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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

53 Comments

  1. Jack Graham
    July 31, 2015 @ 10:57 pm

    Bad reviews are fun.

    Reply

  2. curlyjimsam750
    August 1, 2015 @ 12:30 am

    I think Colin Baker has been very gentlemanly in putting his opinion forward, whereas some of the responses to him have been borderline abusive. And I say this as someone who doesn't actually share Baker's opinion. Unfortunately it all rather comes across as people hurling insults at a "beloved" actor for daring to be the only person on the planet with enough empathy to have some concern about how Frank Cottrell-Boyce might be feeling.

    Having the Doctor strangle Peri was a mistake, I fully admit – and I suspect Colin Baker would too. But the way you phrase it above almost makes it sound as if the entire era was about the Doctor violently abusing people, which it wasn't. It was one (albeit misjudged) scene which was quite clearly, to anyone with wider knowledge of the show, intended to represent the character's post-regeneration trauma. The Doctor was mentally ill at the time. To pretend it was in any way typical of the remaining two seasons of that incarnation is dishonest.

    (And it's not as if other incarnations haven't been depicted doing dubious things. In our very first encounter with the Doctor, he kidnapped two innocent people; shortly afterwards he attempted to murder someone with a rock. The Twelfth Doctor, on his first full appearance, was strongly implied to have mugged a beggar. And there are plenty of other examples. Are we supposed to hate all these eras too?)

    Reply

  3. TD
    August 1, 2015 @ 2:20 am

    It's important to note, too, that "least liked" is not necessarily the same as "disliked." Colin Baker isn't going to come very high in my personal rankings, but I do rather enjoy (the Big Finish portion of) his work and think he's a great actor.

    It seems like Baker understood this when he said that he kept coming right after Hartnell, another great actor, but then he just kept going and going.

    It must feel bad to consistently ranked at the bottom, but, I dunno. Bad things happened. What are you gonna do?

    Reply

  4. Chris
    August 1, 2015 @ 3:09 am

    What sticks with me in Colin Baker's entry is "not just the name of the favourite doctor or companion (as if that was worthy of noting anyway)." Polls contribute to the "received wisdom" that my two favourite blogs (TARDIS Eruditorum and Adventures With The Wife In Space) so proudly rail against. It's like when you visit an online music store and it ranks albums by popularity – the most popular are above the fold on the first page, and that gives them a better chance of being seen and therefore purchased, perpetuating their position at the top. The exact ranking of items at the bottom is kind of a crapshoot because there is such a small sample size, but once something is identified as the bottom a perception of that thing actually being worst gets built and strengthened.

    Now I know I'm talking about personal taste, and this is an intelligent comment crowd that probably likes really great though obscure music (I'm a huge Residents fan myself), so we may be prone to say "that ranking doesn't affect me, I know what I'm looking for and am not swayed by what is above the fold." But wouldn't we all like to see our favourite bands on the front page of Amazon? Of course we would, because being at the top is great – they get more exposure, make more sales, and will eventually earn all of the money. But we wouldn't believe that unless we also inherently believe that we are in fact affected by what's ranked on top.

    The ranking format is secondary to the issue: an individual's ranking gives you precise insight into that person's thoughts; a committee's ranking gets filled with so much noise that it winds up being useless information. I think Penn Jillette put it best when he noted: "'Candle in the Wind' by Sir Elton John is the bestselling song of all time. Popular sure doesn't mean right." For this reason I have no problem with Phil or Sue ranking their reviews; I read those blogs to learn about their opinions as individuals. I cannot get meaningful insights from a composite poll. Heck, I don't even know how the poll is conducted or how it arrives at its final result.

    Does anyone know if the raw data of the polls is available? Do they ask people to rank their, say, top 20 stories and count up from there? Or do they have each person rank every single story? If the former, then the numbers on the tail end are probably all very similar to each other (if we plotted responses, we'd see it flatten out towards the end). If the latter, I would not be surprised if there is a significant jump in consensus at the bottom, due to the received wisdom of previous polls ("oh, I already know Twin Dilemma is last, so I'll mark that right away") and that items toward the bottom but not at the very end get into that amorphous "nobody quite agrees" territory. If it's a full ranking poll, I imagine that positive rankings (say in the top 100) outweigh negative rankings in the final result; it would be interesting to run that analysis in reverse to produce a real "least favoured" poll, and if we see clear "winners" for the very top few spots but a huge mess of a tie early on, then that I believe lends credence to the case against trusting at least the bottom of the ranking. I can't say too much about the top ranking other than the not scientifically defendable "I don't trust crowds when it comes to matters of personal taste."

    Reply

  5. Chris
    August 1, 2015 @ 3:15 am

    Dangit. "Defendable" should be "defensible" in that last sentence. I may as well end my argument by falling out of my chair.

    Reply

  6. The Rebel Prince
    August 1, 2015 @ 3:56 am

    On the subject of advertising, have you ever thought (which I'm assuming you have, and rejected) about having a page jump on your posts? I've been visiting the site – infrequently – for a few years, and have always been surprised that one can read the entirety of each of your posts from the main blog page. In terms of attracting advertisers, it may be helpful, and I would think it would also be useful in more accurately cataloging page views? (At least for people like myself, who are only really interested in base content and rarely, if ever, read or post comments.)
    Which is not to say that your site is or ever should be driven by such trivialities as counting pageclicks or forcefully advertising; I greatly admire the fact that your blog uses as many words as is necessary without ever feeling the need to apologise – content rather than catchphrases all the way! But just something I've always wondered about your site, particularly as you deserve to be making as much money as you can from your writing, and gaining as much insight into your readership as possible.

    On the other subject, I think it's somewhat unfair to continue to call people out for decisions made thirty years ago; regardless of how we see Colin's era now – and how it was seen then – we know the complex if misguided reasons things were done (in ponderously graphic detail thanks to commentaries and DWM). And I think ranked polls can be frustrating because they encourage the "received wisdom" that I struggled against so often when entering Who fandom. Yet I think it's telling that, while the Pertwee stories over the decades have been seen as "refreshing" and then "quaint and charming" and then "EGREGIOUSLY ESTABLISHMENT!" and then "the wonderful UNIT family", the Colin stories have always been … the Colin stories. Maybe it's time for him to let go, cherish the greater relationship with fans and the canon he's built up during the audio years, and take it in his stride. Asking Who fans to stop listing things is a Sisyphean task if ever there was one.

    Reply

  7. prandeamus
    August 1, 2015 @ 4:57 am

    As I remember the Twelfth Doctor met Clara wearing the beggars clothes but sans watch. I'd assumed therefore he'd bartered them.

    Reply

  8. Sean Daugherty
    August 1, 2015 @ 5:49 am

    This is pretty close to my thoughts on the matter. Individual rankings are fine (though, honestly, I'm generally less interested in the order than I am in the reasoning, even then). Composite, poll-based rankings are meaningless and more than a little hive-minded. What good does it do anyone to know that people hate "Timelash" without knowing why?

    Reply

  9. Eric Rosenfield
    August 1, 2015 @ 5:54 am

    I think Baker's point is specifically about a publication like DWM. To wit: "I really do care about the new wounds being inflicted on today’s professionals by a magazine that should be protecting them." DWM is seen as an official organ of the program and so Baker makes an interesting point that it shouldn't be hurtful to members of the program. This is different than an independent magazine or blog or whatever.

    Reply

  10. Sean Daugherty
    August 1, 2015 @ 5:57 am

    I think the big issue with the critical reaction to the Colin Baker years is that they're after the formation of "modern" fandom. We've seen critical reevaluations of the Hartnell era, the Troughton era, certainly the Pertwee era, and even parts of the Tom Baker era, but Davison, Colin Baker, and McCoy? By and large, the received wisdom of 2015 isn't wildly dissimilar from the received wisdom of 1990. The fan community was already thinking, writing, and talking about the show in broadly similar ways in both years, which I'm not sure can be said about fans in 1970 versus 1990.

    In other words, I wonder if, like so much else about Doctor Who, much of the fact that "the Colin stories" are and always have been simply "the Colin stories" is a direct result of John Nathan-Turner's "fan-industrial complex"?

    Reply

  11. Sean Dillon
    August 1, 2015 @ 7:21 am

    Bad reviews tend to be a source of where the creator can improve on their work. At least, if they're actually well written and have legitimate concerns such as the fact that you thought having your main protagonist be a domestic abuser within his first full episode. And not things like "It's not close enough to the source material" or "this isn't canonically sound" or "why is Gwen Stacy conscience, don't the people behind the film know that she's meant to be unconscience when she dies so Peter can be sad that he never got to say goodbye to her".

    Reply

  12. Elizabeth Sandifer
    August 1, 2015 @ 9:03 am

    Equally, I think DWM's credibility as a magazine rests in part on the fact that, despite being ideologically committed to the idea that the program is the best thing ever, it still has a clear measure of independence and realism about the program.

    Reply

  13. Elizabeth Sandifer
    August 1, 2015 @ 9:06 am

    I'd point out that the "McCoy was terrible" wing of fandom does, in practice, appear in complete retreat.

    Reply

  14. Elizabeth Sandifer
    August 1, 2015 @ 9:06 am

    Certainly I'm inclined to think that the bad review is a venerable literary form that ought be cherished.

    Reply

  15. Elizabeth Sandifer
    August 1, 2015 @ 9:09 am

    As for a page jump, I'm willing to take the hit to the precision of my analytics and the hit to my advertising revenue (which is a very small part of my overall monthly revenue from my work) in favor of having a more convenient front page. If it were easy to do collapse/expand within Blogger such that headlines could be expanded without reloading pages, I'd do that, but I'm in a position to avoid formatting for advertising, and I'm largely happy to do so.

    Reply

  16. Elizabeth Sandifer
    August 1, 2015 @ 9:10 am

    As for a page jump, I'm willing to take the hit to the precision of my analytics and the hit to my advertising revenue (which is a very small part of my overall monthly revenue from my work) in favor of having a more convenient front page. If it were easy to do collapse/expand within Blogger such that headlines could be expanded without reloading pages, I'd do that, but I'm in a position to avoid formatting for advertising, and I'm largely happy to do so.

    Reply

  17. Elizabeth Sandifer
    August 1, 2015 @ 9:10 am

    Is there any real mystery to why people hate Timelash?

    Reply

  18. Ben
    August 1, 2015 @ 10:19 am

    Since it was Sylvester McCoy who recently trotted out the hoary MRA argument that "The Doctor can't be a woman because DUH! He's always been a man," I'm a little surprised that Colin Baker is the 80s Doctor on the hook this week.

    Reply

  19. Jack Graham
    August 1, 2015 @ 10:42 am

    Poe. 'Nuff said?

    Reply

  20. Daibhid C
    August 1, 2015 @ 12:12 pm

    Absolutely. I remember a discussion on alt.fan.pratchett about people's least favourite Discworld novel, and I made the point that my least favourite Discworld novel was the same as my least favourite Skittles flavour; it wasn't that I didn't like lemon Skittles of Colour of Magic, I just liked the others' more.

    And if I'm interpreting these readings correctly, the same probably goes for "Forest of the Night"; it scored 5.5/10; meaning either everyone thought "'Salright", or for everyone who hated it, there was someone who loved it. If I'd written a quirky non-traditional story that didn't even have a monster, I think I'd be okay with that.

    Reply

  21. Daibhid C
    August 1, 2015 @ 12:24 pm

    The participants are asked to give all the stories a score out of 10. They aren't ranked at this point; there's nothing to stop you giving all the stories 10/10 (or indeed 1/10) if you feel that way inclined.

    For the other categories (favourite director, favourite monster, favourite nonsensical technobabble, etc.) you're just asked to list your favourite. So all appearing lower down on the list indicates is that you're not anyone's favourite, not that you're everyone's least favourite.

    And as far as "knowing why" goes, you can add comments to the poll and a selection of these is published with the results.

    Reply

  22. Daibhid C
    August 1, 2015 @ 12:29 pm

    There's been a bit of a shift in how the Colin stories are seen, surely? It's gone from "The Colin stories are terrible and therefore Colin was a terrible Doctor" to "The Colin stories are terrible, but that's not his fault".

    Reply

  23. Dan
    August 1, 2015 @ 5:05 pm

    I think Baker's mistake is to act on the assumption that DWM's sole purpose is to celebrate the programme. It's also a commercial venture, and people like polls and these sell magazines. The bottom of the poll is about as interesting to people as the top.

    At the same time, it's true that the people who fare less well in these polls may well be hurt, and how can this not be a valid point? Perhaps Colin is being idealistic, because this certainly isn't going to change how media in general functions (since this is hardly limited to DWM), but he's not actually wrong.

    Serious critical writing is truly a different matter. Then there is the fact that coming last in a poll doesn't necessarily imply that you were bad, or unpopular.

    Reply

  24. Dan
    August 1, 2015 @ 5:11 pm

    Daibhid above: "The Colin stories are terrible, but that's not his fault". Case in point. People aren't just voting for the portryal of the Doctor when they vote for their favourite Doctore.

    Reply

  25. Anton B
    August 1, 2015 @ 11:29 pm

    Yaay! Civil War of the Doctors! Bring it on. I'd watch the he'll out of that.

    Also I hate lists.

    Reply

  26. elvwood
    August 2, 2015 @ 3:15 am

    I'm really torn on this. I can completely understand Colin's position – and think it is great the way he emphasises that it is a general point while being open about his own reaction being the thing that spurred him into writing – but I actually love the lists. In fact, I volunteered to run the book Non-Dynamic Rankings on Gallifrey Base when it looked like they were going to fold, and those go into ridiculous detail, with lists of most-marmite stories, lists which ignore the outlier votes, and so on. And not one piece of (non-statistical) analysis in sight!

    I find it fascinating looking at how my opinion varies from the norm, and always get frustrated when we only see the winners in these things; heck, I even wished DWM would publish standard deviations so I could get some idea of how marmite the stories were among their audience! But then, would I want to find myself at the bottom of a poll? Definitely not. So if my own desire to see that information comes at the cost of someone else's peace of mind, perhaps I should lay it to one side.

    Our society promotes competition in a way that I think is unhealthy. If we were all properly secure in our own self-esteem these things wouldn't bother us, but we've been taught so relentlessly to compare ourselves against each other all the -ing time that it is hard to avoid being hurt.

    I will have to think about this some more.

    Reply

  27. Froborr
    August 2, 2015 @ 7:59 am

    So, I'm about to make a really odious comparison, so I want to frontload it with caveats. My impression of Baker is that he's a generally decent person; I read his post about this and it really did seem to be primarily motivated by kindness and empathy. I can't imagine he will stoop to the level of the nastiness being flung at him in response, let alone some of the really ugly stuff people sometimes do on the Internet.

    That said.

    "Your job is to celebrate this, not to point out problems or be negative" is exactly how GamerGate thinks video game reviews should work.

    Reply

  28. Jeff Heikkinen
    August 2, 2015 @ 12:33 pm

    C. Baker's Doctor did revel in violence noticeably more than any other, in a way that really was sometimes a poor fit for Doctor Who. But I do agree that it was never again as bad as in The Twin Dilemma, if for no other reason than his choice of target on that occasion.

    Reply

  29. Dan
    August 2, 2015 @ 4:01 pm

    I honestly don't know if that comparison adds anything. You can do a reductio ad absurdum with it – if it's valid, you must be able to compare Colin Baker to Gamergate. There is no comparison there though. Gamergate is a swamp and a mire I steer clear of as much as possible, granting I have that luxury.

    Reply

  30. Ben
    August 2, 2015 @ 5:46 pm

    I wonder if the two of them have any interest in paintball. 🙂

    Reply

  31. Ben
    August 2, 2015 @ 5:48 pm

    Gamergate logic seems to shift depending on who they're talking about.

    Reply

  32. Froborr
    August 2, 2015 @ 9:03 pm

    Here's the thing: that position has been (rightly) castigated as anti-intellectual and anti-art when GamerGate tosses it around. It's not any less so when Baker expresses it in a much less hostile way. Negative reviews serve a purpose, namely of informing people with tastes similar to the reviewer that they should steer clear. Negative polls serve a similar purpose, namely that there is a broad consensus that this is something of which you should probably steer clear of, unless your tastes are very different from the mainstream of the population being polled. Negative criticism serves to expose the toxic elements of our culture by examining their manifestation in the artifacts of that culture.

    When you make something and put it out into the world, you are inviting comment on it. By putting it out there you have sent an invitation for people who dislike it to express that dislike and, if they wish, explain the reasons for it. There are, of course, right and wrong ways to express that dislike–GamerGate's tactics of choice being a particularly, viciously wrong way–but I reject outright this notion that it's somehow wrong to say that bad work is bad.

    Reply

  33. Matt Marshall
    August 3, 2015 @ 1:06 am

    And while I admit my view is roughly "I feel like Colin Baker should be more concerned about the fact that his tenure in Doctor Who asked the audience to accept a domestic abuser as a sympathetic protagonist…

    While I respect 99.9% of what you write, I feel readings like this are intellectually dishonest and following some sort of deliberate misreading (or at least one coloured by an agenda). The Doctor's actions in Twin Dilemma are clearly the madness of someone having a psychotic episode rather than domestic abuse. The show is not asking us to accept a domestic abuser, it is asking us to accept that someone who had had violent episodes of mental health in the past through no fault of his own can be a hero and shouldn't just be locked up for life like a lot of the 'treatment' at the time had it. Which, you know, is actually quite laudable.

    Twin Dilemma was still rubbish. But I think it had more of its heart in the right place than most would care to admit.

    Reply

  34. SK
    August 3, 2015 @ 5:28 am

    how Frank Cottrell-Boyce might be feeling

    It was Frank Cottrell Boyce, was it? Well I bet, when that issue came out, that he broke down in front of his BATFAs, Carnegie Medals, Independent Films Awards, and cried, cried, cried his heart out that the readers of some poxy little magazine didn't like his story quite as much as the other ones.

    Reply

  35. Sean Daugherty
    August 3, 2015 @ 7:57 am

    Fair point about Timelash, but we're deeply immersed in the fan community. Very few reviews or ranked lists are going to substantially alter our own opinions of the stories we've already watched and made up our own minds about. A better example might be Love and Monsters: last I looked (which was a while ago, granted) it ranked extremely low on most "best stories ever" lists. I personally think it's spectacular, though, and I'm not the only one. It's the DW equivalent of Marmite: you either love it or loathe it. If I'm coming into it, sight-unseen, knowing that a lot of people hate it doesn't tell me nearly as much as knowing why those people hate it.

    Reply

  36. Spoilers Below
    August 3, 2015 @ 8:34 am

    I love that writing good-bad, over celebratory parody reviews can lead to such gems as this (which, weirdly, came out before gamergate even happened): "If Films Were Reviewed Like Video Games"

    http://www.somethingawful.com/news/movie-game-review/

    As well as its follow up editorial: "I Can Only Enjoy Video Games With Featureless Blocks as Protagonists"

    http://www.somethingawful.com/news/triangles-in-gaming/

    Reply

  37. Daibhid C
    August 3, 2015 @ 12:53 pm

    I suppose it's that McCoy hasn't really said anything interesting; it's the usual reasons why there can't be a female Doctor and the usual explanations of why that's nonsense apply.

    Whereas "But why does there have to be a least favourite story?" is something that I don't think I've seen discussed before.

    Reply

  38. Sean Daugherty
    August 3, 2015 @ 6:47 pm

    I don't know that there's much of a shift in the way the stories are seen. Certainly nothing like the reevaluations of the early Hartnell, mid-era Troughton, Pertwee, or Baker/Williams eras. The received wisdom (that they were terrible) is still pretty much as it always was. And I'd say that the McCoy era is broadly similar (some gems mixed in with some terrible stories).

    The actors, on the other hand, tend to be given more leeway than they used to, but I'd argue that has as much to do with the fact that they've been able to build on their TV work thanks to the Big Finish audios. In 1990, it was hard to say that "gee, Colin was actually pretty good" when all you had to go on were his two seasons of dubious quality. Now that we have several dozen non-televised performances of his to go on, it's easier to take that position.

    Reply

  39. Sean Daugherty
    August 3, 2015 @ 6:54 pm

    The way "The Twin Dilemma" deals with the Doctor's regenerative trauma is horrifically bad… but I'd agree that, even as bad as it is, it's a stretch to say that it's presenting the Doctor as a domestic abuser. Even the production, as tone-deaf as it is, has the Doctor immediately realizing that what he did was beyond the pale. Even among all of the unnecessary edginess of the script, it's never once seriously suggested that this is going to be the status quo for the new Doctor.

    I'm not sure I'd agree that it had "its heart in the right place," because I don't think the script is tackling the concept of mental illness except by clueless accident. But I don't think it's quite as wrong-headed as the commonly-cited criticism has it, either.

    Reply

  40. Elizabeth Sandifer
    August 3, 2015 @ 7:07 pm

    But his immediate next suggestion after realizing that strangling her was beyond the pale is still abusive.

    Reply

  41. Scott
    August 3, 2015 @ 8:06 pm

    Yeah, for better or worse McCoy's comments aren't really anything new under the sun. Disappointing, perhaps, but the argument's already been hashed out.

    Although I was amused to see that they did apparently make the pages of the Washington Post. Who'd have expected that Sylvester McCoy talking about Doctor Who would end up there a decade ago?

    Reply

  42. Scott
    August 3, 2015 @ 8:26 pm

    Although it could be argued that he's still undergoing very drastic psychotic episodes throughout the entire story, though, of which the strangling was only one. It's all still unpleasant and stupid and all kinds of awful, but it looks to me more like a careless production team making some stupid creative decisions and not thinking through all the implications rather than the production team actively trying to turn the Doctor into Stanley Kowalski and asking the audience to think he was brilliant for it.

    Reply

  43. Scott
    August 3, 2015 @ 9:53 pm

    I don't agree with Baker's opinion, but I can see how thirty-odd years of having your status as basically least popular person in the entire fandom constantly highlighted for all to see would grate a bit. Particularly since, Big Finish aside, it's not like he's ever going to move that far up the rankings ladder.

    Reply

  44. Matt Marshall
    August 3, 2015 @ 11:24 pm

    Well yes Phil, but it's clear that he's not actually better at that point in the story as he continues to act strangely throughout the story. It's that old trope where a character does something crazy, states they are better and then immediately does something equally crazy showing that they are in fact, not.

    I mean, you can claim it to be 'domestic abuse' but that reading would necessitate that anyone acting under a mental illness should be 100% culpable for their actions and they will never get better. Which uh, no.

    It's still abusive, but it is 'abusive whilst clearly mentally ill' which is a completely different thing.

    Reply

  45. Matt Marshall
    August 3, 2015 @ 11:42 pm

    I have a feeling that Timelash got one of the higher AIs of the season though, so they must have been doing something right! (I can't seem to find the list of AIs though, I might be wrong!)

    Reply

  46. Sean Daugherty
    August 5, 2015 @ 11:03 pm

    The biggest problem is that the show never seems to want to deal with the aftermath of any of this. I think Matt's spot on, honestly: the Doctor is clearly unstable for the vast majority of the story, and the production is pretty clear about presenting it. But I'm not sure there's really any resolution to it. By the end of the story, he's supposed to have stablized… and everything promptly moves on as if nothing had happened. The Doctor himself never addresses it, and his flippancy towards Peri in the serial's closing line is, in context, in shockingly poor taste (though I wouldn't necessarily call it abusive).

    And, to make matters worse, this is a recurring problem throughout Colin's two seasons. The Doctor's brief Androgum turn in The Two Doctors is treated much the same way, and his villainous turn in Mindwarp is only slightly moderated by the scenes of the Doctor only trial acting moderately put out. The standard way the show has for dealing with the fallout of all of this is to ignore it and move on… and that's not an acceptable approach for dealing with either domestic abuse or mental illness.

    Reply

  47. Daru
    August 6, 2015 @ 11:49 pm

    "Our society promotes competition in a way that I think is unhealthy."

    Agreed. I find the kind of empty competitiveness that "Best of" lists promote really unhealthy and especially un-creative. Sometimes we can't really compare one product to another, even if they are from the same stable, such as Doctor Who, as we can easily get completely different types of stories presented to us.

    And sometimes something is awful.

    Reply

  48. Daru
    August 6, 2015 @ 11:53 pm

    "The Doctor's actions in Twin Dilemma are clearly the madness of someone having a psychotic episode rather than domestic abuse."

    Sometimes domestic abuse is caused by people who are having psychotic episodes. Abuse is still abuse.

    Reply

  49. Daru
    August 7, 2015 @ 12:00 am

    "The Doctor himself never addresses it, and his flippancy towards Peri in the serial's closing line is, in context, in shockingly poor taste (though I wouldn't necessarily call it abusive)."

    Poor Peri is bounced all over the shop between the Hyde-like reactions of the Doctor, then at the end of the tale asked by the Doctor to basically love him whether she likes it or not.

    That feels like classic abuse to me – make the person you want to be manipulate so confused that they comply, or just give up and like you. I saw this with how my partner was treated by her ex-husband – his being the ok guy sometimes, but one who can turn on a dime – she lived in fear really but tried to appear happy. She still struggles to think a good thought about herself now.

    It's hardly like he stops treating her with barbs and derision after this story – I think the abuse continues.

    Reply

  50. Alan
    August 7, 2015 @ 6:53 pm

    Honestly, in Peter Davison's penultimate story, he mercy-killed a companion and then basically brutally killed the Master. This was one story after he tried to murder Davros in cold-blood but stupidly managed to get himself locked outside of the room. I'm not a fan of the Sixth Doctor and I still think Twin Dilemma was the worst story ever, but I do try to have perspective.

    Reply

  51. Alan
    August 7, 2015 @ 7:18 pm

    "I mean, you can claim it to be 'domestic abuse' but that reading would necessitate that anyone acting under a mental illness should be 100% culpable for their actions and they will never get better. Which uh, no."

    Sort of like how Hank Pym backhanded Janet that one time because the artist misinterpreted Jim Shooter's art notes and he is treated by a large chunk of the fandom as a despicable serial abuser to this day?

    "It's hardly like he stops treating her with barbs and derision after this story – I think the abuse continues."

    As I mentioned during the post on "Attack of the Cybermen," Peri at the start of episode 1 still seems visibly afraid of the Doctor even though some time has passed. I found it quite troubling.

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  52. Daru
    August 7, 2015 @ 11:55 pm

    From my viewpoint he still continues to behave as an abuser after his episode of psychosis has finished.

    Reply

  53. Jeff Heikkinen
    August 8, 2015 @ 9:37 pm

    An interesting contrast is the case of Wil Wheaton, who at one point did a series of reviews of Star Trek:TNG episodes, which is, of course, the series that made him famous. In one, he says something like "This is the exact moment Wesley [Wheaton's character, for the 1% of people reading this who don't know that] became the most hated character in the Star Trek canon, and rightly so". There are points I can't agree with Wheaton on but he's a first-rate rolemodel when it comes to keeping such matters as Baker is concerned about here in perspective.

    Reply

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