![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A few thoughts:
Fandom (well, old school, male British fandom) tends to emphasise the on-screen rapport between the second Doctor and Jamie - hang on, I've just been looking at an icon community and, in fact, latterday, mainly female, internet fandom also enjoys the interaction between the second Doctor and Jamie, and have seen things in the relationship that hadn't occurred to me. Ahem.
What struck me from watching The Krotons and then The War Games last week was that in these stories the Doctor displays a close relationship with Zoe, too. So often Zoe has been dismissed as the girl with the computer-like brain who was told that logic only enabled her to be wrong with authority. In The Krotons their shared intellectual abilities and interests are the basis of a bond between them not previously seen, I think. She's still more innocent than the Doctor, of course - a character trait established in The Wheel in Space, when she took a childlike delight in relating information, but struggled with the social dynamics of the Wheel itself - and it's her unguarded love of puzzle-solving which leads to the revival of the Krotons. The Doctor qualifies as a 'companion' chiefly to protect her, I think. In The War Games the fate of Zoe is presented as more closely linked to that of the Doctor than is that of Jamie at times; it's Zoe who sets out to rescue the Doctor and is caught with him towards the end of part one, and it's Zoe who first visits the Alien headquarters. Watching the two stories together there's a sense that Jamie is being marginalised, which may or may not reflect discussions late in 1968 and early in 1969 over when Frazer Hines was leaving and whether Wendy Padbury would carry over into the Jon Pertwee era. More likely, perhaps, that Zoe was simply more appropriate for futuristic settings than was Jamie.
The Krotons depicts one of the standard tropes of the Troughton period - a formal setting, where authority is understood and only ineffectively questioned, is disrupted by the arrival of three schoolchildren, at least one of whom has evidently been kept down a year for several centuries. The civilization of the Gonds is coded as primitive, as opposed to the technocracy of Clent's base in The Ice Warriors - on the film print released onto VHS in 1991 the set design is rather smudged, but it seems to fuse inspiration from medieval castles and from South Sea island dwellings. The Doctor establishes a tortured relationship with the leader of the host community, as usual; but Selris is played rather flatly, possibly because the source of his leadership is passivity. The Gonds submit to his hereditary leadership of the council without seriously doing anything to question it, until first a love affair, and then the arrival of the Doctor's party, cause ripples in the status quo. Selris, meanwhile, submits to the law of the Krotons without question. He readily accepts the news from the Doctor that the Krotons are not the Gonds' benefactors, perhaps because his mind responds to suggestion from any non-Gond with scientific knowledge; but he then continues to defend the laws of the Krotons and insists that Zoe become their companion, as much because he always has enforced Kroton orders as because the lives of his people depend on them.
Bedtime. Maybe more War Games thoughts tomorrow.
Fandom (well, old school, male British fandom) tends to emphasise the on-screen rapport between the second Doctor and Jamie - hang on, I've just been looking at an icon community and, in fact, latterday, mainly female, internet fandom also enjoys the interaction between the second Doctor and Jamie, and have seen things in the relationship that hadn't occurred to me. Ahem.
What struck me from watching The Krotons and then The War Games last week was that in these stories the Doctor displays a close relationship with Zoe, too. So often Zoe has been dismissed as the girl with the computer-like brain who was told that logic only enabled her to be wrong with authority. In The Krotons their shared intellectual abilities and interests are the basis of a bond between them not previously seen, I think. She's still more innocent than the Doctor, of course - a character trait established in The Wheel in Space, when she took a childlike delight in relating information, but struggled with the social dynamics of the Wheel itself - and it's her unguarded love of puzzle-solving which leads to the revival of the Krotons. The Doctor qualifies as a 'companion' chiefly to protect her, I think. In The War Games the fate of Zoe is presented as more closely linked to that of the Doctor than is that of Jamie at times; it's Zoe who sets out to rescue the Doctor and is caught with him towards the end of part one, and it's Zoe who first visits the Alien headquarters. Watching the two stories together there's a sense that Jamie is being marginalised, which may or may not reflect discussions late in 1968 and early in 1969 over when Frazer Hines was leaving and whether Wendy Padbury would carry over into the Jon Pertwee era. More likely, perhaps, that Zoe was simply more appropriate for futuristic settings than was Jamie.
The Krotons depicts one of the standard tropes of the Troughton period - a formal setting, where authority is understood and only ineffectively questioned, is disrupted by the arrival of three schoolchildren, at least one of whom has evidently been kept down a year for several centuries. The civilization of the Gonds is coded as primitive, as opposed to the technocracy of Clent's base in The Ice Warriors - on the film print released onto VHS in 1991 the set design is rather smudged, but it seems to fuse inspiration from medieval castles and from South Sea island dwellings. The Doctor establishes a tortured relationship with the leader of the host community, as usual; but Selris is played rather flatly, possibly because the source of his leadership is passivity. The Gonds submit to his hereditary leadership of the council without seriously doing anything to question it, until first a love affair, and then the arrival of the Doctor's party, cause ripples in the status quo. Selris, meanwhile, submits to the law of the Krotons without question. He readily accepts the news from the Doctor that the Krotons are not the Gonds' benefactors, perhaps because his mind responds to suggestion from any non-Gond with scientific knowledge; but he then continues to defend the laws of the Krotons and insists that Zoe become their companion, as much because he always has enforced Kroton orders as because the lives of his people depend on them.
Bedtime. Maybe more War Games thoughts tomorrow.
Tags:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}