Mickey, Martha, and the Message that Doesn't Belong on Who
Cut for spoilers for entire season. Crossposted to personal journal.
( Mickey, Martha, and the Message That Doesn't Belong on Who )
( Mickey, Martha, and the Message That Doesn't Belong on Who )
The sample size is small enough that I can still just about handwave it in my head as unfortunate coincidence.
While I'm sure it's not intentional, I'm sure it's not coincidence. Someone from the demographic top of the food chain of his society (disclaimer: like me*) who considers himself enlightened and who means to help is still subject to the unconscious influences of enculturation. (Even the oppressed themselves are subject; cf. the maid in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. And the women in the test audiences of the first Star Trek pilot - which had a female executive officer - who said, "Who does she think she is?") I haven't seen Last of the Time Lords and have only been reading spoilers. I was gratified to read that Martha told the Doctor off and walked away (and yet shall still be back next season). But it's also true that the only other companion to walk away from the Doctor instead of toward something else was white and was argued with, and I hadn't read till now that the Doctor didn't even tell Martha he was sorry, he was so sorry. It'd be the work of three synapses to come up with a retroactive in-character explanation for that, but it's too late now and it'd still play the way neadods says it plays and that's the insidiousness of it and it's too late to fix it.
* Actually I stopped being at the top when I aged past my late thirties.
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When I was posting that comment, I was umming and ahhing on how much to attribute to subconscious influences. I'm not sure I'm entirely ready to accuse the production office of institutional racism, but you definitely have a point.
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But at the same time, actions speak louder than words...
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This was my feeling, and it ignited an internal debate over whether outright racism is worse than the unconscious kind. Here, the unconscious seems to be more destructive, because it is so naturalized in the text. "Subliminal indoctrination". I don't normally cry "think of the children," but this is a show explicitly aimed at a family audience and forming the opinions and enthusiasms of kids - and it's making a hero out of a short-sighted megalomaniac* who has racist and speciesist tendencies (his desire to "save" the Master isn't just history, it's "one of us").
*I think Nine's treatment of Mickey comes a little more out of jealousy/irritation at stupidity, because he does offer him the chance to come along, and covers for him with Rose. In BT, he rags on Mickey a lot less than Jack and Rose do, and there is an element of semi-affectionate ribbing that goes both ways. But Ten and Rose in ROTC/AoS? ::hate::
And sensitivity/exploration of one arena of identity (in RTD's case sexuality) doesn't guarantee awareness in another - Spike Lee's sexism is a great example. The Star Trek example - in the racist climate of 1964, they couldn't stand a human female being second in command, but a male alien was okay? The implications for the status of women are not good.
I have wondered throughout this series whether the general lack of character development for Martha - other than medical student with an adolescent crush, what do we really know of her? - was another form of this unintentional racism. They were afraid to give her any negative traits, they didn't want to make her racially non-specific but didn't want to give her any obvious race markers, and so ended up trapped and did nothing.
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And her family. The only characterisation we were given for the family dynamic was black families = broken.
Tish was stupid.
Leo was useless and then absent (although at least he wasn't yet another absent father like his dad).
And Martha's mum wasn't provided with any motivation for betraying her daughter. I'm presuming someone told her off screen that the Doctor killed her niece, Adeola, at Torchwood but that's too big a leap to require of a family audience.
Martha's dad, whose name I didn't even catch (!!), was shown as weak-willed and controlled by a white woman at the beginning of the series and later got to tell Martha to run away.
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It's possible to justify any of those characterizations; the problem is that it's the entirety of their characterizations, and taken together, it's extremely uncomfortable.
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Yes, and if they were the only example then I might accept that the series hadn't fallen into the black families = broken stereotype but Mickey's family was broken too and Mickey blamed himself for his grandmother's death which strikes me as a rather damning piece of characterisation for a mostly throwaway line in a family series (and if I was feeling picky I could point out that the relationship in The Runaway Bride still makes 100% broken families).
Thank you for Clive's name. I could've googled it but I thought that the fact I didn't even catch it was indicative of his lack of status as a character in the programme.
It's possible to justify any of those characterizations; the problem is that it's the entirety of their characterizations, and taken together, it's extremely uncomfortable.
::nods agreement::
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I could've googled it but I thought that the fact I didn't even catch it was indicative of his lack of status as a character in the programme.
I agree - I only remembered because I thought, "Wow, it's early to be recycling that name." He doesn't even get a memorable name. Plus, both Clive and Pete are portrayed as philanderers "clinging to the nearest blonde." At least Pete got more characterization. Because he's pretty and white, I'm bettin'. Or, to be fair, written by Paul Cornell.
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Oh ****, I'd forgotten the Webbers.
That's it, I'm calling pattern. Sort it out in S4 Rusty or I will shake my fists at you.
(The only thing I don't want to see is "the shared memory of the Year That Never Was brings Francine and Clive back together". Because that would be too trite and easy and yay! your angst is fixed now!)
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This is getting creepier the more I think about it
Well, it's partly a function of the necessities of drama: if there's no conflict, there's no drama. No drama series tv hero has a happy home life. Usually they don't have any at all; but if they do the relationship is either conflicted or uninteresting. E.g., Jackie got less and less screen time the better she and the Doctor got along: her two midseason appearances in Season 2006 were in the alternate universe and in that year's Doctor-lite episode. Hell, look at Torchwood Three: Gwen had a happy, healthy home life when she signed up, and was the only one of them who did, and to make it dramatically viable she had to screw with it. Of all the dramas I watch, about the only one with a happy, healthy marriage for the protagonist is Medium - and those characters are based on happily-married real people.
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Like the racism I described above, it was probably conditioned reflex, in this case tv-writer reflex: "Oh, let's put Martha's family in. What'll be wrong with them?"
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That's true. Surely, though, they've got space for one stable family with an external threat. I particularly wish they'd have a good example of a father - other than Pete in Father's Day, who's not a great husband. People used to moan about Rose's Daddy issues, which I have to say, I never really saw (other than her father died when she was too young to remember him, of course she would have wanted to know about him - and I don't think it had a thing to do with her relationship with the Doctor). But it does start to look like RTD/the team have daddy issues. Interestingly, in the Sarah Jane Adventures, we do get a good dad and a flighty mom, so it's nice to have it spread around a little bit.
Just rambling a bit, but there are other ways of creating conflict, and it would be nice to get a bit of variety. I think having The Idiot's Lantern and Fear Her both is one of the worst decisions they've made because they're so similar - and so close together.
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