And so is my wife

I was watching some old Doctor Who recently. It's what I do. It's not sad. You're sad.

Anyway. This is how not sad I am. I was watching a reconstruction of an episode which was deleted decades ago. Luckily there are some photos, taken off the TV in the 60s, which someone has synchronised with the soundtrack, which someone else has recorded off their TV, also in the 60s.

Thanks to these weird people, who spent the 1960s recording Doctor Who off the telly before it was technically possible to do so, I was able to enjoy a weird and only slightly tedious slideshow of the story Fury From The Deep. And in it, there was a man who had a wife.

I know he had a wife because he kept calling her "My Wife!" Even though her name is Maggie Harris. And even though she worked in the same place as him, and everyone there knew her, he would only refer to her as "My Wife!"

"My Wife has disappeared! Where is My Wife? I think the seaweed creatures might have kidnapped My Wife! I gave the secret documents to My Wife!" It was most disconcerting. Maybe he was just very excited about having got married. But it came across as weird.


Trouble and Strife

It led  me to reflect that having a wife, in Doctor Who in the 1960s, was unusual. People tended not to be married. They just hung around in space, or in Ancient Egypt or wherever, having adventures and getting shot by Daleks.

And then I thought that actually, having a wife was a fairly unusual thing in adventure narratives, in general. I remember watching Firefly in 2002, thinking how refreshing it was that two of the ship's crew were married, and that the marriage was a good thing. It was still unusual then, 35 years after the crackly studio bound nonsense of early Doctor Who. How odd.

Soaps and dramas are full of wives, obviously. But that's because the focus is relationship and emotion. Narratives involving action tend to be uninterested in married couples. A wife is a thing you might get at the end of the story - a reward, in some respects. But also a signal that the adventure is over. Because the protagonist is "a man", obviously, and part of being "a man" is being single.


Ex Wives

Marriage is the end of story, or so popular narratives would have it. They are the opposite of adventure. That's why Wash and Zoe were so unusual, in Firefly. They continued the adventure. Even in excellent, forward looking television like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, there is a tension between the adventure the men want to go on and the fact that they are married. In fact, that's more or less the gimmick of The Sopranos, isn't it? He's a mob boss, but he's also a family man. How unusual and thought provoking. (Which, of course, it is, but why is it unusual to have such thoughts provoked?)

Uncharted 4, which I've both praised and moaned about recently, has a protagonist with a wife. Nathan Drake starts the story settled down, mucking about in suburbia with his wife, Elena. I sort of vaguely remember her from playing the earlier games, but I played 3 and 2 in the wrong order and so was utterly confused about who was who. And, to be honest, it didn't seem to matter much. All we did was run about killing people and watching temples explode.

The game does attempt to integrate Elena into the narrative, and she is clearly a capable and interesting character in her own right. But there is still an implicit tension between narrative excitement and domestic bliss. Nathan feels the need to deceive Elena in order to go on an adventure with his blokey mates. For much of the game she is a slightly nagging presence on a phone, lied to by Nathan in order to prolong the fun.

When she does turn up, she's a welcome addition to the hyper masculinity of the gameplay. Which begs the question, why wasn't she in this from the start? Why did the game feel the need to employ that tired old ideology - marriage is the enemy of adventure? They pay lip service, towards the end,  to the idea that their relationship is compatible with adventure, and I guess that's part of Nathan's arc. But that feels a little half heated when she's absent for so much of the game.

Still, at least Nathan does call her by her name. He doesn't just shout "Oh look, it's my wife!" all the time. So I suppose there's some progress.