Yes, but they were well-written adventures, first. I never thought any earlier episodes started with the “what points do we want to make” question, like recent ones have.
But is that because they didn’t start with that question, or because the writers were skilled enough to disguise it?
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no snark intended here: maybe that’s more of a reflection about what issues you’re comfortable with - what feels “natural” to you - than the show or it’s writers
when we see stuff we’re comfortable with it’s easier to focus on the adventure, when we see things we’re uncomfortable with that feeling persists despite the adventure
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Well, now we are splitting hairs, perhaps. Basically, the Jodi-era showrunner / writer was too often not up to snuff, IMHO. But Russell T Davies was a hard act to follow - and I’m glad to see him back.
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Ncuti Gatwa is 5’8” Russell Davies is 6’5”. (Things I had to look up after seeing a picture of the two of them together)
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In the example of the Mutants, it was absolutely, explicitly meant to be political and written with that goal in mind. We know that, because the script editor, Terrance Dicks, said as much. The show runner at the time, Barry Letts was very interested in making political stories during his time in charge of the show. We know that, because he said as much. If you can get ahold of the dvds they were releasing back in the 2000s, you get a lot of depth on what they were doing and why.
But… I have really no idea why people think that popular culture should be free from politics. Much of the apolitical shows are pretty boring and have very little to say about the world. Why watch that?
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Any talk of gender identity is being purged from the BBC. Trans people aren’t allowed to talk on the BBC about anything other than transgender now, and only with a TER chaperone to berate us for every word. The TERs get no similar treatment, although they are so obsessed with trans people they rarely talk about anything else. They think about my genitals more than I do, and I’m the person they give dysphoria to.
The BBC even give air time to holocaust denying transphobes. Do I need to do the Magnus Hirschfeld talk again?
Yeah, it was right wing 10 years ago, and has taken a further hard right turn in the last few years. I’m surprised that the director-general didn’t mandate that the next Doctor was a beige cardigan wearing white straight cisgender man.
Or did you mean something else, like what the Qanon antivaxxers believe about the BBC?
Just a reminder, the opposite of left-wing politics is right-wing politics. Apoliticalism is the only non political view, the act of not caring one way or another. If you are motivated enough to tell people your opinion without directly being asked, you are not apolitical.
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I don’t think that. I specifically said I have no objection to political stories.
Absolutely not. I was not uncomfortable with any of the issues covered. It was just so damn blatant - zero subtlety - to the extent that in some of them the actual storyline seemed very badly shoehorned around the politics. The writers many years ago managed not to do that - they managed the balance well and above all wrote compelling stories where the politics was clear but did not distract from the story.
In some recent cases I found that distraction too much and it spoiled the experience. And - if it is not clear, I’ll repeat myself - NOT because of the politics or the nature of them, but because of the way they were crudely slapped on the actual story.
The best way I can analogise it is that it is like the difference between clever writing where the story points are picked up on the way through, and bad writing where characters have to pronounce screeds of exposition to tell the audience what is going on. We’ve all seen TV shows that suffer from this. Some recent Doctor Who episodes were as ham-fisted as that with the way the perfectly fine political issues were handled.
But that’s just my view.
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Yeah - I was hoping Rupert Grint would take on the role.
That said - will certainly check out the newest Doctor when I can.
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So if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing, your objection is not that stories are written deliberately to address particular political points, but that in some cases it is done poorly and unskilfully?
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I mean… there is not a single sci-fi franchise that hasn’t had schlocky stories at times… It’s the nature of the beast.
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It’ll be interesting watching the gammons explode in the coming weeks/months/years over this.
I’ve done all sorts of fantasy casting of the role since the reboot (Chiwetel Ejiofor was always a favorite of mine for the part since the Eccleston days, though he instantly became too big a movie star for that to ever happen), and previously they picked people that took me by surprise, but this is the first time they picked someone I’d never even seen before. (Which, given how much British tv I watch, and how the actors show up in everything, is a bit of an accomplishment.)
Weirdly, he doesn’t seem to have anything that I can identify as a Scottish accent in the interviews I’ve just watched. I don’t know if he was staying in character, adopted a more London accent when he moved there, or his parents’ accents had more of an impact than living in Scotland.
Although English nationalists have completely co-opted “British” to mean “English,” so that’s coming from both sides…
Hey, Doctor Who is supposed to be about destroying fascists and fighting authoritarianism, poking fun at colonialism and fighting for social justice and against thinly-veiled stand-ins for Thatcher… not “politics!”
Well, that’s sort of true in that in the new retconned mythology, the Doctor is like some sort of ur-Timelord, a unique being who became the means by which the Timelords made themselves into Timelords, by making themselves like her. (Ironically this is all based on stuff they came up with for the original run of the show, which was canceled before they fully got into it.)
With RP English accents, no less. (There was a minor freak-out over Eccleston and his Northern accent, for example…)
The driving forces behind the show at its beginning were a woman and a gay Asian man…
Looks back at entire history of Doctor Who… yeah, nothing new there. Doctor Who is not-infrequently ham-handed about (/gestures expansively)… everything. I’m frequently annoyed by their weak plots in service to something, but they’re mostly not politics.
Or they were fans when they were, you know, kids. Children for whom the politics went completely over their heads and they never thought about it since. Now they’re confronting it as adults and realizing their politics conflict with the show’s, and can’t deal with it.
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So you’ve never seen Sex Education?
You’re in for a treat!
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Extremely. In a way that suggests the motivation was not “let’s write a great story and attempt some sound political education while we are at it” but “let’s indoctrinate the audience - oh, we need a story? Oh, well - let’s cobble something together.”
It was that bad, at times.
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*crosses fingers for announcement of next Bond*
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Black, Scottish and an immigrant - the Daily Mail is going to have an absolute aneurysm (we can hope).
Good luck to him - I wish him all the best in opening up television to people of all backgrounds.
Now can we have some equally radical choices for scripts?
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I really want to see Peter Dinklage have a go as the Doctor.
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Ah, I see. The writers and other makers of the show are out to 'indoctrinate" the masses.
These indoctrinators, are they in the room with you now? And can you show me on this doll where they hurt you?
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Will he reprise his Game of Thrones accent as the Doctor?
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What makes it indoctrination? A story having political intentions isn’t necessarily indoctrination, especially when it’s going against the grain of the hegemonic ideology.
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