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 Deifir de Morte takes The Doctor
back to Forêt. Before it does that, it takes
him to the 23rd Century, to witness the wedding of the Ninth
Doctor and Rose. The mere paragraph
in this story encompasses the events that take place in the last Unfinished
Business story, Alliance of Unity II, and went online on the same weekend
in November, 2006. It then took a slightly sad Doctor, full of regrets
for what might have been, back to the arms of his tree-living sweetheart,
Dominique. Of course, she still
adores him and he doesn’t hesitate about sleeping with her. Meanwhile,
his friends do their own thing, and discover the game of Bâton
Haut, simply French
for high sticks, which slightly resembles the originally Native American
game of lacrosse, and slightly resembles the Irish game of hurling,
and just a tiny bit the Wizarding game of
Quidditch. The arena in the trees is something
that developed from thinking about all of those games and then applying
them to people who live in trees. Alex proving himself good at the game
and revealing that he is part Irish and learnt to play hurley
in Ireland when he visited his gran. It was the only way to get a game that is little known
outside of Ireland
into a conversation among Welsh Wyn and Manchester
born Jasmin and Alec.
The
death match, involving a sort of extreme Bâton Haut,
dominates the story, as it should, since it is the title. The Doctor clearly
doesn’t WANT to fight in that way, but not because he is a coward,
or because he fears losing, but because he knows he CAN beat Éric,
and he will have to kill him. Deifir de Morte IS a death match. This
brings in a huge moral dilemma for The Doctor, who rarely DOES kill, and
certainly not in hand to hand combat like this.
For a while, I toyed with the possibility of him not
killing Éric, but humiliating him in some
way, much like the end of the ‘death match’ in the second
Karate Kid film, when the Karate Kid simply tweaks the nose of the earnest
young Japanese challenger and makes a honking sound. The other possibility,
given that they are on a high platform with  no
safety net, would be an accidental death, possibly with The Doctor trying
to save his opponent, and his hand slipping before he falls. I rejected
that scenario as having been done TOO
many times already. Die Hard kept coming to mind, but there are quite
a few other similar scenarios where that kind of thing happens. And I
rejected the ‘humiliation’ idea for the same reason. Karate
Kid II is too well known.
The Doctor actually being responsible for a death –
he DOES deal the blow that kills Éric - there
is no question of accident – was the only possible ending to the
situation. If Éric had lived, or if he had
died accidentally, the ‘honour’
would not have been satisfied and other challengers from his village would
have come forward. It had to be complete. And the fact that it was something
The Doctor would not normally do made it all the more startling. It doesn’t
mean he was going to become a psycho after this and kill all of his opponents.
But on Forêt The Doctor lives by different rules, a different
morality than elsewhere in the universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacrosse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quidditch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karate_kid_2
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