Doctor Who Christmas Special 2011: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

[strange_complex]

So, the Doctor Who Christmas special, then. I am usually an absolute sucker for these, frequently believing them to be far better on the day of viewing than I later realise is really justified. But sadly this one failed to wow me even on Christmas day itself. swisstone has already covered most of the plot-holes and lazy clichés, thus saving me the trouble, and I agree with his basic thesis - that Steven Moffat is not really giving Doctor Who the attention it needs or deserves. So I will stick to noting a few things which particularly struck me as I watched.

The two stand-out aggravations for me were mystical motherhood and negotiable death. On the mystical motherhood side, I couldn't shake off an icky feeling throughout the story that someone had pointed out to Moffat some of the sexist tropes which have cropped up in his previous stories, so he decided to Do Something About It and redress the balance - but completely failed because he assumed that femininity is essentially equivalent to motherhood, and can only understand motherhood anyway by treating it as strange and mystical and quasi-supernatural. I thought while I was watching that I recognised this as a common trope by male writers who are trying to portray women positively, but still fundamentally viewing them from a patriarchal and reductive point of view. However, having typed a seemingly endless string of searches involving words like "trope" "women" "feminine" "motherhood" "mysterious" "mystical" and "magical" into Google, I still can't seem to track down a basic description of it or a list of other examples, even on TV Tropes. Surely I'm not making this one up, am I? More likely I'm just using the wrong search terms. Anyway, it's annoying.

As for the negotiable death, Moffat has done this so often now that it is intensely predictable, and I groaned with resignation at the inevitability of what was to come as soon as Madge started seeing visions of her husband's 'death' in the time vortex. That's annoying in itself, because it makes Moffat's stories less able to surprise or enthral, but I find this particular device repellent even if it is only used once. It undermines our ability to engage meaningfully with in-story deaths, so that any emotions which they provoke have to be regarded as temporary or provisional until we can be sure whether or not the death is 'real' - often much later in the story. And it toys with the viewer, dangling a hard-hitting narrative with a very powerful emotive force, but then just waving it all aside without working through its consequences properly. I would respect Moffat very much if he had dealt with parental death properly in the Doctor Who Christmas special, and equally much if he had chosen not to include it at all. But what he actually did smacks of wanting to have it both ways - maximum emotional impact and a fairytale happy ending - without being prepared to do the creative work necessary to make the two consistent with one another. In other words, it is lazy writing again - not to mention insulting to people who have had to deal with the utter non-negotiability of death in the real world.

Other than that, I also felt that we hadn't had enough time to get to know the family and their wartime lives before they came to their Uncle Digby's house, so that it was difficult to get any real sense of how fantastic the house might seem to them in comparison to everyday normality, or how badly they needed such a wondrous experience. Here, in fact, it would have helped if the children had known by the time they arrived that their father was dead, so that we could have seen them briefly being able to forget their pain and loss as they got caught up in the magic of what the Doctor had in store for them. As it was, all the Doctor's efforts seemed rather embarrassingly over-blown from their point of view. And although this in itself could have been been used to move the emotional trajectory of the story forward by tipping the children off to the fact that something more fundamental was wrong within their family, it wasn't.

Meanwhile, I'm sufficiently steeped in the work of Ray Harryhausen at the moment to notice how similar the design of the Tree King and Queen was to that of the wooden figurehead who comes alive and starts attacking people in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and to be very little surprised to come across yet another example of the extent of his influence:



But as for Doctor Who, I don't really have anything else to say about this story.

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Comments

[katsmeat.livejournal.com]

What you describe is an episode that's done to gender and motherhood exactly what the Magical Negro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_negro) archetype does to race. It seems to me to be all about the old thing of portraying men as the norm, and the male experience as neutral. Even though women (mothers) are portrayed as intrinsically better in some way, it still has the effect of making them "different" or "abnormal"

Well, at least Just Jane (http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/595435) got an outing. And presumably the trust that owns her got a wodge of cash from the BBC for filming, that will help her ongoing restoration to flying status.

[ms-siobhan.livejournal.com]

But honestly the only possible way ladies can be fulfilled is if they have children ;-)

And I think you've hit the nail on the head Harryhausen-wise, I knew there was something the wooden people reminded me of :-)

As I think I may have already said I heard child actor bratty type voices and so opted to do the washing up in the kitchen instead, after about 10 minutes Mr Pops called me from the living room to say I had made a wise choice.

[thanatos-kalos.livejournal.com]

The idea of dominant ideology undercutting/framing/essentially messing up attempts at subversion of said dominant ideology pops up in pretty much everything I read for the PhD, so I think you can definitely call it a trope, even if it's not on Google. :P

[kernowgirl.livejournal.com]

Actually, I just watched this and enjoyed it very much, although I fully understand your issues with it.

The only defence of the mystical mother trope I can offer here is that Dr Who has a tendency to make just about everything mystical sooner or later especially in Christmas specials. (And honestly, in fiction, it's always refreshing to see the mother figure be the active role; usually the father figure is dominant and mothers are more of a nurturing background figure).

That said, while I felt that there were some very strong notes hit on the whole concept of motherhood, I also felt that a lot of it was heavy-handed. For example, I remember when the doctor was talking about why it hurt for Madge to see her children so happy, saying it was because they would be so sad later. And I thought: "No, it's because she's jealous of them!"

Clearly, that would have made Madge a less sympathetic figure... After all, mothers are supposed to be ultimately selfless. But selfless characters tend to lack depth--in many ways, we're defined by our desires. So there's an all too common portrayal of motherhood as subsuming the female character. She is living only through her children.

That said, I enjoyed Madge as a character, and thought the actress did a good job of making her interesting and personable despite the by-numbers writing. I would just have liked to have seen a more flawed and complex character, as opposed to the rather patronising imperfection of bad driving.

I was thrilled to see Bill Bailey and disappointed when he was only a cameo and a rather wasted one at that. Still, his first scene made me chuckle out loud, as did the doctor's: "There are some sentences I should really stay away from" line. (I always appreciate a good reword of an old joke).

But as a mushy Christmas story, I liked it a lot better than last year's.... partly because of the Narnia references, admittedly. I do wish the husband had stayed dead though, and I can't help but wonder what poor Anderson's fate was!

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I didn't enjoy this Christmas special.

Generally wet.

I agree about the mystical motherhood trope and the negotiable death. Both poor in their own way.

I'm not much enjoying Moffat's tenure.

[hollyione.livejournal.com]

I found it slightly missing something too. Pleasant enough to watch, but the Narnia references didn't do much for me - there wasn't really any reason for them to be there as far as I could see. Also the true sadness of losing a father wasn't really explored, as you mentioned in your review - almost trivialised by the fact that he was saved by the Power of Sacred Motherhood.

And WHAT about his co-pilot who seemed to conveniently disappear? And WHAT would his superiors say about his lancaster suddenly turning up in a completely random place? And why not use Bill Bailey a bit more? Etc, etc.

[chrisvenus]

I have to admit I'm surprised it was only when you saw the visions of the husband in the vortex that you realised he was going to come back to life. I was assuming from the moment they actually bothered showing him that he was going to come back. Otherwise his death would have been better served off screen allowing for more time for the family.

And yes, I did think the same that Moffat was overcompensating for sexism.

yupyup

[jayseajay.livejournal.com]

hey there, its jane, she of bitching about sherlock in cif...i'm a bit late to the party, but was on an early morning caffeination and doctor who noodle about, and found myself here...just wanted to say that i was really interested to read that your response to the mother-ship trope on xmas day was exactly the same as mine...'he's aware of the fact that many of us think his writing of women is dodgy and has stuck this whole adoration of the mother in to compensate.' what i find striking about moffat is that he is so blind about gender politics that when he tries to defend himself (or his fans try and defend him) against charges of misogyny they turn to other tropes which are equally suspect. he doesn't get that veneration and denigration are two sides of the same operation (its a strange omission is there is nothing on this on tv tropes etc...its seems evident...maddona/whore being only the most notable example...there is a nice taxonomy from melanie klein which might be useful here, it lists six types of defense against narcissistic wounds and almost reads as a patriarchal playbook...the most notable are denigration, appropriation and idealization). this issue also comes up i've found in that people seem to think that the fact that moffat often writes adult men as incompetent, blundering emotionally stunted menchildren is somehow evidence that he's not a misogynist - see he hates men too!! - without understanding that this is also only just the shadow side of the myth of the invulnerable, self-sufficient warrior hero...And lastly, with regard to sherlock specifically, Moffat thinks that a rebuttal of a charge of sexism here consists in demonstrating how chivalrous his protagonist is, and how he hates it when people are violent to women...Again, there is a fundamental failure to understand dialectical reversal...Two sides of the same coin steven, repeat three times and go to bed with some Jung under your pillow. anyway...i'm wibbling...just to say, its nice to find a smart doctor who blog - clearly my ident gives away my biases - i'll check out some of your pieces on the last couple of seasons...cheers.