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The Definitive Moffat and Feminism Post

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I went back and forth over whether to post this, having drawn it up for my reference. But ultimately, I decided that, as we get closer to the Moffat era (which in many ways starts with Blink, the story with which it became obvious who the next showrunner would be) that I wanted one definitive, centralized post on the subject. (Edit: It’s rather closing the barn door after the cows have gone, but since this got way wider linkage than I expected… I don’t mean “definitive” in the sense of “the last word ever on the subject.” Rather, I mean it as “here is this Doctor Who blog’s one-stop definitive comment on feminism in the Moffat era so that, when I get to it in a few months, there’s an overall statement in place that provides context for my comments on any given story.” So, definitive for the context of TARDIS Eruditorum. Not for, like, the entirety of the cosmos.)

Let’s start with a brief overview of the history of feminism in Doctor Who. It’s never been the case that Doctor Who has been a tremendously misogynistic show. It’s also never been the case that it’s been a terribly feminist one. Instead it has always been somewhere in the middle, but unmistakably behind its times.

It started well enough, with Barbara serving as a terribly strong and iconic female character of the sort the series would go over forty years without seeing again – a middle aged woman who was not there primarily as sex appeal, but who was sensible, practical, and able to carry her own plot on her own terms. But she was paired with Susan, who, by the end of the first season, was such an obedient little peril monkey that she’d successfully avoid breaking out of prison cells because there were rats and would go willingly to the guillotine because she was feeling a bit queasy.

The history of subsequent female companions can hardly be called any better. No matter how lofty their intentions, they all ended up the same way. Let’s take a brief tour of the post-Susan female companions, or, more accurately, their fates. Married off hastily, as a last-minute replacement for a plot where she’d have died; died; died; mind-raped and dumped in London; hastily written out after only appearing in two episodes of her last story, last seen being told to look after the male companion who was also departing; given six episodes of 1960s torture porn before she sobbingly asks to leave because she can’t take it anymore; mind-raped into forgetting all her adventures with the Doctor.

One can only hope the refrigerator is bigger on the inside too. Sure, there are cases where male companions had similar fates, but that’s not the point; the point is that all of the female characters suffered ignoble and humiliating fates that cut them down to size. Every single one.

This brings us to the granddaddy of them all, Terrance Dicks. Who writes out a smart and capable female character with no explanation to replace her with a dumb blonde, declaring openly that he considers the companion’s only role to be getting captured and rescued.…

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Adapt Themselves To The Planet (Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks)

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I am a human Dalek. I am your future. My head is covered
in penises.

It’s April 21st, 2007. David Tennant’s joy is over, and not just because of the story we’re talking about today. Timbaland have made it to number one with “Give It To Me.” There are no other significant changes to the charts, but a week later Beyonce and Shakira take number one with “Beautiful Liar,” and Arctic Monkeys, Enemy, Mark Ronson, and Natasha Bedingfield also chart, the latter with the rather impressively titled “I Wanna Have Your Babies.”

In news, the Virginia Tech massacre takes place, about which I find myself wanting to say little more. Boris Yeltsin dies. The first of the 2008 US Presidential debates takes place, which should provide lots of flavor and color in these sections in the days to come. And Mary McAleese, President of Ireland, calls a general election.

While on television it’s Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, a pair of beloved and well-regarded episodes that nobody has a bad word for. One of the things that starts to happen with Season Three, and continues throughout the new series, is that Doctor Who begins to attempt to update various past eras of the show. Having done most of its “the definitive X” ideas in the first two seasons, the series moved on to pilfering the past in a broader way. Gridlock was part and parcel of this – in many ways, it’s just Paradise Towers or The Happiness Patrol for the modern age. Which also clarifies the sorts of stories that this approach is meant to open the door to.

With Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, then, we get a combination of two old types of stories: the Hartnell-style historical, and the Hartnell-style periodic Dalek epic. It’s easy to forget that in Seasons Two through Four of the classic series, the Daleks were given twelve to thirteen episodes a year. Something between 20-30% of every season of Doctor Who in the first four years was consumed by Dalek stories. And so after two seasons in which the Daleks were mostly wheeled on as surprise villains, here we get Daleks treated as something ordinary – an obligatory, annual engagement. This is not bad so much as it’s different – certainly the Daleks have had that role before, and not just in the 1960s (there’s an annual Dalek story in all of Seasons Nine through Twelve).

This results in us having to re-evaluate the Daleks in terms of their basic function. They are no longer the apocalyptic “worst threat imaginable.” They’re a routine but perennial threat. The Doctor even acknowledges this, mocking the Daleks, saying, “time was, four Daleks could have conquered the world, but instead you’re skulking away, hidden in the dark, experimenting.” But this isn’t a devastating change as such. The Daleks become the occasions for celebration – excuses for a big popcorn-munching runaround. This also has to be taken in terms of the at times formulaic structure of the Davies era – the past/present/future trilogy of the first three stories, an action heavy two-parter with prominent monsters “for the kids,” a darker and more horror-focused two-parter, a cheap/Doctor light episode, and finally a big narrative collapse for the season finale.…

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“This is MY town!”: A Piece of the Action

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“We rock.”

OK yes, it’s absolutely delightful.

Actually, it’s better than it lets on, and to find a reason why look no further than that second writing credit. Gene Coon had decided that, given the success of “The Trouble with Tribbles”, Star Trek could use more episodes with a larger and more overt focus on comedy (and it’s worth noting it was Coon who saw the potential in young Dave Gerrold’s script, encouraged him to keep submitting to Star Trek and who helped him shape “Tribbles” into the masterpiece it became). George Clayton-Johnson, the author of “The Man Trap”, had written an early version of this story as a treatment early in the first season called “Chicago II”. The actual idea for the episode is frequently attributed to Gene Roddenberry due to a two-word pitch (among many others like it) in his original 1964 proposal for Star Trek, Star Trek Is…, entitled “President Capone”, but as it’s a rather strangled path from that to what we can watch on screen, it’s tough for me to give him full credit for it. Coon discovered Clayton-Johnson’s script, liked the idea and decided to retool it. Coon’s writing partner here is David P. Harmon, whose previous Star Trek credit was “The Deadly Years”, which is not especially encouraging, but thankfully, “A Piece of the Action” turned out actually beautifully: It’s a highlight of the season, deservedly one of the most iconic stories of the series and exactly the sort of thing the show needed right about now.

The knee-jerk way to read “A Piece of the Action” is through its Cargo Cult undertones, and as it turns out this is what I expected I’d be spending this post going on about. In the most pleasant of surprises, “A Piece of the Action” manages to avoid the majority of the flak involved with this kind of prompt, (I know this is the second week in a row I’ve underestimated Star Trek, but given this season has made me sit through “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, “Friday’s Child”, “The Apple”, “The Deadly Years” and “The Gamesters of Triskelion” I maintain I had some right to lower my expectations) but first let’s talk a bit about what we mean by Cargo Cult. A Cargo Cult refers to what happens when, following contact with Western colonial powers whose presence results in a short-term burst of material prosperity, non-Western peoples establish a new religion based around worship of specific aspects of Western materialism in a hope this will bring about a return to that period of prosperity. The most famous example of a Cargo Cult took place in Melanesia following World War II, when natives began worshiping spiritual versions of US servicemen prophesized to return to teach them how to to live in plenty.

Obviously, as a particularly blatant example of how callous and thoughtless Western expansion thoroughly wrecked traditional Oceanian societies, Cargo Cults are not a phenomenon I’m not especially fond of, especially when they’re so frequently treated in the West as a source of mild paternalistic bemusement.…

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Saturday Waffling (September 7th, 2013)

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I’ve just finished the Human Nature/Family of Blood post. Those who enjoy when I play absurd structural games will be happy. Those who find me unbearable when I do that will probably find September 18th a somewhat disappointing experience. Or, at least, the part of September 18th where they check my blog. I don’t want to suggest that, like, if they go out for ice cream the scoop will fall off their cone or anything.

So, the Hugo Awards happened. I am oddly fascinated by the Hugos, or, at least, the three categories in which I feel like I have any right to have opinions, which are the Dramatic Presentation awards and the graphic story award. They’re the perfect mix of actually recognizing quality and being utterly idiosyncratic. And so I am going to opine on them.

Doctor Who lost Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) for only the second time since the 2006 awards. The three Moffat episodes for 2012 were nominated, along with an episode of Fringe and the actual winner, the Game of Thrones episode “Blackwater.” This is on balance probably fair, though I’ll happily defend the virtues of The Snowmen. “Blackwater” was a really bloody good piece of television.

At this point what I’m really interested in is the 2014 awards. Dramatic Presentation is at times little more than a “whose fandom is bigger” award, which is why it was possible to guess the 2012 winner as soon as Neil Gaiman’s episode of Doctor Who was even announced. Game of Thrones frankly had an undistinguished 2013 run. One assumes “The Rains of Castamere” will get nominated, although the field is fairly open if it wants to do what it did in 2012 and compete in Long Form as a full season. But I’m skeptical that it deserves to win. Doctor Who will surely be in with both the 50th Anniversary and Christmas specials. For all that Neil Gaiman seems unbeatable, I doubt Nightmare in Silver will get nominated (though if he doesn’t win for Ocean at the End of the Lane, something went wrong). And, of course, we’ll have Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which offers Joss Whedon, who beat Doctor Who with Dr. Horrible in 2009. So Doctor Who vs Joss Whedon vs Game of Thrones. It’ll be, I think, the most exciting year for the category in a long time.

Clearly the award should go to Welcome to Night Vale. You do all listen to Welcome to Night Vale, right?

In Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) we have an interesting category. The original Lord of the Rings films were bulletproof at the Hugos, to the point that in 2004 the acceptance speech they did for the MTV Movie Awards featuring Gollum won out over the season finale of Buffy and two episodes of Firefly in what is surely the single stupidest Hugo award ever. But The Hobbit clearly didn’t do nearly as well. The Hunger Games also lost out, which is less surprising. And of course one of the two Joss Whedons was going to lose, and it was always going to be Cabin in the Woods.…

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Without Friends Or Protection (Gridlock)

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Get it? Boe-tox?

It’s April 14th, 2007. David Tennant is still terribly happy. Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani, Fray, Fergie, Timbaland, Beyonce, and Shakira also chart, which feels like just about the most 2007 list of musical artists one can muster. Since Shakespeare wrapped things up, the Ministry of Defense allowed the fifteen sailors released by Iran to sell their stories to the press. This was immediately reversed for anyone who did not act on the first day. Johnny Cash’s home in Nashville burns to the ground, and Kurt Vonnegut dies.

While on television we have an unsung masterpiece – Russell T Davies’s best script of Season Three, Gridlock. There is a line of criticism against Russell T Davies that would suggest he is not particularly interested in science fiction. Instead he’s interested in visual spectacle and character bits, and happens to like the way science fiction things look and emotionally feel. But he’s spectacularly uninterested in worldbuilding – his oft cited line about not caring about Zogs from the planet Zog unless there are humans about is not just an observation about the importance of not making things too strange (after all, he did the “no humanoids except for the TARDIS crew” trick on his second script), but an observation about grounding stories in anything other than the day-to-day world of human experience. The creator of Raxicoricofallapatorius, the Moxx of Balhoon, and the Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe is clearly not averse to the presence of overt weirdness. What he is averse to is doing a story that isn’t grounded in contemporary Earth culture. And so even when, at the start of the second season, Davies made his high profile “we’re doing an alien planet for the first time” story the alien planet is just New Earth. Davies, in other words, is almost pathologically opposed to alien planets unless he can ground them in day-to-day Earth issues: busses, hospitals, and, in this case, traffic jams. As a writer, he wants either human interaction or massive spectacle.

But in Gridlock we have an odd story in which Davies manages to hit on an approach that does the worldbuilding for him, without him having to actually engage in any of it directly. The basic mechanic of the episode – tons of different people in their cars – means that Davies’s usual trick of “lots of weird and outlandish images” crashes into his other usual trick of “depictions of ordinary people with domestic lives” to create something that Davies never really manages again in Doctor Who: lots of weird and outlandish images of ordinary people with domestic lives. The result is that for the first and only time in the Davies era we end up with a cross-section of an alien society. Because of the particular central image of the story – the act of driving on the highway – it’s possible for Davies to mash up S&M cats, elderly lesbian trainspotters, nudists, and dapper businessmen into something that feels like a sane, coherent world.…

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“A world sinks thus; and yon majestic Heaven/Shines not the less for that one vanish’d star!”: The Immunity Syndrome

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Sometimes you really do have to go with the obvious screenshot.

Well, here’s something I wasn’t at all expecting. Given how Star Trek has been seriously underperforming the last few weeks as well as the fact the series has been steadily but noticeably running out of steam since midway through the season I fully anticipated that the episode about the Giant Space Amoeba would be another silly runaround, especially as my memory of it consisted mostly of some agonizing debate over Spock taking on a suicide mission from which it was eminently clear he was going to come back, as well as of the aforementioned Giant Space Amoeba. I was totally prepared to glibly take the piss out of this one as another example of Star Trek‘s inevitable march towards cancellation.

It turns out the memory does in fact cheat, and I’m thankful it does in this case because “The Immunity Syndrome” is actually properly excellent.

In some ways the episode “The Immunity Syndrome” is most immediately comparable with is “The Doomsday Machine”, from which it inherits its thriller structure. Once again, we have a tense countdown to destruction that is narrowly averted at the last possible second and which keeps us on the edge of our seats throughout the entire story. Perhaps as a result, this is a laudably tight and exciting production, and, like its predecessor, a sterling example of what an “average” (to use a potentially loaded term) episode of Star Trek in its second season ought to look like. However it’s a great deal more than that: In this regard (and uncannily so given “A Private Little War” is still relatively fresh in the memory) “The Immunity Syndrome” may actually be closer to “The Alternative Factor”, because the threat posed by the Giant Space Amoeba for almost the entire runtime of the episode is an honest-to-goodness narrative collapse.

We’ve come perilously close to narrative collapse a number of times in Star Trek so far: “The Alternative Factor” is, naturally, the most obvious example, but as I mentioned in its corresponding post, “The Menagerie” at least flirted with the iconography of collapse, though thanks to a combination of the approach of the early Gene Coon era and Gene Roddenberry’s general writerly incompetence that’s not quite what we got. “The Immunity Syndrome”, however, is the closest we’ve gotten yet, and while it ultimately stops just short of becoming one, for the vast majority of the episode it seems like it just might go all the way. The telltale sign comes in the very first act, when the Enterprise discovers the aptly named Zone of Darkness, which immediately begins to sap the life force of both the ship and its crew. Within the zone, there is no starlight, either because it’s been blocked by something or all the stars have simply gone out. Now a lot of calamitous things can happen on Star Trek: The show threatens the destruction of the ship or the death of crewmembers on a seemingly weekly basis.…

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Believe in the Stars (The Last War in Albion Part 8: Starblazer, the Pulps)

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This is the third of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. The entirety of chapters one and two are available as an ebook single at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s superhero strip Captain Clyde came to an ignoble end in 1981, but in many ways what was most unusual was that it existed at all, given that superheroes were not particularly popular within British comics, where you were likely to find a wider variety of comics… 

“Believe in the stars.” – Alan Moore, Dodgem Logic #4, 2010
The superhero is thus best used to describe a type of pulp hero story that emerged out of 1930s American comic books. Not all superheroes have their origins in comic books, but enough do that it is a reasonably entertaining game to identify ones who first appeared in another medium, particularly ones that have any degree of popularity today. They are defined primarily by a visual intensity and a sense of heritage tracing back to Action Comics #1. And they are worth fighting over because pulp heroes of that sort are a large part of contemporary culture, and have come to almost completely dominate the American comic book industry, in which large swaths of the War are fought. 
Figure 58: Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future traded on
the fantastic and brightly colored art of Frank
Hampson (From Eagle v3 #12, 1952)
But the War starts in Britain and remains, in the end, fought in Albion. And in British comics culture superheroes never gained the absolute dominance over the comics industry that they did in America. In British comics the first massively popular instance of highly visual pulp storytelling was Eagle, an anthology comic featuring stories in several genres headlined by the colourful adventures of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, and, crucially, dating to 1950, not 1938. And 1950 was squarely in the dead period of superhero comics between their World War II popularity and their Silver Age revivals. This meant that the British comics industry had several years in which to develop its own styles of highly visual pulp storytelling without any influence from American superheroes. 
Figure 59: All-Star Superman #1 cropped
to digest size.

Which meant, in turn, that in 1979 Grant Morrison could submit a story to Starblazer, a comic that simply would not have ever existed in the late 70s American comic book industry. Starblazer debuted in April of 1979, and became a twice-monthly title in July of the same year. Its concept is simple – single issue sci-fi stories (later broadened to include fantasy as well) sold in what’s known as “digest” format. Measuring at 13.5 x 17.5 centimeters (or roughly 5 x 7 inches), digests were about the height of a mass market paperback, but slightly wider at the base – similar to the formats used for science fiction magazines like Galaxy and New Worlds, as well as to American “digest” comics, the most famous of which were Gold Key’s efforts.

…

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They’d Take Some Adapting (The Shakespeare Code)

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Come on. I dare you. Shout “Freebird.”

It’s April 7th, 2007. David Tennant remains very happy with the charts, or, at least, with the top of them. His feelings on Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani, Fray, Fergie, Take That, and Justin Timberlake are, to the best of my knowledge, undocumented. In news, Ukranian President Viktor Yushchenko dissolves parliament. The University of Florida unexpectedly wins the NCAA Basketball championship to the swelling pride of nobody whatsoever in Gainesville, Florida, a town that is known to bring trees down when it wins football. Three people are charged in the 2005 London bombings, and Iran releases fifteen British sailors captured back before Smith and Jones, proclaiming it a “gift.” And, the day this story airs, the 153rd University Boat Race takes place. Cambridge wins by one-and-a-half lengths.

While on television, The Shakespeare Code. Some time ago, I was having lunch with Jane, one of our regular commenters, and we were talking about the blog and the roles various commenters play within it. She mentioned Jack Graham and asked what role he played, and I, without a second thought, replied, “he’s the blog’s conscience.” Which is to say that Jack has a staggering 5,000 word piece on The Shakespeare Code that is the definitive account of it, and I’m humbly penning a brief follow-up sketch. Jack, for his part, savages The Shakespeare Code for what it’s not, which is to say, a story about traveling back and time and meeting Shakespeare. He is, of course, absolutely correct that this is not at all what the story is.

His dismissal of what the story actually is holds some water, and I’m certainly not going to be so foolish as to disagree with it, but equally, I’m not, in this case, as interested in the ethics of it as I am in the shape of it. Jack is ultimately making the same observation Tat Wood makes in About Time, which is that Doctor Who has moved to being about people in strange worlds to… ah, but here’s where things fog up. Whatever the ideological case for why this move represents the end of civilization as we know it, it’s not entirely clear what this new take on Doctor Who is.

Whatever it is, Gareth Roberts is surely the iconic example. Gareth Roberts is a writer with little interest in world-building. For Roberts, the point of Doctor Who is to provide cracked mirror reflections of middle class Britain. For him the pinnacle of the series is thus the Graham Williams era, where everything in the universe proved able to become Douglas Adams-esque banter. I said last week that Roberts only ever writes love letters, and this remains an important explanation for his writing. A Roberts script is only ever going to come out of a basic passion for its subject matter. This isn’t a problem – in fact, it’s what makes Roberts’s scripts so much fun. But it means that there’s not a desire to explore the pokey ends of concepts in the scripts.…

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“…is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?”: Obsession

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“What did you see, old man?”

“Obsession” is Moby-Dick for Star Trek again, so firstly all of the comments I made the last time we talked about this kind of story in “The Doomsday Machine” still apply. There is fundamentally not a whole lot to add to that (except for one issue I’ll discuss a little later). The primary problem is, as always, the idea of doing a blind vengeance story in a setting that’s supposedly more enlightened, idealistic and utopian. With Commodore Decker this worked, because we could get a character study about the tragic fall of someone consumed by a need for revenge without jeopardizing one of our own: Imagine, for a moment, that Decker’s role in “The Doomsday Machine” had been filled by Kirk, McCoy or Sulu: There’s no way the show could come back from that the next week, because the nature of serialized anthology television necessitates hitting the reset button in the last two minutes of every episode and doing that after that kind of intensely personal story would have been catastrophic. Furthermore, by essentially casting the Enterprise crew as Ishmael, this upholds the narrative reiteration structure that helped make the episode successful and also helped push the series towards the idealism it will soon become famous for.

In short, this is the problem “Obsession” is continuously grappling with. It’s doing Moby-Dick again, except this time with Kirk as Ahab. Aside from this being, ultimately, a bit lazy and more evidence Star Trek and other US TV shows really need fewer episodes a year in order to better vet their scripts (at least this one is actually somewhat coherent and isn’t a total write-off like the past few weeks have been), it risks breaking the tenuous solid ground the show’s carved out for itself in the wake of “Mirror, Mirror”, “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Journey to Babel” because now Star Trek is more indebted to idealism than it’s ever been before. It’s not fully in that camp yet, it will take the fans to actually put it there, but it is now self-evidently the kind of show that someone could conceivably and plausibly draw that reading from. Hell, even “The Gamesters of Triskelion” portrayed the world of the Federation as something positive and worth striving towards, even if it was appallingly modernist and teleological about it. “Obsession” now has to deal with the challenge of doing a mad vengeance story with a main character on an anthology show that’s started flirting with utopianism, which is something not even “The Doomsday Machine” had to worry about.

The success or failure of this was always going to hinge on how the script handled conflict, and to its credit “Obsession” at least doesn’t totally blow it-It handles the problem about as well as could have been expected of it. It helps greatly that Kirk’s turmoil isn’t just vengeance here but guilt and self-doubt about his hesitation when facing the Vampire Cloud eleven years prior and his inability to save the crew of the Farragut.…

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Something Rotten at the Sausage Factory: How Wikipedia Embraced Transphobia for Chelsea Manning

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There is something that you never, ever do to a transgender person: use their birth name. The reason here is simple – to call a transgender person by their birth name is to deny them the basic right to their identity. It is to claim for yourself the right to dictate who they are, over their own express wishes. It is to tell them that their transition is invalid – that they deserve instead to suffer from the genuine and real pain of gender dysphoria, and that this is preferable to ever allowing them to think that they might have the right to define for themselves the basic aspects of who they are. It is hate speech, plain and simple, as straightforwardly as using the worst racial or sexual slur you can think of.

This is not a matter of when hormone therapy has begun or surgery has taken place. Those are just procedures to reduce the material impact of gender dysphoria and make social transition less awkward and, frankly, less dangerous. The point where it becomes hate speech is the instant that a person has told you their preferred name and gender presentation.

On August 22nd, Chelsea Manning issued a public statement confirming the longstanding reports that she was transgender and asking that instead of using the name “Bradley Manning,” as media sources had been doing up to that point, people refer to her by the name of “Chelsea.” Almost immediately after this announcement the Wikipedia page for Manning was changed from being called “Bradley Manning” to “Chelsea Manning.” In the early hours of August 31st, following a week of discussion, the page was moved back.

This is the story of how the fifth largest website in the world came to actively embrace transphobia and hate speech.

Some disclosure. I am not an impartial observer. Nevertheless, this is a factual account based on the public record of Wikipedia talk pages and logs. Still, in the interests of disclosure, I involved myself in this debate in a minor role, advocating for the position you’d expect. This was my first substantial contribution to Wikipedia in several years, but I do have administrator rights on the project dating back to 2004, when I was a highly active editor. I am friendly with several of the persons involved, although have not met any except on the Internet. One person involved, Morwen, was a significant donor to my Kickstarter. I am not writing this piece on behalf of any of them, and in fact more than one person I am friendly with has expressed reservations over the piece, though not about its factual accuracy.

Morwen has a highly visible role in what happened, but not, ultimately, an important one; she was the editor who retitled (or, in Wikipedia parlance, moved) the page following Manning’s announcement on the Today show. To begin, at least, events consisted of jargon-heavy technical decisions based heavily on Wikipedia policy. These events may be somewhat opaque to outsiders, but it is nevertheless worth summarizing the exact events that led to the larger conflict.…

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