Women and Their Stories in Doctor Who

[fauxkaren]

So, I ended up getting into a really great discussion with therealycats about RTD's Women in Doctor Who vs Moffat's Women in Doctor Who over in this post and while replying to her comments, I realized that I was basically writing the meta that I'd been toying around with writing, so I edited my comments together to create this post. If you want to see my

Comments

[shinyopals]

I am too sleepy to feel like making an intelligent comment rn, but IA with this essay.

It almost makes it worse that I legitimately like Amy and River a lot, because I want them to have these great stories and awesome lives but they do not. I also can't get over how horrifying/messed up River's life actually is and how unacknowledged that is.

[fauxkaren]

Yeah, River's personality grew on me a LOT in series 5, so it sucks that she's saddled with that convoluted and sucky story. And Amy had a lot of potential as a character (as witnessed in The Girl Who Waited), but the show just so completely failed to really capitalize on that. Basically for me, both of their characters are really missed opportunities.

[_thirty2flavors]

Yeah, after two seasons I can say I am genuinely fond of Amy Pond (not something I could've said mid-s5). But is that an accomplishment of the writing, or just Karen Gillan settling into the role and being really really likable? I don't know. Similarly with River, I started off s6 thinking "okay, okay, I'm finally into this character everyone else says is a BAMF, this is awesome".

But then neither of their storylines this season worked for me. Amy's story would have been stronger to me if she'd chosen to leave in God Complex rather than be left by the Doctor. River... everything there was a hot mess.

After two seasons I feel like I like Amy, but I don't feel like I really know her. She's a ..model now, I guess, but I don't know why, etc.

[_thirty2flavors]

Yeah, I saw his PAY ATTENTION tweet, which I found deeply irritating because I do pay attention, thanks, and all we saw on screen was her being a perfume model and signing an autograph. At BEST I can extrapolate she's famous for something nonspecific.

It's true that it's Gareth Roberts, so he probably deserves some of the blame. I tend to assume that anything major regarding a companion was at least looked at and approved by the showrunner, and I figured Amy's post-Doctor career would fall into that category, though given that it had absolutely 0 impact on anything I guess I could be wrong in that assumption.

To clarify, I mean that if I think something is significant to the overall plot arc and/or a major character's arc (like Amy's career), I assume the showrunner calls the shots there. A line or basic premise that makes me wince is going to fall on the head of whoever wrote the episode. For instance in "Closing Time" I think there was a line about a hot babysitter? Unnecessary, gross, and definitely Gareth Roberts, not Moffat's

[_thirty2flavors]

I had heard before the episode aired that Amy was a "model" and had seen a screencap of Eleven in front of her ad (it appears much earlier in the episode than it's first drawn attention to) so it was only the little girl that surprised me, and I was left thinking "...are models really that famous?" If the intention was to give Amy a post-Doctor career in something specific to her (beyond the name of a perfume), they failed. Beyond that, what we do see of her career (perfume model/generic celebrity) has nothing to do with what we've seen of Amy as a person and basically boils down to "Karen Gillan sure is hot hur hurr".