best_enemies | Discussion Time: In which the whole thing accidentally got bahleeted and I about screamed. / AMU9

Discussion Questions:

The Rules: Be freely off topic and respond to any you feel like! Or none! Or just write comment crack/porn, since I had a lot of fun reading that last time and maybe you did too?

Think these questions are lame? I'm running out and we never talk about the actual questions anyway. Feel free to offer up some of your own in the comments and I'll edit the posts accordingly.

1) So this quote from Time Monster is a good example of a running theme in Three-era Master episodes:

Doctor: "You're risking the total destruction of the entire cosmos."
Master: "Of course I am. All or nothing, literally! What a glorious alternative!"

The introduction of the Master as a foil sort of challenges the Doctor's possession of the territory of the sublime (Doctor-as-sublime being something the show plays with to varying extents and with different levels of success throughout the shows' run). The Master's existence in some ways contextualizes the Doctor as not some unknowable alien force, but a member of a species with a past comparable to that of a human: a pretty contemporary British human of a certain class even, with school days and acquaintances thereof. Does placing the Doctor as a member of a society makes him less mythic, and thus less potentially sublime?

In opposing the Master, the Doctor is forced to be a voice for caution, reason and moderation in hopes of preserving the existing order of things, which makes him not the wild exile/explorer/meddler/enfant terrible we more typically see him as. Is this pro-stasis, establishment position at odds with his character? Or is it part of a larger play with the Doctor's position in terms of authority and structure, a la his troubled involvement with UNIT and, in Four and Five's eras, his alternating clashes with the establishment and reluctant acceptance of responsibility (Key to Time arc, Deadly Assassin, Five Doctors)?

Does the Master's appropriation of the Sublime undermine key aspects of the Doctor's personality (his recklessness, for example), and thus challenge him as his Inverse/Mirror on the level of self-definition? Alternatively, does the Master showing up and forcing the Doctor to respond to him by advocating Preservation move the Doctor into a less selfish, more positive position? Could the Three-era conflicts between them be seen as a growth/maturation arc for the Doctor in some ways? Such a reading could be strong, especially given that Three, in a fit of Eastern Philosophy, regenerates into Four, who arguably lacks the tendency towards self-indulgent emotional over-commitment that Three felt compromised by. (This is predicated on an understanding of regeneration as at least to some degree a situational response mechanism, and of course YYMV on that one.)

Is the 'all or nothing,' 'choosing the way to unimaginable glory' schtick of the Master's just talk given that he's so unwilling to die and embrace failure/destruction at that level at the end of Time Monster? Is straining for the sublime a consistent part of his characterization throughout his regenerations? Is it correlated to the fact that he's interested in the Doctor, where there are obviously easier, more willing and less potentially emotionally and materially destructive fish in the sea?

The Romantic-era definition of genius would fixate on the capacity of a person to reach their ultimate capability/the Sublime, and to disregard convention in order to do so. A lot of the tension between them as enemies of anything else is based on the opposition between them as geniuses. Could you successfully read this era as a meditation on the idea of genius and moral responsibility? Given that we're already playing with blatant Sherlockian themes in this era, such bleed-over seems a bit natural. Does the Master challenge the Doctor to live up to the fullest definition of his virtu, to be the fullest expression of himself, with an amoral disregard for the possible consequences? Or is all the Master's 'join me' stuff bullshit--in other words, does he want an incredibly capable equal/partner, or to reduce the Doctor to a position of subservience?

If we believe the Master wants them to use their intelligence to rule benevolently, and that nothing should impede the rational extension of the government of the most intelligent for the benefit of all, it'd be a pretty classically Humanist position for the Master to take, and in some ways it puts the Doctor on awkward, murky philosophical ground to naysay it, to argue for meekness--especially given his traditional position as a champion of progressive human initiative.

On a Doylist level (yeah, it's totally in my vernacular now, thanks

selenak), do people ship this pairing because it appeals to them from the standpoint of appreciation of the sublime rather than the beautiful? Not consciously, obviously, because philosophy rarely swims into people's ken whilst they enjoy their internet prons, and if it does it's only 'cause it's gotten lost. But if we think about it (and I'm of the opinion that pr0n and shipping and such don't break under the burden of such examination, but become better understood and more interesting), is that the appeal? Like, some non-threatening 'fairy cake with the edible ball bearings' Ten/Rose shipping would be an example of the Beautiful, whereas to varying degrees the emotional charge of this pairing and thus the erotic charge is fundamentally an appeal to an appreciation of the Sublime? Alternatively, is this a reduction or mis-read of the vectors by which people are drawn to the pairing? Is it over-simplistic to conflate emotional charge and erotic appeal so neatly?

Bolstering such an understanding would be the fact that they're both Time Lords, and thus a combination between them is less human-organic/more distant/more potentially destructive than a Time Lord/Human pairing might be, and conveys, due to the age and power of both, that acknowledgment of limitation and brevity that underpins an appreciation of the sublime. The old saw about them being 'the couple with absolutely no safe word' figures into such a conception of boundlessness.

On the other hand, is such an understanding undercut by the camp*/canivalesque of their dynamic (disguises, ludicrously complicated schemes, their status as characters you can't always take terribly seriously)? Does what we know about their species so throughly contextualize them sociologically that you can't simultaneously doublethink them as mundane and sublime? We talked with the Mirror vs. Erlkoenig thing about how the dynamic between them is dynamic on a thematic level: Is it easier to read the sublime in some incarnations than others?

*and Oh, hey, is using the lit crit toolbox to examine 70s scifi for subtext itself an act of Camp?

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For those not familiar with the aesthetic/philosophical distinction between the Beautiful and the Sublime, allow me to steal from wiki: "Kant investigates the sublime, stating "We call that sublime which is absolutely great"(§ 25). He distinguishes between the "remarkable differences" of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness" (§ 23)."

(Side note: anyone who can tell me wtf Kant is taking about with his distinction between mathematical and dynamical sublime wins a freaking cookie, though--I give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it makes sense in German? ...but really, I think Kant's trying to be opaque half the time, the better to loose you in his Dark, Bowie-Esque Labyrinth of Clauses! If Kant comes up to you and asks you to read Critique of Pure Reason to get your baby brother back? Just take the Crystal of Dreams.)

I also find this helpful:

"In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. This can be found in the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation, § 39.

For him, the feeling of the beautiful is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer.

Feeling of Beauty - Light is reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer).
Weakest Feeling of Sublime - Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life).
Weaker Feeling of Sublime - Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer).
Sublime - Turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).
Full Feeling of Sublime - Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).
Fullest Feeling of Sublime - Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature)."

But really you could just read two Books of Wordsworth's The Prelude and grok the whole concept. Totally worth checking out, too. (Though if you've never touched the thing, do yourself a favor: 1805 version, not 1850. If left alone in a room with a poem overnight you'd find Wordsworth dead in the morning, having choked on the sheer volume of his own edits. He's the anti-Pound.)

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2) In that incredibly slashy article

versaphile posted a bit back, the writer posits a Delgado!Master who brought the Keller Machine to earth either anticipating that the Doctor would survive the Master's earnest attempts to off him with Autons, or, and this seems more plausible to me given the obviousness of "Um, Autons hate you too, fleshy, not-plastic!Master," a lack of intention to /really/ kill the Doctor off in Terror of the Autons.

Ainley!Master does something similar in Castralvalva to Five, in which Event Zero is just a prelude to the entire Castralvalva scheme.

However the Master's schemes are awfully earnestly deadly to be simply game-playing. For every scheme the Doctor gets out of my intelligence and skill, there's one he lucks out of, or needs assistance to survive. And while some of the schemes are mere regeneration killers, or possibly temporary punishment mechanisms (marooned in spaaaaaace for Time Monster, aged!Doctor in S3), his motivations are complicated by the fact that some of them seem meant to Kill The Doctor Dead For Real Real, a la Event Zero.

So does the Master have an unrealistic, inflated opinion of his Best Enemy, as in 'he expects the Doctor to be able to survive everything he tosses at him via cleverness, rather than to very often just luck out'? Is the Master just a natural cascade-planner? Does he not /expect/ to win against the Doctor, and so over-plans for the eventuality? Is he trying to draw out the Doctor's death? If so, does he do it purposefully and consciously? Is it all elaborately staged game-playing to him, with little intent to actually kill? Or does he see himself as always trying to earnestly kill the Doctor? If so, temporarily, or permanently?

Does he have a larger aim that he's working towards through the game playing as regards the Doctor? If so, how is that functioning?

3) Earlier I was musing about Time Monster and what the Master would do in the face of actual!Doctor Death. It might well change from incarnation to incarnation, but really, if he succeeded in offing him or even managed it accidentally if you don't think that's his MO, what does he do then? I think you'd have to argue hard to convince me that a year later he's ruling the galaxy without a pang and only very occasionally sighs wistfully for his lost opponent. Does he have the ability to move on if the Doctor's properly dead? Does he freak out and try to undo it somehow? Does he change dramatically once his opposition/foil/inverse is out of the picture? We know the Doctor can manage in the face of seemingly-gone-for-good Master for an extended period, but can the Master?

4) Often

deborah_judge has harshed my squee by pointing out that once the sex haze wears off in any given fic, it's nigh impossible to imagine them successfully Doing Domestic. I tend to see them as Old Friends at the heart of it and thus to believe cohabiting would come back to them pretty naturally, but she has a point or several: "It's going to make him a pain to live with in the long term, I can just imagine what he'll do when the Doctor doesn't take out the trash." and " Still don't know how long it'll last, they might break up after the sex-haze fades a bit and they can actually get properly offended by each other's barbs."

At any point, are they capable of or interested in living as a mundane couple? The kind that maybe participates in the social perpetuation of having kids and such, or even just the kind that deal with each other on a daily basis and makes the necessary compromises on what they're doing today and such?

Do you have to break one character into subservience to get them into a long term relationship, or is that not necessary? Are they even interested in each other any more if one of them is broken: say, does the Master even want Broken Beyond Recognition and Integrity of his Personality!Doctor, or does the Doctor have any interest in 'And I'll Never So Much As Contemplate Harming An Ant Again'Woobie!Broken!Master?

ALSO: WEDNESDAY'S EP IS MIND OF EVIL. WATCH IT AND PARTICIPATE. YOU WILL FEEL PLEASED YOU DID. YOU WILL FEEL CHERISHED, VIOLATED AND MIND-PARASITE-ED--NO. NO WAIT, THAT'S THREE.