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Still watching for Donna
Jan. 22nd, 2012 11:37 pmOkay, Netflixed The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Skies over the weekend. My thoughts are many and varied, and chiefly not concerning how incredible it is so that no one has edited Ten's verbal shutdown of Rattigan into the Doctor talking to BBC Sherlock ("it's so awful hard to be clever" and all that).
The biggest thing I'm taking away from this, slightly inspired by a Firefly post on tumblr, is that there's a weird half-step behind getting up on a soapbox. Where the author isn't actually preaching, but just kind of staring at you and hoping you'll get the hint. It's where, in portraying a character trait, the author shares that trait and so exaggerates it a point that they find reasonable, but that the audience gets the bad side of.
Here, it's the Doctor's hatred of gun violence (not private ownership of guns, but as wielded by duly-trained Lawful Good government people, which is so divorced from the American gun rights controversy that I can't even discuss it) and by extension the military. Obviously, the Doctor feels superior to everyone, and is naturally anti-authoritarian, so it makes sense that he'd feel superior to puny human authorities with guns. It's just that RTD turns this up to eleven, with Donna (whose job is to be the non-Doctor figure and put the Doctor's views into a distinct context) reacting to Martha's position in UNIT as if she's joined the Dark Side. Not that I've been to Britain, but that seems like a weird feeling for a working-class girl with a beloved war veteran grandfather to have. Oh, and who's lived through two instances of aliens trying to commit mass murder, once with them only being stopped by the Doctor mass murdering them first. So... did it ever occur to RTD to have her say "Hey, Doctor, UNIT's not the ones who drowned Spider-Man's kids, now are they?"
But it's the Doctor who's really unbearable, goofing off in the middle of life-or-death situations in a way that feels really callous ("Several soldiers just killed mercilessly... great time for a The Doctor Dances callback!") and at one point giving CO Colonel Mace a "he's a name, not a number!"-type line about a man under Mace's command who just died. You know, because the Doctor knew the guyfor five minutes, and those icky military commanders, they don't care when people serving under them are killed. Honestly, it's a bit surprising the Doctor gets away without a punch in the snoz.
What's worse is that RTD is a good enough writer to make Mace an actual good guy. He's onboard with getting the Doctor's help, he greets the Doctor with respect and admiration, he gets a cool line before shooting a douchebag Sontaran, and a cute fellow officer kisses him (a cute female fellow officer, BTW, because you never can tell with the RTD era).
Which brings me back to Firefly. I admittedly haven't watched the series in a while, but c'mon, as a nerd, there's only so much you can forget about Firefly. My last impression was that Whedon laid it on a bit thick with the awe and mystery of Mal. I know he's Nathan Fillion, but he doesn't deserve the whole Shaft theme song ("he's a complicated man, but no one understands him 'cept his Companion..."). And to get across that Mal was a flawed, issue-y character, they had him be rude to Inara and call her a whore. But they also had him be rude to Book and disparaging of his religion, which I think might be more of a reflection on Whedon's atheism. Just by dint of the fact that Mal's rudeness to Inara is characterized by name-calling (makes Mal look immature and crude; plus he's a man in a Whedon story disparaging a strong female character) while his rudeness to Book is characterized by snark and badass posturing. Nerd circles will favor both atheism and smartly-written sarcasm, even when the person using sarcasm isn't in the right compared to the person being genuine.
Take Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Spike, for instance, who has a fan following because he has smartly-written one-liners attacking the other's position, even when that position is something like "Please don't rape and eat me." It makes me wonder how Firefly would play if, say, Book were a Muslim instead of a vague Christian denomination. Or would that make scenes of a white man telling a black man that his beliefs are foolish too uncomfortable?
I could go more into Batman and gun control (I seem to recall a Devin Grayson comic where Batman actually argued with a giant Bat demon about how awful handguns were), but I hope you're nodding your heads at this point and recognizing the phenom where a writer is too good to just use a soapbox, but still has a blind spot in regards to seeing how their writing will play with people who don't feel exactly the way they feel about an issue.
The biggest thing I'm taking away from this, slightly inspired by a Firefly post on tumblr, is that there's a weird half-step behind getting up on a soapbox. Where the author isn't actually preaching, but just kind of staring at you and hoping you'll get the hint. It's where, in portraying a character trait, the author shares that trait and so exaggerates it a point that they find reasonable, but that the audience gets the bad side of.
Here, it's the Doctor's hatred of gun violence (not private ownership of guns, but as wielded by duly-trained Lawful Good government people, which is so divorced from the American gun rights controversy that I can't even discuss it) and by extension the military. Obviously, the Doctor feels superior to everyone, and is naturally anti-authoritarian, so it makes sense that he'd feel superior to puny human authorities with guns. It's just that RTD turns this up to eleven, with Donna (whose job is to be the non-Doctor figure and put the Doctor's views into a distinct context) reacting to Martha's position in UNIT as if she's joined the Dark Side. Not that I've been to Britain, but that seems like a weird feeling for a working-class girl with a beloved war veteran grandfather to have. Oh, and who's lived through two instances of aliens trying to commit mass murder, once with them only being stopped by the Doctor mass murdering them first. So... did it ever occur to RTD to have her say "Hey, Doctor, UNIT's not the ones who drowned Spider-Man's kids, now are they?"
But it's the Doctor who's really unbearable, goofing off in the middle of life-or-death situations in a way that feels really callous ("Several soldiers just killed mercilessly... great time for a The Doctor Dances callback!") and at one point giving CO Colonel Mace a "he's a name, not a number!"-type line about a man under Mace's command who just died. You know, because the Doctor knew the guyfor five minutes, and those icky military commanders, they don't care when people serving under them are killed. Honestly, it's a bit surprising the Doctor gets away without a punch in the snoz.
What's worse is that RTD is a good enough writer to make Mace an actual good guy. He's onboard with getting the Doctor's help, he greets the Doctor with respect and admiration, he gets a cool line before shooting a douchebag Sontaran, and a cute fellow officer kisses him (a cute female fellow officer, BTW, because you never can tell with the RTD era).
Which brings me back to Firefly. I admittedly haven't watched the series in a while, but c'mon, as a nerd, there's only so much you can forget about Firefly. My last impression was that Whedon laid it on a bit thick with the awe and mystery of Mal. I know he's Nathan Fillion, but he doesn't deserve the whole Shaft theme song ("he's a complicated man, but no one understands him 'cept his Companion..."). And to get across that Mal was a flawed, issue-y character, they had him be rude to Inara and call her a whore. But they also had him be rude to Book and disparaging of his religion, which I think might be more of a reflection on Whedon's atheism. Just by dint of the fact that Mal's rudeness to Inara is characterized by name-calling (makes Mal look immature and crude; plus he's a man in a Whedon story disparaging a strong female character) while his rudeness to Book is characterized by snark and badass posturing. Nerd circles will favor both atheism and smartly-written sarcasm, even when the person using sarcasm isn't in the right compared to the person being genuine.
Take Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Spike, for instance, who has a fan following because he has smartly-written one-liners attacking the other's position, even when that position is something like "Please don't rape and eat me." It makes me wonder how Firefly would play if, say, Book were a Muslim instead of a vague Christian denomination. Or would that make scenes of a white man telling a black man that his beliefs are foolish too uncomfortable?
I could go more into Batman and gun control (I seem to recall a Devin Grayson comic where Batman actually argued with a giant Bat demon about how awful handguns were), but I hope you're nodding your heads at this point and recognizing the phenom where a writer is too good to just use a soapbox, but still has a blind spot in regards to seeing how their writing will play with people who don't feel exactly the way they feel about an issue.
