I’m gonna have to disagree with you on that one. He is literally a white supremacist.
The impression I got from the story was that, because he was stepping outside of his bubble, as it were, he was more enlightened than the others. His comments about reading and how he knew about history certainly gave me that impression. Certainly his reaction to the Doctor was nothing like Lindy or the others.
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Indeterminate on that front. He’d been spending a lot of time offline, studying history, and seemed relatively intelligent. I could see him overcoming his upbringing, and it might’ve made for an interesting arc…
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Hard disagree on that one. That was not what I took away from his characterisation at all.
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He still talked about all the history he learned with great glee and not as though there was anything wrong with it. Maybe he would have learned from travelling with the Doctor, but I doubt he would have agreed to go in the first place.
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He talked about a couple of things about the industrial past and money as payment - not really enough to extrapolate that he hadn’t come across the racism ingrained in his society and decided it was wrong. He was more concerned with saving Lindy and getting himself away from danger than having a debate about how terribly racist everyone was. You seem to be ignoring the way he reacted to the Doctor which was definitely less ‘racist’ than Lindy or the people he meets at the end.
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I think being enthusiastic about history and living outside his bubble is a far cry from being an actual white supremacist.
I read it as if he was actually trying to better himself and as a result is accepting of the Doctor despite the accepted attitude of the society he has been raised in.
I would say he is the literal opposite of a supremacist.
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I feel like he’d be intelligent enough to save his life and go with the Doctor. He’s the most popular person there, so probably wouldn’t really care what the others thought so much.
Of course, once he was in the TARDIS, he’d probably also think that if the Doctor could fly it, he certainly could, probably crash the TARDIS someplace, and spend a few episodes finding out he isn’t superior to everyone, and isn’t the smartest person in the room…
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To me Ricky is an obvious allegory for how white celebrities get praised and adored for doing the bare minimum while still holding onto racist beliefs. I feel like that’s a reasonable extrapolation to make from the themes of the episode.
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I think I agree with your first sentence up to this point:
The racist beliefs bit is definitely possible but I don’t think it is explicit.
There’s a bit of discussion about this over at Gallifrey Base with someone asking the exact question we’re discussing. I’m going to split this off into a separate thread though as we’ve gone way off topic.
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That is certainly a fair extrapolation, he is certainly meant to represent something like a “Tik-tok influencer”. What I disagreed with was using the term white supremacist, he is not being actively racist or spouting propaganda or worse. Merely existing within a society where racism is acceptable is not reason enough for such a strong label surely? Especially when he is the only person who refrains from looking down on the Doctor.
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Someone in the GB thread draws a parallel with Nurse Redfern - someone with racist assumptions but also a good person - just like most of us are a mess of contradictions.
I agree with @BillFiler that referring to him as a ‘white supremacist’ is a bit of a reach. He may well hold racist views being a product of his society but he may also be open to adjusting those views as the episode clearly shows him to be willing to step outside the norms of his society.
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I was at my mother-in-law’s on Friday. She’s 70 next year. She has ‘opinions’ on certain groups in the area my eldest goes to school (Croydon, basically). Some of those opinions are definitely racist. But I would never think of her as a white supremacist - just someone who sadly lets generalisations become ‘fact’ in her thought. She wouldn’t be like Lindy in interactions with people. She wouldn’t be openly racist and would be appalled to be thought of as such. But she comes from a different generation. It’s not an excuse but it is a nuance.
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To me it’s just very obvious that he’s the “cottagecore” brand of white supremacist - the kind of person who says “we should go back to traditional values” where “traditional” clearly means “white only”. My friend used the term “blood and soil Volkisch”. He is not good just because he wants to go outside and touch grass. It just makes him a different kind of bad.
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Where is this even inferred in the episode? Genuinely interested if I missed something.
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I’m not using the term “white supremacist” lightly. I know not everyone who is racist is a white supremacist, and I know some people were raised that way and can learn to change their views. This is not the way I feel about Ricky.
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But I’m not really clear what in the episode and in the script is making you feel this way about Ricky when lots of us don’t seem to have interpreted his character that way at all.
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Same here. Genuinely curious.
I see him as the odd man out in a society of racists. Not a good guy as such, but definitely the best of the bunch.
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I feel like we don’t textually know enough about him to be able to say for certain. His single interaction with the Doctor is brief and professional in a high-pressure situation, and he can’t see the Doctor’s face for half of it. That’s not really enough to glean his feelings either way. That said, the fact that people seem to be leaping to the conclusion that “he’s nice and cool and I liked him, therefore he can’t be racist” is really weird. Racists can seem very nice when they’re only interacting with other white people
Realistically, he’s going to be a product of his society, and we’re given no reason to believe he doesn’t hold their views, other than people headcannoning that he must be a good person because he seemed friendly
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That’s it, we don’t know enough about him either way - what little we do see I feel indicates that he at least is trying to do good and be better than his surroundings. As such I would always give people like him the benefit of doubt instead of assuming the worst of him.
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