Today I can't stop thinking about world building.
Last night I watched the latest Doctor Who episode, called "The Girl Who Waited." The girl in question, Amy Pond, is the latest in a long line of female sidekicks for the titular Doctor. (I'm going to try to write this for an imagined reader who knows nothing about the TV show, which is A) quite difficult, and B) part of my point about world building.) Doctor Who is a long-running British sci-fi drama in which our protagonist, a time traveller, goes on wacky and sometimes creepy adventures throughout time and space, often in the company of beautiful, young, mostly female but sometimes male sidekicks (called "companions"). The Doctor's latest companion, Ms. Pond, is often called "the girl who waited" by the Doctor in reference to their first meeting, when Amy was just a little girl. The Doctor, having to leave, promised Amy he would return for her. But because of his cantankerous time travel device (think Han Solo's relationship with his ship, or any use of the trope where mechanical breakdowns further plot development) while he was gone only a few minutes, many years passed for young Amy, and they met again only when she was a young adult. Every night she waited for him to return, and every night she was disappointed. But all's well that ends well, and now they adventure together (along with her husband Rory).
Last night's episode involved a repeat of this initial premise--Amy becomes trapped on a creepy quarantined planet, the Doctor promises to come right back for her, and though mere minutes pass for the boys, they find Amy 36 years older (in old-age makeup) and very, very bitter. After all these years, Amy Pond has grown tired of waiting.
Which brings me to my first thought about world building. Authors have always built worlds, of course--London is a character, perhaps the most important character, in the novels of Dickens, and Faulkner would not be a success without his evocation of the Gothic South. But television world building is a very different beast. Most episodes of both comedies and dramas in the early years of television were written to stand alone. Tune in to any episode of Leave it to Beaver or Gunsmoke and you'll find the same basic plot. Each episode contained all of the information one would need to understand what was happening and why. The same was true of comic books--each issue of Superman was a stand-alone story, and the characters would explain in dialogue any pertinent information. Even soap operas, the most continuity heavy of genres, made sure that characters were constantly expositing, so that one could go on vacation, miss two weeks of the show, and then return and catch up to speed almost instantly.[i]
But as time went on, all of television became more and more soap operatic. By this I mean that TV began to tell stories that moved past individual stand-alone episodes and began telling longer stories. Writers discovered that what audiences were interested in weren’t the plots, which after all were utterly formulaic. No, what we wanted to see was the characters, and the plots were just excuses to watch the characters do something.[ii] But as we watched these characters have their comedic or dramatic adventures, each the same as the last, we began to notice that these beloved characters weren’t very bright. Why would Superman throw Lex Luthor in jail at the end of each adventure, knowing full well that he’ll just escape again in a few months? Why would anyone ever be friends with Jessica Fletcher, knowing full well that murders follow her around like stink on shit? In short, audience members were watching so many examples of narrative that they began to see what was previously noticed only by lit professors and other devourers of novels—they were noticing the conflict between the tropes upon which plots are constructed and the need in all realistic genres (and even comic books were being written “realistically” i.e. characters behaving in psychologically believable ways) for characters to learn from their experiences. It used to be that characters didn’t learn anything until the adventure was almost over. Elizabeth Bennet’s discovery of the true nature of both Darcy and Wickham means that the story will soon be moving to its close, as does Oedipus’s discovery of his true parentage. However, in open-ended genres like soap operas and comic books, characters could not learn, because learning means the end of the story, and these stories don’t end. So soap opera husbands are always having affairs that end badly, returning to their wives for a tearful reunion, only to begin again the cycle of adultery. Robin will always blunder headlong into the trap from which Batman must rescue him—if he ever learnt to avoid the trap, he would cease to be Robin. So now we are faced with a dilemma. We want our characters to learn, but we don’t want the story to end. This conflict between plot and character drives most of the TV I’ve seen in the past decade, including the revival of Doctor Who. Last night’s Doctor Who episode, in fact, used perhaps the most melodramatic of tropes, the one most emblematic of the plot/character conflict—the damsel in distress.
How do we know that our protagonists are heroes? Because they save people. And though saving strangers is alright, we respond better when we have an emotional investment in the person being saved. Hence the need for a love interest to save. The rescue of the damsel tied to the train tracks is a trope that has been with us for well over a hundred years now, and dates back to a time when theatre audiences were mostly male. The women that made up the soap opera audience didn’t seem to mind, but female audiences today are (quite rightly) tired of seeing women as nothing but love interests and passive victims. This dilemma would seem to have an easy fix—just stop writing women as damsels in distress. Give them the agency that men have enjoyed for a long time now. But this isn’t happening, and it’s not because all these shows have misogynists for writers (though, boy, it feels like that sometimes.)[iii] Instead, I believe that these writers are wrestling with how to show characters changing within an open-ended story.
At the beginning of “The Girl Who Waited” we are explicitly reminded that Amy Pond is the traditional damsel in distress. She tells her husband to save her, which he does, though he is 36 years late in doing so. The plot is a rerun, and though tradition calls for characters to make the same mistakes over and over again, this time Amy learns. In the rest of the episode we are shown an Amy Pond who has learned to take care of herself, and as a consequence, we know that she cannot be allowed to remain in the story. And sure enough, the Doctor finds a way to go back in time and save the young Amy.[iv] But by saving younger Amy at a point in time before she spent 36 years learning to rely on herself, the old age make-up Amy is wiped from existence, having never lived. The story thus, in a very postmodern way, makes its plot turn on the very problem of telling this kind of damsel in distress story. We are made aware of the injustice of taking away Amy’s hard-won agency even as we understand that the story cannot proceed unless it happens. Instead of not ever learning, characters now learn only to forget.[v] At first this growth followed by reset button might seem like the perfect solution, but my unease with last night’s episode lies in part with how it seemed to deconstruct itself as it went along, as if lampshading the genre’s difficulties with character growth and female agency was the same as fixing it.[vi]
The problem of character growth within an open-ended story results in another trend that last night’s Doctor Who demonstrated—that of a generally world darkening—which will be a subject of a future post, as these ramblings have gone on long enough.
[i] This is one of my favorite aspects of soap operas—the expositing. Characters telling each other things that they should be fully aware of, simply for the audience’s benefit. In a more realistic milieu such dialogue would be bothersome, but in a world in which evil twins kidnap and impersonate their siblings, I’m OK with the idea that everyone is expositing all the time.
[ii] . Ironically, the current demise of the soap opera on daytime television is proof of the fantastic popularity of the genre. All TV is now soap opera, and the tropes of the genre no longer written just for stay at home moms. Doctor Who was a trendsetter in this regard, as it has always been quite a soap opera, albeit one which uses scientific mumbo jumbo to paper over its more melodramatic leanings.
[iii] When I say “not happening,” I don’t mean to belittle the wonderful worlds that many writers are creating, especially within the genre of science fiction novels. I am discussing TV (and indirectly comic books) and its reliance upon long-standing tropes.
[iv] OK, that’s not quite an accurate summary of the plot, but summarizing time-travel plots is an exercise in masochism.
[v] Superman’s “kiss of forgetfulness” at the end of Superman II being a prime example of this trope.
[vi] This post needs about a million links to tvtropes.org, but I’m too lazy to bother right now. Look up “lampshading,” but be prepared to spend the next four hours of your life down that particular rabbit hole.
