Points to make About Doctor Who: The Woman Who Lived
~I don’t understand how Me
can change her voice so completely. Like, that’s physically impossible? And how
did she remember who the Doctor AND Clara were? If she’s managed to forget all
the people that loved and cared for her, why has her bizarrely-selective memory
decided to keep those two from falling into obscurity? “Hey so, I know you
really love your village and family, but I think we need to make more space for
those two random people who you knew for less than a day. K thanks bye!”~ I really like the
character of Me and how she’s lived for so long that names no longer have
meaning to her (also I hoped to get some genderqueer representation where Me
mentions that she uses no pronouns because gender is meaningless to her, but I
guess that’s too much to ask in the ever so progressive year 2015). So you can
see how I’d get upset if, say, the Doctor kept insisting on using the wrong
name, even after Me told him to shut the fuck up and respect her identity.
People choosing to call themselves by a name other than their assigned one? Noooo, how could it be possible that
someone might be dissatisfied with by the word someone ELSE chose for them and
without ever asking them? I mean, god, wasn’t anyone triggered by that shit? I
know I would be (not to mention the hypocrisy of the “Doctor” refusing to call
someone else by their chosen name. It’s strange because he didn’t seem to have
that issue with Missy. Hmmmm, me thinks awful writing is afoot)~NO. No Moffat, no. What the
fuck, no. Why. The .Hell. Did. We. Get. To. See. Me’s. Children. She’s a
fucking kid, jesus, do I really have to point out how creepy that is? I don’t
care if it’s her 800th birthday, she’s physiologically still a child
and I’m not even sure if she would even be able to have children, considering
how she’s supposed to constantly “repair” herself. Is no one else upset at
this? She’s supposed to be immortal, yes, but the message is still the same.
Later in the episode she even KISSES a FUCKING GROWN MAN WHO THEN FUCKING
FLIRTS WITH HER. DID SAM SWIFT ALSO KNOW OF HER IMMORTALITY AND THAT SHE WAS A
BAZZILLION YEARS OLD OR WHATEVER? I’M NOT SO FUCKING SURE. Fuck, how did this
even make it to BBC without a great big hammer coming down to smite the script
with holy, cleansing fire? Children watch this, people of all ages who might
have been victims of child abuse/rape watch this and it is so not okay. I
refuse to sit back while Moffat normalizes pedophilia and I don’t care if he
wrote it or not, he still let it happen.~Also, is it impossible to
do drama without dead babies anymore? Was there some sort of law that I wasn’t
aware of? Is that what we have come to, cheap crap to make us sad without even
the slightest creative effort? Because even that’s going to get old soon. Will
we one day get to see Missy mourning over the loss of her babies due to bad
writing? Can we only do tragic female characters if said characters have lost
their children during infancy at some point? Is the TARDIS going to have babies
in the future, whose death the Doctor will then have to avenge?~Oh look, Me tells the
Doctor that she’s been feeling nothing but loss and pain her whole life,
causing her to become completely apathetic towards the world and other humans
as a form of emotional defense. The Doctor, unsurprisingly, can’t seem to grasp
how much he messed her up and doesn’t let her travel with him, for no explained
reason, while I chew angrily at my wristwatch.~Purple-y, glowy magic gem
thing that is magic and obscurely linked to Ancient Greek mythology, for
arbitrary plot purposes. Or perhaps the writers simply couldn’t be bothered to
come up with any good ideas and went for that. Take your pick.~I do not understand why the
bandits don’t just shoot Me and the Doctor. Even when Sam’s life was in danger,
the dude with the gun didn’t even try to fight back and basically just stood
there gorping at Capaldi’s chiseled butt cheeks. Those are supposed to be
greedy bandits and I thought they were trying to rob them. Why on earth are
they running away?~The costume from Beauty and
the Beast has allied with a flamethrower to create this episode’s villain, who
looked menacing and mysterious initially, but sure enough devolves into cheesy and
clichéd by the end. More on that later, but I’d like to focus on a specific
line from the episode first. How exactly does “each death” create “a small
crack on reality” Doctor? When was that even established? Does a small,
specially-trained Death Pixie come along to do that, or is it more of a “magic
unicorn tear” thing? Because that’s an awful lot of cracks you’d have to deal
with and by that token, the Universe should have been in tatters by now.~Doctor: “Oh Clara I just
made a small child immortal, forcing her to spend her entire life having to
watch others die and losing everyone close to her. That is a terrible thing to
do to someone and I understand that. I still did it though *guitar-solos into
the night*”Me: “Doctor, you made me
like this and forced me to watch everything and everyone I cared about vanish
like wisps of smoke on a breezy day. It’s your fault I’m so messed up and you
won’t even take me with you when I beg you to”Doctor: “No I only did it
because I wanted to saaaave you. See?
I’m not horrible at all! I only cared about your future well-being and aren’t I
just the most considerable person in the world? I didn’t know you wouldn’t like it, it’s not like I knew exactly what I was
doing and what that would lead to. It’s not like I myself am immortal and being
alone for extended periods of time leads me to be cruel and merciless.
Honestly, I don’t know what you’re complaining about and please untie me”~Do we kill the butler? Do
we kill the Doctor? Do we kill an ant? We don’t know! The parameters of this
item’s function are sketchy at best and it is never explained who or what needs
to die and whether the sacrifice HAS to be of a human. I personally don’t see
how, say, a tree has less life force than a thirty-something person, but each to
their own. Oh it’s the bandit dude that had no reason to not shoot Me and the
Doctor, good to know.~Me heads off to Sam’s
execution and the Doctor somehow manages to escape arrest and magically gets a
horse to ride on. At this point I’m rooting for Me all the way. Let her take
advantage of the execution and let her travel away with some weird, magic
pebble that makes no sense, she deserves it. She has been left to suffer for
hundreds of years and the Doctor didn’t even have the decency to help her when
she asked him to. Heck, he doesn’t even respect her enough to call her by her
name, why the frig has she not won yet?~Awkward scene where Sam
does a small gig with a bottle of wine in one hand, so as to stall for time and
further any already-existing historical inaccuracies. Somehow the people
gathered up to watch him die horribly, decide to appreciate all his terrible
jokes, instead of getting up to hang him themselves. Will he die, will he not
die, will his death be retconned once again? I drum my fingers impatiently and
silently hope for the former.~The Doctor shows up and Me
agrees to kissing Sam. I do not understand why she does that, nor do I
understand why she didn’t just stick the gem in his chest and get it over with.
Were I in her place, I’d be shooting at the creepy asshole before he could get
any other syllables out and I would definitely not smooch his dirt-encrusted
beard. Why is the Doctor not even trying to stop the execution, when that’s
literally what he came to do? Surely setting something on fire would scatter
the crowd faster than bad puns. Oh wait, he used the psychic paper that
previously didn’t work on the guards, but somehow works on the executioner.
Moving on.~Me has finally had enough
and decides to kill Sam herself and thank god that annoying jerk is finally
dead (or is he???) Somehow the colour purple is linked with death (as the
Doctor is quick to point out) which is hilarious in its stupidity. Purple’s the
colour of death now, is it? Oh good, because I always thought there was something
terribly off with plums and aubergines. And gold is for immortality now,
flipping dandy. Hey, if we’re going to associate random light wavelengths with
abstract concepts of lifespan lengths, then perhaps I should have a go: Pink is
for glittering butterflies dancing around the moonlit flowers of a
long-forgotten grave and infra-red is for cheesy writing that is so bad, it
causes spontaneous bouts of projectile-vomiting.~Evil lion dude turns out to
be evil and tricks Me into calling down a rain of burning phlegm. Now, I don’t
understand how he even planned for this or why. In fact, I don’t understand
anything at all! Am I supposed to believe that this inexplicably magic amulet
can open portals to another part of the Universe, where aliens await to bomb
everyone with combustible saliva? Why? How has this not happened already if
it’s supposed to be an alien/Ancient Greek artifact? Surely someone must have
died at some point while it was lying around, so why didn’t the portal open
then? How did lion dude know about it and how long was he on Earth? Why did he
even need Me to retrieve it for him, couldn’t he just do it himself? How long
were the aliens waiting for the portal to open? Why did they attack, what was
their motivation for taking over Earth? Why did Leandro want them to come? Were
they supposed to take him with them after they were done spewing fire all over
another random village? How could he be certain that they wouldn’t betray or
accidentally incinerate him? Why did he start attacking people after the portal
opened? Wasn’t that extremely dangerous considering that aliens were aiming for
the frightened, squishy people? How was he killed in the end? Why? What is even
going on in this episode?~Me suddenly stops and
inexplicably realizes she cares about people, after watching a few dozen
complete strangers run around in panic. While I’m fine with the idea of her
having a change of heart, I believe it was handled poorly and ended up feeling
inconsistent and out of place.~Sure enough, Me and the Doctor
res Sam as Leandro makes almost zero efforts to stop them and the Moffadox™
makes yet another hair-pulling appearance. The surrounding spectators then,
having completely forgotten about the minor apocalypse that just happened, take
the time to clap and cheer for the senseless revival of a criminal who they
previously wanted to see dead. I don’t understand why that is, or indeed why we
should feel happy for an outlaw who was supposed to be executed five minutes
and one biblical cataclysm ago. Why are we supposed to care about him, he’s
actually violent and robs people? I mean, he’s probably killed at least once,
why are we meant to be rooting for him now?~ Sam, having completely
forgiven Me for half-killing him, treats her and the Doctor to a few rounds of
aluminium mugs and I’m pretty sure non-adults should avoid consuming large
amounts of alcohol, regardless of whether they’re immortal or not. Me announces
to the Doctor that she’ll be taking care of the messes he leaves behind from
now on, as Moffat inserts yet another character into the Doctor Who timeline.
Finally, we get a painfully-predictable scene where the Doctor uses his
super-enhancing bionic Timelord vision to spot Me in a selfie.So what’s the final verdict?
Well, a large part of the episode was enjoyable, but there were so many
problems elsewhere that it got harder and harder to appreciate the bits that
were good. I liked the dynamic between Me and the Doctor, but he was such an
asshat and she had so many inconsistencies in her character, to the point where
it ended up ruining everything for me. I’d call it proof that Doctor Who can do
better, but then I’d have trouble keeping a straight face. This episode had so
much potential and could have been so much better, but ultimately ended up being
mostly crap.There is definitely something creepy here and it’s this: the fact that someone would take something as gross and deplorable as pedophilia and use it as a buzzword in an attempt to slur someone; a person who didn’t even write the episode no less.
You literally made up that a character played by an adult is a child with absolutely no episodic proof that she is and embellished it so you could position yourself as a hero of abuse survivors while simultaneously slandering someone else of promoting pedophilia:
Children watch this, people of all ages who might have been victims of child abuse/rape watch this and it is so not okay. I refuse to sit back while Moffat normalizes pedophilia
That is disgusting and shameful.
Like, I do get how someone *could* see Ashildr/Lady Me as slightly younger than she is, seeing as a) she’s played by Maisie Williams whose most famous role is a literal child and b) her face is a super young looking face. But Maisie Williams is absolutely eighteen, and…there’s really no other way to put this…you can tell just by looking at her that she’s not ‘a small child’. So I’m guessing Ashildr was like her actor eighteen throughout The Girl Who Died, which is only one year younger than Rose was in her first series. (And oh boy, did the fandom not have a problem with her having babies, as long as they were the Doctor’s!) Eighteen is young to have what looked like three babies* (triplets, I’m guessing) but probably not unusual in medieval England, plus she definitely seemed to want them if she has to keep reminding herself to not have anymore.
Anyway, yeah, it is definitely a stretch from “immortal woman with physical form of eighteen-year-old has sex with unknown person; has children” to “Moffat normalizes pedophilia“. And, as other people have pointed out, kinda a completely baseless (but serious! Like, really horribly serious!) accusation to make against Catherine Tregenna.
(*You could definitely get something out of the fact that there are indeed a few other mothers in the Moffat episodes/era who have had babies whilst young – just look at Nancy – and I’d be totally up for meta that criticized that pattern. This, however, isn’t it.)