#forwardflash

[pillowspace]

Since we’re bringing up eating gods again, I want moon’s left pinkie finger and an eyebrow /not forwardflash J🍴😋

I think he only has like one of those things

[roxannepolice]

Oh yes, absolutely this! I think there's a misconception that Donna showed Ten the error of his ways in following vague rules rather than doing the good thing, but I think the difference is a more quantitative one. Like, it's not about what only how much. That's why the Doctor needs someone to STOP them, rather than show them the right way. It's not about always following the laws or always following your heart, it's about spiralling either in "I can't do anything" or "I can do everything". It's about helping the last of humanity survive beyond universe itself and letting them cannibalise their own past to achieve this.

Of course, there is the hubris of Ten saving Adelaide Brook specifically rather than "anyone". He is motivated by compassion inititally, but he eventually spirals into the And x will obey me ubermensch who themself calls good and evil rather than accepting it's never an individual's choice to make, no matter how wise or kind they are. Saving Yuri and Mia didn't have the same effect, just as saving Caecillius and his family and I think it was a brilliant choice that the Doctor gets forwardflashes when he arrives on Bowie Base and when Adelaide kills herself, but not after landing on Earth. Like the history is in flux at that point (I think the concept of fixed points works best when you consider that history isn't just things happening one after another, but have to be observed and interpreted by the future).

So yeah, it's not what it's how much.

I was thinking about the Time Lord Victorious… Doesn’t the Tenth Doctor become one because of Donna? Isn’t what happens in The Waters of Mars an echo/mirror of The Fires of Pompeii?

At Pompeii, when the Doctor was going to leave without saving anyone because the city’s destruction was a fixed point in history and he was ‘in charge’ of keeping this rule unbroken, it was Donna who tried to stop him. At Bowie Base One, he’s about to leave too as it's flooded, but now he can’t, even if it might change history.

Isn’t it darkly, almost sadistically ironic that this time, from Adelaide Brooke’s point of view, he should have been stopped not from leaving but from staying?

[thegutterjournals]

19/03/2018

MELBOURNE