“Thank you, but I’d rather die behind the chemical sheds.” - Evey Hammond, V for Vendetta

Vanishing Act

By Catherynne M. Valente

I get this strange, sinking feeling watching Partners In Crime. It’s a feeling of reversal, of a joke that works both ways…it might be nausea. It might irony. I can’t be sure. That word is still hemorrhaging meaning these days, and here I am without a triage unit.

The feeling is this: the creators of DW seem to believe that Donna is a fan stand-in Companion. Ridiculously over-enthusiastic about the Doctor and his adventures, convinced that those adventures are so awesome that they will redeem every poor choice she’s made in the last two years. Longing for spaceflight, in possession of otherwise meaningless lives. They believe that she is a gift to us, a clear and present audience-insert. But there–that strange and sinking feeling again. Because when I look at Donna, she’s not a mirror, she’s a telescope, and on the other end, dead in the sights, is Russell T. Davies and his gang.

Ridiculously over-enthusiastic about the Doctor and his adventures, convinced that those adventures are so awesome this time that they will redeem every poor choice they’ve made in the last two years. And bubbling over with obnoxious hyperbole regarding the OMGGREATNESS of everything ever, while we, Doctors all, stand back, tired, unsure, burned by the past, bored to tears with screechy, sad show-runners who cannot stop trying to seduce us. We’re willing to try it again, of course, because it’s better than nothing at all, but it doesn’t look like anything new, or special, or even fun. So we carry RTD’s baggage with a heavy sigh and shove off for another season.

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Does it matter what this first episode was about? Not really–it was an incidental plot, incidental monsters, unmemorable and unfunny. Fat people were yet again little more than victims, continuing the parade of the old, the heavy, and the female being endlessly villainized. The evil Mary Poppins antagonist was one-dimensional, sorry, and subjected to a cringing Wile E. Coyote mid-air pause before dropping to her inevitable death. The score was sickeningly “wacky.” The anemic comedy served little purpose, and the whole thing existed only to introduce Donna to us once more. The first episode of the season, like the Christmas Special, is rarely strong, but with only 13 episodes a season, we have to start asking: how many throwaway shows would you like us to swallow before you remind us why we cared about this show so much in the first place? Do you really have so little quality in your collective handbag that you must ration it out so?

But of course, there was Rose. In the end, always Rose. For a certain kind of fan–which I am not but sympathize with, as we have been asked, since the first episode of the first season, to see through her eyes and her heart–nothing else matters but that she appeared, as if out of nowhere. Her face was lovely and sad–and silent, of course–and familiar, the only affecting moment of the episode for me. She is a character who has been mistreated, but in her first-season incarnation was the closest thing to genuine and sublime this show managed. Her apotheosis was more than I ever expected from a cheezy SF show. The show itself has never ceased to meet much lower expectations since then. I expect and dread this time around the inevitable four-way of Rose, Martha, Donna, and the Doctor. I cannot believe that RTD will avoid the misogynist catfight choice, given his apparent views of women’s motivations, and that is deeply tiresome and trite. To bring Rose back seems little more than an act of desperation, an attempt to reclaim an old beauty whose reason and ration the creators never really understood in the first place. I have small hope, however, that as before, Rose will surprise me.

She walked away into nothing. Vanished. She is a ghost–something that Doctor Who is quietly obsessed with. I count a full six episodes of the new series dealing with ghosts, vanishing women, the melancholy disappearance of beauty–far more if you count in that number episodes dealing with empty bodies and vanished souls. Vanishing is an act of terrible fascination and horror for this new Doctor, this man who himself vanishes over and over, sighing out of existence with a sound that is half-shriek, half-warning bell, not un-reminiscent of that famous Dalek cry. They all disappear in the end, don’t they, Doctor? No wonder you scream.

But Rose vanishes without a sound, no warning, no cry. She is, as she has always been, a TARDIS in miniature, floating aimlessly in space, full of secrets, and ever so much bigger on the inside.

Perhaps the only question the new series ever seeks to ask, over and over, is: where has she gone?

Only the antecedent of that holy, tantalizing pronoun ever changes.

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Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and four books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, and Oracles. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award and the Million Writers Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Rhysling and Spectrum Awards, and the World Fantasy Award. She currently lives in Northeastern Ohio with her partner and two dogs.

For more on Catherynne M. Valente, please visit her website.