Whovians love to argue over who are the best and worst companions, and for good reason.but-not-likethis I thought you might find this interesting
Oh, Cracked. About as sexist and ridiculous as usual. “those are not characteristics that generate plot so much as wet dreams”. “Competency is attractive. It’s why somewhere right now someone is masturbating to the thought of Madeline Albright negotiating a peace treaty.” This isn’t someone geniunely ranking the companions – which is kind of a pointless thing to do anyway – it’s ranking the companion’s attributes by how attractive men find them. If I didn’t know what Doctor Who was, all I’d get from the bit about Clara is that she apparently has no characteristics that a man wishes to wank over, although I note that the author says he’d have sex with her anyway. I’ve never been able to work out why tumblr likes Cracked so much. It’s just Reddit under a different coat of paint half the time. Anyway-
Protip: if you write an article about female characters and cannot refrain from using some variation on the phrase ‘masturbate to’ more than, oooh, three times, you are probably a sexist hack. Just sayin’.
Pick your favourite character(s) in Doctor Who and tell me your favourite episode for them. Not the episode that they’re in that you love the most, but the episode you love the most for them. And then tell me why it’s your favourite!
(And then I will maybe/probably rewatch some of the episodes to get a new insight into the characters you guys love)
I think people have done most of my other favourites already, so I’m gonna go with-
Mickey
World War 3. I was tempted to go with Rise of the Cybermen, but World War 3–
Well, it brings up one of the best parts of Mickey’s story: his relationship with Jackie. Jackie’s spent a year calling him a murderer and harassing him. They don’t like each other at all. But Mickey saves her anyway, comforts her, tells her to run while he holds the Siltheen off-
Long before Series Two, Mickey was a goddamn hero! Well worthy of the Doctor’s admiration, even before the whole thing with the hacking and the missile. And he also quite thoroughly demonstrated that he was absolutely no idiot-
– not that that mattered. >:(
Anyway, yes, Mickey is a guy brave and selfless enough to defend to the death a woman who hates him, and I wish he got more credit for it!
I feel like they had a missed opportunity with really developing Amy Pond’s character from Doctor Who. They could have made her so much more badass (like the way they made Rose) but instead put her in short skirts and made her have this silly crush on the Doctor the whole time.
What female character in nerd/geek/fan culture do you wish was more developed? Send us your thoughts at www.fakegeekgirlslikeus.tumblr.com/submit
But Amy Pond isn’t a badass, nor should she be.
Not a badass in the traditional way, anyway – she has tremendous strength of character, a great deal of intelligence, and it can’t be denied that she likes to hit things. But this is just one more example of the bizarre faux-feminist Strong Female Character argument that leaks into so much of online discourse- Rose isn’t some generic ‘badass’ either, nor Martha, nor River, because ‘badass’ isn’t a description of someone’s character. If we’re judging women to be missed opportunities or not based soley on the amount of Cool Stuff they do, we’ve set the bar incredibly low.
No-one put Amy in short skirts apart from Karen Gillan, and she talks about that here. Which actually brings me neatly round to my next point: Amy shouldn’t have to be more more like Rose, either. Female characters, just like female people, are not one-size-fits-all. I can’t help but notice that on that fakegeeksgirlslikeus website, they’ve grouped three very different women – Martha, Amy, Tauriel from The Hobbit – under the banner of, basically, ‘could have been more interesting if they hadn’t crushed on the Doctor/been part of a love triangle.’ Well, why? Nothing about their love lives cancels out what they actually achieve, which is plenty. Going back to Amy-
-like, I relate to Amy. I did as far back as The Beast Below. She’s immature in her attitude to sex and relationships (hence the ‘silly crush’). She’s abrasive and insulting even to her loved ones, she’s afraid of abandonment, she has complete mental breakdowns in bad situations (Like me!), she likes history and storytelling and art. I honestly don’t think these are things that are easy to miss, either: I don’t buy the ‘not developed enough as a person’ argument.
I found some of the little details of her character – her strength in the face of lack of support, her doubting her own mind sometimes (again, like me!) to be affirming. I know I’m not the only one who thinks that, either. But, yeah-
-I suppose she could have been badass in the way none of the Doctor Who companions actually are. When her husband is dying in her arms, she could have yelled ‘DON’T YOU DIE ON ME!’ and brought him back with a punch to the chest. When being sucked into the earth, she could have made a sarcastic quip about it. When told to hand over her baby daughter, she could have blown Kovarian and her soldiers up with a big gun and walked in slo-mo away from the explosion-
–or she could have cried, panicked, pleaded, and acquiesced. Which is what she actually did. Rose (to give just one example) probably wouldn’t have done. But that’s alright too, because female characters should represent the entire spectrum of women. And we’re not all strong, and we’re not all badasses, and we shouldn’t have to be to gain respect.
So, I’ve been thinking about it ever since I had a bit of a discussion defending “The Day of the Doctor,” and it occurred to me that some of the themes of the episode have been in place since at least “The Parting of the Ways.”
I mean, in “The Parting of the Ways,” we see the Doctor facing off against a vast army of Daleks. All he has is a Delta Wave, which will fry the brains of everything within range—including billions on Earth. Upon being challenged by the Dalek emperor, he realizes that he cannot and will not do it, perhaps because of his previous experiences in the Time War, and the fact that he has had to make that sort of horrible decision before.
Since countless trillions are at risk from the Dalek forces, and they would almost certainly destroy (or use) Earth anyway, this is, by the numbers, very much the wrong decision. But such moral arithmetic has a weakness: it assumes that the Doctor is the only one who can meaningfully do anything. No hope, no help coming, just a sadistic choice.
Meanwhile, in the twenty-first century (I know, that’s a lousy way to put it, but we lack decent time travel vocabulary) Rose is exploring the many virtues of getting help. With the help of Jackie, Mickey, and a big yellow truck, Rose is about to demand assistance from the biggest dea ex machina that she knows. She creates the Bad Wolf entity—all the temporal power of a TARDIS, but with a human’s ability to be proactive—and the rest is history.
And throughout the ensuing series, the show seems to have a distinct opinion on the notion that the Doctor is the only moral actor on the scene; it’s generally against it. True, there are times when he’s the only one in a position to save the day, but when he makes a crucial moral choice by himself, there’s usually a distinct unease around the whole thing. In “The Runaway Bride,” the destruction of the Racnoss is revealed to be something that would have literally destroyed the Doctor if Donna hadn’t intervened; “The Waters of Mars” represents part of a frightening downward spiral. Ten, in particular, yo-yos semi-predictably between admitting that he’d be a very bad god, believing he has no choice but to act as one, and—in his darker moments—seeing no problem with wielding ultimate power over people. The Doctor, we are reminded many times, should not travel alone, and at least a part of that is because the Doctor shouldn’t be the only person to choose.
And then comes “The Day of the Doctor.” Alone is exactly how we see the War Doctor, alone in a desolate landscape, alone in brilliant light that gives little comfort—alone with a box. We learn that it is the end of the Time War, and the Time Lords have used up almost all the cosmic horror class weapons in the Omega Arsenal (which really might as well be called Pandora’s Box). The Doctor has the last of the weapons, one so sophisticated that it can think. The Doctor has the sole responsibility to decide whether Gallifrey lives—which would give Rassilon a chance to execute his frankly omnicidal plan to exalt the Time Lords—or whether he will slaughter every living thing on Gallifrey. Billions versus all the trillions who lived. The arithmetic is plain.
Except that the Doctor is alone, in a room, with a box. And the Doctor in a room with a box is never really alone at all.
The Moment—not just a weapon, but a being—identifies herself as Bad Wolf. And the more we see of her, the more the parallels are apparent. The Moment thinks like a TARDIS—she perceives time in a manner distinctly different from our past-present-future system—but she has the proactive nature of a human or a Time Lord.* But it isn’t until the end, after the Moment has meticulously gathered the Doctors, the TARDISes, and Clara in the same spot, that we see how much she really is Bad Wolf. The Moment is hope. The Moment means that the Doctor doesn’t have to make the moral decision alone. He has help.
Help makes it better. Help allows people to find a better way.
*In fact, you could make a decent headcanon that TARDISes run on an intentionally downgraded version of the Moment’s OS, capable of perceiving the web of time as a unified entity, but deliberately designed not to act on it as powerfully as she does. There is also a popular headcanon that I saw shortly after “Day of the Doctor” aired, to the effect that the Bad Wolf entity actually sparked sapience in the Moment, which, combined with the first headcanon, has the entertainingly loopy effect of making the TARDIS her own grandmother. Make of that what you will.
Right! Isolated some parts of conversations that didn’t pass to see if the isolated bits do pass. Since, after all, all that’s required to pass are three lines between women that aren’t about a man. And yet, quite a few episodes have failed…
—–polls now closed—–
The Shakespeare Code
DOOMFINGER: But it must be tomorrow!
BLOODTIDE: Love’s Labour’s Won must be performed.
(Lilith changes the hair in the doll.)
LILITH: Fear not. Chant with me. Water damps the fiercest flame.
Two lines about the play, then: the beginning of a spell. To kill a dude. (admittedly, an unimportant-to-the-story dude, but still.) Does the action of Lilith changing the hair in the doll signify that the conversation/the spell is about a man now? Well, this is the deciding factor for the whole episode, so…
And now! one from the Moffat Era:
Cold Blood
ALAYA: Why would I tell you?
AMBROSE: Because if you don’t, I’m going to have to use this on you.
(Ambrose has kept a taser from her collection of weapons.)
ALAYA: Now you reveal yourselves.
The thing Alaya won’t tell is anything about a cure for Ambrose’s father. But although Ambrose is motivated in this scene by saving the male members of her family, this three lines also reveal something vital about her: that she’s willing to torture to get what she needs. So! Does it pass or not? What do you think?
Anonymous: I found this for Amy Pond on TV Tropes “Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Very genuinely thinks that abusing Rory is okay, and (emotionally and physically) beats Rory over the head a whole lot. Gets called out on it hard on occasion, and slowly learns that there are other ways to love someone. It’s still her default defense mechanism when she feels her that relationship isn’t heading the right way.” What do you think about this? You may have done a thing on this topic before, but IDK.
I don’t really agree? For the most part, it seems to lump together emotional and physical abuse and comes to some slightly odd conclusions based on that.
#one of my favourite things about amy#is that she is a textbook *problematic fave*#in the vein of the ninth doctor or sherlock or ward or owen#and before amy I hadn’t really seen a female *problematic fave*#so I think that’s a brave and worthy creative choice (via thatsabsurrrrd)
Amy isn’t perfect, and she doesn’t always have a particularly healthy relationship with Rory, and she often screws up and sucks at communication and she can be kinda awful to people sometimes. She learns, sort of, through experimenting and trial and error, what makes her and the people around her happiest. But she’s not perfect, and she’s never perfect, and that’s okay.
I’m watching DW with my parents and The Face of Boe is in this one…
And one of the Cat nurses is saying that she can hear him singing, such old songs, in her head
So I’m just imagining Jack singing like old Earth ‘ballads’ music like
“BABY YOU’RE A FIREEEEEWORK / COME ON LET YOUR COLOURS BURST / MAKE ‘EM GO ‘AHH AHH AHH’ / YOU’RE GONNA LEAVE ‘EM ALL IN AWE AWE AWE”
I cAN’T
Okay, lemme see if I can list all the Doctor Who alumni that’ve been in Broadchurch so far. (without looking at the Radio Times article about it…)
David Tennant (The Tenth Doctor/Alec Hardy)
Arthur Darvill (Rory Williams/Paul Coates)
Olivia Colman (“Mother”/Ellie Miller)
Eve Myles (Gwen & Gwyneth/Claire)
Meera Syal (Nasreen Chaudry/Sonia Sharma)
Adjoa Andoh (Francine Jones/Julie)
David Bradley (Solomon/Jack)
Peter De Jersey (Androgar/Brian)
Welcome to part of my project to work out how many times Doctor Who passes the Bechdel Test! This bit's on Livejournal so I can post polls on it.
Basically, I need your help discerning whether the following conversations pass the Bechdel Test or not. Some of these I thought and thought about, and then just figured, put it to a vote.
—–Polls are now closed! If you vote now, it won’t be counted!——
The Age Of Steel
Fear Her
The Shakespeare Code
Midnight
Turn Left
The Eleventh Hour
Cold Blood
Night Terrors
The Time of the Doctor
The Caretaker
Dark Water
