Paradiso

There is a world in which the standards for artistic and literary output are much higher. In this world modern writers like Neal Stephenson are considered mainstream trash. Twilight is considered so far below even pulp standards as to be unworthy of mentioning; Breaking Dawn topped at seventy-first on the New York Times bestseller chart; during the same week The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana spent its record hundred and tenth consecutive week atop said chart.

            Joel Schumacher’s film career ended after Batman & Robin, so Kinuyo Tanaka directed The Phantom of the Opera—which was her last movie before her death at the age of ninety-five the next year. Her state funeral in Tokyo was watched by a hundred million people worldwide. Phantom was a Sondheim musical. Sondheim’s generally considered one of the low-end-of-mainstream people in theatre, but that’s considered probably his finest work. Andrew Lloyd Webber got shitcanned from the musical theatre industry in the 1990s; he’s considered a one-hit wonder because of Cats.

            Britney Spears is another one-hit wonder because of ‘Toxic’ and is fading gracefully into relative obscurity, though ‘Toxic’ might be the next big Internet –roll phenomenon. Snow Patrol, Ryan Adams, The Decembrists, Franz Ferdinand, and The Killers are all extremely popular and a little overplayed. Pretentious indie people tend to be Kajiura Yuki fans. Noir was dubbed very well, aired on prime-time US television in 2002, and became the most popular foreign TV show of all time in America.

            Don’t forget that Invader Zim lasted for six seasons and is still immensely popular in syndication, Shinkai Makoto’s movies get big North American releases, Richard Dawkins’s forays into religious studies were met with schadenfreudean laughter from all quarters, Joss Whedon had the good sense to end Buffy the Vampire Slayer after four seasons and palmed off Firefly to another creative team after his juice ran out midway through Season Three, and Shark Attack 3: Megalodon is considered so bad as to be practically from another universe and worth preserving for that alone.

            After the outcry following the poor writing of ‘Doomsday’ Russell T Davies stepped down from his post at Doctor Who. The fourth season of the revived series (thirtieth overall) was the much-loved, instant-classic ‘Return of Gallifrey’ story arc penned mainly by Gary Russell, P.J. Hammond (whose enduring classic Sapphire and Steel ran for a hundred and fifty-one episodes in thirty-five serials over the course of eleven years), and Doris Lessing. The script for ‘Love & Monsters’ was considered too terrible for even Davies to use (even by him, who wrote it on a bender) and was replaced with a brilliant deconstructive exercise by A.S. Byatt.

I think I’m going to go cry into a bucket of ice cream now.

Does Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who pass the Bechdel Test?

So far, ‘Moff Time’, the most recent season of the staggeringly long-running British science-fiction series Doctor Who now run by Steven Moffat, has had four episodes: ‘The Eleventh Hour’, ‘The Beast Below’, ‘Victory of the Daleks’, and ‘The Time of Angels’. When Moffat took over from Russell T Davies, there were some concerns raised about Moffat’s gender politics and competence writing female characters. Moffat got his start with the children’s drama Press Gang in the early nineties and then moved into broad, mediocre sex comedies before finding his true calling: scaring the everloving crap out of the younger generation of the United Kingdom. This history, plus some unfortunate statements that he’s made in interviews, gave rise to a legitimate concern that his tenure on Doctor Who would have far more problems with gender politics than Davies did. Since Davies had already racked up an astounding track record of genderfail in his own right, this was seen as a huge, huge potential problem, particularly since the show revolves around the dynamic between a sequence of mostly-female characters and an extremely powerful male character, the Doctor.

With these concerns in mind, I think that a good way to gauge Moff Time so far is to apply the Bechdel Test, a series of criteria enumerated by the lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel. For a work to pass the Bechdel Test, it has to (1) have multiple female characters who (2) talk to one another about (3) something other than a male character. I’m not going to sift back through the entire history of Doctor Who gauging the series’ entire forty-seven-year history and then comparing it to the last four episodes. That would take too long, although I can say off the top of my head that the 1963-5 run with William Hartnell, Carole Ann Ford, William Russell, and Jacqueline Hill produced by Verity Lambert and the 1987-9 run with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred produced by John Nathan Turner had pretty good Bechdel Test scores and the 1971-3 run with Jon Pertwee, Nicholas Courtney, Katy Manning, and Roger Delgado produced by Barry Letts had pretty poor ones. The Hartnell-Lambert period benefited from having two female leads, the McCoy-Turner period benefited from having a companion who coded as lesbian, and the Pertwee-Letts period suffered from having a relatively large cast of dynamic male characters and only one prominent female one.