Live-Blogging Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead
Posted 31 August 2008 in Doctor Who by Catriona
I have a confession to make: I’m doing this live-blogging while finishing watching an episode of 30 Rock and also playing the “Tower of Darkness” adventure on Dungeons and Dragons: Tiny Adventures.
But it shouldn’t interfere: after all, the encounters in Dungeons and Dragons only refresh every ten minutes or so.
30 Rock, on the other hand, was Nick’s idea. It is hilarious. I was uncertain about watching anything with Alec Baldwin in it, but I’m loving every episode. Of course, it’s being shown on free-to-air television at some ridiculous time analogous to the time that Arrested Development was shown—11 p.m. or 11:30 p.m., something like that—but that’s par for the course, isn’t it?
We’ve also decided to revamp our eating habits, and I now have a stomach full of fibre (especially bran) and fresh vegetables. So far, my body isn’t really enjoying this new pattern of behaviour. Apparently, it can cope with one healthy meal a day.
Whoops, the episode has started, while I was rubbishing on about irrelevant things.
I love you, Colin Salmon! You rock.
NICK: Where’s my iPhone?
ME: I don’t know! Just sit down and watch television!
I’m losing patience with Nick’s obsession with his iPhone—but then, I have no power over the situation, do I?
(He still hasn’t found it.)
And we’re back to everyone being chased by the skeletal remains of Proper Dave. Poor Proper Dave.
Oooh, hang on—we haven’t seen this country house before. (Nick is going to try ringing his iPhone.) And that’s Donna. Wait, what’s happening here?
(He’s found it.)
Hang on, that’s Doctor Moon! What’s he doing there? This manipulation of Donna’s memories and her behaviour is intensely creepy: that repeated “and then you remembered” is starting to seem thoroughly disturbing.
It’s so like Donna to go fishing in a black sequined tunic. And now she’s married? Wow. And with children? This is, perhaps, the creepiest sequence in the entire episode.
Fully integrated? Pardon?
Hey, that was the Doctor! And now Doctor Moon’s telling her to forget the Doctor? Okay, this is well disturbing. I don’t like the idea of people having control over my memory; I feel as though I have little enough control over it myself.
This back story with River and the Doctor is fascinating to me; I understand that a big influence was The Time Traveller’s Wife, but I’ve never read that. What it’s reminding me of is Slaughterhouse Five: “Listen. Billy Pilgrim’s come unstuck in time.”
Oh, so they’re quarreling like an old married couple, are they? I’ve heard a lot of debates about what these two are to each other, but to me it seems quite clear: she’s his wife. Or she will be.
Oh, a doctor moon is a virus checker that supports and maintains the computer at the centre of the planet? Well, that answers some of my questions.
Now, that’s why I like River: for much the same reason as I like Donna. Donna is free from jealousy, and River, seeing Donna, demands to know whether the Doctor can get her back. They’re both free from jealousy, because they’re both secure in their relationship with the Doctor, different though their relationships are. We need more women like that on television, instead of the skeletal, insecure child-women that we’re supposed to enjoy. (It’s true: I’ve never got over the idea of Ally McBeal as a role model.)
(On the plus side, I just challenged the Captain of the Guard to a sword fight and won. Yay, me!)
Okay, that woman in the flowing Victorian garb is thoroughly creepy. And now the little girl doesn’t want Donna to have anything to do with her? So what does that imply about Donna’s current existence?
See, this mysterious woman points out that Donna has suspected that this world is not right before it is pointed out to her.
(Wow, that’s a lovely shot, with them all running along the bridge from one building to another.)
She’s not stupid, Donna: that’s my point.
I feel as though I can’t type fast enough to deal with everything that’s being dealt with in this issue. And now Nick’s trying to make interesting ideological points to me, and I don’t have time to deal with them.
Oh, Doctor, honestly: I figured out what the Vashta Nerada were talking about when they mentioned their forests, long before you did.
Oh, dear: now Other Dave is repeating himself. He’s ghosting.
Nick thinks that the fact that the Doctor uses the word “soul” is problematic, since after Time Lords die, their minds are stored in the APC Net—the Matrix, before Keanu Reeves. For Time Lords, that is their afterlife. So the use of the word “soul” is suggestive—and perhaps not canonical.
(I managed to defeat a gargoyle in battle, but took four points of damage.)
Ah, now River’s talking about her Doctor, and how this Doctor doesn’t seem finished in comparison. This is fascinating. Solipsistic, yes, but fascinating. What happens to the Doctor in the interval, that whole armies run from him? Or, more to the point, that he’s willing to put himself in a position where he’ll face whole armies. Has he come to terms with the Time War and his genocide?
Oh, there’ll be reams of fan fiction written about this.
Nick wants me to add that it’s not problematic that someone’s stolen a person’s soul through a computer programme, but that it would be a sore point for the Doctor. I think my garbled rewriting of that is what Nick gets for introducing complicated ideological issues while I’m trying to live-blog a complicated episode.
River’s attitude is intriguing to me: she loves this man, that’s quite clear. But she doesn’t love this man. This man she finds frustrating and immature, essentially hard work.
DONNA: But this isn’t me? This isn’t my real body? But I’ve been dieting!
For some reason, that makes me laugh out loud every time.
I don’t buy the idea that “being brilliant and unloved” are the two qualities needed to reveal absolute truth. That seems odd. Being brilliant and having a frighteningly pixellated face would seem to be closer to the truth.
Damn! The little girl just deleted her own father! Now that’s strangely depressing.
Donna’s children seem to have a better grasp of what’s going on than Donna does.
Oh, dear: now Doctor Moon’s gone the same way as the little girl’s father. Poor Colin Salmon.
Nick’s excited because in the first shot of the gravity platform, you can see its reflection in the windows. Nick is easily excited by CGI.
That the children are conscious that they cease to exist when their mother isn’t looking? That’s horrible. How can they, processed to think that they’re small children, manage to cope with that idea?
Now the Doctor and River, and the others, are in the data core. Remind me never to wake my computer up from sleep mode. Apparently, it’s terribly cruel.
(I’ve just been stabbed by a thief. After chasing him and tackling him down a hill. That doesn’t seem fair.)
This child’s face on a statue is creepy. (I know, I’ve used the word creepy a hundred times in this blog entry, but it’s an intrinsically creepy episode.) I love reading as much as anyone. I dare say that I love reading more than many people do. But spending eternity as a computerised version of myself? In a giant library?
Actually, I’ll get back to you on that one.
Oh, Vashta Nerada—the Doctor’s not stupid. He didn’t need that much time to realise that Anita was already dead. Poor Anita. I felt worse, frankly, after Other Dave ghosted, and he died in a much more perfunctory fashion.
DOCTOR: I’m the Doctor, and you’re in the biggest library in the world. Look me up.
Oh, River! As soon as you punched the Doctor, I knew things weren’t going well.
DOCTOR: That’s my job!
RIVER: And I’m not allowed to have a career, I suppose?
Oh, they’re definitely married.
Now, this angle—the idea that the Doctor knew from the beginning of their relationship when and how she would die—this is the sort of thing that normally makes my brain ache. But Alex Kingston just acts the hell out of this scene.
(Embarrassing admission: I’m closer to crying at this point than I ever have been in all the episodes of Doctor Who. I cried unceasingly for the last ten minutes of season two of Torchwood, but Doctor Who—never. But this scene breaks my heart, and combined with Donna’s separation from Lee is almost too much for my stiff upper lip.)
Oh, Steven Moffat. How you (normally) hate killing people off. And I love you for it. I do so love a happy ending.
Oh, crap: cut to the Doctor staring at (what’s left of) River. That’s not a happy ending.
Dammit, Moffat! How am I supposed to cope now? Now you’ve decided that Lee may just be imaginary? That’s just cruel.
DONNA: Is “all right” special Time Lord code for “really not all right at all”?
DOCTOR: Why?
DONNA: Because I’m all right, too.
Damn, they come out of this episode damaged.
Oh, Moffat, you bastard! You absolute bastard! (I love you, Steven Moffat!) So Lee is real, but he can’t call out to Donna? Oh, why not just kill people off?
No, Doctor—you can’t leave it at “spoilers”. You know there’s more to it than that. There must be. Moffat hates killing people off! Remember, “everybody lives! Just this once, everybody lives!”
See! I knew that wasn’t the end of the story!
This running scene, here—this is the culmination of all those discussions about how much running the Doctor does. This is the Doctor actually running for his life, running for someone else’s life—not just avoiding a monster, but running when there is nothing else to do, no other way to save people.
And here we have absolute Moffat: he just hates killing people off. So Proper Dave, Other Dave, Anita, Miss Evanglista—all alive. And there’s Doctor Moon! Hurray!
I’ve heard it said that what the Doctor does here is cruel: trapping the woman he apparently loves in a computer that he knows is going to go insane. But I don’t think that that’s supposed to be the end result. I don’t think it should be assumed that the computer will go insane again: there’s a big difference between four thousand minds and five minds.
I understand that Moffat argued his way into keeping Donna’s children alive in the computer at the end of the episode, against executive producer Julie Gardner’s concerns. And that, in the end, they switched positions: she felt the ending with the children alive was ideal, and he came to see it as saccharine.
I can’t remember having any opinion on it at all: I was too busy trying to deal with the rest of the episode.
And that’s “Forest of the Dead.”
Next week: “Midnight.” Oh, dear lord, that’s going to be hard to rewatch.
(Still, I became so distracted by the live-blogging that I managed to kill a grick—I don’t know what that is, but it has tentacles—without noticing.)
Share your thoughts [5]
1
Tim wrote at Aug 31, 03:04 pm
> Donna is free from jealousy, and River, seeing Donna, demands to know whether the Doctor can get her back.
Except River, who already knows Donna’s fate, should know that the Doctor gets her back.
> What happens to the Doctor in the interval, that whole armies run from him? Or, more to the point, that he’s willing to put himself in a position where he’ll face whole armies.
Come to think of it, how is that different from the Doctor we’ve already seen? He’s stared down armies and tyrants before, hasn’t he?
For me, the ending spoiled what was otherwise a great episode. I can see why keeping River alive would create some problems from a production viewpoint, but they could easily gloss over them as they did for the Doctor’s daughter, and I would have preferred that to the simulated paradise solution.
We were explicitly told in the first part that the neural relay only records an incomplete impression of a mind — at the very least, the humans of that period don’t consider the data ghost to be a genuine human being (though as I’ve said, their reactions complicate that statement). But we’re clearly expected to believe that River and the other expedition members are, in some sense, real inside the computer.
Also, if this civilisation has access to effectively perfect neural recording and can recreate physical human bodies, they should be able to bring River and the other expedition members back to physical life.
For that matter, in a civilisation with that sort of technology, why was Charlotte dying?
And to come at that from the other end, what sort of family condemns a dying child to remain a child forever?
2
Catriona wrote at Aug 31, 08:50 pm
I don’t know that “Can you get her back?” necessarily means “Are you two going be be reunited?” In context, I thought it simply meant “Can you bring that image up again?”
I’ve been rabbiting on a great deal—probably too much, if this is a symptom of that—about this jealousy-free relationship Donna has with the Doctor. It’s one of the things that’s really stood out for me this season, which is why readings that argue that Donna clearly is jealous and heartbroken that the Doctor doesn’t love her drive me up the wall.
I’m so grateful to have a companion who isn’t in love with the Doctor that it’s highly likely I’m now over-stating the issue: I’m now actively looking for examples of non-jealousy (to coin a phrase) in characters I like.
Oddly enough, for once I didn’t want them to keep the character alive. I mean, I know they did—within the computer—but for once I didn’t want them to avoid a death scene. (Because it was a brilliant death scene.) Judging from what Moffat was saying on Doctor Who Confidential last night, it is intended to be a paradisiacal ending, but I know many people were uncomfortable with it.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about it, to be honest.
3
Matthew Smith wrote at Sep 1, 02:32 am
Yeah I thought this episode had a few holes. The stuff about the chip only recording an impression and then being able to recreate the dead expedition members was a flaw – unless after each one died, the computer was also to announce “Proper Dave has been saved” in which case we could surmise that the person was half-teleported moments before their death (but that would have spoiled the plot device of not knowing they were dead straight away). And if they can be stored, then we should be able to teleport them out as well so I agree with Tim there. I also thought it was weird that the characters which were just created by the computer to fill gaps were ambiguous as to whether they had minds of their own or were just projections of the mind perceiving them. If they were just projections, then where did Donna’s children’s minds come from after Donna was teleported out? Does this computer have the ability to spawn conscious entities ad-nauseam or did it somehow copy them out of Donna? Good episode all up though. I watched this around the time I found out Stephen Moffat was going to be the new head writer (or whatever the title is that Russell has been doing) and thought that I’d like to see more episodes like that.
4
Catriona wrote at Sep 1, 06:44 am
That’s a good point about the children, Matt: I hadn’t thought of that. Since all the children were the same, I suppose that the plausible assumption would be that, given these four-thousand minds to look after and deciding that the best way to do that is to give them a simulacrum of real life, the computer created the children as part of that illusion.
But, then, the children are either just like real children—in which case the computer does have the ability to create real, sentient—albeit electronic—life forms.
Or the children are limited computer programmes (and, frankly, I’ve always found very young children to be a little repetitive, especially in their likes/dislikes and their conversation, so you might be able to get away with that for a few years)—in which case, it raises further questions about, as you say, how complex the recreated expedition members were.
(I suppose the children could have been endlessly duplicated copies of children who happened to be in the Library when the Vashta Nerada attacked, but that seems not to be bourne out by the fact that they remain in the computer while the Library patrons are reactualised.)
And the children do seem to be more cognisant of the fact that they’re in a computer programme than the adults are: witness that conversation where the children tell Donna that they know they don’t exist when she’s not watching.
5
Matthew Smith wrote at Sep 2, 03:04 am
And just last night I was listening to a philosophy podcast discussing David Hume and his epistemology of skepticism towards the existence of unobserved objects! He would have been right at home in that computer. No wonder the philosophy academics are interested in Doctor Who!