“You might want to look away now, we’re about to critically examine a children’s Christmas television special.”
Just finished watching the Doctor Who, and I have some strong opinions on it already. Oh dear.
They are:
a) The Doctor trying to ‘take care’ of things was adorable.
b) Bill Bailey and his crew needed much more screentime. Great actors, funny dialogue, and wasted potential.
c) The attempt to tackle sexism made me seriously hate the writer (who I just found out was Stephen Moffat. Oh, Moffat, why do you have to disappoint me?).
The story began with a woman who can’t drive, and continued to crash every vehicle she came across in the episode. Then in the middle, the story decided to make it very clear that the alien race view females as ‘strong’ and males as ‘weak’ – a cute little cultural twist that I liked, and it worked well with the story. These aliens made a big deal out of how much of a strong person the car-crashing woman was, and everyone present generally nodded and agreed ‘oh yes, the strongest woman ever because she is a mum and that is wonderful’. Shortly afterwards, this ‘strong’ woman started gushing about how she met her husband: he followed her home every day from work, even though she didn’t seem romantically interested in him, and eventually she gave in and married him.
So this strong, admirable woman was blackmailed into a relationship? What.
If you’re going to write a story about how strong women are, it helps if you put a strong woman in it. Just an idea.
(EDIT: ‘even though she didn’t seem romantically interested in him’ originally read as ‘even though she didn’t care for him’, this was reworded for clarity.)