#belinda chandra... early episodes that is...

[sticksthesecond]

i love a duo that's just one brilliant, insane freak of a person and then just a guy who's having the worst time of his life.

[starleska]

ohh you're not slick Russell!!! we see how 'The Harvest Bringer' includes the word Harbinger 👀 but the question is...if Henry Arbinger was the Harbinger for Maestro...and Harriet Arbinger was the Harbinger for Sutekh...is Mr. Ring-A-Ding the Harbinger for someone else? and if so...who? 😱

[o-the-mts]

The Doctor Who fandom is testing my sanity with the whole "Belinda Chandra was forced into motherhood" thing. Like we literally saw The Doctor use his regeneration energy to restore reality and then learn that Belinda was a mother all along. All those cut scenes of Belinda talking about her child were there to show that the Doctor forgot them and we never saw them because reality had been altered.

And no, Belinda was not stripped of her career as a highly competent nurse. Everything we saw in The Robot Revolution - her work, her flat in the city, her crappy roommates - is also from reality. It's made pretty damn clear that Poppy lives with her grandmother in the suburbs and Belinda had to get there early after her night shift because Lakshmi had to play a concert.

Am I really the only one who saw this, because it feels like everyone else is talking about an episode from an alternate reality.

[noddytheornithopod]

I think Series 11 (first season with Jodie Whittaker) of Doctor Who actually has the right idea on how to approach a new era for the show - something more grounded, more focused on the core cast, minimal to no reliance on legacy characters and lore.

I know many people don't like the episodes in that season, but regardless of the subjective quality, I think the overall intent and direction was admirable. Of course, Series 12 made it all tie into the show's lore in big ways with lots of recurring elements, but yeah.

Like, I think there's still room for example the Daleks to return, and any old iconic monsters, but don't rely on old stuff and get bogged down in the massive amount of lore that makes it alienating to outsiders who may have otherwise been willing to give it a shot.

I mean, it's a part of why Series 1 worked - it was a mostly fresh jumping on point, and any connections to the past were either in the background (eg UNIT appearing) or explained in a way that made them accessible to a new audience (the Daleks and Time Lords).

I don't think we need a Time War style backstory to do a status quo reset, but like I said, make something that's accessible and makes people want to tune in instead of pushing them away.

Also: I don't think Doctor Who needs to try and recapture its success it had in the 00s and to some extent the early 10s. Don't focus on trying to be the biggest show in the world that everyone wants to watch (a mistake they made with the Disney deal IMO, aiming TOO high), but focus on making quality. If it means smaller budgets and maintaining a smaller but more loyal viewer base, then so be it. Downsizing a budget and making it more niche isn't guaranteed to make it good, but as we've seen with RTD2, going bigger doesn't mean better either.

Large corporations owning all of these IPs means they feel that everything they make has to be the next smash hit, when that's inevitably not going to happen. But why be satisfied with even moderate success when we live under capitalism, aka infinite growth for growth's sake?

We even see it in other franchises. Stuff like Solo and The Mandalorian and Grogu while not Box Office disasters didn't do as well as other Star Wars movies, but that's enough to make people write them off as complete failures. Everything HAS to be breaking records or it sucks.

Anyway yeah, Doctor Who's in a tricky spot. If this competitive tender doesn't go well, we're looking at Wilderness Years 2.0. But I'm not even upset about it, that's how bad the show has damaged its reputation lately.

Like yes, the Billie Piper regeneration was awful, but even with hasty reshoots, they came up with the worst possible resolution to Belinda Chandra's character, like stuff that's more than just regular bad.

And worst of all, nobody at the BBC thought it would be a bad idea to air a Eurovision themed episode that dealt with direct allegories to Israel's colonialism not only alongside the main show, but deals with those themes in such a poor way that I've seen people genuinely consider this Doctor Who's lowest point in 60+ years. I genuinely wonder why nobody saw what was unfolding with Israel and decided that maybe having your allegories for Palestinians be terrorists willing to murder trillions (a comically high number), while the Doctor tortures one of them for what he's about to do (but NOT the genocide the evil corporation does, a corporation that at BEST only gets a slap on the wrist, a sad song fixes everything). But don't worry, there's "good" Hellions! It's not all comically bloodthirsty terrorists! You just have to lean into respectability politics to make people cry for you a little and that will solve everything!

I'm sorry, but handling such a sensitive subject this poorly when Israel is committing a real genocide as we speak is absurdly incompetent at BEST. But welp, we've seen the BBC is willing to bend the knee to Zionists, so like they'd apologise for letting this episode be made. From what I can tell, the script was still written before Israel started its genocidal campaign in Gaza, but even if so, how did nobody see the optics of what was happening and think this was a bad idea? Did they think the passive liberal approach was enough to do the subject justice? Were there Zionists who wanted their precious Eurovision tie in where Israel could continue artwashing its image to the world who wanted this episode made anyway?

If there were ever any good ideas in Juno Dawson's script, they have been written out in consecutive drafts. And I know at least some stuff like the Doctor going edgelord torturer and pushing that further was RTD's idea. And like, I've seen Dawson HAS shown support for Palestine, and I think RTD himself has even acknowledged what is happening (even as he's still willing to work with Zionists but that's ANOTHER story). So WTF happened?

Okay, I went on a big tangent. Look, after these last three episodes of RTD2, I'm not even sad that we could be in the new Wilderness Years. The BBC really needs to take its time and get this right instead of forcing Doctor Who on TV for the sake of it.

I really hope we get genuine new voices too, I think we need some fresh approaches to the show to help reinvigorate it. Maybe even get a showrunner who isn't even a big fan of the show, like Tony Gilroy and Andor.

I'm sure things are going to work out eventually. But my god, we are in such a fucking mess right now. And RTD being weird and passive aggressive in his instagram post doesn't help either. I genuinely wonder WTF happened BTS during RTD2 to lead to where we are now.

[curioushabitforarivergod]

The Gender Politics of Disney-Era Doctor Who

this is very chatty and not very formal but its also like 3.5k long. i wrote majority of this very sleep deprived. thanks to @aitafrog for the read through.

++

Doctor Who’s Series 2 finale was, for lack of a better word, dogshit. While the series started off strong with intrigue and an interesting companion, as the eight week show runtime went on, it became clear the quality of episodes was declining. The Robot Revolution was great, as was Lux. The Well achieved what no one thought possible — a return to Midnight. Yet somewhere between that point and the two part finale Wish World and The Reality War, its quality began to decline, and not only because of Russell T Davies’ lazy writing (which is a whole other can of worms). As the series continued, it became clear that initially well-established companion Belinda Chandra was fading further and further into the background — something you don’t want your audience surrogate to do in an eight episode series. 

Bel was losing agency and credibility. She was becoming a flat character with no personality and fewer lines, and it spoke not as some might suggest, to the declining quality writing (although that certainly played a part), but to a longer, more established problem that exists not just in Doctor Who but in a wider media landscape of how non-male characters are treated. Belinda’s final form became one of oppressive womanhood and maternal sacrifice in an ultimate character assassination and rewrite, replacing her with the role of “mother”. 

But this problem is an older one, rooted in both ClassicWho and NuWho and their treatments of female characters.

Classic Issues = Modern Problems; or The Treatment of Women In Doctor Who Prior To The Disney-Era

The treatment and portrayal of female characters in Doctor Who is neither new nor limited solely to Disney and the second Russell T Davies era. Other creators have talked about this before in relation to both Classic and NuWho, but I believe it’s important to establish that Doctor Who’s relationship with women has been an up and down one. 

Doctor Who is an old show — it’s the oldest running sci-fi show in the world, and it’s been on modern screens for twenty years, a lot longer than other modern TV shows. Times and attitudes have changed during this period. Beginning roughly alongside the rise of second-wave feminism, female characters in the early period of the show were obviously treated differently from male ones. While not all stories used this formula, the companion often fell into the “traditional role” of damsel in distress, with companions often being captured and having to be saved by the Doctor; from Susan and Barbra, to Jo, Sarah-Jane, Peri and Mel, just to name a few.

With the reboot in 2005, the writers tried to adapt this structure for modern audiences. Companions became more proactive and involved. In Rose, Rose breaks this traditional damsel in distress role from the beginning by saving the Doctor several times from the Nestene Consciousness. Companions still relied on the Doctor, but there was an understanding that the relationship between them was a more mutual one.

At the same time, Doctor Who began to lean further into the idea that the Doctor travelled most frequently with a woman, often younger, a difference from Classic Who which also had a range of male and sometimes robot companions. The modern show is self aware of this, occasionally calling it out, although it's usually played off as another companion’s jealousy: “You can tell you're getting older. Your assistants are getting younger.” (School Reunion, 2006), and “Oh, she was blonde? Oh, what a surprise!” (Utopia, 2007) While recognising the trope, however, it does not actually draw much attention to the imbalance of gender roles within Doctor Who. It becomes a sort of inside joke with the audience rather than a genuine criticism. It also perpetuates ideas of “cat-fights”, of women who fight against each other for male approval. This similarly becomes a gag in The Sontaran Stratagem, and the Doctor’s warning for Donna and Martha not to fight each other, although it’s played differently and becomes a joke at the Doctor’s expense rather than companion and ex-companion.

And then we get this: “A mystery wrapped in an enigma squeezed into a skirt that's just a little bit too tight. Oh yeah.” (Nightmare in Silver, 2013)

Moffat’s writing here is deplorable — it’s a verbal example of what much of his earlier tenure was; one-handed writing — and to have the Doctor say it when they’re meant to be a paragon of what is right and just is horrifying. Reducing Clara to sexualisation not only demeans and diminishes her narrative, but poses a question of the Doctor’s integrity. Does he profile young, impressionable women for the explicit purpose of aesthetic, romanceable reasons? 

Rose was 19; Martha was 23; Amy was 21; Clara was a little older at 27; Yaz was 19 — with all of them, there was some notion of either romance or sexuality. And I’m all for fictional age gaps, but someone millenia old with a teenager or someone in their early twenties, no matter if they’re legal, is at the very least, morally questionable. Within this list of characters, Clara is the only one with a developed frontal-lobe. I think there seems to be the opinion of some writers that the women in Doctor Who are there for fan-service, to be attractive. This is most visible in the 11th Doctor’s era of Doctor Who and Moffat’s one-handed writing; Amy is a kissogram because it’s sexy, she flirts with the Doctor and other men because it’s sexy. The same case can be made for River Song, and her flirting. It’s a male fantasy and it’s fan-service. At the same time, however, they shouldn’t be placed in such strict boxes; both Amy and River mature as people over their arcs and their purpose is never solely as something visually appealing for the male-gaze. Otherwise, characters like Amy wouldn’t be my mum’s favourite. 

It is not to say all relationships and female characters within the classic and the 2005 BBC eras had such a gender divide. Romana, a Time Lady (whom I am very much in love with), is just as witty and intelligent, if not more so, than the Doctor. Donna had an agency not really seen in other characters, as did Bill, largely because of the boundaries they established. But outliers don’t excuse the legacy of failures done to the women of Doctor Who.Despite this, I think it’s important to realise Doctor Who does attempt to acknowledge this constant failure in Twice Upon a Time, and I think it does so in a reasonable way, unlike the casual, humorous mentions in earlier stories:

1ST DOCTOR: If I hear any more language like that from you, young lady, you're in for a jolly good smacked bottom. 12TH DOCTOR: Can we just pretend that that never happened? BILL: I'm a broad-minded girl. I mean, I know we have this whole professor - student thing going on. 12TH DOCTOR: Can we just never, ever talk about this again? BILL: I hope we talk about it loads. I hope we spend years laughing about it.

(2017)

Using the Doctor’s embarrassment, it’s amusing and self critical, even if it neglects the same critique of the modern era. In comparison to the steadily improving attitudes towards femininity and womanhood in Doctor Who, Disney appears comparatively bad. I think this is because despite its issues, Doctor Who was working to address them through acknowledgement and responsibility, casts with increasing diversity in age and genders, and Jodie Whitaker’s portrayal of the Doctor. The Disney-era has continued working to none of these amends, and as a result it looks so, so bad.

Pro-Life Politics in Doctor Who; or How Doctor Who Reinforces the Patriarchy In Its New Era

When it was first announced that Disney would be partnering with BBC and would be the sole distributor of the new Doctor Who overseas, I was apprehensive. As an Australian, free-to-air television and ABC iview had been the way I consumed Doctor Who for years. I was devastated that it would now be on a streaming platform that I had no access to, to the extent that my birthday present was a subscription. I was worried too, that Disney politics and its position as a multi-billion dollar company would harm the core ideas of Doctor Who; both its nature as an inherently queer text and also its critique of social issues through sci-fi. When it seemed that this wasn’t the case with the 60th anniversary specials, I mentally breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps too soon. 

The first season of this new era seemed to have a heavy emphasis on family, specifically non-nuclear style families. Ruby Sunday is a foster kid, brought up by her mum and her grandmother. This is not an inherently bad concept — the original run of NuWho saw something similar in non-nuclear families — but it soon became clear there was an emphasis on the idea of women as caregivers and mothers. 

In The Church On Ruby Road, we’re introduced to Ruby and her family, all women, who have fostered thirty-three children over the years. Immediately, the notion of the female caregiver is forced onto these characters and the narrative, and it’s only furthered as both the story and the season unfold. The Doctor’s introduction to Ruby — and to a certain extent, ours — is through the lens of a stolen child Ruby must recover, in part showing a woman’s inherent maternal nature. This similar idea is shown again through Ruby and the Doctor’s first actual outing, where an entire ship of babies imprint on her as their “mummy.”

While the babies do imprint on the Doctor too, there seems to be an overall lack of male parental roles within this first series. The only other character we really get to see being a father is in Boom, notably written by Steven Moffat. Vater, however, still dies within the cold open, leaving Splice an orphan (even if her faith allows her to believe he’s still there). 

The finale of Series 1 further forces motherhood, this time onto Ruby’s biological mother. Despite abandoning Ruby for valid reasons and not expressing any sort of interest in finding Ruby during the last 19 years, Ruby forces herself into her mother’s life… and is immediately accepted. Thrust into unexpected motherhood, there’s no reluctance on Ruby’s mother’s behalf, and she becomes a third maternal figure to Ruby despite not having wanted a baby initially. It feels forced and relegates the women of Ruby’s life to roles perpetuated by gender stereotypes; Ruby’s mother cannot have a place in her life outside the role of a caregiver.

This emphasis on the female caregiver continues into Disney’s Series 2, once more through Ruby Sunday and Doctor-lite episode, Lucky Day. Conrad Clark, a truly despicable person, is brought down through the power of women to protect and care for each other in maternal roles. Kate’s actions to protect Ruby through her somewhat immoral means are implied by Shirley as motherly: “You’ve already got two mums. What do you do, collect ‘em?”. (Lucky Day, 2025) This joke and Ruby’s wordless acknowledgement through her laughter act as a confirmation that Kate was acting through a caregiving characterisation; Kate is not allowed to protect Ruby through a mutual friendship (or as I would prefer, a lesbian attraction and pining) nor through a working relationship. Instead, she can only interact and protect Ruby through a maternal relationship, which establishes Kate as an independent force and Ruby as a dependent one; women’s relationships cannot be equal.

As a kind of antithesis of this, Conrad is meant to be explained as the way he is through his mother’s abuse of him and his father’s absence. His lack of a kind, motherly figure within his early life leads him to abuse and manipulate other women, reinforcing an outdated idea that women must love and care for men in fear that without a “feminine touch” men would be beasts. It’s oddly Freudian and anti-feminist, and removes not only Conrad’s agency but in a subliminal way suggests the role of women is to fix men. I see no other reason for including ideas of abuse within Conrad’s life; it is otherwise uncalled for. 

While Wish World enforces patriarchal society as a narrative device to show the wrongness and disconnect with our own world, The Reality War bizarrely continues it. Belinda’s only role within the narrative is to act as a caregiver and a mother to Poppy despite no prior “motherly” instincts. Yet her sudden motherhood fails to further the plot, and so Russell T Davies literally puts her into a box for the majority of the finale because she has no other use. It continues the complete character assassination of her from her introduction as a capable nurse, wary of the Doctor’s nature in a narratively interesting way, to a blank canvas who has little to no role in The Interstellar Song Contest. This can be seen most clearly in her lack of retaliation to the Doctor’s torture of Kid — despite having called him out on these exact things in The Robot Revolution. 

In a truly horrible ending, her role as mother and caregiver is perpetuated in the ending of The Reality War by literally rewriting her character and story just to enforce motherhood upon her. In the entirety of the season, she had never once expressed a wish for a child, and had seemed perfectly happy as a single woman focusing on her career as a nurse. It’s such an odd dichotomy, and it ruins Belinda as a character completely. She is shoved away, given a house and a child and told to play family, and she has no agency or choice in the matter — despite whatever an alternate universe version of her said. 

It speaks, I think, to pro-life ideas, something I thought I would never see again in Doctor Who after Kill the Moon (which yes, I understand was more than that, but for the sake of this and its general interpretation, I’m choosing to read that episode in this manner). Poppy is literally called a “happy accident” in The Reality War; she is the accidental child of the Doctor and Belinda in the same way an accidental pregnancy might occur in any other TV material, but because of science fiction, she is born fully formed instead of several episodes of an increasing tummy bump. 

It highlights an alarming trope in media of accidental pregnancy where a possibility of abortion is given under the guise of “pro-choice.” This is ultimately refused because abortion doesn’t sell; there is a deep moral opposition and social stigma still attached to abortion which threatens monetary gain for investors and media producers who are ultimately corporations. Women are treated as objects or commodities; French feminist philosopher and linguist Luce Irigaray notes in her examination of the uses and misuses of language in relation to women:

Neither as mother nor as virgin nor as prostitute has woman any right to her own pleasure… distinguished, divided, separated, classified as like and unlike, according to whether they have been judged exchangeable. In themselves, among themselves, they are amorphous and confused: natural body, maternal body, doubtless useful to the consumer, but without any possible identity or communicable value.

(Women on the Market, 1977)

Simply, the “media’s” woman is a damsel in distress, a lover, a mother, a sister, a dead body, but never ever anything outside of her relationship to a man in direct mirage to patriarchal societies' wishes. I don’t think I’ve ever watched (or to that extent, read) something where a woman is given the choice of abortion and actually takes it.

The Reality War doesn’t suggest abortion explicitly, but it's there. The Doctor can choose whether or not to shift reality to let this “happy accident” live even though she wasn’t real to begin with, and Belinda can make this choice too. But it’s an illusion, because Doctor Who would never kill a child, just as the media would never kill off the chance of one. In the minds of creators, there is a possibility to create a living, breathing, entity that represents the one of the only possible endings of a woman’s story, and without it there is no plot; characters, particularly women, are forced to say “yes, and.” We realise there was never any choice subliminally, and slowly, while verbally suggesting the opposite, pro-choice is killed by the media because babies are good and so women need them to be good too. 

Pro-choice shouldn't be an illusion, but it is, and Belinda is relegated to the only story that is allowed to be told: motherhood. 

Within Doctor Who, just like most other media, “evil” or morally corrupt women are not portrayed as caring or motherly at all, further perpetuating the idea of a good woman as someone who fits within certain parameters, maternal being one of them. The Rani quite literally steals a baby in Wish World to use for her own benefit, like many of the “evil witches” in fairy tales. She shows no love to the baby, and keeps it locked in a room with Conrad. Furthermore, she — or rather, Mrs. Flood — mentions stalking both Ruby and Belinda, likely as early as birth, which is incredibly creepy both textually and subtextually. It continues the implication that “bad” women don’t want to have children of their own, but rather want others as they thus aren’t forced to mother them and instead can be used for nefarious purposes. 

The inability or lack of want to have children within Disney-Era Doctor Who is portrayed through these negative perspectives too. The introduction of The Reality War’s “Time Lords are infertile” lore when almost every Time Lord is portrayed as arrogant, manipulative and (often) wanting to destroy the world, suggests their inability to have children is because of their immoral behaviors. This is amplified because of the context of the series and era as a whole, which has been almost solely defined by the roles and expectations of a mother to a child. Most commonly, this mother-child relationship is non biological; if you do not have a child, find one(!) Those who do not conform are outsiders and more likely to fall into immoral and corrupt behaviour. Rather bizarrely, it replaces the “power of friendship” with the “power of family.”Similarly, in The Church On Ruby Road, in the alternate universe where Ruby didn’t exist and Cherry and Carla thus never raised her (and 33 other foster children), they’re quasi-evil in their uncaring, unmotherly nature: “I couldn't have a kid full-time. It'd be a nightmare. This little brat arrives, ruining my holiday. I was looking forward to it. Christmas Day.” (2023) Returning to Conrad for just a moment, we see it here too — it’s Conrad’s mother’s abuse that turns him down his path, and events spiral into Lucky Day, Wish World, and The Reality War.

So Where to From Here?

Disney’s-era of Doctor Who has continued a long-running failure to portray female characters, yet somehow made it worse. We seem to be sliding backwards from the late Moffat era, and even from Chibnall’s era. While the diversity and exploration of non-nuclear family dynamics within this Disney-era is interesting and builds off the first Russell T Davies era, it’s also misogynistic as soon as examined with a closer lens. 

The relegation of female characters to the role of motherhood and caregiving within this era is anti-feminist and subjugating. There should be a diverse range of experiences between characters, but every woman (barring the evil or morally-grey ones) is obsessed with the notion of motherhood. There is no diversity between Davies’ characters, and it’s certainly not the reboot I wanted or expected in a second RTD showrun. 

The Disney-era’s treatment and attitude towards women and gender politics of motherhood highlights a real problem within the show, fandom and wider media landscape. I hope with Billie Piper taking a front seat, there will be a shift and adjustment in this, but I’m not convinced. I believe there needs to be a change, not just in the face, but in the team behind Doctor Who too — we need more women writing for the show. Looking at the Wikipedia of credits for Doctor Who episodes, the overwhelming majority of them are men. But the women writers who are in those credits are good ones — Helen Raynor, who wrote both the Dalek two-parter Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks, and the Sontaran two-parter The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky the following year; Sarah Dollard, who wrote Face the Raven and Thin Ice in the 12th Doctor’s tenure; or maybe Maxine Aldertone, who wrote The Haunting of Villa Diodati and Village of the Angels, two of what I consider the better stories of the Chibnall era. I’d mention more female writers, but there have only been 11 other women who’ve written for Doctor Who, and most have only one attributed to their name. This number makes up only about 10% of the writer credits for Doctor Who. I think it’s clear it's time for a female showrunner, because for a show that prides itself on a progressive approach to social issues, and that generally has a 50-50 balance in terms of audience gender, it's clearly not represented in production.

Further Links

Back to Marx: reflections on the feminist crisis at the crossroads of neoliberalism and neoconservatism

Women on the Market

[hawkiest]

If only e1 Belinda "No one scans my body without my consent" Chandra got to meet e8 Belinda "my entire life was rewritten by the Doctor" Chandra, or even got the glimpses of what was to come while she was in the time fracture, the whole season would've lasted for only one episode, because she would've beat the Doctor's ass into early regeneration with her timey whimey star certificate from the future

Justice for Belinda