Doctor Who season 2
Oct. 7th, 2006 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI read some meta on DW last season, and it made me think thoughts.
The trouble with thinking thoughts is they tend to be the grrr, ism! kind of thought and then things get less fun.
But anyways, under the cut for the USA not seen it
someone had feminist rage about it here
I had a couple of semi random observations:
The Ood
are they slaves?
if they have no free will, they're humanoid animals, or even biological robots.
If they literally *cannot* think for themselves, if they die without being given orders, then freeing them is actually killing them, so leaving them to die does in fact add up to the same thing as freeing them all.
I'd say they aren't slaves. They don't add up to being slaves. They're empty, and you can't free what doesn't exist.
But mine is not the only interpretation.
I was also annoyed that they made the ugly things evil after all. That was just cheap.
The Doctor's authority -
he's always acted as if he had it, but since the 5th Doctor he very definitely *does* - he's *President of Gallifrey*. He is the boss of the Time Lords. They fix badness that happens to time - he said so in Fathers Day. The Doctor fixes a lot more aspects of badness. So the Doctor goes out and decides a few nasty species need wiping out - Cybermen and Daleks, just for starters. As President of Gallifrey he goes and tries to kill them with an ancient Gallifreyan device.
He *has* the authority.
What he has also had are the consequences.
Did he undermine Harriet Jones because she was an uppity woman?
Or did he undermine her because he knew, though she remained blissfully unaware, that she had just fired the first shot in a war she was utterly incapable of winning?
He loves Earth. He doesn't want it going the way of Gallifrey. Having seen the end of the world, in a properly regulated galaxy, he could know it wouldn't. Unfortunately for him, he's the only regulation this galaxy has any more. He's doing his best to keep things on track, but he's one man, and he hasn't the resources of his entire race. He hasn't the resources of any properly equipped individual Time Lord - much as we love it, the TARDIS was an old model in for repair when he nicked it. He's making do with the battered mini of Time Lord transportation. And with that he's trying to keep the whole of existence from imploding up a paradox or similar.
So he does his best, sends off the aliens, first contact achieved and some understanding reached. Time relatively on track, probably.
And then the locals decide to go shoot at the very very big wide universe, to start a shooting war when they've only got one gun.
Wouldn't you be a bit pissed off?
Yes, in our world, the penis vs woman level is pretty damn ugly.
But it do make sense in his world too.
He has the authority, not just because he has a penis, but because he is the duly elected (twice) President of the Time Lords.
What else...
Oh yeah, something that bugged me about the geek girl who ended up in concrete. (Literal sex object for the geek guy, as someone pointed out).
That was the Terrible Fate and Just Deserves that the old Gallifreyan President was condemned to at the end of Five Doctors. Literally, turned into a face on a stone slab. Horrible terrible doom, and also immortality.
Nasty, nasty, nasty thing to do to some woman that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I don't know how much sense I'm making.
I do agree, feminist rage is lurking if you look at DW.
I'm not sure I agree on the source of it - blaming the male writers may seem reasonable, but I keep reading people saying 'gay male' a lot, like to blame the gay. As if it is only logical. See, they don't like women to shag, so they must not like them to write either!
... not so logic in my mind.
But I'm not quibbling that there is indeed a pattern there, and its a right mess if you think about it.
I just had these other random thoughts too.
The trouble with thinking thoughts is they tend to be the grrr, ism! kind of thought and then things get less fun.
But anyways, under the cut for the USA not seen it
someone had feminist rage about it here
I had a couple of semi random observations:
The Ood
are they slaves?
if they have no free will, they're humanoid animals, or even biological robots.
If they literally *cannot* think for themselves, if they die without being given orders, then freeing them is actually killing them, so leaving them to die does in fact add up to the same thing as freeing them all.
I'd say they aren't slaves. They don't add up to being slaves. They're empty, and you can't free what doesn't exist.
But mine is not the only interpretation.
I was also annoyed that they made the ugly things evil after all. That was just cheap.
The Doctor's authority -
he's always acted as if he had it, but since the 5th Doctor he very definitely *does* - he's *President of Gallifrey*. He is the boss of the Time Lords. They fix badness that happens to time - he said so in Fathers Day. The Doctor fixes a lot more aspects of badness. So the Doctor goes out and decides a few nasty species need wiping out - Cybermen and Daleks, just for starters. As President of Gallifrey he goes and tries to kill them with an ancient Gallifreyan device.
He *has* the authority.
What he has also had are the consequences.
Did he undermine Harriet Jones because she was an uppity woman?
Or did he undermine her because he knew, though she remained blissfully unaware, that she had just fired the first shot in a war she was utterly incapable of winning?
He loves Earth. He doesn't want it going the way of Gallifrey. Having seen the end of the world, in a properly regulated galaxy, he could know it wouldn't. Unfortunately for him, he's the only regulation this galaxy has any more. He's doing his best to keep things on track, but he's one man, and he hasn't the resources of his entire race. He hasn't the resources of any properly equipped individual Time Lord - much as we love it, the TARDIS was an old model in for repair when he nicked it. He's making do with the battered mini of Time Lord transportation. And with that he's trying to keep the whole of existence from imploding up a paradox or similar.
So he does his best, sends off the aliens, first contact achieved and some understanding reached. Time relatively on track, probably.
And then the locals decide to go shoot at the very very big wide universe, to start a shooting war when they've only got one gun.
Wouldn't you be a bit pissed off?
Yes, in our world, the penis vs woman level is pretty damn ugly.
But it do make sense in his world too.
He has the authority, not just because he has a penis, but because he is the duly elected (twice) President of the Time Lords.
What else...
Oh yeah, something that bugged me about the geek girl who ended up in concrete. (Literal sex object for the geek guy, as someone pointed out).
That was the Terrible Fate and Just Deserves that the old Gallifreyan President was condemned to at the end of Five Doctors. Literally, turned into a face on a stone slab. Horrible terrible doom, and also immortality.
Nasty, nasty, nasty thing to do to some woman that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I don't know how much sense I'm making.
I do agree, feminist rage is lurking if you look at DW.
I'm not sure I agree on the source of it - blaming the male writers may seem reasonable, but I keep reading people saying 'gay male' a lot, like to blame the gay. As if it is only logical. See, they don't like women to shag, so they must not like them to write either!
... not so logic in my mind.
But I'm not quibbling that there is indeed a pattern there, and its a right mess if you think about it.
I just had these other random thoughts too.
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the comment I would post elsewhere if I didn't hide instead
Date: 2006-10-07 08:51 pm (UTC)The thing is, I didn't think of them as slaves. I didn't think they had a person in there to be enslaved. I mean, no free will, nobody home, not a slave just a robot.
Like the big bad thing, with leaving an empty body in chains.
Ood weren't empty too, so freedom would be free to sit around and die.
Trouble is this is like the exact opposite of the humans in the hospital. They were supposed to be empty but thoughts moved in.
So it kind of ends up with ugly=bad human=good.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 08:56 pm (UTC)Only between Five Doctors and Trial of a Time Lord- by that time he's been deposed, though I think he's still quite happily calling himself President while blowing up Skaro. Nice going, Seven, I'm sure that didn't piss the Daleks off enough to start a Time War or something...
no subject
Date: 2006-10-07 09:04 pm (UTC)and the Time War thing was what I meant, first shot in all go boom.