The Belfry

Some… interesting speculations about the upcoming finale to the current Doctor Who. (Insert the usual spoiler warnings for people who actually don’t look at the back of the book ever.)

The whole mishegas about “shocking” revelations and so on is quite annoying. I’m sick of shows that do that “shocking revelation” finale thing anyway because more than half the time it’s either something any viewer with half a brain saw coming from miles away at the beginning of the series so it’s hardly “shocking,” or else it results in the characters being completely derailed in some cheap “they weren’t the people you thought they were” ploy. A bad or lazy writer does this: they’ll take a generally heroic, good-guy character and suddenly “reveal” that he has some sort of bizarre flaw, like he’s a pedophile or a Republican, and we’re supposed to come away thoughtful about the many variations of the human character and how we’re not supposed to take people at face value or some shit like that, but mostly we come away squicked and no longer want to watch the show because it’s basically been ruined.

I don’t know whether the “shocking” revelations at the end of this run of Doctor Who will be one or the other. Here are my only half-serious speculations on what Rusty and Co. are going to lay on us:

• The Doctor is actually going to turn out to be half-human, thus making biologists and anyone else who knows anything about science want to kill themselves. This is actually an old, widespread speculation given some impetus by the movie with the 8th Doctor. (I’ve never seen the movie, just read about it.) But now he’s going to spell it out in triplicate and rub it in our faces and be all emo about it. (Well, emo is a given for everything with this Doctor.)
• The Doctor is going to finally reveal what happened to his wife and kids. He said something to Donna in “The Doctor’s Daughter” about having lost his family “a long time ago.” This is going to turn out to be something he did that caused them to either 1) get killed, or 2) get pissed off enough to reject him. Oh wait — this being Doctor Who, maybe he does some fucked up time thing that means they never existed, except for Susan who somehow escaped his time fuckup. And this caused him to run away from Gallifrey, yadda yadda yadda.
• I’ll bet we never find out why he brought Susan along though. I’ll bet we don’t even hear her name mentioned. I don’t think I’ve heard her mentioned again except by fans ever since she left during Doctor No. 1’s run.
• This being Russell T. “The ‘T’ is for Gay!” Davies’ reign, I’ll bet we don’t find out that the Doctor lost his family because he’s actually not gay and didn’t have had a hot steaming romance with the Master and that caused his family to not leave him and him be not thrown out of the Academy and off of Gallifrey. Yeah, Russell T. “The ‘T’ is for I wish I could make the Doctor gay like in that fanfic I wrote when I was a gay Welsh teenager and he so did it with Turlough! In Cardiff!” Davies. We’ve got your number.
• We’ll find out that the real Doctor died a long time ago and all the rest of the Doctors have been human actors.
• We will find out that the Doctor is actually Welsh, not English.
• We’ll find out that the Master used to be a woman and in fact was the Doctor’s wife, until the Doctor murdered her having found out she and Borusa were having an affair.
• We’ll find out that no Doctor has ever traveled in time and space, that clearly being impossible; instead he’s just been carting his companions around Brighton, and to make them think they were on different planets he had the help of the BBC.
• The Doctor is really a Kaled. In fact, the Doctor is Davros’ son. They had a big fight on a planet made of lava, where Davros lost his legs and one arm and — oh wait, wrong movie.
• The Doctor is evil, the Master is good. Wait, that one is basically true. (j/k)
• The Time Lord that Timothy Dalton is playing is the Doctor’s father.
• Or he is Borusa, somehow revived from being a stone face in a tower, but still evil and wanting to be “King” of Gallifrey and wear a very tacky crown.
• Greek letters are Gallifreyan letters, and they gave them to the ancient Greeks, who thought they were the gods. (I find the whole Greek letters on Gallifrey thing irritating. Gallifrey is an alien planet in another galaxy with a billion-year-old, or whatever, civilization. They have their own freaking alphabet; they don’t need one from a late-blooming race of primitive apes. Very lazy, old Classic Who writers! Actually I think the new series dispensed with this, which is of the good.)
• Romana is the Doctor’s daughter that he didn’t know he had, making their love affair, which they totally had, really creepy incest.
• The Master is the Doctor’s son. Or father. Or (this is probably the one because they’ve been hinting at it in a very obvious way since the Martha days) brother. Thus Rusty gets to hint at gayness and then shift it off the Doctor, who being the hero of a Family Show isn’t allowed to be openly gay.
• The Master is the Doctor’s gay brother — and their falling-out is due to the Doctor having been a homophobe. He has since Repented but everyone knows that even repentant homophobes must never be forgiven for their past sins and must be made to suffer for all eternity. (Or let’s capitalize that in Rusty Speak: “For The Whole Of Eternity!”) The Doctor’s penalty for not approving of his brother’s lifestyle is to spend his entire life all alone except of course for his companions, with whom he will have Sexual Tension but no actual sex.
• The Doctor will also be shown as having been a Racist because the reason he wouldn’t have sex with his companions is because ew gross, they’re aliens. (A perfectly normal response in the real world where species have no natural attraction to those not of their species unless something is wrong with their wiring, but in tv scifi anything goes.) Being racist is as bad as being a homophobe in today’s world, so the Doctor will be shown getting his just desserts for that too, even though he has sort of semi-repented and in fact River Song will be his first human lay, but not until he’s Doctor Eleven, because no one is allowed to sleep with David Tennant — the fangirls would never allow it. (Look up their reaction to “The Girl In The Fireplace” if you don’t believe me.) Anyway… I don’t think John Barrowman is going to be on the show but he would be perfect for this — he could call the Doctor out for being a racist and a homophobe because the Doctor wouldn’t have sex with him.
• The Doctor didn’t blow up Gallifrey because of the Daleks, he blew up Gallifrey because… oh, I don’t know, they’re a bunch of jerks, those Time Lords, and they finally got on his last nerve. He only meant to blow up the Academy, or the Citadel, or something, but this being the Doctor, Something Went Wrong. Oops.
• The Doctor is really Davros in an earlier life.
• The Doctor and the Master are the same person, split into two beings by some time shit or something.
• Humans are descended from Time Lords. (Because Humans Are Speshul.)
• Rose is really a Time Lord. (Because Rose Is Speshul.)

I would be very surprised if at least one of the above does not play out in some fashion.

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I guess this is going to be where I post about Doctor Who stuff. Why not? I can put pikchurs and things. Yays.