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.