Dr. Who

I made a promise with myself that if Dr. Who ever got a woman doctor I'd start watching it -- and I have!

I'm really enjoying it so far. Love all the season's core characters. Really enjoyed the witch trial episode, particularly the nod to the very queer history of King James in casting Alan Cumming.

It's hit and miss. The Rosa Parks episode was particularly painful, pushing the whitewashed "she was just tired" propaganda version of the narrative, erasing Claudette Colvin, and making it seem like civil rights revolutions are the result of happenstance and individual acts of surprise heroism, when in fact they are long, multi-pronged campaigns carefully engineered by a whole community of dedicated, organized, educated activists.

>> https://www.pbs.org/video/is-the-rosa-parks-story-true-zw9irm/

The political satire seems to be falling flat in a lot of places.

In Arachnids in the UK, the unscrupulous gun nut businessman with political aspirations is clearly supposed to be an outrageous caricature of a rich white republican man, but like. Trump already exists. And Trump is already a caricature of a caricature of a caricature of himself. So any attempt to parody the American stereotype in fiction fails, because what was supposed to be a caricature instead comes across as a calmer, more intelligent, more reasonable, & toned down version of Trump -- the milquetoast!Trump.

Kerblam!, the Amazon Prime episode was just ...bad worldbuilding. The villain's motivations just ... made no sense? Why is the future proletariat so foolish as to be fighting robot slaves for acces to unfulfilling, dangerous, repetitive, socially isolating factory labor? I spent the whole episode just yelling UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME at the screen.

I'm surprised at how much death there is in this show. How much, and also how formulaic the death is in the show. It seems to be the pattern that the show gets you emotionally invested in several new characters at the beginning of an episode and then proceeds to kill 1/2 to 2/3 of said characters before the end of the episode. Like, characters die in Star Trek, but not generally in a "tragedy of the week" sort of way.

Are the previous season like that?

I think my favorite episodes so far are Demons of Punjab and The Witchfinders.

Re: Tween Romance in Stranger Things

So I realized this week that the problem with the tween romance in Stranger Things is that it’s essentially the Born Sexy Yesterday trope performed by children.

Which is to say, the premise of the romantic connection is that girl likes boy because he’s the first boy she’s ever met and presents himself as her window to the world.

The other side of that is that boy likes girl because she fits a controlling fantasy in which he gets to be her first everything and teach her everything he wants her to know and never have to worry about her having interests outside of him since the only interests she has are the ones he gives her.

The trope is made even creepier in the second season, most of which she spends in solitary isolation in a shack in the woods, never able to see people her age unless she astrally projects herself, which causes her nosebleeds.

I can’t decide which is creepier:

The regular version of this trope, in which an adult woman’s body contains a mind of a baby

Or the child version of this trope, in which a 13 year old boy who should be learning how to interact in a healthy manner with girls who are his peers, instead finds a pretty girl he can keep in his closet and groom.