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[auntiemeesh]

I love episodes like this, the ones that play around with time and the consequences of changes. One little action - going right instead of left - and the world is changed.

Okay, so I'll start off with the quibble. I didn't buy the whole 'the Doctor's dead, it must have happened too quickly for him to regenerate' crap. That was a whole lot of hand-waving there, to kill him off and make up some lame excuse for not regenerating. If I allow myself to think on it too much, it might really take a big dent out of my OMG!AWESOMEEPISODE! squee. And I don't know, maybe there's some canon factoid from the old Who that makes that statement not as absurd as it sounded to me, in which case I will retract my complaint. But until someone points that out to me, I'm going to wonder why they couldn't come up with something a little more plausible than that.

Okay, on to the good stuff.

The idea that most of the time, if a change is introduced in your personal timeline, life will fold around it a bit, but most of the time the actual changes will be minor. I've seen this idea crop up in more than one show/book/movie, but with each of them, there's the corresponding idea that there are some people/events/times that when changed will have a much larger effect. (I wish I could remember the one story in particular that is nagging at the back of my mind - I'll probably figure it out at some odd time, like three in the morning, or in the middle of some innocuous conversation with a four-year-old at work.) The fact that Donna is one of these people isn't really surprising. She and the Doctor are pulled together by something that neither of them can really identify, and if there's something going on that the Doctor can't see, then it's big indeed.

I loved seeing the consequences of what would have happened all those times if the Doctor hadn't been there to prevent them. I still don't think it's necessary to have him killed off in order to make that happen. I think it quite likely that if he had no companion at all, it could be argued successfully that he just wouldn't have been hanging around Earth at the critical moments.

The thing about the Darkness Coming. I've watched just enough Torchwood to recognize that. I'm about halfway through season one, on that show and I've seen the 'they keep killing whatshername' episode, where Whatshername comes back from the dead and says that there's nothing out there but Darkness and that it's coming. Having not seen much beyond that, I don't know if it's a running theme through the show, the way Bad Wolf has been in Doctor Who, but I definitely caught the connection right away.

And how creepy was it that suddenly Bad Wolf was everywhere, including all the lettering on the TARDIS. And that eerie red glow inside the TARDIS was freaking me out a little. Donna may have brought herself back to something close to the original timeline, but something has changed and not for the better, that's for sure. I'm decidedly curious to see how everything plays out in the upcoming weeks.

Comments

[eve11]

(I wish I could remember the one story in particular that is nagging at the back of my mind - I'll probably figure it out at some odd time, like three in the morning, or in the middle of some innocuous conversation with a four-year-old at work.)

If you read the Wheel of Time books, they had that idea of the people who have more control over destiny or eg, the tapestry of time, than others. They were called Ta'veren. Odd that I remember that bit out of all of the stuff I read (years ago now, too), but for some reason it stuck.

I really liked this episode too. Was equally skeptical about the Doctor not regenerating. But, maybe since he was in such a dark hole at the time, he decided not to regenerate, like the Master decided not to when he got shot at the end of season 3. Or more gruesomely, maybe he did regenerate, twice, and drowned anew each time.

I thought Catherine Tate was fantastic in this. She had good chemistry with Billie Piper, too. Oh man, the scene with the mirrors where she didn't want to open her eyes... *shudders* that would've been my reaction too.

And yeah, the eerie red glow at the end was creepifying. Kinda reminiscent of the paradox machine at the end of season 3. And did you hear the Cloister Bell? We're in some serious trouble now!

Next week, looks like every single baddie and goodie comes back for a big send-off. Interesting.

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

I'm very familiar with the Wheel of Time series (except for the last four or so books, I've read them all several times) and the concept of Ta'veren is certainly very similar to Donna's situation as presented here. But that's not what I'm thinking of. There's a story and I can't remember if it's a book, fanfic, movie or tv show episode (although my memory is telling me I saw it in text format). Someone's personal history had been altered, somehow, and he was being lectured on how time was resilient and wanted to go back to it's normal shape, and all it would need was a small nudge to set things right. The person didn't have to go back to the instant of the change to fix things, there was a much broader window than he'd expected. But I can't remember who he is or what the situation was. It's clearly going to drive me crazy until I figure it out.

[eve11]

Farscape, perhaps? Harvey talking to Crichton in ...Different Destinations?

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

You might be on to something there. I think it might be the combination of Harvey's explanation in Different Destinations, combined with Einstein from Unrealized Realities - dealing with wormholes and screwing up reality, go back and fix the first thing that goes wrong and the universe should spring back into place. Leading to Kansas, in which things have gone wrong and John has to find a way to fix things.

I'm glad you figured this out, because I was stuck on books - I seem to remember things in textual form, even when the original wasn't, so in my mind, I was seeing this as pages in a book, but none of my books were even close to this storyline, so I was feeling a bit frustrated, lol.

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I liked your suggestion that perhaps the Doctor was just in such a dark place that he decided to not regenerate. While I don't think he really was in such a dark place, I think that could be argued much more successfully than that he didn't have time.

I didn't notice the Cloister Bell (and don't really know the significance of it) although themonkeycabal commented on it as well. She picked up the whole Bad Wolf thing right from the starting gate, while it never occurred to me until it was right out there. Doctor Who just seems to be one of those shows that I never make the big connections on. I'll get them sometimes on a smaller, episodic scale, but the big, overarching things I never seem to see until they're pointed out to me.

[eve11]

The Cloister Bell is a holdover from the Old Series. It only rings when there is something seriously dangerous or wrong going on.

I was a little bit confused about the Bad Wolf stuff at the end. I figured that was what Rose whispered to Donna but I'm not sure if that precipitated the universe change or if somehow the Bad Wolf signs were always there and we missed them, or what. Can Rose travel between dimensions because she's still got an element of the Bad Wolf inside her? Color me confused about all that. I mean, it was a gripping ending, make no mistake, but it left me with a lot of questions!

[natacup82.livejournal.com]

I pretty much handwaved that whole Doctor is dead so easily thing because nothing can ever, ever top Tinkerbell Jesus in sheer ridiculous absurdity on this show. Overall it was very good and interesting to see how that little change did so much, although I'm guessing the doctor had to die to make the deaths of at least Martha & Sarah Jane more plausible. The darkness thing does come up again on Torchwood I think, it sounds familiar, although now I'm wondering that and the bumblebee thing also came up on The Sarah Jane Adventures as well.

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen any of The Sarah Jane Adventures, so any connections forged there will sadly be lost on me. Luckily, I think they're done well enough that you don't really need those other references, they just make a nice bit of consistency between the shows (something the Stargate people fail to do rather spectacularly, IMO).