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An interesting post I dug up on the OG just today from Steven Moffatt, about that episode, and one of it's more controversial factors. Namely, a cut line where a few people have commented they thought a line was needed.
Link
We sort of assumed you'd all remember about emergency program one - that the Doctor has made provision for Rose in the event of his non-return. For ages there was a line about it - Rose said to Mickey, "The Tardis will always take me home" - but we cut it, thinking it cut across her devastation at the loss of the Doctor. It's still sorta kinda implied - the Doctor asks "How long did you wait?" which clearly means there was an alternative - but we should probably have kept that line in.
Anyway. The intent was never that he abandoned them - just that he leapt towards the woman in greater danger.
Steven Moffat
Look who was right after all.
Link
We sort of assumed you'd all remember about emergency program one - that the Doctor has made provision for Rose in the event of his non-return. For ages there was a line about it - Rose said to Mickey, "The Tardis will always take me home" - but we cut it, thinking it cut across her devastation at the loss of the Doctor. It's still sorta kinda implied - the Doctor asks "How long did you wait?" which clearly means there was an alternative - but we should probably have kept that line in.
Anyway. The intent was never that he abandoned them - just that he leapt towards the woman in greater danger.
Steven Moffat
Look who was right after all.
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I always thought they could get home. He says "always wait five and a half hours" which implies a choice. He's abandoned them, but not to death on a spaceship. Cos I always thought if nothing else he'd have shoved them in the TARDIS and sent them off before he got on the horse.
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I like it when my interpretation gets supported by the writer.
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But yeah, you are right. As Teh Moff has confirmed.
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So the fact that they are, you know, wrong amuses me.
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Also it is home of Jacob. Who seems like a decent guy and all, but again, has a tendency towards Rose-loving pretiousness.
Disclaimer for people who are reading this and also TWoP posters: Yes, I know not everyone there is like that. But the majority of people I came across seemed to be.
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Sort of like leaving someone at a train station, but with a ticket. Actually catching the train is up to them, but they have the ability to do so at any time.
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Actually it never felt like an abandonment to me, the fact that they simply waited instead of yelling at the poor console again kind of implied they weren't that scared to be stranded on the Ship of the Damned.
Rose's Emo Tear nevertheless shows that it still felt like being at an airport, getting a quick hug and the car keys from your hubby because he's going to join the Peace Corps with a sexy blonde...
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But yours holds up fairly well - though it might have been, for Rose at least, an emotional abandonment, it was never a true physical one.
Also, your icon = fabbo.
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It's like hubby's out of town saving the world why you sit at home and know he's far, far away.
I seriously have to think of better metaphors.
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Not only that, but Mickey says "how's he gonna get back?" twice. Not we, he. That implied to me that they've got a route home but they know the Doctor's trapped.
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I'm certain of it, but I don't know if Rose is so much - Nine did have his whole Rose > Universe thing, and she had only just had the "you are not the most special ever" thing happen, so I think this might have been Rose really confronting the fact that she isn't necessarily the Doctor's top priority. She's important, yes, but not at the cost of other's lives.
We need to come up with an automatic metaphor generator or something, just for conversations like this.
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I think the Thing with Nine/Rose was that he was clinging desperately to the last thing he thought he had which was Rose (well, if you leave out the TARDIS, and we know he strokes bits of her) so that universe < Rose thing was or better would have been temporal after all. I bet he would've done the same thing as Ten in GiF.
But speculating where we would be with Nine now is futile at best. Let's see how she handles War on Earth.
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I've never been in the group that though it was strange that he jumped in; that's what the Doctor does. But the lack of any concern whatsoever for his other companions, or indications that they knew how to trigger Protocol 1, came off as bizarrely inconsistent with the usual characterization.
Basically, they cheated scriptwise because they wanted it to come off all This! Is! True! Love!
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And I am looking forward to War on Earth muchly. As weird as that sounds.
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Also, we don't know when that line was cut, if it was during the rehearsals, or up until the final edit. From the sounds of things, it would have been about the same time as Rose's emo-tear moment was.
And if you look at what Moffatt remarked, the line was cut because it was assumed we'd know there was a way home. Bizarrely enough, it was a case of over-estimating the audience's deductive skills. And as the rest of the comments here show, enough people picked up on the intended interpretation for it to be a viable interpretation of the script.
In fact, the Doctor's lack of concern ties in very well with The Satan Pit, and "I believe in her." The Doctor has confidence in Rose being able to take care of herself. Especially when she's been left with a way home.
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As I said, Nine seemed to cling to her, yet he was able to sacrifice her for the Dalek in 'Dalek'. There was IkilledHer!Emo, sure, but there wasn't someone like Reinette
to shag him senselessholding his hand.Both Nine and Ten seem to go exceptionally cold when some loved one dies, I love it that both seem to have that trait, shutting the world out if needed.
Oh how I cannot wait to see Army of Ghosts. It's frelling up my entire week because for the first time in months I'm counting down the days to Saturday again! *squees*
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Oh yes, oh yes indeedy. *wants it to be the weekend*
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But I don't think you can discuss the structure of this ep without it. My reading of this season is that the first four episodes were meant to set up the waypoints for the whole season.
As background, I completely enjoyed, brought, adored the whole S1(R) arc of love; came out of tPotW fully satisfied. But as Who old-skool, I also had to ask: how the fuck are they going to get out of this without killing Rose off? Because it's the basic structure of DW that Doctors change and Companions leave. How do you explain Rose leaving? Character death is fine when the story demands, but I don't like killing off characters just because you have written yourself into a corner. And most other ways of writing her off risk the Buffy-Angel dilemma: if you set up a relationship as the One True Love that will eventually be returned to in the distant post series future, you lock down the characters in ways that screw with future storytelling. Great for fanfic, won't work serieswise.
So that's the question in my head when I'm watching the first few eps, and the answer that they seem to be setting up is that Ten loves Rose, but isn't *in* love with her like Nine was. And what makes this stone cold brilliant to me is the way they shaped the character of Ten.
Again, as background, my take on Nine: He loved Rose, in ways beyond any other companion seen on screen; even if you retcon the extra gloss of emotion back across the backstory, that is, use the Sarah Jane to Sarah Jane comparison to recalibrate the tone of the old series, you don't get things like "I could save the world and lose you"; and it wasn't a asexual love either. As someone insightfully pointed out, he wouldn't have been so miffed and insistent that he *does* dance when she doubted it, if not. However, he was just so fucked up and broken (and in fact, his ability to love her in many ways was rooted in the same psychic rent that left him vulnerable to things like the Gelth) that he held himself back from going there.
Now, there's a theory, with a considerable amount of backing from the series (particularly the 4th-5th transition) that the new personality of a Doctor is formed in reaction to the lacks of the last one. And what do we get in Ten? Pretty much exactly the sort of boy Rose would aspire to: pretty, young-looking, with a nice suit but still from her own class (the accent). Geeky (and we know from Mickey that she likes some geek in her boy.) 'Does domestic'. Perfectly willing to have sex with humans. Her mother even likes him!
Except for the bit where he's not in love with her anymore.
How could I not love something so bleak and black and heartbreaking? It's so fairy-tale resonant, it makes PotW even more sad -- Nine left her everything she wanted, except for his heart -- and yet it solves the problem without trying to retcon the Nine/Rose relationship.
Now, succeeding episodes have blurred and smeared this a bit, but I still suspect they are going to swing back towards it in the end. And that they overtelegraphed to some degrees their points in these four to set it up. And I think the particular comparisons being set up in tGitF is: 'that bit where he said he wouldn't leave you, like Sarah Jane? So not true.' 'the reason he hasn't hit on you? not because he doesn't do humans'. And these points are if anything *undermined* by writing errors. It's even *more* resonant of the Sarah Jane setup if Rose is faced with the prospect of being back in London, always looking over her shoulder to see if the Doctor has come back for her. But Moffat wanted the cheap hit so he cut that line and left in the one from Mickey about 'we can't fly the TARDIS without him.' And he fell in love with his own scenario, so he had to throw in a Magic Mindmeld Wom-Wom to say 'this is Really True Love, not like him and Rose. Reinette Knows Him Completely.' So the story is not that no companion is more Special to (this) Doctor than any other, but that we were merely mistaken on which companion is the Special one. When it's far more devasting when Reinette is just another prospective companion. Because there will always be another possible one around every corner, in every ep.
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Pity that the line was dropped, though. It would have saved a lot of the fanwanking.
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In the little fanfic section of my brain, I was actually composing a story in which they did eventually go back home in the Tardis (via the emergency protocol), and the Doctor was there when they got back (or showed up soon after, and presuming nothing in an ordinary earth life would have caused him to regenerate over the 250 or so years, he'd arguable look the same, though his suit and coat might not have made it in one piece. :)).
And he would/could have been there, because when they went back to 2006/2007, time on earth would have continued moving so that it actually WAS 2006/7. In fact, no matter what year they'd returned to, 1750/60 had passed and moved forward on its own - slow time. The difference is, he would have lived (domestic! ACK!) those 200+ years on the 'slow path' while for Rose and Mickey it would have been minutes or hours, because that's just how time works. Though God knows what he would have changed or influenced in that time (the temptation to see and/or help his former selves or UNIT or even see Sarah Jane) while he waited. *g*
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But I very much like your plot-bunny - I'd certainly read it if you were ever to write that. It's an idea I have seen very briefly touched on, not really examined in a huge amount of detail. Though I do have the fabulous mental image of him running into his past selves and/or companions and all that allthe time.
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It's one tiny moment of the episode, in which shipping really isn't the topic. If you have problems with the rest of the episode, fine, but we are not talking about them here.
Also, you cannot criticise Moffatt for cutting the line, because we don't know if it was him that cut the line. Yes, it might have been. It also might have been the director for that episode. Orit might have been cut during the final edit. Or Rusty might have asked for it to be removed. We just don't know.
All we know is that is was intended to be there. And so for those of us who always believed that that's what the episode showed, it's validation for our arguments. If we get into debates about it again, we have undeniable evidence to back up our interpretation. That's what I was posting about.
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I bet he has an emergency programme for everything.