A short clip from the longer presentation, “Doctor Who Regenerated”
Dr. Rosanne Welch, Cal Poly Pomona Faculty from the Department of Interdisciplinary General Education is back by popular demand with a new lecture on Doctor Who and Television!
This time, the Doctor will focus on a deeper look of the themes of the writers behind “Doctor Who.” Above and beyond race and gender, they include social justice and the power of childhood.
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Transcript:
The other fable that Steven plays with, rather interestingly, is the concept of the fairytale marriage — the fairytale wedding. First of all, he gives us the first married couple to travel in the TARDIS, which was a really, really, really, really cool thing to provide and it’s a really interesting marriage. We’re going to have Amy. We’re going to have Rory. First of all, what does he call Rory? What’s Rory’s name? Rory Pond. But that’s Amy’s last name. That’s not his last name, but once they get married the Doctor continuously refers to him as Rory Pond and when Rory argues about that he says “Give it up. That’s true. That’s who you are.” And Rory accepts it. You’re right. As a matter of facet it really doesn’t matter who changes their name and why does she have to change her name. It’s a ridiculous old habit. So, that’s one. So Steven has been hit with the idea that he is a misogynist and I see some evidence of that, but then I see this other argument against it and so I find it a very interesting dance that he seems to be playing. But by giving us Rory and Amy, he’s showing us a working marriage where the woman happens to be more dominant than the man. She’s more adventurous. She’s more — they’re of equal intelligence, but really Rory should be smarter than her because he’s trained to be a nurse. She really has no formal training. She didn’t go to college. She had all the crazy stuff happen because she saw the Doctor when she was a little girl. So I think its very interesting the balance that he strikes here and also the fact that Rory is always strong emotionally for Amy and that’s the power that he has in that relationship and that’s Steven Moffat’s of what a real mariage should be. Interestingly enough, he and Sue Vertue, who helped produce these episodes and produces Sherlock with him — that’s his wife. So, they are of equal importance in their particular professional worlds. She has the power to greenlight his work and to make it come to fruition — to protect his work from the network. So he gets the vision he wants. They’re a very important team. So, I tend to see that there is more — oddly enough — feminism in Steven Moffat than is necessarily always recognized. Mostly because of them.
“Natalie Lopez at the CalPoly University Library invited me to do a presentation for National Libraries Week on Doctor Who and Culture so that’s why a group of Whovians from both CalPoly and CSUF gathered in the Special Events room on April 16th. It was wonderful to look out over a sea of t-shirts and other Doctor paraphernalia present among the crowd as I pontificated about what makes Who great – mostly giving me a chance to present a case for the fact that writers make Doctor Who and therefore writers make culture.”
