Some People Can’t Take It (But They All Have One Thing In Common…)

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The treatment of people of colour in Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who has always annoyed me. While the characters themselves are great, the way they’re treated by the Doctor often is not. Steven Moffat’s Who has similar problems, but I’m gonna focus on RTD’s for now. I don’t think he’s a racist- but I do think he’s working in an industry that still has unconcious racism going on. So, let’s have a look at both Martha and Mickey, and supporting characters like Penny, Cathica and Julia.

Mickey

First, we’re going to talk about Mickey! I was a huge Mickey fan during Series Two, and was delighted to see him back in Series Four. I still quietly have my fingers crossed he’ll show up on Torchwood or something one day. Along with his wife, of course.

So, Mickey: from day one he was the butt of all the jokes. He runs into things, falls over things, and gets eaten by a wheelie bin. Then he clings to his girlfriend’s legs as she accepts the offer to travel through time, and the Doctor pointedly tells him, “You’re not invited.” But Rose cried, too, when events started spiralling out of her control. Mickey had just been kidnapped and duplicated and in fear for his life- why shouldn’t he have a massive freak-out?

In a way, Mickey starts off his time on the show as a collection of stereotypes: he’s buffoonish, cowardly, and silly. But the Doctor’s reaction to him is unpleasant. Granted, he’s unpleasant to everyone (even Rose at first, and later Jackie) but with Mickey he never really lets up. He deliberately gets his name wrong, and calls him an idiot- even though Mickey has a perfectly legitimate complaint: the Doctor not returning Rose for twelve months made Mickey look like a murderer. Even when Mickey demonstrates that he’s read up on the Doctor, and knows who he worked for and who he got killed, the Doctor dismisses him with “good boy, Ricky.” And then, throughout most of World War Three, even after Mickey’s saved Jackie, exploded a Siltheen and hacked into UNIT’s website, the Doctor’s still insulting him all over the place, for no good reason (“Mickey, you were born in the dark.” “Mickey the idiot.”) Only after Mickey’s launched a missile at the Siltheen, and after the day is saved, does the Doctor start to treat him like a competent person at all.

After World War Three things have improved for Mickey, but then in Boomtown he’s back to being called “Mickey the idiot” again. It seems unfair to compare Mickey and Rose’s accomplishments, as both of them were worthy heroes, but here’s what they did to help save the world/the doctor, in series one:

Rose:
-saved the Doctor’s life in the first episode
-became Bad Wolf, destroying the Daleks and saving Jack and the Doctor

Mickey:
-launched the missle at 10 Downing Street
-provided, along with Jackie, the means for Rose to become Bad Wolf in the first place

…in other words, exactly the same amount of Important Stuff! Hmmm.

The Tenth Doctor is a lot better when it comes to his treatment of Mickey, but he’s still the third wheel and still the Tin Dog. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in The Girl In The Fireplace, where there’s this dialogue:

ROSE: You’re not keeping the horse!
DOCTOR: I let you keep Mickey!

No matter what Mickey’s done, and he’s done quite a lot by this point, he’s still the pet aboard the TARDIS, while Rose gets to be the equal. It’s not fair, not really.

Cathica (The Long Game)

Nine is a total jerk (I didn’t really realise how much of a jerk until I started writing this) and yes, he’s a jerk to Cathica, what a surprise. He tells her she’s not asking the right kind of questions- but she is asking questions! “We keep asking [about the heat]” “You can look at the archive, the news, the stock exchange… and you’re looking at pipes?” “How come it’s giving you the code?” And so on. She’s questioning the Doctor, maybe he doesn’t like that. Of course Rose is going to be asking different questions, she’s a visitor! And she’s used to villainy lurking around every corner, while Cathica isn’t.

Later on, indirectly talking to Cathica, the Doctor says to the Editor, “Because you’ve bred a human race that doesn’t bother to ask questions. Stupid little slaves, believing every lie.” I know it wasn’t meant to sound like it, but basically it sounds like Cathica gets to be, however briefly ‘a stupid little slave’ for…behaving in exactly the same way the rest of the human race does, not questioning things to the Doctor’s (who doesn’t live there, and isn’t human) standards. And that’s not cool. I think Russell T Davies thought he was making a point about how the human race in general doesn’t ask enough questions…so I’m gonna question you now, Russell T…

Martha

…by moving onto Martha. Like Mickey before her, she tends to do twice the work for half the credit. Martha might have been the most competent companion the Doctor ever had, and yet like Mickey she has to leave the Doctor before she’s treated as the hero she is. And Martha’s accomplishments seem to be, in general, much harder-won than Rose’s or even Donna’s. She protected the Doctor in 1913, sticking fiercely to her task despite being forced to deal with racism and sexism on an almost daily basis. Even from her best friend! That must have hurt. In the very next episode, she and the Doctor are trapped in the 1960s, another racist era. And she has to work to support him…it seems like for a long time, Martha got to see all the bad things about time-travel and none of the good. And then she has to walk across a devastated Earth for a year, avoiding danger and death and not knowing if her family were alive. (My admiration for this feat knows no bounds, because it must have been so uncomfortable, so dirty and so hard. I bet she never even got a shower or a proper meal…) And it rather gets me that the Doctor doesn’t thank her for this. All that nasty and difficult stuff, and her family left traumatized, and the Doctor forgiving the man who did it…and he doesn’t thank her. She says “I spent a lot of time with you thinking I was second best, but you know what? I am good.” And he says…nothing…

Julia (Smith And Jones)

In Martha Jones’s pilot episode we also met Julia. Don’t remember her? She’s Martha’s friend who starts crying when the hospital ends up on the moon. Crying? In a stressful kind of situation? Where have we seen that before? But, like Mickey before her, Julia is assigned the role of ‘second-best to the companion’…the Doctor completely dismisses her. Whereas one would think he’d at least take a moment to reassure her and tell it it would be okay, like he did for Rose when she cried in her first episode. And Julia isn’t really all that useless…she notices the strange weather before Martha does, and later we see her treating a patient and assessing the situation calmly.

Morvin (Voyage Of The Damned)

Morvin is portrayed as being a decent person who the Doctor likes, but he falls victim to the old trope of the black man dying first. Which is usually to show all the white characters how dangerous the situation is.

This is annoying, but what’s even more annoying is that they did it twice in Voyage Of The Damned. Earlier on in the episode, Alonso talks on the phone to one of the crash survivors, hiding in the kitchen. Who’s black, and who is promptly killed by the Host, for no reason other than to a) set the Host up as a threat and b) to give Alonso something to react to.

Penny (Partners In Crime)

The treatment of Penny in Partners In Crime really bugs me. Now, Penny’s companion material if I ever saw it. She’s clever enough to know that Miss Foster is up to no good, brave enough to sneak into her office, she gets the whole story out of Miss Foster and does it without freaking out, only screaming when the machine guns go off…

But when she meets the Doctor, we get this little exchange:

PENNY: Is anyone gonna tell me what’s going on?
DOCTOR: What, you’re a journalist?
PENNY: Yes.
DOCTOR: Well, make it up!

Would he speak like that to Sarah Jane? Somehow I think not. And then, because Penny’s rightly annoyed at being left tied to a chair and yells at the Doctor, Donna dismisses her with a “Some people just can’t take it.” Penny leaves, having to hop away still tied up, and that’s the last we see of her.

But Penny’s treatment is extra galling because she did all the work! Without her, neither Donna nor Ten would have known precisely what was going on- they only found out because they were listening in on the conversation. It was Penny who asked all the questions! It was Penny who did the exact same thing as Donna- sneak into the offices, hide in a bathroom, investigate! And she gets…humiliated and dismissed, for no reason.

Yeah, so it really doesn’t add up to anything good. I suspect this is a good example of colourblind casting really not working- when all (or, well, most) the disposable characters are people of colour, something’s gone wrong. Moffat’s DW didn’t really improve matters much either- what he generally does is have his characters of colour be acknowledged as competent, then die in an act of bravery or sacrifice (see: Guido, Rita), while RTD often had them be competent, but never acknowledged as so. Which just annoys me more for some reason.