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I seriously wonder if we all watched the same thing because i have no idea how this came off as screamingly racist to anyone. Unless you interpret the obvious ISIS undertones as literal loving allegory it was otherwise no more xenophobic than any other alien invasion episode. And no more populated with poo poo characters and clunky militarism than any UNIT episode, I'll add. Also yeah the fact that it's a two-parter is, actually, a reason to withhold judgment until you've seen the second part. The main complaint i can see is "they didn't represent the good Zygons enough!" which they have another 45 minutes to do and also did you fall asleep during every single Osgood scene where they were clearly seeding "there is more to this conflict than meets the eye" as a thing. I guess I took it as a given that everyone who advocated for blowing up the Zygons and being paranoid about your neighbors and friends and throwing around Them Foreigners talk was obviously in the wrong. Like hell is this anywhere near as racist as Talons of Weng-Chiang. misadventurous fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Nov 2, 2015 |
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Nov 2, 2015 12:40
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Here’s the thing – we all realize just how racist The Talons of Weng-Chiang is, but “all Chinamen are evil” wasn’t the main focus of the story. There was a great script, memorable characters, and some very tense moments. There’s a reason Talons is considered one of the best Who stories ever, but the racism isn’t imprinted on screen OR a central focus for its entire runtime. If the Zygon splinter group was a minor focus of the story but mixed in with well-done action and suspense, I feel there would be more people saying “OK, great episode but the racism is a glaring flaw” as opposed to “wow, what a racist story.”
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Nov 2, 2015 12:54
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Y'all are obsessed with ISIS. The message was clearly that Americans ruin everything.  How can you not see that? The Zygons whole schtick is perfect camouflage. Perfect assimilation. Then the baby zygons were put in a situation where assimilation is all but impossible. The ones that went bad were sent to America, where they literally refer to non-citizens living in America as "resident aliens". Aliens. These kids were put in a situation where they would be discriminated against as aliens, but not the kind of aliens they actually are. So they are simultaneously pretending to blend in and be normal as hard as they can, and being treated as outsiders who will never fit in. Americans in general like the British more than most other potential immigrant groups, and a few hundred of them could probably drop into any large city and fit in immediately, but dropping a bunch of them into a tiny town (less than 7000 people) in New Mexico of all places was doomed. No jobs, no homes, no support network. Resented and told to go home. And then they start dying. Those particular zygons going "gently caress this, let's go back 'home' to the UK" is perfectly understandable. People treated them like poo poo until they they started fighting back. The moral of the story: don't treat people like poo poo.
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Nov 2, 2015 12:56
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CobiWann posted:Here’s the thing – we all realize just how racist The Talons of Weng-Chiang is, but “all Chinamen are evil” wasn’t the main focus of the story. There was a great script, memorable characters, and some very tense moments. There’s a reason Talons is considered one of the best Who stories ever, but the racism isn’t imprinted on screen OR a central focus for its entire runtime. Its also that it's an incredibly topical and volatile ongoing current issue for the UK, Europe, and Australia that was portrayed in the most tone-deaf way possible.
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Nov 2, 2015 13:06
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Angela Christine posted:Y'all are obsessed with ISIS. The message was clearly that Americans ruin everything. As an American I don’t understand the question and refuse to acknowledge it.
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Nov 2, 2015 13:09
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Burkion posted:And again, even if worst comes to worst- we still have Talons as The Racist Who. I think the real question here is if Talons is more racist than The Celestial Toymaker.
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Nov 2, 2015 13:30
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Attitude Indicator posted:I feel bad for the director of this episode, cause he did a great job with what he had, where everyone else sort of just said gently caress it Really? Those dutch angles in the apartment where Clara was taken were embarrassing. Generally I thought his compositions were off.
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Nov 2, 2015 13:37
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Random Stranger posted:I think the real question here is if Talons is more racist than The Celestial Toymaker. Well, The Celestial Toymaker literally has the n-word in it, so...
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Nov 2, 2015 13:38
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ANYWAY TIME FOR JOKE'S:
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Nov 2, 2015 14:02
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Angela Christine posted:Y'all are obsessed with ISIS. The message was clearly that Americans ruin everything. I suppose the thing that muddies that is how the most blatant ISIS stuff comes in before New Mexico gets even slightly involved, and even that fact gets a little bit lost by the fact New Mexico is actually the location in the episode with the least Zygons. While that exact sequence is a huge part of why I think we're not heading into the Worst Two-Parter Ever, that explanation does turn up a little too late to get properly processed. I have to say, next episode can't come soon enough. I think the fact the story's unresolved is messing us up pretty bad here, we can't say for sure where any of this is standing because it's not done yet. I might have to excuse myself from the thread until the point where the story's done and we can conclusively say whether the story's message was Good or poo poo, because gently caress, I get enough of this from Auspol.
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Nov 2, 2015 14:03
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misadventurous posted:I seriously wonder if we all watched the same thing because i have no idea how this came off as screamingly racist to anyone. Unless you interpret the obvious ISIS undertones as literal loving allegory it was otherwise no more xenophobic than any other alien invasion episode. And no more populated with poo poo characters and clunky militarism than any UNIT episode, I'll add. The structure of the episode's central conflict is a spectrum: 100% Human on one end, Total Zygon on the other, and the Osgood hybrids in the middle. As is standard for liberal/crypto-conservative stories, "the truth is in the middle". Extremes are bad, violent, intolerant, while the sacred middle ground is where we find compromise, tolerance, peace. The Americans and UNIT are geared up for war, the Zygons are terrorists and murderers, and the Osgoods are (literally) the peace treaty between the two sides. The solution is to be not too human, not too Zygon, but somewhere in between, where you have common ground with both sides and everyone's your neighbour. Substitute "Zygon" for "Muslim", as the episode clearly wants you to do. Suddenly being Muslim means being a terrorist. Not in the sense of "all Muslims are terrorists", but rather that if you're very Muslim, a strict or fundamentalist Muslim who takes their faith very seriously, then you're bound to end up beheading hostages on grainy videotape someday. Total Islam means violence against Western society; the more Muslim you are, the less tolerant you can be of other people's lifestyles. The only solution is to only practise Islam half-heartedly - eat a little pork, wear 'normal' clothes, don't go full Muslim or you'll shoot down a plane. It's the same trap as "radicalisation" - if you study Islam a little too deeply, you fall down the rabbit hole and run off to Syria to become a jihadi. In reality this kind of violence tends to have more basis in political, social and economic phenomena than religion alone. The 'clash of civilisations' is not a battle between (cool, awesome, chilled out and relaxed) Western secular liberalism and (backwards, violent, aggressive) Islamic fundamentalism, but rather yet another conflict between elites for political, economic and cultural dominance of important parts of the world.
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Nov 2, 2015 14:17
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Its also that it's an incredibly topical and volatile ongoing current issue for the UK, Europe, and Australia that was portrayed in the most tone-deaf way possible. I don't think the episode is tone-deaf at all. There are undertones, but there's nothing accidental about them. The episode is deliberately racist and xenophobic. It's using the same scare tactics that racist propaganda lives from. Naturally, the inversion will end up subverting this, but it's a bit late. misadventurous posted:I seriously wonder if we all watched the same thing because i have no idea how this came off as screamingly racist to anyone. Unless you interpret the obvious ISIS undertones as literal loving allegory it was otherwise no more xenophobic than any other alien invasion episode. And no more populated with poo poo characters and clunky militarism than any UNIT episode, I'll add. Osgood sort of represents the Zygons, but even the Doctor implies that she's actually human. Her being good is not indicative of the other Zygons. Even the device she can use is implied to be the nerve gas that kills Zygons. Right now, it seems like she plans to kill all Zygons. This is clearly not going to happen, but the episode doesn't really tell you that.
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Nov 2, 2015 14:18
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Lt. Danger posted:The structure of the episode's central conflict is a spectrum: 100% Human on one end, Total Zygon on the other, and the Osgood hybrids in the middle. As is standard for liberal/crypto-conservative stories, "the truth is in the middle". Extremes are bad, violent, intolerant, while the sacred middle ground is where we find compromise, tolerance, peace. The Americans and UNIT are geared up for war, the Zygons are terrorists and murderers, and the Osgoods are (literally) the peace treaty between the two sides. The solution is to be not too human, not too Zygon, but somewhere in between, where you have common ground with both sides and everyone's your neighbour. That's not what "radicalization" in this episode refers to. Yes, there's some precarious stuff going on with "Truth or Consequences", but when the Doctor in this episode talks about Zygons being radicalized, it's not because of Zygon culture/identity being inherently Radical - it's about people, people, not generally taking kindly to having bombs dropped indiscriminately on their friends and family by foreign military powers. It's not a matter of "how Zygon you are" - it's easy to interpret Osgood's total rejection of the Zygon/Human dichotomy as its own kind of Zygon "devoutness", a total union of Zygon and shape-pattern as an almost religious way of life - but whether you're (rightfully) furious at outside state actors trying to genocide you. And when the Doctor implies that Osgood is actually human, we're given the first hint of what I hope Inversion will expand massively upon - the rules have changed. Assumptions about who is a Zygon and who is a Human are no longer secure, and by extension, our assumptions about the entire circumstance. This really isn't me reaching. This is just my experience with how the Moffat Era encodes (or tries to encode; Series 6 is still a total mess) messages and implications by using literal plot events as facets of larger patterns and metaphorical modes of thought. The Moffat Era expects a level of active televisual literacy and engagement in order to suss out what's really "being said". It's "meta", but not exclusively in the Blink "ooh look the camera counts as an observer for the Angels, that's clever" kind of way. It expects to be treated as television, as constructed artifice, and not simply as a window in your TV into the "actual" events of the "Whoniverse". DoctorWhat fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Nov 2, 2015 |
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Nov 2, 2015 14:33
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Random Stranger posted:I think the real question here is if Talons is more racist than The Celestial Toymaker. The most racist thing I've seen under the Doctor Who banner is still the second Sarah Jane Smith audio, The TAO Connection in which an ancient evil Oriental Wizard draws his power from raping young men.  Bungled messaging will never be as bad as actual cruel bigotry, but I agree that if Harness is incompetent to the point that if he had tried to write a "let's get 'em, pa" story, we'd be delighted to see the return of pacifist Doctor. And I don't know if it's because of American culture in general or too much time in the Political Cartoon thread, but "maybe they're not all bad" sounds so progressive that I can't imagine any public figure even saying it. Where I can point out public figures suggesting we nuke the middle east killing every man, woman and child and hunt people trying to cross the border from Mexico for sport. I... I think I'm going to lie down now.
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Nov 2, 2015 14:49
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DoctorWhat posted:it's about people, people, not generally taking kindly to having bombs dropped indiscriminately on their friends and family by foreign military powers Now you're doing it too. Why is this response "radicalisation"? Surely it should be called "self-defence"? There is no need to draw an inherent connection between 'being Muslim' and 'acts of violence', regardless of how sympathetic the reasoning. quote:it's easy to interpret Osgood's total rejection of the Zygon/Human dichotomy as its own kind of Zygon "devoutness" It really isn't. Maybe this is some sort of Expanded Universe thing. quote:This really isn't me reaching. This is just my experience with how the Moffat Era encodes (or tries to encode; Series 6 is still a total mess) messages and implications by using literal plot events as facets of larger patterns and metaphorical modes of thought. The Moffat Era expects a level of active televisual literacy and engagement in order to suss out what's really "being said". It's "meta", but not exclusively in the Blink "ooh look the camera counts as an observer for the Angels, that's clever" kind of way. It expects to be treated as television, as constructed artifice, and not simply as a window in your TV into the "actual" events of the "Whoniverse". Do not try this with me.
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Nov 2, 2015 15:04
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Lt. Danger posted:Now you're doing it too. Why is this response "radicalisation"? Surely it should be called "self-defence"? There is no need to draw an inherent connection between 'being Muslim' and 'acts of violence', regardless of how sympathetic the reasoning. "Radicalization" is a real-world sociopolitical concept that isn't exclusive to Islam/War on Terror stuff. Yes, ISIS iconography is clearly being used here, but again, this is only part 1 of 2. There's a reversal coming and they spent part 1 preparing for it. A lot of the bizarre stuff makes more sense in that context, I should think. quote:It really isn't. Maybe this is some sort of Expanded Universe thing. Nothing to do with the EU, just a close reading of the text. Osgood talks about how the "older" generation of Zygons readily fell into their traditions of assimilation and self-preservation and assumed human form. From this, we can derive some assumptions (though not concrete) about how "homeworld"/pre-Treaty Zygon culture operates. In contrast, (some members of) the younger generation, presumably due to having been raised on the very individualist planet Earth, is more sympathetic to the notion that they shouldn't have to hide their identities. Within this counterculture there (appears to) exist a revolutionary and radical faction willing to commit violent acts in order to secure that right. Truth or Consequences. Meanwhile, the Osgoods reject the dichotomy of "assimilation vs. truth". Note that the episode establishes that the Osgoods maintained an active and mutual mental interconnection up until the death of the Osgood Missy kills. This connection is only possible through a radical embracing of Zygon biology; both Osgoods may pass for human, but neither live traditional human experiences, and by the time of Invasion, the surviving Osgood explicitly identifies as both human and Zygon, not as an act of obfuscation-via-assimilation but as a statement of personal truth. quote:Do not try this with me. I don't "try".
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Nov 2, 2015 15:24
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Oh God don't do this What. Just don't.
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Nov 2, 2015 15:32
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Saying "just wait for part two" just comes off as "no guys, wait, stop looking horrified at all the rascist remarks I just made, I promise the punchline to this joke is really good!" 
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Nov 2, 2015 16:02
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The major difference between the racism of The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Zygon Invasion is this – by now, we as a modern day society should KNOW better.
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Nov 2, 2015 16:07
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DoctorWhat posted:Forest is the loving worst, Kill the Moon is good and Harness has come out and said it's specifically not anti-abortion Get hosed, Barthes! Random Stranger posted:Is this the story with the most on-screen-character deaths? (Obviously not all the deaths are on screen, I mean that characters we see on screen got massacred this time around.) In Warriors of the Deep every single individual (silurian or human) that appears dies, except the TARDIS crew. And More posted:The point they're trying to make isn't about ISIS, it's about racism and xenophobia. The reason it's connected to ISIS explicitly is because that is the main connection to current politics: Fear of immigrants, fear of terrorists. Sure, they could hide that fact, and still make a comment. In this case, though, subtlety really only serves to obfuscate the obvious parallels. Only if you're a bad and/or exceptionally lazy author.
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Nov 2, 2015 16:21
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DoctorWhat posted:I don't "try". Then don't lecture people about secondary worlds, Watsonian/Doylist analysis and how television "really" works.
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Nov 2, 2015 16:26
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Lt. Danger posted:Then don't lecture people about secondary worlds, Watsonian/Doylist analysis and how television "really" works. Please don't bring tv tropes into this.
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Nov 2, 2015 17:27
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MrL_JaKiri posted:In Warriors of the Deep every single individual (silurian or human) that appears dies, except the TARDIS crew. The crew member Bulic doesn't die. It's Horror of Fang Rock where everyone dies.
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Nov 2, 2015 17:38
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To reply to that Doctor What post in more detail: If he didn't intend an abortion metaphor in the episode then he's a moron because there was one. Just like this episode he probably didn't mean to have an anti-immigration metaphor but there was one. Because he's a moron. I remember you getting extremely antsy over this last year too. Are you actually Harness in disguise? Why are you so emotionally invested in it? [edit] Yeah, that's right actually ^^^ MrL_JaKiri fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Nov 2, 2015 |
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Nov 2, 2015 17:49
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Saying "just wait for part two" just comes off as "no guys, wait, stop looking horrified at all the rascist remarks I just made, I promise the punchline to this joke is really good!" "The Aristocrats!"
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Nov 2, 2015 17:51
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I'm with you DoctorWhat, but I doubt you're going to convince anyone itt.
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Nov 2, 2015 17:56
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Just like this episode he probably didn't mean to have an anti-immigration metaphor but there was one. Because he's a moron. "Don't be a dick to immigrants" isn't really an anti-immigration message.
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Nov 2, 2015 17:59
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Angela Christine posted:"Don't be a dick to immigrants" isn't really an anti-immigration message. Cool it's not like I wrote a couple of thousand words on this or anything
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Nov 2, 2015 18:03
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This thread. What is this, the local?
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Nov 2, 2015 18:29
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I thought when Drone Pilot Lady's family showed up exactly like they did in the photo, and the Doctor says "isn't that interesting" i figured he was going to find out that the Zygons were also part of the UNIT Forces, and one of the factions was using UNIT has a proxy in this civil war. But nope nothing comes from it. Also, actual military personnel are not permitted to have family photos displayed like that, because its a distraction. And when you're drone bombing people, you need to be paying attention.
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Nov 2, 2015 18:45
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Open Source Idiom posted:Please don't bring tv tropes into this. To be fair, Danger is quoting nonsense that DoctorWhat himself expressed, with those very terms, about this very show. It's a hole of his own making.
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Nov 2, 2015 18:45
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The thing is, even putting aside the horrific politics and subtext, that episode was one of the clunkiest and most awkwardly scripted pieces of television I've ever seen. Literally every scene had some element about it that was simply off, awkwardly phrased, weirdly framed. It's as though in every case, Harness makes the choice for the least possible drama and excitement. Dear god, how do you make a globe-trotting drama with drone strikes and UNIT teams being wiped out and double triple betrayals so incredibly dull? The "Clara is a Zygon" reveal moment is a great example of this to me, because it's just so stunningly ineptly written. So Zlara walks up to the pod and wipes the glass, revealing her own face. This is, for all intents and purposes, The Reveal. And yet bizarrely the scene doesn't seem to think that this is The Reveal, even though the viewers know how Zygons work and have seen an entire episode about stealing people's identities and obviously understand the implications of this! For some totally baffling reason, rather than make the moment when the viewer is shown the twist the dramatic punch, there's a whole additional beat where Zlara claims it's a Zygon duplicate.... except literally a second later, the UNIT woman points out that makes no sense, and THEN the dramatic moment is played. But.... why? Did Harness expect people to be fooled by the 'they're making duplicates' ruse? Did he think a beat where a peripheral character says "You're a Zygon!" was somehow more dramatic than showing that Clara is a Zygon? What narrative function does it serve to reveal a twist, then try to pretend it's not the twist, and one second later reveal that it is the twist? That would be like if at the end of the Sixth Sense, they casually showed Bruce Willis was a ghost, then had a moment where someone was like "You're a crazy guy who thinks he's a ghost!" and the one second were like "Oh, no, you actually are a ghost!" And that's not even going into how the moment makes no sense from a character motivation perspective. Why would Zlara reveal her own face, knowing full well that showing what's in the pod would make UNIT attack unless she was deliberately loving with them... but if she was deliberately loving with them, why would she go on to then make up the pointless duplicate line? It's just... it's just SO STUNNINGLY INCOMPETENT. The "Good guy is really an imposter!" is such an incredibly easy beat to hit, and Harness drops the ball completely. And the whole episode is full of moments like this, where even a beat that could be acceptable as cheesy fun is completely robbed of its impact by its total lack of dramatic pacing and structure. There have been worse Who episodes, for sure (for my money, Forest is pretty much an unbeatable nadir) but I really don't know if there's been as totally incompetent. Just baffling.
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Nov 2, 2015 18:50
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I think the point of that beat was to try and generate some tension, where we know what's going on, but we're worried because the sympathetic characters in the scene don't. Bonnie tries to use that reveal as a ruse to get the UNIT soldiers to shoot the original copies to death or something equally stupid and evil, and we're meant to worry for Clara's safety, but the UNIT officer sees through her and Clara's "okay". The scene doesn't work, and is poorly conceived on a written level, but I primarily blame the director for mishandling the material.
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Nov 2, 2015 19:02
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Rebecca Front was in this episode (I believe she was playing Curtis LeMay). Another TTOI reunion.
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Nov 2, 2015 19:05
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Wheat Loaf posted:Rebecca Front was in this episode (I believe she was playing Curtis LeMay). Another TTOI reunion. I made her a nice laser-engraved ID badge full of TTOI refs which APPARENTLY SHE DOESN'T WEAR
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Nov 2, 2015 19:41
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I was wondering: Was the refugee crisis going on at the time of writing and filming this episode or did it start later? I don't remember.
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Nov 2, 2015 19:52
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Just watched this week's episode, anyone else think it was the drizzling shits 
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Nov 2, 2015 19:53
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saucerman posted:I was wondering: Was the refugee crisis going on at the time of writing and filming this episode or did it start later? I don't remember. Ahahahaha The answer is yes it was. The question should have been 'why is it still going on' but the answer to that is far more sad and complicated. And not really suited to Doctor Who to tackle like this.
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Nov 2, 2015 19:56
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Only if you're a bad and/or exceptionally lazy author. Are we talking about Harness specifically here? I kind of agree with that. In general, though, I don't see how obfuscating your message beyond "alien invasion" is really important or interesting. Most authors I know who beat around the bush mainly did so because of censorship, and the fear of getting their ears lobbed off.
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Nov 2, 2015 20:09
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Open Source Idiom posted:I think the point of that beat was to try and generate some tension, where we know what's going on, but we're worried because the sympathetic characters in the scene don't. Bonnie tries to use that reveal as a ruse to get the UNIT soldiers to shoot the original copies to death or something equally stupid and evil, and we're meant to worry for Clara's safety, but the UNIT officer sees through her and Clara's "okay". Okay, but even generously chalking up the execution to incompetent direction (twist to fake twist to real twist in under a minute, no time or execution to build any actual tension), how does the scene begin to make sense from a motivation perspective? The Zygons have all the originals fully under their control AND they have the means to zap them into the stupid electrifurs. Why would they need to bring UNIT in to do the killing? Why not just do it themselves? What was literally the point of anything Zlara did in that entire scene that could not have been done ambushing them earlier? I know that in a show like Who, characters might sometimes behave in less-than-logical ways for dramatic effect. I can dig that (or with someone like the Master, embrace it); many of Moffat's stronger episodes don't actually hold up logically, but are exciting enough in the moment that you can forgive it. The problem here is that Zlara acts in a totally nonsensical way that actually makes the scene *less* dramatic and exciting than if it had been played completely straight. It's just... it's just garbage.
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Nov 2, 2015 20:15
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