#it’s an anti-cyberman defense

[lazer-screwdriver]

Liz nonhuman traits: (a nonexhaustive list)

Almost always — sharp teeth/extra canines, telepathy, minor/instinctual timesense, electric conduction system

Sometimes — ability to consume/reprocess metal, tail, claws, digitigrade legs

Only in specific circumstances — acidic blood, methane production, water breathing

[ileolai]

rambling thoughts on Bill

I kind of wish we had more scenes with Moira + Bill, or at least Missy + Bill, bc really... that stuff is the actual core of Bill’s story. All the focus on Heather in the first episode seems to set up the series as a love story/journey to find Heather, when overall, as a series, it’s actually about Bill’s fundamental anxiety about her identity and being ignored.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still very relevant and important to the story arc, but that’s probably a whole different meta analysis.

So anyway...  Moira and Bill. Moira isn’t necessarily a bad foster-parent, but her relationship with Bill is rather cold for someone who should be taking care of her on that level. She doesn’t seem to hear anything Bill says, she doesn’t really see Bill for who she actually is. You don’t really get the sense that Moira has a whole lot of parent-y instincts for Bill, right? She’s more like a room-mate who happens to live with her. I actually assumed that’s what she was, for a moment, when we very first meet her.

Bill keeps blatantly signalling stuff like ‘’uh btw I’m a lesbian’’, and Moira just doesn’t hear it. It goes right over her head, not because she’s a terrible homophobe or doesn’t care about Bill or anything like that, but because she doesn’t seem to actually listen. She didn’t even know there were pictures of Bill’s biological mother around in the house [I mean yes, the Doctor altered the timeline by putting them there, but on a metaphorical level, that says something about how wrapped up she is in her own stuff, to miss these details about Bill’s life] and she doesn’t seem to grasp how important they are to Bill? She just like, ‘’oh yeah, we have photos of your dead mom btw.’’ and Bill has to deal with that by herself.

Moira is not alone in this issue however. The Doctor doesn’t really hear Bill either. He loves her, he’s fascinated by her intelligence and wants to see the potential of that, but he also just sort of walks all over her emotions, and Bill has no real defenses against that. He’s dismissive of Bill’s very real fears of Missy-- and I mean, he’s technically being honest in the fact that he can’t promise her eternal life, but that’s not really what Bill needs to hear at that moment. That’s not what she’s really asking for.

Now how Missy is relevant to this... Missy is like, the symbolic stand-in for Bill’s foster mom’s issues, yes? She’s the ‘’wicked stepmother, hisss’’ as the Doctor paints her in series 9, and overall she’s tied into all this imagery around [super] dysfunctional parenting. So it’s technically her doing, what happened to Bill, although she doesn’t consciously remember doing it. She seems to remember it subconsciously, because her residual guilt and fits of tears become apparent soon after she meets Bill, but she's never really seen Bill as anything more than a means to an end, or a ‘’function’’.

So these two are both responsible for how Bill ends up as a Cyberman. Both in a literal sense, because the Doctor made a series of terrible errors, and Missy actually did it, and in a metaphorical sense -- Bill’s underlying, consuming fear is that nobody sees her or listens to her, so she’s been stripped of her identity, her emotional expressions, and made mute. She has to look up her own name in the Cyberman wifi-cloud or whatever, like she doesn’t remember it. Although there’s some hope in the fact she seems to be able to override the circuit emotionally and so she retains that aspect of her self.

So Bill is like, the kid in the center of a relationship between two parents trying to patch up a divorce or something, yes? Who can’t get their shit together long enough to properly notice her, the Doctor and Missy standing in for that, as representations for that.

Sooo... the Heather stuff, although lovely in terms of queer representation and very very relevant to the overall story on a different level, isn’t really what Bill needs to resolve... she needs to make herself seen and heard, she needs both the Doctor and Missy to properly acknowledge her, to really properly empathize with her, to claim her identity back.

I’m assuming, I’m hoping, desperately, that she gets that moment, because it will be an absolute disaster if she doesn’t, on a narrative level, as well as in terms of... you know, the implications of a queer black companion being denied that triumph. Danny got his resolution over his ambivalence towards being a soldier and went out in a blaze of glory at the same time, but... Bill needs more than that, I think. She deserves more. As a companion and as a black, queer woman.

On a semi-related note: this is why I’m thoroughly fed up with all the stuff about how ‘’the companions should stay dead’’ because ‘’consequences’’. That is just bullshit, and particularly here, in this storyline. Denying Bill her self-actualization, her moment of heroism over both her real and subtextual terrors and physical predicament, would be the worst, most anti-climactic, and dishonest cop-out this storyline could possibly take, and I really hope Moffat would have more writerly integrity than that. 

I’m hopeful, because this is like... the same dude that refused to punish Clara for her Doctorly aspirations, and actually gave her a TARDIS and quasi-immortality and an ending tied inextricably to Gallifrey and really sort of made her the first lady Doctor, prioritizing groundwork for an actual female Doctor over some boring pathos about death.... But... digressing now. I’m still anxious for Bill. I hope, I hope, I hope the Doctor isn’t alone and howling into the Arctic wind at the end because they decided to sacrifice the resolution Bill’s story demands, what the audience actually deserves, for his moment of angst.