Destination: Skaro was just a bit of fun, but how do we feel about Davros without his Mark 3 Travel Machine Chair and third eye?
Julian Bleach did a fine job as a new version of Davros but was it actually necessary to so radically change such a large part of his persona as RTD has hinted that this is the future of how Davros will be presented.
I think of Davros as the mad scientist who makes changes to himself as an extension of tampering with the very nature of Kaled DNA. His disabilities and disfigurement have got actual narrative purpose and not merely a part of the trope of evil people with disabilities.
(We’ll never see Davros scoot around all those ramps in this new wheelchair accessible TARDIS)
Thoughts?
I’m a big fan of the change. Davros absolutely fell into the trope of villains with disabilities as a reflection of their evil—or perhaps even the cause, as I definitely always took some implication that Davros’ motives for creating the Daleks as a perfect race were tied to his own disabilities—and I’m glad to see them acknowledging that and trying to move away from it.
I’m also of the opinion that it was a good change.
I understand people who dislike it, afterall the Davros we know and love has been changed in a big way, and change can be troublesome. But the trope was a gross one that I’m glad to see thrown out.
My scifi head wishes that it was changed on-screen, maybe the Doctor saved him from whatever accident caused his disability in the first place, that would be tidier for me. But I’m happy to think that it was just a change in the Winds of Time.
I especially like that this coincides with the introduction of Shirley Anne Bingham and the wheelchair-accessible TARDIS. Positive representation is better than another disabled villain.
PS. This poll is wrong, I think you meant “Davros walking” to be the title, but it’s an option lol. You can’t change it without losing the votes but I’m happy to vote again if you do.
If it had been changed onscreen in such a way I would have absolutely no reservations about it. I think it is fine to switch it up a bit to better reflect current standards and I can totally see how it can be considered offensive with a disfigured villain.
Without any sort of explanation it becomes a retcon of decades old continuity in a way that sort of implies that contemporary people are morally superior.
I guess my sci-fi brain just craves such a massive change to both have a Holmesian as well as a Doylist explanation
But I’m really happy that parts of fandom embraces it so wholeheartedly
Honestly, if we retcon it where he never has his wheelchair/life support unit, it tends to make him a less interesting character for me. I do like characters overcoming adversity and making huge changes in the world, even if they are bad. He also literally based the Dalek design on his wheelchair, so I’m not really sure where he got the idea from at this point.
I also don’t really like huge continuity changes without some sort of explanation. I would have been much better with this being a Davros who has a wheelchair, but at that stage, didn’t need to always be in it, for example (which is true for a lot of wheelchair users), or a later Davros that, say, grew a clone and had his brain transplanted to it to give himself a fully functional body. (Or, you know, just kill him off? Maybe we don’t actually need Davros any more?)
I would have been better with it if we hadn’t had so much of Davros in a wheelchair at this point.
Also, I get that it’s a trope, but I also don’t like the idea of just not having anyone bad be disabled, either. I prefer balancing things, which is one reason I like them bringing in Shirley Anne Bingham (besides which, she was amazing. I really want more of her.). I kinda feel like there’s a “all disabled people are nice people” countertrope to avoid here.
There’s part of me that really thinks that if we were going to retcon a villain in a wheelchair, maybe we should’ve gone after John Lumic? I mean, this one was under RTD. He could’ve revised Age of Steel before it aired…
This is kind of where I’m coming from as well.
I keep thinking about Professor Judson from The Curse of Fenric - a wheelchair user and an absolutely brilliant scientist, and when he gets possessed he gains the ability to walk again - it is kind of a subversion of the evil wheelchair user trope and was done in the eighties. The current attitude was already in place and I think that what RTD did with the character of Lumic was regressive on this front.
I absolutely love Shirley and I think positive representation with new characters is the best way to counteract a possibly problematic past rather than dramatic retconning
For me it’s a simple case of representation matters. Disabled people face awful treatment in society (my wife is a wheelchair user so we know this first hand) and DW is after all a family show. Showing disabled characters and negative tropes is harmful so I feel that removing it is a good step forward. Plus, it’s now easier to make my own custom minifig!
I don’t think it’s really meant to be a retcon, and I expect that if they bring Davros back as part of the proper show they’ll address it in some way, but that really isn’t necessary for a little comedy sketch that’s already sorta dubious canon in other ways. And nobody is really saying that there should never be any disabled villains, just that too frequently disabilities are tied to a villain’s evilness in some way, and that’s a harmful trope. Lumic is very much an example of this and I’d say even a more clearly problematic one than Davros, but he’s also a one-off character with no like cultural significance or reason to come back.
I actually rather hope RTD just straight doesn’t bring Davros back into the new era. It doesn’t really seem like he’d fit with the whole supernatural vibe we’re going with anyways, and I tend to feel like he was a character that really should have been retired a good while back. I’d rather have more stuff like “Power of the Daleks”, personally.
And I actually had fun with the comedy sketch, and if RTD hadn’t started leaning into that this wasn’t just for the sketch afterwards, I would have just let it go by.
To be honest, it’s rather irritating to me that I often end up not liking things RTD does for representation, because I want good representation, I just tend to end up disagreeing with what he ends up doing for it…
Representation is absolutely important. My father-in-law was in an accident 10 years ago and uses a wheelchair and I have seen the problems that he faces on a daily basis, and it had made him nothing if not more kind - a real case of the blossomiest blossom
And can I just say, those are brilliant LEGO set-ups
I also think that something fans often feel is that they are being told Davros being disabled was bad, you are bad for enjoying those stories, you must burn your DVDs and pretend it never happened
That’s why there is a lot of backlash about this.
But times change. We can move on. If he wants to tell more stories with Davros in the future, we have a new way of doing it. Your DVDs are fine. No-one is going to edit them retroactively, George Lucas-style.
The Eleven is such a good villain and a great idea within the confines of this show.
However linking him with real life schizophrenia really rubs me the wrong way as there is a mainstream understanding of schizophrenia which is incredibly erroneous, being schizophrenic does not equate having multiple personalities as so much media portrays it.
I guess it’s just a bugbear for me
I also don’t think there’s a whole lot left to really do with Davros, and I kinda expect that he’s unlikely to come back anytime soon, but I think if the goal is to try to move away from the harmful trope it’s really important to establish the intention that this will be the norm for the character from now on should he come back.
The Daleks decide Davros didn’t do a good job designing them, so they go back in time, kill him before he creates the Dalek race, then recreate the Daleks themselves. All the previous episodes were on the old continuity, and we’re now on the new one.
