STFU Moffat

I really disliked it which is hugely disappointing to me because one of my favourite actresses, Bethany Black, was in it.

I was hoping she’d have a bigger role, and one which gave her the opportunity to shine. Yes, she’s the first trans actress to be in Doctor Who, which is absolutely a celebratory thing, but I think probably coincidental considering her talent. Bethany was chosen, I assume, because she is a brilliant actress with real vulnerability to her performance. (I loved her in Cucumber and Banana by RTD. I think she was one of the stand-out performers in that). 

How you cast someone like Bethany and then have them play a part like 474 is beyond me. Don’t get me wrong, I liked 474, but I wanted to see Bethany’s range.

I didn’t feel the characters were very well developed, which is a shame. They felt more like caricatures. Under The Lake made me care for every member of the crew, so we know it can be done in the space of an episode. 

Diversity-wise I was pleased. But diversity doesn’t make an episode good. It’s something which should already be there, since we are in 2015, so although I appreciate it, it doesn’t improve the episode for me.

I admire the fact they tried something new with the way it was filmed, but I don’t think it worked overall. Sometimes it was so shaky you couldn’t tell what was going on, and it seemed to work like a barrier and keep many viewers detached from the story, which is the opposite of what I think it was intended to do. 

Still, it’s better to try a new idea than do something boring, so I appreciate this experiment, even if it failed for me.

One problem I found was that a lot of people didn’t really understand the story. And not in a clever way, just in a rather confused, what-was-that-about? sort of way. 

I think you can be smart with your story without leaving your viewers at a complete loss. It’s good to leave some blanks sometimes, to add to the fear-factor, but you need to at least five the viewers a basic understanding of that’s going on so that they can follow it and feel involved.

The monsters… oh the monsters. 

Finally, ammunition against those that want to talk-down RTD because of his farting Slitheen. Under Moffat we now have sentient humanoid eye bogies. I think with that we’re even. (And that’s a generous assessment considering the Slitheen did have a proper motive/personalities/storyline).

Some of the ideas were clever. Capitalism trying to eliminate sleep was something which interested me. I wish the episode had been more philosophical to be honest, and really explored the pros and cons of that. 

I feel awful for saying it, because Mark Gatiss does seem like a nice man and he works hard and clearly adores Doctor Who, but I do wonder if he’s suited to writing for the show at the moment. He writes well for Sherlock, and An Adventure in Space and Time was stunning, so perhaps he feels restricted by the family audience? I’m just not sure what happens when Gatiss writes for Doctor Who at the moment. Things seem to go very wrong.

I also feel like if Mark was a new writer then he wouldn’t keep getting asked back in the way he is. It does seem that Moffat likes to hire his friends regardless of the quality of their scripts. Which is a shame considering we so desperately would love to see some new young writers, especially some young female writers. 

I really disliked this episode. For many reasons. 

I was glad to see Bethany Black, however, which was the saving grace of the thing, although how annoying that she wasn’t given a bigger part. 

Ah well, perhaps she’ll be asked back as a companion when Clara leaves? I live in hope. 

I think it’s good to know some of the “science” behind why media examination is important, especially when kids are concerned, so here’s some excerpts from an interesting post in Psychology Today.

Young children are particularly vulnerable to being influenced and not being able to separate reality from television. Often times this leads to children reenacting such images… Since children are very impressionable such larger than life media images seem not only real but serve as role models….

To be clear, they’re not saying that a child is unaware that the TV is a separate place from their reality. Rather, “There is no fine line between what they see on the “boob tube” and what can happen everyday.” So: you and I might see a movie about 1000 snakes erupting from under a bed at night, and know it can never really happen. A child, though, could see this as a real possibility.

Studies suggest that parental involvement is a core factor in children understanding media or believing some of the “make believe” to be true. In my story my parents were not watching me - I was left to my 6 year old devices and luckily just sprained a wrist. Reports also reveal that kids also listen when parents interject into sitcoms (i.e. explaining not likely scenarios or not appropriate language usage).

This isn’t Moffat-related, but Britain is currently rocked by a scandal about the Prime Minister that was revealed as part of a tell-all biography yesterday: allegedly, while he was at university, David Cameron joined a posh club with an initiation rite where he had to “put a private part of his anatomy” into a dead pig’s mouth. Naturally, the British press is running wild (the Guardian has a round-up of the best Twitter responses here, which I highly recommend) with the scandal, which has been named “Piggate” (since the Watergate scandal, all British political scandals, no matter how minor, have been given a nickname with the suffix “-gate”). 

This isn’t the first time Cameron’s antics during university have shocked the public; he (along with many of his Parliament colleagues) was also a member of the infamous Bullingdon club:

The aim of the Bullingdon Club is ostensibly to dress up fancy with the chaps, get blind drunk at an expensive restaurant or private dining room, and trash the place – because they can afford to pay for the damages without doing a day’s work. Among their known initiation rites, they are said to have to burn a £50 [~$76] bill in front of a homeless person.

(From here, which talks about how Piggate relates to class, but trigger warning for child abuse/sexual abuse in the article - recently it’s come to light that Parliament ignored child abusers within its midst.)

Cameron initially refused to comment on the allegations and members of his party claimed this was a fairly normal thing for students to do (much to the delight of the British public, of course).

Like other scandals around Cameron, such as pastygate*, this highlights the disconnect in Cameron and his cronies (rich white men who all went to the same universities and are all interconnected but believe they have gained everything on merit and everyone else is beneath them) and the general British population. There’s also a sense of despair among many members of the public** that men so out of touch with normality are in charge of people’s literal lives (for example, in trying to reduce the number of people “claiming” to be disabled to get money, the government has declared multiple people fit to work who subsequently died within days).

Anyway, I know a lot of people who read STFU-Moffat aren’t British so in case any of you are confused about why suddenly everyone in Britain is making pig jokes, this is why.

- C

*The Conservatives wanted to increase the taxes on hot pasties, a food associated with working-class men. The Chancellor was asked when he has last eaten a pasty and revealed (to everyone’s horror) that he couldn’t remember when he had last eaten one. David Cameron then claimed he’d eaten one at Leeds Railway Station, but some journalists investigated this claim and found that there was nowhere to buy pasties from at Leeds Railways Station at the time Cameron claimed. It was a big scandal, which probably tells you a lot about the British press.

The first was when Missy said “when the Doctor was a little girl” in her “guess which one is wrong” sequence and the second was when someone (I think it was the Doctor or Missy) called the weird snake guy a “man in a dress”.

The first one is using transness as a punchline and the second is playing on transmisogynist ideas about trans women while also using transness as a punchline.

I wanted to cast Peter Capaldi. If there is any other player on the board other than the person who excited you the most in the role, “Doctor Who” would go off the air, so that’s what you have to do. Was the time right? I don’t know. I think it would have been a disaster if we’d cast a female Doctor when David [Tennant] left. I believe. Disaster. Possible, this time. I think I should get a little more credit for being the only person who’s made it possible. [Laughs.] It wasn’t part of the fiction of the show until I wrote it. And I keep establishing it. But I think when that day comes — whatever showrunner that is — then the BBC will say, “Tell me how this is definitely going to work.” Because, I tell you, there are two venomous packs here. A lot of people in the middle, sensible enough to say, “If it’s good, I’ll like it; if it’s not good, I won’t like it.”

I’m generally skeptical of the “when the time’s right” agument for representation because the time never seems to be right (this isn’t just a Moffat problem, it seems pretty universal: unless writers say they want representation right now, it tends not to happen), and he’s dancing around the idea and insulting it a lot, so I wouldn’t recommend getting your hopes up.

On the other hand, if you skim over the sexism in the article he seems to be vaguely aware that (a) he should have more characters of colour and (b) that women are intimidated by “boys’ clubs”, so I think he is actually becoming a little more aware of things. And apparently he’s in favour of quotas now, which I wasn’t expecting.

(I’d like to think it’s the charming influence of SH and me, but he’d probably disagree. And I’m guessing we’d be one of the venemous packs demanding a female Doctor for the sake of it.)

So I think it’s very unlikely that this is the sign of a genderfluid Doctor, but it isn’t the first time that a genderfluid Time Lord has been mentioned (thanks to Neil Gaiman), and it could later be used as justification for a genderfluid Doctor.

And I noticed that there were more people of colour in the latest episode than there were last time I watched Doctor Who (but then he killed half of them, so that undermined this somewhat). 

I just watched that episode and my, it really had everything that I dislike about Moffat’s writing.

- Characters of colour introduced for no reason except to kill them off to make white characters’ predicaments more dramatic

- Evil woman flirting with the Doctor

- A joke about bisexuality

- Two transphobic jokes (one just wouldn’t be enough)

- Using important women from history as a punchline

- Character brought back from the dead, no big deal, no one cares because it’s such a common occurrence

- The Doctor being about to die and THAT’s a big deal even though this happens, like, every week

- Unnecessary sexualisation of anything a woman can possibly do (”Traps are my flirting”) that also diminishes the impact of women’s behaviour (I guess Missy trapping people is no big deal?)

- Everyone in the universe’s motivation is entirely about the Doctor

Also everyone is wearing black now, when did that become a thing? Someone needs to introduce these characters to colour.

And in spite of a lot of scene changes and different characters, not much actually happened. I guess the Doctor kills children now, if they don’t meet his moral standards.

They were all throwaway lines so they were easy to miss.

The bisexual joke was when Clara made a joke about how Jane Austen was a great kisser (which is also emphasising Jane Austen’s imagined kiss with a companion over her actual accomplishments).

The transphobic jokes were Missy’s “when the Doctor was a little girl” joke and the later comment about the snake guy being a “man in a dress”.

empowerment is such a useless concept tbh.

your personal feelings on make-up really don’t matter when you’re talking about structural oppression. feminism doesn’t give a shit whether you are ~empowered~ from wearing eyeliner or not.

what feminism cares about is the fact that girls are pressured and groomed to wear make-up from their childhood on, that employers are less likely to hire you or pay you well if you don’t wear make-up, that the beauty industry is largely controlled by men and focused on making women feel insecure about their natural body so they can advance capitalism, that the beauty industry spends billions of dollars each year to contribute to the idea all girls are raised into that it’s only their looks that matter and give them worth.