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As the title implies, great big spoilers for Doomsday and School Reunion. I don't think a 42 year old episode needs a spoiler warning.
Everything has it's time, and everything ends
One of the things I noticed upon reading the reactions to Doomsday was the amount of criticism about the final scenes with Rose, how they depicted her as lost and undeveloped and supremely messed up by her experiences with the Doctor. Even I picked up on this.
And as good as that scene was in it's own right, I can see how it does appear to counter some of the series messages - the main tie-in here would be School Reunion with it's "Everything has it's time and everything ends" message, which was all about Sarah Jane finally moving on.
And here we get Rose, broken and crying, and apparently unable to move on. Which is in character for her so far, but not the positive view.
And yet, as much as it felt like a rather horrible ending for Rose on first glance, on reflection it just seems to work.
Because as cruel as it is immediately, it needed to be done for the long term. Rose needed this.
You can't always get what you want
And if you try sometime you find
You get what you need
Yeah, it hurts like a bastard, but a lot of things that need to be done do - as anyone who has ever had a tooth pulled could tell you.
Quite a few people have been arguing that it isn't a satisfying ending because Rose wanted to stay with the Doctor forever and ever. To which my response is quite simply "What the hell does that matter?" Firstly, Rose isn't immortal, she won't be around forever. She will leave the Doctor eventually, even if it is through death (and anyone who thinks the Doctor wouldn't take Rose's death worse than he did seeing her trapped in another universe is completely fucked in the head).
And secondly, and more importantly, what people want isn't necessarily what's best for them. Case in point: Heroin addicts.
Just because Rose wants to never leave the Doctor, doesn't mean she should. And the Doctor knows this. Hello, he put the bloody world-jumping device around her without her permission. He just hadn't counted on her stubbornness, and was hardly going to send away help when he needed it.
The Doctor is no stranger to making the hard choices that other people won't make.
Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.
This is, after all, the same man who abandoned his own grand-daughter on Earth. Because she would never leave him, because she felt an obligation to him, because she loved him, despite the fact that travelling with him meant a loss of individual identity, meant never having a home, never belonging anywhere...
Sound at all familiar?
Like Susan, Rose had the situation taken out of her hands in the end. Like Susan, she was left on a world that badly needed rebuilding, which needed people with knowledge to help out. Like Susan, she was left with people who loved her, who would take care of her, who wanted her to come with them, and found her choosing to go with the Doctor painful.
(And on a more interesting note, both were given a goodbye that excluded any physical contact)
But the most important thing is that both Susan and Rose needed someone else to make the decision for them. It was the final rite of passage, the final parental "I know best" decision before all their decisions are placed into their own hands.
See, for all she's seen and done, Rose is still really a child. She needs this rite of passage if she is to truly become an adult. No matter how much it hurts.
She's had her fabulous times, her games and fun and travels. But she isn't the Doctor, she can't be that Peter Pan, that eternal child. Which is something he knows. If the Doctor knows anything, it's that things end. And that some lessons hurt.
"Some things are worth getting your heart broken for" after all. But the thing about people, is that eventually? They heal.
Pain and suffering define us as much as happiness and love
If the Nine vs Ten dichotomy points out anything, it's that wounds can heal, scars can fade. Slowly, but they do. But it sometimes, that wound needs to be lanced, the bandaid needs to be ripped off, iodine put on the cut.
The things that make us better still hurt.
And if this isn't done, the wound can fester. It took meeting the Dalek Emporer again, making the same push-the-button-and-wipe-out-a-world decision for Nine to heal. And it took that sad, painful farewell for Sarah Jane to finally move on with her life.
Oh, I'm not saying she didn't have a life - she had a good job, she was using her experience and knowledge to do something good - rather like Rose is in Torchwood, methinks - But there was that little broken part of her, tucked away and hidden, that never quite got over her abandonent.
He never said goodbye to her, she never knew if he was coming back. But she got her goodbye, and even if it had been a long painful process, it meant she was finally free of that broken worry.
And it seems the Doctor learnt from this.
Because what else was the scene on the beach?
That was the Doctor coming to see Rose, lost, broken Rose who had been ripped from the life she knew, and to say goodbye. No promises, no rescues, just goodbye. To stop Rose living like Sarah, always in the back of her head wondering. She knows now, he isn't coming back. Which is frightening, and painful, but it's answer.
And the knowledge is always preferable to ignorance, no matter how painful.
Grief is itself a medicine.
People saying that Rose hasn't grown at all? Well, the thing about growing up is, it too hurts. We learn from our pains, from our mistakes, from the things we lose and how we lose them.
We lose them, and then we grieve, and then - then - we move on. Grief is a healthy reaction to loss. And however you interpret the Doctor-Rose relationship, Rose has lost something huge.
And that's what the scene on the beach is. It's the final farewell, it's the throwing the flowers into the grave, or helping your parents dig a grave for your puppy. It hurts like a bastard to do, but without that certainty, without that knowledge that this is goodbye, this is where it ends, for now and forever.
And you can't start a new life without finishing the one before.
Rose has lost her old life, and it it hurts her so badly, losing it and the Doctor who defined this life, whether this was right or wrong. But with that goodbye, that conclusion, she is free to grieve and to move on.
Rose has lost something, and she is mourning that. But...
You need an ending before you can have a new beginning. The Doctor gave Rose her ending. Now it's up to her to make the new beginning.
It's always darkest before dawn.
She's got a whole new universe of her own, she could do anything. It's all up to her. The choice is all hers, no financial troubles, no low status to hold her back. The world is in her hands.
Hope...
- Quotes from School Reunion, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Rolling Stones, William Cowper.
Everything has it's time, and everything ends
One of the things I noticed upon reading the reactions to Doomsday was the amount of criticism about the final scenes with Rose, how they depicted her as lost and undeveloped and supremely messed up by her experiences with the Doctor. Even I picked up on this.
And as good as that scene was in it's own right, I can see how it does appear to counter some of the series messages - the main tie-in here would be School Reunion with it's "Everything has it's time and everything ends" message, which was all about Sarah Jane finally moving on.
And here we get Rose, broken and crying, and apparently unable to move on. Which is in character for her so far, but not the positive view.
And yet, as much as it felt like a rather horrible ending for Rose on first glance, on reflection it just seems to work.
Because as cruel as it is immediately, it needed to be done for the long term. Rose needed this.
You can't always get what you want
And if you try sometime you find
You get what you need
Yeah, it hurts like a bastard, but a lot of things that need to be done do - as anyone who has ever had a tooth pulled could tell you.
Quite a few people have been arguing that it isn't a satisfying ending because Rose wanted to stay with the Doctor forever and ever. To which my response is quite simply "What the hell does that matter?" Firstly, Rose isn't immortal, she won't be around forever. She will leave the Doctor eventually, even if it is through death (and anyone who thinks the Doctor wouldn't take Rose's death worse than he did seeing her trapped in another universe is completely fucked in the head).
And secondly, and more importantly, what people want isn't necessarily what's best for them. Case in point: Heroin addicts.
Just because Rose wants to never leave the Doctor, doesn't mean she should. And the Doctor knows this. Hello, he put the bloody world-jumping device around her without her permission. He just hadn't counted on her stubbornness, and was hardly going to send away help when he needed it.
The Doctor is no stranger to making the hard choices that other people won't make.
Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.
This is, after all, the same man who abandoned his own grand-daughter on Earth. Because she would never leave him, because she felt an obligation to him, because she loved him, despite the fact that travelling with him meant a loss of individual identity, meant never having a home, never belonging anywhere...
Sound at all familiar?
Like Susan, Rose had the situation taken out of her hands in the end. Like Susan, she was left on a world that badly needed rebuilding, which needed people with knowledge to help out. Like Susan, she was left with people who loved her, who would take care of her, who wanted her to come with them, and found her choosing to go with the Doctor painful.
(And on a more interesting note, both were given a goodbye that excluded any physical contact)
But the most important thing is that both Susan and Rose needed someone else to make the decision for them. It was the final rite of passage, the final parental "I know best" decision before all their decisions are placed into their own hands.
See, for all she's seen and done, Rose is still really a child. She needs this rite of passage if she is to truly become an adult. No matter how much it hurts.
She's had her fabulous times, her games and fun and travels. But she isn't the Doctor, she can't be that Peter Pan, that eternal child. Which is something he knows. If the Doctor knows anything, it's that things end. And that some lessons hurt.
"Some things are worth getting your heart broken for" after all. But the thing about people, is that eventually? They heal.
Pain and suffering define us as much as happiness and love
If the Nine vs Ten dichotomy points out anything, it's that wounds can heal, scars can fade. Slowly, but they do. But it sometimes, that wound needs to be lanced, the bandaid needs to be ripped off, iodine put on the cut.
The things that make us better still hurt.
And if this isn't done, the wound can fester. It took meeting the Dalek Emporer again, making the same push-the-button-and-wipe-out-a-world decision for Nine to heal. And it took that sad, painful farewell for Sarah Jane to finally move on with her life.
Oh, I'm not saying she didn't have a life - she had a good job, she was using her experience and knowledge to do something good - rather like Rose is in Torchwood, methinks - But there was that little broken part of her, tucked away and hidden, that never quite got over her abandonent.
He never said goodbye to her, she never knew if he was coming back. But she got her goodbye, and even if it had been a long painful process, it meant she was finally free of that broken worry.
And it seems the Doctor learnt from this.
Because what else was the scene on the beach?
That was the Doctor coming to see Rose, lost, broken Rose who had been ripped from the life she knew, and to say goodbye. No promises, no rescues, just goodbye. To stop Rose living like Sarah, always in the back of her head wondering. She knows now, he isn't coming back. Which is frightening, and painful, but it's answer.
And the knowledge is always preferable to ignorance, no matter how painful.
Grief is itself a medicine.
People saying that Rose hasn't grown at all? Well, the thing about growing up is, it too hurts. We learn from our pains, from our mistakes, from the things we lose and how we lose them.
We lose them, and then we grieve, and then - then - we move on. Grief is a healthy reaction to loss. And however you interpret the Doctor-Rose relationship, Rose has lost something huge.
And that's what the scene on the beach is. It's the final farewell, it's the throwing the flowers into the grave, or helping your parents dig a grave for your puppy. It hurts like a bastard to do, but without that certainty, without that knowledge that this is goodbye, this is where it ends, for now and forever.
And you can't start a new life without finishing the one before.
Rose has lost her old life, and it it hurts her so badly, losing it and the Doctor who defined this life, whether this was right or wrong. But with that goodbye, that conclusion, she is free to grieve and to move on.
Rose has lost something, and she is mourning that. But...
You need an ending before you can have a new beginning. The Doctor gave Rose her ending. Now it's up to her to make the new beginning.
It's always darkest before dawn.
She's got a whole new universe of her own, she could do anything. It's all up to her. The choice is all hers, no financial troubles, no low status to hold her back. The world is in her hands.
Hope...
- Quotes from School Reunion, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Rolling Stones, William Cowper.
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From:
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The point is, that for all Rose makes her choice to travel with the Doctor, it's been shown repeatedly, she doesn't want things to change. She wants to stay the same, travel with the Doctor forever, and yet still always have Jackie there to go back to, she kept Mickey on a string for that reason (which is why she was all "What about me?" when he left).
But the Doctor is the ultimate creature of change. He's unreliable and unexpected and always moving forward, moving onwards. That's what the Mortgage conversation is all about even if stripped of shippiness, Rose wants things to stay the same, the Doctor can't cope with that.
And the thing about growing up? It involves change.
What the Doctor, what the universe does to Rose here is to force her to accept that change happens. No matter how much you fight it, the world moves on. She's had this lesson put in front of her so many times and she hasn't wanted to face up to it. And that's what this was, in the end - "This is what happens, this is how the world works."
Clinging to the past, to her life with the Doctor when she's in the altverse is the childish reaction. Moving on and accepting that things change, all things inevitably end is the adult reaction.
From:
no subject
The mortgage conversation... that, I think, gets taken completely out of context, in that I think people forget the situation. They lost the TARDIS, and for all they knew, they were stuck in that time, in that place with their only option being a lift back to Earth when the research team was done and ready to return. She was actually teasing him about him having to get a mortgage now, and remember - she wasn't there when he had to contemplate a similar fate in GitF with Reinette. I never got the impression that it was the idea of being with Rose and the veering of the converation to shared mortgages that squicked him so much as the mere idea of settling down and being stuck in one place and in one time and actually having to have one in the first place. That life, to him, is just as alien, if not moreso, as traveling around in space and time was to Rose at first. And on top of that, it's also rather distasteful. From what I've heard, he was fairly miserable about being stuck on earth as punishment back in (I think) the Pertwee years. But as you said - stuck without the TARDIS for him meant stagnation.
I don't see Rose as necessarily wanting "a mortgage" either, and bringing it up doesn't mean that. She was teasing him at first, then she realized she'd need one too, and that's when it went to the sharing one. Not because she wanted a mortgage, but because she wanted to remain with him even if they weren't traveling. She would never ask him to give up the TARDIS and give up his life and lifestyle for her, and I've seen several people insinuate that she would. I don't agree with that at all. In fact, she chose to stay with him, but changing her lifestyle doesn't mean she loses her identity as Jackie insinuated.
And they visit Earth just as much for Jackie as for Rose. Jackie was the one who made him promise her things, not Rose. Besides, I think it's fairly obvious that he's grown quite fond of Jackie since WW3. :)
Over how long a period must "change" occur? Months? Or years? Of course she didn't want Mickey to stay in the alt-verse initially. They were not a couple then, but he was really her best friend and his staying meant they'd never see each other again. Ever. Nor would they be able to ring each other up, send an email and have a chat. Neither of them could predict they actually would see each other again either (and apparently it was 3 years for Mickey between AoS and AoG). And this is coming from someone who felt she was awful to him first series and did indeed use him. But she did accept his choice.
She did change a lot, and even Jackie saw it. But Jackie was never fond of her new chosen lifestyle because it meant Rose was away far more than she was home. She's her mother, of course she didn't want her so far away and taking so many risks. But even Jackie has changed, as has her view of the Doctor. But what she wants for Rose - a family, children - was not what Rose wanted for herself. At least not at that point in time.
Despite the hokey stuff in Fear Her, it was obvious that she had become more proactive in things as well. I just don't see that she was the same girl who kissed Mickey goodbye and ran smiling into the TARDIS back at the end of the first ep, innocent and ready for adventure.
Clinging to the past, to her life with the Doctor when she's in the altverse is the childish reaction. Moving on and accepting that things change, all things inevitably end is the adult reaction.
Well, I don't think you can really say that at this point. For starters, until he told her on the beach, she didn't know for sure if it was possible that he could come back for her. And second, she was still grieving. It had only been a few months, and she'd been with him for years. And she loved him. You don't just stop loving someone. Should she have been, "Ok, well, goodbye then. Nice knowing you and thanks for the vacation!" and walked off, back straight? Hell no. That's not Rose. She wasn't crying or mopey before he appeared, either.
Ah well. That's just my perspective. :)
From:
no subject
I'm trying to work out how to word this properly, and I don't think change quite covers it properly. In any case what I am saying isn't that Rose hasn't changed - because as you point out, she obviously has - or that she doesn't want people to change so much as she doesn't want circumstances to change.
For all she had apparently hated her shop job (I mean, "Nothing happen"?), she never actively did anything to get away from it, did she? Not until the Doctor came along and gave her something better to do. It was a bad job, but it was easy to just go with it, yes?
It's easy to stay where you are, whether it is as pointless and dull as a shop, or as grand and important as travelling through time and space. Transition - in the major sense - is hard. I think that's what I am trying to get to about Rose's attitude to change.
For starters, until he told her on the beach, she didn't know for sure if it was possible that he could come back for her. And second, she was still grieving. It had only been a few months, and she'd been with him for years. And she loved him. You don't just stop loving someone. Should she have been, "Ok, well, goodbye then. Nice knowing you and thanks for the vacation!" and walked off, back straight? Hell no. That's not Rose. She wasn't crying or mopey before he appeared, either.
Uh, yeah. I know. Sort of the entire point of this meta, and why that scene worked for me.
From:
no subject
Clinging to the past, to her life with the Doctor when she's in the altverse is the childish reaction. Moving on and accepting that things change, all things inevitably end is the adult reaction."
Except that I think she has accepted change. She's seen Sarah Jane (and potentially her future), she had the conversation with the Doctor about how she will wither and die and he won't. She's seen him fall head over heels for Reinette, she'd had the conversation about the mortgage. With all this in mind she makes the decision to stay, she's weighed all these up but she wants to stay with him because she loves him and because she wants to given him the duration of her life so he won't be alone.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Of course she could have made the decision to go back home to live with her mum, maybe take an access course to go into higher education, get a part-time job to fund her studies, eventually win the lottery to be able to afford buy a place in London. But I don't see why this might be a better choice than travelling the universe seeing amazing things no other human will see, travelling with the man she loves. Is it so very different from those people who choose to spend their live travelling our world.
From:
no subject
But that's the thing - it comes down to whether you think Rose's decision is entirely certain, I don't think it is. She knows next to nothing about the Doctor, had no idea about family or other companions (despite him explicitely mentioned he had travelled with others before) so how can she understand this fully? Humanity has a very different idea of forever than the Doctor does, it's inevitable because of the difference in lifespans.
Of course she could have made the decision to go back home to live with her mum, maybe take an access course to go into higher education, get a part-time job to fund her studies, eventually win the lottery to be able to afford buy a place in London. But I don't see why this might be a better choice than travelling the universe
No, it isn't a better choice. But it isn't a worse choice, either.