Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

It was snowing this morning. It's dropping a cold rain down, now. And I can't decide if the dripping I'm hearing is falling inside the house, or outside (no matter where I go in the house, the sound seems to be coming from "over there," which is worrying. OTOH, I can't see any wet spots or puddles, inside, so... maybe I'm hearing rain dripping from one of the eaves, just outside a window).

Anyway, if I catalog my woes, I'll only be giving them more power.

So that means it's Doctor Who Tiem, Boys and Girls!

Ever since I posted this clip, from An Unearthly Child, to commemorate Doctor Who's 47th, it's been rattling around in my brain.

The only other time (I know of) where the Doctor explicitely mentions his past or his family, the way he did in the first ep., was when he consoled Victoria in Tomb of the Cybermen when she worries that she'll never get the image of her father being killed by the daleks out of her mind.

[insert a long passage of time, where I try to find a clip of that scene, on YouTube, fail, and get sucked into watching long stretches of the whole story via someone's playlist, realize I'm hungry, and my feet are cold, so I go eat some reheated pizza, and heat water for tea, and come back to finish this entry while the tea is steeping]

(My icon is cut from that scene, anyway).

Anyway, from that first clip, (viewed through the instant hindsight of watching it after seeing later stories first, which is, I admit, probably unfair. Except that All's Fair in Love, War and Fanon) I got the impression that at that point in time, (From the Doctor's P.O.V.), he and Susan were newly on the run, and that he still feared that those who were the cause of their exile were still hot on their trail. Of course, what may be a short time to a grandfather could very well be a lifetime to the granddaughter, and she's tired of running and hiding with only him for companionship, so she pressures him to let her go to school there when they land on Earth, etc.. And in that first serial, he's willing to kill a wounded man, just to prevent their getting captured -- in that story (and for several others to follow?) it's Ian who represents the powers of Intellect and Romance over Brute Force and Cynicism, rather than the Doctor. The Doctor is just a bundle of mistrust and anger in that story. That's what makes me think the Exile he speaks of is relatively recent in his personal timeline.

Replaying those two scenes in my memory, superimposed over one another the way you can with memory, and I can't help but wonder what happened that drove him into exile -- especially when he says he has to "really want to" in order to remember them. Did his family turn against him, or did they, like Victoria's father, die horribly, and that's why the Doctor lets their memory sleep?

[aha! I just remembered a different set of keywords to use, to search for the second Doctor's scene. here it is.]

I know the Doctor's family and their fate is a subject for a metric buttload of fan speculation and bickering. But pondering his family's fate has got me wondering more about the wider society the Doctor comes from. You can't be exiled without a wider society to be exiled from.

Also, I'm sticking with my private fanon that Susan is the reason Earth is his favorite planet. It was the planet she chose to make home, and for the Doctor, "Home is Wherever Susan Is (or was)".

*nods*

Also, after seeing some of the clips of Eleven, it's really easy for me to go from Two straight to Eleven, and skip all the in between steps (maybe it's the whole Hobo-Raggedy vibe). So if all of his companions are surrogates for his granddaughter (more or less), it puts a whole new spin on that scene from the season 5 dvd people have been posting -- the extra scene between "Beast Below" and "Vampires of Venice."

Oh, and while I was searching for that Tomb of the Cybermen clip, I found this Patrick Troughton Interview on NJN (NJN was the local pbs station that aired Doctor Who when I lived back in New York).

Enjoy!