Five Drastic Ways to Make Doctor Who Better

Thesis: Doctor Who is less exciting and enjoyable when the Doctor wins every single one of his battles, and when it isn't all about him. To make the show more dramatically compelling and less character-centric, he needs to lose occasionally. (And other stories.)

Solution #1: Blow up the Earth.

I've written before about the problem of stakes in Doctor Who. It's almost a given in new-Who that during garden-variety crises, somebody will be about to conquer or destroy the Earth; during season finales, it's the universe, or all of time and space, or whatever clever-sounding sobriquet the writers have thought up for today. This is supposed to add drama by raising the stakes, but it really lessens it because there's no way the Doctor is going to lose when there's so much to play for!

That's why Steven Moffat should actually blow up the Earth. Do it in the first episode of a season, do it in the last, in the middle, I don't care. Make us think it's another ho-hum alien invasion, like the attack of the Sontarans or the Silent Invasion, when everything looks bad but the Doctor finds the aliens' one secret weakness at the last moment... and then have the Doctor fail. Let the Earth actually be destroyed. And sit back and bask in the astounded screams of the faithful.

Think about the narrative possibilities this would open. Why did it happen? Who blew up the Earth, and how? What about the Companions' families back on the world—they'd actually have to work through a significant loss that can't be timed away. What about a permanent change in the Doctor's character that isn't gone before the next episode begins, when he's actually reminded that he's not infallible? And don't tell me it would take away from possibilities, either; just go to Earth's past, or another galaxy, or anywhere at all. Blowing up Earth would completely change the show in one episode and usher in a new era of Doctor Who—different, scary, better.

Solution #2: Change the Doctor's motivations.

No matter what the villain is, when the Doctor is pleading with the Monster of the Day not to destroy Earth (right before he blows them directly to hell, do not collect $200), he invariably throws in a line about the potential of humanity and our deep character flaws, yes, but also our essential goodness. It's pretty much the same from villain to villain, and it's always felt sort of tacked-on haphazardly. For example, while it may have been true of Tennant, it's hard to imagine Eccleston or Smith actually caring about the people of Earth. It's just not in their characters. Eccleston was an embittered veteran who was driven by grief and guilt, and Smith is a happy-go-lucky mad scientist cowboy who wants to explore. It just doesn't fit with those personalities.

Making the Doctor an asshole has been tried before, with the Sixth Doctor, with disastrous and stupid results. Don't do that. Just make him a guy who cares about winning, not saving lives. He can still defend humanity and defeat villains, but he does it because he wants to prove he's better than anyone else, not because he's got a thing for humanity. It would turn a character anachronism into a strength that could turn into stronger Companion-Doctor relationships, character development episodes, you name it.

Solution #3: Give the Doctor a foe worthy of him.

Like I said above, the Doctor has to lose occasionally. Thinking back throughout all of modern Who, I count really one time where the Doctor loses. “Midnight”, which also happens to be my favorite Who episode, is a terrific deconstruction of the Doctor's motivations, behavior, flaws and purpose that ends with him being utterly defeated by a monster uniquely capable of neutralizing his greatest weapons. It's a glorious, thrilling, terrifying episode, and it's also the only one of its kind. The Doctor winning all the time is boring. We expect that he's going to solve the mystery, defeat the villains, and set things to rights (perhaps with some collateral damage along the way, but most of the people usually live). Wouldn't it be more exciting if, rather than just magically winning every single battle, the Doctor fought a foe that was actually a challenge?

A revived Master would be a great foil for the Doctor, but he needs to win sometimes. A few months ago I was shocked to read a list of the worst Doctor Who villains that prominently included the Daleks. They're great enemies! They're iconic, implacable, devious and crazy! What's wrong with that? Well, they appear more frequently than any other foe, and therefore they've been defeated more times than anyone else, to the point where they're not even a thing worth fearing anymore. Want to put some punch back in the Daleks' step? Have them overrun a human colony on some desolate moon that the Doctor can't save. Show them breaking free from Skaro, fighting dissension in their ranks, killing people by accident in their new Doctor-less confusion. You could think of a million ways to make the Doctor's villains better, and most of them start with letting them win once in awhile.

Solution #4: Build a universe around the Doctor. Have recurring characters.

We're in the early stages of this one actually happening, but we need to go further. Part of the show's charm is its ability to go off and do a completely different thing with completely different people every single week if the writers want, and I'm not suggesting that that be taken away entirely. But the Doctor needs an establishment. Like it or not, there is only so much you can do with the Doctor, a couple of Companions, and a few family members back on Earth we see once or twice a season. The Victorian England bunch is a great start, but here's why it needs to go further.

Doctor Who would be better if it was a little more grounded. I get that it's a vehicle for science-magic-y stuff, and that the changes from week to week in era and technology and enemy mean that the writers can put basically any damn thing they want and get away with it. But you get to a point where all the threats out there and all the different technologies and time periods just get kind of overwhelming. Nothing really registers because anything is possible, and therefore we're not surprised or impressed when we see anything. One really good way to draw people into a TV show is by breaking your own rules (judiciously), but Doctor Who doesn't have many to break.

And plus, it'd just be better. Think about, say, “A Good Man Goes To War”. This goes along with #3, but the schmucks that he defeated that day—who were they? Did we ever hear of General Runaway again, or the headless monks or anyone else? Did it feel like he'd really expended any real effort to defeat this massive coalition drawn together from across time and space to stop him? Nobody, no and no! Wouldn't it have been better if we'd spent a while getting to know these people, establishing how good they are and how determined they are to defeat the Doctor, and then have the Doctor beat them anyway? That, at least to me, beats seven kinds of hell out of a bunch of khaki-clad nobodies who are less interesting than almost any other monster of the week. Give me background, and I'll give you a better show.

5. Solution #5: Everything so far leads to a more story-focused show, which has less character focus. That is a good thing. Do that.

Doctor Who, for the last few years, has been all about the characters. The overall storylines to each season are hiding behind the scenes (Bad Wolf, vanishing planets), unexplained until the end of the year (cracks in the walls) or what have you. The characters are what we see, what we fall in love (or hate) with, what absolutely drives the show. The plotlines, a.k.a. “What the hell is Moffat thinking?” are always a source of interest and debate, but the characters come first. And sometimes, they just suck.

There's no way to say this without coming off as an opinionated ass, but I've never had a problem with that before. River Song is not a compelling character to watch, in my opinion. Neither is Amy Pond. I don't like their acting, I don't like the way they're written, I think they're generally unexciting. Not bad, not good, just mediocre. But we're stuck with them for multiple seasons because the show is about watching the characters interact in weird situations, not watching characters play through a story arc. To put it another way, very few things influence the characters' (Doctor and Companions') decisions outside of the needs of the moment. There's no overarching plot that governs a season, and there should be.

It doesn't mean the end of character-centric play, either. Look at shows like Lost or Battlestar Galactica, which balanced excellent characterization with a general sense of where the story was going. Yeah, they could be tangled and convoluted, but they also had a general direction they were going in. Doctor Who could benefit from that. It would give the characters room to grow and develop in directions determined by the storyline, rather than fumble along from standalone episode to standalone episode all the time. (One thing I've noted for years is that any change or growth in the Doctor's character in particular usually lasts until the end of the episode, no longer. They rarely reference previous episodes by name, and rarer still by their behavior. This isn't a good thing.)


So what's my vision for Doctor Who? It's bold. It's unafraid to mess with your head. It builds a universe for the Doctor, gives him enemies to fight, establishes that he isn't invincible and in so doing, makes him more relatable. And it pumps up the stories, which despite Moffat's brilliance and incorrigible scheming, have been the weakest part of Doctor Who for a good long time. 

God of Ice, God of Fire (Game of Thrones)

I was thinking, on my way to work, about what Melisandre said about there being only two gods (in Book/Season 3). Instead of the Seven and the heart tree gods and the Drowned God and Tyrion’s god of tits and wine, she says there’s only two: the god of fire and the god of ice. Neither are particularly nice gods, but if you have to back one, you’re going to pick the god that allows people to live over the god whose servants kill and revive everybody to fight in their army, and probably wants to cover the whole world in ice because that’s just how those sorts of gods normally do.

Bolstering Melisandre’s claim, besides the fact that the Others exist and reanimate people, is her magic. We have seen the red priests do things that no other religion in Westeros has even come close to matching. They see the future in the flames (supposedly), they spawn shadow-babies (assuredly) and raise people from the dead (repeatedly). And there’s this interesting idea in this universe that their magic is of a particular kind, that asks the victim—not so much the user—to pay a part of his or her life as price. Melisandre gives up the baby, literally, but she’s otherwise unaffected; Stannis, whose life force she drew on twice, is guttered like a candle. He’s permanently depressed now. And Beric spoke of how it feels to come back each time—he loses a part of himself. We didn’t see him before, so it’s hard to really say, but I’m prepared to take his word for it. R’hllor’s magic is all about drawing from somebody to create these miracles.

And yet those are the key words: magic and miracles. Because if we’re taking these incredible events as substantiation for Melisandre’s claims, then we also have to ask: what about all the other spooky things we’ve seen happening around Westeros and Esteros lately? The lamb people reviving Drogo at the cost of Daenerys’s baby. The warlocks who conjure chains from thin air and live forever. Jaqen H’Gar changing his face. These are clearly magic, and there’s no visible connection to the fire god. So how do we know who to believe? If a red priest and a warlock had a chat, the priest might say “Here’s how it is. Your magic comes from the existence of the dragons. Dragons are creatures of fire, and their emergence into the world at this time when the great war is coming is clearly not a coincidence. They were brought here by R’hllor to fight the cold god. Your power comes from them, even if you got burned by them that time, which makes you servants of the Lord of Light.” And the warlock might say “No, no, you’ve got it all backwards. You couldn’t do any of this shit until the dragons came into the world, could you? They are the true source of all magic, fire and not-fire. Their presence is what allows you to perform your little rituals, and your red god is just another god.”

Who’s to say which is right? There is corroborating evidence for the priest’s point, which is that no other Westerosi religion has yet performed a verifiable miracle. Things like Cat praying for Jon to die and him getting sick and then her reversing course and praying for him to live and Jon subsequently surviving are great stories, but a skeptical nonbeliever would certainly wave them off as coincidence. But whether the red priests’ acts come from R’hllor or from the dragons is to explain them as a miracle or as magic, and that brings to mind some cool historical comparisons.

As best I understand it, in the Christian religion, the miracles of Jesus are not considered magic. Multiplying the loaves and fishes, healing the sick, rising from the dead, etc. are the power of God working through Jesus, not some warlock casting a spell. They’re divinely ordained events that occur because God wants to manifest his power in a way we can understand, and they come directly from Him. Magic, on the other hand, is drawn from other sources; Satan is the most recent, but before he was a thing, Christianity was trying to outshout the pre-Christian gods of pagan Europe by saying that their rituals and whatnot were just idolatry. The things they did weren’t miracles because only God could do those, and since He obviously didn’t give you permission, you’re committing blasphemy by defying him and turning to other powers. Miracles are thus understood to be different from magic, and they’re therefore okay for Christians; they were and are reputed to occur all the time at saints’ shrines, and even a garden-variety priest can perform the miracle of transubstantiation, and produce the body and blood of Christ out of some wine and a wafer. If it’s from God, it’s okay; if it’s from something else, like the lamb men’s death magic, it’s not okay.

This makes me wonder, by the way, what the historical Muslim perspective on miracles and magic has been. I’ve only ever read one biography of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, which was written for Christian Westerners by a Westerner and takes a very secular view of things. Things that any Muslim believer would accept as a miracle, it sort of skirts around or explains away in other fashions, the better to not put off a suspicious Westerner. The one thing it can’t really explain away, though, is the miracle of the night journey. That’s when Muhammad is picked up and physically transported from Medina to Jerusalem, hundreds of miles away, and there ascends to heaven to meet with various prophets and finally God Himself.

Obviously this wasn’t a miracle witnessed by anybody except Muhammad, like his original visit from the Lord when he was meditating on his mountain. There are corroborative details, though, in an odd way: he said that while he was flying over the desert, he saw caravans and camels in the desert below, and predicted when he got back that they would arrive in Medina at such-and-such a time. Islamic tradition records that they did, and everyone was amazed and took that as proof of his journey. And you can explain that away any number of ways if you want, like he’d known about them in advance, or one of his friends had helpfully supplied the information, or he’d gotten one right by sheer luck and that sort of outshone the others that he’d missed, whatever whatever. But for a believer, it was more than enough. 

That would very clearly be a feat performed by God for Muhammad, like His decision to speak with Muhammad in the first place. Muhammad was very clear throughout his life that he himself was just a guy, and that God was doing all the hard work. So if miracles are allowed the way they are in the Judeo-Christian portion of the tradition, is magic outlawed in the same way? Djinni were an acknowledged part of the jahiliyyah, pre-Muhammad world, 

On the other hand, 

So are Melisandre’s rituals magical or miraculous? Is it only fire-based magic that works for R’hllor, or are all of the magical events in Westeros somehow connected to the fire god? Did the dragons appear to fight Melisandre’s war, or was that just coincidental? (And if so, where did Dany’s powers come from, anyway?)

Networking is Freaking Magic

I'd like to tell you a very short story.

Between January and August of this year, I submitted at least 150 job applications. About 50 of those came in February, and 100 more came over this summer. I applied to jobs on both coasts and in the middle, jobs with nonprofits, government agencies, corporations, Americorps affiliates, you name it.

This yielded me five interviews, two in person, one over Skype and two on the phone, none of which resulted in a job. One resulted in a flat-out lie about whether I was being considered for the position; that was McMaster-Carr. The others were polite, bland and fruitless.

I've always had a kind of instinctual aversion to networking, because I felt that it's another form of relying on others to do something I could do myself. Plus, the idea of yanking on my connection to someone else and producing a token never appealed to me. I wanted to make it on my own merits, not to get a job because my parents knew somebody or because my old boss did. That was my thought process.

After seven months of frustration, by pure chance, I was invited to a reception in Cleveland Heights for a local candidate for City Council (her name is Melissa Yasinow, and you should vote for her if you're eligible to do so) by the head of a young nonprofit who I'd just met for coffee. I accepted, went to the reception, met the candidate, met her brother through her, met the head of another local nonprofit—Global Cleveland—through the brother. The head, Joy Roller, asked me to come into the office to tell my story of why I'd come to Cleveland, and I accepted. When I got there three Mondays ago, she offered me a temporary job as their administrative assistant while they searched for a full-time candidate; because I'm good at what I do, I soon became the full-time candidate. Now I'm about to sign a contract that'll pay me an adult sum of money to do an adult job.

One hundred and fifty job applications, five interviews, no results.

One random connection, three sub-connections in a single night, and a great job three weeks later.

Networking. Freaking. Works.

This Is How I Cook Caribbean Black Beans and Rice

• Peppers are basted with olive oyl and in the oven. Now to start on the rice.

• Water's on the stove. Time to chop some stuff while I wait for it to boil.
• Aaaand my shorts are on backwards. This is a good start. I wondered where my pockets were...
• Ack! The cheese fell out of the fridge and attacked me while I was getting the green pepper. Stupid cheese, you're not even a part of this recipe.
• Rice is in! Stirring with my grandma's antique wooden spoon that has been passed down for three generations. I deem this dish worthy of its usage.
• Using about twice as much green pepper as the recipe calls for, because I'm worth it.
• (Also a bit more red pepper because I had this half a red pepper sitting in the back of the fridge that I forgot about, and it'd be a shame not to use it.)
• I am rethinking that first decision. That's a shitload of pepper. Oh, well.
• "Slice the garlic paper-thin with a paring knife." The hell is a paring knife? *Googles*
• Wikipedia: "A small knife with a plain edge blade that is ideal for peeling." Well, all of our knives are either serrated or goddamn gigantic. Guess I'll make do.
  I rescued the rice from being Lawrence Welked in a sea of bubbles. Still a lot of water in there. Going to cook a bit more.
  Garlic's chopped. Thought process: "All right, paper thin... Well, for some very liberal definition of paper thin... Okay, I can make this work... Ah forget it WHACK WHACK WHACK WHACK"
  Sweet mother of plants, this is so much more cilantro than I needed. The recipe calls for three tablespoons and there's like, a fern here.
  Time for another round with the world's shittiest can opener. Black beans, emerge!
  (Also: the "preparation time", meaning before things get into the slow cooker, is 30 minutes for this recipe. Considering that the red peppers have to be baked for an hour before they ever touch the slow cooker, I'm not sure the writers understand how time works.)
  Update: pepper's been ground, cilantro is ready, salt is ready. About to rinse the black beans. (The beans: "BLORP".)
  Halfway through slicing up the peppers baked in oil. Heavens to Murgatroyd, these things are hard to cut.
  I love the SOUND that sautéeing vegetables makes. Just this wonderful crackling, hissing noise.
  Well, the green peppers are going to be a bit firm. I thought putting in the garlic for two minutes was a dumb idea, because it's gonna brown if you have it that long, and the fact that I chopped it up pretty small didn't help. I don't think it'll be that big a deal, though.
  Now comes the payoff, where I ADD ALL THE THINGS
  Cilantro: Bam! Salt and pepper: Wham! Wham! Black beans coming down like an avalanche! Vinegar coming in! Hot sauce, co... hot sauuuuuce. Takes forever to get out of the bottle! Okay, here we go. Everything's in. Now we stir. Wait, I somehow almost forgot the rice. In you go, rice!
  And EVERYTHING IS IN THE COOKER AND ON. NOW WORK YOUR MAGIC, SLOW COOKER.
  
  (Update: It was delicious and I'm still eating it a week later. This went well.)

Syria and the Expansion of Executive Authority

Just a little thing to keep in mind regarding Syria and armed intervention: 

President Obama said today that he would ask Congress for permission before going into Syria, although he maintained that he does not need to do so. That latter fact puts him in the category of every single president since Richard Nixon, all of whom have maintained that the 1973 War Powers Act--pretty much the only piece of legislation on the books, at least as far as I'm aware, that sets realistic limits on the power of the President to commit American troops to combat--is unconstitutional and we don't need it. (Presidents, most notably Ronald Reagan, have usually ignored even that flimsy restraint without consequences.)

If you're concerned about the gradual accumulation of power by the executive branch, which has been happening essentially since the U.S. was created, that's a good place to start. Think about it for a second: Obama is maintaining that he has the power to make war upon a foreign country... and it is a war, if a small and one-sided one, euphemisms be damned... without the consent of Congress. Even though it says right there in the Constitution, in Article I, section 8, clause 11, that Congress shall have the power to declare war.

Any justification of that expansion of Presidential authority must inevitably come back to some form of the following argument: "Well, making war is a big deal. But little things like this, where we only kill a few thousand people while losing perhaps none of our own, that isn't a big deal. Congress doesn't even need to be consulted for something so minor."

You know why the power to make war is vested in the most fractious and squabbling branch of government? Because the founders, in my interpretation, set things up so that when the United States goes to war, there's supposed to be a really, really good reason. Like a "The survival of the country is at stake" kind of reason. This is not it. The most important thing we'll be defending is our credibility. Is that worth killing a few thousand people for? Is that worth making war over?

Coda: Chemical weapons aren't the reason, either. As we just found out, the U.S. is perfectly fine with letting an ally use chemical weapons if it serves our interests, and ignored Saddam's later use of them against his Kurdish population. The fact that we publicly said we didn't want them used is nothing more or less than a threat to our credibility. If the use of chemical weapons is so abhorrent and such a threat to people around the world, why is the United States's closest ally saying "I'm not going to get into that heaping pile of crazy?" Why hasn't the international community responded with something more than empty outrage? Because it doesn't matter. It's an atrocity whether the victims are being killed with bullets or with poison gas.

Again, think about this for a second. The best estimates are that more than one hundred thousand people had died in this war before chemical weapons were ever used, as far as we know. If the deaths of all those people didn't prompt an intervention, why is the use of poison gas going to do it? It's not like the people killed by gas are any more dead than the people blown up with explosives, or killed with knives, or guns, or anything else. The United States made a foreign policy choice not to get into the war when it began, and we've stuck to it for two years, because a) it's hard to see how intervention could end the war in a way that helps, and b) Syria is only marginally relevant to our national interests. The use of a new and different way of killing people does not change those reasons at all.

The Passing of a Bicycle God

Jesus. Christ. 

You guys, I may have actually seen Jesus today. 

It may not have been Jesus. It may have been one of the American Gods, a god of steel and stone and bicycle-tire rubber. Like, a pale shadow of the god across the sea in the old country, from a place of savages and dancing flames where they sacrifice three virgins to a monstrous bicycle idol by the light of the full moon. I don't know. But I really cannot say for certain that this cyclist is not that being.

He was not very impressive to look at. The bike he rode was pale pink, the paint cracked and flaking. The back of his seat, which was the only part of it I saw, was torn and had some stuffing coming out. From what I could tell of the handlebar cords, they were somewhat rusted over. The guy himself wasn't wearing a helmet, just a backwards gangster baseball cap and a black T-shirt with an orange messenger bag slung across his back. His legs were bronze and skinny, maybe as wide around as a large zucchini (singular: zucchin?), and without any real muscle visible to the eye when he was at rest. But when he was on the move, guys, holy fuck.

We were going down the Euclid Corridor, which leads from Cleveland proper into the Outer Rim territories, and goes from city to wasteland to medical palace to suburbs. It's maybe four and a half miles from the city center to the Cleveland Clinic, and this guy was just tearing up the road. I mean it. Chunks of concrete were flying into the road, hitting cars, pedestrians, things were exploding in his wake, as I live and breathe.

My bike has twenty-one gears. I was on gear 19 and he easily, easily, outpaced me. Just sped right on ahead as if I was standing still. Okay, I thought when I caught him at a light, I accept your challenge. Gear 20. And he whizzed right on by me again, without apparent effort. Fine, you fuck, Gear 21 it is. I'll pedal my absolute hardest and I will catch up to you, you bastard, see if I don't. And I kept up with him. Barely. I kept up with him for maybe a mile of stops and starts before he signaled right, sweat shining on his forehead in the sun, veered right and was lost to me.

Fine, I thought. I, sir, will remember you. I raised my hand in salute to his freakish biking ability and watched him recede into the heart of Cleveland Clinic. At this point, in my mind, he was still mortal, not yet godly. The divine light had yet to shine from his eyes and his hands. He was forgotten for all of two minutes, while I struggled up the hill on Cornell, to the little plateau at the intersection of Murray Hill... and there he was again. He'd gone the long way around, who knows how many blocks out of his way, and still made it to my intersection at *precisely the same time as I*.

I was impressed. But the true proof of his divinity lay directly before us. There is a hill, leading down into the heart of Little Italy, whose name has been forgotten by Time. No man can surmount this hill without paying a terrible price, for the old spirits of the hill are wroth at man's feeble attempts to conquer it. Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary never came to the base of Murray Hill, because they could not. It was beyond their power to achieve.

This deity in human flesh attacked the hill as though it were a huge, heaving monster and he the knight to slay it. He raced up the hill, and when I say raced, I mean that Lancelot of the House Steroid could not have caught him. I followed him, spitting obscenities and pedaling like a man possessed. I have never taken that hill at a gear higher than 17, but fuck it, I went to nineteen. I was puffing, wheezing, sweating, pushing as hard as I ever have, blazing up the hill compared to me on any other day, and watching this madman on a bike outrace me like it wasn't even a thing. The trees on the park side of the road were cracking and falling backwards, away from the road, as he went. Cars were being blown off the street. A murder of crows arose behind us and sent up a nightmarish chorus of their rackish caws. Thunder rolled in the sky, time slowed, reality bent, and still he kept on, guys, he kept pounding and grinding to the top of the hill. And then, my friends, do you know what he did?

He kept going.

Like it wasn't even a thing.

I was spent. I was done. I wasn't contemplating just laying down and dying as a thing I really, really wanted to do, but it was definitely one of the options I was obliged to consider. A three-legged, broke-dick dog could've beaten me home from the top of that hill. I was just out. And there goes King Bicycle on his raggedy pink machine, flying ahead like nothing alive until he was lost to view.

I know not what god or demon I followed home from work today, but of this I am certain: it was not of this natural, corporeal earth. No man can do the things I saw him do. It could have been Jesus, it could have been Loki, it could have been some nameless god from the nightmare wild before men had words to clothe it. I don't know. But it's here, in Cleveland, and that means no man is safe. Weep for your little cyclists, men and women. Weep for the cyclists of the world.

Agency and Feminism in Gladiator (And Other Stories)

I'd like to talk a little bit about agency. This, if you're a fan of the humanities, is likely one of your favorite words. If it isn't, then read on, and I'll see if I can put it into some kind of useful perspective.

Agency is the one who does. Agency is the ability of a person, a character, or a people to determine their own destiny. To deny a people agency is to relegate them to helpless victimhood. For example, to describe the Jews who died in the Holocaust, or the Native Americans who died in the Columbian Exchange, as simple victims is to deny their agency. The Jews fought back, ran away, broke through barbed wire, hid, led armed uprisings and, in some cases, acted as police for the Nazis and became some of the most vicious and brutal oppressors of their own people. But whatever they chose, they chose; they were not wholly at the mercy of the Nazis. Various tribes of Native Americans fought, made peace, allied with the U.S. and with its enemies, signed treaties, led an anti-white American religious awakening, formed political entities and unions and resisted American attempts to eject them from their land. Often unsuccessfully, yes, but they chose. They were not wholly at the mercy of their tormentors to the east.*^*

To put this in terms of fictional characters, which is where we will be for most of this post, Tony Stark has agency and Pepper Potts does not.* Stark is a billionaire genius playboy inventor who, when he needs to make a major change in his life, designs an invincible crime-fighting suit and flies halfway around the globe to save helpless souls in Afghanistan. Potts is Tony's secretary. She is intelligent, beautiful, charming and indispensable to Tony, and she also has very few choices in the Iron Man movies about what she does, where she goes or the direction her life will take. She follows Tony. Yes, she occupies a different socioeconomic class than Tony, and thus has less choice over her life's direction; yes, she is a supporting character in a movie, and supporting characters are called that because they don't have a lot of agency. But that's what a character without agency looks like, and in a disturbing number of my favorite movies, women generally have far less agency than men.**

You've heard of gender-swapping, right?*** Where you take a work of fiction and swap the men for women, and vice versa? Well, I had the idea earlier today of keeping the genders the same, but changing which characters have agency. Male characters would be relegated to relatively submissive roles, when they had previously assumed dominant ones, and females would emerge from the shadows to dominate the plot.****

Take one of my favorite movies and one that I recently watched, Ridley Scott's highly decorated Gladiator. There is only one female character worth noting in that movie, and a minute ago, I honestly had to go to the Wikipedia page to look up her name. It's Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), by the way. She spends most of the movie "living in a prison of fear", with mad emperor and brother Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) constantly either trying to seduce her or threatening to harm her son. When exiled ex-general Maximus (Russell Crowe) returns to Rome as a gladiator, she brokers a meeting between him and a sympathetic senator, Gracchus (Derek Jacobi). Other than that, she doesn't do anything worth noting in the movie. The story is about Maximus, not her.

Look at the character of Lucilla, though. Look at the way she acts. When Commodus attempts to seduce her, pressing her down on a bed, her face is impassive, stony. She doesn't say anything. When she finally gets up and walks away, leaving him crumpled on the bed, it feels like a release from prison... but she has to walk back into prison sooner or later, every time she enters his presence in truth. When Commodus obliquely threatens her son and slowly, menacingly explains to Lucilla how her son will die if she doesn't reveal her part in the conspiracy against Commodus, she can only stand there and cry. She doesn't argue back, deny her part or anything similar. When Commodus grandly lays out his vision for the future, which includes marrying and raping Lucilla, she can only sit there and not utter a word. Even when she brings Gracchus and Maximus together to plot against Commodus, she barely says a thing after the introductions; the point is to bring the powerful men together, not for her to speak (even though she's the Emperor's sister and theoretically holds some power herself).

Lucilla completely lacks agency. She would never have worked against Commodus if Maximus had not returned from the dead and given her a champion. And although both Commodus and the former Emperor, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) praise her ruthlessness and leadership ability, the praise is a hollow echo given her actual role in the film. All of her decisions are based off of Maximus's deeds or centered on fending off Commodus's advances; she has few emotions save for a desire to protect her son and some affection for Maximus, plus fear of her brother. She is not a mover and shaker; that is for the men.

Now consider what an agency-swapped version of Gladiator would look like, even if we left the story intact. Imagine Lucilla taking an active hand in government, arguing with Commodus about the best policies to pursue as Emperor. Imagine her as the center of the conspiracy against Commodus instead of merely its facilitator, reaching out to bring Gracchus and Maximus together and planning their moves against Commodus; imagine her standing up to Commodus, or even fighting him in the arena. (If that's too strong, perhaps assassinating him in one of the MANY OPPORTUNITIES SHE HAS TO DO SO--we see Commodus willingly drinking a sleeping potion that she mixes and hands to him, for example, and barely even asking what it is.) Imagine her taking charge, becoming a political force, the plot of the movie centered around her. That is agency.

I know I have a long way to go when it comes to both writing female characters and thinking about women's and gender studies (WGS) issues, but it seems to me like we have far fewer female characters with agency than we do male characters with agency, both in Gladiator and outside it. A comprehensive evaluation of everything in culture is beyond my abilies, but if anyone can point me towards media in which female characters have the kind of agency I'm looking for--actively driving the plot, not depending on male characters for everything--I would be very interested to see it.



*^*It didn't really fit anywhere in this post, but consider Avatar. That is a perfect example of a movie with an agency-less indigenous population. The Na'vi aren't entirely victims--they end up winning the war, after all--but they only fight back and win because Jake Sully organizes them and gets them to do so. Imagine a movie depicting a helpless, primitive, frightened tribe of Cherokee who is at the mercy of the U.S. Army until Daniel Boone swoops in and saves them, and how that would play in the current politically correct environment. For an encore lesson in how cultural values change over time, imagine the version of Avatar that would've been made 200-ish years ago, when Andrew Jackson was warring against the Seminoles in Florida and kicking the Cherokee out of Georgia. That Avatar would most likely have celebrated the virtues of white expansion and lionized Jackson fighting against the savages. Now one of the most ballyhooed movies of the 2000s depicts a native tribe successfully defeating white oppressors, with white leadership no less. Man, cultures change a lot over time.

*Disclaimer: I haven't seen Iron Man 3, so take this paragraph as applying to Iron Man 1, 2 and The Avengers only.

**For another example, consider Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and the character of Penny, who is powerless until Captain Hammer helps her open a new homeless shelter, and spends the movie being sought-after by two men. Imagine a movie where she actively played her suitors off against each other.

***This wasn't what I was looking for definition-wise, but it's really interesting, if a bit
outdated. http://users.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/genderswap.html

****Yes, I get that not all movies feature men alone determining the action, and that to say so is as sexist as if it were actually a thing. It just occurred to me recently, though, that in The Prestige, Gladiator, Collateral and several others of my absolute favorite movies--which tend to be about guys, for guys--female characters are side characters while men drive the plot. That's where this post is coming from, and what this paragraph refers to. It doesn't mean they aren't fantastic movies that I love; it means, though, that they have hidden flaws in spite of that.