POBB June 1, 2020

Pick of the Brown Bag

June 1, 2020

by

Ray Tate

In Doctor Who, the Doctor and Fam travel down a strange corridor of time and space.  There's a signpost up ahead.  You're next stop...

The Spoiler Zone

On television Steven Moffat introduced a new menace to Doctor Who.  The Weeping Angels are quantum locked creatures that resemble statues.  

Any statue, anywhere may actually be a Weeping Angel, even ones that don’t look like angels.  However, the Angels bear one weakness.

If you stare at them, they cannot move.

In their debut episode “Blink”—Don’t blink.  Blink and you’re dead—the Angels consign the Doctor and Martha Jones to their doom.  

The Angels are the “kindest serial killer.” They don’t murder you outright.  They send you back in time where you will age a natural death.  

Sans TARDIS, the Doctor and Martha end up stuck in the sixties.  This moment serves as the basis for Jody Houser’s superb four issue Doctor Who team-up.  

The current Doctor as portrayed by Jodie Whittaker only wanted to take her Fam—Graham, Ryan and Yaz—to Woodstock.  Alas, there’s turbulence in the Time/Space Vortex.  She ends up in 1969 London.

The Doctor senses a disturbance.  Events draw her into her past.  She soon meets her previous incarnation and reunites with Martha Jones.

Martha fell in love with the Doctor.  Unfortunately for her, having just lost Rose, the Doctor wasn't in the mood to start a romance, nor could he recognize Martha's feelings for him.

The Doctor’s reencounter with Martha educes guilt and the dawning overtness of her own previous blindness.  Not that she will rekindle any possibility.  Martha's history is a fixed point.  That just makes the Doctor feel even more guilt.

This unrequited relationship with Martha serves as an emotional underpinning amidst a subtle meeting between Doctors and a suspenseful adversarial pursuit from two deadly Doctor Who monsters.

Gifted with a bigger budget Doctor Who returned in 1996, but the new look Doctor Who properly premiered in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston fighting an old enemy, “window shop dummies coming to life.”  The Autons.  

Properly speaking, the Autons are simply plastic shells motivated by the Nestene Consciousness, and they’re operating in the sixties.

The Nestene are one of the coolest loser villains in Doctor Who.  They’ve appeared three times, only to be thwarted Time Lord and Time Lord again.  See what I did there?  They have the same goal.  Rule the plastic laden earth, and they largely attempt the domination through the same means.  

The presence of two Doctors awaken the Nestene Consciousness.  This awakening occurs before their respective future attack to be defeated by the Jon Pertwee Doctor, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and a nascent UNIT led by one of the Doctor's oldest friends Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.  

Ironically, neither alien species knows the other’s in town, and that catalyzes Houser's splendid freewheeling finale in which the Doctors hatch a brilliant plan.

If my explanation seems steeped in Doctor Who lore and a little scary for newcomers.  Think of it as just color.  Houser leaves no reader in the dark.  Her plot and characterization detail the things you need to know.  Roberta Ingranata the second top artist for Doctor Who illustrates with a lively attention to cast resemblance, apart from Yaz I’m afraid.  

By the way, Happy Pride Month