Since when is popular SF opposed to genocide?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Rather alarmed by The Day of the Doctor's rejection of established tropes.

Comments

[kaffy_r]

Well, not completely opposed ... the Daleks still go boom.

But yeah, I get your point. And I'm grinning like a fool because of the whole thing.

[mishalak]

Yes, but I think trying to genocide the Daleks is like trying to killing a mad scientist and not recovering the body. Or taking a pot shot at a vampire with a mere gun... Impolite, sure, but in no way a serious attempt at murder. I expect that any good lawyer could get a client off in such circumstances.

"Is there any evidence that the Daleks were in fact destroyed by my client? Yes, he did sabotage their world destroying weapon, but have any dead Daleks actually been recovered from the space around Skaro? I submit that they are in hiding for their own purposes, yet again, and that war crime charges be dropped in this case."

[kaffy_r]

I tip my hat to you, sir ... curse those damnable disappearing Daleks!

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

I was very pleased at the mockery of using the Sonic as a pointable weapon.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

"Brave words, Dick Van Dyke."

[kjn]

Rejection of that trope is old hat of Doctor Who.

At the end of The Doctor Dances Ten exclaims "Everybody lives!".

Or the entire episode Evolution of the Daleks, where Ten tries to save the Daleks and take them and their dalek-human hybrids to a planet they can call home, and berate the Daleks for killing an entire new species?

Or New Earth? And I'm hardly not even a Doctor Who follower at all!

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

The Doctor's always been a pacifist who goes to great lengths to avoid killing when possible.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Except for Ten.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

And Six.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

And Seven, I've heard.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Seven didn't have to be violent. He had Ace to do it for him.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Six? What Six? I don't recall a Six. whistles.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It really depends. In the previous season, during the origin-of-River-Song/"Good Man Goes to War" arc, the Eleventh Doctor seemed to be getting kind of cavalier about it.

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

What? They are still pro Dalek genocide.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, genocide of Daleks falls under the category of "self defense". There's also that past incident in which the Doctor had the chance of destroying all the Daleks before they got off Skaro and decided he didn't have the right to do it.

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

Sadly, once you decide you can put a whole planet in a bubbleverse it also means you probably could have put your enemies there instead.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Better than belatedly realizing Jor El could have saved most of Krypton if only Kryptonians didn't see the Phantom Zone as reserved only for enemies of the state.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

His brother Zor-El did realize that, but only after the big boom.

[sanskritabelt.livejournal.com]

How much of SF genocide gets washed away as being in 'self defense.'

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Well, it's usually the case (at least in recent decades [1]) that the aliens being genocided are, like Orcs, inherently evil, and therefore there is No Other Choice.

[1] Unlike the Good Old Days, in which simply resisting humans overrunning your planet and driving you to extinction was sufficient reason for a little quick genocide.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Daleks actually have 50 years of consistent protrayal showing this to be actually true, though.

More to the point, in this episode killing all the Time Lords was actually justifiable self defense, given what they were planning to do. (And this also was set up in an earlier story, not just inserted here to make a false choice.) Which is what makes this an especially impressive rejection.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

"Daleks actually have 50 years of consistent portrayal showing this to be actually true, though."

Well, yes. Orcs, too, were consistently portrayed as evil.

My reason for being slightly snarky there is that an author _deliberately_ creates the alien race as irredeemably bad, he or she doesn't find them under a bush - and spreading the meme that "there are some people that are so bad that the only choice to kill them" is problematic in itself, isn't it?

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Well, not obviously, they don't manage to kill them all. In fact, if I remember correctly, the last time he saw them he was fine with them forgetting him.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

It's already *well* established that the Doctor didn't wipe out the Daleks when he ended the Time War. They'll do just fine because the BBC will never, ever let them go.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think the first time the Daleks were exterminated forever and ever, never to be seen again, was in their very first appearance, wasn't it?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And the second time they showed up, the onscreen excuse was "Well, that was millennia in the future at the very degenerate end of Dalek history; this is the Dalek Golden Age." Which didn't stop the Doctor from wiping out the Daleks forever many times after that. Once he even blew up Skaro!

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

One of the lessons of Who seems to be that it's very hard to completely exterminate a species (or perhaps a species with space/time travel).

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

One of the lessons of Who (and many other shows) is that continuity is for wimps. At least Who is forthright about it; Moffat is on record that there is no canon, what with the Doctor's habit of rewriting inconvenient bits of history.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Hence the Time War :)

[leecetheartist.livejournal.com]

In the old series, Tom Baker's Doctor was shattered when the Brigadier killed off the Sea Devils behind his back.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

The Tenth Doctor's very first action after saving Earth following his regeneration was causing the overthrow of Harriet Jones's government because he was pissed she'd ordered the retreating Sycorex ship destroyed.

[srogerscat.livejournal.com]

an action which led directly to The Master taking control of Earth.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Yep. There was a moral there of "Being holier than thou can come back and bite you in the ass". In some ways that's how the 10th Doctor started and ended.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And then there was their return in Warriors of the Deep, in which just about everybody dies, and the last shot is Peter Davison surveying the carnage and saying "There should have been another way!"

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

I think you mean Pertwee. That happened in the first appearance of the Silurians. (And I haven't seen The Sea Devils, but I'm pretty sure it was the sequel and also starred Pertwee. Can't rule out the Brigadier killing them off behind his back twice, though.)

[leecetheartist.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're right, my mistake, Pertwee, thanks!