Random Doctor Who post

[lizbee]

I've been doing Doctor Who posts fortnightly at No Award this year, but I'm just popping my head in here (in a less formal setting) to say...



...this felt like a flashback to the worst of the RTD era, complete with terrible American accents, a (probably unintentional) right wing, anti-refugee subtext, contemporary buzzwords (take a drink every time someone says "radicalised"), the companion making fun of a women of colour for being middle-aged.

Aside from Osgood, who is always a delight, I really didn't enjoy this, except for noting the extremely high number of women in supporting roles, and the fact that middle-aged women were well-represented. Which is definitely something you didn't get in the RTD era.

I've managed to go from "indifferent-to-positive" towards Clara to "actively wishing she'd just leave already", I think because last week proved how unessential she is. But a lot of the things that made me dislike her this week -- ignoring the sound of a child in distress, being ageist towards Jac -- were actually the actions of the Zygon duplicate. I'm now wondering if maybe Clara has been a duplicate all along, and that's why she's been so unpleasant this season.

Comments

[sorryforlaughing]

If Clara really has been a duplicate all this time, I take back 95% of my complaints about this season. But I suspect that's too much of a twist to hope for.

[lizbee]

You say that, but remember that time it turned out that Amy had been a Flesh duplicate for literally half the season?

And, as his detractors love to point out, Moffat does like reusing ideas.

[sorryforlaughing]

There's also my spectacular failure rate at plot predictions to consider. Well, I hope it's true for more than a few reasons.

[nonelvis]

Sorry, but she was swapped at the flats when she visited Sandeep's parents. There's a brief scene at the end that shows Bonnie emerging from the shadows of the flat.

[lizbee]

Oh, really? I missed that!

Still, at least that means it was definitely Bonnie ignoring Sandeep's screams and being awful to Jac.

[ironed_orchid]

I figured the refugee stuff was intentional, but hamfisted.

[lizbee]

I think it was a deliberate parallel, I'm just hoping that the "you can't trust refugees, extremists might radicalise their communities and turn them all into terrorists" thing was accidental. I prefer that Doctor Who not get tips from Tony Abbott.

(Although, as nonelvis pointed out on Twitter, this was the same writer who did "Kill the Moon" last year, so it's not the first time he's gone into Probably Unintentionally Right Wing Storylines.)

[ironed_orchid]

Oh man, that was a TERRIBLE episode.

Definitely in the tradition of cis white guy writing thought experiment who doesn't take into account that for lots of people, this is their lived experience.

[capri0mni]

Well, now my expectations are suitably lowered... :-/

[(Anonymous)]

was it Clara's undemocratic decision that made Kill The Moon right-wing? Cause that seems less clear to me; not sure basic rights should always be subject to democratic mandate, I can think of some obvious examples. Was more okay with that as, yes, a thought experiment, whereas this 'invasion by immigration' plot just seems really skeevy and flirting with the most dangerously right-wing racist ideas of our time.

(big-n-happy.livejournal.com, don't have a dreamwidth, hope you don't mind my popping by! Been looking for discussion on exactly this after the Zygons ep skeeved me out).

[lizbee]

It was more that the episode turned into a sort of heavy-handed abortion metaphor.

[marymac]

I'm pretty certain that one was unintentional. The anti-abortion movement in the UK (outside Northern Ireland, where it is a thing, but is a very different creature to the US debate) really doesn't exist in the national consciousness the way it does in the US/US saturated online spaces.

The abject lack of it in the national consciousness in GB is why we have the NI issue.

[(Anonymous)]

oh, right, sorry, the possible abortion allegory! If it was that, it was really dumb.

[drakyndra]

While I agree that Clara handled quite right so far this season, I was thinking more in the opposite direction - we haven't seen enough of her. Maybe it's just the contrast with last season, which gave us a whole lot of insight into who she was and why she did things (even when what she was doing was bad, like the whole lying thing...) but I feel like we are getting no real looks into her inner life.

You can infer stuff easily enough, but Clara feels weirdly sidelined given this season is supposed to be her last hurrah.

(You could make the argument that the Zygon twist only works because Clara is getting more callous, so it's not until she's advocating for pre-emptive strikes it rings as OOC, but yeah...)

[(Anonymous)]

That middle age comment botheres me until I realised it as "Bonnie" not Clara that said it. But that meant the real Clara was AWOL like Martha when she was cloned.

[(Anonymous)]

That middle age comment bothered me until I realized it as "Bonnie" not Clara that said it. But that meant the real Clara was AWOL like Martha when she was cloned.

[heliopausa]

I skipped "Sleep No More" completely, so I haven't read reviews - I went over to your linked site looking for something about 'Face the Raven' and stayed purely to enjoy the photos of Penny Wong in action. She's my favourite pollie ever; if the parliament had any brains at all, they'd declare a government of national unity and vote her in as PM