#but in this iteration of star wars why are they only PoC?

[clonehub]

Lbr, racist misogynists would read any show of emotion by a black woman as "angry", regardless of how Reva actually behaved. I've seen fans blame Disney for casting her as a character who embodies that harmful stereotype. But I'm not comfortable with the implications that Moses and Deborah Chow would willingly participate in that. As you said, they both highly educated, successful, award winning WOC; that's definitely not something either would do. What you share your thoughts?

youre right about racists misreading everything reva does regardless. i think that, since Chow has been a p succesful writer/director (?) up to this point, it's likely that one or both of them is aware that Black women are stereotyped as being more aggressive than we actually are.

reva's also ambitious (a trait I like in a female character regardless), which would be viewed as aggression and anger. reva's inquisitor status means she's gotta have hatred and anger in her. not automatically a bad thing--but her being played by a Black woman plays into this pattern of Disney putting their "rep" on the side of the FO/Empire and keeping the heroes largely white(washed) or alien. education doesn't always prevent someone from writing something harmful, though, so I'd hesitate to say that their accolades preclude bigotry of any kind. do I think either of them is doing it on purpose? Nope! Maybe another day, I'll get into why a Black actor might play characters that end up playing into common stereotypes. Maybe.

But, and I can't remember who said this but I just reblogged it--we have to remember that the empire is/was a metaphor for white supremacist fascism, as enacted for white people by white people. I saw some annoying post floating around that made the argument that because there were people of color who were N/zis in WWII (they conflated the entire Japanese state with individual willingness of the people to support N/zi germany's vile white supremacy, which is something else entirely) it "makes sense" that Reva (and trilla, and basically every background character in the FO in the ST) are people of color. it's "more accurate" that way.

(no its not. people of color can be white supremacists but the ones pulling the strings and making the plans and building the ideology were and are overwhelmingly white--and notice how star wars will never at any point take the metaphor far enough to examine that level and type of self hatred in a character. not that I want them to)

The other side of the coin is the resistance to having Black characters as protagonists. We had Finn, they dropped Finn, JB left, and now Disney LFL is pushing more PoC into the Empire despite, again, the Empire itself being visually representative of white white supremacists, not Every White Supremacist Ever. We had Rose, they dropped Rose, and now we have more PoC in the Empire and FO. We had Poe--

(that post also conflated the people shitting on Finn for daring to be a Black man in space with the people who are complaining now about how Disney still refuses to deliver on a Black character who's a hero, which.....lmao)

The balance is totally off. Star Wars as an overall story would work best if the Empire remained white supremacist in appearance and the heroes were more mixed, as both aliens and with human diversity. It's a better overarching story that way because it matches what we are literally living through right now. It certainly makes more sense than "a (conveniently) racially diverse fascist government is hurting and oppressing millions, especially these select special white people". I've totally deviated from what you were saying anon I'm sorry kssadfahdlka here's my thesis:

Reva's position as a Black fascist will do less damage if she ends up leaving the fascism, and her character arc has her become a good guy. I really can't see the pattern of Black people/poc in fantasy!racism government breaking if they don't do that or something similar. I speculated on Twitter what Reva's path might be, and this was partly because I want a Black character who is central to the story and a good guy. We don't have that. We. Do not. Have. That.

My fingers are crossed, anon. My position on these kinds of things is never to assume that the creators specifically had a goal to perpetuate racism, but seeing as its happened anyways, I address it.

[canichangemyblogname]

Star Wars media is rife with a very particular trope: the Space Jew. This tropes is when an alien, monster, animal, or other nonhuman creature embodies characteristics of a real-world racial, ethnic, or religious stereotype. Think: Watto or Cid.

This trope often gets confused for the "fantasy racism" metaphor where a writer might deal with a very complex subject that might otherwise be censored by using two racial, ethnic, or religious groups of aliens, monsters, animals, or other nonhuman creatures. This metaphor has been used with varying degrees of success and many would caution against using this allegory all together.

Because, typically, writers aren't exploring the social and economic complexities that result from decades of medical discrimination between the two-headed Boubas and three-headed Kikis. The metaphor tends to be as surface level and as shallow as the writer's understanding of the subject matter.

Aliens, monsters, animals, or other nonhuman creatures have long been used in media as a stand-in for black, brown, and indigenous people. Writers will make a monster character and often single out black, brown, or indigenous people as part of the "monster" group being discriminated against by white people. This, however unintentionally, reinforces the association of black, brown, or indigenous people with animals or animalistic characteristics. It reinforces racist ideas that they are not human. It also reinforces racist ideas that POC are simultaneously physically super-human: stronger, faster, and more agile than their "genteel" white counterparts.

And it is worth noting that this is a theme that disabled folks, Jewish people, and Muslims also get lumped into.

Now, I bring this up in response to some fan works I see regarding the Clones, but also with fan-favorites like Darth Maul. And I'm not just talking about the fan works that give these characters more animalistic characteristics like the "Wolffe bites" trope, I'm also talking about ones that make them animals or monsters.

Where they take an in-universe fact like, "Hunter was genetically altered to have heightened senses," and turn it into: Hunter will stalk and hunt you through a forest and when he finally catches you, he bites you until he draws blood--oh--snd he can smell when you're bleeding or ovulating.

These fics are making groups like the Clones stronger and faster than human men. They are making them more agile. For whatever reason, they growl and bite. They eat flesh and need to consume blood and have a one-track mind that runs on loop: breed, breed, breed. Or they're a "monster" because they're an alien or because they're genetically modified or because they're disabled.

I've seen this with Hunter. I've seen this with Wrecker. I've seen this with Crosshair. I've seen this with Darth Maul. I've seen this through non-con "sex pollen" tropes. I've seen this with Savage Opress. I've seen this done with Grevious. I've also seen this done with: Tech, Echo (the literal reason was because he is disabled), Wolffe, and Fox.

I shouldn't have to say: don't do this. And I shouldn't have to constantly re-iterate that the blueprint; the model, for all the clones is a brown Polynesian man.

Your fic isn't hot. It's racist.

And I've seen people try to explain this away as kink, as if kink can't be racist. There are a couple differences between your partner chasing you through the house as foreplay and what I described: 1.) consent, 2.) your partner is still human.

"But what about A/B/O--"

If you're only writing ABO fics for brown men or black and brown-coded men, but not for your other faves like Kylo of Obi-Wan or Anakin, please analyze that. Please analyze why you feel the need to make black and brown men- and sometimes exclusively black and brown men- half-wolf.

[pla-teau]

THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER: THE STAR-SPANGLED MAN

i’m late to this but watching episode two of the falcon and winter soldier was a ride. a necessary one in my view for the sake of understanding where sam and bucky are in this world.

from episode one to this episode, race is a lingering blanket throughout our time seeing the pair on screen (minus the action sequences and their banter). bucky constantly telling sam that he should’ve kept the shield annoyed me because i wanted sam to explode. i wanted him to unload and explicitly tell him his reasons for not keeping the shield. we saw in endgame that sam was uncomfortable holding the shield when steve passed it on to him. not that he felt unworthy but he knows the implications of the shield, the legacy it holds and the magnitude of that symbol in the usa. he knows that the history is associated with a white man for decades. at the beginning, steve is used as propaganda by the government for the war before he really grows into his own and even goes against the same government that propped him up to be this heroic symbol. sam, as an african american man, knows struggles that steve never had to face all due to the color of his skin. we don’t know specifics about his time in the military besides what we learned in winter soldier but i don’t doubt that sam had obstacles thrown at him in that environment. now, mixing in his struggles and knowing the implications of him carrying that shield, it’s understandable why sam gave back the shield. this isn’t wakanda, this is america and america doesn’t have a good track record with it’s non-white citizens - especially the african american community.

we learn in episode two that there’s a much darker history associated with captain america when we meet isaiah bradley. to me, the erased history and mistreatment of isaiah speaks to the fact that the government always wanted to keep captain america as a white man. captain america is supposed to be the all-american man who loves his country. as a hispanic woman, when i hear all-american man, my mind pictures a white man first because that’s what i’ve been conditioned to think through imagery and from simply growing up in this country. since the mcu mirrors our world, this is definitely the case when it comes to captain america because that’s the only iteration anyone’s seen or heard of. we learn that isaiah fought bucky and won that fight. to date, i don’t think anyone’s come close to defeating bucky when he was the winter soldier. the fact that isaiah did that and was jailed for 30 years in return for serving his government is explicit enough for us to know that the government doesn’t want a black captain america. and the fact that bucky never told steve about isaiah speaks volumes. if bucky told steve, i don’t doubt steve would’ve tried to do right by him. what that would’ve been, we’ll never know. bucky had this information and while his reasoning was that he was sparing isaiah, quite frankly - it’s not a good enough reason. he hurt both sam and isaiah when they visited his house. he used isaiah to physically show sam that he’s not the first black man the government has set up to fail. what angered me about that scene was that isaiah could’ve been spared by bucky just telling sam about him instead of taking him to his house. if he knows that isaiah doesn’t want that trudged up again, why do it to prove a point? i don’t doubt that had bucky just told sam about isaiah, he would’ve believed him. i think sam and isaiah’s first meeting would’ve been different and on sam’s terms, not bucky’s.

bucky, of course, doesn’t understand sam’s reasons for giving back the shield and that’s the fucking point. how could bucky understand as a white man? sam not explaining himself and keeping his composure whenever bucky lectures him on why he shouldn’t have given back the shield speaks volumes. sam’s reasons are his own and frankly, doesn’t owe anyone an explanation. because explaining it to bucky would be pointless. bucky doesn’t understand what sam’s gone through in life and yeah maybe he sees sam as the next captain america because steve said so along with the fact that he’s a good man which brings me to my next point.

a good man. that’s what made the serum work on steve. steve was a good man at the end of the day. we the audience, the avengers and steve’s friends/comrades know that captain america is not just a star spangled man fighting for the good ol’ us of a, it’s a good man that fights for what’s right. that’s why steve gave the shield to sam because he knows sam is a good man that’ll continue the legacy of fighting the good fight and not necessarily for the government or for those in charge. so sam’s comment in the therapy scene about steve and bucky never understanding is not wrong because while they see the legacy being carried by sam as the right choice, it’s wishful thinking that everything would be fine and that the whole world would be okay with it. i say wishful thinking because it’s easy to think that things wouldn’t change and everyone will accept sam as the new captain america when you don’t think about the struggles sam has faced in his life. when you’re in a place of privilege, you can afford to be a little idealistic because you don’t face or rarely see the injustices to poc/ minorities so you can afford to believe the world will be accepting of what you see as common sense or that the world will treat poc with basic human decency.

when bucky shares his fears of steve being wrong about him if he was wrong about sam and sam asks him if he’s finished also says a lot. that interaction just proves what i said earlier, bucky (and steve) is being idealistic in thinking there would be no questions asked and the world would be fine with sam carrying the shield. when sam says “are you finished?” it’s relatable because it’s representative of poc listening to white people throw a fit about something they’ve never experienced and can’t fully understand.

the scene with them and the cops also shows that bucky has a lot to learn about where sam is coming from and why he returned that shield. out of costume, apparently no one knows sam is the falcon. when i say no one, i mean those with authority (bank and cops so far) because what they see first is a black man and a superhero second. while for steve it seems that everyone saw him as captain america first and steve rogers second. seeing how before they apologize to sam for not recognizing him the officer had his hand on his gun vs. how they tell bucky that he’s under arrest gently and calmly should be a wake up call for buck. he’s one of the world’s most dangerous assassins and they’re just like “oh hey...there’s an arrest out for you because you missed therapy sorry.” is aggravating but the worst part is bucky telling sam to show him his ID, being idealistic in thinking that the situation would be resolved once sam formally identifies himself. that shows buck still has a long way to go because not realizing and thinking that being cooperative and doing what authorities say will resolve the situation is in fact hurtful to sam since he doesn’t know that even cooperating and doing as told will do nothing if that authority figure already has a bias going into that situation.

all in all, the main point for my essay-like post is that while bucky and steve see sam as their equal and the best choice to carry on the legacy, the rest of the world may not necessarily agree and they miss that due to their vastly different experiences in life than sam. i truly despised the way endgame did steve with his arc because it would’ve been great seeing him retired and adjusting to current life but also learning about the darker history and implications of the shield since now the show confirms steve knew nothing. i would imagine steve trying to do right with not only isaiah but sam as well by simply being an advocate and trying to understand how life is different for sam. i hope in future episodes we see bucky try to understand this and even fix his own biases and actions that are harmful rather than helpful to sam. i also just can’t wait to see more of sam’s story being fleshed out and seeing him take on the mantle.

[baroquespiral]

Brockton Bay Antifa

Today in missed storytelling opportunities - why the hell does Worm not have an Empire 88 arc? Not only were they hyped but it felt like it was being very carefully set up, in ways that would be unnecessary for a purely affective bait and switch.  It fills out a naturally escalating sequence of challenges from ABB-E88-Travellers-S9, not that most people appreciate shonen power crawls as personally as I do.  Not just generic and tonal “expectations” were being set, but the sort of structural/thematic ones usually placed a layer deeper than the ones you deliberately fuck with (such that a reader can on second or third read notice them and go, so that was the plan all along!).  Consider the following timeline, call it Worm Prime: >You Are Here: Buzz 7.12, Taylor has just figured out that Coil kidnapped Dinah and is considering quitting the Undersiders  >in the course of their argument, Bitch and Grue call her on her hypocrisy in pretending like there is ethical caping in late capitalism: specifically, that she was fine working within a structure that lets Empire 88 run a chunk of the city as a fascist ethnostate >(somewhere in the course of this, we learn a bit about what Empire 88 actually do - more on that later) >even though they were originally against it, the ensuing moral game of chicken goads the Undersiders into agreeing to take down Empire 88 >however, because Dinah’s odds were so shit, and because they don’t trust Coil any more, they decide to come up with their own plan entirely distinct from either iteration of Coil’s  >Taylor agrees to stay with the Undersiders long enough to pull off this one plan >Coil agrees to this (they tell him to avoid risk of his interference) when he sees their original plan is good and Dinah gives it a better probability rating >the Chekov’s gun about why Dinah predicted Coil’s intervention as lowering their chances still gets fired eventually, as their plan goes wrong on a fluke anyway and they have to get Coil to intervene to save themselves one time even though he makes things even more messy from there, in some fun rapidly escalating Xanatos speed chess bullshit >the arc ends with Taylor making her decision about the Undersiders and trying to change the world that she makes after the Leviathan fight, but this time built up to thematically over the course of the whole arc.  This thematically as well as structurally leads naturally into the Coil arc, which pits the Undersiders against another guy with a plan to change the world, and a more sympathetic team.  Which leaves the Undersiders ultimately unrivalled in Brockton Bay in time to face their first larger-than-Brockton Bay threat, the Slaughterhouse Nine, etc... The fact that I don’t really know (or care) where to put Leviathan in this will probably strike some as sufficient explanation for why it doesn’t play out like this - that it’s supposed to be “unpredictable”, either for entertainment or “realism” reasons.  While I don’t buy one of three Biblically symbolic “Endbringers” whose existence is predetermined directly by the cosmic backstory explaining the whole setting as an avatar of the modernist radical contingency of the Event, any more than I buy the ensuing Hobbesian survival horror cliché that doesn’t resemble any real world disaster recovery I’ve ever heard of; in either case, the contingent was timed to interrupt something, and cut short some logical developments, over others, and that’s still worth thinking about. Despite being one of the better researched and more plausible depictions of neo-Nazis in pop culture, Empire 88 is weirdly depoliticized.  The text goes out of its way to never look sympathetic to them - they’re all personally among the worst people in the setting, just all around sadists who are cruel to animals and threaten teenagers in parks and kill indiscriminately in the wake of Leviathan, as if that’s why they’re racist - and the thuggish ones get a lot more screen time than the “respectable” ones - but for all the shock beats they’re given you never even hear about anything actually racist they do.  A sizeable part of the city is their “territory”.  What does that entail?  Does the city make any accommodations for PoC fleeing that area (whose borders, as established in Buzz, are deliberately pushed and made unclear)?  Are there pogroms?  Lynchings?  We know from comments that Wildbow is smart enough to recognize rape as a not-apolitical form of realist grit; we also know that he thinks there are apolitical forms of realist grit, and the political ones should be avoided at least by people without the relevant “experience” (I disagree, but can’t blame him.  Of course, he didn’t have to make a neo-Nazi gang in the first place, or build them directly into the story’s thematic structure as the avatar of the political itself. Not that I want to make this into Woke Wolfenstein or some kind of heavy-handed progressive power fantasy.  Ideally this arc would have been written in 2012 like the original and dodged the bullet of EiffelArt avatars fingering themselves to it 24/7.  Actually, one thematic that would be interesting to weave into this would be the thing I saw one commenter mention about how E88 has more “heroic” coded powers than most of the villain teams (and “heroic” coded powers are mainly “military industrial complex” coded powers...), which would tie well into why Taylor doesn’t feel like she can be a hero or a villain, how the logic that “hero = system” is inherently fascistic, and the Undersiders or at least Taylor and E88 are caught in opposite instantiations of that dialectic (villains who overidentify with the system vs villains who oppose it in good faith, neither capable of identifying with the designation)... This might involve spending some time on their motives, maybe even an Interlude - and I understand the cynical pop-psych reasoning why dehumanization-depoliticization is a better pair than vice versa, but one thing we’ve seen in the last couple years is that this leaves you vulnerable to tactics as crude as a name change. If both this and my Star Wars headcanon read like progressive fix-it fics, I want to clarify that this really isn’t my intention.  While including neo-Nazis and depoliticizing them is kind of asking for it, I really don’t want to force my politics into everything I read.  These started as just attempts to fill plot holes or pacing whiplash, and yet they seem to make things more political of their own accord.  Why is that?   As someone who aestheticizes my own politics way too much not to feel conflicted about Benjamin’s famous motto, one of mine (which works pretty well as a summation of the project of rationalfic) used to be “Make Fiction More Like Reality/Make Reality More Like Fiction”.  If anything it’s the dialectical intimation of the possibility of the latter that’s missing in Worm.

[aion-rsa]

Doctor Who Season 14 Wish-List: What We’d Like to See

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With the recent announcement that star Jodie Whittaker and showrunner Chris Chibnall will be departing Doctor Who following the next season, we have confirmation that Season 14 will be yet another opportunity to regenerate the long-running science fiction show. In that spirit, we reached out to the many Doctor Who viewers amongst our writers to get their personal fan perspectives on what they’d like to see from the next iteration of Who. Here’s what we came up with. Add your own wish-list items below…

Make the Doctor a Bit of a Bastard

My number one wish-list item for season 14 is I want the Doctor to be a bit of a bastard. Steven Moffat had his flaws, but one thing I loved was his interpretation of what the Doctor *is*. The way Moffat sees the Doctor is that there is this vast, ancient alien god, full of loneliness, grief, and rage that can burn out suns. And when it meets humans it pretends to be this fictional character called “the Doctor”, who is half idiot, half superhero (Of course, I think Moffat would also tell you that, though the Doctor might not know it, if you scratch the surface of the alien god behind the mask, you’ll find that deep down it is part idiot, half superhero).

The Doctor is your best friend, and that’s important, but also, sometimes the mask slips. The Doctor should be a bit scary as well as wonderful, and I don’t think Jodie Whittaker has had much chance to show that side of the character. She’s kind and clever and brave and heroic, but she should also get to bluster and be a massive egotist and look like an actual idiot. I hope her successor does get that. Chris Farnell

Vinay Patel as Showrunner

I don’t know if he wants the job, but writer Vinay Patel is my wish-list choice for the next showrunner of Doctor Who. Patel’s two Who episodes are not only among the most successful episodes in recent Who history, but succeed in different ways. With Season 11’s ‘Demons of the Punjab,’ Patel demonstrates that he is able to work outside the traditional Doctor Who formula, giving us a historical episode that challenges the colonialist framework arguably written into the DNA of the show. With Season 12’s ‘Fugitive of the Judoon,’ Patel was asked to incorporate many, many different plot elements into a single episode, without losing the focus or heart of the story—and he pulls it off. Doctor Who has made a big deal about recent strides in representation both in front of the camera, and in directorial roles—and for good reason—but we have never had a person of color in the most creatively influential role of all: head writer/showrunner. The job of showrunner is much larger than the job of an episodic writer, encompassing producer responsibilities in addition writing choices, and I would love to see what Patel could do with it. Or, if he doesn’t want the showrunner job, find him a good non-writing executive producer to support him in the role of head writer. Kayti Burt

More Solo Doctor Episodes

It’s rare to find the Doctor alone. But some of NuWho’s most memorable episodes―’Midnight’, ‘Waters of Mars’, ‘The Lodger’, and ‘Heaven Sent’ spring to mind―have had a conspicuous lack of companions. These companion-lite episodes run the gamut from comedic to exceedingly dark. But all of them benefit from the increased story-telling space created when the Doctor flies solo. Companions serve an important function in Doctor Who. They are audience stand-ins who interpret, question, and ultimately humanize the Doctor. Taking them away, then, forces both writers and viewers to re-learn who the Doctor is through the eyes of strangers. No companions also, from a practical stand-point, means fewer obligatory characters to juggle in NuWho’s tight 45 minute run-time. The writers are free to spend more time on the one-off casts of a given episode, investing us in the mundane struggles of an ordinary bloke who resembles his couch or illuminating the humanity of a shuttle of tourists before it is ripped away. Of course, Doctor Who without companions wouldn’t be Doctor Who. But sometimes a companion-lite episode is the perfect way to remind us why we keep watching. Zoe Kaiser

Give Big Finish a Crack of the Whip

They may have begun their contributions to the Doctor Who canon with a series of niche audio adventures during the show’s wilderness years, but today Big Finish are a lynchpin of the show’s expanded universe. Playing a pivotal role in 2020’s ambitious multimedia epic Time Lord Victorious, and then squeezing into their garden sheds to keep producing content during the pandemic, the team have repeatedly proven they’ve got the skill and imagination to make the most that all of time and space have to offer. 

Just imagine what the Big Finish team could do if handed the reins for a run of adventures you could actually see. Whether it took the form of a fresh start with the next official Doctor or a selection box of old regenerations romping across reality, a palate-cleansing series of ‘new’ writers giving it their all on Saturday night telly before the regular format resumed could be just the thing to reignite the interest of fans whose attention has waned in recent years. (Also, they’ve got Eccleston’s phone number now. Just saying…) Chris Allcock

More Non-UK Episode Settings

I would like Doctor Who in Season 14 to use the TARDIS to see the Earth’s past and present beyond the UK. In the Classic era, many episodes both modern and period were set in the UK purely out of budget necessity. In addition, the early mandate for the series to teach children about the past also meant a heavy focus on Classic Who to cover many areas of UK history. Modern Doctor Who has filmed episodes or scenes in South Africa, New York, Spain, and Utah. There’s so much unexplored history ripe for alien meddling outside of the UK, especially including Asia, Africa, and Central/South America. The series has mentioned several worldwide alien invasions in modern times and the past. Why not have the Silurians wreak havoc in ancient Nigeria? Why do the Cybermen always appear in London first and not Tokyo? If Classic Who can use a soundstage to mimic the Aztec Empire, what excuse does modern Doctor Who have with multiple times the budget, greater access to research resources, and production technology? Hopefully, by Season 14, most pandemic restrictions would have been lifted to allow international filming to resume. There’s so much human history and modern-day experiences outside of the UK. Fans love reading up on the real history and/or modern references to plot events. The Doctor has seen the whole of human existence, Doctor Who is overdue for reflecting more of this. Amanda Rae-Prescott

Retcon ‘The Timeless Child’ Revelation

I understand why Chris Chibnall was seduced by the narrative possibilities of ‘The Timeless Children’. Now that we know the Doctor has lived countless more lives than the 13 (ish) we’ve come to accept – many of them hidden behind a mind-lock following service to a secret Time Lord sect – there exists the tantalising prospect of a hidden Doctor lingering just over every horizon.

If we concede that it was a master-stroke for Russell T Davies to have introduced the Time War, an event that coloured the first of the modern-era Doctors in heavy shades of guilt and grit and regret, then it’s tempting to conclude that these more recent revelations will serve a similar function; that the Doctor’s seismic re-reckoning of their sense of themselves will unlock reservoirs of dramatic tension.  Except… Well, there’s the old adage that says that if anything can be anything, then nothing means anything, and I think that applies here. A tweak is fine. But ‘The Timeless Children’ is a bite too big, a cheat, a rug-pull for the audience and character both.

Red Dwarf, too, plays hard and loose with canon, but if co-creators Grant and Naylor had decided to continue their saga with the mind-bending events of ‘Back to Reality’ cemented as fact, then Red Dwarf wouldn’t have been Red Dwarf anymore. We can only hope that a future showrunner, or even Chris Chibnall himself, is clever enough to ret-con the events of ‘The Timeless Children’ as nothing more than the cunning malfeasance of The Master. Jamie Andrew

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Doctor Who: Why Jo Martin’s Ruth Should Be The Next Doctor

By Amanda-Rae Prescott

TV

Doctor Who: BBC Confirms Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall To Leave in 2022

By Louisa Mellor

Make it Scary. Properly Scary

Every time I talk about Doctor Who with my mum, the phrase ‘hiding behind the sofa’ comes up. Though I am a die-hard horror fan, I too had my share of – not hiding – but having nightmares after episodes of my generation’s Who – namely about the Sylvester McCoy era Cheetah People (coming to get me in my bathroom) and the Psychic Circus (my long-standing fear of circuses, clowns and reality TV talent contests was born here). While NuWho has definitely had some good scary ones – ‘Family of Blood’, ‘The Empty Child’, ‘Blink’ – we haven’t had a properly chilling arc in a while. And it does need to be an arc – setting up something terrifying and then defeating it in the space of 45 minutes and then moving along, doesn’t really cut it. I’d love something like ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’ story, which gave us the Psychic Circus and ran for four episodes. Those sofas aren’t going to hide behind themselves. Rosie Fletcher

Writing That Better Reflects the Doctor’s Identity

Perhaps naively, I’m assuming that the Fourteenth Doctor won’t automatically revert to being a white, cis male in the wake of Jodie Whittaker’s departure. (Fingers crossed, I guess!) But, whether the next Doctor turns out to be another woman, a POC, a member of the LGBTQ community, or some combination of the above, I hope that Doctor Who realizes we need to see actual stories that reflect that identity. 

During the Chibnall era, the show has been largely content to write a female Doctor as though that character’s experience wasn’t terribly different from any other incarnation of the Time Lord, with little focus on how historical sexism or the general misogyny of society might impact her. There were a few obvious exceptions to this – Season 11’s ‘The Witchfinders’ comes to mind – but, for the most part, Doctor Who hasn’t seemed terribly interested in exploring how a female Doctor might necessarily have to move through the universe differently than her male counterparts did. (I mean, the idea that random men throughout time and space would just… allow a strange woman to take charge and tell them what to do feels less realistic than the existence of the TARDIS). For our next non-traditional Doctor, I desperately want to see them navigate the world differently because the world reacts differently to their identity, rather than simply pretend there’s no real difference between Thirteen and the other incarnations that have come before her. Lacy Baugher

Bring Back a Classic Companion

It’s unlikely to the point of impossibility that we’ll see a Classic Doctor returning full time to the TARDIS for another crack at the cosmos, complete with age-worn face. But there’s nothing prohibiting a classic companion from rejoining Team TARDIS. Sarah Jane’s reunion with the Doctor in ‘School Reunion’, alongside David Tennant’s Tenth incarnation, provided goose-pimples galore, and kick-started a spin-off show that sealed Elizabeth Sladen’s reputation as one of Doctor Who‘s eternal treasures.

It would be great to see Jo Grant or Jamie or Ace meeting a new Doctor, and adjusting to another new face, while we, the audience, would get to see both how the companions’ lives had changed sans the Doctor, and how a classic companion would look filtered through our modern sensibilities. It could be fun, soulful, and touching. It would also introduce a new generation of Whovians to the people without whom the show wouldn’t have lasted as long as it has. Jamie Andrew

Make Kids Want to Play it in the Playground

This is a tricky ask. Children’s TV habits have moved a long way from the time you could stop a random child in the street and they’d be able to accurately recite the BBC One weekday schedule with allowances for interruptions by the chancellor’s budget and Wimbledon. It’s a different world. Less ‘Watch with Mother’, more ‘Watch a 31-year-old Danish man play Minecraft while also watching 2020’s Funniest TikTok Fails and liking a video of a Year 10 vomiting frozen honey.’ Capturing kids’ attention is hard, but if Doctor Who is going to have a future anything like its past, it needs to ignite a young audience. It needs to be doodled on pencil cases. It needs to transform airing cupboards into TARDISes and multi-colour Biros into Sonic Screwdrivers. Children need to careen around the playground yelling ‘Exterminate!’ and imagining themselves as the cleverest and the bravest, an alien with two hearts and multiple universes at their feet. It has to keep on making them feel bigger on the inside. Louisa Mellor 

​​Add a Non-Contemporary and/or Non-Human Companion

In NuWho, the main companion character has often been situated as the audience surrogate. Because of this, Doctor Who writers have always chosen to make the character our human contemporary, which is to say from our own time and also from Earth—more specifically, the U.K. While there have been exceptions to this rule, from Nardole to Victorian Clara, they have always been fleeting and/or tertiary characters, rather than a central character. Classic Who has a history of much more temporally and planetarily diverse companions. For example, Second Doctor companion Victoria was snatched from 1866 England by the Daleks before the Doctor and Jamie saved her and she continued on the TARDIS with them. Elsewhen, Fourth Doctor companion Romana was a Time Lord from Gallifrey, like the Doctor. After so many seasons of contemporary, British Earthers traveling in the TARDIS, I would love to see Doctor Who get a bit more creative with one or more of their main companions in Season 14. If undertaken earnestly, it would be a simple way of challenging the show’s storytellers to explore new cultures and/or dynamics across multiple story arcs. Kayti Burt

Stop Looking Inwards and Attract a Wider Audience

Much has been made, in this ongoing culture war that grinds against our minds 24/7, of the idea that Doctor Who is somehow a woke show now, as if the show hasn’t addressed political, social and environmental concerns since its first story, or fan forums weren’t simmering with threads unironically titled ‘The Gay Agenda’ in 2005. There are some obvious differences now: firstly the aforementioned cultural shift whereby anything remotely progressive is an affront that must be removed, and secondly the fact the show now has a female lead and more Black and Asian actors in the main cast.

Another important difference to, say, Russell T. Davies or Barry Letts’ approach, is that the writing is noticeably patchier. The concepts in the stories are not necessarily bad, but there’s both a cynical edge and a feeling that the characters are defined more by trauma or disability than beliefs or behaviour. The issue is not that Doctor Who is suddenly woke, it’s that the writing isn’t strong enough often enough.

So what I want for Doctor Who to do next is make me want to watch again, but ideally to continue with what worked with Chibnall’s approach – and despite my criticisms I believe there are successes here. The show should maintain all the elements that would annoy Piers Morgan, but also it needs to reach out to a wider audience as it did in 2005. Much as I enjoyed Steven Moffat’s era, it began to look inwards to the show’s mythology more often than it did outwards, and this needs to be reversed. Andrew Blair

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Doctor Who Season 13 will air on BBC One and BBC America this autumn.

The post Doctor Who Season 14 Wish-List: What We’d Like to See appeared first on Den of Geek.

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