Category: Doctor Who

Transcript:

…and then Owen was an interesting character. I mean he could be your bland white guy except he wasn’t a nice guy necessarily and they had to put up with him because of his talent and he had to learn and grow. So I think he was an interesting character. He’s not the most interesting of all of them. The fact that he had a relationship with Tosh says a little bit about him right? So it’s not the best character but he was you know i mean if he had to have a second white guy he was okay but here’s where i start thinking about the writing makes the show stand out.

Transcript:

The person of color they ended up with and did keep of course was Toshiko and here they did good and they made a small mistake or they fell into a stereotype. Certainly, they made her a regular. She has a sex life. She falls in love with an alien. So we’re going to go into omnisexual stuff too. So we’re continuing the idea of the show but she also falls in love with Owen. So you know she also falls in love with a human but usually your person of color – largely when that person is of Asian descent – never has a sex life. Never has a home family. It’s like they don’t exist except to be in the workplace. So I would say that the stereotype they fell into was of course she is our computer expert. Happens a lot. We just ran into a yet another new series in the UK called Annika and it’s the story of a female cop and one of her assistants – one of the other cops –  is the actress who played Cho Chang in the Harry Potter series. Now she’s about 30 and she does computer stuff but she also works in the field. So we’ve seen her interrogate people. So they’ve moved beyond that stereotype. They started there and now we’ve seen them move beyond that. So I would say that’s maybe the one flaw with this character but they certainly gave her a three-dimensional life and that’s really all anybody’s asking for. If you’re going to include a character they shouldn’t just be there as window dressing. They should have a complete life right and that’s been an argument for a long time with people of color on different tv shows. They don’t go home to somebody. They’re just there hanging out with the white people helping them out and it’s kind of like no they have other people in their life. So Tosh had a sex life. She had love. She had desires and she went through on most of those. So I think she’s a pretty focused…

Audience: She got more action than Jack.

Rosanne: She did. She totally did which is you know that’s I think innovative.

Audience: That’s saying something.

Rosanne: Exactly.

Audience: Jack talks a good game.

Rosanne: Exactly

Transcript:

Now we come to Martha who belongs on this show but the actress had other ideas. Totally fine. You run your own career. You’re gonna go do that but again in terms of representation the idea all along was that she would have learned from her travels with The Doctor. Where are you gonna use skills like that? Where else? In Torchwood. So totally useful for her. So to have a woman and when I wrote about torchwood I realized i can’t call her African-American. They were like wait wait. I said what do you do they said she’s an English woman of African descent. So there you go or whatever descent a person happens to be in England. So think about how great and I think this would have been so cool if she was a regular on the show but okay she chose not to be but that was the plan and they did try to use her as a guest whenever they could and I think that’s a big deal. Again making sure that there was a person of color in the lead of that show.

Transcript:

If you think about it but he’s an equal partner. Again in children of earth this marvelous bit. They’re carrying these children away together. They’re saving them. He’s just as much a hero. He doesn’t have to have a job that defines him as a hero. He’s one in his heart right and so I think he’s a marvelous character that we don’t necessarily see again on American television. Still, when there are women who achieve a lot they aren’t partnered. We’re not seeing this kind of balanced marriage and I see it much more in UK shows and actually shows in Canada. We watch a lot of Canadian tv. One is the number one detective show in Canada is called Murdoch Mysteries and she’s a coroner and he’s a cop. It’s in like 1910 Toronto and they dated for a series of years and then they got married and in an American show like on Bones – I got married shows over. Show’s done. Nobody cares anymore right? Here they’ve been married for the last four or five seasons and they still both do their cool work and they have this equal relationship.