Looking
at a quasi-companion today. The lethal
Silurian head of the Paternoster gang, Vastra (along with Jenny and Strax) has
never been a resident of the TARDIS, but she’s definitely a part of the
Doctor’s life and has been known to accompany him through time and/or space
when he needs someone with her skillset.
It’s
true that Vastra falls onto the action-figure-ish side of the Steven Moffat
Recurring Character line. She’s a
brilliant detective (the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes if Dr. Simeon is to be
believed) who caught Jack the Ripper.
Her keen intellect is almost as sharp as her weapon of choice, a sword, she
has a knack for the Big Damn Hero entrance, and she’s apparently eaten the odd
murderer here and there (does that make her kind of like a Silurian cross
between Dexter and Hannibal? She eats
people, but only evil people.) All the while, she’s a member of an ancient,
highly developed reptilian species who’s tooling around Victorian London with
her maid/wife.
Sometimes
all the flash works for me, sometimes it doesn’t. I tend to like Vastra best when we really see
her as a product of her environment and/or her past. It’s neat, for example, when she shares
knowledge based on her prehistoric experiences before her people went
underground and into stasis, and I like it when she feels genuinely
Victorian. I dunno; I just enjoy the
idea that, no matter what her original story was, she’s now made a new life and
home for herself in London and has become part of that society. So, I get a kick out of her doing stuff like
calling newspaper ads a “distressing modern trend.” Granted, she’s time-traveled with the Doctor
on at least one occasion, and her experience with people from other
times/places – the Doctor, Amy and Rory, River, Clara – mean that she has
knowledge of technology and other things from significantly further in the future,
not to mention that the Silurians had advanced tech millions of years ago. In that sense, I get why she can function
pretty interchangeably with someone like the Doctor or River in a crazy sci-fi
scenario, and it’s not that I want Vastra to seem behind the times, but I like
the little touches that remind us how she’s influenced by her environment.
I won’t
go too much into her relationship with Jenny, since I’ve already talked about it. Suffice it to say, she can be an
incredibly loving wife, but also a very dismissive, commanding one (it’s worth
noting that most of the moments that have given me pause about their
relationship have been based on things Vastra has said or done.) I always love her best when she’s tender with
Jenny and treats her like an equal.
I
really like the idea of Vastra as an accomplished detective, and we know Moffat
knows his way around a deductive genius, but with this trait, it feels like we
get a lot more “tell” than “show.” I
mean, yes, we’re informed that Vastra is the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes,
and in the Paternoster episodes, there are references to different cases Vastra
is working on – the most notable, I suppose, would be in “The Crimson Horror,”
since her case there forms the basis for the adventure. However, we don’t see her do much in the way
of actual deductive reasoning. With
Vastra, we tend to get more generalized investigating, conjectures based on her
knowledge of other worlds or times, and sexy Victorian reptile lady
butt-kicking. I have yet to hear Vastra
make a really gorgeous, stunning deduction like we’ve been known to get on Sherlock, and I’d like to.
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