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netgirl_y2kI remember not so long ago there was a suggestion going around that the Doctor should have a male companion - and not in a Rory Williams, Harry Sullivan type way, who were really more Amy and Sarah Jane's respective companions; but a dude as his only, or at least his main companion - and I had a visceral Do Not Want reaction to this. One of the things I have always loved about DW, before I was even able to articulate it properly, was that by its very nature it's a show where 50% of the leads have to be women, and changing that would do more to make it not the show that I love than anything Steven Moffat could dream of.
Basically, you can have a male companion when I get a female Doctor... if then.
I feel like I've talked a lot about my childhood memories this month (having Lord of the Rings read to me as I snuggled under a My Little Pony bedspread, watching The Next Generation on Saturday mornings while eating cereals made exclusively out of sugar and e numbers; seriously, there's a reason I'm like this) but here's another one... I am a child of the eighties, and while I know I watched Doctor Who, partly because my dad tells me I did, and partly because if you showed six year old me anything with a quarry and a bubble-wrap alien I was there, I don't really remember watching it. Except on this one occasion, where my mum was busy with my wee sister - I don't recall why, maybe it was the time I made her drink bleach - and I'd been left in the living room propped up in front of the telly, watching Remembrance of the Daleks, and I know that's what it was because I have a distinct memory of the scene where Ace beats up a Dalek with a baseball bat. Ace. Beat up. A Dalek. With. A. Baseball bat. Hearts in my little six year old eyes. My ultimate fate as a science fiction fan and as a lesbian was probably sealed in that moment.
So, I always had fond memories of Ace, but in the back of my mind I assumed she must have been the exception to the rule, that the rest of the Classic Who ladies really were the screaming ankle twisters they'd been popularised as. Then I got into New Who via Nine and later Ten, and finished up at university (man, I'm dating myself with this post) and decided that a good use of all this new free time would be to watch all of Classic Doctor Who.
I discovered Barbara Wright, schoolteacher and companion to the first Doctor, who ran over a Dalek with a truck, and who I genuinely believe is the reason the Doctor always wants to travel with a human woman. I discovered the incomparable Sarah Jane Smith, who was describing herself as a feminist on BBC primetime in the 1970s. I discovered Romana, a Time Lady, who got better marks than the Doctor had at university and had her own sonic screwdriver, and whose failure to appear in the new series saddens my heart.
I discovered companions who weren't quite so universally beloved, but who I nonetheless fell hard for. Peri, whose story had problems, not the least of which being why insist on her being an American after it became obvious that the actress couldn't do the accent, but how could I fail to love a character whose reaction to attempted hypnosis by the Master was I'm Perpugillian Brown, and I can shout just as loud as you. Leela, whose proto-warrior princess costume was a bit something-for-the-dads, yes, but didn't stop her being a brilliant character, and whose second life as bodyguard to Time Lord president Romana in the Gallifrey audios is one of the few things that's ever gotten me to push through my difficulty processing audio only stimuli, because Leela and Romana. Tegan Jovanka, air hostess and Charleston aficionado, early Donna Noble type, my love for her is unsurprising.
Lots of people watch Doctor Who for the Doctor, which is probably the more sensible way of going about it, I watch it for the companions; it's why I'm looking forward to Christmas, and Clara hopefully being the focal point during the Smith-Capaldi regeneration.
On the off chance you have been enjoying my inability to shut the fuck up this December, I still have like five dates at the end of the month that I'd quite like to fill up, even if you've already asked me something, and then you probably won't hear from me for all of January.
Basically, you can have a male companion when I get a female Doctor... if then.
I feel like I've talked a lot about my childhood memories this month (having Lord of the Rings read to me as I snuggled under a My Little Pony bedspread, watching The Next Generation on Saturday mornings while eating cereals made exclusively out of sugar and e numbers; seriously, there's a reason I'm like this) but here's another one... I am a child of the eighties, and while I know I watched Doctor Who, partly because my dad tells me I did, and partly because if you showed six year old me anything with a quarry and a bubble-wrap alien I was there, I don't really remember watching it. Except on this one occasion, where my mum was busy with my wee sister - I don't recall why, maybe it was the time I made her drink bleach - and I'd been left in the living room propped up in front of the telly, watching Remembrance of the Daleks, and I know that's what it was because I have a distinct memory of the scene where Ace beats up a Dalek with a baseball bat. Ace. Beat up. A Dalek. With. A. Baseball bat. Hearts in my little six year old eyes. My ultimate fate as a science fiction fan and as a lesbian was probably sealed in that moment.
So, I always had fond memories of Ace, but in the back of my mind I assumed she must have been the exception to the rule, that the rest of the Classic Who ladies really were the screaming ankle twisters they'd been popularised as. Then I got into New Who via Nine and later Ten, and finished up at university (man, I'm dating myself with this post) and decided that a good use of all this new free time would be to watch all of Classic Doctor Who.
I discovered Barbara Wright, schoolteacher and companion to the first Doctor, who ran over a Dalek with a truck, and who I genuinely believe is the reason the Doctor always wants to travel with a human woman. I discovered the incomparable Sarah Jane Smith, who was describing herself as a feminist on BBC primetime in the 1970s. I discovered Romana, a Time Lady, who got better marks than the Doctor had at university and had her own sonic screwdriver, and whose failure to appear in the new series saddens my heart.
I discovered companions who weren't quite so universally beloved, but who I nonetheless fell hard for. Peri, whose story had problems, not the least of which being why insist on her being an American after it became obvious that the actress couldn't do the accent, but how could I fail to love a character whose reaction to attempted hypnosis by the Master was I'm Perpugillian Brown, and I can shout just as loud as you. Leela, whose proto-warrior princess costume was a bit something-for-the-dads, yes, but didn't stop her being a brilliant character, and whose second life as bodyguard to Time Lord president Romana in the Gallifrey audios is one of the few things that's ever gotten me to push through my difficulty processing audio only stimuli, because Leela and Romana. Tegan Jovanka, air hostess and Charleston aficionado, early Donna Noble type, my love for her is unsurprising.
Lots of people watch Doctor Who for the Doctor, which is probably the more sensible way of going about it, I watch it for the companions; it's why I'm looking forward to Christmas, and Clara hopefully being the focal point during the Smith-Capaldi regeneration.
On the off chance you have been enjoying my inability to shut the fuck up this December, I still have like five dates at the end of the month that I'd quite like to fill up, even if you've already asked me something, and then you probably won't hear from me for all of January.
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Date: 2013-12-20 01:32 pm (UTC)To have the audience POV represented in large part by women was not only fantastically ground-breaking, but it was somehow egalitarian (I suppose because men have always felt free to co-opt female experience they never felt unrepresented?) Even though I'm a bloke, I always felt represented by the female companions, where I could never be represented by the Doctor since he was only ostensibly male, and alien besides, and so full of age and knowledge and experience that one could only imagine being with him, not being him.
Now, though, I don't feel represented by anyone on the TARDIS, since the reduced agency of the female characters has reduced the agency of the character with whom I'm primed to identify without supplying an alternative (for the reasons above). I wonder if that's behind some of the desire for a chap as a companion? That Moffat would, from his own misogyny, be inclined to grant agency there and so one might feel less marginalised? To express this in terms of a desire for a male companion is missing the point, though, and greatly reductionist. What we're after is for someone to pull things back into order and rebalance the show, remind TPTB that the companion - not The Doctor - is the audience.
Um.
ETA: I think I said this before somewhere, but the companions used to be ordinary people in extraordinary situations, but now they seem to be extraordinary people in ordinary situations. I don't like that shift.
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Date: 2013-12-20 10:31 pm (UTC)I wonder if part of the reason I've never really warmed to Eleven are the, failed, I think, attempts to make him the point of audience identification. I was thinking of the 50th anniversary special, and the John Hurt's Doctor asking why Ten & Eleven are afraid to be seen as grown ups. The Doctor is unknowable, and he remains unknowable no matter how many times he says "timey-wimey" or spacey-wacey".
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Date: 2013-12-20 11:16 pm (UTC)There are multiple problems with Eleven, but very few of them are Matt Smith I think. His gurning got worse and worse as the series progressed, but that was in large part an attempt to cover the thinness and incoherency of the scripts, the inconsistencies in characterisation and storyline, and the imaginative impoverishment of the writers. It's very sad. I think yes, it's about making the Doctor speak for us rather than to us, and all this romance and marriage and kissing nonsense. Under Moffat's tenure the Doctor's been married twice, I think, hasn't he? No romance for a millennia and then two come along within a season. What rot.
This is, while I think of it, also the problem with Torchwood in seasons 1 & 2 - they quickly forgot that Gwen was supposed to be our POV character and made it the Jack show. You can't be the mystery if you're the audience POV character. Just can't be done.