Six: In Conclusion, The Differences
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Of course, the Two/Jamie // Edwin/Charles parallels don't always shake out exactly along those lines - and frankly, the task of comparing them is more interesting for it. For much the same reasons that it's exciting to talk about how Victoria seems like she's in tune with Jamie - until she isn't - or Zoe appears to mirror the Doctor - until she doesn't - looking at the points of divergence between Jamie & Charles or Edwin & the Doctor sheds just as revealing a light on the specifics of their characters, considering those previously-acknowledged ongoing similarities in their external situations.
Charles may take to being a ghost just as quickly as Jamie does being a time traveler - but he can hardly be said to keep pace with him. Obviously Jamie isn't from present-day earth, but he's still got some pretty solid connections to it, and he happens to be a companion at the time when the show first pulls the 'hey, out of all of time and space, we sure do seem to land on your earth a lot!' card it's now famous for - it's fairly familiar territory for him, and definitely closer to a world he'd still call home than his alien companion can. Likewise, Charles gets to witness, without interruption, the full and gradual shift the living world goes through from 1989 to 2023. Considering Edwin had a rather more drastic leap to make, popping down to hell in 1916 and not returning to earth again until 1989 - and how dense the global, cultural, and technological changes that 73-year span encompassed were - you might well expect Charles to continue to follow Jamie's lead and mirror his famous adaptability, his easygoing, down-to-earth skill at taking the years in stride and not letting the differences rattle him too much. But in the dead boys' case it's the opposite - Edwin is the one more in the habit of adapting himself to suit the altered world around him (certainly as the character whose personal arc was more directly focused-on in the one season that now comprises the entire show, he had more opportunities to demonstrate this), while Charles struggles more obviously with feeling left out of things.
This is probably because Edwin, for all the horror he endured, at least got a cleaner break from the world at his death, and consequently seems to think of himself as more separate from it anyway - a different problem to solve, surely, but one that seems to protect him from aching every time he can't connect with it the way Charles clearly wants to. And perhaps Jamie would be much the same as Charles is on this front, if he had to kind-of-but-not-really live through the 35 years immediately following his own home era, looking in, but still always separate from it in some crucial respect - though I still find it interesting that even in-universe, characters seem to expect Edwin to be the one of the pair more averse to change. "I know you don't like to try new things" Charles says to him, very early on in the show, and Edwin looks skeptical - understandably, I think, because all he does is try new things & step outside of a comfort zone that most things are decidedly on the other side of, but that he really never lets get in the way of him taking a crack at them anyway - a rather more Jamie-ish behavior, if anything.
Similarly, although Charles is - unsurprisingly - the one to insist upon associating with the living more, dragging Edwin into the world, and outright suggesting they add Crystal to the private space of the detective agency they've shared alone together for so long, it's never Jamie but rather the Doctor who brings the companions they pick up together onto the Tardis. That might feel less shocking since the Tardis belongs more specifically to him than the agency could ever be said to be Edwin's alone (though it's funny how the one chair at the main desk seems so exclusively his) - but Jamie doesn't just fail to invite Victoria or Zoe to travel with them, waiting for the Doctor to do so out of courtesy. He flat-out tells Zoe, when she tries to come with them at the end of Wheel In Space, that it's "impossible" after previously struggling to explain to her that there are "two different worlds" - hers, and the one he and the Doctor share in together. On Skaro, he actually needed to be told Victoria was joining them seriously, despite the obvious lack of other options available. For all his friendliness and tendency to befriend the people they meet on their adventures, Jamie clearly thinks of his life with the Doctor as private and not open to new additions, no matter how much he liked them personally already, or how glad he is to have them once they're there.
There are many, many more things to be said about both sets of characters and the shows that enabled them to become what they are - this post has already become several times the length I imagined it would be (literally) and still, I only let it get this long in the first place because I knew it was still technically the 'shorter' version, that it could've wound up even longer, if I actually cited every example of what I meant, and elaborated on every interpretive claim that I made. As it is, I did not know a shorter route than this that still felt like an adequate explanation, and perhaps that's my fault for not having enough conversations about Dr Who recently - hopefully this is the beginning of rectifying that - but we're here now, either way.
Hopefully, the point still stands that these two shows (or one show, and the hallmarks of a specific era of another & the pairing that defined that) remind me of one another in both broad and specific ways which I was surprised and fascinated to find present in Dead Boys, because so many of them played such a large role in making the Second Doctor's era - which I consider to be a unique, well-crafted, and exemplary piece of scifi tv and speculative fiction in general - more appealing & richer to dive into and discuss and think about than an awful lot of other stories, including ones that have had more typical elements in common & looked more similar from the outside.
Despite how long I've taken in making that point (and whether you're counting in time or in words, I come out of it equally badly lol), I still think it's simple enough one that even I couldn't obscure it underneath like 9k of ramblings spread across 8 different tumblr posts. I'm a bit envious of anyone that could've done it more efficiently, but one series has been out for a year and the other for rather longer than that, and on top of not having seen anyone else make the same argument yet, even in passing, I mainly needed to get these thoughts quasi-organized and out from existing exclusively in my own head at some point, and I've done that now so I can't be too bothered by anything else.
Since I've literally written shorter fics than this before, it doesn't seem inappropriate to say the usual, especially since it's truer than ever: Thanks for reading this far & if you have any thoughts on anything I've said at all, however ridiculous, I'd obviously be delighted to discuss them!
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