So, this past weekend, I took my 11-year-old daughter to SuperCon to meet her favorite actor (and favorite Doctor), Peter Capaldi.
She wore a little blue TARDIS-decorated dress and some Doctor Who pins, and she nearly cried with joy when Capaldi greeted her for the photo op. He was a consummate gentleman and such a sweet and enthusiastic person.
An hour or so after the wonderful photo op experience, she and I were sitting at a table in the food court area.
A burly, older man plopped down nearby. He looked at my little girl’s outfit, smiled, and said, “Do you even KNOW anything about Doctor Who?”
WTF, dude?
I was too stunned for a second to even respond, so he started right in with the ‘quizzing.’
“Who are the Doctor’s biggest enemies, and what planet does he come from?” this stranger asked.
Now I had moved past shocked and right into indignant/angry/protective mode.
“I don’t want her to be quizzed on something she loves, because I don’t want her thinking she has to prove ANYthing in order to be a fan,“ I told him.
Looking at my daughter, I said “You don’t owe strangers explanations or information, ok?“ She said OK and looked relieved.
Still he pressed on, patronizing grin and all: “Oh, I just want to be sure parents are raising their kids right.” Then he turned to my daughter again and asked “Who was the first Doctor, then?”
I cut him off right there. “No. I don’t want her quizzed. At all.”
Dude blinked in disbelief, sighed, and left about a minute later.
“Thanks,” my daughter said. “He was making me feel awkward.”
I held her hand and looked into her eyes. “Some men think they can have power over you by making you prove yourself. You never have to do it. They’re just insecure and pitiful, so they want to make you feel like it, too. It’s not only about fan stuff, and it’s not always just men, but be careful not to fall into that trap, ok?”
That crap isn’t harmless fun. It sets up a pattern of approval-seeking, self-justification, self-doubt, and fear of exclusion that is very dangerous for children (particularly girls).
Fuck that.
TL;DR: Do NOT come at me, my little girl, or anyone in my vicinity with your condescending, gatekeeping bullshit.
The next time, I won’t make the mistake of even TRYING to be polite.
Maybe this speaks to tumblr’s bizarre ‘perfect pure progressive thing/trash awful anti-progressive thing’ dichotomy more than anything else (because a different more unknown white guy will be writing the new Doctor?) , but I’m sort of discouraged that the reaction to the 13th Doctor news from a lot of quarters has been “oh good, I can finally watch this show again, it is Progressive now”. And I don’t want to underplay the huge deal that a female Doctor is, it is a huge deal. But…
Bill Potts was a huge deal too. People who see themselves in her havewritten about herimportance at length. She was (heck, is, she’ll almost definitely be back for the Christmas Special, Pearl Mackie’s been spotted on set) a black, lesbian, working-class co-lead on one of the biggest sci-fi shows ever. Bill beamed out from a lot of the posters and from the children’s tie-in magazines. Bill kissed a girl on television, a full-on passionate overjoyed kiss, during family viewing hour on the BBC. Bill had natural hair. Bill became immortal (by choice) in a world where TV producers almost seem to hate gay characters getting happy endings. Bill was an audience surrogate who represented a lot of Brits who don’t see themselves represented on British TV often. It’s just –
The companion’s the audience surrogate. Everyone was encouraged to see themselves in Bill Potts. And she was the co-lead. That bears repeating. The Doctor’s one lead of Doctor Who and the Companion’s the other one.
If a black, lesbian, working-class co-lead wasn’t enough to get you to Finally Watch The Show Again, why is a white female co-lead what eventually manages to do it?
If a black, lesbian, working-class co-lead wasn’t enough to get you to Finally Watch The Show Again, why is a white female co-lead what eventually manages to do it?
a more articulated version of what I was trying to say yesterday, thank you.
I loved Bill so deeply and was wounded by the way she was treated that all those “I can finally watch DW” messages that have been pouring from twitter and tumblr, mostly coming from white queer people, feel like a personal attack.
No, those two are definitely still alive! If you ever saw a gifset of Jenny (the human lesbian in question) whispering “I’m sorry, I’ve been murdered”, well, her lizard wife brought her back to life with science (well, regular old restart-the-heart medical practice) about five minutes after that.
There’s a little girl waiting in a garden. She’s going to wait a long while, so she’s going to need a lot of hope. Go to her. Tell her a story. Tell her that if she’s patient, the days are coming that she’ll never forget. Tell her she’ll go to see and fight pirates. She’ll fall in love with a man who’ll wait two thousand years to keep her safe. Tell her she’ll give hope to the greatest painter who ever lived. And save a whale in outer space. Tell her, this is the story of Amelia Pond.
Something I’ve noticed with the cinematography of Series 10 that I have not seen in any previous series of Doctor Who is that we almost never see Bill from behind, or at an angle where her face is obscured.
I like doing ‘faceless’ imagesets, and let me tell you that it’s been an absolute bloody nightmare to get decent shots of her at an appropriate angle for that.
But that’s brilliant, isn’t it?
Across every director in Series 10, they have all gone out of their way to focus on Pearl Mackie’s face – her expressions, her emotions, her reactions. It’s all about her story, which is reinforced by the cinematography at every turn.
And that further accentuates what her becoming a Cyberman robs her of – her face. It’s a brilliant confluence of the cinematography and the writing that The Doctor Falls focuses more on showing us Bill as she sees herself, only occasionally showing her Cyberman form during specific moments to visually show us the emotions she’s feeling that are not on-display.
Take her exchange with The Master, for instance, where he gloats about how he tricked and manipulated her for ten years, with Bill (as a Cyberman) responding “I am not upset” to deny him the pleasure of his cruel jibe, only for the transition to show Bill’s actual expression where she’s clearly distraught.
It makes the catharsis of her story’s resolution all the more satisfying where she becomes a being that can literally reshape atoms and states of matter.
HEATHER: “I can make you human again. It’s all just atoms. You can rearrange them any way you like. I can put you back home, you can make chips, and live your life, or you can come with me. It’s up to you, Bill.”
The ultimate outcome is that she gets to decide who and what she wants to be, in totality.
It’s just really good to see that there was clearly conscious though put into Bill’s expression as a fundamental aspect of her character, which is why the Doctor notices her in the first place – when she doesn’t understand something, she doesn’t from like most people… she smiles.
She’s enamoured with a new mystery, not in the way that Clara was where she’d throw herself into it with reckless abandon (like the Doctor), she is driven by a passion to understand.
And Pearl Mackie plays that mixture of awe and excitement and raw emotion so damn well, it’s wholly understandable why none of Series 10′s directors wanted to have her face obscured or do any big landscape reveal shots from behind – they all understood that these things were present in-service to her character, for Pearl to play off of in her own brilliant and unique way.
