Homage to Zog
‘If you’re on Planet Zog, and the Zog people are fighting with the Zog Monster, I don’t give a toss! Who cares about that? If you tell me that there’s a Human colony on Planet Zog, fighting off the elements and trying to survive, then actually I’m interested.’
This is a quote from Russell T Davies, in response to a question about the abundance or paucity of alien worlds in his revival of Doctor Who. I bring it up because I feel that it is a good quote from which to discuss the view of the human race presented on Davies’s show.
The first and more explicitly stated point of view is that the human race is (as the quote would indicate) inherently more interesting, sympathetic, and worthwhile than any other species in the universe. This is reflected many, many times in the Doctor’s repeated statements to this precise effect. One particularly bad example comes in the Season 28 episode The Impossible Planet, in which, upon discovering a group of future humans that have enslaved an alien race, the Doctor’s first reaction is to express admiration for the fact the humans in question are investigating a black hole. This is exactly as painful to watch as it is to read about. The slavery question is revisited a couple of seasons later in Planet of the Ood, but the damage is done.
Davies’s prejudice (and it is a prejudice) against anywhere that is not the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century is very obvious and very tiresome. It is obvious because, of the fifty-five episodes of Davies Who that have aired so far, forty-seven are set primarily on or near Earth, of which twenty-six are set primarily in London and two in Cardiff (with further brief visits to, or mentions of, London or Cardiff passim). Apparently London is the centre of world and universal politics and Cardiff is the paranormal capital of all creation. Neither of which were true in Doctor Who as it existed prior to Davies’s takeover.
When aliens appear, they are invariably monsters, villains, or objects of prejudices that mirror those of the showrunner (a despicable title borrowed from America’s quasi-tyrannical television-writing culture). In many cases (the Ood and the Hath, for example) they are two or even three or these things. Only six stories feature primary villains who are members of the human race. Many times a human character will be presented as sympathetic, then be revealed as a disguised alien and, simultaneously, a villain.
The aliens themselves are also problematic. Most look like humans, which isn’t that much of a departure from the old series except for the fact that in at least one episode (Turn Left) you can tell that they are aliens and therefore Not To Be Trusted because they’re Asian!!! And you can tell the Asian human aliens from the black human aliens because the Asian human aliens are evil and crafty and the black human aliens (in Voyage of the Damned) are good and dumb.
And every companion, except for Astrid who died in her only episode and looked human, has been a human. Most of them from Souf Lunnun.
It doesn’t come across as ‘identifiable situations’. A good writer can find those anywhere and with anyone through clever use of narrative tropes. As Robert Holmes once said, ‘If an audience can say, ‘Ah yes, that’s a cowboys and Indians story’, as opposed to a Zaags versus Zoombers story, they can relate to it much easier.’
Instead, Davies Who’s anthrocentricity just comes across as Davies being a lazy, unimaginative man.
The other side of Davies Who’s ambivalence towards humans comes in particularly strongly in episodes like Last of the Time Lords and the aforementioned Turn Left. In this view, humans, no matter how humane humanly humanish humanitarian human special the Doctor may say that they are, are utterly incapable of dealing with the problems that plague Daviesverse London and Cardiff without the Doctor to save them. In Turn Left they revert to fascism and state-sanctioned genocide after a series of disasters kill almost every character and trap one on the planet Sontar. This happens because the Doctor isn’t there. And in Last of the Time Lords the Master rules the world for a year, during which time the Doctor comes up with a Cunning Plan…to steal a screwdriver. And yet the human race is reduced to, quite literally, praying to the Doctor at the end, which revives him and allows him to take down the Master and turn back time in a visual rip-off of the first Christopher Reeve Superman.
This is from a man who is a self-described atheist humanist. And he turns the Doctor into a fairy Jesus who saves the world because the humans shift their object of worship on to him from the Master. Yes.
This becomes even worse when you realise the Doctor’s ostensible status as a tragic hero who leads a miserable life and does morally questionable things-all of which is true (and leads to a whole other characterisation problem, namely that of ridiculous plotless emo angst) but which sort of belies him being the only outlet for the human race to get their collective head out of their collective arse (which also happens when he is there, as they keep living as though aliens didn’t exist no matter how many times they attack London and occasionally Cardiff). You know who probably the best tragic hero on television right now is? Lelouch Lamperouge. Who, in the most recent episode of his show, traps himself and the show’s villain in a room, alone, forever, so that neither of them can ever hurt any of their loved ones ever again. In order to have a hero be tragic he has to be properly tragic, which entails not being a superhuman saviour of all mankind again and again and again and ESPECIALLY not being the human race’s only way to avoid helplessness-induced extinction.
I could point out that Code Geass isn’t even an exceptionally good show. It’s entertaining, provoking, and occasionally inspiring, but not an all-time classic of television or anything. Davies Who doesn’t even rise to that, and this is one of the reasons why.
Well, I like aliens. I like aliens and alien plots and alien characters-rubber suits, green bubble wrap, horribly obvious special effects lines, all of it. I especially like the wonderful, horrific, fascinating, Gormenghast-in-space world of the Time Lords, which presents a gold mine of plots. Unfortunately, since these plots wouldn’t involve humanoid hominid humany humanic humanian humans, they do not interest Davies, so instead he blew up Gallifrey to cause the Doctor endless, pointless angst and make him into a tragic hero who…isn’t.
I want a show about Hath, Ood, Time Lords, and, yes, Zaags and Zoombers and Zogs. Doctor Who is a show whose purview covers Cornish smugglers, melodramatic space opera, dark historical tales, surreal game-show psychodrama, and Avengersesque pop-spy-fi in a single season. But Davies isn’t interested. He’s content to write onanistically about his ‘interesting’, ‘identifiable’, annoyingly helpless humans.
CREDITS: the 'permutations-on-the-word-'human'' trick comes from violetisblue . I got the idea to make this post from lizbee .