One more titbit to share on Thirteen’s run…

The bit where Graham told her he was worried about his cancer coming back, and her doing a total bodyswerve on saying anything vaguely empathetic…I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT WAS A MEME. I THOUGHT NO ONE COULD HAVE POSSIBLY WRITTEN SUCH A GLIB RESPONSE TO SOMETHING SO SCARY AND SO HUMAN AND SO RELATABLE FOR SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE AUDIENCE. BUT THEY DID.

Fucking hell.

I really can't understand this viewpoint. I've tried, but I can't.

I mean, confession time that's probably gonna paint me in a bad light to all of the omg 13 was such a horrible person here but...this is how I react to shit like this. If you walked up to me and say "hey, Jae, I'm worried that I might have cancer", I would freeze the fuck up.

Why? A lifetime of trauma plus a hefty dose of neurodivergence that makes it hard for me to figure out the "right" thing to say without the necessary time to process and think it over.

And holy fuck, when you're dealing with something this serious, the consequences for getting it wrong can outright cost you a relationship with that person.

At that point in the story, 13 has been through the fucking wringer. She lost everything as 12, managed to find friendship again, only for the Master to reappear and remind her of what happened the last time she dared to open up. Hell, she was just reminded of the Timeless Child in that very episode.

She's not being "glib". She doesn't just crack a joke, tell him to stop worrying, pass it off to one of the other companions to deal with. She acknowledges her shortcomings, she lets him know that she needs extra time to think of something meaningful to say, and Graham accepts this.

Not to mention that suddenly having her know exactly what to say and how to comfort Graham after almost an entire series of progressively fucking up her relationship with the fam would have been jarringly out of character.

It's also important to note that this scene was written based on Chris Chibnall's personal experience with cancer. This is how people reacted to him.

But whatever. Refusing to see any sort of nuance so we can get mad at the woman Doctor is a tried and true tradition at this point, why stop now.

I agree @jae-writes-stuff , the ‘I can’t believe someone wrote this’… it’s a real life lived experience someone in the real world reacted this way to Chibs does everyone think the person this was inspired by is a bad person because they didn’t have the words to comfort someone about their mortality? Now imagine it’s a traumatised Time Lord who doesn’t really deal with or understand death the same way as us because it is so different for them, yes she’s going to lose herself but it’s not a death like ours it’s never really been final final for her. There’s nothing that she probably understands less than the fear of dying that humans are faced with.

And Chibs didn’t write her as an asshole who doesn’t care and blows Graham off she acknowledges what she should be doing and that she’s going to take some time to think of what she should have said in that moment and get back to him. She’s actually being very open and vulnerable in that moment with Graham that even though she talks a lot, in that moment she doesn’t have the words to make someone feel better about something she’s never experienced and doesn’t fully understand so doesn’t know what to say.

Imagine trauma dumping on a friend because you think it’s a good idea for YOU to talk about it not knowing what they are going through and then they are open with you and say I know I should be saying something helpful right now, but I don’t know what, are you really going to think, oh what an asshole how dare they not have the words to comfort me about this thing I just dropped on them?

I really hope people in the real word don’t react as horribly to people who are as honest about not always having the words to say in real life situations as they are to 13 about it.

Incredible to think that a valid criticism of one of the few scenes with potential for an actual emotional connection between two characters is drenched in misogyny. What a wild accusation and how telling that it’s tagged on the end as some self righteous trump card, presumably to dismiss any response.

I speak as a woman who has had two surgeries to remove tumours from my chest. I speak as a woman who lives with a rare neurological condition. And I speak as a person who, if one of my friends had physically recoiled from me when I was going through that, I would have a hard time trusting them again.

Graham talking about what they just went through, and sharing the briefest of brief overviews about his worries isn’t trauma dumping. It is a conversation between two people who are supposed to be friends. Trauma dumping is a world apart from this, so to frame it as that an intense reading of the situation to say the least.

You don’t have to have the perfect thing to say when someone shares something that’s troubling them. But pulling away and shutting down the conversation is not the answer. You talk as though there was a later point where she had thought about what she wanted to say, and where she had gone back to Graham and said it. But we didn’t see that. So therefore it didn’t happen. It would have been so much better if it did. It would have been brilliant to have her come back to him and give a response that she’d had time to consider, that would give them this moment of connection. There are so few genuine moments of connection in this run for me so far that that scene felt like it was utterly torpedoed.

And yes, it may be that this being based on a real life experience that Chibnall faced gives you greater context (and a larger stick to beat people with if they don’t agree with you) but this is a story that’s on screen. It doesn’t come with footnotes. It doesn’t make it any more ‘in character’ for the Doctor just because a real life human person said it to the writer.

The Doctor cured an incurable blood clot in the Almost People - with something he had on hand in the Tardis. That was a brief moment in which the Doctor was compassionate to someone who had been an antagonist during that story. All this while knowing that the Amy on the Tardis is a ganger and the real one is in danger elsewhere in the universe.

Are you honestly telling me that an older, more experienced Doctor couldn’t be compassionate to someone she claims to care about? It doesn’t stack up for me - if it does for you, that’s fine, but don’t cry misogyny and don’t tell people they don’t know what it’s like to have a difficult conversation.