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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 3764633" data-attributes="member: 22424">I'm not sure it's fair to call it on PCness. Unusually, that episode featured rampant racism, sexism and classism, presented not as something wrong with those involved, and not as just a product of the times, but rather just something that is. That was a bold move right there. If they'd been being PC, they'd have ignored the issue, or featured a scene of the Doctor and Martha discussing how we'd evolved beyond such things.Plus, if they'd been being PC there would have been absolutely no question of them giving guns to teenage boys, let alone having them use them. Remember, unlike the US, the UK have massive controls on firearms, and the public at large is much more leery of them, and especially of them being portrayed in anything other than a horribly negative light.And then there's the Doctor, our hero, authorising one boy to take another boy and give him a "good thrashing". Sure, he was human at the time, but still...I'll give you that one...But not that one. It was strongly portrayed as being incredibly difficult for those boys to engage in machinegun fire against a clear, present and immediate threat (and rightly so... that was a very powerful scene, IMO). And that was something they had trained extensively for.Asking a boy to outright assassinate the enemy with a rifle? No, not going to happen. Perhaps if he'd gotten one of the other staff to do it. (Besides, that whole line of enquiry is like asking of Back to the Future III, "why don't they use the gas from the Delorean in the mine?" It simply doesn't fit the story logic.)Again, are you sure you're not thinking of modern American kids? Kids today are considerably harder and more jaded than their counterparts of even twenty years ago. In the show, we're dealing with priviledged English children of 1913, the last year before the Great War inflicted untold horrors on the world.Even when they were being trained with the machine guns, they were being trained for military service in the British Empire, where they would most likely have to use the guns against 'savages' of the various colonies. To ask them then to use their weapons against a little girl, not to mention one they'd probably seen around the place, and may well have talked to...I wouldn't have been too shocked had at least one taken a shot. But I couldn't declare it was unrealistic (or PC) just because none of them did.I was quite surprised that Mr Smith didn't take a shot. On the other hand, though, the Doctor rarely if ever actually kills someone. He even refused to wipe out the Daleks in "Genesis of...", despite knowing full well the horrors that they would unleash. And the episode did show that at least some of his personality remained as a human.Again, story logic. Perhaps he put one of those perception filter thingies on the scarecrow?</blockquote>

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