Everybody loves a good sci-fi story with a monster that lives underwater. Everybody loves a good sci-fi story set in the past. Everybody loves a good sci-fi story that furthers the development of characters they already love.
But this week’s Doctor Who episode, “Thin Ice,” wasn’t just a good sci-fi story with a monster and fancy top hats. It was a pact with the audience, a renewal of faith. It was a reminder of the show’s philosophy toward life, even with the frequently murky moral space it occupies as a complicated piece of fiction.
“Thin Ice” has a lot to say about the Doctor’s evolution as a long-lived alien who often spends his time hanging around humans, getting into trouble, and saving people from all manner of danger. Perhaps one of the most enjoyable aspects of Peter Capaldi’s incarnation is how clearly he has matured from previous versions of the character—even his mistakes are more mature mistakes. So it is refreshing that he and Bill land in 1814, and when his friend comments on how dangerous it could be for her to walk through the past as a black woman, the Doctor recognizes that her concern is valid and tells her so. It’s a complete turn around from how the Doctor handled these sorts of questions with Martha Jones, who he told to walk around “like she owned the place,” just like him. That sort of advice was clearly born from the Doctor’s failure to recognize how differently he is treated by appearing to be a knowledgeable white man, and we see how well it works when Martha is no longer accompanied by the Doctor; when he uses the Chameleon Arch and forgets who he is, she is immediately relegated to servant work at the school where he is teaching, and is constantly spoken down to by the people there.
What’s more, “Thin Ice” is intent on reminding the audience of what true history looked like, with no excuses for homogeny. Once outside the TARDIS in period-proper clothes, Bill notes that the people she sees in London are far less white than she was expecting, to which the Doctor rejoins that Jesus was, too. Then, after weighing in on the “historical Jesus” issue (even more potent because we can assume that the Doctor is talking about Jesus from experience, being a time traveler), he makes the comment that history is “a whitewash.” Bringing up whitewashing at a point in time when the subject is increasingly being brought into public consciousness cannot be viewed as a random gesture—the Doctor is taking issue with the practice, and the episode itself has a completely diverse cast. Whether this is meant to be taken as a renewed commitment to accurately showcasing humanity’s past or not, putting those words in the Doctor’s mouth is a deliberate jab at anyone who would prefer to deny such truths. And when Peter Capaldi himself is showing up at climate marches, it’s safe to say that truth is something on the Doctor’s mind lately.
But the episode only gets more interesting as it progresses, leading the Doctor and Bill to discover a great big fish under the Thames who seems to be eating people attending the Frost Festival. They witness a homeless kid get pulled under the ice, and Bill has to stop and take stock when the Doctor admits that there’s nothing he can do for the child; this is the first time she’s ever seen someone die. Every companion has this moment, the point at which they realize the cost of these adventures and the terrible things they are bound to witness. But the Doctor doesn’t always make himself available at these times, and here he is forced to do so if he wants Bill’s continued help. They end up asking the other children living rough about who is responsible for the Frost Festival’s wide reach, and are led to Lord Sutcliffe: A man who has been using the byproduct of the creature’s steady human diet as a means of producing fuel good enough for interstellar travel.
The Doctor assumes that Sutcliffe is an alien himself, and asks Bill to leave the talking to him, claiming that her temper will not help them ingratiate themselves to another species. He tells her that he must be tactful, charming, diplomatic in this instance, then says: “Always remember, Bill: Passion fights, but reason wins.” These words are not far off from the common chide thrown at anyone who does work in activism—that being aggressive in campaigns for the rights of other human beings does not win battles. That only being logical and reasonable and calm will win people over, making it the only appropriate method of fighting oppression. This bid toward being “less emotional” insists that people who cannot make a separation between their feelings and what they are fighting for are hurting their cause rather than helping it… and in this moment, it seems that the Doctor is saying something quite similar to Bill.
That is, until they meet Lord Sutcliffe, and his flagrant racism toward Bill leads the Doctor to deck him across the face.
By giving us this moment, the Doctor undoes his previous assertion; in the face of such despicable prejudice, passion is the appropriate display. In fact, the Doctor does one better, suggesting that Lord Sutcliffe’s opinions lessen him as a person, saying, “I preferred it when you were an alien. Well, that explained the lack of humanity.” The Doctor does not necessarily believe that bigotry is humanity’s natural state, but he does believe that displaying it makes a human being less human.
In effect, we live in the world that has lately been debating the moral correctness of punching Nazis, and Doctor Who has just answered that with a resounding Yes, Please Do.
But it doesn’t stop there. The Doctor does his best to get information out of Sutcliffe, but also calls him out on his part in the murder of countless London citizens by using the Frost Festival to feed them to his pet money-making beast. Lord Sutcliffe feels absolutely no culpability in the situation he perpetuates—he reckons that without the fish, his wealth would come from coal mines where men die all the same, and he believes that his family has done well for England. For Empire. The Doctor calls that what it is, an accident of birth that has caused Sutcliffe to believe that because he has more, he is more. That his life is more important than the people he puts to death. And Lord Sutcliffe has no difficulty with this belief because he thinks that he and his family have helped their country progress.
We are now standing in the midst of an era where white supremacy, nationalism, sexism, homophobia, and any other number of prejudices stand to become rule of law because too many have embraced the type of thinking that Sutcliffe propagates: that having more makes a human worth more, and that progress is to be measured by power rather than empowering others. And in the parlor of an English Lord’s manor in the year 1814, we receive an answer to this philosophy. The Doctor has made a lot of great speeches throughout the show’s history, and frankly, he makes them a lot. Some of them are standoffish, some of them are touching, some of them dare his enemies to unleash their worst. But this might be the most important one he’s ever given:
“Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river, that boy’s value is your value. That’s what defines an age. That’s what defines a species.”
By uttering those words, Doctor Who is explicitly asking its viewers what currently defines us—you cannot hear those words and neglect taking stock of the world around you. Are we placing value on lives without privilege? Or are we continuing to base our progress on stuff and power and wealth? What age are we in? And if we’re on the wrong end of this… how do we turn and run in the other direction?
The episode turns to Bill to give us the answer, as she’s given a choice by her new traveling companion. The Doctor’s previous experiences have taught him much about how to present these questions. He has been called out by companions before for making decisions on behalf of individuals and entire species, and for forcing his friends to make do without him for the purpose of teaching a lesson—whether it was Donna Noble insisting on jointly making the choice to destroy Pompeii, or Clara Oswald refusing to travel with the Doctor for a time due to his callous decision to abandon her when she decided the moon’s fate. But here the Doctor makes his position clear; he could set the creature free (to potentially harm others or swim far away), but he won’t do anything without Bill’s permission. She must speak for her planet and give him the order. But he does offer one helpful bit of advice: “If your future is built on the suffering of that creature, then what’s your future worth?”
So it’s Bill’s turn to decide: What value do we place on life? Do we define ourselves by the people (and beings) that we allow to suffer, or do we muster compassion to make ourselves into more than that?
They set the creature free. Of course.
Our systems remain mired in oppression and cruelty, as the episode shows us—the general citizenry never really learn what was going on under the ice. The Doctor gives Lord Sutcliffe’s estate to the urchin kids, but it has to go specifically to the one white boy in the crew because Sutcliffe’s will only allows for a potential male heir. People lost their lives for generations due to the Sutcliffe family’s greed. But if people make the commitment to place value on life rather than might, if they refuse patterns of power and subjugation as a mark of progress, then there is a chance for the world to get better. Doctor Who is asking you to remember that.
“Thin Ice” is a powerful response to a world that is currently subsumed by fear and cynicism, a meaningful rumination on the choices that we make each day, and our ability to affect change when we act out of empathy and kindness. The episode’s markedly subtle conversation with the show’s past only makes it more enjoyable. If you’ve loved Doctor Who for a long time, you’ll see how the show has arrived at this moment. If you’re just starting out with the TARDIS, it’s hard to think of a better way to get to know it. Stories like these are the reason why Doctor Who exists—to prove to us that we aways have the ability to move beyond our meanest impulses and embrace lives built on excitement, wonder, and love.
Emmet Asher-Perrin would also like to point out that this episode was written by a woman: Sarah Dollard. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
Wow. Emily, your analysis takes my breath away. Thank you for this!
This episode, along with last season’s “Zygon Invasion”/”Zygon Inversion” have made me love “Doctor Who” as much as I ever did all those years ago when I watched Tom Baker in “Seeds of Doom”. The social and political commentary is rich and relevant: something that everyone can appreciate.
Mr. Capaldi’s performance, along with this level of writing, has been stellar and amazing!
Great stuff. I have one little quibble, though — Bill saying she’d never seen anyone die before. What about Heather in “The Pilot”? She didn’t actually see the moment of Heather’s death, but she saw what she became after her death.
Also, how much time did this episode cover? The 1814 Frost Fair — the last one, due to the warming climate — lasted four days, from February 1-4. We know the previous Doctor visited it with River Song and Stevie Wonder, so they must’ve been there no more than a day or two earlier, unless they were there at the same time on a different part of the Thames. So the Doctor must’ve been off his game to miss what was going on under the ice.
There’s also an audio story with the First Doctor, Steven, and Vicki visiting the 1814 fair, and a prose story with the Tenth Doctor visiting it; they both feature their own contradictory explanations for the extreme cold that year.
Affect change when we act out of empathy and kindness… and punching. ;-)
Lord Sutcliffe was so obviously David Cameron. They even picked an actor who looked like him with that same greasy sheen to his weirdly large forehead and perpetual sneer. And of course their policies on human life.
Good.
People like that deserved punched and hoist by their own incompetent petards.
Please punch more Nazis, people.
“Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege. The boy who died on the river, that boy’s value is your value. That’s what defines an age. That’s what defines a species.”
Between the pro-choice crowd and the gun toters, human life is cheap where I live. And that’s awful.
#5
Are you going to cover our legal fees after we do punch those Nazis?
This episode confirmed my deep love for this show and for the Doctor. You got it exactly right.
The plot of Thin Ice was very similar to Kill The Moon, which was one of the worst episodes ever. Sure, Thin Ice was better than that, but that’s such a low bar… Like The Beast Below, it’s another case of choosing between a giant beast and the lives of a huge number of people. Out of the three, The Beast Below is the only episode in which the dilemma made sense as it was explained: it was not about choosing whether the beast would be killed, but whether it would keep being tortured, so the morally wrong choice was to maintain the status quo, which was obviously a safe option. In Kill The Moon on the other hand, the Moon dragon had made the Moon impossibly heavy, and there was no reason to think killing it would restore the Moon to normal, so without a miracle (which is what happened), the Earth was doomed anyway, whether the dragon lived or not. In Thin Ice, what would happen to the ecosystem if one were to kill such a huge beast, that poops superfuel? Alive or dead, I can’t see how it could stay on the planet. And wouldn’t the alien who left it here get angry if the creature got killed? We don’t even know where it comes from, or whether it’s sentient! Like in Kill The Moon, the Doctor asks his companion to make an impossible choice, without giving her enough information to make the right choice. Sure, it’s better than in Kill The Moon, but again, it could hardly have been worse.
I still dislike the relationship between the Doctor and Bill. You can’t make fun of someone’s preconceptions when you didn’t bother explaining the rules in the first place. The thing with “Pete” would have been funny with a companion who is already comfortable with the situation; but for Bill? It’s completely reasonable to think so, and the Doctor is toying with her emotions. It’s completely normal for her to try to understand what’s happening and to be careful about the consequences. By refusing to take her questions seriously, the Doctor is effectively gaslighting her. Also, the Doctor is just as callous as he was with Clara she-cares-so-I-don’t-have-to Oswald, the difference is that Clara had been with the Doctor for a long time before this incarnation. Bill was right to question his morality, but I’m starting to wonder whether at this point, she shouldn’t be too terrified of the Doctor to keep travelling with him.
What I love about Doctor Who is how it shows that conflicts can be solved by talking, showing compassion and being clever, where lesser shows would resort to violence. Needless to say, I completely disagree on whether it’s OK to punch a nazi. So, to me, the Doctor’s speech was more important than the punch. There’s one thing I really disliked in it though: “an unimportant life”. I know that the Doctor’s views on humans have changed through his different incarnations, but I prefer the Doctor who says “900 years of time and space and I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important.” Spider was important. Had he not died, it’s completely possible that he would have done really important things (especially since he would probably have been the one to inherit the Sutcliffe estate)
The first episode was about a liquid spaceship. The second one was about nanobots that can turn into a spaceship. This one is about a superfuel for a spaceship… I’m sensing a theme here. The obvious thing would be to combine them in the season finale, but what would be the point when any of them is enough to travel anywhere? Or is it because the thing in the Vault needs a spaceship, any spaceship?
@3: There are no plot holes in Doctor Who, only alternate timelines. The creature probably wasn’t there the first time the Doctor came.
Did I miss the review of last weeks episode ‘Smile’?
@9/Athreeren: I think you’re taking the “Pete” thing too seriously. It only took Bill a few seconds to realize he was pulling her leg. He knew she’d catch up. He’s doing what a teacher does — giving her the clues to let her figure things out for herself, rather than just telling her all the answers. The reason he took her on as his student in the first place was because he had faith in her ability to reason and learn. Indeed, he made a much more careful selection than he usually does with his companions, observing her, interviewing, and testing her for weeks or months before ever letting her into the TARDIS. So when he engages in his usual teaching method of throwing them into the deep end and letting them learn as he go, he has considerably more reason than usual to be confident that she can handle it.
And of course the Doctor didn’t mean he thought the boy’s life was unimportant — that was the whole point of the speech. “That boy’s value is your value.” He was referring to what Christ called “the least of these” — the most ordinary people who aren’t kings or nobles or celebrities or industrialists, but whose value is the same as their value nonetheless.
And the Doctor did say to Bill that he had been to this Frost Fair before. Moffat wrote the first reference (the Stevie Wonder one), so of course this Moffat-produced episode remembers it. The other references are in tie-ins, so they’re more negotiable.
Anyway, my thought while watching was, “Well, of course they’re going to let the creature leave the Thames, otherwise it’ll get in the way of the Skarasen when the time comes.”
The messaging in this episode was really complex, and Emily alluded to it here, but I think she’s only really analyzing up to Act 3. In the end, the Doctor and Bill free the fish, but with a clear trade for a few innocent bystanders (and some bad guys). The response to those deaths varies between the typical Doctor no-response to a little bit glad, maybe. Certainly, we’re all rooting for the big bad-guy to die as he tries to take out Bill, and Bill seems not (yet) broken up in playing a role in killing (mostly bad) people. However, the Doctor makes it explicitly clear that this was her choice to make, even at the risk of innocent lives.
The problem is: what do these different responses to and justifications for death mean? When it’s life and death, is equality more important than caring? The punch and the speech are the setup to the Doctor hijacking the explosives and wrecking the fair before everyone (most notably Bill) has left the ice. There’s another shoe yet to drop on this for Bill; this Doctor is still a tiny bit sociopathic.
What struck me about the Doctor’s speech in this episode was that it was explicitly condemning economic and class privilege. By now I would expect the Doctor to oppose sexism, racism and homophobia, but when people who identify as liberals defend gross economic inequality or argue that the industrial revolution was unambiguously a good thing, this felt slightly more daring. I would argue that this is the Doctor moving from making a liberal statement into one that is more socialist. A very welcome move.
@5 Random 22: I don’t think it was an accident that Sutcliffe was wearing a blue coat.
@3 ChristopherLBennett was it explicitly established that Heather was even dead? Certainly she was taken and transformed, but there seemed to be some ambiguity on this point with the suggestion that she and Bill might meet again (would that have been a good thing if it was just an alien wearing her skin?).
@13/Richard: Yes — when Bill was first confronted by the image of Heather on the college grounds, she eventually realized “You’re dead!” and the camera showed a close-up of her eye, whose sclera was discolored gray like (I presume) that of a corpse. The liquid entity had killed her but absorbed some facets of her personality; so it wasn’t her, just something that preserved a remnant of her. More specifically, the Doctor said that the impulse driving the entity was Heather’s “last conscious thought.” Shortly before that, he said he would let it pass that the entity had taken Heather from the Earth “because I have to” — not something he would say if it were in any way reversible.
As for the class issue, Doctor Who has confronted that on many occasions over the years. A number of classic-series writers had very left-wing sentiments, notably Malcolm Hulke, an actual card-carrying communist who put strong political themes in his Who stories — although there were some more conservative voices too, like Robert Holmes, so the series encompassed the gamut of political viewpoints. (The sixth season, interestingly, opened with Mervyn Haisman & Henry Lincoln’s anti-pacifist satire “The Dominators” and closed with Hulke and Terrance Dicks’s fiercely anti-war allegory “The War Games.”) The Doctor may be a Time Lord, but some of his incarnations have presented themselves as more lower-class or anti-establishment figures, like the “cosmic hobo” Second Doctor or the “Bohemian” Fourth.
I don’t understand the significance of the blue coat.
CLB,
Blue is the colour of the Conservatives in UK- the right of centre main political party. Labour’s is red. The colour schemes are a reversal to those in the US. Currently each main party is further from the centre than they’ve been for a while, sadly, and they are both conforming to the caricatures their opponents have of them.
@14 ChristopherLBennett
Certainly the 1963-1989 Doctor Who series looked at left wing ideas on a number of occasions. The Happiness Patrol can be read specifically as anti-Thatcherite. But, it’s something we have seen a lot less of since the series came back in 2005. Partly, I think, because in the UK left-wing economic ideas have become markedly less fashionable. It was a surprise to me to see it presented so straight forwardly.
And yes, Sutcliffe’s very blue coat shouted out Tory to me.
@16/Richard: It seems to me that the modern series has tended to have decidedly working-class sympathies, with its focus on companions who live in council flats and speak in Cockney accents and the like. And it’s certainly been socially progressive in portraying ethnic and sexual diversity.
“Passion fights, but reason wins.” Yes. Without passion, people wouldn’t have a reason to fight. Without reason, they wouldn’t have an actual plan to win. The point of fighting isn’t to be angry or to feel satisfied; smart people fight to achieve a goal.
In this case, the best way to achieve that goal would be to sit down with Lord Sutcliffe and listen to him tell them what a wonderful, successful person he was. Once they found enough evidence to confirm Sutcliffe’s guilt in the murders, Bill and the Doctor could have politely taken their leave, giving him no sign that they disapproved of his plan. Later that night, they could have returned to kidnap Sutcliffe and maroon him in a time and place where he couldn’t feed orphans to a giant sea monster. Or they could simply have murdered him. This plan has a much better chance of preventing future orphans from being eaten, which is the point.
Instead, the Doctor lost his temper and assaulted a murderer in his own home so that he and Bill could be captured and fed to a giant alien fish. I can see one or two flaws with this strategy.
Lord Sutcliffe’s crime is not being a despicable racist. Lots of people in 1814 are despicable racists, and the Doctor could go around punching them all day without changing a thing. His crime is feeding children to an alien fish. By giving into his anger and punching Sutcliffe, the Doctor is making it very likely that he and Bill will be eaten by the same alien fish, which would make it very hard for them to protect the orphans he came here to save.
@5 random22
Do you go around punching Nazis? Wherever you live, there are probably Nazis there, and they usually aren’t hard to find. Of course, you could lose your job and end up in jail, but we await the news of your imminent arrest for Nazi-punching. Please let us know when you’re willing to practice what you preach, and what the consequences are.
I don’t go around punching people for what they say, because that’s the first step towards the death of a free society. Once we decide that “bad people” don’t have the right to say things we don’t like, then we’ve effectively established the principle that any unpopular speech can be suppressed by violence. You say Nazis should be punched; there are plenty of people who believe that environmentalists or socialists or liberals should be beaten. Once we abandon the principle that we can’t reply to words with punches, we don’t get to control who gives the beatings and who receives them.
Free speech protects ideas that are despised by society. Sometimes that means protecting Nazis, but women’s suffrage and equal rights for homosexuals were despised before they were accepted. If any individual or group decides that they get to permit the “good” and punish the “bad”, then they can use that power to silence criticism and enforce their point of view on everyone else. At that point, we no longer live in a free society.
It’s worth noting that Sutcliffe’s attack on Bill was physical, as well as verbal. She was seated, he was standing over her, using his size and position to intimidate. It’s a classic pattern of abusers, to corner and crowd the person they are attacking, without necessarily laying a hand on them. If someone is shouting abuse at you, in that way, you fear for your physical safety, even if the situation hasn’t (yet) escalated to a physical attack.
It’s particularly notable that such actions mean that the person being (verbally) attacked cannot physically escape the attacker without pushing past them, meaning that any attempt to protect oneself by simply walking away becomes a physically laying hands on the attacker, giving them the excuse that the person they were attacking was the one who technically escalated the encounter to a physical attack.
The attacker creates this situation: “You will stay and take my verbal abuse, or you are responsible for any physical abuse I give you, because you touched me as you tried to walk away.”
In punching Sutcliffe, the Doctor changed the situation, so that Bill was no longer trapped by the abuser’s tactics. She didn’t have to choose between accepting verbal violence and an escape attempt that might trigger physical violence, and be used by her attacker to justify physical violence.
Plus, once Sutcliffe verbally attacked Bill, using sweet reason on him was no longer an option. It was no longer possible for Bill to stay quiet in the background while the Doctor did the talking, as Sutcliffe was not in a condition to be reasoned with.
You can reason with abusers when they are acting within limits of reason. But when they are actually attacking and harming someone, to simply try to reason, as you let them continue the attack, is letting them continue to attack. There are times when it may be an unfortunate necessity of the circumstances, but one still needs to be aware that this is what you are doing.
The Doctor is willing to ask Bill to try to be patient with an asshole for the sake of extracting information – this is reasonable strategy. That is different from standing by as the asshole actually attacks Bill.
@19/Ursula: Well-said. I would add, too, that Sutcliffe’s line “Who let this creature in here?” made it pretty clear that his intention was to have Bill physically thrown out or otherwise punished. It was reasonable, both from his words and his ferocious reaction to Bill, to conclude that she would need to be physically defended.
On the punching issue, while I’m against the use of physical force in real life except as a defensive last resort, I think the rules are different when it comes to fictional characters, because there it’s more symbolic. I don’t believe that Nazis should be punched just for expressing hate (there are better, legal responses to hate speech), but the symbolism of Captain America punching Hitler, say, is an effective statement (and it was actually quite a bold political statement at the time, before the US actually entered the war). From a symbolic and character standpoint, the fact that the Doctor — who’s always prided himself on his use of intellect over force, and who had just made a speech to that effect — was so angered on behalf of his friend that he was driven to such a passionate response is very moving.
Although I suspect there may have been a bit more calculation behind it. Just after the punch, the Doctor said, “He’s human. 31 years of age, low on iron.” He evidently got that information from the physical contact — either from Time Lord telepathy or simply from the way Sutcliffe’s jaw felt and reacted to the blow. Whether he actually did it for that reason or it was just a beneficial side effect is open to question, though.
@19 Ursula
Bill and the Doctor are in the same position as undercover cops. They’re pretending to be other people to gain information from suspects, and those suspects could react very badly if they find out what’s really going on. The most important part of their job is to maintain their cover as long as possible, to get the information they need before they act.
They completely mess it up. Bill and the Doctor are here to find out whether Lord Sutcliffe is an alien murderer (or a human murderer) who has been feeding orphans to a giant fish. The fact that he’s an abusive bigot doesn’t tell them anything, and the best thing for the Doctor to do in this case is grovel appropriately, do his best to extract Bill from the situation without allowing her to come to harm or blowing his cover, and go right back to gathering the information they need to save orphans. It might not work- Sutcliffe might choose not to accept an apology and let Bill leave- but it’s what he should have tried. By getting Bill out, the Doctor would give himself a chance to talk to Sutcliffe and learn whether he’s responsible.
“In punching Sutcliffe, the Doctor changed the situation.” Yes. He changed the situation from a dangerous situation which might get worse to a terrifying situation that had gotten worse. As a result of his decision, both of them ended up being verbally abused by a murderer who planned to blow them up and feed their remains to his monster. On the bright side, they did learn about Sutcliffe’s plan, so their investigation actually succeeded at the small cost of nearly getting blown up (and then eaten by an alien fish).
Imagine that an undercover cop angrily punched a suspected mobster who was verbally abusing his partner in a way that implied he might become physically abusive. Now imagine that the cop punched the mobster in the mobster’s own home, with his lackeys nearby, and with no backup available. The Doctor basically does the same thing. Does that seem like a smart choice?
@20 ChristopherLBennett
Since the Doctor is in Sutcliffe’s house, with his agents waiting nearby, the smart thing to do would be to try to get Bill thrown out while apologizing to Sutcliffe. Even if she has to leave, he might be able to stay and get more information out of Sutcliffe.
Being angry is okay. Letting anger dictate your actions is not. I feel that symbols are important, and that passion is a valuable part of who we are, and that punching a suspected murderer in his own lair is a very dumb idea. I believe that it’s important to stand up for what’s right in a way that doesn’t endanger your life, the life of your friend, and the lives of the orphans who need you to figure out what’s going on.
Having the doctor’s feelings overcome his better judgement is moving, as you say, though it’s not a good life choice. But if he was actually trying to figure out Sutcliffe’s species by punching him, then the Doctor is dumber than a bag of hammers. What if Sutcliffe was a bloodthirsty alien shapeshifter with a short temper? Testing the identity of a suspected alien murderer by punching him is like grabbing an electrical wire to find out if it’s live or juggling hand grenades to learn whether they’re duds.
@18 It’s not about punching nazis for what they say, it’s about punching nazis for what they want to do. When you have a group of people who want to see you and your family wiped off the face of the earth as a result of their religion, sexuality or ethnicity then sitting down to hash things out over a nice cup of tea just ain’t gonna cut it. So yeah, it is acceptable to punch nazis right in the face as far as i’m concerned and i cheered when the doctor socked him. NO rationalisation. NO normalisation. NO collaboration.
Wasn’t there another episode where humanity, in the form of Clara, freed the “monster”? That was the one where the city of London was atop a giant whale like creature in space. Clara decides to free it; the Doctor makes it her decision.
@22 politeruin
Have you personally punched any Nazis in the face? Are you willing to lose your job and go to jail to punch a Nazi? There is no shortage of Nazis, and you can find them quite easily.
No matter how many Nazis you punch (or don’t punch), they aren’t magically going to go away. There are a large number of people out there who want you and your family wiped off the face of the Earth. You could spend the rest of your life punching without making the slightest dent in their numbers. Or you could work to make sure that the next generation doesn’t buy into Nazi ideology and that the society you live in doesn’t believe that it’s okay to murder people because they’re different. That would require a life of hard work, though, rather than just talk about punching Nazis.
Civil liberties exist to protect everyone, whether we like them or not. When you break down those protections, you endanger everyone, not just Nazis. Once you choose to destroy the rules against punching political opponents, you don’t get to control who gets punched.
@21/dptullos: No, the Doctor’s action wasn’t smart. But that was the whole point. He argued for reason over passion, and he was right as far as it went, but then his friend was subjected to a hideous and dehumanizing assault, and so he reflexively came to her defense. The fact that he put his affection and loyalty to a friend above what was strategically and intellectually the best choice is not in dispute. That’s exactly what the scene was meant to convey. The Doctor and Bill had been at odds because Bill thought the Doctor was too cold, too detached — that the 2000-year-old alien was too focused on the big picture to care about the little guy, and perhaps also about her. But then, the moment she was treated as less than a person, he acted out of pure, impulsive friendship, proving how much he cared about her. And that led to his speech about the value of a life, his impassioned argument that every life is of equal value and nobody has the right to assume his privilege makes him greater. And through those actions and words, Bill learned that she’d been wrong to think the Doctor didn’t care. It wasn’t about the tactical logic of the situation, it was about the character journey.
Anyway, as I said, I don’t support punching anyone unless it’s necessary to defend oneself or another person from imminent violence by the punchee. But if one did have to punch someone for that reason, and that person were a Nazi, then I think one would be entitled to enjoy it.
@24 No, i have not personally punched a nazi in the face. Yes, i am willing to face the consequences of attacking someone who espouses an ideology that solely exists to eradicate anyone who is not a white supremacist. When i say eradicate i mean murder, do you understand that? Civil liberties do not exist to protect those that would inflict genocide on a huge swathe of people if they could, once you go down that road you give up that right. This is not a merely a difference of opinion. I cannot quite believe you are using the words political opponents and nazis in the same paragraph, that is a false equivalence.
Okay folks, we’re straying far off-topic here, and this is obviously a sensitive subject. Let’s bring the discussion back to Dr. Who.
@25:”The fact that he put his affection and loyalty to a friend above what was strategically and intellectually the best choice is not in dispute.”
Actually, arguably, if you want to get super rational about it, that DOES make it a good reason to punch Sutcliffe, perhaps the best choice.
First, we must establish that the Doctor is very clever and resourceful. This is a man who routinely sees danger and JUMPS in. In the first episode he jumped in the middle of a war with the Daleks just in the hopes it might stop something else from chasing them.
If you don’t allow that he’s fundamentally capable of handling most any situation, then, strictly, tactically, the best solution is always to not get involved at all and go live on a nice tropical planet somewhere. Maybe, in extreme situations, let the authorities know about the problem. But he doesn’t, he’s the Doctor. Which means he does things outside of that. And that he thinks of the long game.
If he punches the racist to defend his friend, it puts them in somewhat greater immediate danger, but he’s fairly confident he can work his way out of it (again, ran through a Dalek war as a distraction, average 19th century humans are pussycats by comparison). If he plays along with the man’s awful treatment of his friend and student, he might get more information about the immediate danger more quickly. However, Bill might feel abandoned and not trust him as much in the future. Maybe she won’t want to come on any adventures in time periods where her race is a factor knowing she’ll have to play the subservient role again (after all, tactically, that’s often going to be the best move, doesn’t mean it’s not going to hurt each time). Maybe she’ll think that he thinks of her just as a pawn, that her feelings don’t matter, or worse that he doesn’t care about people, even when he’s saving people he’s just doing it out of boredom or idolation, and when he really needs her to do something she’ll walk out on him. Maybe whoever is locked up in the vault might eventually find a way to communicate with her and convince her that the Doctor’s the bad guy and he’s the good guy and she’ll note how little he seemed to care both for the boy who died (he moved on) and for when she was being attacked.
@28/ghostly1: The thing about the Doctor is, yes, he’s clever and resourceful and ingenious, but he’s also (usually) an impulsive man-child who’s making it all up as he goes along. Granted, the Twelfth Doctor does seem to have a bit more of the Seventh Doctor-style master planner and manipulator in him than most of his predecessors, but he’s also a flawed character who makes a lot of mistakes. It’s that blend of traits that makes the Doctor such a rich character.
The Doctor isn’t, however, going about randomly punching Nazis because they are Nazis.
The Doctor was specifically intervening when a particular bigot was attacking Bill, a human being with whom he had a specific relationship, including the “duty of care” that Twelve feels towards companions, who are quite vulnerable and dependent on him while they travel together.
To belabor the awkward Nazi analogy, this is seeing some HJ punk bullying your Jewish friend, and stepping in to help your friend. No, it doesn’t solve the whole problem of Nazis. But it deals with the problem as it presents itself to you. It establishes you as an ally – someone your Jewish friend can trust to help as things get worse, and having such friends to turn to for protection could be the difference between life and death. And it make a public statement that This Is Not Acceptable, in a world that is generally saying that this is fine.
The message to be read, if anything is not “go around punching Nazis” but rather, “stand up for and with your friends against bullies, be an ally and protector, even if it puts you at risk” – as it did for the Doctor, he finds himself captured a few moments later, and has to engineer their escape – but he still did right in not letting a bigot and bully pick on his friend.
It is also worth remembering that “captured and tied up by bad guys” is part of an ordinary day for the Doctor and companions. Seeing his friend attacked because of her race is something new for the Doctor. And it was his friend facing a risk he did not share, rather than them being in the adventure and risk together. Sharing risk with his friends as they work together to save the day has always been acceptable to the Doctor. But this version has learned not to abandon his friends to face a danger alone.
The episode was good, for sure. But best episode in years? Opinions will be opinions.
The best episodes are poetry and difficult ethical dilemmas and revealing glimpses into what make the characters tick. To me, they elevate not only the show, but science fiction as a medium of speculative ideas. I just didn’t experience that from this episode.
The episode, to me, seemed okay, but nothing out of the ordinary. The evil mastermind was kind of unthreatening, though quite punchable. The punching scene had a kind of a slapstick feel to it. Sure it was the right thing to do (one of Twelve’s more reckless moments, maybe more passion than reason – but still the right thing to do), but it didn’t really elevate the story above all others. The short speech was nice though.
I enjoyed the episode less than the previous two. But that isn’t to say it was a bad episode – S10 has been very good so far, though I’m crossing fingers for an unforgettable episode down the line.
I haven’t seen anything by Mike Bartlett, the writer of the next episode, but people seem to be expecting a good episode. Let’s hope David Suchet is gonna rock.
I’d say that the way to read the punch scene is that the Doctor was so outraged by Sutcliffer’s appalling behaviour that he acted without thinking, and that this says something positive about his character, even if it wasn’t the most sensible course of action at the time.
The Doctor’s speech and the range of emotions you saw Bill go through saved this episode IMHO. The plot on the other hand was too much of a retread… so far I am not impressed with this season.
Great episode, I loved it, and I love almost everything in the article and comments.
@19 – Ursula: Brilliant.
@23 – mariesdaughter: That wasn’t Clara, it was Amy. Yes, it was a similar plot device, but a different plot built around it. Doctor Who is full of clichés and tropes; what’s important is how they use them.
@30 – Ursula: You nailed it again.
Good episode. Lord Sutcliffe was a heartless toad, and the Doctor’s response to his aggression was entirely appropriate.
It did give me a chance to tease my daughter-in-law, whose maiden name is Sutcliffe. But she has done genealogical research, and was quick to point out that her ancestors were off in Yorkshire at the time of this story. And, upon reflection, with him being a Lord, Sutcliffe would be a title and not a family name.
@23 I would have said that episode with the city riding on a space whale was with Rose. After a few years, companions sometimes blur together in my memory.
@37/Alan: The space-whale episode was Amy’s second. I distinctly remember thinking when I saw it that Karen Gillan would’ve made a more convincing Doctor than Matt Smith did at that point.
Well, I guess it’s all subjective. For me, *so* many things in this episode didn’t make any sense at all. I thought both the writing and directing were weak.
I thought it was the worst episode of the season so far, and the weakest for quite a while.
thank you, once again, for your amazingly brilliant writing and thought process!
In 1814 slavery in Britain was illegal. British troops fighting in the United States had standing orders to free any slave who asked them to. The slave trade was illegal. At the same time, the British plantations in the Caribbean had perhaps the most extreme system of plantation slavery anywhere in the Americas, they were allies of the Barbary States that kept launching slave raids against European shipping, and until the slave trade was banned the British Army was the largest single buyer. They also received delegations from coastal African states wondering where this anti-slave trade thing had come from, and which tried to make it go away again.
I’d say things were in some flux. So all sorts of interesting issues about race, slavery and so on can be raised in 1814 Britain. And yet the best Dr Who can do is to claim that Bill is in danger because “slavery is still totally a thing” while she is standing in the middle of almost the only country in the world in which that wasn’t still true.
I can’t say I’m very impressed.
Slavery might have been ilegal in Britain at the time, but it was still not safe to walk around as a black woman.
I know this is an old thread, but I wanted to comment on how remarkable it is thoroughly Bill is erased from the discussion of the Doctor punching Sutcliffe.
Should the Doctor “punch a Nazi”? Is it okay to punch someone for “saying racist things”? Is it hypocritical for the Doctor to tell Bill she needs to stay calm, and then turn around and punch Sutcliffe for “being racist”?
Sutcliffe was not “being racist” in a vacuum!
First, the Doctor was discussing being calm and keeping their temper with Sutcliffe not as something generally virtuous, but as a tactic for extracting information they needed. They were expecting, perhaps an extreme expression of the general racism and sexism at the time. Not for Sutcliffe to attack Bill.
Instead, Sutcliffe attacked Bill, physically and verbally. Far more than microagression, he was in her face, yelling, insulting, and threatening.
As suggested by the Doctor, Bill maintained her self control. This is not surprising. Women and minorities get used to navigating attacks from bigots, and staying in control in the face of aggression, as a matter of safety. Bill is not surprised by this attack – she’s been anticipating such an attack since she arrived.
But asking Bill to remain self-controlled in the face of racism leaves her vulnerable – the Doctor has asked her not to defend herself. This requires that Bill be able to trust the Doctor – if not to keep her safe, at least to have her back.
Yet somehow all of this disappears. The Doctor has punched a Nazi, and somehow it has nothing to do with Bill being right there in the middle of things.
@44/Ursula: I wouldn’t say Bill was “thoroughly erased” from our discussion. My own comments were centrally about how the Doctor was driven to punch Sutcliffe because of his anger at seeing his friend Bill threatened and disrespected. And you yourself posted twice in the thread (comments #19 & #30) and focused on Bill in your own remarks, while ghostly1 also discussed the incident in terms of the Doctor’s relationship with his friend. So Bill was definitely acknowledged in the discussion, far from “thoroughly erased,” in part thanks to your own contribution to the discussion.
YES, it was hypocritical of the Doctor to tell Bill to stay calm then lose his own cool so thoroughly but no Doctor takes insults to his companion well.