Leela’s companion exit > Belinda’s companion exit
Change my mind.
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This is what annoys me most really! He keeps virtue signalling (a term I hate but it’s what he’s actually doing) while his era pushes weirdly unprogressive stuff. Rose Noble having a dead name actually written at all, the use of non-binary while not being nb, everything with Belinda here, Davros, the optics of surrounding the first queer black numbered Doctor by 2 nostalgia filled white stunt casts, the list goes on. He claims he’s being progressive but he just doesn’t write that way and it genuinely baffles me the disconnect between the politics of RTD2 and the attempts at progressiveness that he says he’s doing.
It all feels performative to me really.
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I want to have this sentiment but it’s hard for me to when it’s clear he hasn’t actually got enough sensitivity readers involved, and also is trying to do it all himself. I appreciate a “trans people are cool” episode but why not get a trans person to write it? Or at least consult on it?
And considering these attempts contradict some of the stuff we’re actually getting in the text… I want to give benefit of the doubt but it’s difficult for me personally
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This is a really frustrating element to me, also. Yasmin Finney is charismatic and genuinely comes across as a lovely person. I was so excited to learn of her casting and really expected to see more of her … y’know… actually doing stuff! Similarly (and I know this is a really minor point), I was pleased to see Mary Malone as one of Ruby’s friends (Trudy) in The Church on Ruby Road and thought that it would be lovely to see more from her friend group in the Earthbound stories.
Nothing.
It might be a very trivial thing, as Mary was playing a very minor role really, but I thought it was such a great opportunity!
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Yeah, I think that this is the case for many actors in the show. I just wanted to highlight that this is an industry problem and not an RTD problem.
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Russell The Davies is a Welsh, white, gay man in his sixties. If you aren’t culturally gay, or British, then there are some things about that that probably don’t seem important. I spent a lot of my formative years in amateur theater, around a lot of variations on Russell T. Davies. Unsurprisingly, there were also lots of Doctor Who fans (I remember a very funny backstage printout war regarding the canon status of the Cushing and Atkinson Doctors during a show. Lovely memories).
What I’m saying is that he’s clearly trying hard to keep up with the times, but there’s also a part of him that’s deeply rooted to a gay culture that is, unfortunately, still quite heteronormative. And he’s also now at a point where basically no one has the capacity or cache to critique or offer him advice. He actively blocks people who disagree with him. I mean this all to say that I’m not shocked at these developments. There is an inherent narcissism to all of this, a natural extension from his having literally rescued the show and it getting the largest ratings it EVER had (reading the 91% AI score for Journey’s End boggled my mind - this is not unearned. If you are my age, you remember a period in England where Doctor Who, this Doctor Who, with David Tennant and Billie Piper, was the biggest thing in the country. And if I remember it, Russell definitely does) but at some point, it has to come to a stop.
Doesn’t it?
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Yes, I completely agree! I just mentioned it to add to your point 
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OK I’m steering this back to the Reality War because although Russell is clearly a big part of the show that isn’t the thread and I don’t want this to get out of hand considering I just made a big statement.
LET’S WATCH THE LAST 30 MINUTES OF REALITY WAR RIGHT NOW
Omega’s just chomped the Rani.
The Skull Omega remembers the Rani! I actually don’t think this sucks at all? The Two Ronnies joke is actually hilarious?
Look, I’m definitely eating my hat about this scene undermining Omega as a character. He was always a big arch weirdo, now he’s just a big CGI weirdo. The skull even sort of looks like the mask, if you squint.
And then the Doctor’s going to shoot him with the big gun, and considering I just made a big show of being completely fine with 3 blasting Ogrons when he thought Jo was dead, I’ll say it - this is fine too The Doctor has canonically blasted a Time Lord before (Hell Bent) and we’re in finale territory. And Omega is extremely annoying. It doesn’t read as out of character at all.
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I don’t want RTD to be the showrunner forever and I really hope that we get a new showrunner soon but what I am saying is that it is easy to blame him for everything but I at least are happy that he is trying to be progressive. The opposite is to do the same again and not have the Doctor be queer, not have any wheelchair users etc and that would be worse then trying and not doing it perfectly.
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I am never going to stop being upset about this. GIVE HER BACK TO MEEEEEEEE
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And Ruby actually gets to use her compassion as something valuable for the plot? This is quite nice.
I am still waiting for this to go off the rails.
The importantest thing of all for me is that Anita Dobson Rani survives. She definitely needs to get another crack at this one.
The baby plotline is extremely, EXTREMELY weird though. I think, to do a shibboleth here, that the closest comparison I can make is that episode of Friends where Phoebe thinks her dead mum has been transported into the body of a cat. There’s a bit of lore regarding the writing of the episode - it’s incredibly crass of me to make it textual on a forum because it inches very close to speculation about personal lives, but you can go look it up and draw your own conclusions.
Everyone clapping and cheering at the baby coming out of the Zero Room - Murray Gold is clearly going to the mattresses to try and make it work for us. Is it working for me? This is just so bloody ODD. Oh, and we saddle Carla with another baby. Doctor just handing out babies left right and center.
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But doing the opposite doesn’t have to be the implied only alternative without RTD.
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This is a really key point - the best of Doctor Who (the best of fiction? Perhaps) often comes from young(er) people reacting to the world as it is - and RTD did this, with a new Doctor Who inspired by X-Files and Buffy and in the aftermath of AIDs and etc. etc. - you don’t need me to say why RTD had a vision for the show, of course he did.
The same goes for the history of the show - Cartmel is writing in a late-Thatcherite, late-Cold War era world and the stories reflect this, Hartnell’s era fosters the utopian dream of post-war Britain, and so on, because these stories were so often written by people who weren’t stuck in the past writing what they already knew (and if they did come back, they for the most part had something new to say).
Same goes for a lot of other shows - take Star Trek and then swap Cartmel for TNG and the utopian dream for TOS (that’s how I first came across this argument and then I realised it really fit with Doctor Who too). But now we’re with a writer who’s just a few decades too old to be on the pulse on his own as much as he was able to before. The show aims for progressive and diverse episodes and casts and crew (and thank God it does, of course), but it’s written by a man who has done his part of bringing Television forward, especially in terms of Doctor Who.
I feel it might be a case of thank you RTD, but there’s a distinct overstaying of welcome in the air.
Anyway I genuinely did like the episode, for all of this.
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Here I pop in again as one of the resident transsexuals.
I think this is what confuses me so deeply about the politics of RTD2. In his writing, both in RTD1 and in the work her did pre-Who and post-RTD1, he’s very capable of writing fleshed out, beautiful, nuanced queer characters. It’s A Sin is gorgeous.
When I saw Finney’s casting, it spoke to something really deep in me. This idea that as someone who grew up as a closeted trans girl, not even admitting it to myself, that none of this actually matters in the Whoniverse. That the Doctor would see me as the girl I am and whisk me away in the TARDIS, and I could live a life where my transness was something to be celebrated and loved for, but not defined by. I was really hoping that Finney’s character would be just that - someone who brings out the Doctors empathy, but not as some tragic trans stereotype. As someone who’s just worthy of love, and can stand alongside Rose, or Martha, or Donna, or Amy etc. I was hopeful for a second that I could finally see myself, as a trans girl, among the Doctor’s female companions.
And what’s worse is, there’s tiny little hints of it. 14 calling Rose his niece was everything I ever wanted and made me tear up a little bit. I imagined being a kid and 10 calling me that. I hope that when the inevitable 14/Rose BF stories happen, they have a sort of Uncle/Niece dynamic, like 1/Susan being Grandfather/Granddaughter.
But it just never came to anything. Rose is just there as window dressing. They could have explored something so ■■■■■■■ culturally and politically important by getting into why Rose vanished in Conrad’s world. Ruby having a trans friend didn’t have to be a focal point, she didn’t have to be “the trans friend”, but we could have seen Ruby develop fierce motivations and allyship to bring down the Wish World.
I went from feeling this immense sense of hope that I’d finally see myself in the Whoniverse - that the desire as a kid to have the Doctor take me on an adventure and just see me as me would actually come true. But it hasn’t happened.
Rose is just a prop.
Trans storylines are a prop.
I feel like a prop.
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That is what the show has been doing for most of its time this was a great step in the right direction.
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Safety rails in the TARDIS? This reads like an AU fanfiction.
“That’s the TARDIS accommodating.” ■■■■ off she would not say that.
You can’t try and tell me the TARDIS is in any way happy about the development.
Literally no female character is safe from Russell T Davies, not even the bloody TARDIS, who has her agency removed so she can be theoretically turned into a nursery.
This is deeply deeply uncomfortable. “I knew I would get you in the end!” - what the hell is going on. I have found the edge of the rails and tumbled off them.
Oh and now the baby is gone?
What?
David Tennant voice
WHAT?
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True it had been but RTD is not the only person who is capable of creating a more inclusive & diverse version of the show. Even if it does feel like it. There is sadly a sense that he’s pulled the ladder up behind him.
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Yeah, I was under the impression Rose was going to be 15’s companion and I was pissed when it instead turned out to be (and I quote myself) some blonde white girl from Corrie. Obviously I love Ruby and Millie now, but it still rankles that Rose isn’t as big a character as she was kind of hyped up to be.
I’m still a Ruby/Trudy truther tho. And for what it’s worth, we did get the word “lesbian” spoken in Doctor Who for the first time by a transfem nonbinary actor, playing a nonbinary character, referring to a trans woman.
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No, and I hope it keeps doing it and learns from the mistakes it has made, growing from them regardless of who is the showrunner. But if I had to guess, I would say that RTD has probably fought a lot of people at the BBC and Disney to have been able to make these things. I hope whoever takes over after him keeps fighting because it is going to be even harder to be inclusive in the future when you see where the world is heading.
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Calling it now, Poppy is some sort of eldritch abomination that has completely warped this narrative and turned everybody into a “we must save the children” weirdo.
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