Ofcom will not probe lesbian lizard snog in new Dr Who series Ofcom has declined to probe the BBC after it received complaints about the screening of a kiss between a lizard-like character and her human wife during an episode of Doctor Who. The watchdog received half a dozen complaints after the characters, played by Neve McIntosh and Catrin Stewart, shared a crafty live-saving snog* as …
Practically none. If you kiss your pet the same way you kiss a human you fancy then I worry about a) your pet or b) your unsatisfied partner
Personally I thought they're one of the best things to happen in Who in ages. At least they're comprehensively getting rid of screaming girlies, so common in classic Who
Yeah but, no but...isn't interspecies "stuff" extreme pr0n? Well according to HMG and mumsnet anyway. If the maid had tried that with a horse there would have been hell to pay, but lizards are there for the taking...is that the message? Mind you I quite fancy that lizard myself...I'm off to get a gekko now to see what all the fuss is about.
The kiss served no purpose in the story, didn't do a whole lot in the way of character development, and was rather clumsily shoehorned into the writing with an excuse.
I almost looks like this was the BBC's plan all along: Put something a tad provocative in knowing it would be sure to stir up complains from the easily offended homophobes* thus giving them a little publicity and making said homophobes look like the prudes and idiots they are.
*They all deny it, but does anyone seriously believe there would have been complaints had one gender differed?
I thought it was all quite ham-fisted - they've made the point that they're a married couple in previous episodes, but felt the need to mention it at least 3 times in this episode plus the pointless kiss, together with the ridiculous 'my lungs can store oxygen' which makes no sense at all. And they hinted that Clara is gay too. That's all fine, if it fits with the story, but it's grating to have it highlighted so many times, very amateurish and actually served to undermine their point.
"I thought it was all quite ham-fisted - they've made the point that they're a married couple in previous episodes, but felt the need to mention it at least 3 times in this episode plus the pointless kiss, together with the ridiculous 'my lungs can store oxygen' which makes no sense at all"
Yes but the real point is (and maybe they were deliberately doing this, maybe they weren't) if they were of different genders the exact same storyline plus the number of mentions of marriage and "kisses" wouldn't have been noticed or indeed have grated you.
I suspect similar storylines have happened between the Doctor (Matt Smith) & River with multiple mentions of their relationship.
"The kiss served no purpose in the story, didn't do a whole lot in the way of character development, and was rather clumsily shoehorned into the writing with an excuse."
Apart from the fact that the clockwork zombies home in on breath, and the human girl's lung capacity was less than the lizard girl's. So they shared.
Some reptiles, such as I thing Crocodiles, can hold their breath for amazingly long periods, so is it really unthinkable that she would have that attribute?
Do some strenuous exercise such as fighting off the aforementioned clockwork zombies, or moving a large item of furniture, and see if you can hold your breath for as long as you can when not breathing hard.
How do you propose the lizard transfers some of her air to the human?
A straw?
A "totally believable" snorkel carried on the off chance?
An arbitrary hollow finger?
Oh the howls of outrage from the nitpickers about the plot hole. And people whine about the over use of the sonic.
The monster homing in on breath is not a new concept either.
Some of the Chinese vampire movies such as Mr Vampire portray Chinese vampires as homing in on breath too, so to evade them, don't breath.
Countless stories where people share breath to get to the surface when one has been trapped underwater..
Some real insects even use breath to home in on prey.
"I almost looks like this was the BBC's plan all along: Put something a tad provocative in knowing it would be sure to stir up complains from the easily offended homophobes* thus giving them a little publicity and making said homophobes look like the prudes and idiots they are."
Oh no.. surely not.. They would never do that.. Like the two women who kissed on DS9 years ago and caused outrage among the easily offended, or Uhuru and was it Spock, or Kirk's mixed race kiss?
It's a plot line. It rounds the characters out a smidge with a potential for a bit of back story. Deal with it.
Any worse than Captain Jack, and the any gender, any species, any time meme?
"*They all deny it, but does anyone seriously believe there would have been complaints had one gender differed?"
Who all denies it?
With people who get outraged for a hobby.. Sure. Some just love to tell anybody they can corner how offended they are. Just look at any story here.
Good on Ofcom for telling them to grow up and piss off.
It's 2014. looking at your feet and mixing up words up is not a believable depiction of affection any more. People engage in marital unpleasantness all over the place, and this would be a great opportunity to explain to a kid that sometimes people like to snog someone the same gender.
"Some reptiles, such as I thing Crocodiles, can hold their breath for amazingly long periods"
Except Crocodiles aren't holding their breath. They simple not breathing and building up an oxygen debt in their blood. Crocodile blood is also known to be very efficient at storing oxygen AND their muscles happen to work well even with low oxygen. The point being their lungs have nothing to do with it. An equivalent practice would be like divers hyperventilating before a long dive. The capacity of the lungs hasn't changed, just the amount of oxygen in the blood.
I found the kiss to be jarring, not because of some homophobic agenda but my suspension of disbelief finally broke that a lizard could transfer oxygen back out of its blood and into its lungs in order to then breathe that oxygen into a human. I'm with another poster on this one, I think the BBC are trolling (JUST like they did with the panto-like Captain Jack). The kiss didn't add anything to the plot that hadn't already been said MULTIPLE times but was wedged in anyway at the expense of the science.
Science Fiction is at its best when extrapolated from already known science. When you start making things up that outright contradicts our understanding of the world then it stops being science and become magic, which has its place in a different genre.
* OK, I'll concede that 2 sets of lungs are better than 1, and so in that sense the additional capacity would have helped but rather assumes that Lady Vastra hasn't absorbed all of the oxygen contained in them already.
I imagine it also helps that they are ectotherms. That saves a great deal of energy.
Now there's an idea for a future scene... Characters fighting against killer robots with thermal infra-red vision. Clara, Vastra and some other characters pinned down, as the killer robots stalk them looking for any sign of heat to shoot at. Then the cold-blooded one calmly steps out, walks behind one and hits the off switch.
...at a lizard lady doing something improbable with her oxygen supply? How do you cope with the frequently killed immortal, who travels around in an extra-dimensional, time-hopping police box from the 1960s? Doctor Who isn't exactly "hard" sci-fi.
Until we all learn to stop viewing homosexuality as a deviant behaviour, any incidence of such behaviour in any TV show is probably going to seem jarring and shoe-horned in*. The Kirk/Uhura kiss probably felt like that to many viewers, way back when, but I doubt anyone would bat an eyelid, now.
*I honestly don't care if the writers included it solely to piss-off the moral outrage brigade - if it helps demystify homosexuality among Who's intended audience, it served a useful purpose (it prompted a brief discussion between my young son and I, about same-sex marriage - of course, he thinks that kissing is icky, regardless of the participants' genders).
Actually, homosexuality is "deviant" in that it deviates from the majority practise. That's a good thing too - if everyone was gay, there would be no more people and the human race would end. The beeb loves to promote it, but I found it to be an eww! scene. By explicitly sexualising the moment, it rather hit you in the face with "how would that work?" which just wasn't a thought that was required and completely dropped you out of the story.
The show has gone from being entertainment to social engineering. Surely it must be possible to have a show which is just entertaining. My kids are still kids, they aren't interested in sex and I'm reasonably sure Dr Who isn't the best way to teach them about it. If I did have kids who were interested in sex (say a 15 year old boy) I'm also sure putting images of sex between a woman and a lizard woman in his head is also not a really helpful thing to do.
I don't let the Beeb or any other mass media do my kids sex ed - that's a parent's role. I'd kindly thank the mass media to stop it - I'm not convinced they are either competant or have my child's best interest at heart. In the mean time, the button is off.
I think you'll find that many gay people procreate. Sometimes they grit their teeth and do it the old-fashioned way, because they want children, sometimes they use medical intervention.
I wouldn't call a minority preference 'deviant', especially when it is so deeply embedded. That would be to suggest that all left-handed people are 'deviant'. Right-handedness is the majority 'practice', but that means nothing at all. It just is.
Showing minority 'practices' is not teaching sex-ed, it is showing the world as it is. Children who are cocooned to believe that the world is just mummies and daddies are not being helped to face the world they'll live in when they grow up.
However, I always suspect a lesbian kiss or sex scene, as it always seems there to titillate the male part of the audience than for any plot-driven reason (I am speaking more widely that Dr. W) From a rough count through memory-land, I think it's about eight women-women kisses to men-men kisses on TV. Strange bias...
"However, I always suspect a lesbian kiss or sex scene, as it always seems there to titillate the male part of the audience than for any plot-driven reason"
Not really going to work when the two women in question are only there to try to generate a spin-off series that Moffat can run in imitation of RTD's Torchwood. I'd sooner see them drown than kiss.
New Scientist covered this particular point in their "Guide to the cool science bits" in the episode
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26096-doctor-who-episode-1-a-guide-to-the-cool-science-bits.html#.VABKQEuZ47R
"Cameo-companion Madame Vastra, a member of the super-evolved reptile species the Silurians, finds it much easier to hold her breath, claiming she can store oxygen in her body to breathe later. It turns out that's actually true, at least for monitor lizards, which have bird-like air sacs."
"suspension of disbelief finally broke that a lizard could transfer oxygen back out of its blood and into its lungs in order to then breathe that oxygen into a human."
That's exactly what can happen. If you fill your lungs with oxygen free gas (like helium at a party) the oxygen in blood will defuse from your blood back into your lungs, and you pass out in seconds. There is no active transfer going on in the lungs, it's just diffusion from higher concentration to lower.
"Apart from the fact that the clockwork zombies home in on breath, and the human girl's lung capacity was less than the lizard girl's. So they shared."
Thus negating the purpose of holding their breath.
Badly written episode all round - Clara's motivation made no sense at all given that she is the one human to have seen all the Doctor's incarnations.
"An equivalent practice would be like divers hyperventilating before a long dive. The capacity of the lungs hasn't changed, just the amount of oxygen in the blood."
No it hasn't. Hyperventilating rids the body of more carbon dioxide. It is the build of of carbon dioxide that triggers breathing, not lack of oxygen. I have found that after hyperventilating it is actually beneficial to empty the lungs of air as it assists in reducing buoyancy when diving to 10m - you get there quicker. ~The air in your lungs has a much greater buoyancy effect in the first couple of meters than it does 10m down.
"Clara's motivation made no sense at all given that she is the one human to have seen all the Doctor's incarnations"
Have a listen to the Verity! podcast, there is an intelligent discussion about Clara's reactions and motivations, including the needs of the episode as a whole with relation to the audience. Both sides make valid points.
"Have a listen to the Verity! podcast, there is an intelligent discussion about Clara's reactions and motivations, including the needs of the episode as a whole with relation to the audience. "
I'll give it a go but the audience's needs includes some level of characterisation which rises above the needs of this week's plotline. Otherwise there's no point in having continuing characters. Or watching.
No she isn't. The sum of her splintered selves have seen all of the Doctor's incarnations, but a given splinter would not necessarily have knowledge of them all.
Granted, I too found it jarring and not fitting with the story. But they've hinted this is to be a somewhat darker Who than we've seen in the past so I was willing to cut them some slack on it.
"Badly written episode all round - Clara's motivation made no sense at all given that she is the one human to have seen all the Doctor's incarnations."
I wondered that too, but then it struck me that she had seen all the Doctor's *past* incarnations up to Matt Smith only. So for her it's a more difficult adjustment to make as she was in the unusual scenario with the impression she had seen all of the Doctor - to find out there were incarnations of him with which she was unfamiliar was harder to adapt to.
"Some reptiles, such as I thing Crocodiles, can hold their breath for amazingly long periods, so is it really unthinkable that she would have that attribute?"
Reptiles can hold their breath for a long time as they are cold blooded creatures, and don't consume huge amounts of oxygen making heat. Their shared breath would not have sustained the human very long. The plot line has a hole the size of..... er..... well..... a typical plot line.
i hate those characters.
"ooh i'm a lesbian. did i ever mention i'm a lesbian? OOOOOH! YOU MADE AN INNUENDO! CHEEKY! i'm married! to a woman!" it's like really bad panto
oh stfu with your mockney accent, you're only there as the serious ones for strax to bounce funny lines off
With the kiss I got the feeling that they wanted to do the same sex kiss to confirm the relationship between the women in the viewers eyes. They said they were married but because they are secondary characters, and therefore don't get the time for tender moments to establish that in the viewers eyes, a kiss was required to confirm the type of relationship.
The problem however is that not all international markets are as forgiving as the UK and therefore to ensure the scene is not cut in those markets they made it into an awkward "let me give you the air from my lungs" thing.
If they'd made it a full blown give me a kiss because we're about to die thing. They still would have got the same 6 complaints in the UK and no complaints in any other country because for them they would have had to cut the scene. Ok maybe not every other country, but I can think of one or two large markets where it might have been an issue to show it.
I've seen very little of the series since it was restarted but it seems to me that eye-candy has almost always been there albeit in different forms: from the earnest but still nubile assistants to the more explicitly erotic. Something for everybody's fantasy.
The episodes I have seen have singularly failed to capture the sense of reaching for the stars that seemed to drive the original series: yes, it was science fiction but it also attempted at times to explain the science of the time. Maybe because you can't keep that up forever and because it gets cheesy at times.
I guess the real challenge will come when the Doctor returns as a woman. Could be interesting.
What "New Series" are you talking about? If it's Series 8 of the New Era, then that's not surprising, it was the first episode.
If it's the New Era itself, starting with Christopher Eccleston, then you cannot really categorise it as a single "series", seeing how variable it has been.
I hope that they can bring it back from the travesty I feel it had become with Matt Smith as the Doctor, but I fear that the problem now is the lack of imagination of the writers. The last seriously good episode in my opinion was "The Doctor's Wife", which was written by Neil Gaiman, not one of the stock writers.
Also I seem to have some different memories of the original Who series, especially around the Tom Baker/Peter Davison eras. The former always used to enjoy an innuendo and a letch, plus assistants like Leela (Louise Jameson) running around in basically a bikini for most of it. Plus I think there was a story set on the planet "Kly Torus" or some similar spelling, and at least one monster that looked like an overgrown organic dildo.
Plus there is of course the famous death/regeneration scene with Peter Davison acting his heart(s) out before bloating into Colin Baker, but all male eyes were drawn to Nicola Bryant's cleavage floating just over his head at the time.
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