Doctor Who and the Ideal Immigrant

Abstract

The remarkable themes of Doctor Who Special: Joy to the World, briefly unpacked.

Introduction

I have previously written about the problems and lurch to the political right of the reboot of BBC television drama Doctor Who. In the 2024-12-25 Special, Joy to the World (the dire plot of which has been adequately addressed in other places), these trends continued. So, onwards, with spoilers.

Death of an alien

Some old favourites

The Doctor abuses women

Not for the first time, harsh negging used by the male protagonist for a female’s (Joy's) ’own good’. Also, wouldn’t it have been kinder not to screw up the hotel-worker woman Anita's life? Coercive control and all that.

Nature Traduced

Dinosaur (and Nature) reduced to a bitey oubliette cameo.

No threat to capitalism

Even Doctor’s sworn ‘enemy’ seems to thrive while he parties around.

The waiting game

Perhaps not so extreme as the writer’s previous obsession with waiting, Joy waits on return, Anita waits for Doctor to leave.

Don’t make me think

Feels. Is ‘some people are lonely at Christmas’ really the height of insight the show aims at? Why yet another ‘Blitz’ reference that ignores the vastly larger number of people the British have bombed? Or are helping bomb right now?

That old one-way door granting strange adults access into a vulnerable young person's bedroom

Seriously, if one of these writers is your landlord, get out now! Don't stay to grab your kettle, just bolt out the front door and never come back. This is not going to work out like Monsters Inc. Anyway, I've summarised previous red flags.

Various others

Once could also add 'Kissing-up to Christians', 'Badly Misjudged Joy' (it was going around), the problem with characters, the deadening Earth-and-Human-centricness of it all…

The 'Good' Immigrant

However, what really stood out for me was the depiction of the 'Silurian' hotel manager character, killed off third-way through. Here's some of the excruciating dialogue, as we are treated to unnecessary racism as the unnamed character dies.

17:03 Doctor: You’re a Silurian, the proudest race I know.

17:10 Dying ’Silurian’: I was lost. In the caves. There was a door. This place. They were so kind. It was so exciting.

From this depiction, we can see how the writers envisage the perfect immigrant:

1. Dehumanised: this 'Silurian' doesn't even get a name (and 'Silurian' is a misnomer, not a great term then).
2. Is singular (absolutely no hordes).
3. Point of entry is singular and sealed… no more to follow.
4. Doesn't reproduce.
5. Works in the service industry.
6. Works in public, brightly-lit spaces with comforting security (is quite unthreatening).
7. Wears western-style clothing.
8. Is polite and speaks perfect English.
9. Is pathetically grateful.
10. Enthusiastically boosts the wonderful nation of his saviours.
11. Disses own (mere caves, etc)
12. Dead.
13. And dies in the most convenient, tidy and least consequential way imaginable, without imposing any obligations at all (nobody even needs to email their next of kin or whatever).
14. Quickly forgotten.

Now, I don't have to explain why this panders towards far-right, xenophobic tendencies, but combined with the Doctor's emoting does suggest how foke Doctor Who is these days. Has Modern Who been captured by the far right, is this BBC-core or pragmatic pandering to retain its licence fee?

The Making of "Taxi for Mary"

Introduction

The idea was to do a very short (perhaps as little as one minute long) animation on the nativity story for Christmas, with an offbeat theme. I liked the idea of giving donkeys some agency, so Mary's old donkey retires and presumably arranges for a replacement, a time-travelling taxi-driving donkey (from a future Donkey Civilization? who knows). Anyway, after some development of the story, I captured the gist in a mini storyboard.

Mini storyboard for Taxi for Mary

Process

I wanted to use felt shapes originally, but in the timescale I decided to use felt and other textures photographed and imported into Adobe Flash CS5. This is perhaps the last hurrah for my Creative Suite 5, since it will no longer work with the next version of MacOS. However, as the story was to be driven by the narration of the donkey-taxi-driver, I thought this character might be easier to animate as a sock-puppet, especially as it would be sitting behind the steering wheel all the time.

Visualization of donkey-driven taxi

I thought about a uniform or cap for the donkey, but that seemed too fiddly and unnecessary, so I looked for more naturalistic style.

Some visualisations of the donkey's head

I used an old sports sock, cutting two holes for little finger and thumb (for donkey's forelegs to operate steering wheel) and a large gap for the mouth. I covered the sock with felt and sponge padding (cut from an old seat filling), only receiving a few mild burns from my hot glue gun. Note to self: upgrade health and safety. The donkey's ears were wire loops at each end of a wire bent to include a neck support, covered in moulded wire mesh, masking tape and a top layer of felt. The idea was that the ears would be bent as if by the roof of the taxi cab. The forelegs were made as separate digit-mittens, with moulded black plasticine hooves with neodymium magnets embedded to (hopefully) contact with the metal steering wheel, made from a jar lid. The donkey's mouthparts had space at top for middle finger and below for the other two fingers so I could animate the mouth for rough lip-synching.

The steering wheel was stuck inside a frame built of LEGO®, clamped to sturdy laptop desk, placed in front of green card, and lit by three LED lights. The video camera was placed on a tripod and zoomed in to accommodate the frame. Then the donkey sock puppet was positioned with its hooves holding the wheel, and videoed lip-synching with the pre-recorded (in Apple GarageBand) narration.

Green-screen frame for the donkey puppet

The video was then taken in segments into Apple iMovie, synchronised manually to the audio output in segments from Garageband, and edited to length. Each video segment (still rotated 90° from upright) was then exported as QuickTime movies. To crop, rotate and remove the green backgrounds, the videos were then imported into Apple Motion. After cropping, rotating and resizing (to about 540 pixels square) the keyer filter was applied, which automatically detected the green colour, and then the right slider in the spill contrast had to be slid all the way to the left to fully remove the background. The video was then exported with the alpha (transparency) channel.

To get the video into Adobe Flash, it was first converted into FLV (Flash video format) by Adobe Media Encoder. Once in Flash, it was placed like any imported video without using a surround. The audio was retained in the imported video through these operations.

The rest of the work in Flash was relatively straightforward. Some simple effects were used, and mostly very simple shapes with imported textures as bitmap fills with minimal animation were created.

I wanted to finish up back at the start (Mary and Joseph's Carpentry in Nazareth) to illustrate that the original donkey had retired, not "retired", as might have been implied by the narrator, and indeed had been joined by her replacement. This is where a photograph of the puppet was broken up into slightly simplified Flash shapes, and a slightly smaller mirror copy was elderified into an old white donkey. This hopefully help tie up the different visual styles and produce an adequate ending to animation already about 2 minutes long.

Donkeys at rest visualisation

Result

Reflecting back, a major theme was time, probably not surprising considering how time-consuming animation can be, and in this case a looming deadline of Christmas Eve, which I met before tea-time when I uploaded the video and English captions. There were some weak gags and observations, and Mary was not simply a passenger either. While this project was essentially another animation test (and my first green-screen foray, thanks to a useful tip from the Internet), it also met my original concept and was completed on time (even if I had to buy Apple Motion, it was worth it).