The "T" stands for "Total Bollocks Overdrive" (267/365)

[white_hart]

While much of Doctor Who fandom appears to be celebrating the news that Russell T Davies is returning as showrunner, I have to say that I am very much less than thrilled.

Yes, Chris Chibnall's era has had its problems, and I think that Jodie Whittaker's Doctor has often been underserved by the material she's been given to work with. Also, the whole Timeless Child thing is utterly wtf and I'm mostly just pretending it didn't happen, on the grounds that it's the kind of thing that's bound to end up getting unhappened sooner or later. However, I've loved the conscious effort to increase the diversity of the series, and have enjoyed the way he's taken the opportunity to explore smaller stories. Not everything has to be about the fate of the entire universe.

For me, Steven Moffat's version of the show was the best. Yes, he also had his problems (though I disagree entirely with the people who claim that all his depictions of women are misogynistic), but his Doctor Who is as magical as I remember Doctor Who being when I was a child.

Russell T Davies, on the other hand...while I am, obviously, very grateful to him for bringing back the show, I can't forget the way just about every woman over the age of 30 in the whole of his era of the show was portrayed in a negative light, and middle-aged women always seemed to turn out to be evil. Or the recurrent fatphobia. Or the way one female companion got given a "happy ending" consisting of a human Doctor lookalike she'd only just met, because appearances are everything. And another female companion got randomly married off to the only other Black main character in the series. And Donna Noble, the most amazing woman in the universe, had all her glory and character growth undone. (And I was never very keen on the huge Total Bollocks Overdrive Earth-in-peril stories which marked the RTD era. I prefer a bit of subtlety, and the possibility of pretending that I'm still young enough to believe that it might all be really happening, somewhere out there.)

So definitely less than thrilled.

Comments

[legionseagle]

Word. (Even though I think there's a Doylist reason why Martha didn't get paired up with the white boyfriend she'd had at the end of the year that never was arc, given that the actor in question had just made it big in a series in the States and presumably wasn't available/too expensive for a bit part in Journey's End, there's literally no reason to pair her off with Mickey who was a terrible boyfried to Rose most of the time, and a bit of a dead loss as a human being in my view -- a view incidentally I thought at the time, and not coloured by subsequent revelations about Noel Clarke.)

[white_hart]

Well, quite. I don't think "everyone gets paired off" is actually a particularly satisfactory or imaginative happy ending, either, to be honest...

[legionseagle]

It was being sent up by Oscar Wilde in TIOBE in the 1890s.

[legionseagle]

Incidentally, from an unpublished essay I wrote in 2010 about the RTD era's portrayal of female characters I noted that there are at least 22 self-sacrificing deaths (SSDs) in the RTD era (deaths which the person suffering them intended and expected to be permanent, and they split 14:8 female/male, with three of them being companion-equivalent (Astrid Peth, River Song and Donna Noble (in Turn Left).

And I also had this to say about contrast between male and female authority figures in comparable positions:

The first example contrasts two ship’s captains dealing with an on-board crisis. In The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit Zed is treated sympathetically as a good man rising to the challenge of his role despite a crippling burden of self doubt. No narrative criticism accrues to him either for his handling of the crisis or his unquestioned acceptance of the use of Ood slaves to support his team’s activities, even though all the Ood and three other crew members are killed when the team release a spirit of pure evil into the Universe. Zed survives.

Conversely, Cath McDonnell, the ship's captain in 4241[first broadcast 19 June 2007], is explicitly blamed by the Doctor for the deaths of crew members (including her own husband) which result from her unknowingly drawing power from a sentient star. She sacrifices herself and earns partial redemption.

Next, consider two Presidents in a parallel world. In Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel the male President is treated as a decent, sympathetic man, although he governs a Britain in which homeless people are rounded up for lethal experiments, and the entire population is controlled by ear-pieces piping news and the “joke of the day” directly to their brains. His murder by Lumic is a tragic moment. In Doomsday, we learn he has been replaced by Harriet Jones. The Doctor, demonstrating an ability to hold a grudge which transcends dimensions, mutters, “You want to watch out for her.” In a further denial of the original Harriet Jones’ legacy42[as remembered by the Ninth Doctor] Pete Tyler says, “They’re calling it a Golden Age but it’s not true” [emphasis added].

The actions of two commanders in defending premises under alien attack is considered next. Colonel Mace is the UNIT commander tasked with the attack on the ATMOS factory and its subsequent defence in The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. His interactions with the Doctor provoke the latter’s typical impatience with military etiquette, guns and the use of brute force to meet threats. However, the Doctor is not wholly opposed to military support, at one point wishing he had the Brigadier’s assistance. Mace gives a St Crispin’s Day-style address to the troops:

“The Sontarans might think of us as primitive, as does every passing species with an axe to grind. They make a mockery of our weapons, our soldiers, our ideals. But no more. From this point on, it stops. From this point on, the people of Earth fight back and we show them. We show the warriors of Sontar what the human race can do."

His strategic use of the Valiant wins him the accolade, “Brilliant!” from the Doctor, while his dying Sontaran enemy dubs his bravery, “Magnificent”. He survives his victorious defence of the factory, though it is left to the Doctor and Luke Rattigan (another SSD) to destroy the Sontarans and their ship43[It is presented as morally acceptable to wipe out the Sontarans because “they never surrender”. Given that, in The Christmas Invasion, we see the Sycorax commander first surrender and then make a cowardly attack from behind, it is difficult to distinguish between the Doctor’s action here and the one he finds unforgivable in the case of Harriet Jones, or between Mace’s approach to the deployment of military force against aliens and Jones’.].

The dice are loaded against Torchwood leader Yvonne Hartman from the moment early in Army of Ghosts when she asserts her intention to use alien technology to reinstate the British Empire and “defend the border against the alien horde.”44[Ruthless, imperialist women seem to be a Torchwood speciality, including Alice and Emily in Fragments (21 March 2008) and the Duchess in the radio play The Golden Age (2 July 2009)] In 21st century, multi-cultural Britain such ambition marks her out not merely as a hubristic megalomaniac, but one whose political views are somewhere to the right of the BNP. Unsurprisingly, her attempted defence of Canary Wharf ends in the destruction of Torchwood One with massive casualties, including Hartman herself. However, even in Cyberman form she retains enough sense of self to achieve a SSD, repeating, “I did my duty, for Queen and country” as she buys the Doctor and Rose time for them to banish the Daleks and Cybermen into the Rift.

The final contrasting pair are the Doctor’s antagonists Mercy Hartigan, in The Next Doctor, and Mr Diagoras in Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks45[first broadcast 21/28 April 2007]. As indicated above, the “quisling” theme, in which humans knowingly ally themselves with hostile aliens, is popular in New Who, and both these stories include quisling characters who become physically bonded with alien invaders, initially reluctantly but who then embrace their destiny. Both are motivated by resentment at the injustices of their positions in human society, Hartigan as a woman in 1850s England and Diagoras as a working-class man scarred by his experiences as cannon-fodder during the Great War. Both have already dragged themselves some rungs up the social ladder, impliedly in Hartigan’s case by exploiting her sexuality46[Davies, in the accompanying podcast, stated she is damaged and so “sexualises everything”, symbolised by her bright scarlet dress and innuendo-laden dialogue. This reinforces a New Who trend, mentioned above with regard to Jackie Tyler, where overtly sexual behaviour in female characters is presented negatively, unlike overtly sexual male behaviour.] and in Diagoras’ case by ruthlessly exploiting his fellow workers.

[white_hart]

Excellent analysis! It really is incredibly blatant.

[legionseagle]

The horror about female sexuality (at least in characters older than about 22) is particularly noticeable.

[white_hart]

Hence, presumably, why Donna has to keep insisting that she and the Doctor aren't married and she just wants to be mates.

[legionseagle]

And Jack Harkness - JACK HARKNESS - conspicuously leans out of range of Donna's "Hug me, being alive feels so good" manoeuvre in the last minutes of Journey's End

[lokifan]

Wow. Yep.

I also agree that despite Moffat's own issues, it made DW feel much more magical and I like a lot of his thematic work and style. Plus, yeah, I LOVE Moffat's women and think "they're all the same" is like... SLIGHTLY true but mostly a really flattening reading.

[nostalgia]

I've seen people saying "oh he'll have learned since 2009" in regards to women and PoC but I don't know what they base that on because I haven't seen his post-DW works cos I was so sick of his tropes.

[legionseagle]

I absolutely refused to watch his Years and Years, because although it starred Emma Thompson, who is one of my all time favourite actors, it starred Emma Thompson as a dangerously charismatic leader turning Britain into a fascist hell-hole complete with death camps.

[white_hart]

I felt similarly. And also it just sounded much too depressing, and I watch TV for relaxing escapism.

[alithea]

I watched the first episode and noped out hard - far too depressingly plausible!

[alithea]

I was surprised by how enthusiastic twitter seemed to be about the news. I will never forgive him for the ending Donna got, nevermind all the other nonsense.

[ankaret]

It all feels to me like the people rejoicing about the return of imperial measurements, in that yes, no doubt you had a nicer time when you were young, or back when ten years of austerity and a plague hadn't happened yet, respectively, but this isn't actually a solution.

[alithea]

Yes, that's an apt comparison.

Although a lot of what bemuses me with the imperial measurements fans is that they never really went away anyway - I'm not old enough to have been taught in anything but metric but I still know my height, weight, bust and waist measurements in imperial not metric, we still buy milk and beer in pints and curtains in inches, and measure long distances in miles and speed in miles per hour... It's like they believe all the crap in the Daily Hate Mail about imperial measurements not being allowed by the EU over the evidence of their own eyes

[ankaret]

I'm surprised by the positive reaction too, but then I absolutely cannot forgive Russell T Davies for referring to old school fans as 'ming mongs' and then pretending he had no idea that it was a slur directed against people with Down Syndrome.

I don't hold any particular brief for old school Dr Who fans, who can be just as sexist and ridiculous as the next person, but when you've had to explain to a kid in your charge why someone is yelling 'ming-mong' at them in the street it fucking sticks with you.

I find his Dan Savage-y loathing of fat flesh, and especially female fat flesh, and especially female, sexual fat flesh tiresome too, and I wish he'd go work on it somewhere that isn't national TV.