32 Mickey Smith from Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse [Video ] (1:07)

Watch this entire presentation: Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse: Paving the Way for a Lady Doctor with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (36:58)

For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!

Transcript:

Mickey is probably one of my favorite companions. Right? Because he starts out as Rose’s boyfriend. He loses her to The Doctor — so that kind of makes him a loser because he lost his girlfriend. That’s kind of sad, right and they played with that a little bit. He wasn’t quite as good as The Doctor, but he worked at it. He discovered that he wanted to be more in the episode where Sarah Jane came back and what he really does that is so cool is when he has a chance to pick a parallel universe or a real universe, he wants to stay in the universe where his grandmother is still alive. His grandmother is the most important influence in his life. Not a grandfather. Not a dad. A woman who he wants to spend more time within his own life. SoI thought that was a super cool thing for him to choose to do. And of course, at the very end of David Tennant’s era, he visited all his past companions and did something to save their life before he regenerated and we discovered that in the interim Mickey and Martha have fallen in love and gotten married. So, he picked the most equal and powerful woman that he could be with if he couldn’t have Rose. Right? So, he grew up and moved on to an adult relationship, not a dependent younger relationship..

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter and Instagram
https://twitter.com/rosannewelch – http://instagram.com/drrosannewelch

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Rosanne Welch, PhD

Rosanne Welch PhD teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

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