Doctor Who- this might be the last straw even for me.

[TinselAngel]

For fucks sake

Juno Dawson as a writer.

McCallum was a huge crush of mine too - I loved him in The Invisible Man, The Man from UNCLE, Sapphire and Steel, and The Great Escape when I was young.

I recently rewatched UNCLE and Sapphire & Steel, I thought both really held up well. Although, UNCLE did go a bit Sixties madcap at times but that was par for the course in those days, even Trek had a few of those episodes.

Tom Baker was my first Doctor, and I really like (and liked) him, but I did spend a lot of time hiding behind a cushion, or the couch, as a child because of his scarier stories. I love Pertwee, whose episodes I watched as an adult, I really like his take on the Doctor and I think he got some very interesting stories. And I have a huge fondness for Davison because I remember crying my eyes out at his regeneration when I was a little girl because I was sad that he was dying. I took things very seriously as a kid 😊

Yes! I think they handle a lot of this - race, sex, sexuality, concepts of nationality and national relations - really well. As each decade moves on small changes mean it diverges further and further from actual history, but always for logical reasons.

For example by the time they get to the 1990s most of the main political players are different but social attitudes are for the most part quite similar to the real ones - so the US military still ends up with the Don't Ask, Don't Tell rule, but by a slightly surprising route.

Hmm....is the issue that comics readers don't want any gay etc characters? Or that they're badly written & flat bc they're just there to check a box? Sorry to revive an old thread, but I'm quite into some forms of comics (not superhero stuff) tho & eas aware of disputes about this.

Personally, I don't watch any of these new Whos. Even without the silly politics, it's basically a corny comedy series these days, full of nerdy in-jokes and with little atmosphere or appeal.

They really should have killed the show stone dead at the end of the Tom Baker era, when it was already looking very tired.

Having said that, I do enjoy dipping into the old ones now and then, especially the surviving Troughton and Pertwee stories.

I think it’s cos the gay characters are not well-written, they’re just there to tick a box or push a message. Same thing with a lot of the Mary Sue and Girl Boss type female characters showing up in genre media: I want better female representation than making a female version of an existing male character for stunt purposes or making female characters the 'bestest ever' without showing any character development or personal growth. We used to know how to write effective and heroic female characters such as Sarah Connor, Ellen Ripley, Max Guevara, Buffy Summers etc.

In my view, many of the older stories for characters such as, for example, the X-Men spoke a lot more effectively about how a society treats minorities (racial & sexual) poorly than any of the recent stunt publishing of Kal-El being bi and snogging his boyfriend 🤷‍♀️

Yes, that sounds pretty accurate. Mary Sues are the death of feminism! ☹️ I used to associate that w characters like Bella in Twilight, sad to see it taking over action stories too...

It’s basically a corny comedy series these days, full of nerdy in-jokes …

Really curious to learn how you know this if you haven’t watched any of these new Whos.

Genuinely!

I didn't say I "haven't", I said I "don't". 😄

I did watch some of them years ago, and a couple that were recommended by friends who know I'm not a New Who fan (and those recommended ones were pretty good).

But most that I saw were just too twee, flimsy and jokey to be enjoyable.

I lost interest in DW when the title character also became the narrator. All the exposition because they didn't trust the storyline to be comprehensible to viewers. I've not watched much of the recent Dr, although I've been in the room when it's been on (a man watched his wife, who'd just given birth to his child, disintegrated and didn't seem at all upset. I hope i misunderstood that. The Doctor seeing people suffer cruel deaths but seconds later is laughing and joking). The Doctor reincarnating in the skin of a former romantic interest, if that's what they're going to do, is a bit too AGP adjacent for me.

They're badly written. If Marvel wanted a gay superhero in the X-Men franchise, they've already got Northstar, who's a fan favourite and has been really underused over the years. Give him a solo series with a good writer and a good artist and hype it. It's not difficult.

What they actually did was take Iceman, a character who had been very heterosexual for over 50 years, turn him gay overnight, give him a personality transplant that turned him into a narcissistic jerk who's only interested in shopping and shagging, and generally write him in a way that suggests they got all their knowledge of gay culture from 1990s sitcoms.

The most amazing thing about the Iceman comic is that Sina Grace, who wrote most of the issues, is a gay man. From other work of his that I've seen, he can actually write - I've just come to the conclusion that he shouldn't be allowed to write gay characters or themes, because he'll just do cheesy self-insert fanfic.

See also RTD, I suppose.

Oh no they didn't..this is so predictable, as I've seen similar happen w films & TV series, not especially w gay characters (tho somewhat) but also female & ethnic minority characters. Series who had good, rounded examples of the above trade them in for sudden swaps of race, etc & make them 1-dimensional. What is it w them? They may think it's progressive but it's the opposite, & probs stirs up prejudice..

cheeky self-inserts might be part of it... It's c odd..

@SionnachRuadh and @AliasGrace47 I agree self inserts, along with Mary Sues (who are really just a male writer’s ideal fantasy woman) have increasingly become a problem.

I think it comes from who is being hired to commission and to write nowadays. People aren’t necessarily given jobs because of just talent, there’s class issues, networking and ideology involved which gives people work that they don’t have the talent to complete well.

There’s also no diversity of thought, background or viewpoints in a lot of current pop culture. I’ve started rewatching and rereading stuff from the 20th and early 21st century because it feels less homogeneous and far less preachy than what is produced today.

Yes, the infamous nepotism babies are an issue. I suppose there's always been that issue, but there used to be more routes for stuff to break through. I'm hoping for a 90s style indie cinema revival.. or New Hollywood style revival, Hollywood seems to be coasting on big blockbusters. In the 70s you had Star Wars etc filling up seats (which I love) but you also had cutting-edge stuff which just isn't there so much anymore.

French & German films too have always been better for morally ambiguous etc characters.

I'm very much reading and watching old stuff these days. I'm not sure what happened to writers, but it wasn't good.

From the comics realm, I really want to revisit Ann Nocenti's run on Daredevil. Ann is really a fantastic writer, and not least because she's very left wing but has never written propaganda. I remember one story she did (this is my sketchy memory, so I may be hazy on the details) where there were two women, a left wing activist woman and a conservative Stepford Wife type. The great thing was, as the story went on, the conservative woman genuinely wanted to help people around her even if her efforts misfired, while the activist woman was a horrible narcissist who abused everyone around her. So what you'd expected at the beginning turned out not to be the case.

That speaks to me, because there's a kind of moral complexity involved, and I felt she'd really observed both types.

Ann is still alive, and I hope in good health. I'm sure she has lots of good stories in her. The current year comics industry doesn't seem to be interested.

That's really interesting, I'll check out Daredevil. I've never tried superhero stuff bit I probably should! Someone like Nocenti sounds like an interesting person who should still be employed..

This is a shame. I know gay people who did find comfort in YA growing up, but it sounds like books were picked just bc they had gay characters, and no-one was interested...
I mean, I suppose it could be that no straight teen wanted to check out books w gay protagonists, but that seems unlikely to me.

At my school, girls read stuff like Robin Talley & Malinda Lo whoever they were interested in in IRL, bc they were well-written stories. Similarly we all read Patrick Ness, who generally features gay male characters, bc they were great stories.. Just getting in dreck misses the point.

I do think that Dr Who is as interesting lens to view cultural developments. In the 60s and 70s it strip-mined Hammer's horror, B-movie science fiction and pulp fiction for themes to plug into it's endlessly flexible format. Science fiction as a rule was psychologically flat, with most of its conceptual themes coming from ideas like ethical use of technology, depletion of natural resources, clash of civilizations, ethics of war, etc. Dr Who incorporated those themes, usually in a simplified and less nuanced way and was likewise psychologically uncomplicated - the Doctor was eccentric and enigmatic, the side-kick was spunky. On occasion science fiction plot themes would stray into the realm of what we would now consider woke, exploring concepts of sex, race, freedom, societal roles, environmentalism, factionalism, oppression and colonialism. Those ideas were explored in a sophisticated way by the great writers like Heinlein, Clark, Le Guin and Asomov. Those themes found their way into Dr Who too, though usually in a muted form. Some examples of episodes with broader themes:

• In Genesis of the Daleks, did the Doctor have the right to commit genocide against the Daleks?
• In the Sun Maker, the ills of degenerate totalitarian state that evolved from monopolistic capitalism.
• In Robot a mishmash of themes, how to limit AI sentience, atheism, scientist playing God. With an ally who turns out to be the chief antagonist - the brainy Miss Winters - the electrifying and spark throwing director of the National Institute for Advanced Scientific Research - both a veiled lesbian trope and formidable adversary of the Doctor whose own motives are intellectually justified, but corrupted by her lust for power.

In most cases, larger themes have a bit of a tacked-on feel, used to justify the action and to assure the viewer that you're rooting for the good guys. In Genesis of the Daleks it leaves the resolution of the serial suspended and elevates it to a masterpiece of the era.

When Davies revived the show in the 2000s, he turned up the tempo, modernized the SF/fantasy references and injected a large dose glossy, up-to-date, interpersonal melodrama. The result of the collision of genres - 70s-style Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer - was a spectacularly brilliant success. But, detectable was another thread, the woke morality play. This too worked extremely effectively because it was new -- instead of being tacked on, the social theme was central to the plot, e.g. Harriet Jones' downfall for turning out being a naughty Thatcher clone.

Adding color to the 2000s era was the feeling that Davies was being subversive. Hot-off Queer as Folk he injected a heavy dose of sex, sexuality, and double entendre. This worked, even though in retrospect it was rather formulaic and not very subtle, because it was new and still risque.

Now practically all the tropes that made Davies' early 2000s novel, are not only cliched but required by sensitivity engineers. Watching an episode is an exercise in figuring out, not how the Doctor will save the day, but how the plot can be resolved without offending any sacred cows and still be slotted into one of accepted morality play formulas. I find it ghastly and unwatchable. I'm not alone. But I think the observation that's missing is that Davies himself has not changed from his former glorious self, in some ways he's become self-derivative, but in other ways he's a better showrunner. Davies was a genuine TV pioneer - the changes he helped introduce have become codified, and with it what's demanded from BBC light fiction programming and global distribution partners and its endemic of everything produced.

Perhaps Davies hasn’t changed and he was always an insufferable, woke bore. If that is the case, then his spectacular “subversiveness” was kept in check by the requirement to entertain and not bore us all with it too much. If so, perhaps it was like Lennon and McCartney, that something (or someone) else in that situation was key to creating a product that was incredibly popular, in a way that has never been recreated in solo work.

Realistically, I think that he has changed. The current narrative, where he is being told all the time that he is entirely right (on) has warped his previous subversiveness into crushing self-righteousness that means there are no longer nuances in his work. His politics are no longer a racy undertone against the backdrop of a good story, but are the whole point.

I did actually watch all of the latest series it had a few good episodes, but wasn't great. Amongst Dr who fans there is a definite feel that the first Davies era RTD1 is way stronger than RTD2. Interestingly even very identity focused fans have found RTD2 era annoying and they tend to see the way characters are being used in the series to be just a lot of tokenism. With more conservative fans long gone it isn't clear who the series is for. It certainly isn't a show for everyone to bond over which was the point in the past. Gatwa actually was pretty good in the role, only he got lumbered with some bad writing.

Dawson wrote the Eurovision episode which had high viewer numbers because it followed Eurovision proper. It was a rather unbalanced one with the tone flipping all over the place - basically a sort of terrorist Die Hard plot based around the interstellar Song Contest. It got a lot of criticism because people thought it was commentating on Palestine when in fact it was more concerned with Ukraine if anything.

I think some of it's RTD and some of it's just the era. Like the whole thing about a female Doctor - that was mooted back in the 80s when they were trying to do anything to avoid cancellation. I think Joanna Lumley was being considered, and I'd have watched her.

By the time they actually got around to doing it, it was done badly (I don't think Jodie is a bad actress, she was just wrong for the role and given poor scripts) and the show and BBC seemed more interested in a culture war narrative that pitted them against sexist fans on the WSOH. Which was mostly a phantom war anyway.

I don't know who RTD thinks the audience is. The great thing about the old show was that it was aimed at kids and their parents, but in principle for everybody. Today... I don't think kids are interested, the long term fans have mostly checked out, and the only audience I can identify are the kind of people who hang around the Who subreddits, who are all 20something and identify as "queer" and "neurodiverse". And even they say RTD2 is crap.

Possibly, with that big cash injection from Disney, he's just been making a show to amuse himself.

Joanna Lumley in Sapire & Steel was very much a Doctor-esque role in a Dr Who-esqe series. She had a number of amazing moments, playing arch but never camp, which was very difficult at the time for a woman in that kind of role, especially one of Lumley's unconcealable good looks. Alas, probably impossible after her stint as Patsy.

I got bored of Doctor Who at the tail end of the Jodie Whitaker series - too many companions felt like a famous five type gang, and the moralising just got very repetitive. Similarly the current strip mining of longstanding Marvel & DC Comics stuff I was reading 30 years ago - nothing feels new or different, it's the same film with different costumes. Plus the Arkham Asylum psychopathic mentally ill people stereotype now really angers me.

Some old Who audio books are great - Audible has the Pyramids of Mars which is your classic ancient alien animates mummies and tries to destroy the universe because he hates everyone. No moralising, just a massive villain, excellent use of Hammer horror tropes (as noted by a pp) & a lot of peril. There are no moral discussions as everyone is too busy running away from a killer mummy.

The companions of old Whosare stereotyped but the males get it just as bad as the females so that's fine by me - such as Jamie the brave but narrow minded and not very bright Highlander

I don't think I ever felt hit over the head with a morality play in the early RTD era. It was mostly just fun and clever.

And I didn't really lose interest because of the morality stuff. It was more, repetitive plots, over-complicated story arcs, too much self-referential humour, and the weird stuff around friendship that Moffat seems to do with his shows where it just all gets to be too much. And increasingly, plots that just didn't make sense.

With Whitaker (and actually it was set up before she appeared), the decision to have a female doctor, for me, seemed the beginning of the end, because on the one hand it was clearly created as a sort of "sex is a social construct" moment, which I thought was the real beginning of the preachy identity obsession. And worse, it was already tired because sex swapping was already being done so often to try and revive tired stories. Largely unsuccessfully - people just don't seem to like it when you swap out the sex of an established character, or just try and transplant a story that way.

Since then every episode I've caught seems like a kind of lesson, with the companions and even The Doctor simply being new tick-boxes of early 21st century identity categories.