#remember when I wrote a whole essay on why this ship doesn't work I should reblog that

[musical-chick-13]

I hate Raúl/Sofía :)

[mylittleredgirl]

Imagine, if you will, that you are sent back in time. You are now a showrunner on Voyager through timey-wimey Q reasons. You can now add an arc to a character that deals with mental illness(and deal with it well). Who do you choose and why?

oh i'm immediately sweating at the idea of being responsible for something like that! 😂

[three hours later]: i wrote the longest tumblr dot com essay of my life about mental illness in voyager. it's below the readmore.

tl;dr: voyager Did Some Things with janeway, b'elanna, and chakotay, and i ultimately choose b'elanna, because i think that arc has the most interesting facets to pull apart.

so, voyager does have a few mental illness episodes already: "night" (janeway; depression), "extreme risk" (b'elanna; parasuicidal behavior), and "the fight" (chakotay; psychosis). there are things to love and hate about each of them!

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"night" sure is a portrait of depression, in a way that's hard for me to even watch. it's a great episode and mulgrew nails it, but the depression isn't named, and it's not treated at all -- the scene where the crew mutinies to keep her from sacrificing herself is great family feels, but the overall solution to janeway's mental breakdown is to fling her back into the fire. "we need you so don't leave us" is a different message than "we see your suffering and are here to help you through it."

janeway needs and deserves a multi-episode arc with how they set it up, and she doesn't get one. HOWEVER, if it were up to me and i were designing the show, i would choose to give my mental health arc to someone other than the captain, especially the first female captain of the franchise. it's 1998 and my girl has enough PR problems.

gender aside, i want my arc to have open disclosure and community support, and that creates real problems when she's at the very top of the military hierarchy (in voyager especially, with no external oversight or chance for respite). any significant mental health arc involving the captain will be about her captaincy as much as her healing.

remember the exchange between the doctor and janeway in "year of hell" when he tries to remove her from command for mental health reasons and she just... says no? what if it's chakotay instead? what if it's tuvok? what if it's the whole command staff sitting around together discussing whether or not to have a mutiny? what if it's the whole world sitting around discussing whether a woman with mental illness is capable of being in charge of something important like people's lives? and is it irresponsible for her not to step aside for someone "saner"? if we put this up for debate in the 90s, we are not going to like what comes out.

realistically, janeway's mental health does impact her command decisions sometimes. the more people who know she has a diagnosed condition, even in the far-flung enlightened future, the more people who are going to have this bit of data in their mind when they consider her more extreme orders and actions.

it's very messy. it's interesting messy, but not the best option for star trek's first time digging into this.

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i really like "extreme risk," especially the end -- b'elanna is healing, but it will be a journey. it portrays the whole thing so well: the way b'elanna is living this silent parallel life from everyone else that they don't know about, the way they try to reach her but can't, the way she hides it, the way she articulates it.

on the flip side, the "treatment" she gets in that episode is absolutely batshit, and that should really come up more whenever someone says that chakotay would make a good ship's counselor. (neelix, on the other hand, is a GEM to b'elanna here and elsewhere.) if janeway's psychiatric treatment plan was "more work," b'elanna's is "more trauma" (and then more work). i'm going to come back to this one!

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"the fight" is like... the worst if someone is looking for "good representation." it is not handled well. AND YET, it's the only episode where it's explicitly called out as mental illness (even if it's a made-up one), and the ONLY episode where anyone says it can be treated (successfully!!) with ongoing use of medication. prior to that, we saw mental illness treated one of two ways in trek: counseling (mostly for situational, trauma-based mental illness), or institutionalization (some tos episodes & ds9 "statistical probabilities"). it's wild watching the reg barclay episodes now, wondering why deanna wasn't encouraging him to take an anti-anxiety hypospray.

i've blogged about this before, but i feel like there's some realism in the Terrible Representation parts of "the fight." hear me out: mental illness can be fucking terrifying. especially in the case of a sudden acute onset, it can feel like it will ruin your life. untreated mental illness can be a burden on those around you and impact the children in your home.

also, chakotay has established, unresolved internalized issues with his own culture, so the fact that his grandfather refused treatment on spiritual grounds is going to be a tough thing for him to respect or forgive (and might actually be the origin of some of his resistance to his culture!!). the fact that he's rude and dismissive about his grandfather ("crazy old man") is pretty shocking from someone as generally open-minded and caring as chakotay, but it works... as a starting point, where he's terrified and facing his worst childhood fear that he has never processed as an adult.

so that's where this episode blows it: it brings up all these terrible mental illness stereotypes and then just leaves them there unchallenged. chakotay goes on an emotional journey toward surrender (he has to let himself go "crazy" in order for the ship to survive), but there's no journey toward acceptance. he doesn't come away from it with a greater appreciation for his culture or with a new empathy for his grandfather. and because it's medically handwaved off-screen, he never has to think about it again.

i'm honestly obsessed with the possibilities here for chakotay, but in the context of 90s episodic trek, i don't think i need to spend my magical Q-powers multi-episode arc to fix this. this genuinely could have been wrapped into the end of the episode (and left to the hurt/comfort fic writers after that).

because they don't NEED to magically cure chakotay! it has already been established in the episode that his condition can be managed with "a couple of hyposprays a day." imagine that it's the spring of 1999, and a Strong Male Lead in a family viewing tv show now takes prescription psych meds!!! and they work!!! not only is he on his way back to being first officer with this permanent condition on his medical chart, his mental illness is evidence of heroism, not weakness. at the climax of the episode, the doctor fully activates the gene (with chakotay's permission) so that he can communicate with the aliens -- with an implied warning that it may not be reversible.

so if i'm in charge, we get a scene at the end that's more emotionally in line with the end of "extreme risk": chakotay isn't happy about this outcome, but he will continue to live his life and serve the ship with the full trust of his captain and crew. "this is part of me forever, but i can learn to live with it" kind of vibe. he hopes this will be an opportunity for him to better understand his grandfather, but he's making a different choice that's right for him (medical treatment). janeway says she's here for him. maybe in a future episode we get a mention, the way we do with neelix's single lung. dishes are done.

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so now, my multi-episode arc can go to b'elanna.

because she needs it. her situation is complex! she has childhood trauma and self-hatred and so much other internalized shit that she needs to process, embrace, and/or unlearn.

and the bones of the arc are already there! there's obviously a connecting line between "faces" and "lineage," because both are about b'elanna not wanting to be klingon due to childhood abandonment, but i feel like a line should also be drawn between "extreme risk" and "lineage" too.

in "extreme risk," she tries to cut her trauma out of herself. she tries to do the same to her unborn child in "lineage" (not incidentally, by undergoing a medical procedure herself). in both cases, she has a "this is the only reasonable course of action" attitude about a WILDLY unreasonable course of action, which feels very personally familiar to me from a mental illness perspective.

in both episodes, her extreme behavior is treated as something situational (as a response to grief; as the result of a hormone imbalance) but it would be soooooo easy and good to tie these things together into a recurring character arc toward treatment and wholeness.

with the exception of "extreme risk," all of b'elanna's issues get pinned on her being klingon ("juggernaut," for instance, where she is sent to punitive meditation lessons to learn to control her temper). any mental health arc for her would have to tease that apart -- what's her natural temperament? what's a chemical imbalance? what's internalized racism? what's an unhealthy coping mechanism? what's a trauma response?

i would love - love!!! - for her depression to be identified as specifically a human problem, and for her to find ways to lean into her klingon side to help her.

that's actually a really important part of this, to make sure it isn't star-trek-ed too deeply into an Alien Metaphor. actually name it! let this forge connections between her and others on the ship! talk about the how the doctor can fix the chemical imbalance (it's the 24th century, after all), but that's not the end of the work that needs to happen.

b'elanna is in charge of a department and could be in charge of away missions, so we can still explore the "is someone with this still capable" question that we could with janeway, but in a way that's more manageable for the audience to take in (basically, something like "juggernaut" reimagined through this lens).

and maybe, instead of janeway at the end of my reworked version of "the fight" up there, b'elanna's the one to offer chakotay support and hope, sharing some of her hard-earned expertise. her hard journey is now a Good Thing as well, because of how she can support others.

thank you anonymous friend for this theoretical exercise, and congratulations to anyone who read this all the way to the end!

[omegangrins]

Chibnall, Children, Choice and Consequence

Allow me to introduce a companion piece to A Treatise on the Doctor:

It's pretty simple:

Chibnall knows what he's doing and is playing a long game to show how the Doctor needs to take more responsibility.

Let me start off with my favorite examples. That's right, plural.

Every single villain 13 faces is never defeated, merely pushed away from causing them any immediate problems. Tim Shaw being the prime example.

1&10. Seriously, Tim Shaw. Her plan was to use his own bombs on him and then teleport him off the planet. Even without Ranskoor Av Kolos, the Doctor should have thought to check in on him. Especially after The Ghost Monument showed the Stenza were a greater threat than she knew. She still hasn't even checked up on WHAT THE HELL THE STENZA ARE! They sound worse than Daleks but naw, let's go rain-bathing in the upper tropics of Canstano instead.

2. Ghost Monument. We saw the END of an interuniversal race. What the fuck is the beginning that got them there? Who is Illyn and how and why did he orchestrate a super race?

3. Krasko. Sent back in time. Really, Doc? Not gonna take a look at the device and see where Ryan sent the prick so you can double check that he's not gonna cause anymore damage?

4. President Trump analog. Ooooo, you looked at him menacingly, Doc, that'll show him!! Not like he's gonna KEEP DOING ILLEGAL SHIT LIKE THIS.

5. The Pting. She literally shunted it off ship to be dealt with by someone else BUT DOESN'T GO BACK TO BE THAT SOMEONE ELSE ONCE SHE HAS HER TARDIS. That's like leaving a living nuke floating around after sweeping it under the rug while you fly off to Paris.

6. The Pakistani-Indian conflict still happens and millions still die. Not her fault but still....

7. Kerblam. Sure, Charlie's terrorism was solved but not the underlying problem that led to it. Humans still can't work because corporations like profits over people.

8. Similar to the Punjab, how you gonna solve sexism, classism and all the -isms?

9. WHY WAS THE SOLITRACT THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE??!! It's been around since before the universe. Why'd it decide to come back now? It's a whole universe trying to hug our universe to death. Maaaaaaybe we should check out why.

11. She's gets a pass on the Dalek. Fucking impossible to eradicate them.

12. The Master!!! Finally she checks up on something after the adventures... and it's horrible. With everything gone to shit in her absence. Seeing a pattern yet?

And Barton? And the Cassaven? They didn't disappear into smoke.

13. Multiple Earths being multiply fucked. Remember when I said the Doctor couldn't solve racism, classism, sexism, or any of the other -isms? Starting to look like she needs to TRY.

14. The Skithra FLY OFF after getting hit by a laser beam. That kind of thing tends to piss people off. Even if they're idiots using other's technology.

15. Jack. The Judoon. The Ruth Doctor. All things I'd start checking out if I had a time machine BUT

16. WE CAN'T cause the TARDIS emergency alert is going off and we need to hurry up and run and solve this problem before we run out of time in our TIME AND SPACE MACHINE. Leading to another problem the Doctor could help solve but won't. Plastic and over-consumption.

17. Oh yeah, let's trap two Eternals from another universe in the same place. There's NO WAY that could ever turn out bad.

18,19,20. And again. Cyberium. Pushed off Shelley onto herself and onto Ashad and onto The Master.

That's almost 20 "enemies" the Doctor still needs to deal with.

Oh, not to mention that they let UNIT go defunct because they didn't have the forethought to ask if they needed any money in their alien fighting budget. After asking for an office, a desk, and a job. Kinda funny that way, aren't they?

I hope by now you've gotten the idea that this is VERY deliberate. This is Chibnall laying down some very heavy pipe to smack the Doctor like a clothesline. There isn't a one of these situations that can't come around to bite her in the ass.

Barton, Roberts, Skithra. These are all very loose strands for a time traveller like the Doctor to get tripped up on. Chibnall's past episodes prove it. They're all about the Doctor learning how to take responsibility.

42: The Doctor almost gets Martha killed and almost gets himself killed trying to fix it.

The Hungry Earth: The Doctor (a thousand year old "adult") tells Elliot (a 10 year old kid) that "Sure it's totally fine to go get your headphones while we prepare for an approaching unknown alien force." And 11 rightfully gets his ass chewed for it by the child's mother when the kid goes missing because OF COURSE THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS, JACKASS!

Cold Blood: I could write an entire essay about the Doctor's guilt over the Silurian/Human conflicts they've witnessed, but I don't need to. Because every single Silurian centered episode written in the new era is from Chris Chibnall. And you can feel the sad knowledge of Classic Who spill through. He KNOWS how many times the Doctor has fucked up with the Silurians (about 8 times in television format. And it's rough everytime. Rough.) and he writes those episodes like an apology on behalf of the whole human race. And the Doctor. You know why people are put off by Warriors of the Deep? 5 releases a gas that melts the Silurians. And though it's cheesy, the idea and execution is still horrible.

Add to that if the Doctor hadn't stopped to check the crack, then Rory wouldn't have waited and been around to be shot then absorbed by the time crack.

Power of Three: An entire episode about how the Doctor has a problem slowing down and really taking account of the lives of their companions.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship: The Doctor actually tries to be responsible and pick the right people for a job. For once. But gets angry when they realize it's too late and there's another bunch of Silurians they failed to save. Classic!

Like I said, if you can't see the pattern, you're not paying enough attention to your responsibilites.

Which leads me to the why.

When you fly around time and space for thousands of years, you develop a few duties of care along the way. In every situation, you're the oldest. Technically the only adult in terms of experience. You have a responsibility to act a little less rude and be a bit more aware than needing cue cards to tell you that you should be sad about things around you. And that's the purpose of 13. She's unlucky but learning. Like 12 telling himself something with his face he couldn't say out loud, 13's instincts are leading her to a new place for the Doctor: being a caring, responsible person. Not so much laughing hard or running fast, but being kind. It's the one thing they recognized as a problem in themselves when seeing 1. Being a Doctor is about being kinder than that. Just because you HAVE to saw someone's leg off, that doesn't mean you can't wait a little and comfort them before you do it.

You wanna know what gave me every faith in Chibnall showrunning Doctor Who? 13 staying for Grace's funeral.

Do you understand how unprecedented that is? This is the same person who never said Goodbye to Jo Grant as she got married and fucked off into the night. The same Doctor who said, "I don't do domestic.", did it with Rose a regeneration later, and then closed himself off to everyone but a married couple he felt guilty about who ended up birthing his wife. Have you any idea the number of funerals the Doctor should have the common decency to sit through? This many.

So for 13 to stay around for the death of a woman she has only just met and not only that, BUT call out Ryan's father for not doing the same, it shows tremendous character growth. It's taken millennia but they're still changing.

Something similar happens with Rosa and The Witchfinders. Realizing that there a lot of companions who have been in situations that are sometimes worse than aliens, but they still manage to make it through. So she needs to buck it up and persevere for everyone else.

That's where her anger comes from, and really it's one of my favorite traits on her. It reminds me of 7. Someone impossibly old and impossibly kind saying to hell with it and at least having some fun with the evils who drag us through the universe. And just like Cartmel planned for 7, 13's past will come to haunt her.

That's where children come in. Most of us are crying babies to the Doctor.

There's this thing you notice most in British shows about answering the question directly as asked. Someone says "Are you sure?", you answer "Sure". That's a direct acknowledgement that you heard the question, understood it, and processed it enough to respond in a manner directly correlating to the question asked. Yas and Graham got it and said "Sure" but Ryan missed it and said "Deffo". This is like Elliot with the headphones. The Doctor should have immediately been like, "Okay, Ryan, it's obvious that you're still dealing with the trauma of your grandmother's death and probably not processing things on a logical level. I said "Are you sure?" Not "Are you deffo?" Because we are most definitely not deffo, Ryan. Graham, you wanna help here?"

I'm being sarcastic for points sake but you understand the idea. The Doctor knows better and has a responsibility as such. She should've really sat down with Ryan and Graham and seen if there was a better way to process their grief.

Because I'm fairly certain that "Deffo" is gonna lead to Ryan's death and Graham's cancer resurging as time cancer (I don't know what time cancer is. I just know it's bad.)

And that is gonna piss Yas off. Which will give you all that character you think she's missing (she isn't. Her character is in her subtleties and silences.). That's WHY her character is a police officer (like how does no else see that the man who wrote Broadchurch wrote an inspector character companion?) Imagine you're Yaz and you see the Doctor flying around in a big, magic box that says POLICE. As a fellow officer, you're gonna expect some basic safety protocols.

Like do a background check on everyone flying in the TARDIS to know whether they're stable enough (mentally, physically, emotionally) for time and space travel. It's no picnic. These people are going to go through hell. A little vetting and planning like Time Heist or Dinosaurs on a Spaceship goes a long way.

Secondly, full fucking disclosure.

"Oh. I can't die because I change my body. Oh. I have arch enemies that will try to kill and torture us any chance they get. Oh. My home planet is full of the biggest assholes in the universe and I'm including my arch enemies."

Third, police like to do this thing called "check-ups" where they go back to the scene of the crime in order to see if there is any more information that can be gleaned which you might not notice when you are busy running around trying not to be killed... Like, the Doctor has the perfect machine to do this with, but nope. Adventure done, run to the next place!!

These are all things you'd expect any reasonable person to do and say when taking others flying off into time and space and "helping". Even if they are an idiot passing through and learning. Especially when you consider the Doctor is vastly older and more experienced than everyone they encounter. They SHOULD know better. And they've got the lifespan to slow down. It's not like they need to be in a hurry because they're going to die at any moment like humans. The Doctor could easily stay for tea and it would be less than a drop in their lifespan.

Now, as usually is the case when I make these theories, I have a parts 1,2,3,4 and 6. There's allways this 5th piece I miss but I manage to get at the end.

But the 6th piece is the Timeless Child. The Doctor isn't a Time Lord anymore. They're not beholden to those people and ideas anymore. Even moreso, those people basically raped her childhood for their own gain so it's not like you'd really listen to them and their "policy of non-intervention".

I'm sensing a coming Trial of a Time Lord season (even believing these two seasons are the opening statement and preliminary evidence of the trial itself) wherein the Doctor finally gets the turnaround 6 deserved. A Trial of the Time Lords, if you will.

"In all my travels through time and space I have battled against evil, against power-mad conspirators. I should have stayed here! The oldest civilization: decadent, degenerate and rotten to the core! Power mad conspirators? Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen — they're still in the nursery compared to us! Ten million years of absolute power: that's what it takes to be really corrupt!"

This is what it's all coming down to. Chibnall's takedown of the Time Lords. And The Master is going to play the most crucial role of all.

They're going to be revealed as an Ux alongside the Doctor and show how the only constants they have in this universe are each other and it's about damn time they work together and tell these high collars to eat Schitt while they explore every star and planet they can find.

Come on, the episode is called The Timeless "Children". If it was just the Doctor it'd be called "The Timeless Child". The Master says as much with the misdirect line, "built on the lie of the Timeless Child." since we see two kids playing in that flashback.

"Since always. Since the Cloister Wars, since the night he stole the moon and the president's wife, since he was a little girl. One of those was a lie, can you guess which one?"

Now we know which one was a lie, we know the Master HAS known the Doctor since they were a little girl. THAT little girl...

But this is all just speculation. It's not like Chris Chibnall could have been thinking about this for the past 40 years and was given a blank slate to do whatever he wanted for five years on his favorite TV show. If y'all want to think he took those reigns and is choosing to make things worse...

Well then you don't know much about responsibility.

I'll let the man himself tell you about it.

"Very early in my career,” says Chibnall, “someone told me that you learn more from a failure than you do from a success. And then I lived out that phrase for a year in Los Angeles. I learned that I would not work that way again or be put in that situation again.” The essential lesson was: “You either have to be in total control of a show or working with people who share your vision and will work with you to achieve it. Also, never work with 13 executive producers.

“Camelot was the classic case of too many cooks. It wasn’t a harmonious set-up and I think that does manifest itself on screen.

“I had a fantastic cast but you have to be free to tell the story you want to tell in the way that you want to tell it. What ended up on screen was not what I wanted and so it is a blemish on my CV.”

Credit to @thirteenthdoc

“You immortals - so entitled, so spoiled. You never clear up after yourselves and you always leave stuff lying around.” - Thirteenth Doctor in Can You Hear Me?