Voyage of the Damned

[seeingred]

spiralsheep's attack on the Doctor Who Christmas special, Voyage of the Damned is misleading and riddled with errors.

In it, she states:

"out of the pool of potential survivors, the fat, black, working class man is killed first"This is incorrect. Morvin is the second of the Doctor's group to die, after the white, upper-class steward who opens a door onto

Comments

[travlr1]

Technically, maybe the first "death" is the Captain. Furthermore, the deaths of the Steward and Morvin are accidents. Foon and Bannakaffalatta and Astrid commit acts of self-sacrifice. Frame, who somehow survives being shot, is brave and survives. Slade and Copper survive at the end, but only through being clever or cowardly. Minor characters and passengers are often killed by the Host, but none of the main characters in the episode are.

The episode actually tackles racism, sort of, in the form of cyborgs. Of course, both Bannakaffalatta and Max Capricorn are ashamed of their cyborg-osity(?). While Banna... (i'm not typing all that out!) can confide in the closeness of those whom he gets to know and can share his secret with people, who can fall in love, who can commit an act of self-sacrifice, while the very opposite, Max Capricorn has become a villian, turning inward, uncaring, who could kill billions of people, just for profit, and revenge. Of course, 'things are changing on Sto, cyborgs can even get married...'

So is the whole cyborg thing a metaphor for racism? Or homophobia? I mean, when I first watched it, I kinda picked up on that subtext. Whoever saw Morvin get it didn't understand that all the people on the Titantic were ALIENS. Well, aliens, robots, and cyborgs. The only human in this episode is the Londoner when they visit the planet. (I would say the Queen as well, but I am not sure about that after the events of Tooth and Claw...)

Anyway, there's my 2 euros on the subject.

[seeingred]

Because the aliens are so similar to humans, I think we can still talk about race, class, and gender when it comes to the Stoians (Stoites? Sto-ons? Sto-aways?)

*thinking hat on* For example, we can ask why Morvin gets bumped off so quickly, even though he's not the first to die. In old films they used to often kill off the minor Black character early on - suggesting he was worth less than the other characters, or of less interest to the audience. (In some recent films, too - although the cliche is so well-known now that it also gets made fun of, as in the movie Evolution.) So there is an (obviously unintentional) echo of that in Morvin's early demise.

[jblum]

First question which needs asking: was Morvin even written as black? Would Russell even have given the color of the casting of a minor supporting artist a second thought?

[seeingred]

Do you mean the casting director should get the blame instead? :-) Even if the script doesn't specify Morvin's race, surely RTD would have a say in the casting anyway.

[jblum]

It's the difference between a thought the writer had living in his head for months, and a decision made alongside seventeen thousand others in the midst of a week or two of prep, possibly even one made by an underling and waved through. If, to be blunt, the underlying issue is how un-right-on Russell is, that's a lot less time spent being un-right-on to blame him for.

[travlr1]

Yeah, I'm aware of the that whole cliche. But does an accidental death count towards that, though? In those kinds of movies, it's usually the villain or serial killer who offs them. But Morvin steps too close to the edge and falls to his death. Of course, why they are walking across a broken bridge above one of the engines (what about the radiation?) might account for some of the blame... I still think that perhaps Morvin and Foon made some kind of strange suicide pact, knowing they might never pay off their 5000 credit phone bill... (but by comparing that to pounds, using the Doctor's hand conversion skills at the end of the ep, it's something like 100...) something that would take '20 years'. (Compare this to Copper's not wanting to spend 10 years in jail...)

Concerning this cliche, what about the deaths of the cooks in the kitchen and the death of the mechanic in Deck 31? Thinking about this, these are the only people who are implicitly killed by the Host. What does this say about this story in relation to class, as well? This is related: please take note of the cook that is talking to Frame. Keep also in mind that some of the more sinister characters seem to be concerned about their 'retirement plans'... and that some of the more heroic or self-sacrificing (or simply sacrificed?) characters seem to be working class people.

And let's not forget about the phobia or 'racism' or 'cyborgism' concerning cyborgs... That might be a good topic for conversation... I'm actually sitting down to make an interesting analysis of VotD... might take a while though since it's New Years... I actually don't think this is a bad episode, if you watch it more than once... it kind of grows on you.