In which Moffat has a Thing

[zeborah]

(I've been pondering this a while but got around to it tonight after reading annathepiper's review of S6ep1.)

Moffat has some harmless and indeed interesting thematic refrains going on, one about eyes and sight and such, and another about forgetting and remembering and such. I rather like these things.

What I'm less happy with is his compulsion to store sick girls in boxes so that his boys can take them out and play with them when it's convenient.

(Contains spoilers through to season 6 episode 1 of Doctor Who, though I've added a cut tag/extra warning before that one just in case (ETA: No I didn't, that turned out to be impractical after all, so be warned.). Please don't spoil me for anything beyond that, not even rumours.)

• The Girl in the Fireplace: The title says it all really. Reinette is trapped in the fireplace; the Doctor runs in and out as he likes, oblivious to the passage of time, sure of her adoring welcome, until he's thwarted by her illness and death.
• Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead:
  
  • CAL/Charlotte Abigail Lux is stored inside a virtual reality to protect her from dying of an incurable disease (physically she's in a room deep deep in a planet that's been quarantined from the rest of the universe). Unlike Reinette, Amy and River, she never even gets to grow up.
  • During the episodes, Donna and Miss Evangelista are similarly "saved". (We see some men saved in the same way, but the only one we see much focus on, for most of the episode we don't know if he's even real. All the focus is on the women.)
  • The episodes finally conclude with River being given the same treatment, as a permanent solution which we're supposed to see as a wonderfully happy ending. River Song, relegated to a simulation of domesticity and happy about it. Really?
• The Eleventh Hour: Amy is stuck in her timeline while the Doctor pops in and out at whim. For a change, it's not portrayed as good for her and she even gets to call him on it.
• The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone: River Song is removed from prison to carry out this mission, and at the end of it she's returned to prison.
• The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang:
  
  • River continues to be stored in prison with time off to take a message to Our Hero.
  • Then she gets trapped in a time loop in the Tardis until the Doctor wanders in.
  • Amy gets stored in the Pandorica to heal her from being mostly dead. (To be fair, the Doctor later puts himself in a similar situation -- but then that's mostly to save the universe, not to save himself.)
• A Christmas Carol: This is the episode that started my thoughts moving in this direction. Abigail-- Wait. Same as CAL's middle name above? Really? That begins to make me suspicious about "Amelia" too. --Anyway, Abigail is stored in stasis mostly because otherwise she'll die in a few days. Kazran and the Doctor pop in once a year, sure of her adoring welcome; take her out, play with her, and put her tidily away. Eventually they're thwarted by her illness and impending death.
• The Impossible Astronaut: River's still stored in prison but ready to leave the moment the Doctor summons her. Later we get the explicit parallel drawn between her and Amy as young impressionable girls who have the Doctor popping in and out of their lives and loving it.... I can't help fearing they'll do something box-like with the girl in the spacesuit either.

If it was just the Doctor storing girls in boxes for their own good, that'd just be the Doctor being the Doctor. But it's done by all sorts of other people too; it recurs so often in so many (minor) variations, and the girls and women are always portrayed as content to be in the box and ecstatic to being taken out and played with, and it's getting increasingly disturbing.

If I get through my current fanvidding project (been dragging on since at least September) I'll be rather tempted to skip all my other ideas and go straight to Living Doll. If I only had the time...

Comments

[ajk]

I must admit I was a bit taken aback by that aspect of the Carol.

(BTW, cut tags do not work in the views that I'm using, and if there was an extra warning, I missed it. But the la-la-I-can't-hear-you analogue for reading seemed to work well enough as soon as I realized that I was reading about an episode I haven't seen. I'm unlikely to be able to see any of the new episodes until after BBC finishes with this series.)

[zeborah]

Gah, sorry - originally I had cut tag and warning (for those who don't get cut tags) just above that bit, but then decided I should wrap the whole thing in a cut tag, and as I don't believe one can embed cut tags I removed the latter but forgot to edit the warning - fixed now.

[rumpelsnorcack]

While I do agree that he has this habit of doing this it hasn't really bothered me much apart from the literal fridging of Abigail. I also wouldn't put River in this group. She's constantly defying the men's attempts to keep her in her box. It's made pretty obvious that she comes and goes as she pleases and merely pays lip service to the idea that she's in prison. If you want to look at the women as the men's playthings, then she's subverting it all the time, in a 'yes, dear, you think you have me boxed up but we both know you really don't' whereas the other women are far more literally put into and taken out of their boxes by the men. Even if in The Impossible Astronaut River comes out when the Doctor summons her, we've seen her at other times out and about just because she wanted to be - even in episodes written by Moffat.

[zeborah]

This is true - I think it's mostly that I was so downhearted in The Impossible Astronaut to hear her speech about becoming englamoured by the Doctor when she was just a girl (whether "girl" meant girl or young woman) - she seemed to be ascribing everything to that formative experience rather than to her own volition, which colours my viewing of everything else.

But even without that and discounting the prison, I'll still see her being put into the virtual reality this way, unless/until I see an episode in which she finds a way to escape that too. :-)

[ide_cyan]

It's an ugly pattern when it's all laid out like that.

And it resembles Joss Whedon's.

[heliopausa]

Yes, a very disturbing pattern.
And also, it occurs to me, there was the RTD episode ("Love and Monsters") where a woman was "saved" by being -- her face and mind only -- embedded in a piece of pavement, utterly helpless but (the script strongly implied) able to be taken out of wherever she was stored, to provide oral sex for her boyfriend.

[zeborah]

I actually really liked that one (partly because of the novelty of having very little Doctor in it). Including the ending, because to me it very strongly implied that she was just as happy with the sexual side of this arrangement as he was. I'm fairly asexual myself but am led to understand that many people do enjoy giving blowjobs (just as of course many people don't). And they can still kiss, and the implications of that line allow for more imaginative play. Indeed I think the reason I liked the ending was because it's about how there's more to a relationship, even more to sex, than just PIV.

Of course it is a horrific ending when you think about it. Just, if I were in her place, I'd have way more trouble coping with the lack of ability to write or to turn pages or go outside and do some gardening or or or; the sex (even for someone like me rather uninterested in participating in it) would be the least of the horror.

But then too coping with the aftermath is Another Story: this story ended there, and it felt an appropriate ending to a story about relationships and starring a heroine who seems the type to make the best of a bad situation.

--Some of this is a Watsonian analysis; some of it is me-as-viewer having my personal biases (also I really like the actress, having seen her in a couple of other things) so even though I was surprised the first time I found out some people hated the episode, I can understand it.

From a Doylist perspective I probably would have been more annoyed if it had been Moffat writing it. From anyone else, it's at least not part of the same pattern. It's one story where the heroine gets saved in a moment of grace and is content despite being reduced to a mostly intellectual being, among other stories where the heroine saves herself and others and gets to run around having adventures on all sorts of other planets. One among many is a lot more bearable to me than time after time.

[heliopausa]

"One among many is a lot more bearable... than time after time."

True!