Month: April 2014

manicpixiedeathbitch:

In re-watching the Nine and Ten era Doctor Who series, one thing that has really stood out to me is the emphasis on questioning inherent power structures. Nine actively and literally tells people to question things (see the Satellite 5 episodes) – question your government, question the media, question your parents

Basically, question all institutions and question why you should trust their authority

(also, most baddies and villains happened to be either a) people who just want money or b) people who just want power)

The point of sci-fi, originally, is to use extraordinary things to illuminate and explore the human condition and in this sense the early series of the reboot succeeded quite wonderfully, its focus being on the nature of power for the most part

And this, in essence, is why for me Moffat’s series fall short. He has at his disposal an incredible established universe where near anything is possible and there are hundreds upon thousands of ways he could use that to explore the nature of humanity, but he just… doesn’t.

And while we’re talking about Doctor Who’s exploration of power structures, it’s very, VERY clear from not only post-2005 but also classic Who that the Doctor is an anti-authoritarian at heart: all authority figures are only respected as such to the extent that they can prove themselves worthy of the title, the Doctor himself rejects any and all salutes directed at him, and so on and so forth

The Eleventh Doctor, on the other hand, is an authority figure. He takes it upon himself to order people about, expecting their unquestioning loyalty; he makes decisions about his friends’ lives on their behalf (see Amy’s pregnancy).

And just ugh this bugs me so much because it essentially goes against everything that the Doctor has previously stood for and why I love his character so much and yeah sorry for rambling and I know this is a really badly-formed argument, this has just been on my mind a lot lately