Often fans want to go for hyper-realism about the race of characters in film (i.e. Arthurian, or Norse mythology, but this seems to be very selective. Look at any Hollywood film that takes place in biblical times, but have no people who look in the least like Middle Easterners. How many times are English actors used as default European characters for any European drama/ or generic fantasy setting(when is someone going to do a 3 Musketeers films with actors who are French)? Look at that retched Avatar film. Of course you had some fans crying foul, but I honestly belief the majority of fans would have been A-okay with the casting if the movie had actually been good.

A lot of it comes from simple ignorance. I am amazed at the number of “smart” people in fandom that don’t know facts like English census records show that blacks were indeed living in London and all parts of England during Victorian times, yet I hear all the time from fans that there was no blacks in England which is why you never see them in historical dramas, and any attempts at rectifying that is just “multicultural, p.c. BS!” So I guess people like Colridge-Taylor and Mary Seacourt were just myths?

Good point. Russell Davies was still helming the show at that time, and I think there were several problems that various people had with his writing and story choices, so it’s entirely possible that Rose’s mother and Donna were affected, as characters.

It wasn’t the hair that kept the oldschool companions in line. It was the scarf.

…well, for that Doctor, anyway. Don’t forget the TARDIS is huge. Huge enough to include entire dungeons. With chains in the walls. And long-desiccated skeletons attached to those chains.

That’s the sort of thing guaranteed to take the starch out of any uppity companion…

Tara Thorton is a Sookie Stackhouse’s best friend in the “True Blood” TV series (although a relatively minor character in the books).

In keeping with the theme of this thread, I’ll point out that in the books, she’s white. Making her black in the show was a good idea IMO.

Also, Lafayette (the gay black cook) was killed off early in the book series, but they decided to keep him alive and on the show. (And make him Tara’s cousin.) Also a good move IMO.

There are lots of black people in Louisiana, so it’s not particularly PC casting, just not being all white for no good reason.

I wasn’t suggesting that there were flaws in her performance. It was the writing that I was objecting to. Consider Rose’s mother. She has all these characteristics that are found so often in female roles (perhaps more in sci fi and fantasy than elsewhere, perhaps mainly in fifties and sixties drama?) which facilitate the male lead’s ability to, well, lead and stuff, to be more rational, to the one who knows what to do. The male “just do what I’m telling you to do and never mind understanding why” and the female “I’m not going to do what you tell me to do until I first complain that you din’t remember my favorite color” are the yin-yang of leading man/leading lady dynamics in older cinema and seemingly much sci fi. It happens fairly often in Dr. Who, but Rose’s Mother and early Donna more so for the female roles and never with Martha.

By the way, the original Dr Who and Companion did this quite a bit but the companion seemed to quickly and early understand that she should just follow instructions. Probably mostly out of fear of Dr Who’s hair.

It helps if you know that Catherine Tate is also a comedienne who’s had at least one series of her own, and who is really quite funny. It was nice to see her play a more or less straight dramatic role, but of course the insanity did ooze out here and there as well. It’s also possible that they were still trying to settle her into the role at first.

Her initial appearance was, as I recall, in a Christmas special – so she and the Doc had a history prior to the regular series flow.

I was just a little too tickled to see her at all to really notice any flaws in the performance.

Yeah, SJA was a kids’ series – actually, I got my regenerations off a bit; Sarah first appeared with Doctor #3, Jon Pertwee. She continued with DW#4, and was eventually left on Earth – by her request – along with a robot dog called K9. (Get it? Get it?)

Sometime in the third season of the DW series reboot (as I recall), we learn that she’s spent her time since then chasing after bad guys, and that she’s kept K9 (Ha ha I get it now damn that’s clever!) around. The SJA series spun off sometime in there.

There’s been a trend in DW lately to get involved with family and romance subplots that strike me as being a bit squicky, actually. If you look at the first eight doctors, they were quite above it all. I like the human interest to an extent, but dammit, the show has always been about foiling nasty aliens, not friggin’ pregnancy tests.

(And yes, the regeneration on DW #8 comes from the movie starring Paul McGann, which was aired once on Fox in the 1990s and which can be found now on DVD and, hence, BitTorrent. If you’re really in the mood for a laugh, and particularly if you’ve seen a fairly substantial block of the old series shows, check out Rowan Atkinson’s Doctor Who sendup for Comic Relief, ‘The Curse of Fatal Death’.)

I’m getting the feeling that nobody’s really interested in any versions of these stories which precede Geoffrey… 😉

But, just for the sake of absolute clarity – all of the stuff you think you know about Merlin and Arthur was invented in the twelfth century by one bloke with a political axe to grind, and bears about as much resemblance to the original mythology (and historical reality) as Mel Gibson’s Braveheart does to the actuality of the First War of Scottish Independence. Which is to say: none whatsoever. What you’re calling “myth” is actually “historical fiction”.

And every now and then one of them shows up on Dr. Who!

Merlin is a sweet family-oriented fantasy show, and it already rearranges the myth to make Arthur and Merlin contemporaries, to define Merlin as not being a wise and revered wizard when he steps onto the scene, to have Arthur reared by his father Uther and have Igraine dead, to have Mordred not as Arthur and Morgan’s son, and to seriously bury the Arthur/Gwenivere/Lancelot love triangle. What’s taking it one step farther by changing Gwen’s origins to make her a commoner, and African to boot?

I find all the actors on the show to be refreshing casting, to be honest. None of them are Hollywood perfect, but they’re all attractive in interesting ways, and they’re all pretty good actors, which is a helluva lot more than can be said of some casts on this side of the pond. I’ll take several more seasons of Merlin‘s charming silliness over, say, Camelot‘s broody and meandering self-indulgence.