beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I just rewatched Adrift. I now have to take a break for Being Bloody Furious. I hate hate hate that ending with a fiery passion. "And then he went mad" isn't an ending, it's a start. I know the whole thing is written from a parent point of view, I know it ties to Gwen and Rhys talking about babies and ties to Jack and Gray, and I don't care, because the conclusion is wrongwrongwrong and the story doesn't seem to know that.
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This episode so needs a follow up though, with a different ending. I really need to get back to writing.



ETA: Dear Internets: The proper response to 'I'm Furious' is not 'But It's Powerful!'
It has the power to make me furious. I had noticed that.
Also, jumping in to 'Furious!' in order to disagree with the cause is a really great way to make the Furious at you.
Just FYI.
You want to disagree on this one, do it in your own journal.

Have finished counting characters in Torchwood season one and two.
Those links go to my longer notes.

I did more tables later and more notes about race here.
And some about deaths.

I am counting speaking characters: male or female, white or of color, and Bechdel test pass/fail.
My count is likely imperfect. I can only count what I see.

According to the 2001 census Cardiff is 92% white.
I'm going to assume that men and women are 50/50. (I'll assume it because I *looked* for a number but did not find one. Google fail.)

I shall do math and draw conclusions, in pretty color coded tables.

First a recap on season one, now in one table:
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Green means there's at least the percentage found in Cardiff, orange means it's close (I chose 40% for women, roughly meaning one more woman needed to be even), and red means they've got some explaining to do.
On the Bechdel green is pass, an orange fail means two women talked about men, a red fail means no scene had only two women talking. Thankfully there's always at least two named women, they just don't always get to chat alone.

And now for season 2:
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So, general conclusions:
There's a consistently high percentage of people of color, helped along by the way that Tosh on her own is a representative proportion for anything up to 10 speaking characters, so with a maximum cast of 28 and most shows in the mid-teens then one or two other people of color keep the percentages quite high.
Season One averaged 17% people of color.
Season Two averaged 18% people of color.
Consistent, and consistently more than double the 8% wiki reckons for Cardiff and the UK.
I am not complaining, I'm counting. I think it's cool.
I had a thought, and looked up the USA: around 80% white. [ETA: Though different bits of wiki have different answers, and 80% white is the *highest* number; try here ] So Torchwood is actually reflecting [or closer to] the ethnic diversity of the USA. And Torchwood does quite well shown in the USA.
Interesting.

There's a very frequently low percentage of women. Over the entire two seasons only 4 episodes had 50 something percent women. No episode had more than 60% women, and 6 had only 20 something percent, with the lowest at 21%. The inequalities are not symmetrical, you never get a lot of women and very few men to the same extent you get a lot of men and very few women.
Season One averaged 37% women per episode.
Season Two averaged 39% women per episode.
An improvement, technically, and yet not a very large one.
2/5, or 40%, of the main cast are women... so at least they're consistent.
Which is odd.
Did we suddenly get outnumbered and me not notice?

Bechdel Fail and Pass are about 50/50 over the two seasons, but season one was 8/5 in favour and season two was 5/8 to the fail. Episodes with quite a high percentage of women can still Bechdeil fail.

I did not count have now counted the hypothetical 'reverse Bechdel' where two men talk about something other than a woman. In the interests of technical accuracy I probably should. Since I'm not rewatching them all again right away I'll do it from the transcripts. And, also, do it later.
... later apparently meaning after 0330.
I have made blue 'pass' to mean two men talk about something other than a woman. I have made pink where there is no scene with no women in it. ( Read more... )
So, now I've checked, there's a difference between the two seasons. The first season has four episodes where every scene has at least one woman, and one that barely just barely has men alone; the first and last episodes are both all mixed, and it's about even on test fail between genders. The second season has two all mixed episodes, not the first and last; the fail is 2 m-m to 8 f-f. There's more times women are involved in interactions in the first season.

I've said before I liked the first season better for politics reasons, but this wasn't consciously what I had in mind.

Next, because clearly I need to do more math, I can take the full transcripts and the notes I've just made on categories of all those speaking characters, and I can figure out how many words they had each in each episode.
... this may take a while...