On Doctor Who and the Somber Puppies

[danieldwilliam]

 

I have been watching Doctor Who. It is nice to have it back on television again after what felt like a long time where it was only sort of television.
 

Enter your cut contents here.

 

I'm enjoying it so far. It's okay. A solid 63 /100. I'm fine with that given that it's early days for a new cast and writing team. Each of the episodes have been solid route one sort of stuff. The Doctor encounters a bad alien or a mis-understood alien and then sorts them out. Definately Doctor Who stories. Self-contained and more or less coherent. Particularly if one is prepared to accept that Doctor Who is science fantasy adventure involving a time traveller and not a work of science fiction and particulary not a work of science fiction about time travel. There is even running about on corridors on a mysterious space ship. Vintage Who.

So far, nothing about it has made me think "Mmmh, that's interesting, I feel compelled to think more about that." or "I didn't see that coming", or indeed, made me think much about anything. Well not deliberately. The Rosa Parks episode got me thinking about the public perception of how political campaigning happens but mostly because the writers got the actual history wrong. I have other thoughts - those are in the Somber Puppies part of this post, which I suppose we are approaching, because unlike the Doctor I can't conveniently manipulate time itself in order to avoid an awkward plot point.

I'm not *loving* Jodie Whitaker's performance as much as I'd hoped. It feels a little giddy at times, like Matt Smith after too much sugar and there has been at least one moment in each episode where the acting gears have ground enough to stop me watching the television and start watching the acting. Perhaps I started by being too focused on the acting because I wanted it to be great. I'm still not sure if the problem lies with the plot, the writing , the directing or with the performance, or perhaps the very specific part of the audience that is struggling with it a bit, me.

If that all feels like I'm not enjoying it, well I am. I look forward to watching the programme. I plan the family weekend around it. The Captain and I talk about it. I have not once found myself buried under the duvet screaming "Moffat, you utterable ****!" Small steps forward, small steps forward. A solid 63/100 with plenty of open road and good will in front of it.

Except I think in one area. The place where the Somber Puppies dwell and I greatly fear that they may have just the glimmer of a point. I think their point might lie in a failure of the moral courage required by the writing team to do well what they will be accused of doing anyway. A failure to give it both barrels with Checkov's Gun.

If I understand the Sad Puppies argument it was that there was a trend in modern science fiction to chose cultural and indentity politics issues (or perhaps touchstones, shibboleths, signals or McGuffins) and prioritise those over plot, good writing or the science bit of science fiction and that considerations of plot, literature and Science! were more important in the genre than explorations of identity politics could ever be. They were concerned that the genre of science fiction was being used as a tool in the (a) culture war. That many people on the other side didn't mind *what* was being done or how well it was described so long as it was being done by a BAME, LGTB, woman possibly speaking non-standard English. Science fiction was being ruined for the real fans by focusing on identify politics and not what proper science fiction ought to be about.

Some (many) suggested that they were not in good faith - and the Rabid Puppies joined in and it all got a bit tasty and then N K Jemisin won three Hugos on the trot and everyone declared that they had been right all along but the Rabid Puppies had an actual country to run now so would be busy until Janaury 2023 but they would return.

I shall be refering to the good-faith, iron-man (or possibly the irony, man) version of this critique as the Somber Puppies to avoid the tribal confusion between the Sad Puppies, the Rabid Puppies and The Puppies Against Whiskers on Kittens, Nice Things and  Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String or fascist bastards as my grandads would have called them just before launching a hobnailed boot or the payload of a Lancaster bomber at them.

It's not a view to which I subscribe. I'm always wary about ought statements. Call me a lawyer with a strong interest in jurisprudence and constitutional law and a side order in political activism in the field of constitutional reform but when someone starts using the word "ought" without doing some ground work (or ground norm work) then I start looking to see where the money trail leads. Mostly I don't subscribe to the view of the Somber Puppies because a) it seems entirely possible to do "good traditional science fiction" but without defaulting to having white USian men as the lead characters, b) science fiction has a role in exploring the impacts of science on the community, on the economics, politics, society and culture of the community - if some writers want to focus on how some elements of hypothetical science impact on people who are not hypothetically white USian men that seems to fall squarely in to the remit of science fiction to me, we have come a long way from The Cold Equation, and only a few white people have been thrown out of the airlock and c) 90% of science fiction is a bit rubbish anyway.

But I worry a bit that the current season of Doctor Who is flirting with the Somber Puppies and not in a good way. I think it has explicitly chosen a side in the (a)  (US) culture wars. Doctor Who has always been an implicitly liberal (in the British sense) even Whiggish television programme. I wonder if it has gotten itself overtly involved in a tussle beyond its ken.

Specifically I think two episodes Arachnids in the UK and the Tsuranga Conundrum contained elements that pushed a talking point from one of the sides in the US culture war without exploring them much or particularly well.

Checkov's Gun (to which we have returned, as we must,) has not delivered both barrels.

The parody of Donald Trump was not great and largely ad hominem. It ridiculed the man but not the impact of the man. I'm all for the parody of objectionable human beings in positions of power. Satire is a powerful weapon when it's the only weapon you have. I'm not sure that mocking someone's mental health by referencing their obsessive compulsive focus on washing their hands is a safe place to satirise Donal Trump. It's not big and it's not clever - a bit like Donald Trump. There's plenty of things that he's chosen to do that are worth mocking. I'm not sure that the satire added much to the episode. The main premise of the episode seemed to me to be that cutting edge science and corner-cutting lowest-bid dodgy capitalists might not mix well (see the use of antibiotics in cows, genetically modified crops, deep learning and the use of targeted adverts etc). I'm not sure that a Trumpian figure was necessary. Trump doesn't actually do the things where science and capitalism mix badly. He's an old fashioned grifter, banging a populist right wing drum and probably in over his head but too thrawn and proud to be manipulated as planned by his puppet masters. Targeted ads were done for him, not by him and the episode didn't satirise how the character flaws of a Trumpian capitalist in particular would lead to problems.  Any generic capitalist would have done and perhaps Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg would have been a better target for the satire. So my conclusion is that the satire was not there to expose (for example) the convenient and lucrative lack of self-awareness about where the boundary between private enterprise and the public realm lies that one sees in Zuckerberg or the use of identy politics to create and mis-direct fear and anger in the guise of a bumbling but straight-talking man of the people that is one of the actually dangerous aspects of Trump but just to poke fun at Donald Trump, the person,  - and therefore to place Doctor Who into one of two camps in a foreign conflict. (Perhaps a quarrel in a far away land that we or the BBC know little about.)

To what end was Trump mocked? Mostly to the end of mocking Trump. Checkov's Gun has been fired but perhaps at the wrong target.

The Tsuranga Conundrum had a pregnant man and I thought it dealt with it superficially. The purpose of a pregnant individual in an adventure story is to pin the heroes with a sympathetic, deadline driven problem. They are not the focus of the story, they are there to make things difficult for the heroes whilst they try to deal with the main issue. They are a Maternity Crisis. Similar devices include time-bombs,  people trapped in various things or the Irish Border. Why not have a man be pregant? Well, males being pregnant is a bit of a larger science fiction story than a female being pregnant. Woman bites dog and so on. The reason for this is that female is the sex that gets pregnant, or rather, animals that get pregnant are called females.  We're in to r/K type strategic choices within species and the harsh evolutionary economics of arms races and co-evolved behaviours. So a species which has always had males who get pregnant could get you in to an exploration of the kinds of dimorphism one would expect with sexual reproduction, whether these are immutably fixed where ever you have sexual reproduction in animals and / or how much culture and gender is necessarily linked to asymetric risk reward in sexual reproduction or body form. Or one could poke about in the changes in human society or in individuals if a technological change meant that human (Terran) men could now become pregnant when this wasn't always the case (See Iain M Banks for details). But that probably requires a bit more room than there is room for, for a plot device which is secondary or tertiary to the main action.

See TV Topes Maternity Crisis for all the details and more you would want.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MaternityCrisis

I wonder what the choice to have a pregnant man acting as the Maternity Crisis is for. There's not time to explore the full breadth and depth of it. The writers chose not to do so. They chose to make the maleness of the pregnancy largely disposable. There were a couple of nods to the cultural aspects of it. Ryan and Graham seem a bit confused that a pregnant man would want other men around him during labour (or the necessary C-section for which some evolutionary  adaptations - no pain receptors so you can cut the bloke open - have happened but not the crucial adaptation of a valve to the outside world). Unless the point was that a story about a pregnant was pointless than I'm not sure there was much of a point to it.

I fear it looks like virtue signalling of exactly the sort that the Somber Puppies thought was getting in the way of properly telling proper stories. We need some added drama in this episode, let us add in a Maternity Crisis, but, har-har, we'll make the pregant person a man, just for lolz but we won't spend any time exploring what that actually means.  It's just there to be cool and groovy. For the record I don't think it detracted very much from the story, but I think it did distract a bit from the story without taking the opportunity to do much of interest with the distraction.

Checkov's Gun has been pointed at, taken down off the wall and fired but it turns out to be loaded with blanks. Although even if blanks are being fired one should always use barrier protection just in case.

So there are two examples of hat-tips, at best, to science fictional issues that have relevance in the current debate about indenty politics and 21st Century Western Capitalism without much in the way of dramatic follow through or follow up. I don't think they did the hard work of making them interesting. If they weren't going to make them interesting, what were they for?  For sure you can argue that the show doesn't have the space and the target audience doesn't have the bandwidth to deal with a full on exploration of these things. Perhaps my expectations are unreasonable. But from behind my sofa it feels almost as if the writers have taken a side in a political argument that is largely framed in terms of the US and wanted to signal that they were on that side and then run out of time and energy to do the job properly.

Comments

[notasupervillain]

I haven't seen the new Who, but in general I agree about your Somber Puppies point. My only caveat is that regular stories often suck, and I think virtue signaling stories should be allowed to suck too. I know this isn't your point (63 isn't a bad score), but it's something I encounter a lot in media criticism and I think needs its own set of puppies. Like, why does the show starring a woman need to be twice as good? Why can't it have occasionally rubbish acting and plot points out of mediocre fan fic and the occasional overly didactic storyline? Everything else does. Why do bad episodes of shows starring women matter more than those starring men?

(I know why. I still want you to name a puppy after the phenomenon.)

[danieldwilliam]

Aye - there's no need to expect a programme with a woman in a pivotal role to always be better than the average show. I agree, it ought to be okay for them to be mediocre or to have particular episodes that are poor or a bit random.

I personally was looking forward to Jodie Whitaker being really, really good because she's been really really good in the other things I've seen her in - also written by Chibnall and co-starring David Tennant. I was more worried about Chibnall as a writer.

I will give some thougth to a suitable Puppy naming convention.

Part of my unease here about the vitue signalling is that I worry for the long term future of a programme which I hold in great affection. Casting Whitaker as the Doctor was already going to alientate some viewers and I worry a bit that intentionally virtue signalling to the point where some viewers think they are being got at might see the BBC involved in a conflict in the US about which it doesn't know enough to know what it doesn't know. I'm not sure I have the mental energy to cope with years and years of Trump supporters demanding that the BBC hand over the head of Chibnall.

I don't think 63 /100 is a bad score - particularly for a show that is in the middle of a mini-reboot. The first season of a new Doctor is usually a bit bland and messy. If this were the third season of Whitaker / Chibnall and it was still getting mid-60's scores I'd be less happy.

I am enjoying sitting on the sofa with my son every Sunday evening very much.

[notasupervillain]

63 is decent score. It used to be high enough for me to definitely to watch something. Now, I'm sure I'd like it, but I have so little TV watching time so I probably won't get down the list to Dr Who. If it gets to high 80s, I'll reorder the list.

I think time is the answer. I didn't like Tennant when he first appeared on the scene, and in retrospect that's an amazingly talented writer and actor.

I agree that the virtue signaling will get them into trouble if they don't knock it off. But it shouldn't! Lots of shows starring men virtue signal in stupid ways and we all roll our eyes and get over it.

Let me know if (when) the show gets good enough that I need to move it to the top of the list :)

[danieldwilliam]

I shall do so.

I expect that it will take about half way through the second season before it finds its feet properly.

[notasupervillain]

You know where to find me.

[danieldwilliam]

What examples of shows staring men virtue signalling in stupid ways particularly stand out for you?

[notasupervillain]

I don't watch much TV, so I can't give TV examples. But Justin Trudeau does this All The Time and it drives me up the wall. And he gets lauded for virtue signal so ridiculous that I don't think any woman would dare say it.

[mountainkiss]

This seems horribly churlish but is there any possibility of this being under a cut tag? It’s so very long.

[danieldwilliam]

There is - I find the cut tag function in dreamwidth significantly less good than the cut tag functionality in LiveJournal which in turn I never found particularly intuitive but I've found 5 minutes to figure it out.

[mountainkiss]

I’ve always just used the LJ HTML which weirdly still works in DW despite actually having LJ in the code. Thank you for doing this.

[danieldwilliam]

It's not that it doesn't work, I just find that it doesn't work well for me.

Problem located between desk and chair.

[mountainkiss]

I’m not following the last sentence. Really sorry.

[danieldwilliam]

I am the cause of the problem, rather than something to do with the set up, I am located between my desk and my chair.

[mountainkiss]

Oh I see! I haven't heard that term.

[danieldwilliam]

It's been a favourite of mine since I first heard it.

[andrewducker]

I found the latest episode pretty dull. And, frankly, most of them haven't done much for me. I liked bits of Rosa, but largely they haven't given me The Feels much at all.

For all of RTD and Moffat's flaws, they generally managed at least one or two episodes per season that had me saying "Yes, that was awesome!" and reminded me why I keep watching.

[danieldwilliam]

I agree. I've not yet seen anything that makes me think WoW but equally I've lost my temper so much that I've felt the need to throw the television out of the window.