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beccaelizabethProfessor Yana and the Master respond to basically the same urge - survival - filtered through different cultures and genetics. The Master is a Time Lord, so he knows that personal immortality is an achievable goal, because it has been done. Professor Yana is a human, so when he feels that same driving urge towards survival, he also knows his personal clock is ticking. Options for personal survival are few and getting fewer. So he pours it all into species survival. Which is one reason I figure Yana had kids and when the Master called the Toclafane his children he was being biology-literal. The other being that's the most depressing thought ever. But even if they were only related to him by them all being a bit human, that's trying for genetic immortality, the survival imperative. The difference between Yana's altruism and the Master's absolute selfishness, in this case, is just one flipped bit of possible. Time Lords can keep on living, and the Master decides to.
Other Time Lords mostly don't. They accept that it's 13 and out. Go live in the Matrix forever instead. Which is another form of immortality, but one that doesn't take up so much physical space. If they invented regeneration/immortality before they invented space travel, that might explain TARDISes - if they're all getting born and nobody dying you'd need to make the planet bigger on the inside to fit everyone in. Which could result in aggressively expansionist Gallifreyans, like in the Dark Times, when they apparently kicked everyone else's arse. But at some point they changed. Decided to stay home and just watch the universe. Possibly when they gained the ability to see possible futures through Time? People going around making decisions and changing things would make all their heads busy. Better to stay home and do nothing and have nice quiet head. Whatever the reason though, once they're all on one planet, they don't seem to have big overpopulation problems. They accept limits on their immortality and pack down small into the Matrix. Do they also accept limits on their reproduction? 900 years of phonebox travel and as far as we know the Doctor never chose to have children after his first regeneration. Is that just him, or his people? If they've controlled that particular urge then their regeneration wouldn't make the population spiral out of control so much. Only the first life would have children, minimizing the impact of the new technology. Maybe the Doctor Doesn't Do That Any More?
How is this control achieved? Well it can't just be their biology doesn't work that way, because they're all super smart and could grow newbies in tanks if they wanted to. New bodies too. The Master survived, so that's potentially available to the whole species. But they don't choose it. So it's in their minds as things not to do. And powerfully, if it's going to override survival. Something like a taboo, but seriously strong. Which might explain both the Doctor's reaction to Jack and his reaction to Jenny. If these are things that everyone in his species could do but does not... somehow that's programmed in. But his reaction to Jenny is adequately explained within the episode, albeit in a sad way. Time Lord prejudice was only the explanation for Jack. Time Lords don't do immortality. Except for the few crazy ones.
Time Lord society and technology seemed stagnant, at best. At worst they'd lost the more important bits of knowledge. Bit of a problem. Time Lord society also seemed to revolve around the Academy, education, study. That seems just a bit contradictory. If they're all going and studying, why arent' they all finding stuff out? Why do they end up knowing less than the Doctor and the Master? Experience vs book learning is the obvious one. But there's got to be other levels. In order to forget bits, Time Lords must be studying only the approved stuff, and forgetting the hidden stuff. So you end up wondering what kind of education this Academy really is, how it compares to schools and universities here.
To get a PhD, to get to be a Doctor, you have to do some bit of thinking that nobody did before.
... One wonders how many Doctors there can possibly be on Gallifrey. And if that's why our one is The...
A doctoral thesis or dissertation is a contribution to knowledge, new and improved. It's the result of a whole lot of education. First you find out what everyone in your society is supposed to know - compulsory schooling. Then you specialise and learn what everyone in your field is supposed to know - B degrees. And then you go and figure out something knew. High school teachers know a whole lot and teach only a small slice of it. When their students leave they still know less than their teacher. University teachers - Professors - are trying to get students to the point where they know at least one thing their teacher doesn't.
Professor Yana's title really was an affectation. There hadn't been a university for a thousand years - and he didn't start one. And that was why he had to wait for the Doctor to turn up to finally make the machine work. We don't know how long they were sitting around waiting for the rocket to work. We do know that he kept them in the dark about the true progress of the rocket. He worked with Chantho and asked the Doctor what he knew about he systems. He said there'd been so little help. But he hadn't been actually trying to make any. If Professor Yana had been teaching for (almost) as long as he'd been studying then he'd have a bunch of students doing research, doing thinking, maybe thinking of the thing he has missed. But he has no such thing. He's just trying to think on his own. From that point of view it's surprising he ever called the Doctor in.
Yana: "Better to let them live in hope."
Doctor: "Quite right too."
... and I'm going to call the Doctor a bit short sighted on that one. But only in what he says, not what he does.
Children of Time isn't quite right. They're not children. They're students. They follow him around, learn things, and then go off and think of things that he wouldn't. Quite a lot of which he doesn't like, but so it goes. The point is, Ace named the Doctor right - he is acting like a Professor, like a teacher, who wishes his students to exceed him. And that's why he succeeds where the Master repeatedly fails. The Master has limits on what he can think. Everyone does, it's called individuality. The Doctor can't think up everything that Jack or Martha or Sarah Jane would. But by helping them all learn, he can help them think up new things. Companion saves the day. Doctor Donna to the rescue - she graduates by thinking up a new thought her teacher couldn't. Professor type win.
Yana and the Master are making a similar mistake - thinking they know things and nobody else knows things except the Doctor and that they therefore don't need anybody else except the Doctor.
They're also keeping people in the dark because they'd be scared of the truth.
I like that part. It means Jack and the Master are doing wrong in the same way. Jack would really hate that.
Torchwood keep Earth in the dark because things are big and scary. But they've got no Master type excuse for that, they're more like Yana. The Master really is different than the rest of the universe, Time Lord, Academy education, doing things his teachers wouldn't think of. But Yana didn't have much of that. He scraped together an education however he could, studied whatever he found, learned a lot. And then, apparently, he didn't pass that on. And that left him fighting the darkness alone, even though his goal was to preserve everyone.
Solution both times is tell everyone truths. Lots of truths. Don't just say "There's dark stuff out there", keep going to "And this is what we can do about it." And then, eventually, when they've studied up enough, people will start coming up with new things. Cause that's how learning works.
It's also how story works, with the Doctor, or within the Torchwood team. But because they currently want to keep an outside world more or less like our own it's not how story works in the wider DW Earth. We don't see the story of how the improved technologies cause changes in their society. Not in present day Earth. That preserves the ability to tell and retell the first contact story, the one where humans find out a new thing and find it scary or shiny or all the rest. But it keeps the scale of the SF elements small. 21st century Earth won't be the story of the cultural impact of any of what we've seen, it's just staying individual. Keeps the story close to our world, recogniseable, and flexible. If they want to see impact stories they can time travel into futures and use those.
I get frustrated though because the politics comes out creepy. There's the chosen few, who get to know these things and cope with them, and there's the vast majority, who just get to react to things, usually by screaming and getting blown up. Every time we get a new Torchwood agent or a new Doctor's companion or a new group like the AU Preachers or LINDA we see how ordinary people react to the extraordinary. I like that part. But then they've just joined the chosen, and they look at the majority with suspicion and keep hiding things from them. That's just weird and creepy. Also there's no present day examples where people just live with the alien. It's always framed in terms of antagonism, or very rarely cooperation against another threat. It's all very well writing stories set in the future or on other planets which are all about the destructive futility of interspecies hostility and suspicion, but if all the examples set on the most recogniseable world are about bad things invading, it's not saying what it thinks it's saying. Yeah, there's the Doctor, alien and on our side. That's useful. But if he's the only one it's still not saying good stuff. I miss worlds where the aliens are really alien, and also individual, and also shopping in the same stores as the human looking people.
I liked the first season of Torchwood because, while they were drugging people to make them forget and other creepy secret keeping things like that, they were also screwing up a lot and (nearly) dying. That's logical. They insist on fighting alone, they get splatted. Good stuff. Even if they think they're the good guys, they're doing bad, so it goes wrong. Torchwood and Yana, keeping people in the dark.
If they're both supposed to just be heroes, there's something gone wrong.
And if Sarah Jane acting the same way is supposed to be a good thing - if the journalist making false reports is somehow the right thing to do - something gone very wrong indeed.
Other Time Lords mostly don't. They accept that it's 13 and out. Go live in the Matrix forever instead. Which is another form of immortality, but one that doesn't take up so much physical space. If they invented regeneration/immortality before they invented space travel, that might explain TARDISes - if they're all getting born and nobody dying you'd need to make the planet bigger on the inside to fit everyone in. Which could result in aggressively expansionist Gallifreyans, like in the Dark Times, when they apparently kicked everyone else's arse. But at some point they changed. Decided to stay home and just watch the universe. Possibly when they gained the ability to see possible futures through Time? People going around making decisions and changing things would make all their heads busy. Better to stay home and do nothing and have nice quiet head. Whatever the reason though, once they're all on one planet, they don't seem to have big overpopulation problems. They accept limits on their immortality and pack down small into the Matrix. Do they also accept limits on their reproduction? 900 years of phonebox travel and as far as we know the Doctor never chose to have children after his first regeneration. Is that just him, or his people? If they've controlled that particular urge then their regeneration wouldn't make the population spiral out of control so much. Only the first life would have children, minimizing the impact of the new technology. Maybe the Doctor Doesn't Do That Any More?
How is this control achieved? Well it can't just be their biology doesn't work that way, because they're all super smart and could grow newbies in tanks if they wanted to. New bodies too. The Master survived, so that's potentially available to the whole species. But they don't choose it. So it's in their minds as things not to do. And powerfully, if it's going to override survival. Something like a taboo, but seriously strong. Which might explain both the Doctor's reaction to Jack and his reaction to Jenny. If these are things that everyone in his species could do but does not... somehow that's programmed in. But his reaction to Jenny is adequately explained within the episode, albeit in a sad way. Time Lord prejudice was only the explanation for Jack. Time Lords don't do immortality. Except for the few crazy ones.
Time Lord society and technology seemed stagnant, at best. At worst they'd lost the more important bits of knowledge. Bit of a problem. Time Lord society also seemed to revolve around the Academy, education, study. That seems just a bit contradictory. If they're all going and studying, why arent' they all finding stuff out? Why do they end up knowing less than the Doctor and the Master? Experience vs book learning is the obvious one. But there's got to be other levels. In order to forget bits, Time Lords must be studying only the approved stuff, and forgetting the hidden stuff. So you end up wondering what kind of education this Academy really is, how it compares to schools and universities here.
To get a PhD, to get to be a Doctor, you have to do some bit of thinking that nobody did before.
... One wonders how many Doctors there can possibly be on Gallifrey. And if that's why our one is The...
A doctoral thesis or dissertation is a contribution to knowledge, new and improved. It's the result of a whole lot of education. First you find out what everyone in your society is supposed to know - compulsory schooling. Then you specialise and learn what everyone in your field is supposed to know - B degrees. And then you go and figure out something knew. High school teachers know a whole lot and teach only a small slice of it. When their students leave they still know less than their teacher. University teachers - Professors - are trying to get students to the point where they know at least one thing their teacher doesn't.
Professor Yana's title really was an affectation. There hadn't been a university for a thousand years - and he didn't start one. And that was why he had to wait for the Doctor to turn up to finally make the machine work. We don't know how long they were sitting around waiting for the rocket to work. We do know that he kept them in the dark about the true progress of the rocket. He worked with Chantho and asked the Doctor what he knew about he systems. He said there'd been so little help. But he hadn't been actually trying to make any. If Professor Yana had been teaching for (almost) as long as he'd been studying then he'd have a bunch of students doing research, doing thinking, maybe thinking of the thing he has missed. But he has no such thing. He's just trying to think on his own. From that point of view it's surprising he ever called the Doctor in.
Yana: "Better to let them live in hope."
Doctor: "Quite right too."
... and I'm going to call the Doctor a bit short sighted on that one. But only in what he says, not what he does.
Children of Time isn't quite right. They're not children. They're students. They follow him around, learn things, and then go off and think of things that he wouldn't. Quite a lot of which he doesn't like, but so it goes. The point is, Ace named the Doctor right - he is acting like a Professor, like a teacher, who wishes his students to exceed him. And that's why he succeeds where the Master repeatedly fails. The Master has limits on what he can think. Everyone does, it's called individuality. The Doctor can't think up everything that Jack or Martha or Sarah Jane would. But by helping them all learn, he can help them think up new things. Companion saves the day. Doctor Donna to the rescue - she graduates by thinking up a new thought her teacher couldn't. Professor type win.
Yana and the Master are making a similar mistake - thinking they know things and nobody else knows things except the Doctor and that they therefore don't need anybody else except the Doctor.
They're also keeping people in the dark because they'd be scared of the truth.
I like that part. It means Jack and the Master are doing wrong in the same way. Jack would really hate that.
Torchwood keep Earth in the dark because things are big and scary. But they've got no Master type excuse for that, they're more like Yana. The Master really is different than the rest of the universe, Time Lord, Academy education, doing things his teachers wouldn't think of. But Yana didn't have much of that. He scraped together an education however he could, studied whatever he found, learned a lot. And then, apparently, he didn't pass that on. And that left him fighting the darkness alone, even though his goal was to preserve everyone.
Solution both times is tell everyone truths. Lots of truths. Don't just say "There's dark stuff out there", keep going to "And this is what we can do about it." And then, eventually, when they've studied up enough, people will start coming up with new things. Cause that's how learning works.
It's also how story works, with the Doctor, or within the Torchwood team. But because they currently want to keep an outside world more or less like our own it's not how story works in the wider DW Earth. We don't see the story of how the improved technologies cause changes in their society. Not in present day Earth. That preserves the ability to tell and retell the first contact story, the one where humans find out a new thing and find it scary or shiny or all the rest. But it keeps the scale of the SF elements small. 21st century Earth won't be the story of the cultural impact of any of what we've seen, it's just staying individual. Keeps the story close to our world, recogniseable, and flexible. If they want to see impact stories they can time travel into futures and use those.
I get frustrated though because the politics comes out creepy. There's the chosen few, who get to know these things and cope with them, and there's the vast majority, who just get to react to things, usually by screaming and getting blown up. Every time we get a new Torchwood agent or a new Doctor's companion or a new group like the AU Preachers or LINDA we see how ordinary people react to the extraordinary. I like that part. But then they've just joined the chosen, and they look at the majority with suspicion and keep hiding things from them. That's just weird and creepy. Also there's no present day examples where people just live with the alien. It's always framed in terms of antagonism, or very rarely cooperation against another threat. It's all very well writing stories set in the future or on other planets which are all about the destructive futility of interspecies hostility and suspicion, but if all the examples set on the most recogniseable world are about bad things invading, it's not saying what it thinks it's saying. Yeah, there's the Doctor, alien and on our side. That's useful. But if he's the only one it's still not saying good stuff. I miss worlds where the aliens are really alien, and also individual, and also shopping in the same stores as the human looking people.
I liked the first season of Torchwood because, while they were drugging people to make them forget and other creepy secret keeping things like that, they were also screwing up a lot and (nearly) dying. That's logical. They insist on fighting alone, they get splatted. Good stuff. Even if they think they're the good guys, they're doing bad, so it goes wrong. Torchwood and Yana, keeping people in the dark.
If they're both supposed to just be heroes, there's something gone wrong.
And if Sarah Jane acting the same way is supposed to be a good thing - if the journalist making false reports is somehow the right thing to do - something gone very wrong indeed.