TV Club’s discussion of The Idiot’s Lantern has thrown up quite a few comments expressing frustration/distaste/anger at the final scene where Rose encourages Tommy to go after his abusive father.
Occasionally, Doctor Who (particularly modern Who) is criticised for being heavy-handed or insensitive about certain real world issues: abortion in Kill the Moon; cancer in Can You Hear Me?; the environmental message in Orphan 55.
Which do you think are the most egregious examples? Do you think fans have overreacted to certain ones? Should the classic era be lambasted for its unfortunate ‘off their time’ elements?
Oh of course, I just meant that ‘we’ might criticise elements of modern Who whereas we give some leeway to classic because of how it is a product of it’s time. The discussion is whether that is right. Some fans seem to delight in acting superior to the production team of the 60s or 70s despite that maybe not being the best look for fandom.
I wondered how long it would take for Talons to be mentioned .
Yes, the yellow-face is not good at all and ‘that just how it was’ is a weak defence but then again, it is ‘just how it was’ and no amount of looking down on the story is going to change that. Should we ‘cancel’ the entire story on that basis? I really don’t think we should because I don’t believe the people involved were ‘being racist’. They were making decisions in a world where the ‘correct’ choice may not even have been viable. Let’s say a Chinese actor was chosen to portray Chang. Would we then have people criticising the fact a Chinese person was being forced to play a stereotype? I bet we would.
There isn’t really a right or wrong way to approach the racism underlying some of Talons which is why fans who get all holier than thou about it piss me off. The generations that come after us will no doubt look on the choices and attitudes we have and look down on us and wonder what on earth we were thinking. The generation we’re criticising in the 70s and 80s were those who had rebelled to the attitudes and society of the early part of the 20th century.
Yeah no agreed with this, while I’m not a fan of the way it’s done in Can You Hear Me, I can at least understand what the writers were getting at and what they were trying for. I think it’d be a great moment if that character beat came back and 13 were better able to deal with it having had the time to think but they didn’t do that and without it it just falls flat and feels off.
The Idiot’s Lantern on the other hand, I don’t get why they did it at all, I understand what they were trying but unlike Can You Hear Me, it doesn’t feel like they’re coming from a place of understanding at all, and trying to almost force morals on people who’s situations they don’t know or understand at all.
I guess my point is with Can You Hear Me, a better writer could’ve made it work, with The Idiot’s Lantern, a better writer wouldn’t’ve written that.
As long as something isn’t made to be decidedly malicious I try to just let it go (oh no Donna and Rose made it quite clear that I can’t do that because I am male )
Often the very recent stuff tend to bug me more, like Ruby calling her birth mother her real mom or the whole Davros situation, but most things tend to become a bit irrelevant to me with time (like Talons was about 45 years ago, I just can’t find the “energy” to feel strongly about whatever issues it may have.
I think part of the issue on Talons is that it isn’t just one scene and it’s over, because it’s all pretty central to the serial. (Whereas The Crusade, I can dismiss the one scene because overall the rest of it was pretty great…)
Eh, I wouldn’t accuse anyone of overreacting per se, we all have different limits as to what we can tolerate in a show, even with the understanding that it was made in the past when it was considered less egregious (at least, by dominant societal consensus).
E.g. As much as I love s19, hoo boy is it chock full of racism, most of it not even “contributing” to the plot even, and I don’t begrudge anyone who wouldn’t want to watch it (hell, I struggle to get through a lot of it bc of that anyway). Speaking of, shout out to Janet Fielding for calling out and attempting to lessen some of the absolutely godawful racism in Four to Doomsday
This just shows that while this kind of stuff was considered “acceptable” enough to write and broadcast, it doesn’t mean that there weren’t people back then who were aware of how racist it was
When you read the whole story as an abortion story (because of the fact that Clara and the world have a choice of killing the moon-baby or letting it be born) it takes a really weird ‘pro-life’ stance.
Four to Doomsday (to some extent) and Black Orchid I’ll give you, but chock full? I’d say Kinda is deliberately paroding the Empire attitude towards ‘primitives’ and I can’t really think of anything in Castrovalva, The Visitation or Earthshock. Oh, I suppose Kalid would add to the badly-thought through elements.
I think Talons is a different critter from, say, The Abominable Snowmen. In one of the featurettes on Snowmen, somebody notes that having white actors play Asian roles wouldn’t be done today, but that the roles weren’t stereotypes and that it was done because there weren’t Asian actors around. Now, I don’t think that’s exactly true, and I think the apparent dearth of Asian actors was a function of racism in the theatre/TV world, but I think it’s a very fair point that the show was just subject to a prevailing paradigm way beyond its power to change.
Talons, on the other hand, is part of a pattern of British fiction - such as Fu Manchu, an explicit inspiration for the show - making out Asian people in the East End to be violent criminals, when they weren’t. And unlike Snowmen, it didn’t have to do that, and by choosing to do so, the makers furthered that injustice.
(Sidenote: I think it’s Tom Baker who points out in several different featurettes that there was a stereotype of Chinese people being opium dealers, when actually it was Britain drug-running opium in China. Which, as Victoria Wood explained in her documentary on tea, was done to influence the tea trade.)
Our current obsession with “representation” has, I think, distorted the conversation. Is yellowface in Talons a problem? Sure. But it’s a lot less of a problem than the show’s whole premise. There was no call for the show to use racial slurs or for the Doctor and Leela to perpetuate harmful stereotypes. And that’s not just a modern criticism; it’s one that’s been around since the show aired, which is why it wasn’t even shown in Canada.
These are valid points and yes, Talons is explicitly basing itself on Fu Manchu stories which is the main problem.
I just think it is interesting that for years, Talons was held up as the epitome of brilliant Doctor Who but has experienced a spectacular fall from grace in the last few years.
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