50th Anniversary Fanwork-a-thon-a-thon, Round Nine: Three

[jjpor]

50th Anniversary Fanwork-a-thon-a-thon, Round Nine: Three

(Secondary prompt: Who Spinoffs)By now, my friends, I can't help but feel that the end is near and sooner than we might expect we are going to be facing the final curtain (figuratively, hopefully). But not quite yet! We still have a trio of excellent Doctors to get through before the big

Comments

[akashasheiress]

Ah, look at all those nice, empty spaces.

Still, I'll be my boring self and take the 30th. :)

[jjpor]

Yes, we seem to have room there... ;D

[akashasheiress]

Ta!

Also, I think they people who think that Three is actually that cozy with the establishment haven't really been watching his stories.

[jjpor]

To be honest, I strongly sympathise with leftist readings of Doctor Who (how could I be such a fanatical Seven fan and not??), but I think people like Paul Cornell threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, in their blanket condemnation of Three. It's an era of contradictions, sometimes, to be sure, but it's more nuanced than that particular criticism of it would seem to suggest. As always, imho, of course. :)

[akashasheiress]

I don't know if there were as many contradictions as is popularly thought. While many characters within The Establishment were very sympathetic, I don't get the sense that the show (or the Doctor) were pro-The Man, so to speak. While the Brig is clearly an awesome character, the narrative is frequently disagreeing with him IMO. It's still nowhere near NuWho level. I can't imagine Three being all cozy with Churchill, for instance.* And the goals are often achieved by subverting UNIT rules etc.

*Yes, there's the ''my friend, Chairman Mao'' comment, but I think that was simply due to the isolation of Communist China (and hence a lack of knowledge).

[jjpor]

I think tbh, even as someone who's used it as a talking point in the past that the Chairman Mao thing is a red herring (ba-doom, tish!). As you say, the full story about the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution etc was practically unknown to the general public in the West at the time (and deliberately kept that way, as far as possible, by the Chinese leadership) and Maoism was kind of cool for a while with the counterculture or whatever was left of it by 1971, so yeah. And also, there's no real evidence that the Doctor meant it seriously or was just trying to inveigle his way into the good graces of the Chinese communists he was talking to

[akashasheiress]

Oh, yeah, you definitely have a point there. But even then, it's certainly not worse than New Who. With the whole lip-service thing, I mean. It just annoys me when people use (for example) the Three-era contradictions to 'prove' how much more progressive and enlightened NuWho is when it's actually much worse in several ways. I do think that Three would have genuine issues with Churchill that weren't all about competing egos (although that would certainly take place, too

[jjpor]

To be honest, I don't think the old series would have gone near any historical characters who had been alive within living memory (dead less than a decade in Churchill's case during the Three era), but I agree the level of social conscience and "political" sophistication in almost all of old Who generally puts the new series to shame. But then again, I think that's more to do with the way popular culture and society has changed in the past thirty-odd years than with the actual TV programme or the people making it during the two eras. Then again, we have had this conversation a few times by now and always end up agreeing in the end

[akashasheiress]

Yeah, I agree. It's more to with the state of telly today than with Who in itself. But it's just especially sad when it's Who, due to its history. :(

Those outfits in The Dominators. Hell, just the title of the story. ;D