Doctor Who: The Stolen Plot Device

[matgb]

So, watched it last night, then went to the pub, then came back, and watched it again as a few points were bugging me. There now follows a poll, and that poll does contain spoilers.

[Poll #1213113]Overall, I enjoyed the show, but I enjoyed the penultimate show last season as well. This is Rusty's last ever finale, and I refer my honourable friends to the opinions expressed this time last year.

ETA: My friend the astrophysicist says: Basically, doing this with a planet will screw it up but he still enjoyed it.

Comments

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

I don't think they should ONLY cast any race in the role of cannon fodder. The fact that they seems to be casting black and Asian actors completely disproportionately as cannon fodder hasn't been jumping out at you for three series now? It has me. I'm totally with spiralsheep on this issue.

And yeah, his spelling's awful, but I still love him...

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

There's probably a breakdown somewhere, isn't there? I'm sure I've seen one - I'll go look. I've heard it said before, certainly, and I've noticed it a couple of times, but I'm not sure. If the leads are both white and a lot of one-episode-only characters die, if they're casting for diversity, there would be a higher proportion of non-white characters dying, IYSWIM. And it also depends on which of the characters are written as a certain race, I guess, and which are just cast that way.

I don't normally (well, always ~blush~) pick up misspellings, but I liked that one. Most of my mistakes are homonyms too...

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Ah - this post from seeingred is what I was thinking of - it's got a breakdown, and the difference isn't statistically significant. Though there are discussions about who counts and who doesn't, and the definition of "dying", heh. And it's from before this series - would be interesting to update it.

[paulgregory.livejournal.com]

Last week's Confidential had a montage of Who screen deaths - I don't know who thought cutting together these sacrifices and killings out of context to the sound of Live And Let Die was a good idea, but they did it anyway. That would be a simple subset to count from.

[matgb]

Thing is that counts speaking parts—I didn't notice it until recently, but SB pointed out to me that a huge chunk of the time the non-white female character will have bad things happen if she appears to be major.

It's not a hard and fast rule, but it's happened to often—yes, he's sometimes doing colourblind casting, but he does also seek to over-represent minorities, so this might contribute to the problem.

I'm pretty sure it's not in any way intended, but the first on screen death this time was Martha's friend in UNIT. I guess partially because he tries to present himself as being oh so very progressive, and critqued Primeval for being horribly white, etc it annoys me a bit that while it's not tokenism, it's still Bad Stuff.