Should Joss Whedon write an episode?
- Thread starter The Borgified Corpse
- Start date
After watching "Children of Earth," I think it may be safe to let Joss Whedon write a Torchwood episode. There's hardly anyone left for him to kill off now.
I need to keep reminding myself that "Children of Earth" was just fiction. Otherwise, I'd be tempted to form an anti-government revolution and start blowing up government buildings. I've never seen a more compelling anti-government work of fiction than "Children of Earth."
Some of Joss Whedon's work has been almost equally compelling in its condemnation of authority.
For the most part on Firefly, the Alliance didn't seem that bad. It wasn't until the movie when we saw their experiment on Miranda that they jumped into the category of grand atrocities.
The Dollhouse has its good points and its bad points. I don't see any problem with it in principle. But "Epitaph One" & the Sierra backstory episode have shown us that many involved with the Dollhouse have evil intentions that result in dire consequences.
On Buffy/Angel, authority gets off pretty lightly. Mostly, we're just confronted with authority figures that are incompetant or in over their heads, like Principal Flutie, Principal Snyder, the Watchers Council, & the Initiative. There are a few demons in elected office, like Mayor Wilkins or that evil Senator from "Power Play" & "Not Fade Away," but they seem like rare exceptions. For what it's worth, "Conviction" also implied that the government has some good magics working for it as well. Wolfram & Hart represented a system that was rotten to the core.
It is a complete misconception to say that anyone who is a liberal and a Democrat therefore thinks that government is good. There are plenty of liberal Democrats who do think government is bad -- they just think it's also preferable to corporations.
True -- I'm not saying Whedon is a Libertarian. But his work reveals a consistent, pervasive anti-institutional bias. There isn't a single institution in his work that isn't somehow incompetent or corrupt -- not Sunnydale High School, not the City of Sunnydale, not the Initiative, not the Order of Aurelius, not the Watcher's Council, not Wolfram and Hart, not the U.S. government, not the American economy, not the Knights that were fighting Glory, not the Alliance. Hell, even Buffy herself, upon becoming the head of a worldwide organization in the Season Eight comics, ended up stealing millions of dollars from a Swiss bank.
Whedon may not be anti-government per se, but his work reflects a clear ideological bias in favor of individualism -- even if not Individualism -- over institutionalism. He is not the kind of writer who would have his hero make a joke like "Only Britain is Great;" his work is far more distrustful of the idea of loyalty to an organization than RTD's seems to be.
Which is not to say that RTD has been depicting the United Kingdom as a pure and virtuous thing, either. It's completely accurate to note that even the "good" leaders of the U.K. like Harriet Jones are susceptible to morally questionable choices, like destroying the retreating Sycorax ship. Certainly the depiction of the election of Harold Saxon to Downing Street reflects a certain skepticism with messianic politicians. The Torchwood Institute is corrupt when first introduced in DW Series Two.
But I don't think RTD's work goes nearly as far in the individualist ideology as Whedon's. With Harriet Jones, we still get a very celebratory, "This is a GOOD leader!" quality to her most of the time. The assassination of Tony Blair by the Slitheen is depicted as a pretty horrible thing, and Downing Street seems to be a sort of sanctified space that we're supposed to be very reverential of and horrified by alien infiltration of in "Aliens of London." UNIT is generally depicted heroically or semi-heroically, even when some of its commanders make questionable or unreasonable choices--even Donna's skepticism of the justness of their actions at the beginning of "The Sontaran Stratagem" is mitigated by their role in helping defend the Earth in the subsequent episode, and it's implied that Martha Jones is helping them become better. Even the corrupt Torchwood Institute is depicted in "The Sound of Drums" as being something that could be rebuild and rehabilitated under the right leadership.
And of course even Whedon doesn't discount the idea that working in groups can help people accomplish more. He tends to portray Buffy's and Angel's connections with their friends as being the keys to their salvation and survival, after all.
But I think it's fair to say that while Whedon is not purely Individualistic and Davies not purely a communalist, Whedon's work tends to be further biased towards individualism and skeptical of patriotic projects than Davies's in Doctor Who.
I would argue that the first truly cynical depiction of the U.K. government we see in modern Whoniverse occurs in Children of Earth, which is a Torchwood story -- and I would argue that Davies's work in Torchwood actually has a different ideological project than his work on Doctor Who. (I don't know what HIS ideological biases are, in person.) Doctor Who seems to have a persistent, "Be proud of being British and remember that the government isn't perfect" message, whereas Torchwood seems to basically be saying that the entire system is fundamentally corrupt.
I don't agree with that assessment at all. Buffy Season Two makes it very clear that Snyder answered directly to Mayor Wilkins, whom we discover in Season Three founded the City of Sunnydale specifically so as to provide Vampires and Demons with a stable Human population to prey upon in return for being able to Ascend into an Old One.
Meanwhile, the Initiative turns out to be a government project to harness the powers of Demons for shadowy government ends -- with no real sense of democratic accountability at all -- that's both responsible for numerous deaths, experimenting on U.S. citizens without their consent, and that eventually gets its ass handed to it when Adam, its own creation, turns out to be beyond their control. In its later appearances, it's always too busy fighting random minor Demons to actually both to help Buffy; fundamentally corrupt, the U.S. government's Demon-control project is.
Meanwhile, not only do we discover that the Watcher's Council engages in deliberate attempts to murder their own Slayers upon turning 18, but that it's more interested in sending thugs to murder wayward Slayers like Faith than in working on ways to help them. The entire organization is either too incompetent or too corrupt to offer to help Buffy fight Glory, even though it apparently has a massive bureaucracy and expert fighters on staff, all because they're not willing to work under her authority rather than to give her orders. The Council utterly fails to help Giles help Willow the way the Coven does, and then it fails spectacularly at protecting Potential Slayers from the First Evil. It gets itself blown up and all but destroyed at the hands of the First. And then, on top of it all, we discover in the last half of Season Seven that the Watcher's Council's ancestral organization, the Shadow Men, deliberately created the First Slayer by forcibly infecting an unwilling girl with a Demon, targeting her for what is, in essence, rape and enslavement because a woman's life was more expendable to them -- let a girl fight the Vampires and Demons and get killed, and then let another girl take her place, all under men's control.
Meanwhile, on Angel, Wolfram & Hart is depicted as an organization that has virtual control over the entire U.S. government and economy because of its vast powers -- corporate America run amok. (Certainly it has effective control over the L.A. local government.) And then it turns out that the Circle of the Black Thorn controls huge elements of both the Demon and Human populations, including a sitting U.S. Senator who's running for President.
And then there's Firefly's Alliance, whose Blue Hand agents and Parliamentary Operatives casually murder anyone they wish and whose Parliament covers up an experiment performed on the population of an entire world, creating the Reavers.
Then there's the Dollhouse, whose entire reason for being is to enslave people with their "consent."
Bottom line: Institutions, in the works of Joss Whedon, are consistently and almost uniformly corrupt. The best of them are incompetent, and the worst are downright evil. Whedon's work displays a much stronger skepticism for collectivist projects than Davies's work on Doctor Who.
But, as I said before, I also think that Davies's work on Torchwood has a more skeptical view of institutions than his work on Doctor Who. I think it has to do with his target audiences -- he's trying to instill British pride and patriotism into children, mediating it with an understanding that governments are not perfect, whereas he's sharing with his adult audience on Torchwood a much more skeptical view of their fellow adults in positions of authority.
I think Firefly is an answer to that question: He wouldn't. I rather suspect that the entire idea of Star Trek wouldn't appeal to him -- he's not into stateliness or institutions. He once described the premise behind Firefly as, "The people that history stepped on. The people that the Enterprise would just fly right by and completely ignore."
I feel I've failed for having to ask this question but what is the Order of Aurelius?
There are no sanctified spaces on Joss Whedon's shows because they all take place in southern California.
Of course, this difference wouldn't even be relevant if the episode that Whedon wrote didn't involve Earth. While there are shades of British patriotism on Doctor Who, they tend to only pop up in a few select episodes.
Basically the Master's posse, including Darla for a while.
Yeah. It was the Vampire cult of which the Master was the head, and from which almost every major Vampire in the Buffyverse was sired.
As I recall, in fact, the siring line went something like:
The Master (Heinrich Joseph Nest)
↓
Darla
↓
Angelus
↓
Drusilla
|
-----------
↓ ↓
Spike Darla (again)