It would appear that the BBC has confirmed, in an updated FAQ posted yesterday (I think), that the Doctor IS half-human on his mother's side.

Since this was established unambiguously in the TV Movie, and since the TV Movie is firmly etablished in turn as part of the official continuity of the show (apart from anything else, the Eighth Doctor's image appears in the Journal of Impossible Things in Human Nature), I've never understood why so many people simply won't accept this. It's as if, not liking the destruction of Gallifrey and the Time Lords, a huge body of fandom continued to argue that Gallifrey was still there and the Time Lords were still around. It seems bizarre that believing the Doctor to be half-human BECAUSE IT WAS SAID ON THE SHOW has pretty much been an eccentric minority opinion.

When I first saw the TVM on broadcast I thought it was a horrible tacky idea. I think now that was largely a function of the TVM being a horrible tacky piece of work overall. Since then I've come to think that it explains a lot - his curious fondness for Earth, for instance, and even his horror of relationships between the almost-immortal and the butterfly human.

There's a humungous thread on no-longer-OG where people are still trying to twist reality to avoid this, of course, but I feel a certain satisfaction.

From justpolina, via text, a couple of days ago: "This episode is the bastard child of The Poseidon Adventure and Robots of Death!"

I thought it was so apposite, I'd share. :) 

Doctor Who is a big part of my life. It has been since I was, I think, eight years old, and that really was a long time ago now. Other than a brief passion for Mary, Mungo & Midge when I was about three, it's the first 'thuse' I ever had. My love of the show, which started when Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen reigned, mounted in intensity until I was about fifteen. It died slowly during the Davison era, and I admit - I became an apostate when Colin Baker appeared. I used the Davison/Baker (as opposed, I suppose, to the Baker/Davison) regeneration as an excuse to cut my ties with something that had become painful for me to watch, so much had I once loved it, and so bad as I felt it was then. To this day, I've not seen the majority of Colin Baker/Sylvester McCoy episodes.

For years, I looked back on Doctor Who rather like the boy that you couldn't believe you once went out with in fifth year. I watched the TV Movie when it was broadcast, and was underwhelmed along with everyone else. So when I heard they were bringing it back, I had to be persuaded into watching it at all - by <lj user="wryelle">, in fact, who convinced me that it would at least be a laugh.

I didn't realise it would be good. I didn't realise that the production team would take the basic concepts of the show and treat them with some degree of emotional realism, the one thing that I yearned for as an earnest, thusey teenage fan. No-one could have been more sceptical than me as I watched season one with a fair degree of detatchment and absolutely no investment. I was gradually won over and drawn in by the charm and excellence of what was in front of me, absolutely not, at that stage, by any remaining attachment to Doctor Who itself. I think it was during the opening title music of Boom Town that I first felt that old, old flutter of excitement - although truthfully, looking back, it was the moment when Rose phoned her mother from the station in The End of the World that I realised that Doctor Who had changed. In the old days, Mickey would have died when he fell into the Auton bin in episode one, and Rose's mum would never have been seen again. I was intrigued. 

Those were the days of my innocent enjoyment, season one. They were comparable to the happy years of my early adolescence, when I watched the Key to Time season with shining breathless excitement. They were the days before... I hooked up with fandom. And once I came into contact with fandom, sadly and ironically, the rot of frustration set in.

Fandom in those days meant the Doctor Who Appreciation Society. You sent off a postal order for five pounds, and every month you received a photocopied, stapled-together copy of a publication called Celestial Toyroom. All the other fans were men. Except for the very few who were girls, and even in those days wrote the majority of (photostatted) fan fiction. The medium might have been different, but the disillusioning spectacle of a fandom consumed with hatred for the show it supposedly celebrated was spookily the same. I remember, at twelve, receiving my first copy of Celestial Toyroom and being baffled by the casual, understood dislike of everything that was appearing on screen. Graham Williams, the then producer (and in those days the producer was the showrunner), was a universally derided figure in the pages of CT. 

I'm not sure whether it was the actual quality of eighties Doctor Who, or my increasing age, or the constant background bitching and gloom of fandom that eroded my enjoyment of the show then. But one thing's for sure, I really don't want to let it happen again.

Doctor Who is a big part of my life, as I said. But I've become almost entirely silent online about it, because I feel I can no longer say what I really think and feel about it. Frankly, Outpost Gallifrey (as it no longer is) has become preferable to the claustrophic, depressing, inward-looking LJ communities that I used to enjoy, where the prevailing mood is disgust. The LJ comms are mostly female-dominated and therefore, one could once have interesting discussions about the emotional, shippy, character-driven aspects of New Who - whereas the mixed-sex atmosphere on Outpost Gallifrey (or whatever it's called now) is largely antipathetic to this. (You start a shipping thread and you get a slew of people saying how they don't want any of this lovey-dovey nonsense in their nice antiseptic Doctor Who, thanks. Which is fine if it's their opinion, but that's not what you want to talk about.) It seems to me that you can't have a jolly discussion about shipping and the Doctor's character any more on any of the comms or LJs I frequent, because everyone is too busy slagging off RTD, calling the Tenth Doctor all manner of things, obsessing over hating Rose, or pursuing socio-economic agendas that have nothing to do with Doctor Who. 

I just want to talk about the show I love, in an in-depth, analytical way. You go into a fandom to share your enjoyment of something you love with other like-minded people. It gets profoundly, disproportionately depressing and kind of defeats the point when all your fandom seems to do is heap opprobium on that object of love. 

For some time now, I've been thinking about what to do about my participation in fandom. It was, however, the incredible avalanche of negativity - almost hatred - that followed Voyage of the Damned that spurred me not to shut it all out, but to create a second LJ persona where I could say what I really think. On my main LJ, I've kept quiet about Doctor Who for a long time because most of my flist isn't that interested anyway. What I really wanted was a Doctor Who focussed LJ, where I could build up a flist of other fans, and where I could have real discussions at last. 

I don't know whether this will work. And I'm not saying that I never want to hear a negative comment - of course not. But I want to start from the assumption that I do actually like the show and will in all probability continue to like it. I'm always interested to see what's going to happen next. I'm cool with most casting descisions. I see the possibilities in most developments. I - I'm sorry, I'm so sorry - I think that RTD is a highly talented, driven professional whose work and enthusiasm I admire no end. I'd like to have constructive discussions about aspects of the show, not over-arching wails of despair about how the sky is falling in. It was falling in too in 1978. It always was. 

So, having said all that, what did I think of Voyage of the Damned? It was an OK episode, nothing spectacularly exciting. It was entertaining enough to slump in front of after Christmas dinner, but there was nothing terribly significant about it - TCI was David Tennant's debut, of course, and TRB had its own sparky signficance as the first post-Rose episode. Donna, I thought, was a much more exciting character than Astrid, who was a bit of a conceptual re-tread of Rose. The most interesting thing about it was seeing once and for all that the Doctor's pattern of compulsively picking up pretty, spunky girls is no accident - and as an aside to fandom, I really I don't see how anyone can now sustain a Rose OTP position, nor (on the other side of the fence) continue to claim that RTD has some kind of OTP agenda himself. Which is good.