By the Quality of his Enemies

somewhere different: the doctor and sherlock: "because i'm clever!"

o-c-deus:

mswyrr:

I just realized. The writers of Doctor Who and Sherlock are not imagining themselves as aristocrats, who just luck into power. They’re imagining themselves as technocrats. The rule of the clever people. Cleverness as a justification for all other privileges.

It’s like they’re…

Much as I like the show (well, under RTD and some of Classic and a few eps of it under Moffat), this is definitely true. A clever, pretty white man who has the privilege of never having to stay and clean up his mess or work with anyone else for a living (see: magic [female] ship that provides him with housing, food, and transportation) runs around the universe, getting into other people’s and cultures’ business, judging it, and picking a few clever, pretty, younger people (almost always women) to favor and to flatter by telling them they’re almost as clever as he is. The Doctor is a one-man privilege machine.

He is. Which makes it incredibly interesting to play him as a human—he’s white, he’s male, he’s British, he has all the privilege you can ask for, on Earth, and yet, he’s lost so much privilege compared to what he had as a Time Lord. It’s like playing post-colonial Britain. Kind of. >_>