Moffat vs Davies: The Doctor Who Face-Off

Doctor Who fandom is a very strange, varied, and fervent lot. You have your old-school fans who look upon the new series and its fandom as trendy knockoffs and posers. You have your new fans that started with Tennant or Smith, and have never seen so much as a single episode of the original series. You have fans that love both, and fans that viciously tear apart characters and creators aside from their own personal favourites. Myself, I'm aware of the flaws in the series, the sometimes stilted storytelling and cheap effects of the classics and the weird pacing and oft-too intense focus on romance in the new series, but love the show for all of its flaws and and successes. My favourite Doctor, for the record, is Sylvester McCoy (7), and my least-favourite is one I still have a great deal of respect for, Jon Pertwee (3).

Russell T. Davies was the man who launched the show again in 2005. He was the one who cast Eccleston and Tennant, the one who created Rose Tyler, and the man responsible for the show's rebirth. He's also the man who brought us the farting Slitheen, the blowjob paving stone, and season 2 Rose Tyler. But he was progressive in a good way, introducing a lot of diverse characters and giving them some depth. We wouldn't have Captain Jack Harkness (wink, smile) without him, and he was beloved by much of fandom for this.

About six months or so before it was even announced, there was a great disturbance in the force. Steven Moffat, who had brought us "Blink", "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances" (Everybody lives!), and "The Girl in the Fireplace" (sob) was to take over the show from RTD. Maybe it's hyperbole, maybe it's me mis-remembering, but I'm sure there were cries of misogyny before "The Eleventh Hour" even aired. According to a very vocal section of fandom, Moffat hates women. Moffat's female characters are terrible. But what's the truth?

Your combatants, picture courtesy whatculture.com

I seem to be making a habit of shittingon waifus lately, so let's dive in.

• Rose Tyler: I like series 1 Rose Tyler. I do. She's a sweet, well-meaning girl from a rough neighbourhood who has a very small life. She's got a boyfriend she's not too serious about, and at this point in her life, they're good for each other. Then she starts traveling with the Ninth Doctor and her universe expands. She faces death without blinking. She saves the day a few times herself and points out the obvious when Nine overlooks it. But somewhere in the first 20 minutes or so of Series 2's "Tooth and Claw", she starts turning obnoxious and gobby, and her entire character devolves into fawning over the pretty 10th Doctor as she grows more and more detached from her roots.
• Martha Jones: This one irritates me greatly. Martha is an accomplished young medical student, a doctor-in-training herself, ready to accept the fantastical and jump in with both feet. She maintains this greatness save for one flaw that destroys her character: she's got a crush on the 10th Doctor, and you can see the huffy sighs and irritated eye-rolling every time he mentions Rose. It isn't until she's forced to save the world herself that she finally realizes that she's got to get away from him, as it's unhealthy for her.
• Donna Noble: Donna started off gobby and obnoxious, but in a relatable way. She's older than previous companions, but still working a shit job and living at home. She remains gobby and obnoxious, but grows into a more confident and capable person along the way. Then it's all undone with a tear-jerking slide back into mediocrity by the end with amnesia that will explode her head if she ever remembers and regains that confidence and competence.
• Kylie Minogue: Kylie Minogue in a sexy cocktail waitress dress. 
• The Lady Christina de Souza: GOD DAMMIT RTD YOU COCKTEASE

I weep for what could have been.

So that's RTD. I am unimpressed. Let's look at Moffat.

• Amelia “Amy” Pond: Let's just overlook the fact that she's a nearly six foot tall Glaswegian redhead that seems genetically engineered to turn my head; Amy Pond is a mess. When we meet her she is working as a stripper (shut up, she's a stripper, it's a family show so they play it off as kiss-o-gram) and is emotionally unbalanced because of the promise of adventure that is ripped away from her as a child (YOU SAID FIVE MINUTES!!). She's got a boyfriend whose relationship with her she promptly denies in their first encounter with the Doctor, and then proceeds to walk all over him, pushing him around and generally giving him no say in their relationship, to the point of passive-aggressing him into divorce before a forced reconciliation. Amy Pond is complex. She's a properly human and fleshed-out character. She's not a very pleasant person, but she's interesting.
• River Song: Controversial, this one. A lot of people can't stand River, and it's probably due to her first few appearances, coming onto the scene like a proper Mary Sue, with all the air of an established character with her 'sweeties' and her 'spoilers.' I've heard a lot of complaints thrown in Moffat's direction about how a 'strong female character' was brought low by being turned first into a lunatic and then into a simpering weak woman. The problem is, that's proper character development, but shown in reverse, because we're seeing most of her life in reverse order to the Doctor's timeline. River is born on Demon's Run, kidnapped as a baby by religious zealots and brainwashed into finding and murdering the Doctor before escaping, regenerating into a rebellious young child who grows up with Amy, then regenerating again when meeting the Doctor, attempting to murder him before breaking her programming, then kidnapped and re-programmed to kill him again. She then spends time in prison and the timeline is fuzzy, but by the time we meet her in her first appearance she's the capable and confident badass and has retroactively earned that sass she displays. An interesting experiment in character building that I enjoyed the more I watched.
• Clara Oswald: Clara spent a year as a temporal construct, a person split into many people that existed for a short time long enough to save the Doctor from the Great Intelligence before he figured out the mystery that she was and retrieved her from the temporal winds of his own timeline. We don't meet  the real Clara Oswald until the 50th anniversary special, where she begins to grow as a character, free from her duty to protect the Doctor from an omnipresent enemy. By the first episode with Capaldi's 12th Doctor, we have a much clearer picture of her: She's a teacher. She's got a life outside the TARDIS, and uses the Doctor as a weekend getaway. She's got control issues, and doesn't entirely trust him. She's incredibly awkward around someone she's got a romantic interest in, and adorably he mirrors that. And after the tragic events of last series finale, she's got even more room to grow.

  

  Pictured: Control Issue.

In conclusion, I'm going to state very firmly that Steven Moffat writes better women than Russell T. Davies did. I say this for two reasons:

1. Moffat's companions don't define themselves by a romantic interest in the Doctor.
2. They're complex and relatable people. 

I will credit Davies with Donna Noble (until her last episode), but that's all he's getting from me.

“I'm not your boyfriend, Clara.”

“I never thought you were.”

“I never said it was your mistake...”

Joss Whedon 2: The Whedoning

So last week, you may have noticed me taking Joss Whedon to task. I admit I was being harsh in my assessments, but there was a purpose behind it. This week, Joss Whedon would seem to have fallen down some stairs or walked into a doorknob, because angry feminists certainly didn't run him off of Twitter. That would just be horseshit. Feminists love Joss Whedon, and would never call him an absolute trash can or misogynist baloney man, threaten to ruin him, or demand that they fight him.

Oh.

So Age of Ultron came out and, keeping to the barest minimum of spoilers here, some very vocal people got mad. Like real mad. Butt-mad. Pee-pee hearted. 

Joss Whedon is now both racist and misogynist. The racism comes from Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, both of which are of Roma and Jewish heritage in the comics, having been cast as two clearly white actors and now being portrayed as 'nazi sympathizers.' Now, Romani people hailing originally from India, I can kind of see how not casting them with slightly darker complexioned actors might be a valid complaint, except that no one complained about the lily-white kids in Days of Future Past, and they're portrayed as slavic in AoU mostly due to Marvel not having the rights to Magneto. As for the 'nazi sympathizers' thing, Hydra isn't public knowledge in the MCU. I sincerely doubt a couple of mid-20s slavic kids are up to date on WWII military history. 

The misogyny comes from a couple of places: Tony Stark's 'prima nocta' joke, and Black Widow being damseled and mentioning her sterilization. I've gone back and forth with a few people on the sterilization thing, and I'm pretty solidly falling on the side of her meaning that her entire upbringing made her a monster and the sterilization was there to identify with Banner, who mentioned it first. Scarlet Witch's near-breakdown is also being tossed about, but she's pretty unstable to begin with due to her powers and I really don't think I'd fare too much better if my first combat situation was an extinction-level event either. At least give her credit that after Hawkeye's pep talk, she came out swinging and cleared the field.

Widow was damseled, but then she was 1 on 1 with Ultron. Widow is a covert operative, so if you've thrown her and Hawkeye on the field, you're already losing. In my opinion, they shouldn't even be on the field in the first place. Thor and Hulk should be making lots of noise while Widow and Hawkeye are taking out targets without anyone knowing they're even there. So when Widow goes up against a walking extinction-level event, I don't fault her for losing. I'm calling bullshit on her not being able to unlock her cell door, though. She could build a radio transmitter in a cave with a box of scraps, but had to wait for Banner to shoot the lock off? Nah.

So for nearly a week, outrage was directed at Joss Whedon. Vile insults and threats hurled his way. One might even say... harassment. Laced, peppered, scattered, smothered, and chunked with social justice terminology and gender/racial commentary. But it couldn't be harassment, because I've not heard it called that by the news outlets covering it. Strange, is it not,  when in one situation any form of criticism -- from mild and constructive to obscene and overt -- is directed at, say, a pop culture critic, it's harassment and threats, but it's not harassment when another group with even more extreme intensity directs it at a different person. No bad tactics, only bad targets, eh?

Keep pushing, Patton. You'll get there.

Then, something strange happened. The narrative shifted. The headlines went from “did angry feminists run Joss Whedon off of Twitter?” to “Angry feminists did NOT run Joss Whedon off of Twitter.” With all the familiar vocabulary of someone all too familiar with glass ashtrays being hurled at his head and walking on eggshells around a volatile significant other, Whedon made a public statement. No, he says, it's not that at all. I'm totally used to that (which I find even more disturbing). They did nothing wrong, so please don't think badly of them. 

Even his last tweet, thanking everyone for being so kind before closing out his account, reminds me of the last words I spoke to my ex-wife before I moved out, that all I wanted was the best for her. Said mostly so that things didn't turn ugly as I was walking out the door. I hope someone appreciates him falling on his sword for the cause.

Still, it feels like some self-awareness may be dawning here, especially inthis section: 

“Every breed of feminism is attacking every other breed, and every sub-section of liberalism is always busy attacking another sub-section of liberalism, because god forbid they should all band together and actually fight for the cause.”

Even seems some other people that have recently been complicit in holding up dodgy narratives have buckled under the strain. I also find it interesting that he says “literally the second person” to call and make sure he was okay was saintly Anita Sarkeesian, especially considering her writer and producer Jonathan McIntosh had no hesitation in shitting on Age of Ultron's 'hyper-masculinity' from a great height.

Pictured: Jonathon McIntosh shitting upon AoU from a great height.

Anyway. We all know the reason Joss quit Twitter was because I railed on him last week. Correlation, causation, and all that. I'm taking full responsibility for it. I am all-powerful! I will crush the lesser races, conquer the galaxy! Unimaginable power! UNLIMITED RICE PUDDING!

Now maybe I can get on with my next waifu-shitting fit that I've been delaying for like six months. Here's a hint, in proper Whedonesque style. It's two words:  Doctor...

Joss Whedon: Kiss the Ring

In which I shit on everyone's waifu again.

I've been a long-time viewer of Joss Whedon's television shows. Being a life-long nerd, it's sort of expected that I'd have faithfully followed at least one of them, and I'll be upfront and tell you that I came in kind of late on Buffy, starting with (the atrocious in retrospect) season six and then catching up on the previous episodes as well as Angel, on reruns. I probably pirated the first copies of Firefly. I even watched Dollhouse. When I heard he was directing Avengers, I was excited, and I wasn't let down when I saw it.

But something's always struck me as odd about Joss Whedon's work. Everyone who's anyone when it comes to voicing girl-power, smash-the-patriarchy sentiments seems to worship his work and hang on every baffling word the man tweets. And I just don't get it.

Someone once asked Joss “Why do you write strong female characters?” His response was the utterly glib “Because you keep asking me that question.” But that's the thing, he doesn't write strong female characters. He writes Strong Female Characters. As in, that's their one defining trait: they're strong. I mean, sure, every now and then you get a character like Cordelia, who had serious character growth... after she was moved off the mothership and onto the spinoff, with writing being handled primarily not by Joss, but mostly it's just “spindly kung-fu waif”:  Buffy, River Tam, Echo, and now Black Widow.

Look at the contrast between Widow in Iron Man 2 and Winter Soldier vs Avengers. She beats up some dudes and then runs away from Hulk. She gets exactly one good scene in Avengers, when she fools Loki. In Winter Soldier, she moves the story forward almost single-handedly. In Iron Man 2, she goes from "coquettish secretary suspiciously proficient in martial arts" to "complete and total badass" in a fight scene that she has yet to surpass in the MCU.

I just don't get why Joss Whedon is so revered by the feminist crowd that even Anita Sarkeesian won't criticize him, despite literally putting a woman in a refrigerator.

Pictured: Literal Woman In Refrigerator

Whedon treats his female characters like shit. And not in the good way where bad stuff happens to them and they struggle to overcome it, he's just got a blatant disrespect for them. There's so much that's “problematic” in his work, from the year-long date-rape scene between Buffy and Spike that was season six to the aforementioned fridging of River Tam, to the sexual imagery used in the Widow interrogation scene at the beginning of Avengers to the entire concept of Dollhouse. One could, if one were of a mind for critical theory, claim that Joss's library of work is dripping with misogyny. 

Then there's his actions and words outside of his work. Joss Whedon once spoke at an Equality Now event about how he hated the word “Feminism.” When The Mary Sue were 'fanning themselves' over Chris Pratt in the Jurassic World clip, Joss replied that he was too busy bemoaning how it was “70s era sexist.” Goony beard-man mansplains to women how they're wrong about feminism. And they love him for it.

Now don't get me wrong, when it comes to character and dialogue, he's pretty damn good. And his shows have consistently had great action scenes. I'm glad they gave him the Avengers films, because in sequential storytelling, the Avengers films are the series finale episodes that are just witty banter and big fight scenes. The really interesting stories like "Cap and Widow on the run" and "Tony suffering PTSD" take place in the connecting episodes, but give Joss the big slap-bang fight scenes and let him ad-lib with RDJ for 2 hours... and forgive him for panning the camera over Scarlett Johannesburg's T&A like Michael Bay hopped up on goofballs.

This is also why Guardians of the Galaxy was in every way a better movie than Avengers, despite it having no real right to be. Gauntlet thrown, fanboys. Come at me.

M'sogyny

So here's to you, Joss. A tip of the fedora to someone who I have no idea banks so much goodwill amongst the progressive gender-focused crowd when you have no real right to it.