Love and Monsters: An episode about a group of people with complex backstories (losing children to drugs, having their mother killed when they were a child) who bond over the Doctor. Manipulated and killed. Subplot about Jackie Tyler dealing with never knowing when her daughter will be home, if she ever comes home, and the shit she has to put up with because of it.
“Let me tell you something about those who get left behind. Because it’s hard. And that’s what you become, hard. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s that I will never let her down. And I’ll protect them both until the end of my life. So whatever you want, I’m warning you, back off.”
It parallels Elton (who lost his mother) and even Bridget (who lost her daughter), who got involved with LINDA as a coping mechanism for being left behind.
It’s also got a great ending speech:
”you know, when you’re a kid, they tell you it’s all, grow up, get a job, get married, get a house, have a kid, and that’s it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It’s so much darker, and so much madder. And so much better.”
A message that RTDs Doctor tries to convey in almost every episode.
Frequently dismissed by people because “lol monster not scary”. Maybe if he was a stone angel with some pointy teeth…
Space Pig: Clearly not meant to be taken seriously. Designed to be obviously not an alien to the audience, to show the gullibility of humans and their tendency to overreact and act violently when faced with the unknown, as the soldiers did when they shot him to death when he clearly showed no threat. Also, meant as a DISTRACTION for the overreacting humans so that the real alien threat could put the world on red alert and they could get ahold of nuclear weapons.
Scribble: A product of an emotionally disturbed child from an abusive home where her only living family member refuses to give her closure of the abusive part of her childhood.
Slitheen: Skinned human beings and wore their pelt. Intended to use nuclear weapons to destroy the planet to sell for profit. A clear symbol for the destructiveness of corporate greed. But like “lol it fart and green so it bad”, right?
Lazarus: Tried to play god and delay the inevitability of aging and death. It resulted in him becoming quite literally a monster who’s fears and selfishness made him disregard other’s lives.
”It doesn’t work like that. Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It’s not the time that matters, it’s the person.”
Everything ends. That’s a common theme in Davies work. He’s informing us that death is inevitable but it doesn’t have to be horrible if we make the most of what we have.
Shrivelled Ten: The Master purposefully made the Doctor pathetic and weak to destroy the will of the people of earth. The Doctor is a symbol of hope, and if you weaken him then people give in to their fate.
Max Capricorn: He planned to wipe out London just to get revenge on members of the board. His inability to let go of his anger at the board is paralleled by his inability to let go of life, hence his existence as a cyborg at 200+ years of age. but “lol head on wheals, right?”
The Master: He’s completely physically unstable, because he planned his own resurrection as a means to escape the Doctor and cause the Doctor grief. His physical instability is just a visual manifestation of his emotional/mental instability. It’s symbolism Davies uses to get his point to the audience.
Chloe Webber: Already addressed this a bit, but I’ll continue. Chloe was being possessed by another child who she felt kinship to, because she literally had no one. She had no way to communicate to other children because of the emotional distress her father caused, and her mother also had emotional distress which caused her to not be able to communicate with Chloe about her father. The means the Isolus uses to get to Chloe is hardly relevant when you put it into the perspective of WHY she targetted Chloe.
Tinkerten: This is admittedly a Deus Ex Machina, but it’s a decently executed one, because the story arc is intended to take a backseat to character and emotional one. From a narrative perspective, Martha’s journey is less about finding a solution to the Master and more about her coming in to her own person. Furthermore, the God Symbolism is used for a reason, so it can be deconstructed (as RTD tends to do), as the minute he survives, he’s punished for his hubris. His self-righteousness (forgiving the master) leads to the Master deciding to leave him alone in the universe, and later leads to Martha leaving, as he caused a HUGE rift in her family life.
RTD knew he was writing a kids show. He took serious stories and complex emotional arcs, and buried then under sixty feet of silly to get them accross to the young audience, as he should. Moffat, however, takes silly nonsensical stories and shallow emotional “arcs”, changes the chronological order, ads some scary monsters and flowery speeches, and thinks himself mature.
I read somewhere that RTD’s Doctor Who was a serious show pretending to be silly, and Moffat’s was a silly show pretending to be serious, and I think this all explains it well, and you’re a perfect example of the people who buy into it.
Now, tell me again why I shouldn’t prefer RTD to Moffat?
