Doctor Who: I am going to miss...

[dewline]

...everything after this latest movie, apparently. BBC and Disney+ just announced their Big Deal for access to the series outside of the UK from now on. CTV Sci-Fi is history to them now, just as the CBC was forced by Conservative Party pressure to walk away from their relationship for Canadian broadcast rights years earlier.

I smell ideological pressure on the BBC from somewhere, of course.

Comments

[shanejayell]

That is just weird. I thought BBC was trying to do their own streaming service too?

[dewline]

For domestic audiences only, I think.

[lilly_c]

iPlayer is only for UK viewers, it's still glitchy and crashes a lot despite been around for years.

[mtbc]

It's quite a shame. Government pressure against funding means the BBC looks for money elsewhere and Doctor Who's one of the things that suffers once they notice that they can generate significant overseas revenue from it.

[sabotabby]

I think it's only for distribution? But it still seems like bad news. That said, I torrent it because I want to watch it right away, and I'll feel less bad about that if it's Disney.

[danieldwilliam]

The press release referred a couple of times to things like "shared vision" so Disney might be more involved in the creative direction than just a distribution agreement.

[dewline]

That worries me. Then again, if they're looking to keep the content secure against right-wing pressure groups...?

Dare we hope for that? After all, our title character has been established as transgender by multiple regenerations across the centuries. And the transition from Whittaker to Tennant to Gatwi - and also Jo Martin as the "fugitive" Doctor being introduced during Whittaker's tenure - has certainly become an excuse for other bigotries being trotted around again.

Also, Russell T. Davies' return for a second tour as showrunner...

[danieldwilliam]

To be honest I think the more important worry is whether Russell T. Davies and the BBC production unit can still actually write a coherent story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

[sabotabby]

Hahaha. They certainly haven't been with Chibnall.

[danieldwilliam]

I found quite a lot of Moffat's later output unsatisfying and when Chibnall turned out to be tell less interesting stories in a less well structured way than Moffat I found I was not that interested in watching the programme any more.

[sabotabby]

I'm weirdly loyal to the show even when it sucks. It imprinted on me in childhood. But like, Chibnall's entire run was so bad. And I wanted to like it because female Doctor and so many people were attacking it for being too "woke," except that I found hers the most reactionary run since Three.

But you know, it's not like there's tons of it, so I watch what I get.

[danieldwilliam]

Reactionary in what way?

(I watched little of Chibnall's run and wasn't paying much attention to what I did watch.)

[sabotabby]

Do you have 5 hours? If so I highly recommend the 5-hour "Fall of the Doctor" video.

But in a nutshell (and this is still going to be long):

The first female Doctor is also the most passive Doctor in modern Who, maybe ever. With any story, the writers have a choice: Does she intervene in the event, possibly changing the past/future, or does she observe. "Fixed points" exist as a plot device in order to tell historical stories or to create drama, but the writer is the one choosing whether it's a fixed point story or not.

13 has a disproportionate number of stories where her only role in the plot is to explain things to the audience. Which is kind of bad in terms of gender representation, making the one female Doctor the only one who exists as sort of a Siri for the viewer (especially when they forget and have Graham, the older white man, explain things to her rather than the other way around).

But then it gets worse. Because Chibnall is so determined to do "woke" stories about BIPOC history, what we get is situations of racial injustice where...the Doctor, a white woman, stands by and just lets racism happen. Because history said so. This is most egregious in the massively overrated Rosa episode, where the Doctor forces her companions in to the role of racist white people on the bus so that in the future, racism can be solved??? The episode also has Graham explaining to Ryan who Rosa Parks is, and Yaz talking about how not all cops are racist.

Then we have the Amazon episode. The Doctor has generally been a rebel and an anticapitalist, as recently as 12, but now all of a sudden she loves Amazon? And goes on to the villain, an oppressed worker who is doing a terrorism, that "the system isn't the problem, it's the people." She repeatedly allows evil corporations and individuals to get away with exploitation, something any previous Doctor would have stopped.

The worst, though, is the episode where the Master is a brown guy in Nazi Germany using some kind of disguise, and the Doctor disables his disguise so that the Nazis see that the guy they were working with is brown, and then she runs off and leaves him to be executed or whatever.

It just chafes that people think it's "woke" because they did an episode about Rosa Parks (placing the problem of racism as something foreign and in the past) and have a female Doctor and say trite liberalisms like "the future is female," which actually the race and class politics are so backwards and to the degree that she does anything at all, it's in maintenance of the status quo.

Anyway here's an icon of 12 punching a racist like a proper Doctor does. /rant

[dewline]

Distribution is a form of control, of course...and no comment re: piracy.

[thewayne]

Strange things going on at the Beeb. But I am happy that we'll be getting something worthwhile from Disney+ that isn't tainted by the Mouse.