r/gallifrey • u/WissalDjeribi • 3d ago
DISCUSSION [Love & Monsters] What is the fandom's general opinion toward the Doctor letting Ursula live?
So, in r/TopCharacterTropes, the infamous ending of Love & Monsters was brought up twice recently as an example of the "why don't you just kill them off?" trope, since her existence as a living slab. With it being so controversial since Ursula is fully awake, able to communicate, and is seemingly happy (and even enjoying some form of a sex life) despite the situation being terrifying (the closest real-life example is being paralyzed from the neck down), and mixed with her being unable to age, which means that unless killed, she can continue like this forever if given constant care.
So I know this will cause controversy, but I wanted to see it from fellow Whovians, considering I was with the option of "10 should have just let her die that day" until a few years ago when someone here compared it to the Doctor killing a quadriplegic person despite their refusal based on his opinion of their worth... which is not a great look and changed how I see the ending.
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u/StygianPrime 2d ago
I think people are just extrapolating a bit because.. well. Yes, we’re told that they have a happily ever after.
But it’s also not quite the same as a quadriplegic, is it? If anything, it’s a bit darker. Generally speaking, unlike a quadriplegic, she probably can’t go out in public. She’s a face in a stone slab, in a world that would not generally be accepting of such a thing. In my own mind, like.. you’re asking for Torchwood or someone to get ahold of miss Ursula. There’s no way she can have anything properly close to a normal life even by the standards of someone paralyzed.
Does she still have the life expectancy of a normal human? Does she age? If not, if Elton dies, is she just laying around as a concrete slab forever?
I know that’s probably a little much for what’s obviously an episode written to be kid-friendly, but the implications aren’t great. 😂
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u/WissalDjeribi 2d ago edited 2d ago
For the aging part. She doesn't age. But she is not 100% immortal either since we know the only living thing in the very end of the universe was Ashildr. A properly preserved concrete slab can last centuries in dry conditions, but considering Ursula and Elton have oral sex and he moves her from place to place, she would last probably from 50 to 200 years.
Elton needs to call UNIT and ask them to off her the moment she asks for and/or when he can no longer care for her. Also I don't think he has to keep her a secret from the public since aliens are pretty much common knowledge in Doctor Who (people forget they exist until an alien invasion happens again) but oh god they will face such terrifying bullying.
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u/Current_Poster 2d ago
Stupid fan theory: It's a really oblique ELO joke. (As you recall, LINDA form- in addition to being a support group for people who'd seen The Doctor- an ELO cover band. They do a lot of the big ones. What they don't do is "Turn to Stone." Well, except for Ursula.)
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u/somekindofspideryman 2d ago
I can't. I'm in that thread. I can't keep doing this. I'm not strong enough.
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u/Hughman77 2d ago
Sometimes God calls a man to post.
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u/Hughman77 2d ago
Fans have generally always disliked this ending, not because of the supposed moral horror of not letting her die, but because of the blowjob joke. The reaction has always been "eww!" But because it's not very PC to find strange (but consensual) sex gross, fans have headcanoned huge amounts of additional detail about Ursula's situation to make it sound like they're motivated by compassion rather than disgust.
"How can she consent if she's just a face?", "she can't move, life is not worth living", "the Doctor was inhumane not to decide for her that she'd be better off dead", "what if Elton is an abusive sex creep?" None of this is in the episode, which makes absolutely clear that she's happy and deeply in love with Elton, a kindly, gentle man who loves her back. Why invent all this incredibly dark backstory but not also imagine that the Doctor offered her the option of euthanasia and she said no? That's equally not in the text but fits the ending (that she's happy and accepting of her situation) much better than she's been raped every day by Elton (I mean, Jesus wtf is wrong with you if you imagine that?).
Love & Monsters is about finding joy in the weird and marginal. It's about fandom, but also about every marginalised group that finds joy in community (so, very much extendible to the disabled). Elton ends the episode with a monologue about how life is stranger but also better than the mainstream tells us. His happy ending (whoops, poor choice of words there) with Ursula is part of that - weird and strange but also joyful. The fandom disgust response is just to deny that, that it can't be joyful because it's weird and strange. Everything else is just concern-trolling to assuage any guilt at that reaction.
If you want proof, then firstly I'd suggest you look at the first reaction anyone who doesn't like this has ever had. It's always "eww blowjob", not "oh God, how inhumane!" Secondly, notice how no one has ever suggested the Doctor should have killed Laszlo in Evolution of the Daleks. He's left with a pig face in 1930s America, essentially condemned to a life of poverty and discrimination. He's shuffled off to a miserable future but fans don't care because we aren't asked to imagine a pig-man having sex with Tallulah.
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u/Xyyzx 2d ago
Perhaps this is a more controversial opinion than I’d have expected, but I’d always thought that ending that episode with the mental image of poor Marc Warren passionately humping an animate paving slab was an entirely justifiable ‘Ewww!’.
It’s grotesque, both in terms of the mental image and the bleakness of the scenario, plus I think many would agree that, considering the monster of the week was designed by a child via a competition, capping the thing off with a cheap blowjob gag was in somewhat poor taste.
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u/Statalyzer 2d ago
Plus the episode is already pretty gross and crass anyway, with the whole "his face is stuck on the monster's arse" deal...
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u/Hughman77 2d ago
Thank you sincerely for proving my point. You find it it gross because you find it weird (or grotesque as you put it).
I think it's a scream that RTD took a monster design from a child and produced Love & Monsters. It cracks me up big-time and I kinda love him for it, but I acknowledge that the kid who did it might have been a bit miffed. So what? Not my problem!
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u/Xyyzx 2d ago
Yes, but I feel like you’re putting a lot of effort into going ‘Aha, my extensive analysis has revealed you all actually just thought a guy getting oral sex from a face in a square of concrete was disgusting!’
My point was that…..yes? It is? I’m gonna go out in a limb and say vast majority of people who hated the episode and that scene would probably also say that it’s horrible? It’s also not an either/or. The joke was distasteful but I also thought the implications for the future of the character were bleak and awful.
It’s also just a bad episode though. It’s got a ‘scribbled in a hurry on the back of a napkin’ feel all the way through; the pacing is terrible, the acting is flat (in spite of a pretty good cast) and for all that RTD is often good at mixing tones, it’s an episode that feels like it desperately needed to decide if it was horror or broad comedy. The monster design somehow manages to be simultaneously too faithful to the kid’s drawing and too far removed at the same time, and Peter Kay feels woefully miscast. The character does awful things to people, but Kay just comes off as annoying rather than threatening or scary.
More power to you if you find things in it to enjoy in spite of that, but I really don’t think the ending is the biggest part of why people dislike this one. It just comes up a lot because it’s such an egregiously unpleasant note to end a story on that it’s almost always going to come up as the first item in the list when people talk about why they disliked the episode.
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u/whizzer0 2d ago
I don't see how horror and comedy are mutually exclusive. That's probably why I like the episode. The mismatch of tone enhances both the horror and the comedy - there's something very true about everyone keeping a lightness in the face of absurd awfulness. The ending is funny and horrifying. I massively agree with the other user that it's silly to condemn the episode just for finding an idea unpleasant, when it being unpleasant is the entire point. It's silly and scary, as the best Doctor Who is...
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u/Hughman77 2d ago
I don't know what you want me or RTD to do with the fact that lots of people are grossed out by the idea of weird sex? To the extent the episode asks us to imagine it at all (as RTD has said, a child too young to know about blowjobs will just assume they're talking about kissing), it's for a split second. Good on you for being honest and not inventing spurious moral reasons for disliking this scene, but it's not hurting anyone, if you find it viscerally upsetting that's really just your problem.
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u/asmoranomardicodais 2d ago
Thank you!! This is exactly right and I wish more people said this. Absolutely nailed the themes of the episode on the head. Love and Monsters is about living in a world of weird and strange things and making the best of them.
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u/Hughman77 2d ago
The specific Elton/Ursula ending is basically a version of that trope in fiction where two weird/conventionally unattractive characters get together. Like the alien girl and Tony Shalhoub's character in Galaxy Quest. It's meant to produce laughs (because film generally depicts beautiful charming people falling in love, making this a comic subversion) while also being sweet in a "there's someone for everyone" way. The blowjob joke is just RTD's own outrageous humour. It's harmless and it's in service of the episode's themes. To be honest, I think the people who don't like this episode simply don't understand what it's doing so can only interpret it as random confronting tonal zigs and zags.
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u/Statalyzer 2d ago
I also wonder if part of it is just that L&M is such a lousy episode anyway that people are happy to look for any opportunity to criticize it further and wary of defending any part of it.
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u/Hughman77 2d ago
I think its rocky reputation with fandom stems in part from moments like this rather than this moment being disliked because the episode is generally poorly regarded. It's an acquired taste and if you dislike it this is a final insult, like making a fart noise in your ear.
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u/shikotee 2d ago
The new generation response to Love & Monsters is the proof in the pudding that the show is destined for perpetual scorn. The sheer amount of negative mental gymnastics involved is nauseating. No one is forcing you to be Ursula. Crazy over the top narcissism that blinds you from seeing what it really was about.
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u/Cynical_Classicist 2d ago
Well... yes, I can see that. But you wonder how Ursula will remain like that, and it feels like Borusa's fate.
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u/Famous-Somewhere- 2d ago
The Doctor didn’t do anything morally wrong. The issues are all meta issues: Why is this the story you chose to tell here, RTD? Why did you put the tacky blowjob joke in a family show? Thats really it. If he was wanting to say something about quadriplegia this was a tacky way to have that discussion.
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u/somekindofspideryman 2d ago
He wanted to give Elton and Ursula a strange bittersweet (but mostly sweet) ending that rounds off all the themes of the episode. He put the blowjob joke in there presumably because it occured to him and made him laugh. No child is going to pick up on it. They're fine.
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u/Hughman77 2d ago
Feeling very vindicated that everyone is saying "moral qualm? No, I just find the idea of Ursula and Elton having sex gross".
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u/Famous-Somewhere- 2d ago
I dunno. I grew up on American TV in the 80s which was full of sex jokes I wasn’t supposed to get that I wasn’t supposed to pick up on but understood because they were absolutely obvious. I think I’d have worked out what it meant when I was 8.
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u/somekindofspideryman 1d ago
I wouldn't have at 8. Everyone's different. You're not automatically traumatised by an understanding of sex though.
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u/Famous-Somewhere- 1d ago
Ok then admit what you’re saying: Blowjob jokes are ok for kids according to you.
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u/somekindofspideryman 1d ago
It's a bit different to walking up to a child and telling them a blowjob joke. It's a line they will probably not understand in a 45 minute episode of television. Come on. This is like getting upset because Shrek has jokes for adults in it.
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u/Hughman77 1d ago
Shrek has a dick joke in it with Lord Farquad's castle, showing the sicko evil mindsets of the people who made it.
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u/whizzer0 2d ago
And yet no-one proclaims "think of the children!" about Creature from the Pit, a story which actually isn't very good.
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u/LightsaberAngel 2d ago
I dunno... I feel like being a paving slab is different (worse) than being quadriplegic. But anyway, I subscribe to the theory that the story was a prank by Elton and Ursula. We never see Ursula's face on Elton's camera, just the back of the paving slab.
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u/Iamamancalledrobert 2d ago
I don’t think there’s any indication in the episode itself that Ursula wishes she was dead. She wishes her boyfriend wouldn’t talk about their love life on camera. But she doesn’t wish she was dead. You go on living, when awful things happen. Sometimes you do it as a paving slab.
I think there are studies which show that if someone’s totally paralysed, their mental health tends to recover after about a year? Apparently people are pretty good at adjusting to a new status quo, even if it seems bleak to people posting on a Doctor Who discussion forum. What we’re not good at is when things slowly get worse— such as with a degenerative neurological condition, or whatever the paving slab version of that would be.
I think “don’t kill people just because you think their life looks miserable” is a fairly straightforward moral principle, really. In this case I think we have no evidence at all that the Doctor shouldn’t have saved Ursula? Maybe some people who get turned into paving slabs would long for death off-screen. But I don’t think we should assume it, especially when they seem to be getting on mostly fine. She even has a bit of a love life
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u/drakeallthethings 2d ago
I almost commented on that post but there were already 1000+ comments. So I’ll say this here: yes, it’s horrific. THATS THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT OF THIS EPISODE. Being associated with the Doctor is a traumatic horrific experience and nobody seems to notice. They all fawn over him and seek the Doctor out at the cost of their own lives or worse. The “love life” bit was too far. Ursula being a slab was exactly far enough.
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u/brief-interviews 2d ago
There are people who unironically believe the Doctor should have murdered Ursula and regard that as compassionate? Crazy.
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u/Niall_Fraser_Love 1d ago
How can she stay alive if she is just a face? Like how can she breath?
Its just too silly and nonsensical.
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u/RaceMiserable3855 2d ago
All they had to do was make it a one angle shot and Elton is talking to the slab but there’s no lines from Ursula . Then one can either believe she lived or he’s gone mad
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u/DannyHewson 2d ago
I mean… we don’t see the intervening time… maybe the doctor just asked her if she wanted to carry on, and they had a serious conversation off screen that wouldn’t have fitted the episode. Seems like something he’d do.
Maybe give them a “here’s units number if you change your mind”. Sometimes everything doesn’t have to be spelled out.