I think I've mentioned Doctor Who before on this blog, but I'm too lazy to go back and see. To recap, I started watching the rebooted Doctor Who earlier this year as a distraction from thesis and the big questions of like, such as, Where am I going to live in three weeks? Fortunately, the Doctor was there to entertain me. It was the first time I ever followed a show in real time. Ah, popular culture. Still catching up. Anyways, my thoughts on the latest Christmas special under the cut.
I would have enjoyed the Christmas Special had there been more Narnia and less Super Uterus. I mean, we just came off a season where it turned out that River, the one badass lady time traveler who could give the Doctor a run for his money, was entirely formed and defined by the Doctor: conceived in the the TARDIS, raised to be his murderer, and then falling in love and chasing him across the stars. All of those tropes, conceivably, could have been done in an interesting way, but instead they were executed in the most boring manner possible. (And don’t even get me started on the filler specials where River pops in and out and the Doctor broods on her looming fate. Can we say paternal and patronizing?)
Which brings me to Amy Pond, River's mother, Doctor's companion, the secretly pregnant girl who waited. I found her story line so frustrating. It was bad enough that there was a forced love triangle between Amy, the Doctor, and Rory. I mean, the first few times when Amy was unsure of whether she wanted to marry Rory, I felt I understood. But then the triangle wouldn’t stop.
I legitimately never understood why Amy and Rory were together anyway. This is how it went: Amy flirted flirtatiously with the Doctor whilst Rory broodingly brooded over her lack of attention to Rory’s selfless devotion. Then! Crisis! Rory is about to be/might be/is definitely dead! Cue crushing grief for Amy and protestations of her need for Rory to make life complete. Time is re-written, rinse, repeat. This got old, very fast. I hoped that we would see the end of this in Season 6, following the magical wedding that saved the world in Season 5, but alas. Season 6 brought the pregnancy scare and the kidnapped baby everyone forgot.
I think pregnancy and motherhood are great and stories about them should be told because they are a key part of human experience. BUT, when your lead female character, known as “The Girl Who Waited” (and waited, and waited, the waiting was intense), spends the season kidnapped, unknowingly pregnant, in need of rescue, and then her baby is kidnapped, there is a problem. ESPECIALLY when no one ever speaks about the missing baby the rest of the season in any significant manner. Fans are fond of saying that Russell Davies’ Doctor Who was very over-melodramatic, and indeed, his seasons often were, but I submit that there is are few tropes so melodramatic as love triangles and kidnapped babies. Not only are these tropes melodramatic, but they are superficial. Irritatingly so.
I can’t get over the fact that NO ONE mentioned the kidnapped baby the rest of the season, despite the fact that there were several episodes centered specifically on parenting and the importance of parental love. (Primarily fathers’ love. I enjoyed these episodes because while “Mother Love” is rather overdone, it is rare to have a story in which a man proudly proclaims that he saved the world through his deep and profound love for his child.) The glaring lack of concern over kidnapped Baby Pond is not answered, for me, by the excuse that “Baby becomes River; they knew she’d be fine.”
What kind of excuse is that?! Baby Pond spends years being psychologically broken and turned into an assassin by creepy, creepy aliens. Amy and Rory KNOW this. The DOCTOR knows this. I don’t care if that timeline can’t be re-written, they would have had to try to rescue the baby, and failing, grieve.
The excuse that “no one wants to see people sad” doesn’t cut it either. Don’t put in a kidnapped baby if you don’t feel like dealing with the narrative fallout. That is terribly lazy story telling.
Which brings me back to the Christmas Special. Here we find Mother Love in full force, but in horribly stereotyped ways. Madge is a brave little woman during WW II, trying to keep the death of her husband from her children because she doesn’t want Christmas to be ruined. However, she lies to her children and says their father will be with them for Christmas. (Why that lie? Why not just say she doesn’t think he’ll make it? Why???) Then they all stumble into a Narnia-esque world that is under ecological threat from humans.
The Doctor and the kids meet some tree people who tell the Doctor he isn’t “strong enough” to help them escape from the coming acid rain. The Doctor is understandably miffed because he is strong, last Time Lord, blah, blah, blah. I, on the other hand, knew that only a woman would be “strong” enough the moment I saw the lady tree person holding the crown, waiting for the savior.
Madge, meanwhile, has met the human ecological terrorists causing the acid rain, fooled them with fake tears (such a tired stereotype), and enlisted their help in finding her children by threatening them with her hidden gun. The female ecological terrorist is incapable of driving their transport to the children, and the male terrorists cannot be trusted, because, duh, they are men and soldiers and they think only in terms of Getting Their Job Done. Emotions do not get in their way! So Madge is left to drive the transport herself, based on one flight taken with her lost pilot-husband, and crashes into the tower where her children are trapped. (Women are such terrible drivers, lol.)
There Madge is crowned with the life force of the dying forest and saves the day. To use the Doctor’s words, she becomes “The Mother Ship.” Yes, she saved the trees through the power of her uterus. Her daughter, you see, wasn’t “old enough” and hadn’t had any children. So then Madge, the loving wife, the super mother, guides herself, the Doctor, her children, and the trees through the Time Vortex, picking up her husband along the way.
I like happy endings. I wanted Madge’s husband to be saved. None of what happened in this episode was exceptionable in and of itself. But coming after two seasons that were so disappointing, gender wise, this celebration of the uterus was not enough. Don’t tantalize me with the promise of Narnia, ignore the ecological terrorism (I mean, seriously, what happened to the Doctor who was enraged by the mining of a sentient star? I was expecting some comeuppance for the acid rain.), and then tell me that the only way a woman can save the day is through her roles of wife and mother.
Not that either of those roles are bad, on the contrary, they are beautiful and important. But for the last two seasons, those have been the only roles for women to inhabit on Doctor Who. Amy is Rory’s wife and River’s mother. Ultimately, River is the Doctor’s wife. (No children yet, but hey, there's always next season!) I find this tiresome. The previous series of the show had many issues, but in the end, I felt that the characters were real people and the women had a wide range of backgrounds, feelings and agency that had more to do with their humanity than simply their gender. I really don't know if I'll watch the next season...
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