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BBC Announces Adult Doctor Who Spin-Off
Dogtanian writes "The BBC has just announced a new 'Doctor Who' spin-off called 'Torchwood'. It is intended to be more adult in tone, and will follow a team investigating alien activities in modern-day Britain. Described as a cross between 'The X-Files' and 'This Life', it will feature Captain Jack, the bisexual time-travelling conman who featured in a number of recent Who episodes. The BBC are likely hoping that this spin-off will be more successful than 'K9 and Company'. The title is an anagram of a popular British sci-fi series, by the way."
Okay, it's been about twenty years since I've seen any Doctor Who, so I can't comment specifically on this character, but...
How does having a bisexual character constitute an "agenda" or "uncomfortable sexual baggage"? Isn't that just sort of a fairly realistic inclusion of the fact that actual people are sometimes gay or bisexual? In much the same way that people are sometimes female, or tall, or left-handed, and thus characters in stories sometimes also have these traits?
Were you made similarly uncomfortable by Tom Baker's curly-haired-people agenda and baggage?
Speaking as someone who's seen the series, new and old... we don't even need to bring homosexuality or bisexuality or whatever into this...
Tom Baker's characterization didn't totally revolve around the curly hair. Captain Jack, on the other hand, had very, very few scenes that weren't heavily sexualized.
You could forget, sometimes, that Tom Baker had curly hair. By contrast, the way Captain Jack was written, it was pretty hard to forget, even for a moment, that he was continuously randy for anything vaguely warm and moving.
It's even more glaring given that Doctor Who has historically been a show so foreign to sex that fandom has long speculated that the main character's species reproduces asexually.
Now, that was a writing problem too, but I would have preferred something in the middle rather than having a main character almost totally dominated by his sexuality at the expense of other aspects of his development.
DNA just wants to be free...