I: Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo
So out of nowhere, Bootstrap Maggie goes, "Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo." Meaning, those buffalo who are buffaloed by buffalo often turn out to buffalo other buffalo, who are also historically buffaloed by their fellow buffalo. What it means is that everybody lies to everybody else -- that there's always another head on the totem pole, below yours. And above. What it means is that "buffalo" is the password to language: verb, object, subject, noun, adjective. To buffalo, I buffalo, you buffalo, we buffalo. And if I'm tricking you, and you're tricking somebody, if we're all the buffalo that buffalo buffalo, we're all in the same trap. The only way out is to rise: to tell the truth. Bliss would call the buffalo a symbol of the Doctor, because Bliss thinks everything is a symbol of the Doctor, and vice versa. Bless Bliss, we used to say. Bless Bliss. But she's right about that, too: he's the key you turn in the lock called everything, the password to the whole world. Verb, object, subject, noun, adjective: the Doctor doctors, I doctor, you doctor, we doctor. He's the buffalo. The last of them.
Season 1 of Doctor Who is the Hero's Quest -- a retelling of that human tendency to reach for experience of the divine, and the human tendency to reach it. Season 2 of Doctor Who is the same story told fourteen ways: the human tendency to fuck it up and forget what we're here for, and the human requirement to fall away from God and enter the real world again. And Season 3 of Doctor Who is a lot of things, but what makes it stand apart is the lack of Rose, and its resistance to substituting Martha for her. Season 1 was Rose's story; Season 2 was the story of all Companions, which is to say all people who have seen or wished for miracles, which is to say, all people. But Season 3 is a story about Doctor himself, and that is I think key to the season as a whole: just because the Companion was designed to be our entry point doesn't mean the Whoniverse is restricted to that lens.
I think maybe we were "trained" to think of the Companion's POV as the most accessible, and thus to become batshit shippers, but the show takes a step sideways in Season 3, and it makes Martha a bit queasy to watch, if you're not prepared to jump away from the Companion thing. I love that the show can concentrate on such radically different aspects of the Doctor's world, because it's vast and beautiful and full of history -- but I think this is also pretty confusing at first, like changing TARDISes midstream. Actually, you could even say Season 1 of Torchwood is not "about" Gwen or Jack, but about the icky relationship between people and technology, people and the edge of superiority, people and the Other. It fails, spectacularly, and I love it -- but it fails not because it's about the wrong stuff or does what it's "about" wrong: it's just that we were trained by Rose to think the New Series were about particular characters.
In those terms, then, Season 3 is the natural chapter in a forty-year romance between the Doctor and the Earth; it's a postscript for heartbreak. It's an examination of medical ethics. It's an examination of the role of the individual in the workings of religion. It's the story of a girl who pledged her life to help the world, and how she did it, in a Gospel told by and for the Doctor himself. It's a story of reversals and dark mirrors: defining the Doctor by precisely defining his opposite, and then resolving the difference; by resolving the question of power and its responsibilities by upgrading simple human power to a near-divine level, then giving Him a human heart. It's a biography -- actually, it's more precise to call it a working pathology -- for God. Most interestingly -- to me, at least -- is that it's the step in what seems to be an ongoing project by Russell Davies to ask a very simple question: why do atheists (Joss, RTD, Ursula K. LeGuin) write better religious fiction than the faithful? Or, really, why do they do it at all?
II: The Runaway Bride
The Christmas Special begins with a repeated element from earlier seasons. In this season, more than ever, it pays dividends to pay attention to repeating images and concepts. We begin with a zoom into Earth, the fourth such in the new series. The first time, we said hello to a new friend; the last time, we lost her. And in the middle, we traded one Doctor for another, and said hello again. This time it's a goodbye. "The Runaway Bride" is a story about coming to terms with grief, finding the strength to admit that sometimes hope and love aren't enough; and it's a story about finding peace.
The Companion for this story, played by the wonderful Catherine Tate, starts us off, walking down the aisle, neon family either side. She's always been stable, always kept her valence shell full, non-reactive; until she met Lance, until she met our Doctor, she was odorless, colorless, monatomic -- but that's not why her name is Donna Noble. In every chapter of this story, you'll find a hymn: sometimes they're more hidden than others. Sometimes they're profane. But this is the Christmas Special, and so this is Donna Noble: give us peace. The first thing she does is open the doors of the TARDIS wide, and let some air in.
After Donna's been kidnapped by the pilot fish Santabots, there's an excellent scene in which the TARDIS physically comes bouncing down the highway, careening after her. They showed this at Children In Need; I watched it on the web, and it was amazing: the TARDIS comes careening down the motorway, music so crazy you couldn't really hear what was going on, on the screen. But in the crowd: everybody in the whole concert hall, gasping at once, breathing with a single breath. It was huge. The moment made me understand Doctor Who fandom a whole lot more. Think about the power of that moment: when the TARDIS comes into the shot, and the whole world starts cheering, all of them in love with exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time. And from one kidnapper to another, the Doctor asks Donna to jump. She asks if his "friend," whose name he hasn't yet said, trusted him too. Did she jump? Did she ever.
Being a normal person -- a person who didn't notice the Santa Fish or the Slitheen or any of that shit -- doesn't make you less. It makes you Donna, which you already were. "The Oncoming Storm" isn't bullshit mythology, it's the way of things. But just like the Time War, which hurt everybody but the normal people, the Doctor comes in waves. There's a trees/forest analogy running through the season, and Donna starts it here. The trees are made of forest, and the forest is made of trees. No trees, no forest: but without a forest, the wind can take you down, one by one.
The Doctor gives Donna a ring to keep her hidden from the pilot fish, but soon figures out that her disappearance arose from her body's saturation by huon particles, a source of energy that hasn't existed for billions of years, and which was being manufactured again by Torchwood, in its base below the Thames. It's something so powerful that Gallifrey was afraid of it, and Torchwood thought it could handle it. She was getting them in her coffee, and they can't be biodamped by a simple ring. Which is to say, the thing she thought would make her special is now the thing that can't stop her from being special. Which is to say, she's not a replacement Companion; she's a mirror: The Last Of The Singletons, so desperate to hear those four little words that she can't see the danger signs. So afraid of being alone.
In contrast to the cuppa that saved Ten and the world a year ago, the huon was administered through Donna's coffee. Later, the Doctor takes Donna back 4.6 billion years, when the Earth was waiting to form: a Rachnoss ship drifts into the system and begins to pull debris around itself, attracting dust and light and growing mass. I mean to say that at the center of the Earth is a secret: something dark, scary, chthonic, something forgotten, something you can't wrap your head around. Something that's scary because you can't understand it, because it looks ugly to you, because you don't have enough information, because you're not comfortable: something that makes you shudder without knowing why. Does it make you love Earth less? It shouldn't.