Rant: Dr Who & The "Spunky Assistant"

(This post refers to events and character developments in a number of episodes, from the start of the new series in 2005, through to yesterday's The Shakespeare Code, but I don't THINK it contains any detailed spoilers - Nova)

Martha Jones

Dr Who tends to be remembered through rose-tinted glasses: the old series, old companion and the last Doctor always look much better through the misty lens of fond memory.

Because of that, I wanted to give it a couple of episodes before I passed judgement on the Doc's new assistant, Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman).

Two eps in, and one very funny (and very cleverly handled) bedroom scene aside, and she's making a good impression - she fits the ongoing trend for companions to stand up in their own right and question and challenge the Doctor, rather than being kidnap fodder with a big loud scream, and she handles the odd situations she finds herself in with admirable poise - flirting with Shakespeare and grabbing scanners from Judoon space police.

And actually, it's that trend that's beginning to bug me a bit.

Maybe I'm just "pre-menstrual" or plain pissed off, but how far into hero territory are ALL female lead characters now required to go?

Ellen Ripley

Alien's Ellen Ripley, who started this trend, broke new ground for sci-fi heroines by refusing to be a victim, and by fighting back against massive odds, despite various limited armouries, with all the guts and gusto of any male action hero, and she deserves a place in history for forever changing the representation of women in movies.

Sarah Connor in Terminator picked up the baton, especially in T2, and a return to the bad old days of female lead as ornamental scream-machine is now unthinkable.

But at what point does this trend become just another limiting stereotype, and create its own kind of damage to the self-esteem of girls and young women?

Men, on the other hand, have always had access to a full range of personas, because aside from the quipping action hero, there's the thoughtful and reluctant hero (Blake from Blake's 7, Neo in The Matrix), the cowardly joker (Vila in B7) and the scared guy who gets roped in and somehow comes through at the last minute - Purvis in Alien Resurrection comes to mind, the little guy who uses his chestbursting alien to save Call's life.

Women have gone straight from victim to hero, preferably with a dash of noble self-sacrifice, and there's still no grey area for us - for example, I can in no way imagine sneaky Adam from Dalek and The Long Game, Mickey the idiot, or Captain Jack the conman, as female characters in this current Whoniverse....

Entertainment

In the wider media, men have the option to be slobs, and so be cute; be layabouts, and yet be quietly noble; be traitors, yet be witty; lecherous, yet lovable - or to be pretty much anything else they choose.

They tend to be judged less on having pure morals and a perfect character, than on their entertainment value as a whole.

Yet I cast my mind back over the new series of Doctor Who and all, ALL the female characters who've had more than a bit part have been: brave, resourceful, self-sacrificing, noble, good and strong - most of them have been witty as well!

It's surely a clever adaptation of the Madonna-whore complex that all women must be shown as wholly perfect, in order to get any respect at all?

Notably, malevolent female characters like Cassandra, last night's Lilith, and the Plasmavore have all been non-human in either form or original species, and all fairly unsympathetic/unlikeable - so far as I can find, there have been no young female humans who have been anything less than great since the series returned in 2005.

Insecure

Now, I'm not suggesting that some sub-Bridget Jones neurotic would necessarily make a great central character for a show like Dr Who, or be in any way a better role model, but surely painting ALL young females as heroic is every bit as straight-jacketing as having them faint screaming at the merest hint of trouble?

Surely women are not so insecure still, that the only reflection of our kind we can handle from the media is this absurd caricature of spunky resoucefulness, moral rectitude, unlimited courage, and "get up and go"?

I'd like to see women represented as fully, roundedly human - equally capable of being crappy, having an off-day, or having base motives as male characters.

I simply cannot see any other way in which we'll break the restrictive corset applied to all minorities (in representation if not mass of numbers) in which one of us represents all of us, and is held up to be a kind of figurehead.

Assumption

Not so long ago, any person from a minority ethnic group in the public eye would often be asked to speak for all people in that group, and/or treated in the media as though they did, despite the denial of humanity inherant in that assumption.

To switch genres for a moment, it seems that a lot of the flack garnered by the character Bridget Jones, who does stand alone in the bestseller charts as being a likeable, yet deeply flawed, lead female, was because women are still seen (by ourselves as well as the media) as an homogenous mass, whereby one woman can then let the whole lot of us down, because we are not truly individual.

Notably, such accusations of gender traitor were never levelled at comparably stupid, weak and needy male characters in comedy, such as Hancock, Steptoe Jnr or Rodney the Plonker. Frasier had many of the same issues as Bridget, yet I don't recall outraged columns about how men think of more than finding love and increasing their status.

And can you even imagine a FEMALE Mr Bean?!

Moral Ambiguity

If comedy - intrinsically a genre about absurd people doing stupid things so we can laugh at them - still has restrictions on how it portrays women, what chance does sci-fi, which relies heavily on heroes and villains to drive the plot forward, have of throwing in the odd less-than-perfect female, who makes big mistakes, screws up or acts selfishly, while remaining likeable and sympathetic?

Captain Jack had a large amount of moral ambiguity around his past, which ran through right into his first appearance as a con-man on Dr Who in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances - if women are to ever be shown as real people rather than cardboard cut-outs, then it's time we had an equally personable - and equally flawed - female step up as more than non-human villain of the week.

It's generally the mark of a gender-oppressive society that women are handed the role of self-sacrificing carriers of the moral burden, while men are held far less accountable and given far more freedoms.

And as long as the only female characters we're asked to like on this series are pure of heart and noble of deed, we may not have stepped quite so far away from the bad old days as we think.