Eleven
The new reign begins. So far, I've seen the new episode, The Eleventh Hour twice, and I unabashedly love it. The actors were perfect, the story was a very nice modern day fairy tale, and there was the right amount of instantaneous chemistry between Doctor and his companion. So why has the euphoria of the past two days suddenly worn off? Simple, because the people who throw around the 'ism' and 'ist' words are also right there, finding fault from the very first.
I don't have a problem with people criticising an episode, or the writer of the episode. God knows, in the past few months, I've gotten a lifetime's worth of criticism in about Russell T Davies and Children of Earth. It's the never ending propensity for viewing anything new either in literature or on tv under the lens of political correctness, and trying to find instances where it doesn't hold up. One case in point, the Harry Potter fandom where, according to a couple of LJers, anyone who criticises Lily Potter is a misogynist. And the same seems to be true now with this episode: it's sexist because Amy wears a short skirt and works for a kissogram company, because Eleven asks her to fry something up for him, because she is waiting for her knight in shining armor to arrive, and he does, literally falling from the skies, and on and on and on until the very joy is crushed out of the show.
Where do we get the idea that entertainment and/or has to be politically correct, and who defines political correctness anyway? Is it someone of non-Scottish descent in the US who's offended by the Scottish joke, or is it the one who is put off by Amy's short skirt and bogus policewoman uniform? Can't we all just lighten up a very little and go with the flow, or does everything have to be passed through the filter of political correctness? If anyone's interested in where this would go, taken to an extreme, look no farther than a recent article in The Guardian that trashed Lewis Carroll and JM Barrie, substituting instead a carefully selected group of writers who's messages were weighed, measured and found to pass the personal muster of the Guardian critic. Newspeak, folks.
God help us all when literature or entertainment is filtered through the sensibility of the earnest and the humorless, and we are left with carefully selected messages and no mess. Storytelling is meant to be messy, that's the point of telling a story. It's OK that Amy's dressed as a bogus cop, working at a dodgy job. That's her story when she and Eleven meet again. It fits. It's not perfect, it's not Amy the doctor, or Amy the librarian in carefully pressed dress and cardigan. That's not Amy. The girl who fulfills others' fantasies is, and she's the one the glass slipper of this modern fairy tale fits.
And that's because The Eleventh Hour is a modern fairy tale. It has it's antecedents squarely rooted in the classic elements of children's fantasy, magical realism to be exact. It is what it is, and it is a glorious telling of the story of a child with a mysterious, threatening crack in her wall, praying to a childhood fantasy figure for deliverance which comes in the form of a mad man in a box, falling out of the sky. The rest is awesome as Amelia helps Eleven acclimate, and Eleven listens to, and addresses her fear and then disappears from her life again, until he returns again, twelve years later in solid fairy tale tradition, to 'slay the dragon' and offer her an invitation to adventure, which she takes. If the rest of the series is as enjoyable as this first episode, I'm going to be looking very much forward to each week's new story, and chronic complainers and professional critics alike can be damned if they are offended by what they see. This is what Doctor Who was and should be, and I for one am thrilled.
I don't have a problem with people criticising an episode, or the writer of the episode. God knows, in the past few months, I've gotten a lifetime's worth of criticism in about Russell T Davies and Children of Earth. It's the never ending propensity for viewing anything new either in literature or on tv under the lens of political correctness, and trying to find instances where it doesn't hold up. One case in point, the Harry Potter fandom where, according to a couple of LJers, anyone who criticises Lily Potter is a misogynist. And the same seems to be true now with this episode: it's sexist because Amy wears a short skirt and works for a kissogram company, because Eleven asks her to fry something up for him, because she is waiting for her knight in shining armor to arrive, and he does, literally falling from the skies, and on and on and on until the very joy is crushed out of the show.
Where do we get the idea that entertainment and/or has to be politically correct, and who defines political correctness anyway? Is it someone of non-Scottish descent in the US who's offended by the Scottish joke, or is it the one who is put off by Amy's short skirt and bogus policewoman uniform? Can't we all just lighten up a very little and go with the flow, or does everything have to be passed through the filter of political correctness? If anyone's interested in where this would go, taken to an extreme, look no farther than a recent article in The Guardian that trashed Lewis Carroll and JM Barrie, substituting instead a carefully selected group of writers who's messages were weighed, measured and found to pass the personal muster of the Guardian critic. Newspeak, folks.
God help us all when literature or entertainment is filtered through the sensibility of the earnest and the humorless, and we are left with carefully selected messages and no mess. Storytelling is meant to be messy, that's the point of telling a story. It's OK that Amy's dressed as a bogus cop, working at a dodgy job. That's her story when she and Eleven meet again. It fits. It's not perfect, it's not Amy the doctor, or Amy the librarian in carefully pressed dress and cardigan. That's not Amy. The girl who fulfills others' fantasies is, and she's the one the glass slipper of this modern fairy tale fits.
And that's because The Eleventh Hour is a modern fairy tale. It has it's antecedents squarely rooted in the classic elements of children's fantasy, magical realism to be exact. It is what it is, and it is a glorious telling of the story of a child with a mysterious, threatening crack in her wall, praying to a childhood fantasy figure for deliverance which comes in the form of a mad man in a box, falling out of the sky. The rest is awesome as Amelia helps Eleven acclimate, and Eleven listens to, and addresses her fear and then disappears from her life again, until he returns again, twelve years later in solid fairy tale tradition, to 'slay the dragon' and offer her an invitation to adventure, which she takes. If the rest of the series is as enjoyable as this first episode, I'm going to be looking very much forward to each week's new story, and chronic complainers and professional critics alike can be damned if they are offended by what they see. This is what Doctor Who was and should be, and I for one am thrilled.