Doctor Who Analysis // SALTY ABOUT MOFFAT // Doctor/River the Pairing: a Venting

[silverwolfcc]

Notes: I. I do not hate Moffat. I try not to hate anyone or anything because negativity is a toxin that will weigh you down.
II. I actually love the character of River Song, as an individual, and I started off shipping her with the Doctor and really looking forward to having more and more gradually revealed. Which was possibly my mistake. I built up an idea of how great it could be, and thus became salty about the disillusionment, and after a year of introspection, I still blame Moffat for it. Alas.
III. This is not going to enhance your love of anything to do with Moffat. This is only being put into a written tangible form as poison extraction, and to help anyone else mildly (or intensely) bothered by the Doctor & River's relationship who is having trouble putting it into words.
IV. You are not wrong for liking, enjoying, or even really thoroughly loving a pairing. Love is good. Love is great. This is not a post about love. This is pure salt. Don't want the salt/hate? Don't read this.
V. For the love of all that is holy and unholy in this and any other universe, don't fucking use this for shipwar justification! That is that not the purpose of this either! If you've been linked this by someone because of their salty tears, see 1-4 and feel free to skip and move along. I do not want to rain on anyone's parade. I'm just that salty right now.
VI. I've gotten canons wrong before. I probably am wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But don't spam me with commentary telling me how I'm wrong (in b4 people doing it just because I said don't) because I just don't give a fuck. I just want to get this out of my system and continue looking forward to Chibnall picking up the reigns for season 11 even though I'll miss Capaldi (my favorite.)

What I hate about you:

Moffat has a total disregard for holding together any semblance of "canon" not just from other writers, and other sources like the books, audio, classic, seasons 1-4 of the reboot, but of himself and his own writing. It's mind-boggling. It's frustrating for anyone who cannot be a casual fan, because that is just not how they roll. It makes it more difficult for future writers. Like building a house of cards on a mountain of shit. I've used this analogy a lot with my brother, but I usually add, "But look, a house of cards on a mountain of shit, is just that. But add a maraschino cherry on top and it's a work of art. It's a piece of modern art that speaks of the fragile collapsing base decayed and eroded, and rather than trying to fix things from the bottom up, in our society we try to throw sprinkles and glamour and glitz over the top to look good even though it's so precariously balanced that even doing so could make everything collapse into literal utter ruin." And I stand by that. However, it remains that building a house of cards on a mountain of shit, has no practical or logical reason to do that! For the love of god channel your energy somewhere else. Maybe that's just me.

Now part of Moffat's problem is his grandiose ideas do not have practical feasible solutions for film. Such as the difficulties in filming Girl in the Fireplace because even getting the royal court ballroom was a big deal, and they absolutely were not going to be able to get a place that would allow a horse on marble floors. While, as a director, this bothers me to no end, because the original Terry Nation stories were so fantastic through sheer writing, acting, and film techniques. The daleks were upturned trash cans with a whisk and plunger, and yet they were and despite Moffat's constant idiocies with them (honestly if I just go into all my problems with Moffat, I'll be writing posts for a month) -- such as The Pilot where he used the dalek just to show off how his puddle monster wouldn't be exterminated by it (fuuuuuuck you Moffat, I literally walked out of the room screaming at my tv at that) the daleks are terrifying. Not through special effects, through REALLY GOOD WRITING. (Again, just picture me opening a can of Morton's salt and dumping it straight onto my laptop when it comes to Moffat's handling of writing & daleks all right.)

However, referencing things is not tying into canon.

The one my twin hates the most: Donna, Peter Capaldi's "Who frowned me this face?", and Ashildr.

Moffat failed to actually tie the moral of the story of Pompeii's lesson to the Doctor into Ashidlr.

This infuriates my twin to no end, and kind of flabbergasts me, because I fail to understand how anyone could so blindly MISS that point.

A recap:

Donna begs the 10th Doctor to save just one family from Pompeii, because fixed points can't be averted. You can't save everyone from every natural disaster. That's not what being a TimeLord, or even a time traveler is about. As my brother (twin) also says, rather than doing a movie about time traveling and failing to save JFK, shouldn't a time travel movie about saving a President be to protect one who wasn't shot in this universe? Exactly. Pompeii was doomed with or without the Doctor's interference and he couldn't stop that. But Donna saw how much that hurt him, was killing him inside and making him hardened and callous. She saw him at one of his worst and darkest moments in all his life, months after losing Rose and trying to find a loophole, only to be able to say goodbye and nothing more, and as we later find out, without Donna there to stop him, the Doctor would have drowned and bypassed his regeneration cycle, ending the Doctor, and condemning the earth. Saving the family in Pompeii was a token gesture. Small. It didn't alter history. But it made him hate himself less.

The moral of Donna & Pompeii is that you can't save everyone all the time. It's impossible, even for the Doctor who likes to do many impossible things. HOWEVER: you can sometimes save some people, EVEN IF it's not always the people you like or want saved. Another example of this of course: is the Titanic and Astrid Peth. The people who died were the ones the Doctor loved and cherished most. They were the best people on board. The ones who lived included an obnoxious stock broker who only saw the universe in terms of money and indeed; his highlight of escaping was that he'd sold all the stocks he had in the company just before the crash specifically to tank the stock value.

This is something akin to Monster (the manga) wherein the neurosurgeon saves a young child by working on his operation rather than the Mayor whom a lesser skilled surgeon worked on; and yet the boy grows up to be a monster. (And indeed, already was quite the homicidal maniac by that point and had been shot by his sister who uncovered what he'd been doing, but this is not the point.)

Yet the way Moffat utilized it demonstrated he completely twisted the point from its original purpose, and whatever his intended goal; I can only surmise he failed epically. The 12th Doctor (Capaldi) sets up a trap to defeat the villains; an alien race using 9th century Vikings for chemical drugs (UGH CAN I JUST ADD IN MY SALTY SALT SALT THAT DAVIES ALREADY DID THAT BETTER AND WAY THE FUCK DARKER IN TORCHWOOD MIRACLE DAY? GET OUT MOFFAT. Miracle Day wasn't popular for a reason, why would you even copy that?!) but in the process his own arrogance and lack of foresight gets his favorite girl of the village killed. In an emotional fit he tells Clara how he's tired of always losing, losing people he likes to death, so of all the people in ALL the millennia he's lived by that point; he decides it's a great idea to bring her back to life, even though it might make her a touch immortal.

Oh, and let's just casually remind you as further proof that Moffat doesn't stick to canon (not even his own writing) the Doctor once ditched Captain Jack because he was made immortal and it felt so wrong and awful that he couldn't stand it. And he liked Jack a hell of a lot more than Ashildr.

This is the polar opposite of the lessons from Donna and Astrid. I understand tying in Capaldi's repeated face from the Pompeii episode. Awesome. However, this completely twisted the message of it. The Doctor had saved the entire village that Ashildr loved. Ashildr was already a freak in her village, she blamed herself thinking people would die just because she dreamed they did, she was never going to get married and have a normal viking life, even if she wasn't made into an immortal freak, and she died in battle, protecting and loving her village, and loved by them, and would have been honored completely as a hero by them. I get that the Doctor doesn't believe in heaven, hell, or Vallhalla. I get that Season 8's whole afterlife schtick was a ruse on Missy's part. But see that's where a classy writer could have said, "Yeah but what if the Doctor's wrong? What if there really IS Vallhalla, and she's there now even though she's not your traditional viking warrior, she fought with imagination, and won."

Moffat is not as clever as he thinks.

See instead, it seems a LOT like Moffat just wanted a reason to have an immortal-ish chick running around, reverse engineered her into the viking village, and tried to cram all the circumstances in to fit his narrative.

This is bad writing.

And it shows. It shows a lot.

And it reflects. Audiences didn't dig it.

Now what does all this have to do with Doctor/River the pairing?

Everything.

Because the entire reason it seems like Moffat reverse engineered Ashildr's backstory was because River was so liked for being an immortality foil to the Doctor, similar to the Master/Missy, yet her own distinct character. People wanted more! More psuedo-TimeLords especially with the TimeLords gone.

And therein lies my entire problem with River/Doctor as a pairing.

Individually River Song is an amazing character. Dynamic, interesting, fascinating even. How does he get to know her, to trust her beyond the fact that his future gave her his name? However this sets you up. It's like the house of cards from the top. You get more and more curious to see its base. And then when you do see its base? It's incredibly shoddy and disappointing.

The biggest problem I have with it is that it's not about WHO they are as people or characters. It's only about what they are, what roles they play in the little family dynamic, how they came about into existence, how their experiences and choices shape them.

I get frustrated with actors sometimes. Never tell me what your character is. It doesn't mean a god damn thing. I need to know who they are. YOU need to know WHO they are.

What is all the superficial shit that is generally meaningless.

How is the events that happened to you.

None of that means anything to you as a person. As an individual, how you treat others and interact with them, what you do, how you say things, who you are.

River/Doctor is not about who they are. Not even a little. If it was, they wouldn't be together. They wouldn't be a pairing. At best, she'd be like a sibling rivalry. And frankly, if I was to go back and re-orchestrate the entire "romance" from the start, that is exactly what I would change and what I'd change it to.

Moffat emphasizes so much that the Doctor makes people better, but his starting point with River makes that meaningless. She's supposed to be healing him when he's at his worst but he spends a thousand years alone, and seems to have lost his drive to do anything, and to some extent, even his god damn conscience and mind after Clara.

A marriage, a romance should be equals. But River and the Doctor are only equals in terms of dramatics. They do not hold each other as equals, and the Doctor only holds River as his equal in her intelligence, respect, and the time vortex making her part TimeLady-ish, and then the kidnapping fiasco making him a weapon.

She is beyond unhealthily obsessed with him, and the way it's always structured is that it's never the Doctor's fault -- Oh except for River reaming him out for scaring his enemies so much that they made a weapon to defeat him???

To be perfectly honest, I hated that speech so much. And I still do.

Moffat tries so hard to make the Doctor always perfect, rather than just a really weird alien who couldn't stand a caste & structured society and tyranny in the universe and didn't want to stand idly by doing nothing (and was punished multiple times for his interfering ways) that whenever he DOES try to make the Doctor flawed, it comes across ABYSMALLY. It doesn't fucking work, and worse? It's emotionally unrelatable. What fucking people have you met that need a moral lesson of "protecting your friends by scaring terrorists means they'll kidnap your friends to turn them into raving psychos because that's your fatal flaw." *FIRST OF ALL*, to use Israel for example. Hamas controlling the Gaza strip often took some Israeli soldiers as hostages because of the Jewish law of "all for one" (basically) in an effort to get either their own men freed or concessions, or to just literally start trouble. This was the biggest reason Netanyahu hard shut down the concrete corridors being built, because he knew they were tunnels being created for this exact purpose (and showed the U.N.) But at no point did they decide "We'll kidnap Jewish babies, raise them as terrorists and they'll be totally given access to insider Israeli forces and then they'll still be loyal to us so they'll kill on command." Even the KGB hasn't tried that. And yes, there's a line between fiction and reality, but here's the thing.

Doctor Who is about an alien so it can be about humanity. That was the beauty of the early scifi in even the 1960s. Each moral was something relatable. Sometimes humans were dicks. Sometimes they were victims. Sometimes they just needed a little help. Sometimes the Doctor is a hero, and other times he's so alien that it's almost incomprehensible. But it's not just about him and him alone.

I *get* that after the Time War, it seems like the Doctor is the one most important individual in the universe, but he's really not. The first main theme of Doctor Who is SUPPOSED to be that EVERYONE is important. BECAUSE THEY ARE. Which I could spend 50 pages going into how Moffat doesn't get this concept, much less its execution, probably because he does not subscribe to that, but focusing SOLELY on the Doctor/River, it doesn't work. Because after the Time War as much as he was alone and missed his people and felt guilt and shame over what he did to them and indeed; to River (fucked up rescuing her, let her child self be raised alongside her parents because that was the only way for them to be together, let her be turned into a monster, her own mother shot her, ALL TO KILL HIM, then was arrested and in prison for life for it etc. etc. etc.) the big thing he missed was a sense of stability and knowing what he was doing, and even in Moffat's own writing; where he was going ("Home; the long way around.") and NONE OF THAT is REMOTELY provided by River's presence.

There is some argument to be made that in the Husbands of River Song she does give him a bit of home and stability (24 years, yeah, we fucking get it Moffat, mention it a dozen more times in Mysterio please) but this is frankly laughable to me. She couldn't recognize the real him despite knowing all his past regenerations because she never seemed to get the real him. She had so much trouble knowing the real him that she thought he was incapable of being in love with her or risking himself for her or that he would even care (even though.... that's.... precisely WHY she was turned into a weapon and HOW she killed him???? TWICE?) and kissed other men and called them her husband to his face. And brandished a gun and flaunted her psychopathic genocidal homicidal maniac tendencies. Wow. That's arguably a taste of home and the TimeLords, especially post-war, but let's be honest with ourselves. It doesn't take a genius to see that Moffat was trying to make the point that the Doctor is also a genocidal occasionally homicidal figure. Only again, he does it so damn POORLY that it's cringe-worthy AND FURTHERMORE: makes the pairing of River and the Doctor THAT MUCH WORSE. Because rather than helping the Doctor be the kind of BETTER GOOD MAN HE WANTS TO BE, or even just find and ACCEPT who he is and becomes, River exacerbates and brings out his ABSOLUTE WORST.

And that's the part of River/Doctor that really makes me sick. She brings out the worst in him so he can bring out the best of her. But I don't even think that IS River's best. She seems to be having a lot more fun conning genocidal space emperors out of their jewels and shooting mummies and digging up ancient treasures and being sassy than she EVER has fun that we see her with with the Doctor. I'm NOT trying to compare her to Rose or other companions/romances of the Doctor, but even with Astrid who lasted all of one episode, he laughed, she laughed, they were delighted by the little things, like the fact that London smelled frankly AWFUL! It harkened back to his old companions, and the idea of coming along just for fun, not always to save the universe or risk being displaced in time like the Ponds. And yet, because it was the Titanic, she still died trying to save him.

Which is another point again. River giving up her regenerations to save the Doctor is supposed to be a huge sacrifice.

I just don't see it.

He risks all his future regeneration capabilities regularly. Regular humans actually DO die to save him and it crushes him every time (Adric, Astrid, many ood, let's not even talk about the year Martha spent watching entire continents destroyed just because the Master was locked onto Earth). Is it because she's supposed to kill him and has no real reason to trust him? UM let me just point you to the MANY TIMES the Doctor saves and spares daleks and Davros whom he has WAY less reason to trust, and yet they never marry him.

Meanwhile, refusing time to go forward, stuck in a fixed point in the suit of her childhood nightmares; refusing to allow time to progress out of sheer willpower (that's not how fixed points work but moving on) all so she could make the Doctor understand how truly loved he was by others and the universe was very sweet, yes. And important, and poignant. But it doesn't work romantically. Instead it emphasizes their foiled attributes, and comes across a billion times more Cain and Abel.

Imagine instead, if the Doctor wanted to write himself into the story of Rory and Amy and have them be his parents (this is a theme that would work disturbingly well through the whole course of 5-7) But in so doing, just by crash landing and imprinting on baby Amy, he disrupted the other time traveling child in their life, one who wouldn't even exist without the Doctor's interference, but because he just wants family, he keeps trying to befriend the not-sibling. By the time of the death, you actually could argue that the Doctor made the would-be psycho murderer (whose mission was to murder him but still wound up murdering others after he released her so IDK ABOUT THAT WHOLE HEALING THING WOW) BETTER instead of the current River situation which is hard to imagine not being better almost any other way.

There is so much toxic and fucked up about their relationship, but the one that gets to me the most, is that I think they'd be happier and more well-adjusted with other people.

That is the worst thing to base a marriage on. I'm Catholic. We almost believe murder is better than divorce. And yet River/Doctor is such an unhealthy relationship I can't enjoy it.

I hope others do. And I hope to god they never read this and get upset, or worse, agree with it. I hope I'm wrong or just don't understand some inner hidden facet.

But for my money? I'd take the Master/Doctor over River Song/the Doctor. She is a more interesting, dynamic, CONFIDENT AND HAPPIER woman without him. Around him either through sheer programming brainwashing, natural competitiveness, or Moffat's fucked idea of "love" (no that's obsession) River becomes less of a woman. She even purposely hides her own pain. As she tells her OWN MOTHER, "Never let him see the damage." HER MOTHER. If I said that to my mother about my boyfriend, or husband, she'd take me aside and explain in no uncertain terms that when you love someone you'd rather do your best to help their pain than pretend it doesn't exist. AND INDEED? MOST of my fights with my boyfriend have been because in the past I really tried to cover up the pain and even now, I'm god awful at expressing or showing it. And when I don't? It not only sends the message that I think he doesn't care (and while it's I don't WANT him to care, that's also wrong) but that I think he's not strong enough to handle it. And indeed, River doesn't think he's strong enough to handle it. And for all I can tell? She's probably right! He probably ISN'T! But the only way to GET better at handling it is to try!

That forces the Doctor to not grow. And that's I think the major source of Moffat's biggest problem. He doesn't really handle development and growth well. At best, I can say it's because he overthinks it via time machine, but even though we got to see River develop as a character, she slips around the Doctor, and Moffat's Doctor doesn't grow. He doesn't LET himself get affected that way because it hurts. WELL OF COURSE IT HURTS! But as we learned from the cyberman with even Tennant; that's good! It lets you adapt! And even arguing that adaptation is a human trait, not something the Doctor can do easily, I'm not talking about a total overhaul of his character or the amnesia of 8, or "WHO AM I" of 7 (and 8), just something by way of people in love are meant to bring out their best.

And in that case, 11 was far more in love with Amy, even in spite of Moffat's writing and clear overarching vision.

River/Doctor just doesn't work for me. And I don't even buy that she healed him as 12 because while he might not have the borderline suicidal reckless disregard for his life and TARDIS that 9 & 10 had (god especially 9), living seems to be a fucking chore for him. "I live therefore I live." Jesus fucking christ. The last time I was that comatose was well before I met my fiance, not after getting to spend 24 years with him.

And that's part of it. I don't see what they get from each other that wouldn't have been better served had it been a sibling Cain & Abel relationship. I flat out, don't. And after the last 6 years, I have to admit... I don't want to anymore either. I just don't. I'm done. I don't WANT to understand what others see in River/Doctor, I've tried, and it's brought me nothing but further frustration, heartache, and headaches. Maybe I just see love, marriage, life, and Doctor Who very differently from others. And you know what? That's okay.

But if you're as salty as me and unable to put your finger on exactly why, I hope this helped. I'm generally going to disregard this as poison extraction, as I said, and please understand, I do still love River Song as an individual character. I think that's a big part of why I don't like her shipped with the Doctor. A relationship of any kind; sibling, rivalry, parents, or romance, should serve to highlight, enhance, or GROW a character. This is one that I just don't see as having that effect on either.

-- CC out.