So I happened to be watching some Batman: The Animated Series the other day, and I felt compelled to talk about how much I enjoy the series’ version of the Joker played by Mark Hamill.
This might seem, at first glance, a little silly to write about. “Really?” you might respond. “You mean to tell me that one of the most celebrated interpretations ever of not only the Joker, but any comic book villain, is really really good? You don’t say! Perhaps you’ll favor us next with a post about how Citizen Kane is a pretty sweet flick, and that the Beatles wrote some cool songs.”
Yes yes, okay, but the reason I thought it might be moderately interesting to talk about the show’s version of the Joker is that he is so fondly remembered by fans despite being quite different from the way he’s portrayed in current comic books.
The modern day Joker (and by “modern day,” I mean you can actually trace this interpretation back decades, but it’s especially in the air today after the success of The Dark Knight and his portrayal in Grant Morrison’s Batman comics) is described often as “a force of nature.” That’s pretty much the standard characterization these days, right? Death on two legs, a man-sized natural disaster with a body count in the, what, thousand? A malicious, twisted trickster god raining blood and death and madness.
This is fine. It makes him a really powerful conceptual opposite for Batman, and it can hardly be argued that “man vs. force of nature” doesn’t make for terrific drama.
However, a thunderstorm doesn’t really make for an interesting character. I am, the record will show, a huge supporter of Grant Morrison’s superhero comics – one of those guys who’ll point to a character’s one-off appearance in an issue of JLA as that character’s definitive portrayal, etc., and you all roll your eyes. And yet, his nigh-invincible Joker personally leaves me cold, however well-done his portrayal is, because he really is just a thunderstorm. He just sort of happens, and you never know why because he is so far above you. Even his quest against Batman seems somewhat dispassionate – like he’s holding all the cards, he knows he’s going to win, and he’s just waiting for Batman to catch up. Works very well in The Dark Knight as one story, but in the ongoing narrative of superhero comics, at some point, there’s not a whole lot to do with him other than have him show up, kill people, mess with our heroes’ heads, and repeat.
Now, the animated series’ Joker is a far more human character. One of the episodes I watched recently was “Joker’s Millions,” in which a flat-broke Joker gets a massive inheritance from a gangland rival, clears his name, and blows a bunch of money, only to find out later that most of the money was fake; with the IRS after him for inheritance tax, he can’t admit that he was fooled or he’ll be humiliated. Can you imagine the Joker, as seen in most contemporary comics, being portrayed as so down on his luck? Living in a slummy motel, unable to afford food for his pet hyenas (oh yes, there are pet hyenas)? Desperately cobbling together a crime just to keep out of something so ordinary as tax trouble? Or the Joker as seen in “Mad Love,” worked up into a jealous frenzy at the mere suggestion that Harley Quinn came a lot closer to killing Batman than he ever did.
This is a Joker with highs and lows, who feels joy and disappointment, a Joker with honest-to-God passion. This is a Joker who wants things, and can’t always have them. This is a Joker who retains the grandness of his philosophical and conceptual war against Batman, but is also petty enough offended when he’s tossed out of the Gotham City Comedy Competition.
There is a guy I’d be interested to read more about on a regular basis!
So, in order, my attempt at as many plausible explanations as possible:
1.) Why did the smoke monster kill the pilot? Pick one: killing off potential authority figure to create more confusion amongst survivors/killing pilot because he was in a bad mood.
2.) What did Locke see when he saw the smoke monster? A smoke monster isn’t scary enough on its own now?
3.) What’s with the polar bear in Walt’s comic? Green Lantern and the Flash have to fight it. Coincidences happen, you know.
4.) Where’s Christian Shepherd’s body if it’s not in the casket? Smokie took human form and tossed it somewhere it wouldn’t be found so when he assumed Christian’s form Jack would question it less.
5.) Why did the psychic insist that Claire fly on Oceanic 815 and why did he insist that Claire had to raise him? Jacob told him to do it in advance, having already identified Claire as a potential candidate.
6.) Why did the Others want Walt so bad? For the same reason Widmore wanted Desmond so bad.
7.) Who sent Kate the letter about her mother being treated for cancer? Jacob.
8.) Why does Walt appear to warn Locke about the hatch and how does he know about it? Because Walt is psychic and can’t control his abilities or even know when he’s using them, causing people to “see” Walt but instead of him telling them things, he merely echoes back their own worries.
9.) Why does the smoke monster make mechanical sounds? Look, if you want to complain about how the totally imaginary smoke monster doesn’t sound like all the other smoke monsters, go right ahead.
10.) How does Walt apparate before Shannon? See question 8.
11.) How does Walt communicate with Michael using the Swan computer? That was Ben, or someone Ben told to do something.
12.) What was the deal with Kate and that horse? The Island is a weird place, and Jacob has weird powers. That should be enough.
13.) Why are supplies still being dropped on the island after the purge and by who? The whole takeaway from the Dharma Initiative plotline is that they’re a bunch of well-meaning techno-hippies who are fairly brilliant scientists and totally balls at everything else, particularly organizational logistics. I mean, these are guys who literally made some guy who just showed up one day their chief of security. Is it really too hard to imagine them setting up supply drops with third parties, the drops paid for by trust funds, and those drops continuing long after the organization went defunct?
14.) What triggered the lockdown, and who on earth would design black lights to light up showing secret thingies during the lockdown? See question 13.
15.) What happened to the original Henry Gale Who the fuck cares?
16.) What happened to Libby in between the mental hospital and getting on the tail section of flight 815? She got better, mostly.
17.) Who built the four-toed statue? Probably the ancient whoever-they-weres at a much, much earlier point in time.
18.) Why does only one specific bearing get you off the Island? See question 12.
19.) What are the heiroglyphics on the Swan countdown timer about? Paranoid Dharma scientists decided to use a non-base-10 signature for certain elements and the heiroglyphics are the non-base numbers.
20.) Why does Tom feel the need to wear a fake beard? He thinks they’re stylish. No, I’m kidding: because the Others didn’t want the survivors to know how comfortable their lives were.
21.) Who was Libby’s previous husband who gave her a boat to give to Desmond? Henry Gale. Happy now? Christ.
22.) Why were there skeletons in the polar bear cave? Bears get hungry.
23.) Where did the toy truck come from? Anybody with kids knows that their toys get absolutely everywhere.
24.) How did Locke and Eko escape the hatch implosion? They got really lucky.
25.) Why couldn’t Locke talk after the hatch implosion? But not that lucky.
26.) Why did the smoke monster kill Mr. Eko and why didn’t they just do it the first time they met? Because Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje decided he wanted to leave the show after one season and sometimes writers have to cheat.
27.) What did Mr. Eko mean when he said “you’re next” after he died? He was trying to warn Locke that Locke was a person of interest to the smoke monster and wrongly concluded that, since the monster had killed him, it would similarly wish to kill Locke.
28.) How disgusting was it when Hurley was eating from that tub of ranch dressing? Fairly.
29.) Why did Yemi’s body disappear? Because the smoke monster likes to take away corpses to freak people out. It’s been there for millennia: it has to get its kicks somehow.
30.) Why does Danny say that Jack wasn’t on the list when he was? Because sometimes people are wrong about things. This goes doubles for underlings of Ben, who probably lied to them twice a day just to stay sharp.
31.) Why can’t women on the island have babies and what does that have to do with anything? Another of Jacob’s rules. He has weird powers, you know.
32.) What was that Russian letter in Mikhail’s typewriter? “Dear Mom. How are you? I am fine. I liked the borscht you sent me last month. It was very tasty…”
33.) Why is the supply drop menu hidden behind a game of computer chess? See question 13. (Admit it: if you could get away with putting something important behind a game of computer chess, you would be tempted to do it.)
34.) Why did Ben give Juliet that weird mark as a punishment? What was that about? Ben has a lot of issues.
35.) What’s the deal with Jack’s tattoos? They say “I boned your mother” in Thai.
36.) Desmond knew a monk? How did that monk know Eloise? It’s a small world.
37.) Why did Ben see his dead mother? See question 12.
38.) Who decided it was time to kill the Dharmites in a purge? Probably Ben. See question 34.
39.) What happened to Ben’s childhood friend? She moved off the island, got married to an accountant named Henry Gale, had three children, and then got divorced when it turned out Henry was sleeping with his secretary (who was not Libby). She now works as an associate professor at the University of Chicago. She likes cats.
40.) Why did Desmond have a false vision of Claire and Aaron leaving the island on a helicopter? Desmond’s future-sight was only accurate while it was still active; once it went dormant, his loss of ability to observe the state of the future meant that the future could now be changed. Basically, think that whole thing with the cat in the box with the poison, but in reverse.
41.) How does Mikhail keep coming back to life? Smoke monster killed him a looooooong time ago and nobody knows.
42.) Why does Walt tell Locke that he still has work to do? Because Locke is hallucinating.
43.) Whose eye appeared in the cabin? Good question! Although it should be noted that we don’t know it was the smoke monster, because although that silhouette looks like Christian, it was never confirmed to be. Hey, maybe it’s Christian’s corpse and the eye is the smoke monster! That’s scary! The smoke monster is fucking with people!
44.) Where did Miles get that picture of Ben? Dharma records, which were kept in a dusty, unlocked warehouse in Iowa (see question 13).
45.) Who’s the R.G. on Naomi’s bracelet? Royce Gale, Henry’s half-brother and her secret lover. Aren’t you glad you asked?
46.) Why is there a difference between the times? See question 12.
47.) Who is “the economist” and why did Ben want him dead? Ben wants lots of people dead.
48.) Why was Ben so surprised that they could kill Alex? For god’s sake, I don’t even have to make anything up here: Ben explicitly said that he had thought he knew all the rules of the Island and that it turned out that he didn’t.
49.) If the smoke monster can’t leave the island and Christian Shepherd is the smoke monster, how did Christian appear in LA and on the freighter? See question 12.
50.) How did the monster get into Jacob’s cabin? You mean the cabin that Ben called “Jacob’s cabin” when in fact we would eventually learn that he’d never met or seen Jacob and was just bullshitting? Perhaps this question should be “how did the smoke monster get into a perfectly normal run-down cabin?”
51.) Why ask Locke not to tell anybody that he saw Claire in the cabin? Because if Locke had told, say, Kate that he’d seen Claire, then maybe more of the candidates would have stayed on the island, which just makes the smoke monster’s job of “kill or remove all the candidates” more difficult.
52.) Why did Ghost Horace direct Locke to the cabin and tell him Jacob was waiting there? Because Smoke Monster lies to get his way.
53.) Why did the Oceanic Six name Charlie, Boone and Libby as the other three survivors? What’s the logic in that? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two can’t rhyme with “those three people were definitively dead, as opposed to others who might escape the island and disprove the Six’s story.”
54.) Why does Miles decide to stay on the island? Because he gets hunches about where might be a bad place to be – and is often correct – and he tends to follow them. Amazingly, he avoided going to a ship which then blew the fuck up.
55.) What is the deal with the frozen wheel? Heat gets absorbed from the room in the energy transfer which allows teleportation.
56.) Why does Ben insist that the Oceanic Six, as well as Locke, must return to the island? Because at that point he was still taking orders from Jacob (via Richard), who had planned this thing out well in advance.
57.) Why don’t the rules of time travel apply to Desmond? Huge bursts of electromagnetic energy will do that to you.
58.) Who were the people trying to kill Sayid and Hurley? Pawns of Ben trying to frighten them into doing what Ben wanted.
59.) Ben asked his butcher friend, who was holding Locke’s body, if Gabriel and Jeffrey had checked in yet – who are any of these people? Sayid killed Gabriel and Jeffrey one question ago, and “these people” are Jacob’s network of people he’s done favors for off the Island (Ilana being the most notable).
60.) What was Ben hiding when he took something out of the vent and put it in his bag? C4 to crash the plane if necessary. Alternately, his porn stash.
61.) When the gang was unstuck in time, who was that shooting at them from the outrigger? The rest of Rousseau’s band, gone crazy via smoke monster, before she managed to kill them.
62.) Who sent Sun a gun and pictures of Jack and Ben? Widmore.
63.) Who attacked Sayid at the hospital and why did he have Kate’s address? Another one of Ben’s flunkies, and because Ben gave it to him.
64.) Why was the smoke monster at the temple? Because.
65.) When did the temple become like an anti-smoke monster fortress? When Dogen moved the remaining Others there and did the ritual thingies Jacob taught him to do.
66.) How did the producers of the hit TV show “Expose” deal with the death of their two lead actors? They killed off both characters and then elevated existing characters in importance to compensate. Ironically, when the show ended after a hit six-year run, some dork put up a video of “one hundred unanswered questions about Expose,” which included things like “why did Steven drink an entire bottle of hot sauce? What was the point of that?”
67.) How did Eloise come to run the lab? Because she’s smart and a scientist and amazingly, sometimes qualified people get jobs in their field.
68.) Who figured out that a pendulum set up that way could predict the island’s movements? Who figured that out? Daniel Faraday, back in the 1970s.
69.) Why did those returning to the island need to recreate the circumstances of their first arrival? Because it’s easier to tell people to do the same thing they did last time than it is to do it a different way, and Eloise isn’t exactly patient.
70.) Why did Jack, Kate and Hurley go from that Ajira flight to the 70s, and why didn’t Sun? See, that’s a good question.
71.) How did Richard bypass the sonic death fence? Because the Dharmites assumed Richard was like the smoke monster. Interestingly, Richard is not a smoke monster, and can do things like, say, “tinker with controls on a sonic death fence” or “put up a ladder next to the sonic death fence and then go over it.”
72.) How did Ethan go from the Dharma Initiative to a member of the Others? The Others are pretty famous for trying to spare/recruit children. Ethan was a child at the time, if you recall.
73.) What’s with all the heiroglyphics under the temple? Presumably the ancient whoevers built the temple. And they like heiroglyphics. Did you really need this explained, Questions Person?
74.) Why did Widmore tell Ben to kill Rousseau and the baby, and then let Ben keep the baby anyway? Because Widmore was and is a power junkie and likes to be considered ruthless, but is not quite so actually ruthless that he can kill a baby in cold blood on his own.
75.) Why did Daniel leave the Island in the 70s, and why does he tell Jack that he doesn’t belong there? See question 68, and also remember that Daniel died precisely because he got a specific detail very, very wrong.
76.) Why does Richard think he saw everyone in the 1977 Dharma picture die? Because he saw the blast from far off and made an assumption.
77.) Who broke the circle of ash around Jacob’s cabin? A boar did it.
78.) Why can Jacob leave the island, but the smoke monster can’t? Because they aren’t Superman Red and Superman Blue. They have different powers. Yeesh.
79.) Jacob uses his last breath to say “they’re coming,” but who are they? Pick one of: the 1977 candidates and friends, or Widmore and his flunkies.
80.) What’s the deal with the pool bringing people back to life? See question 12.
81.) Why did it bring back Sayid with an English accent? Because Naveen Andrews is English and sometimes actors slip up.
82.) What is the infection? How did Claire get infected? How did Sayid get infected? Why did Sayid need to take a poison pill when all it took to uninfect Sayid was a simple argument from Desmond? Dogen is a mysticist who has trouble realizing post-traumatic stress disorder and others forms of mental illness for what they are. (Which is not unreasonable given that crazy people tend to end up allying with the smoke monster.)
83.) Why was the smoke monster surprised that Sawyer could see young Jacob? Because most people aren’t supposed to see dead people that easily and Jacob was already manifesting himself, as he did in the penultimate episode; the younger Jacobs were the “larval stages,” if you will, of Jacob’s final manifestation.
84.) What’s the magic lighthouse about? See question 12.
85.) How does Dogen being alive keep the smoke monster out? See question 12.
86.) What happened to the flight attendant Cindy? And the kids? Either they got killed in that mortar strike or they fled into the jungle and eventually Hurley saw to it that they got home safely.
87.) Why didn’t Sun tell Jin to leave so their daughter wouldn’t be an orphan? Because sometimes people don’t think clearly when they are in the middle of a sinking submarine, oddly enough.
88.) Where did Jacob and Smokie’s mother come from? A boat! Presumably a Roman one.
89.) Where did Jacob and Smokie’s other mother come from?The West Wing.
90.) Who finished the magic wheel that combines “water and light” and when did it freeze up? Somebody who came along later. (At a certain point these “nitpicks” just become a child going “why? Why? Why?” over and over again.)
91.) What is the nature of the light? It’s the magic at the heart of the world that binds us all. If that’s not good enough, you should probably just avoid fantasy literature altogether.
92.) Magic wine? Seriously? The water/wine isn’t itself magical; it’s just a binding ritual to tie the two people together that works well on the newer party who doesn’t understand the nature of the magic yet and needs a bit of sideshow.
93.) Why did Zoe want an electromagnetic map of the island? Because they needed to set up the electromagnetic fence without it exploding.
94.) Why did electromagnetism send Desmond into the afterlife? Because it nearly killed him.
95.) Wasn’t Sayid’s solemate Nadia?I did that one already.
96.) Why weren’t Michael, Walt, Lapidus, Eko, or any of the other characters at the church? Because they, like Ana Lucia, weren’t ready to leave yet.
Seriously: beyond the problems of Walt and Eko, and the time-travel split of question 70 which smacks of writer fiat? Most of these aren’t really huge, important questions, or even really minor questions; they can be answered by a little bit of handwaving and a few basic assumptions, and then they’re just fine. A couple (like Mikhail) probably could have been stood to be answered during the series proper with one or two sentences and it would have been similarly just fine, but as it is aren’t crippling. Most of the rest are just “why does this show like to create an atmosphere of mysterious weirdness” and if you keep asking that maybe you should have been watching, I dunno, Desperate Housewives.
The big problems with the show’s enduring mysteries mostly stem from casting issues. The show’s creators admitted long ago that Walt was a mistake, made mostly because they initially assumed and pitched the show as happening over a number of years on the island, but hey whoops over the first thirteen episodes they realized that, no, this couldn’t be a “over the course of years” show when their narrative demanded one-right-after-the-next episodic continuity pretty much all the time. So they wrote Walt out. Better shows have done worse. The other casting fubars – Eko, Ana Lucia, Libby, Shannon, et cetera – stem from things the writers couldn’t have foreseen (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje suffering from depression/homesickness and being genuinely unhappy in his job, Maggie Grace being unreasonable about her salary demands and the network insisting on her being fired, Maggie Rodriguez and Cynthia Watros getting caught in a DUI incident and ABC getting puritanical) and they dealt with them as best they could.
This happens with serial television. it’s not all planned from the beginning. The writers left Sam Seaborn’s status open on The West Wing after his departure because they wanted to keep his slot open if his new show tanked and he wanted to come back (it did; he didn’t) and then just had to kind of shove it off to one side because it didn’t make sense to address the fate of a character half a season later when they had so many storylines that needed the time. Willow was never originally intended to be a lesbian on Buffy, and indeed they only decided to go that route halfway through season four practically as it was happening. Generally, the writers of Lost did a bang-up job mostly keeping a lot of disparate plot threads more or less in check, and most of the complaints come down to, as said, fans complaining that the writers weren’t explaining the creepy mysterious atmosphere enough.
One of the criticisms that makes me think people really weren’t watching the final episode of Lost that closely, which I’ve seen all over the place, showed up in comments today:
I agree with much of the criticism and I’ll throw in one of my own: Shannon. I know Sayid’s lost love from iraq wasn’t on the island, but she’s the one he should have wound up with.
See, here’s the thing: the entire point of the “afterlife” isn’t to make people happy, because what was evident from the entire season was that given a chance, some people are just going to keep punishing themselves for their sins, imagined or otherwise. Locke did it (stuck back in the wheelchair, and this time it was genuinely his fault as opposed to somebody else doing it to him). Charlie did it (hedonistic rockstar lifestyle which actually just made him desperately unhappy). And Sayid especially did it, giving himself an afterlife where not only was the supposed love-of-his-life not his wife but where he’d still done all the horrible things he felt guilty about, and on top of that he was forced to do things that would only isolate him further from her.
It’s obvious why Sayid constructed his afterlife in that way: because as much as he loved Nadia, the primary emotion she inspired in him was guilt, both for what he did directly to her/allowed to happen to her in their younger days and for allowing her to die when he got back from the island. That’s exactly why Nadia couldn’t be the one to help Sayid “let go” – the guilt she represented was what he clung to hardest. And that’s why it had to be Shannon who made Sayid remember again: because she was the only memory of happiness strong enough to make him do it.
And this is consistent with the other afterlives. Locke’s lady disappears once he remembers (triggered by feeling his feet again and suddenly remembering the first time he felt them again, not by Twoo Wub) because she was never really there, just like Nadia wasn’t really there. Jin and Sun’s memories aren’t triggered by their love for one another but by seeing their child again/for the first time. And so forth.
My take: people complaining that a show having an afterlife sequence when the whole thing was one extended religious allegory pretty much right from the beginning are a bit odd.
(Also, despite what people saying: afterlife sequence not explicitly Christian, nor even vaguely so. See Philip Pullman for alternate illustration of the concept of dead people “letting go.”)
Every season I consider doing recap/discussion posts for Survivor and every season I never quite get around to it, mostly because most seasons start out slow with a bunch of people you don’t really know mostly playing blind – which is amusing, but the real meat in watching a season of Survivor arises in the midgame once you know who the serious players are this time around, and who are the requisite bunch of bored housewives/wannabe actors who just wanted the experience and think that the “one in (whatever) chance at a million dollars” rhetoric is a literal chance rather than it having to do with playskill.
Which is a shame, because watching the interplay on Survivor is fascinating, not least because you basically get an omniscient watcher’s perspective on people’s attempts to discern what other people are doing/planning, and it gives the viewer a sense of superiority that’s often unwarranted. After all, at this point most people who go on Survivor are fans of the show1 and you have to know that every single one of them thought things along the lines of “well why didn’t X see that coming? It was so obvious!” Which it only is when you’ve got the overhead view, of course.
Thinking in those terms made it clear that Parvati is probably the best player in the game’s history – no offense to Sandra, who’s definitely got skills and whose second win wasn’t entirely unjustified, but the sheer number of times that Parvati accurately guessed what her opponents were doing before she could have gotten it confirmed that they were doing things was just amazing this time around, and she did it while basically being marked as a threat from the start of the game. More than once this season I saw her suss out a particularly clever move (my favorite was when she guessed that Rupert was bluffing about finding a hidden immunity idol – which Russell bought whole hog, incidentally).
And Russell’s play this season was much worse than his first time out. He basically only survived out of the early rounds due to a massive stroke of luck (IE, Tyson deciding to abandon an otherwise rock-solid plan to eliminate both Russell and Parvati for reasons that still remain incredibly dense) and then a second one which he barely had to work to achieve (JT throwing him an immunity idol on blind faith). And if in his first run Russell merely seemed blind to the necessity of social play, this time he deliberately ignored it – his rant at the reunion about how “America should decide” made that clear enough.
Of course, what Russell also illustrates is that Survivor players often fall into a pack mentality, looking for an alpha dog to lead their strategic alliance. Someone like Coach, for example, eagerly signs on to anybody who looks “strong” to him, which makes him little more than a useful tool.2 Even in this all-star season, a lot of players largely fell into pack mentality, with the villains signing into either Boston Rob’s alliance or Russell’s, and the heroes following either Tom or the dual-headed alliance of James and Amanda – and when James was too injured to continue JT stepped into the leader role largely by force of assumption. One of the reasons Sandra won, I think, is that she was clearly not just a Russell follower but instead clearly playing her own game, as her attempts to sabotage Russell were well-known to the jury, which won her a measure of independence.
So more than ever, it seems that the path to winning Survivor is a trickier and trickier balancing game: you need to be independent enough to be considered strategic, but not so strategic that you become seen as weaselly; you need to be friendly, but not ingratiating; you need to vote people off without making it personal to them; and above all you need to be smart, or at least smarter than most everybody else.3
Really, I understand that people can sometimes have antipathy towards reality TV, but Survivor is one of the ones I’ve never understood hating; it’s a fascinating peek into how people can become Machiavellian plotters, skillful or otherwise, and how various people react to perceived betrayal.
If Canadians were eligible to go on it I would do it in a second; I can’t see how it wouldn’t be immensely fun and memorable, even considering the misery contestants have to suffer. [↩]
Of course Coach is a really obvious example and most people don’t explicitly tell the camera they want a strong leader to follow, but the trend mostly holds. [↩]
Exception: Todd Herzog of Survivor: China, who managed to win without playing very smartly at all, mostly by using a basic alliance strategy which, inexplicably, nobody bothered to challenge. [↩]
Sorry, that probably requires a bit of explanation. Um, and I’m going to deliver that explanation in a nice, long paragraph, so that those of you who don’t want spoilers for the new Doctor Who episode, “Flesh and Stone”, which has aired in Britain but not in America, can skip this entry if you like.
Basically, for those of you not familiar with the series (or at least, not over-familiar with the series) the Doctor, an enigmatic wanderer in time and space, tends to have a traveling companion with him on his journeys. (Primarily as a way of solving a lot of writing problems–the Doctor tends to already know a lot of things the audience needs to know, so having an inexperienced traveling companion is an easy way of delivering expository dialogue that doesn’t sound forced.) These companions tend, very frequently, to be pretty young women. (Again, this is done for rather mundane reasons; the series wants to appeal to a very broad audience, and there are certain elements of the viewing public that respond strongly to pretty young women…for one reason or another.) Thus, it’s become something of a running gag among viewers that we never actually do see what the Doctor does in the TARDIS with those pretty young women between adventures.
And in the relaunched series (we are now trending towards the spoilery bits, here) that element has become more explicit. Rose, the Doctor’s companion, has a very obvious crush on the Doctor, and while the Doctor can’t ever bring himself to actually say the words, “I love you,” at any point, David Tennant is clearly playing the part as a man in love. Martha, the next companion, has her own crush on the Doctor, but since he’s still mooning over the departed Rose, she’s got no chance (an element that’s rather overplayed in Season Three, but that’s another story.) The romance angle goes into full retreat for Season Four and the 2009 specials (excepting for the season finale to Season Four, where Rose comes back and we practically get swooping strings when the two of them see each other)…but now it’s rearing its head again. Current companion Amy Pond just about jumps the Doctor’s bones at the end of “Flesh and Stone”. But the Doctor doesn’t reciprocate…despite Karen Gillan being just about the prettiest of the pretty young women ever to join the Doctor in his travels. Why?
The question is actually pretty contentious, in Doctor Who circles. (It says something about Doctor Who that it is actually less contentious than the question of what year the Third Doctor stories took place in.) There are a lot of people who believe that sex is off-limits in Doctor Who, at least in regards to the Doctor himself. They feel the Doctor should be above that sort of thing, even if they can’t necessarily articulate why. (Or if they can’t agree on a reason why. Doctor Who has possibly the strongest gay fan following of any science-fiction series, precisely because he’s a male sci-fi hero who doesn’t lust after women. To a lot of fans, the reason he doesn’t hit on his female companions is the same reason Will doesn’t hit on Grace.)
There are a lot of people who make the counter-argument that the Doctor most certainly does have a sexual relationship with many, if not most of his companions over the years. They insist that the people who insist “sex shouldn’t be allowed in Doctor Who” are prudes at best, Puritans at worst, who never noticed the sexual subtext of the older stories and now get angry when they spot it in the newer ones. (A sub-set of these people feel that there’s a sexual subtext to some, but not all stories, and that the Doctor has a “true love”, who is {INSERT COMPANION HERE} and that this is the perfect pairing and the series hasn’t been any good since that true love left and he’s been forced to make do with pale substitutes. All of these people are twelve-year-old girls. Even the ones who aren’t.)
Me? I fall at least a little into the former camp. I feel that there’s a reason why Russell T Davies and Stephen Moffat, the people who’ve been in charge of the relaunched series, haven’t pushed the boundaries of the Doctor’s sexuality too far. (And they really, really haven’t. For all that the Tenth Doctor is much more lovey-dovey than his predecessor, he still won’t even say the words, “I love you.” Not even once. My standing joke is that all the times he says, “Rose…I need to tell you…” and trails off, he’s trying to find a way to explain that traveling in the TARDIS makes you sterile.) It really isn’t in the Doctor’s character to have a sexual relationship with his companions, and Amy Pond provides the key to why. (Well, half the key.)
When Amy makes her rather blatant come-on to the Doctor, his response (played magnificently by Matt Smith) is absolute horror. He can’t imagine sleeping with Amelia Pond, because Amelia Pond is the seven-year-old girl he was just talking to a few days ago. Sure, she had a rather inconvenient case of growing up, but as the Doctor said to her, “Don’t worry; we’ll soon sort that out.” He’s not looking for a lover. He’s looking for a daughter. Or, if we’re to provide the other half of the key to the Doctor’s character, a grand-daughter.
Because the first pretty young woman the Doctor traveled with, back when he was an old man played by William Hartnell, was his grand-daughter Susan. (Also more contentious than sex: Whether William Hartnell was the actual first incarnation of the Doctor, or just the first we’ve seen.) The two were inseparable, each one the only reminder the other had of their home, and the original stories tended to focus on the differences between them and the humans that shared the TARDIS with the Doctor. (When Carole Ann Ford, the actress who played Susan, left the series, some speculated it wouldn’t survive her departure.) Susan’s departure was a watershed moment, a coming of age as the Doctor finally realized that staying with him was preventing her from living her own life. He forced her to stay behind with the man she’d come to love in one of the most bittersweet moments of the show’s history.
And the subsequent episode makes explicit what all the subsequent stories would leave as subtext. Ian and Barbara, the Doctor’s human friends, convince him to adopt a young orphan woman they’ve rescued from a crashed starship as their new traveling companion. Vicki becomes a surrogate grand-daughter to the Doctor, someone who makes him feel young and alive as they share the wonders of exploring the universe together…until she also falls in love with a boy and leaves. And the Doctor found another surrogate for Susan, and another, and another…at heart, Doctor Who is a series about a lonely old man who’s lost his family, and who finds it again with an orphaned girl. (This is the one really big mistake the new series makes with Rose, I think; not that she loves the Doctor, but that she only travels with the Doctor by choice. All the best companions of the old series were running away from something.)
Not every companion is living in Susan’s shadow, of course; Romana, for instance, seems to be pretty blatantly shagging the Doctor off-screen. (Mainly because Lalla Ward and Tom Baker pretty much were blatantly shagging each other off-screen. But now is not the time to delve into the vast store of gossip about who was having sex with who on the set.) But that’s the model of Doctor Who. That’s the reason why all the jokes about “What is the Doctor doing with those pretty young girls between adventures?” miss the point. The Doctor has a father’s love for his companions, not a romantic passion. There is most definitely a difference.
Your guest judge is Tasty Oreo, who is amusingly bewildered when Jason Coleman leads the crowd in a round of “Aussie Aussie Aussie/Oi Oi Oi,” which is not coincidentally also the cheer for Osgoode Hall law school students. (We stole it, of course.)
Top four: Broadway. And of course we start off with a Tasty Oreo Broadway, because that is what Tasty does and this is a final competition episode don’t you know. This was perfectly fine and decent and not nearly so cliched as a lot of Tasty’s routines can be. That is all.
Ivy and Robbie: rumba. It’s odd because I liked this, but on the other hand, throughout the whole routine as I was watching it and enjoying it, I kept thinking how un-Latin Robbie’s dancing was, and I think I peg that more on the choreo – which was really reminiscent a lot more of a smooth waltz with some ballet overtones than a rumba – than on Robbie, because really it was seamless. But a lot less Latin. Ivy’s flourishes were lovely, but Tasty makes a very good point noting the lack of resistance in the movements. So this was good, but not quite a proper rumba, to say the least.
Jessie and Philippe: jazz. Philippe is one of the best forklifts I’ve ever seen: he’s just seamless in his lifts, utterly without flaw. I liked this routine but I thought the choreo got just a bit frenetic in a few points, and the first unison section did suffer just a bit with a couple of very small missteps. Still, on the whole this was very good and I have little else to say.
Philippe and Robbie: hip-hop. GRATITUOUS SHIRT REMOVAL FOR ALL THE LADIES! This was probably the best two-man hip-hop routine out of all the SYTYCDs ever – even better than Benji/Travis from season 2. The judges were all over Robbie, but honestly, I think Philippe danced this better: it wasn’t that Robbie was bad – he was probably just about at his best all season and his improvement continues apace – but Philippe was just so completely confident that he didn’t need to up the intensity because he was able to dance the routine with pure cool.
Jessie and Robbie: contemporary. And it’s the Avatar-themed routine that the Twitters were telling me about in advance. Robbie makes me sad by saying how Avatar is his favourite movie of all time. This was… okay. Kind of bland, to be honest, and given that the choreography was obviously very difficult in its physicality that doesn’t really say too much for what was being done with it. Good unison, but I felt at points that both Jessie and Robbie were letting their exhaustion show. I wanted to like this and I didn’t.
Ivy and Philippe: contemporary. A lovely little number that three weeks ago would have been remarkable and at this point is just sort of in the middle. (It doesn’t help that this season has been really, really heavy on contemporary and jazz: there’s a reason you want to mix genres, it keeps them from getting stale.) Absolutely nothing else to say about this.
Ivy and Jessie: jazz. I will first express appreciation for the lack of a “hey look at the girls they are so pretty” contemporary routine where the two girls do a dance about feelings or rainbows. This was rough and dirty and brutal (good brutal) and a lot of fun. I thought Jessie danced this a hair better than Ivy did, relying more on her moves than facial expressions where Ivy occasionally did the opposite (Ivy unfortunately does have a tendency to be a bit of a ham). But it was a very slim difference and this was very good.
Philippe’s solo: Smooth and cool. The cane was perhaps a bit awkward for a few bars, but that is a minor complaint for a solo that was really very good.
Ivy’s solo: Unfortunately boring and sort of predictable. Dancing to “Missionary Man” by the Eurythmics should especially not be boring, and yet this was.
Jessie’s solo: A very good contemporary solo without anything that especially distinguished it from most other contemporary solos.
Robbie’s solo: Skillful controlled thrashing combined with solid technique: a strong piece of work.
Top four should be: 1.) Robbie 2.) Jessie 3.) Philippe 4.) Ivy Top four will be: 1.) Robbie 2.) Philippe 3.) Jessie 4.) Ivy
