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Less the heroes of our stories than the villains of some other bastard’s

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The Perfect Companion

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Yes, the female companions of the Moffat era are smart, strong, capable, multi-talented, capable, prone to saving the day, etc.

But this is just the job of the companion.  Even the worst of the classic series companions – Victoria, Dodo, etc – gets to be smart, strong, capable, etc when required.  They don’t tend to save the day in the classic series, but they always do what is needed and expected of them.  It’s a tautology: the companions do the companion things more or less successfully.  That’s not something that’s entirely untroubling, but – for good or ill – it’s how this works.  In the revived series, a great deal more is expected of the companions.  It’s actually worrying just how much is expected of Martha.  But the point is that they all step up because that’s what they’re in the text to do.  The ones that don’t, fail to be companions (i.e. Adam).

You also have to look at what they do and what happens to them on top of their basic role as companion.  Rose rejects the roles of shop worker, daughter, girlfriend, etc. in favour of gradually becoming a committed social actor.  Sadly, she is reabsorbed into such roles by the end (a major disappointment).  Martha throws herself into the role of social actor to a huge extent, ultimately rejecting the Doctor because he cannot satisfy her level of newly self-created level of self-esteem.  Donna escapes her emotionally unsatisfying family life and work life to, once again, become a social actor.  The theft of this from her is horrific, and is clearly meant to be.  It all goes wrong by the end of the RTD era, with them all married off, etc.  But this, however awful (and it is crushingly awful), is still a relatively late development.

The early-to-mid Moffat-era companions, by contrast, are given the arrangement of their domestic lives as their main extra-curricular activity (so to speak) on top of their ‘duties’ as a companion, right the way through.

Amy’s character – i.e. what she does, says and thinks on top of all the fulfilment of ‘companion duties’ – is focused upon getting married or not getting married, being a mother or not being a mother, having a domestic home life or not having a domestic home life, being a wife, saving her marriage, etc, etc etc.  The Doctor actually intervenes, several times, to ensure that her personal life runs along the proper lines.  Whereas, in the RTD era, the Doctor was a force that (selfishly) drew the women out of the confines of personal and work life and into the wider arena of social action, in the Moffat era the Doctor actively tries to provide Amy with a perfect, middle-class domestic idyll.  House.  Car.  Marriage.  Etc.

River is ostensibly an archaeologist, or sometimes an assassin, but her character arc (if the random string of things she does can be called a character arc) is all about her assimilation into stability via her romance with, and marriage to, the Doctor. …

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The aliens… They’re just so… alien

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J.K. Rowling recently reignited the Potterite shipping-wars by saying that she should never have coupled Ron with Hermione.

Among the things she apparently doesn’t regret putting into the world’s most widely-read/seen Fantasy franchise of recent decades are the following:

  • Gold-obsessed Goblin bankers with big noses and a nigh-communistic inability to comprehend or respect ‘human’ notions of private property.
  • A race of willing slaves with brown skin, huge rolling eyes and ‘pickaninny’ speech patterns.
  • Giants who are born savage and thick, and who live in ‘primitive’ tribes.

Lest it be thought that I’m singling Rowling out for special snark, let me broaden this out immediately.  The SF/Fantasy genre, as a whole, contains a discourse of race that represents a peculiarly insidious reflection of racial ideology.  Race pervades these genres as a category.  Tolkien’s Middle Earth is full of different ‘races’.  The world of Star Trek is full of different ‘races’.  The world of Doctor Who is full of different ‘races’.  Just think how often we are assailed with ‘races’ in Fantasy that can be told apart by both physical characteristics (the blonde hair of the Thals, the crinkly noses of the Bajorans, etc.) and apparently inborn social characteristics.  The Doctor pronounces the Jaggaroth “a vicious, callous, warlike race” (my emphasis).  A social trait (the tendency to make war) is thus ascribed a racial origin.  And the ones I’ve mentioned are just some of the best known and most mainstream. 

Let’s look at another extreme example, which shows a particular kind of Fantasy worry about race:

There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today—I don’t know how to explain it, but it sort of makes you crawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst—fact is, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate ’em—they used to have lots of horse trouble before autos came in.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow over Innsmouth, written in 1931.

This is particularly interesting because the story is about ‘race-mixing’, expressing Lovecraft’s bigoted horror of ‘miscegenation’.  But he wasn’t writing in a vacuum.  He was a product of the late-19th and early-20th centuries…  and, indeed, being a man stolidly stuck to the past, he was also a distillation of much of the American 19th century.

The American 19th century was a period of intense construction of race and ‘races’ as a social category (which is what ‘race’ is with reference to human ethnicity; as a biological idea it’s essentially meaningless).  To quote Richard Seymour:

Historically, the act of oppression that produced the category of race preceded the systematic pseudo-scientific classification of human variation along racial lines.

…

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Maybe some of us BELONG in the fields

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A very good overview of the squalid pass to which Moffat has brought the show in its 50th anniversary year, with special attention paid to the issue of mysoginy, via River and Clara:

…we’re not being encouraged to think there’s something wrong with this person [River]: it’s the show itself that comes across as jaded and withdrawn from empathy and decency to a psychopathic extent (and what a charming ethical copout to have the Doctor leave before he can witness the rest of the killing). Again, we have the depressingly widespread idea that a woman acting violently is empowering and a corrective to sexism and misogyny. When questioned about his ability with female characters during a Guardian interview Moffat replied:

River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women. It’s the exact opposite. You could accuse me of having a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people. That would be fair.
It would indeed. Unfortunately, a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people is no substitute for an interest in human beings.

http://richardhcooper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/steven-and-women-or-how-steven-moffat.html

I don’t agree with every jot and tittle of this, but it’s still excellent.  Very well worth reading, with lots of points which seem, to me, pretty much irrefutable… depressing but irrefutable.

I do want to express my increasing impatience with the idea of accidental reactionary writing, a notion that the writer of the above article flirts with (though his conclusions are nuanced).  Personally, I’m coming to the brain-bending conclusion that people who aren’t racists or sexists don’t need to concentrate on remembering not to say racist or sexist things. 

Thanks to Johnathan Barlow (or ‘old Legohead’ as I always think of him) for putting this my way.…

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Changing Times, Nice Guys and ‘Strong Female Characters’

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I’ve gone on the record saying I think Moffat’s version of Doctor Who is sexist and heteronormative.  A challenge I often hear – and it’s a serious point – is the idea that Moffat’s Who is, at least, no worse than previous eras on issues like depictions of gay relationships, and is frequently better.  There are positive depictions of gay characters, quite unlike anything in, say, the Hartnell era.  Well, firstly, let me say that I don’t want to claim that things are ‘worse’ now (in any absolute way) than in the Hartnell years, when homosexuality essentially didn’t exist at all in-story in the Who universe. And sure, many old episodes have displayed all sorts of heteronormative stuff, and also outright homophobic stuff (albeit usually by implication).  Harrison Chase is, in many ways, implied to be an evil gay man (it’s not that I think gay people are like him, but rather that he is constructed partly of tropes that connote gayness in pop culture).

It isn’t that there’s a scale that pertains to culture now just as it pertained in 1963 and 73 and 83 etc, with Who scoring 3.7 points on the heteronormativity scale (or the racist, or sexist, or whatever, scale) in 1963 but now scoring 9.1 under Moffat. That’s not how I see it (which isn’t to say that comparisons across the decades are meaningless). Normative assumptions shift and fluctuate with all sorts of social and economic changes (this is part of what I was getting at in my previous post with regards to upswings and downswings in the reactionary content of culture). There are ideas now that simply weren’t widely accepted (or even much known about) in, say, 1963… but which are now widely understood and championed by large numbers of people.

Awareness of homophobia, discrimination against LGBT people, heteronormativity, etc, are all examples of issues where people’s widespread views have changed drastically. And this isn’t the ‘condescension of posterity’, because I acknowledge that people’s ideas have been changed by people, particularly as a result of the great breakthrough struggles of the mid 60s through to the early 70s. That’s partly why Moffat’s Who looks extraordinarily liberal and right-on by the standards of much of the old show… if we look at them with the same constant, reductive scale of measurement… which we can’t do because it’s more complex than that, with struggles and changing ideas altering the normative assumptions against which we make judgements. 

To be crude about it, even today’s crusading reactionaries in the Tory party talk the talk of respect for gender equality, racial equality, etc.  They have to… even as their actual policies reinforce division, discrimination, inequality and attacks upon the living standards of ordinary people that Thatcher could only fondly dream of getting away with.  But there are swings and roundabouts in people’s consciousness.  Poeple today would be (and are) very unwilling to tolerate open racial prejudice from their politicians, yet there is widespread anxiety about immigration and asylum, carefull inculcated by the media. …

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Welcome Matt

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Timelash II.  Series 5.  You know the drill.  Thank goodness this tiresome, needless, self-imposed task is now almost over.

The Eleventh Hour

How interesting that, whereas RTD usually got public figures to play themselves in contexts that took the piss out of them (even if they didn’t realise it), Moffat drafts Patrick Moore and casts him as a prestigious and influential expert with a naughty twinkle in his eye, rather than as a sexist, right-wing old pratt.

I’ll post seperately on The Beast Below.  I’ve looked at the heavily biased and ideological representation of Churchill in Victory of the Daleks here.  The only other thing to note about that wretched story is the cynicism with which the Daleks have been redesigned in order to launch a new range of toys. 

The Angels Two-Parter

I like the bit with the angel on the screen.  Nice bit of appropriation from J-horror.

Otherwise… well, I’ll once again quote my friend vgrattidge-1, who captures it concisely:

Just what ‘Who’ needed – another straight-to-video style ‘Aliens’ rip-off that undermines a brilliant (one-off!) monster and makes them behave in illogical ways for plot expediency, plus the smug and annoying River Song (I just can’t bring myself to care what relationship she has with the Doctor) and well, not much else. It’s hollow stuff with the Doc making another tough-guy speech before firing a gun…Yawn

One interesting thing about this story is the matter of the Church Soldiers (related to the Church Police perhaps… will they be investigating dead Bishops on the landing and rat tart?). I remember Paul Cornell saying he was grateful to Moffat for his generosity in portraying relgious people in a positive light. So… Paul sees it as positive when monks are shown going around in fatigues, obeying orders within a military hierarchy and carrying machine guns? How telling.

Vampires of Venice was too boring to write about.  Here is my (positive) look at Amy’s Choice.

The Hungry Earth / Whatever the Other One was Called

The Silurians become dull, generic reptile aliens… and, as I recall, such reptile aliens featured in one of the very few half-decent episodes of ST: Voyager, which actually tried to intelligently investigate some of the cultural ramifications of ‘common descent’, etc. It comes to something when Who can’t even do reptile aliens better than Voyager.

The less likeable side of Star Trek actually provides the inspiration for story. It resembles the worst excesses of Trek when it’s in liberal-moralising-allegory mode. There is the fatuous treatment of racial suspicion, the vapid semi-allusions to Israel/Palestine (lets get round the table and sort out a deal… all we need is a reasonable negotiating partner!), etc.

Worse, it wants to have its cake an eat it. On the one hand there is the morally myopic liberal fingerwagging at nasty old inherently-xenophobic humans… but this contradicts the half-assed (bordering on offensive) subtext about Guantanamo Bay / Abu Ghraib, where the mother who tortures a recalcitrant and inherently hostile Arab terrorist… sorry, I mean a Silurian… for information is shown to be acting from understandable necessity.…

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