Reading/Watching Log #98

No, your eyes don’t deceive you, there are only books on the log this month – no films or shows save for the Doctor Who Christmas Special. This just sort of happened rather than being something I planned out; I’m still racing to catch up on all the posts I usually do for the end of the year, and there wasn’t much free time for anything else.

The two shows I am watching (Elementary and The Adventures of Robin Hood) are probably going to stretch into March, because February is when my annual leave kicks in, and I’m going to use it to finally get the quartet of Evil, Nancy Drew, The Great and Perry Mason under my belt. Three weeks of freedom to make up for my Covid Christmas!

Women of the Year: A Retrospective 2023

It is now my mission to write up all the end-of-year posts that I usually have finished by this point in time, but which I’m running behind on thanks to that pesky Covid-induced delay.

As ever, this is my annual post of female characters I watched or read about during the course of the year who didn’t make the cut for Woman of the Month, but were still engaging and noteworthy. It also works as something of a retrospective concerning female characters in general for 2023, specifically in the realm of mainstream pop-culture entertainment.

As ever, there were the usual problems: women getting fridged to motivate a male character, writers being blatantly terrified of any complexity or shortcomings in their depictions of women (which inevitably leads to accusations of girl-bossing or Mary Suedom) and women who are genuinely spunky and charming, but who never actually get to impact the plot in any meaningful way (Marion Ravenwood, Kitty Softpaws, Cara Dutton...)

Plus, there is still that pervading assumption that women have to be relatable role models – which means that when characters like Evelyn Quan Wang or General Nanisca come along, it feels like a genuine (and glorious) shock to the system.

But my main issue with female characters in 2023 is simply that there wasn’t much to get excited about. With one obvious exception (she’s blonde and shares her name with an outdoor cooking device) it was a fallow year for female characters – at least in the media I consumed.

Part of that had to do with the fact I simply didn’t watch as many shows or films this year. Because I’ve been burned so many times with unceremonious cancellations on streaming services, I ended up sticking with shows that aired decades ago (Spooks, Sailor Moon, Elementary) which left me with a much smaller pool of female characters to choose from. For the first time ever, I had to skip a Woman of the Month post and write it out later, simply because I had so few options.

And more generally speaking, there just didn’t seem to be many compelling female characters on display this year. I’ll have more to say about that in a bit, but for now, here are some of the women worth your attention from an otherwise not-hugely-inspirational year...

Woman of the Month: Donna Noble

Donna Noble from Doctor Who

Donna Noble did not have an auspicious start to her tenure on Doctor Who, first appearing as a stroppy Bridezilla who was singularly unimpressed with the Doctor right on the heels of Rose Tyler’s emotional departure.

Personally, I felt she was a breath of fresh air after the overwrought teenage angst of Rose, but I distinctly recall audiences being somewhat taken aback by this new prototype of potential Companion: abrasive, bossy, and uninterested in anything but getting to the alter on time. No adventures throughout time and space for her, thank you!

And yet even this early on, she had hidden depths: talking the Doctor down from his homicidal rage against the Racnoss, and urging him to find someone to travel with, intuiting that he needed someone to reign him in. As it happens, that ended up being the major theme of the Tenth Doctor’s tenure, and it’s picked up again when Donna returns to the Tardis – this time as an eager participant who has been searching for him since their last meeting, having come to regret turning down his offer to travel with him.

Now she’s not only answering the call, but seizing it with both hands – even though she’s not ready for some of the ethically sticky decisions that the Doctor has to face on a daily basis.

But having grown exponentially from a vapid, inattentive woman obsessed with celebrity gossip and landing a husband, Donna’s great tragedy is that she must lose all memories of her time with the Doctor in order to save her life, taking her character development back to square one. It was a bitter pill to swallow, especially when her final appearance in “The End of Time” made it clear there would be no takebacks.

And yet, the beauty of a long-running television serial is that anything can be revisited, literally decades after they were seemingly wrapped up. A full thirteen years after she was last seen in the show’s chronology, Donna Noble returned to the series for a long-awaited continuation of her story.

Now with a teenage daughter, the conundrum of her memory loss and the danger it posed her is beautifully resolved when it transpires that half of the repressed Time Lord energy passed into her child at birth, allowing Donna to access her hidden intelligence without any fatal consequences. It’s a surprisingly simple and elegant solution to the problem, albeit one high on emotional intensity with a few “suck it bigots!” parallels to the non-binary nature of Donna’s daughter.

There’s a reason Donna is one of the show’s most popular Companions, and for my money, it’s twofold: firstly that she depicts so much growth during her time on the show, and secondly that she’s blissfully devoid of any romantic tension with the Doctor. Instead, they build a solid friendship – perhaps the most affecting of the entire show – which ultimately provides the Doctor with a place to heal and rest.

We watched Donna’s development with our own eyes, from brash and self-absorbed to conscientious and empathetic, and so the loss and regaining of her experiences across time and space becomes all the more powerful for having unfolded in real time. She had to wait thirteen years, and so did we.

It didn’t seem so at the time, but in hindsight, her character trajectory was always in the hands of a story that knew what it was doing.

Reading/Watching Log #97

Whew, I’m finally finished. Getting laid low with Covid was one thing, but after the monthly deadline passed, I found it difficult to get motivated in finishing up this post. Plus, I still have my Recommendations of 2023 and Women of the Year posts to make, and I’ve no idea how long they’re going to take me.

It’s a little strange looking over this log and seeing it divided into what I watched before, during and after Covid. More than that, there are some crazy coincidences in what this material contains, including a. a small, almost throwaway, scene in which a person of colour deals with a passive-aggressive comment on where they were born (Doctor Who and Dial of Destiny), a skeleton that is animated by sentient bandages/rags (Zita the Space Girl and an episode of Legend of the Seeker), two social climbing women (The Crown and Dangerous Liaisons) and actors who looks like Eddie Redmayne, who are not actually Eddie Redmayne.

So here it is, better late than never.

Links and Updates

So what did you get for Christmas? I got Covid, which meant I didn’t get a Christmas. I’ve finally dragged myself out the other side of my sick bed, though I still feel like crap and barely have the energy to type this (the post you’re about to read was written about a day before the symptoms really hit).

I’m ticked off, as I was able to avoid the virus for this long, but I suppose I knew deep down it was going to catch up to me eventually. In any case, I hope your Christmas was better than mine.

My last Links and Updates post was a bit miserable, as there’s been so little to look forward to this year and so much more that has been unceremoniously cancelled. And then, in the past couple of weeks, something happened – the promise of good stuff!

And yes, a lot of it is prequels and sequels and remakes and continuations, but they appear to have a level of care and quality involved that piques my interest...

Legend of the Seeker: Desecrated

We start with another of those patented camping scenes in which the characters are ribbing each other over the fire (it’s a staple of this show by now) when Kahlan emerges from the forest and announces that gars are attacking a nearby village. They all race off to lend their assistance... only for it to turn out to be a surprise party for Richard’s birthday.

Aww. But also – enjoy it while it lasts.

Legend of the Seeker: Creator

Ah, it’s a good old clip show episode. This should be an easy one.

With the advent of short-form television, in which a season gets approximately eight to ten episodes at most, the use of the Clip Show has pretty much disappeared. Their purpose back in the days of twenty-two-episode seasons were obviously to fill in a bit of time and save a bit of money by showcasing footage of the show that had already been shot, usually under the guise of catching the audience up on events, or demonstrating how much a character has grown.

For my money, the best justification for a clip show was “Past Imperfect” from Xena Warrior Princess, in which the story involves Gabrielle literally revisiting her memories leading up to a particular life-altering choice, with a twist on what was actually occurring in that moment.

In this case, Legend of the Seeker goes for more of a Courtroom Drama, where our characters are forced to defend Richard’s integrity as a hero to a mysterious figure who confronts him with the prophecy that he’ll end up helping the Keeper by giving him the Stone of Tears.