Doctor Who 7x03
Sep. 16th, 2012 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
opusculasedferaWell, that was a thing? I can't tell if it was genuinely lacklustre or if it was just my indifference to Westerns as a genre. I feel like I like the idea of the Doctor dealing with the unsolvable problems re: genocide and war and responsibility a lot less than I like the execution. It felt a bit like they were just going through the motions. When Isaac died and the Doctor replaced him, it was just so obvious that the Gunslinger was going to be his permanent replacement because the Doctor doesn't stick around like that. And Jex blowing himself up is the usual "oh shit, there isn't really an ethical choice the heroes can make!" cop out to avoid them actually having to make an imperfect decision.
Speaking of, I'm awfully tired of the trope where people who've done terrible things randomly find some other people in mild trouble and help them out. It was especially weird here because the people of Mercy weren't even in particular danger, they were experiencing the shittiness of it being the 1860s. And it does completely and utterly suck and is entirely unfair that people in the past were living in shitty conditions and died of cholera and I don't think that letting people die of cholera is a good thing to do, but we can't really save people in the past and it felt weird to be ignoring other kinds of problems? I suppose the hand-wave to this is that the Khaler(?) were only travelling in space and their war was happening in what was the 1860s on Earth so it really was equivalent for Jex to someone travelling to a third-world country now to help, but it doesn't feel like that because the show is generally so time-travel focused.
I think what really bothered me was that they kept the whole moral debate so incredibly abstract and the one thing that seems to be true about actual moral decisions is that they inevitably end up being very specific. It just wasn't clear exactly what had been done to the Gunslinger and other cyborgs. It originally seemed like they had been more or less brain-wiped, but then the Gunslinger was talking about his hometown very openly and he seemed mostly reluctant to return because he had been so altered, but it mostly seemed to be appearance based? The cyborgs were "programmed to kill" and all that, but the Gunslinger didn't seem programmed to do what he was doing, he seemed to be making all of his own decisions and he knew exactly who he was when Jex asked. He was pretty set in his ways, but it didn't seem very different from any other time I've seen this same revenge plot play out with a non-cyborg avenger, he wasn't programmed to do it or anything.
Given all this, I don't know why no one bothered to try to help him! Okay, the Doctor gave him a purpose in the end, but they simply didn't go into the question of why he couldn't reintegrate into society anything like well enough to prevent me from coming up with a bunch of other potential endings, all of which made more sense to me. Frex: why didn't this scientist who feels super bad about it all devote himself to un-cyborging the cyborgs? They haven't had their brains removed, just altered, and if they can graft a gun onto a person, why on earth couldn't they remove it and graft on some decent prosthetics? I can believe that an army wouldn't bother about its cyborgs in the aftermath of a war, but I can't understand why the Doctor didn't even offer to try to un-cyborg the Gunslinger or to take him home. I could believe that there are reasons why this wouldn't work, but you have to SHOW those reasons or the Doctor seems even more useless at actually struggling with these moral questions than usual.
These sorts of questions are especially why the whole "I will redeem my crimes by helping some unrelated people!" trope rings particularly hollow. It's one thing to have killed someone and then gone off to serve others because you feel the need to do some good and there is no way to bring that person back to life, but there definitely seemed to be things for Jex to do with the cyborgs that would help, especially as he didn't actually seem to have crash-landed, he seemed to have picked Earth for some reason. You don't atone for things abstractly, you have to help pick up the pieces of the things you broke, if it's at all possible.
It wasn't a terrible episode, Amy got to be fun and I sort of like where they're going with Amy and Rory being a bit tired of the Doctor's little ways, but it was a bit disappointing overall.
Speaking of, I'm awfully tired of the trope where people who've done terrible things randomly find some other people in mild trouble and help them out. It was especially weird here because the people of Mercy weren't even in particular danger, they were experiencing the shittiness of it being the 1860s. And it does completely and utterly suck and is entirely unfair that people in the past were living in shitty conditions and died of cholera and I don't think that letting people die of cholera is a good thing to do, but we can't really save people in the past and it felt weird to be ignoring other kinds of problems? I suppose the hand-wave to this is that the Khaler(?) were only travelling in space and their war was happening in what was the 1860s on Earth so it really was equivalent for Jex to someone travelling to a third-world country now to help, but it doesn't feel like that because the show is generally so time-travel focused.
I think what really bothered me was that they kept the whole moral debate so incredibly abstract and the one thing that seems to be true about actual moral decisions is that they inevitably end up being very specific. It just wasn't clear exactly what had been done to the Gunslinger and other cyborgs. It originally seemed like they had been more or less brain-wiped, but then the Gunslinger was talking about his hometown very openly and he seemed mostly reluctant to return because he had been so altered, but it mostly seemed to be appearance based? The cyborgs were "programmed to kill" and all that, but the Gunslinger didn't seem programmed to do what he was doing, he seemed to be making all of his own decisions and he knew exactly who he was when Jex asked. He was pretty set in his ways, but it didn't seem very different from any other time I've seen this same revenge plot play out with a non-cyborg avenger, he wasn't programmed to do it or anything.
Given all this, I don't know why no one bothered to try to help him! Okay, the Doctor gave him a purpose in the end, but they simply didn't go into the question of why he couldn't reintegrate into society anything like well enough to prevent me from coming up with a bunch of other potential endings, all of which made more sense to me. Frex: why didn't this scientist who feels super bad about it all devote himself to un-cyborging the cyborgs? They haven't had their brains removed, just altered, and if they can graft a gun onto a person, why on earth couldn't they remove it and graft on some decent prosthetics? I can believe that an army wouldn't bother about its cyborgs in the aftermath of a war, but I can't understand why the Doctor didn't even offer to try to un-cyborg the Gunslinger or to take him home. I could believe that there are reasons why this wouldn't work, but you have to SHOW those reasons or the Doctor seems even more useless at actually struggling with these moral questions than usual.
These sorts of questions are especially why the whole "I will redeem my crimes by helping some unrelated people!" trope rings particularly hollow. It's one thing to have killed someone and then gone off to serve others because you feel the need to do some good and there is no way to bring that person back to life, but there definitely seemed to be things for Jex to do with the cyborgs that would help, especially as he didn't actually seem to have crash-landed, he seemed to have picked Earth for some reason. You don't atone for things abstractly, you have to help pick up the pieces of the things you broke, if it's at all possible.
It wasn't a terrible episode, Amy got to be fun and I sort of like where they're going with Amy and Rory being a bit tired of the Doctor's little ways, but it was a bit disappointing overall.
