6.8 KiB
The Doctor is a chauvinist son of a bitch
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 19
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Created: 2013-12-30T15:21:59
Post:
[deleted]
Comments:
u/FeepingCreature [+11] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (40 minutes later)
Once, an organization of humans orchestrates a plot to conceive and grow a human child with some of the capabilities of a Time Lord.
I should note here that, the first time we gained the capabilities to create a human child with some of the capabilities of a Time Lord, we decided to use her as an assassin. Doc has a point.
u/Paradoxius [+9] (3 hours later)
Specifically a psychopathic assassin with the singleminded goal of killing the Doctor. Also, that wasn't a group of humans doing it for the good of humanity or anything; it was specifically a religious extremist organization doing it for their own distorted ends.
u/VorpalAuroch [+4] Life before Death (2 days later)
Well, they were trying to save the universe. Badly.
u/DeliaEris [+8] Fully General Idealist (14 hours later)
It might be worth pointing out that the Time Lord civilization is generally portrayed as having Gone Bad, so there's some evidence to suggest that being Time-Lord-ish makes people evil.
u/None [+9] (20 hours later)
They're generally portrayed as having Gone Decadent and Corrupt, prior to the Time War. I wouldn't call them the good guys, but neither would I say they were really bad, either. It's not like they purposely ruined their own lives, or ruined the lives of whole other species (that often) and thought it good to do so. They even fought the war against the Great Vampires.
Overall, I'd call it a better universe for having had the Time Lords keeping a measure of historical order, even if they weren't the ideal universal rulers.
(Some of the Expanded Universe stuff even claimed they had a treaty of neutrality and equality with an Expy of The Culture, so in that conception it's not even as if the Time Lords were really universal rulers, just one of the several parties at the top of the heap.)
u/None [+7] (10 hours later)
Considering that as recently as The Night of the Doctor, we saw a "Flame of Eternal Life"... But he forgets about it, and at one point calls it the Flame of Eternal Boredom. Really.
u/None [+2] (20 hours later)
Worse: he drinks the Sisterhood's potion derived from that Flame himself to trigger his regeneration process. Now if he had pointed out that actuarially speaking, anything actually fun (especially his kind of fun) is a major risk to a Truly Biologically Immortal person and said this was why he shows such a flippant disdain for his own immortality, that would have been more ok. That would have said, "Yes, I can live indefinitely, but I've got lots of things I value more than living forever, such that I'm willing to take the risk of dying in order to really live my life instead of just barricading myself inside a safe-house."
But he didn't.
u/notentirelyrandom [+6] (2 days later)
Take my least favorite episode, for example. "The Lazarus Experiment." Moral: Sufficiently old people are better off dead, and that's the way it was meant to be. If you mess with that then you are the problem.
Having the Doctor do what he does is almost always better than having him not do it. If he retired to an isolated planet somewhere then Earth would probably be wiped out. He does get credit for that. But I really wish he would occasionally not suck at philosophy.
u/Psy-Kosh [+3] (4 hours later)
While I overall agree with you, the organization in question, as the other commenters have noted, wasn't trying to solve death or anything, but explicitly trying to kill the Doctor, and was engineering an assassin. And all of that was to serve the offshot branch of those that believed that Silence Must Fall.
The Doctor himself did, in fact, once concede to Jack Harkness that his prejudice against immortals might be a flaw, that it might be a bad part of himself, an irrational bigotry.
u/Psy-Kosh [+3] (5 hours later)
Oh... one question... "chauvinist"?
That's a term usually used for for males sexist against females, and could plausibly be generalized for sexism in general. But does seem like a stretch to use it as a fully general term for bigoted/hypocritical/self-righteous/other nonsense like that.
u/None [+2] (6 hours later)
I had more meant it as in, "racist". Because, you know, the Time Lords are the master race, but humans getting more like Time Lords can't happen, because humans suck and aren't ready.
u/None [+5] (8 hours later)
I've heard the term "speciesism" being used.
u/Psy-Kosh [+3] (6 hours later)
Ah, okie. I don't think I've ever seen it used in the sense of "racist" rather than "sexist", but no matter.
(Funny thing is the Doctor, IIRC, has also explicitly said that Time Lords are more corruptible than humans, that a time lord (including himself) directly absorbing the power of the time vortex the way Rose did would be really really really really really bad. Actually, come to think of it, I think he said that in the same episode, heck, in the same conversation that he admitted to Jack that he might be a bit of a irrational bigot on the subject of immortality.
(I think the episode was "Utopia")
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (7 hours later)
It's actually sort of funny, because the term "chauvinist" originally meant a sort of blind, exaggerated patriot. In the late 60s the term "male chauvinist" was used to refer to sexists, and later it transmuted into being just about sexism, with the earlier sense being mostly dropped in modern times (along with the need to append "male"). So it's totally fine to say that the Doctor is a "Time Lord chauvinist", just a little bit unconventional.
u/Psy-Kosh [+2] (10 hours later)
Ah, cool. I did not know that, thank you.
u/ajsdklf9df [+0] (15 hours later)
He sure is, but that's what you get when the Character is aimed to entrain humans. We are all still mortal as we have always been, and people feel most sympathetic with people like them. That's also why he is British. And hangs around the UK. And we can't have a female doctor because despite the Queen and Thatcher, the UK is weirdly sexist like that.
u/MadScientist14159 [+1] WIP: Sodium Hypochlorite (Rational Bleach) Eventually. Maybe. (5 days later)
There was a female doctor in a comic relief special.
u/ajsdklf9df [+3] (5 days later)
comic relief special.
u/VorpalAuroch [+1] Life before Death (2 days later)
Mostly because Steven Moffat is sexist like that. And it never came up before 11.