out Jack is attracted to men. We see her obvious dismay even when the Doctor and Jack make it clear that Jack is also still attracted to women, and she’s never quite as interested in him after that. I do personally believe it’s a matter of Rose simply getting used to Jack (him not being a shiny new attraction anymore) and being more attracted to the Doctor, who is set up to be her monogamous primary love interest, but it’s worth noting that the Doctor witnesses how queerness makes Jack less desirable to Rose. I think Rose is nineteen and sheltered and grows out of her homophobia, but the Doctor internalises it.

Rose’s perfect man, based on what the Doctor saw she admired and disliked in Mickey, Adam, and Jack, is intelligent, a bit of a geek but still stylish, charismatic, pretty but absolutely not effeminate, boyish but still a man, and straight as a ruler. And that is what Ten constantly asserts himself to be throughout season 2. It gets off to an abrupt start too - the Doctor literally leaving the polyamorous pansexual guy behind them. The inconvenient thing about cutting out the third wheel character so you can focus on the two you’ve decided are solely love interests to each other now is that it will feel like the Doctor getting rid of the competition, or worse, getting rid of the guy he could not pretend to be straight around. Adding in a scene where the Doctor homoerotically stares at him through a window while he’s all sweaty, telling him “I can’t be around you because you’re an abomination and make me feel all weird”, isn’t going to beat the allegations.

Even his flirtation with Reinette is tinged with some amount of performance. Not the romance itself, but the scene where he gets back to the ship after the party and Rose reacts like he’s her philandering husband. Ten plays up to it, because within heterosexuality a man being desirable to other women makes him even more desirable. There is a hint of pride that now he’s the object of jealousy.

This posturing lingers on into much of season 3 because he’s still trying to impress and charm Martha. I know people vary wildly on what Ten wants from her and what he won’t allow himself to want, but it does seem undeniable that he wants to be desirable to her. It’s interrupted by the arrival of the Master, who so disrupts the Doctor’s performance of heterosexuality (already made shaky by Jack’s return and continued presence) that he pretty much permanently shatters it. I’d argue the Master himself is aware of this, given the fact that he mimics and mocks the Doctor by taking up with a white blonde girl, who the Doctor himself later jokes was a beard. (Doctor, you can’t really joke that the woman who was meant to parody your love interest was a beard without some implications falling back on you.)

To be clear, I’m not making this argument in a bid to paint Ten as more problematic, but to find narrative context for the homophobia and heteronormativity that was written into the character and then somewhat abandoned. Maybe this is all an unfair assessment, and I have to admit it is difficult to extricate my perception of Ten’s gender presentation from the phenomenon of geek men idolising that exact gender presentation as desirable, relatable, and attainable. It is particularly interesting, but a whole other essay, to note the fact that the geek men who do this encompass both queer and straight, trans and cis, but that the the Tenth Doctor as interpolated into the genders of cishet geek men tends to resemble his season 2 self the most, while trans mascs gravitate more towards the disarrayed homoeroticism of his behaviour around the Master or his borderline GBF-ified tendencies around Donna. And honestly, I’d count myself as a non-binary geek whose gender was influenced by the Tenth Doctor, and for myself there has been a process of divorcing that posturing macho thing from the effervescent boyishness that remains charming.

[teacupsandcyanide]

RTD telling Freema her character wouldn’t move beyond unrequited love for the Doctor during her initial tenure as companion because it’s important that we show that sometimes suffering happens feels rich coming from the guy who dug Ten up twice so that he could endgame with his girlfriend and his QPP at the same time and also still be the Doctor and also never die and also Rose got a replacement dad and also Ruby’s bio mum wanted to love her and and also there were no long term consequences from Donna’s memory wipe post Star Beast and also there was no bad blood between her and the Doctor over it and also Bel wasn’t mad that she got forced to be a mother and also INTRODUCING BILLIE PIPER

[teacupsandcyanide]

[teacupsandcyanide]

See okay, re: Donna’s original ending.

Things I don’t have a problem with:

It being sad

Memory loss as a method of separation / narrative device

The absolute horror of Donna losing her memories to the point where she also loses the personal growth she gained while travelling

The Doctor and Wilf and Sylvia being sad and pained about this

Things I do have a problem with:

I actually don’t mind that he does it against her will but I don’t like that it’s framed as noble and tragic, rather than a very dark thing to do, a violation of trust and consent and a “I know best” pull typical of Ten’s more Time Lord Victorious moments

Like I get that we’re meant to believe that it was mindwipe or death, but the last thing we see Donna do is sob and beg the Doctor not to wipe her mind while he forces a mindwipe on her, then it’s framed as something that happened rather than a choice

There’s a lingering focus on his pain, his loss of her, his angst at having to wipe her memories and stop existing to her. This is understandable to a point, but it does sometimes feel like Donna losing her memories and some of her personality is something that happens to the Doctor, not Donna.

I actually quite like aspects of Star Beast but one of the problems I have with it and with the 60th specials in general is that they continue this framing of the mindwipe as Something That Happened rather than a choice the Doctor made, even if it was a choice that was dark but ultimately necessary to keep Donna alive.

Donna is granted stunningly little interiority about it when it comes to anything more complicated than “oh wow, a whole life I forgot”. She’s never mad at him, not even in a “I get you had to do it and I guess I’m glad you did but I still have to process the violation of trust” way. She’s only mad that she gave the lottery money away because of her subconscious principles. And this from a character who has “hot tempered” and “bossy” as main traits. I fully expected a bit of resentment to come out more in Wild Blue Yonder and that would have been the perfect time to deal with it, but instead she’s not even cross when he nearly leaves her behind (which, again, seriously?? She’s not even gonna give him a bit of lip over it? Donna “I’m not blinking flip jumping I’m supposed to be getting married” Noble’s fate is to be platonically Taming-of-the-Shrew’d?).

I think it’s also buckwild to see the Doctor return to this companion whose memory he wiped and express no real guilt about having done it, when in the intervening years he’s seen the effects that memory/history tampering had on Amy and Rory, had his own memory wiped of Clara, and been called out by Bill on the whole “it’s fucked to go around wiping people’s memories” thing. (This is also why I didn’t like Thirteen wiping Ada’s memory and the like, but that’s a side tangent and a much smaller quibble.)

[teacupsandcyanide]

they should invent a new “getting out of bed” where you don’t have to get out of bed