What if Series 11 sucks?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want Series 11 to suck. Maybe, by the tone of everything I’ve written about Chris Chibnall, Series 11 and the Thirteenth Doctor so far, you might be under the impression that I’d be privately happy if Series 11 crashed and burned. Only then, you might think I might be thinking, will Doctor Who’s powers that be realise their folly and put Doctor Who right. Nope. I don’t want Series 11 to suck. I don’t even think it will suck. I think there’s every chance it will be a great, roaring success. But I think there’s equally a chance that it could suck. A bit like Brexit, the thing could go either way, and it’s really difficult, at this point, to predict which way.

The key thing is Chris Chibnall’s apparent willingness to be bold. There’s no more conspicuous evidence of this than his decision to regenerate Peter Capaldi into Jodie Whittaker, but most recently we’ve learned that Chibnall had cast out all of Moffat’s people and brought in an entirely new batch of people to write, direct, produce and set to music Doctor Who. Even before the sex of the Thirteenth Doctor had been revealed, we knew that Chibnall was seriously toying with radical ideas to shake up Doctor Who’s format (before settling for probably the least interesting possibility of a series of ten single episode stories). If nothing else, this tells us that the person in whose vision Series 11 will be molded wants to do Doctor Who differently to how it’s been done, at the very least, in recent memory. That means being bold.

Boldness is good. Boldness is the opposite of timidity, predictability and staleness. Boldness is the opposite of boring. If there’s something Doctor Who should never be, it’s stale and predictable and boring. Doctor Who is supposed to be the antidote to staleness in television. It’s supposed to be bold and daring and it’s supposed to set the imagination aflame and do something radically different from the usual bland diet of undifferentiated soap operas and detective dramas. If a show about an immortal alien who can go anywhere in time and space isn’t going to be bold, then what exactly is the point of it?

To be candid, if Chris Chibnall really is trying to make a clean break from what Doctor Who has been for the last thirteen years successively under Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat and blaze an exciting new direction for the show, then I’m broadly in support of the Chris Chibnall “project” in boldness. I think he has the right idea in this respect, because it really has come time for Doctor Who to reinvent itself.

I adored Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who, but I’m not an average member of the audience. Under Moffat, the show was steadily losing viewers and increasingly becoming a cult fandom. Simply put, people had become bored with Doctor Who, bored of seeing the same thing every week. Bored of the bloody Daleks all the time. The characters may change every couple of years, but the show basically stays the same, and had stayed basically the same since it returned to the screen with what was then a new lick of paint in 2005. Steven Moffat did a lot differently from Russell T Davies, but the Doctor Who he made was still basically the same show that Davies made, and an average member of the audience, the valorised “casual viewer”, who didn’t know who Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat were, wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Davies’ Doctor Who and Moffat’s Doctor Who.

In Moffat’s final years, he seemed to recognise that the general audience was growing bored of Doctor Who, and he played increasingly to the fandom — people like me — rather than vainly trying to appeal to a broad general audience (although there was a last gasp attempt at doing this in Series 10).

Ironically, I think the female Doctor decision looks more like a symptom of Doctor Who’s crisis of staleness than anything resembling genuine boldness. Here is a show that had been making basically the same twelve episodes every year since 2005 and which people were increasingly becoming bored of. The big, scary “cancellation” word was being thrown around with more and more seriousness. To remedy the problem of staleness, Doctor Who could sit down and think about how it could reinvent itself to return anew and regenerated, like it did in 2005, or, alternatively, it could perform a cosmetic but attention-grabbing change, like changing the Doctor’s gender, which would buy it a couple more years to continue going on making the same 12 episodes every year as before, just with a woman playing the Doctor now instead of a man.

I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I’ve no doubt that, if Steven Moffat had been the one to bring in a female Doctor, this is exactly how it would have gone down. A female Doctor would have been a superficial panacea to temporarily bring back a few eyeballs while nothing substantive would have changed. Chris Chibnall, at least, has shown a willingness to revamp and reimagine the show and do things differently. But I don’t know if he’s going to do enough to dispel the charge of staleness and justify another 13 years of Doctor Who. I don’t know if it’s possible to get out of the rut Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat have dug Doctor Who into over the last 13 years. There needs a properly radical and paradigm-shifting departure from the Doctor Who of Davies and Moffat to justify the show’s indefinite continued existence, and it remains to be seen whether Chris Chibnall is up to the job.

So what if Series 11 sucks, then? What happens if the new regime produces something that’s either boring or bad? Chibnall’s brave new era will be off to a terrible start, and it will be difficult to justify continuing the show, at the very latest, after Jodie Whittaker exits. If Series 11 is bad, the female Doctor experiment will be pronounced a failure and cancellation will be openly discussed. If Series 11 is simply boring, the initially high viewing figures borne on interest in the female Doctor Who will quickly dissipate and return to normal (ever-diminishing) levels, and cancellation will still be on the cards, albeit a few more years down the line. If the drastic changes needed to revive the show aren’t made and the show continues to be boring, viewing figures will continue their downward trajectory and, at some point, the show will be cancelled.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a controversial thing to say. At 13 years, Doctor Who has run long past the typical lifespan of a TV drama. That’s because it has the capacity to continually swap new actors in and because it doesn’t have a narrative “end point”. We could keep on following successive incarnations of the Doctor around forever, if we wanted. But that doesn’t mean that even a show like Doctor Who can’t reach its use-by date in the minds of the audience, especially if it doesn’t seem to change very much during its occupancy of its weekly time slot.

If that’s the case, I’m actually not sure that temporary cancellation would necessarily be a bad thing. Maybe it’s what needs to happen. Maybe a show like Doctor Who needs these occasional hiatuses when it gets into a stale rut it can’t break out of, to return years later from its spell in purgatory renewed and regenerated. Would anyone deny that the show’s cancellation after 1989 was, ultimately, for the best? If it weren’t for 1989, we wouldn’t have had 2005 and everything Doctor Who has been since it returned from its banishment. Maybe this version of Doctor Who — let’s call it Doctor Who 2.0 — has reached the end of its natural life and should be peacefully put to rest while it still has its dignity. Then, after an appropriate amount of time has passed — I would say 10 years at the least, long enough for people to miss it — it can come back a shiny, brand new show, Doctor Who 3.0, and preferably looking very different from how it did before, like it’s 2005 all over again.

Or maybe I’m wrong. There’s always that possibility, too. It’s just that I think it’s impossible that, without a radical overhaul, the show could do anything but continue to lose viewers from this point. Jodie Whittaker may well end up being a sensational, fan-favourite Doctor, but the whole female Doctor thing is ultimately an attention-grabbing gimmick that won’t, on its own, bring viewers back long-term. The show’s high water mark was the end of the Tenth Doctor’s era and the first two seasons of the Eleventh Doctor’s era. Since then viewing figures have been in freefall, especially during Capaldi’s era. It’s hard to see how the show could return to that level of popularity and cultural heft if it carries on just as it is, short of regenerating the Doctor back into David Tennant.

I might just end by saying that, out of the two alternatives I foresee — that Series 11 is bad or boring — I think it much more likely that Series 11 will simply be boring, “boring” here meaning that it might well be a competent, even brilliant, series of episodes, but that it’s still nothing we haven’t seen before, still Doctor-Who-as-usual. Chris Chibnall is accomplished enough a writer and showrunner for us to be confident that there’s no great danger of Series 11 being bad. I don’t think the man who made Broadchurch and Born and Bred is capable of writing bad television, or at least a whole series of bad television.

Or Chibnall could surprise us all and bring back Doctor Who this year as if it had been away for 16 years, not one.

What has Chris Chibnall done to our fandom?

Probably to the mixed amusement and weariness of some of my irl friends who follow me on Twitter, as well as to my non-fandom mutuals, I’ve been tweeting almost exclusively about Doctor Who for the past few months (beginning with the run-up to the new series). I can’t help it—I get excited about Doctor Who and I like to talk about it on a platform where it’s acceptable to spill out every unfiltered thought that crosses one’s mind. Usually I stop talking as repetitively about Doctor Who soon after a new series ties up and go back to being weird and incoherent about non-Doctor Who things, but this time the feverish speculation and excitement around the identity of the Thirteenth Doctor has kept me going. I spent two hours the night before the revelation of the Thirteenth Doctor making a thread of ironic candidates for the role of Thirteen (e.g. Michael McIntyre, Jeremy Clarkson, Russell Brand, Jo Brand, Jacob Rees-Mogg, etc.) for my own amusement; I regret nothing.

Following the announcement of Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor, though, I fell silent. Uncharacteristically for me, I don’t think I sent a single tweet, about anything, the day of the announcement (in Australia we got it in the early morning). In part this was because I was still processing the news, trying to figure out how I felt about it, and didn’t want to prematurely denounce it—because my immediate instinct was to denounce it. But it was also because, interspersed between the glowing, rapturous positivity and joy over Jodie’s casting coming from every direction, there was the smug, faux-indignant calling-out of those disappointed in the casting as ‘sexists’, ‘bigots’, ‘misogynists’. It was really quite repulsive and hateful. People, both men and women, saying innocuous things about being disappointed with Jodie’s casting were being quoted by people who’ve already changed their icon to Jodie Whittaker in a flower crown, with “Lmao just say you hate women” and “LMAO LOOK AT THIS FUCKING SEXIST”.

Sure, there were the actual sexists reacting with opprobrium to the news, typically found in places like the comments section of the Daily Mail rather than on Twitter—who, I agree with the female Doctor people, can fuck off. But the number of actual sexists among the no-female-Doctor crowd is actually minuscule. I can count the number of people I’ve seen express opposition to a female Doctor out of a bigoted attitude towards women on one hand. The people you see in Daily Mail comments sections don’t even watch Doctor Who, or haven’t watched it since the 1970s. This show isn’t for them. They’re the same people who take to the comments section, frothy-mouthed, over every trivial offence of political correctness and encroaching “Cultural Marxism”. Most opponents of a female Doctor who are actually fans of the show simply think of the Doctor as a man and have trouble accepting, on an emotional level, that a female Doctor is the same character—we’d find it difficult to accept a male Hermione for the same reason. If you consider that sexist, then you need to go read a dictionary.

me, watching all the white men cry over the fact the 13th doctor is female pic.twitter.com/4B2cBsTOIJ

— eloise (@lyanastcrk) July 16, 2017

And let’s not forget that the people who don’t want a female Doctor aren’t all men. I’ve seen almost as many women expressing disappointment in the casting decision as men, if not more (probably because women aren’t scared by baseless, cynical accusations of sexism). All my female friends who watch Doctor Who whom I’ve asked have said they’re opposed to the change. This gets ignored because it doesn’t fit the neat “women versus sexist white males” narrative. The few times I’ve seen the more strident female Doctor proponents actually engage with women who’ve expressed their opposition to a female Doctor (instead of simply ignoring them, as they usually do), the former just tend to brush the latter off with something vague about “internalised misogyny”. Figures.

Maybe it looks pathetic or oversensitive to get upset by the ignorant, braindead tweets of 16-year olds, but it’s just an example of the hate and bile that’s suddenly consumed this fandom. If not outright hate and bile, from my experience, among even casual, non-strident supporters of a female Doctor the lazy, smug assumption that those who don’t want a female Doctor are probably sexist seems to be fairly commonly held. Merriam-Webster’s tweet, that “’Doctor’ has no gender in English” exemplifies this attitude. It’s the attitude that being opposed to a female Doctor is something inherently blameworthy and morally suspect, and not an understandable response to changing the gender of a character one has known as a man for 13 regenerations and 53 years. I feel like using the term “virtue-signalling” is to risk being placed in suspect company in the eyes of reasonable folk, but for present purposes it’s a useful concept to describe what this is: it’s very easy for those who support a female Doctor, in the eagerness to display their tolerance and progressiveness, to fall into the unscrutinised assumption that the other side are all bigots.

That’s not to say that our side has done much to dispel that assumption, when we have cranks writing angry, incoherent things about feminists and “SJWs”, which is almost as odious as the actual feminists and SJWs throwing accusations of sexism around like confetti. It’s hard to believe that it wasn’t that long ago that we were able to have a civil, respectful discussion about a female Doctor in this fandom. The female Doctor debate has always been tense, but before now it’s also managed to remain civil. I remember participating in discussions about a female Doctor, where both sides tended to respect the other side’s views, and the few idiots who threw around accusations of sexism were rightly shut down by other female Doctor supporters (as were the “feminists are ruining everything” brigade by our side).

'Doctor' has no gender in English.

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) July 17, 2017

I think the difference is that, then, they were the minority view, and, as anyone expressing an unpopular point of view does, you watch what you say and how you say it, to avoid the brunt of the ire of the majority. Now they’re the majority and they’ve won. The bile thrown at opponents of a female Doctor now has the flavour of smug triumphalism more so than genuine indignity. They’ve won, we’ve lost, we don’t matter anymore, but they’re taking the opportunity to have their fun provoking us, ridiculing us, parading our naked bodies through the streets for the visceral amusement of the citizens of the victorious nation. The message is clear: we’re not welcome in the fandom anymore; it’s their city now. So we can either deal with it or fuck off.

To be clear, I’m not talking about all female Doctor supporters. If you’re pleased with Jodie’s casting and you don’t think that everyone who isn’t probably hates women, then I’m not talking about you. This post isn’t about you, and I don’t have a single uncharitable thing to say about you. You’re fine in my book. I am talking about the people who somehow manage to assert with a straight face that it’s inherently sexist not to want a female Doctor and that all opponents of a female Doctor are sexists. I know there are many female Doctor supporters who are conscientious and fair-minded people who respect the other side.

If a Twitter poll conducted by the account @WhovianLeap is to be believed, the nice female Doctor people are the majority: it asked “Is it sexist to want a male Doctor?” to which, out of 626 votes, 73% answered NO and 27% answered YES (assuming that the majority of respondents would have been female Doctor supporters). So, while 27% is still an uncomfortably large number of people who think I’m a sexist, it’s reassuringly clear that the great majority of fans don’t consider it sexist to think the Doctor should remain a man.

Is it sexist to want a male Doctor? #doctorwho #drwho

— Whovian Leap (@WhovianLeap) July 16, 2017

But don’t be mistaken, there’s still a deep rift in the fandom, one I can’t see being healed any time soon. As long as the Doctor is played by a woman, this underlying division in the fandom is always going to remain close to the surface. We who found ourselves on the losing side of this casting decision, even those of us who warm to Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor (as I hope I do), aren’t going to forget the torrent of vitriol we were subjected to. We aren’t going to forget that a significant proportion of this fandom hated us and wanted us out of the fandom. Arguably more than anything that’s happened before, this decision has split the fandom in two in a way that I fear is irreversible.

I expect that the number of the alienated will diminish over time as some of those who were opposed to the casting change their minds and come round to Jodie’s Doctor, and others simply leave. Somehow I think that’s what the people I’m talking about want: for this decision to decimate the “problematic” element of the fandom which doesn’t want a female Doctor, and for a new, progressive fandom and a new, progressive Doctor Who to emerge from the ashes of the problematic old.

Already we’re being erased: Radio Times claimed that the “overwhelming majority of Doctor Who fans” are “looking forward to the first female Doctor” based on a poll the website conducted, where the proportion of respondents who answered that they were looking forward to seeing Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor was 40%, and the plurality of respondents (43%) answered that they would reserve judgment until they saw her. If this isn’t fake news, then nothing is. Piers Wenger, the Controller of BBC Drama, remarked on the “overwhelmingly positive response” to the casting of the first female Doctor in reference to the number of views the teaser trailer has accumulated. At the time of writing this, that teaser trailer has 57,732 to 36,064 likes to dislikes on YouTube, a ratio 62% to 38%. By no definition is that an “overwhelmingly positive” response. It’s a travesty for the BBC. It shows that it’s made a decision which is unpopular with at least a third of viewers. We may not be the majority, but we’re a very formidable minority, and it’s insulting to pretend we don’t exist.

It might be more helpful to be encouraging, and not simply scornful, of fans who are uncertain about change.

— Peter Davison (@PeterDavison5) July 17, 2017

My plea to Chris Chibnall and the BBC is not to take the side of the head-bangers. My plea to the makers of Doctor Who is not to fall into the easy assumption that everyone opposed to this decision is a bigot. We number at least a third of the fanbase, and count among our number some of Doctor Who’s longest, most devoted and most prominent fans, including, it appears, the likes of Peter Davison (who, unlike most Doctor Who people, gave no ringing endorsement of Jodie’s casting, but instead tellingly urged the Twitter mob to cool it with the hate towards disappointed fans).

You don’t want to alienate us, because we’re not going to take it on the chin. We’re not going to appreciate snide asides about sexism and intolerance directed against us punctuated throughout Series 11. We’re not going to abide being made to feel like we’re not welcome in this fandom anymore by the show. We want you to understand us, and show that you understand why we feel the way we do. We don’t ask that the decision be reversed, just that you extend an olive branch and show us that you want us to keep watching. We’re worried about the future of our show, and, as hard as it is to believe, given how angry we sound, we really do want to like this change, and we want you to help us like it, because we love this show, and the alternative—to stop watching Doctor Who—doesn’t bear thinking about.

As for female Doctor supporters, I’m not even going to try to reason with the ones who are beyond reason, but to the rest of you I only want to say: as long as we’re still on opposing sides of a divided fandom, let’s at least try to be friends. Let’s at least try to be civil and courteous and respectful towards one another. Can we still geek out together over the Christmas special, Twelve’s regeneration, the Twelveclara reunion, and everything amazing Series 11 and the Chibnall era is going to bring us, while agreeing to disagree over our feelings about the next Doctor? (At least while we still do disagree) Without calling each other names? Because being in a divided fandom is no fun at all.

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See also on Gallifreyan Ramblings:

• Thirteen: my feelings about a female Doctor
• The female Doctor question once more
• On a female Doctor and sex-change regeneration

Thirteen: my feelings about a female Doctor

It’s been nearly 36 hours since I learned the identity of our Thirteenth Doctor, and I think I’m now ready to write this. It’s taken me that long to process what happened yesterday and to work out how I felt about it. I’m still processing it, to be honest. I mean, I could have turned out a post quickly on the day of the announcement and probably attracted a lot more hits, but it would have been raw, emotional and full of uncooked, unformed and probably not entirely coherent thoughts. I’m someone who typically can’t be counted on for immediate reactions (which is why my reviews always take a day or two). Especially with something as big as this, I tend to need time to work out how I feel, and, now I’ve had that time, I think I’m now ready to put my thoughts into something approximating sober and considered form.

I didn’t want a female Doctor. I still don’t. You can read my thoughts on the matter in full here, but the tl;dr version is that I think of the Doctor as a man, and I have trouble accepting that an incarnation of the Doctor played by a female actor is the same character played by Peter Capaldi, Matt Smith, David Tennant, Tom Baker and William Hartnell et al, a character I love. Jodie Whittaker is a fine actress—she’s a top choice for a female Doctor and I am confident she will acquit herself superlatively in the role. But that’s not the problem for me. The problem for me is that I feel that Doctor Who is a man, so a ‘female Doctor (Who)’ is a contradiction in terms. I felt that way before, and the announcement, even of an actress as fine as Jodie Whittaker, hasn’t changed how I feel.

The standard riposte to this sentiment is something along the lines of “the Doctor is a shapeshifting alien who has been canonically established as being able to change gender and race, so, no, the Doctor is not a man and your feelings are invalid”. Well, I’m sorry if “your feelings are invalid, deal with it” doesn’t convince me. I can’t just change my feelings or turn them off at will. That’s not how feelings work. Especially after I’ve watched thirteen regenerations of the Doctor as a man and have come to identify and connect with the character as a man. Throwing continuity at me isn’t going to going to make me suddenly shed my feelings about the character and accept a female Doctor—because remember this isn’t about the abstract question of the nature of Time Lord regeneration, this is about a character, a person, that I love. This isn’t about whether the Doctor can regenerate into a woman (we know and accept, now, that he can), it’s about whether I and so many other fans can accept that Jodie Whittaker is our favourite fictional character when that casting decision has taken away something fundamental to how we identify that character.

That in the previous sentence I used the pronoun ‘he’ instinctively to identify the Doctor, without even thinking about it, attests to the point I’m trying to make: I’m not going to be able to easily adjust to using ‘she’ or ‘they’ as instinctively and as comfortably as I currently use ‘he’. Please try to understand this.

Credit to AarontheGeek on Reddit

The other riposte I’ve seen is the “this show is all about change, and that you don’t want a female Doctor shows you don’t understand this” argument. Okay, first, to nitpick, change is a central feature and theme of the show, but the show is not “about” change. When you’re trying to make your friends watch Doctor Who and they ask you what it’s about, your reply isn’t “it’s about change”, you typically explain that it’s about the adventures of a time-travelling alien and his friends. Invariably you identify the character of the Doctor as central when you’re explaining what the show is about.

And that’s important—even diehard female Doctor proponents would not deny that the character of the Doctor, not the abstract thematic idea of “change”, is the most important thing in Doctor Who. You simply could not have Doctor Who without the Doctor. So “change, my dears” is a justified argument when made against the idiotic, shrill Tennant fangirls (those that are still inexplicably around, anyway) who insist that David Tennant and only David Tennant can be the Doctor. But when a very sizeable proportion of the fandom are concerned that something fundamental to the character has been compromised too far for their tastes, “change” just doesn’t cut it as an argument, I’m afraid.

In any case, even if it is true that change is a central theme of the show, that doesn’t entail that any and all change is therefore necessarily good. Do I actually have to restate that fans are allowed to dislike things in the show – decisions made by the writers and producers? That fans are even allowed to dislike a Doctor? There were plenty of fans who turned off when Peter Capaldi was cast because “he’s old” (including the friend who first turned me onto Doctor Who)—something far more trivial than that the new Doctor has switched genders. I think those fans were missing out on what has been one of the greatest ever Doctors, but I respect that that’s entirely their prerogative if they don’t want to watch an old Doctor.

In any case, as fundamental as the theme of change is to the show, Doctor Who is a show as equally steeped in tradition. I’m not really sure how this is being ignored, if not outright denied. The Tardis, the phonebox, the-Daleks-and-the-Cybermen, toilet plungers, young female companions, Britishness, pacifism. I think even most female Doctor proponents would be reluctant to change any of those things. A US-centric (rather than British-centric) Doctor Who with an all-American Doctor Who cast? I think practically all female Doctor proponents would, rightly, reject that. Because Doctor Who is a British show. It doesn’t have to be British-centric, but it is, and we like it that way. And we don’t have to accept that Doctor Who turns all Midwestern accents and streets of Manhattan if we don’t want to.

I think I’ve made my point. Admittedly that went on for a lot longer than I intended it to. But what I’ve been discussing up to here is my feelings about a female Doctor in the abstract. Ask me in the abstract: do I want a female Doctor? No. But, no matter what I want or feel, it isn’t abstract any more. Whether I like it or not, the Thirteenth Doctor is a woman. It’s reality. Jodie Whittaker will be listed after Peter Capaldi’s name in canonical lists of the Doctors from now until the end of time, and that can’t be changed.

So I think the best I can do is to continue to watch and hope that my mind is changed. I’m not going to stop watching. I love this show too much for that. In everything I’ve written about a female Doctor before now, I’ve repeatedly said that, while I didn’t want it to happen, I would try to keep an open mind and give a female Doctor a chance. I intend to keep that promise. I would like, by the end of Series 11, at least, to be prepared to take back everything I’ve written in this post before this paragraph. Because I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m not.

So what I want to say now to female Doctor proponents, particularly Chris Chibnall, is this. Okay, you’ve got your wish. Congratulations – I genuinely mean that, and I’m genuinely happy that you’re happy. It’s heartwarming to see that this is so meaningful to so many people. But don’t forget that we still exist, we who never wanted a female Doctor at all and still don’t want one, and that there are many of us. No doubt you’ve seen our tweets and our comments. Ignore the sexists and the bigots—I’m not speaking for them, and I don’t want them in our fandom any more than you do.

But as one of the many fans worried about a female Doctor, I want you to know that, for now, I’m game. I’m going to follow your lead on this. You’ve extolled the virtues and the promises of a female Doctor for so long, and now that we have one, I don’t really have a choice except to go along with it. Now that we have a female Doctor, I’m interested in seeing how it works out, and I’m willing to be won over. But I’m trusting you on this. This was your victory, and you led us into this.  So naturally I’m holding you responsible for how it works out. If a female Doctor succeeds and, as I hope, I warm to the change, I will graciously admit that you were right all along. But if it doesn’t, please try to be humble when I say “I told you so.”

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Next time on Gallifreyan Ramblings: another female Doctor post. I feel like I need to say something about what has been happening in the fandom since Sunday’s announcement, because it’s not pretty, and, from a fandom perspective, it’s almost as noteworthy as the female Doctor news itself. I didn’t want to discuss that here because it’s probably going to be a lengthy discussion in its own right, and I didn’t want to detract from what I’m trying to say here. It does merit a post of its own, and I’ll try to have that one up in the following days.

By the way, read my original (pre-Jodie) female Doctor post for a fuller, more detached account of my thoughts on a female Doctor, if you’re interested.

The female Doctor question once more

It’s been almost a month since Peter Capaldi announced his intention to leave Doctor Who at the end of 2017. In remarkably quick time the fandom has turned from lamenting Peter Capaldi’s impending departure, to speculating excitedly about the identity of the actor who will be playing the 13th Doctor, to now fighting angrily amongst itself in the latest fandom war to break out in this exceptionally quarrelsome fandom. I’m talking about the controversy over the question of whether the Doctor should be played by a woman. It’s not really a new controversy—it rears its head every time the question of the next Doctor comes up and every time anyone publicly speculates about the future of Doctor Who. Not to mention every time Steven Moffat gives a self-indulgent wink to the fans indicating the possibility of the Doctor one day undergoing a sex-flipping regeneration.

But there’s something different about the discourse about a prospective female Doctor this time. It’s like the calls for a female Doctor have finally reached fever pitch. The people calling for a female Doctor are calling louder and shriller than ever before. There’s no humility in the calls for a female Doctor any more. What used to be speculation and suggestion about the possibility of a female Doctor has turned practically into demand, coupled with an intolerance for the views of those who don’t want such a radical change to the show’s format. I’ve never seen it like this before. It’s practically at the point where those pushing for a female Doctor won’t accept any new actor cast as the 13th Doctor who isn’t a woman.

I’ve elaborated on why I don’t want a female Doctor before, but with the female Doctor idea being pushed so forcefully at the moment, I feel compelled to reiterate my position. I’ve seen various reasons put forward in opposition to a female Doctor, but fundamentally, for me, it’s about being true to the character. For me, it’s simple: the Doctor is a male character. The Doctor is a man. I’ve never thought of the Doctor as anything other than a man. I don’t think generations of fans and producers of this show since the 1960s have ever thought of the Doctor as anything other than a man, as indicated by the fact that in 53 years and 13 regenerations, the Doctor has only ever been played by male actors. For me, at least, casting a female actor to play the Doctor would not be true to the character. I would feel that a 13th Doctor played by a female actor would lack something intrinsic and fundamental to the character, which is the character’s gender. Seeing the Doctor played by a woman, I think and I fear that I would feel, “This character is not the Doctor. She is another character (maybe even a good character) but she is not the Doctor.”

As I said in my earlier post on the subject:

I’ve come to love this character, the Doctor, independent of any of his individual incarnations. When I think of the Doctor, no individual incarnation springs immediately to mind, but I think of a number of essential traits that make this overarching character, this person, who he is: heroic, principled, selfless, eccentric, lonely, mysterious — and a man. I very much get the feeling that, throughout his various incarnations, despite looking and feeling different after each regeneration, the Doctor remains the same person, and it’s very important to me, for my investment in the character, that the Doctor always feels like the same person. To an extent, at least, I’d feel that the Doctor had become a different person if the Doctor were to become a woman. After thirteen or however many incarnations as a man, I think I’d feel that I couldn’t recognise a female Doctor as the character I knew and loved; that a female actor is likely to depart in a fundamental way from how the character has been portrayed in the past would only exacerbate this feeling.

“But Time Lords don’t have a fixed sex, it’s been shown they can regenerate into the opposite sex, so the Doctor is not a man” might come the objection. My first response to that would be that all that’s been shown onscreen is two Time Lords regenerating into the opposite sex, one, the Master, after a long history of having been a man (like the Doctor), and one, the General, whose first words after regenerating were “Back to normal, am I?” It’s not been established canonically when and how Time Lords can regenerate into the opposite sex—it certainly hasn’t been confirmed that every Time Lord can do it, or that a sex change is a 50% chance for every Time Lord. That the Doctor has been a man 13 times out of 13 so far suggests that there’s more involved than pure random chance.

But I recognise that Moffat (or Chibnall, if he is so inclined) could easily retcon that continuity and establish with a single throwaway line in a forgettable script that the Doctor has an equal chance of regenerating into a man or a woman, and that he’s just had exceptionally unusual luck so far. So the more important answer to the objection above is that just because the Doctor can be made to regenerate into a woman, doesn’t mean he should. The whole idea of sex-flipping regeneration is very new in the history of the show (2011 was the first reference I believe), and the Doctor has now been a man for 13 regenerations and 53 years offscreen or over 2,000 years onscreen. He’s long been widely and popularly identified as a male character, and the Doctor was entrenched in the fandom’s consciousness and the broader cultural consciousness as an iconic male character long before Steven Moffat turned up on the scene, late-coming, and told us all that, actually, the Doctor isn’t a male character, he’s actually a bisexual gender-fluid sequential hermaphrodite (as I once saw it amusingly put), and that our long-standing identification and association of the Doctor as a male character is wrong and misplaced.

That’s my view, for what it’s worth. I fully respect the views of those who disagree with me and take a different perspective, as long as they respect mine. Because it’s an increasingly common thing among the more ardent supporters of a female Doctor to dismiss everyone who doesn’t take their position as misogynists. Because apparently there’s no other possible reason a person might be reluctant to radically change a fundamental part of the format of a 53-year old show other than hatred of one half of the human race. Even the substantial number of female fans who oppose a female Doctor. Apparently they hate women, too. Sounds legit. Perhaps there are people who oppose a female Doctor because of misogynistic motivations, but I would assume their number is minuscule, because one wonders why misogynists would spend their time watching a show which so proudly elevates and empowers its female characters.

I know that the majority of supporters of a female Doctor are reasonable, intelligent people who do not believe that opponents of the idea are all misogynists. I’ve been in many debates about a female Doctor before and the majority of those arguing for a female Doctor have been reasonable and respectful of the views of those of us who disagree. But there is a vocal minority who do take that line, and they’re incredibly stubborn and infuriating people to argue with, who are typically projecting their own profound intolerance onto others. In this respect it’s regretful to see that Radio Times has, since Peter Capaldi announced his departure, become a prominent voice pushing the “all-opponents-of-a-female-Doctor-are-misogynists” line with its articles containing thinly-veiled suggestions to that effect, giving unwelcome respectability to that view.

Something else I worry about with the push for a female Doctor is that it would be done for all the wrong reasons. If it’s done for genuinely creative reasons, because the producers are interested in the creative possibilities casting a woman as the Doctor opens up, that’s fine. I respect that, even I don’t agree with it. I can’t respect the decision if it’s done for political reasons, to promote a social agenda, or simply to be progressive or politically correct. Doctor Who isn’t another front for a progressive social agenda, another hive of reactionary social oppression that needs to be prised open by the winds of equality, it’s a TV show for kids. When it comes to casting for a TV show, “it’s time” just isn’t an argument. Why is it time? Is it oppression to be denied the opportunity to be Doctor Who? Is playing the Doctor a human right now? Should we inform the UN, in that case? Forgive my saltiness, but I really don’t have patience for arguments like this. A casting decision should always be a creative one with the purpose of making the best work possible, not a political one, because when politics is elevated above art in making casting decisions, by definition worse casting decisions are made and the show, as art, suffers.

I mean, I wonder what would be gained politically by turning an established and iconic male character into a woman as a purely symbolic act, especially considering the backlash from the substantial proportion of fans who don’t want a female Doctor. I’m not sure that the campaign to turn established male characters into women is the best progressive strategy considering how much it annoys fans (male and female) of the franchises in question. In any case, I’m not even sure a decision to turn an iconic and long-established male character like the Doctor into a woman, when the person making that decision knows that they would face a huge backlash from a substantial number of fans if they did so, can ever not be political. Even if the decision is made predominantly for creative reasons, the decision to cast a woman as the Doctor, after 13 men have played the character and after the character has been entrenched in popular consciousness for so long as a man, couldn’t not be fundamentally political. It would almost certainly be perceived that way, especially if Chibnall uses the words “it’s time”, as he would, in reference to the decision.

All that said, I’m not necessarily saying that if a woman were cast as the 13th Doctor, I wouldn’t give it a chance. As I said in my earlier post on the subject, I would most likely continue watching the show and I would keep an open mind about the change—I would even be interested in how a female Doctor would be played out, like most fans, I’m sure. I would be prepared to admit that I was wrong about how I thought I would feel, and that I end up continuing to identify a female Doctor as the character I love. But I think my reservations are legitimate, and I would rather it not happen at all than see it go ahead on the unlikely chance that I end up warming to the change. And it’s not just me—as I mentioned a number of times, there are a substantial number of fans, if not a majority, who are opposed to a female Doctor. It’s worth considering whether what the idea’s supporters want from a female Doctor is worth alienating a huge proportion of the fandom for.

Peter Capaldi’s departure

So, for anyone who hasn’t heard the earth-shattering news, Peter Capaldi will be leaving Doctor Who after Series 10, to regenerate in the 2017 Christmas special. I wasn’t ready for the news to be honest, because it doesn’t feel that long ago that we welcomed Capaldi into the role. But, on the other hand, I was kind of expecting this. Peter’s not a young man, and the role inevitably takes its toll even on sprightly youngsters like Matt Smith and David Tennant. And three seasons, or four years, seems to have become the convention for an actor’s run as the Doctor these days. Anyway, here are some of the thoughts that have been running through my head since I heard the news.

On one level I’m disappointed. Peter Capaldi has been an absolutely fantastic Doctor and it was always going to be sad to see him leave. Although I admit it took me a while to warm to him after Matt left, over Series 9 I came to adore him, so much that I count him as my second favourite Doctor after Matt Smith, and Twelve and Clara have become my favourite Doctor and companion team after Eleven and the Ponds. Of course I knew that Peter had to leave eventually, but I thought (or hoped) that with Peter it would be different. I saw uniquely in Peter, unlike in Matt, the potential to become the next iconic Doctor Who, the show’s modern Tom Baker, if he stayed around for an extended run. I would have loved to have seen Peter establish himself in the role long-term. I would have loved to have seen his face and his name become synonymous with the Doctor, like Tom Baker was. Given how much Peter revered the show and loved the role, and given that he wasn’t a young actor like David or Matt with full careers ahead of them, I half expected him to do exactly that. But alas. It’s been a privilege to have had Peter at all, so I can’t complain that he didn’t stay for longer.

Peter has undoubtedly been the best actor ever to star in the role. He brought compelling gravitas, intensity and passion to the role. His Doctor was utterly bewitching to watch. Unlike most actors who take up the role, usually up-and-coming actors or relatively small names, Peter was a distinguished and widely-respected actor when he took the role. It’s probably not exaggerating to say Peter was (and is) one of the most distinguished British actors of his generation. The role was, frankly, below him, but he took it up anyway because he loved the show so much and it was his childhood dream to be the Doctor. Do we realise how privileged we are to have had him? Without at all detracting from Matt or David or Chris or any of the other actors who’ve played the role, Peter’s performances were just of a higher calibre than any who’ve come before him, as the tours de force of Heaven Sent, Hell Bent, Twelve’s speech in The Zygon Inversion proved. You could see how devoted to the role he was by the way he put everything into his performances, and it’s made for some of the best Doctor Who ever (in my opinion).

When Twelve regenerates we’ll get a new actor in the role, and that in itself is exciting, as sad as it is to see Peter go. The speculation has already started (and I’m going to join in soon—watch this space!) What’s already clear is that the calls for a female Doctor are louder than ever this time round. I’ve shared my reasons why I don’t want a female Doctor before, but since the topic has come up again I’m going to write another post on the topic soon reiterating my thoughts. I’m not sure what I would do if, come Christmas, Twelve regenerates and the Doctor is a woman, but I think I would keep watching, albeit begrudgingly. I would give it a chance, at least, but I can’t see it working.

In any case I think it’s unlikely that a female actor will be cast as the next Doctor. A new showrunner is taking over, and, with Peter (and probably Pearl, too) going at the same time, everything is going to be new. Like in 2010, it’ll practically be a reboot, and the show has to win its audience over all over again. I think, in those circumstances, Chibnall and the production team would consider that introducing a female Doctor would be too big a risk to take, because if the audience don’t take to a female Doctor and turn away from the show, the BBC might easily be tempted to make the decision that the show is finished and cancel it.

On the subject of Series 11, though, even though I would have loved to have seen Peter continue as the Doctor under Chris Chibnall and see a new showrunner’s interpretation of his Doctor, I’m also excited by the prospect of a 2010-style (soft) reboot. A totally clean slate. That means, I guess, Pearl would have to go, too. I realise it might be uncharitable to Pearl to advocate for her to leave before we’ve even seen her, but I have a feeling that she’s only staying around for one series anyway, since Series 10 is Moffat’s final series. Maybe Chibnall would have preferred to have some familiar faces around him when he started, maybe not, but the opportunity to totally reinvent the show, with a completely clean slate, is too good to pass up. I think Steven Moffat’s total overhaul of the show in 2010 was immensely successful in breathing new life into the show and ushering in an exciting new era. I’m looking forward to seeing how Chibnall recasts Doctor Who in his vision.

Now, let’s start preparing ourselves for another emotional regeneration. What am I saying? You know you’re going to cry, you may as well accept it. At least we’ll get to see Twelve with Clara again… *lip quivers*

Doctor Who headcanon #2

Time Lord regeneration is both the secret to the continuing success of Doctor Who, and one of the great mysteries of Doctor Who mythos. It’s easy to forget that the Doctor isn’t human, but each time the Doctor regenerates, losing his old face and persona and gaining new, we are reminded of the alienness of the Doctor and his kind, the Time Lords, as represented by the wonder of regeneration. Time Lords are creatures of time — they “walk in eternity”, as the Fourth Doctor so enigmatically put it. The essence of time is change, and regeneration reflects this aspect of time. You think you know the Doctor, but there goes and regenerates, and suddenly he’s no longer the man you know. When you appreciate that the Doctor has done this twelve times in a lifespan of over 2000 years, you realise how really alien and inhuman the Doctor, and his species, is.

Much ambiguity surrounds the concept of regeneration in Doctor Who lore. It has never really been made clear what actually happens when a Time Lord regenerates. True to form, we fans have tried our best to nail down the precise mechanics of regeneration, but, ultimately, until more explicit evidence is provided, it is a question open to interpretation.

Which is where headcanon comes in. Some time ago I read a contributor’s piece on Doctor Who TV which speculated that regeneration involves the total “death” of the Time Lord in body and mind, wherein the consciousness of the Time Lord’s former incarnation is disintegrated alongside the physical body and is replicated in the new body. In this way, each incarnation of a Time Lord has a separate consciousness. I’m not satisfied with this explanation, as I don’t really like the idea that the only relation that any given incarnation of the Doctor has with his previous incarnations is that they are made up of the same atoms and share memories. This theory almost denies that the Doctor is the same person as his previous selves. Are a man’s memories all that makes him who he is?

I prefer to think that regeneration is an organic process that is supposed to rapidly “renew” the Time Lord’s body, rather than dissolving the old body and constructing an entirely new body. The change happens at a cellular level: the cells remake themselves to rejuvenate the whole body. This process is imperfect, though, and the regeneration process will result in a physical change of appearance — a side-effect of regeneration. The regenerative process also has the effect of frazzling the brain, resulting in an altered personality, but, ultimately, continuity of consciousness. In this way, aspects of personality due to “nature” (i.e. preferences, persona) change, but not those due to “nurture” (i.e. values and principles, memories, things that are learned or due to experience).

This interpretation can also be distinguished from theories that see regeneration as involving a “body-swap” wherein an existing body is simply changed into another body (while consciousness and memories are retained). I don’t see regeneration as exchanging one body for a completely different one, but as a complete and drastic renewal of the same body. I think it is the disposition towards seeing regeneration as a simple “body-swap” that leads many to embrace the possibility of a female Doctor: the argument is that there is no reason the Doctor could not regenerate and find that he has ended up with a female body. In contrast, the way I prefer to see regeneration — as a renewal of the existing body rather than changing one body for another — means the idea of a female Doctor is more problematic, as it is hard to see how a male body could renew itself into something other than a male body. The objection could be raised, “But how is it any different from a young man (Eleven) regenerating into an old man (Twelve)?” Ignoring the fact that Eleven had physically aged to an extent that made him physically older than Twelve when his regeneration process began, I’d suggest that such changes as physical age, height, complexion, hair colour, facial structure, weight, etc, are essentially superficial changes of outward appearance. In contrast, a change from man to woman, involves a fundamental chromosomal shift, which begs the question: if one chromosome can slip, why not two? Why do not Time Lords routinely regenerate into non-humanoid forms?

I suppose the way one looks at the mechanics of regeneration also depends on what explanation for the origins of regeneration one accepts. To my knowledge, two different explanations for Time Lords’ ability to regenerate have been offered in the show. The traditional explanation, developed in the expanded media, was that regeneration is an artificial aspect of Time Lords’ physiology inserted by Rassilon during his shaping of Time Lord civilisation. The more recent explanation propounded in the revived series is that Time Lords evolved the ability to regenerate naturally, per A Good Man Goes to War:

DOCTOR: “But she’s human. She’s Amy and Rory’s daughter.”
VASTRA: “You’ve told me about your people. They became what they did through prolonged exposure to the time vortex. The Untempered Schism.”
DOCTOR: “Over billions of years. It didn’t just happen.”

This explanation posits that Time Lords evolved the ability to regenerate due to billions’ of years exposure to the time vortex. A similar process, River Song’s conception in the TARDIS, brought about the ability to regenerate in her.

These two explanations are plainly in clear contradiction with each other: either Rassilon did artificially insert regeneration into the Time Lord genome, or he didn’t; either regeneration is a result of natural evolution, or it isn’t. Such a contradiction can be resolved by resorting to Rule 3 of my headcanon rules: “Any blatant contradictions between onscreen explanations can be resolved by preferring the most recent explanation.” Rule 9 also comes into play: “Only the television show is explicitly canon; the audio stories, novels and comics are canon if you want them to be, but are not necessarily so.” Since the traditional explanation was only propounded in the expanded media, its canonicity must be subordinated to the later onscreen explanation. Another related piece of Time Lord backstory developed in the expanded media but retconned in the revived series was the idea that Time Lords are “born” fully grown through an artificial process of being “loomed” into existence from DNA strands — The Sound of Drums and Listen have showed Time Lords as children (the Master and the Doctor respectively), as did The Day of the Doctor, which made mention of “2.47 billion” children who died on Gallifrey (and indeed showed some Gallifreyan children).

So I prefer the “evolutionary” explanation for regeneration rather than the “artificial” explanation. It occurs to me that, if one accepts the evolutionary explanation, one would be more disposed to seeing regeneration as a restorative process (as I do) rather than as a process involving a total reconstitution of the body, or a body-swap. Conflicting views of the implications of regeneration, can be, if not resolved, but at least better understood, when the different interpretations of the mechanics and origins of regeneration are understood.

On a female Doctor and sex-change regeneration

The regeneration of the Master into Missy has brought to the fore debate over the prospect of a female Doctor. The debate among the fandom about whether the Doctor should one day regenerate into a female form onscreen has been as vociferous as any debate about UNIT dating, whether Susan named the TARDIS, or whether or not Adric was an annoying tit. It was first established that sex changes for Time Lords were possible when the Eleventh Doctor remarked in The Doctor’s Wife that another Time Lord, the Corsair, had regenerated into a woman “a couple of times”. Subsequently, in The Night of the Doctor, the Sisterhood of Karn divulged to the Eighth Doctor that, with their “elevated” Time Lord science, they could bring about a controlled regeneration, even to change him into a female. Now that a major male Time Lord character has been shown onscreen to have regenerated into a woman, the prospect of a female Doctor has become more real than ever.

Personally, while I thought the Master’s sex change was very successful, and while I’m not completely closed to the idea of a female Doctor, I do have significant reservations. For one, I think portraying the Doctor as a female would be incongruous with the essential nature of the character. The Doctor, to me, is an intrinsically male character — not overtly or stereotypically male in that he’s some kind of chest-beating ape, but still very much a masculine character. Paul Verhoeven explains it well. He’s a father figure to the universe, a defensive and loving dad. It’s clear he sees himself in a very paternal way — he feels he has an obligation to look after the universe, to protect his charges from bullies and meanies of all sorts, to step in and give a helping hand, as a father should. He loves and is loved by the universe as a fatherly protector.

As well as this, there’s my personal subjective preference for the Doctor to remain a male character. I’ve come to love this character, the Doctor, independent of any of his individual incarnations. When I think of the Doctor, no individual incarnation springs immediately to mind, but I think of a number of essential traits that make this overarching character, this person, who he is: heroic, principled, selfless, eccentric, lonely, mysterious — and a man. I very much get the feeling that, throughout his various incarnations, despite looking and feeling different after each regeneration, the Doctor remains the same person, and it’s very important to me, for my investment in the character, that the Doctor always feels like the same person. To an extent, at least, I’d feel that the Doctor had become a different person if the Doctor were to become a woman. After thirteen or however many incarnations as a man, I think I’d feel that I couldn’t recognise a female Doctor as the character I knew and loved; that a female actor is likely to depart in a fundamental way from how the character has been portrayed in the past would only exacerbate this feeling. Think of it as if a loved one or a very old and dear friend suddenly decided to get a sex change. After the operation and after that person has assumed their new identity, I think most people would feel that, although that person bears a resemblance to the person they used to be in many ways, it would be as though the person one knew and loved had essentially gone, or at least changed to the point of unfamiliarity. That’s because sex is not just biological happenstance — the sex organs you happen to possess — it is a fundamental part of what makes a person who they are.

All that said, I said I’m not completely closed to the idea. Although I have my reservations, I’m willing to be open-minded, and consider any proposal for a female Doctor on its merits. If a female were to be cast as the Doctor, I’d certainly watch with an open (even interested) mind and be willing to embrace the change. I could very well be wrong: a female Doctor might not be as incongruous as I expect, and I might identify with her as recognisably the character I love. At the same time, I think my reservations are legitimate, and I can’t help but be sceptical and respectfully opposed to the idea. However, I think it may, at least, be worth road-testing the concept of a female Doctor in a one-off episode in which the Doctor inadvertently turns into a female for the duration of the episode. The way the Doctor, as a female, relates to his/her dumbfounded companions would be worth watching, although I think the idea might have worked better with Matt Smith’s Doctor (with the Ponds) than with Peter Capaldi’s: I can imagine Twelve turning into worse-than-everybody’s-aunt, played by Judi Dench or Maggie Smith.

Sex-change regeneration

There’s also the more academic matter of in what circumstances Time Lords can regenerate into the opposite sex. Personally, I’d rather that it not be established canonically that regeneration is completely random with regards to sex, and that Time Lords are equally likely to regenerate into the opposite sex as remain the same. That is, I don’t want it to be established that Time Lords, as one participant in such a debate amusingly put it, are a race of bisexual gender-fluid sequential hermaphrodites. That’s not because I’m a bigot, it just blatantly contradicts all history of portrayal of Time Lords on the programme, and would seem like a liberty taken with the canon for narrow political reasons, as a way of championing transsexualism.

The evidence is that one Time Lord, the Master, has regenerated into a woman after more than one regeneration cycle of being a man. All the other Time Lords we’ve seen have always regenerated into the same sex, with one offscreen exception (the Corsair). This doesn’t exactly suggest that regeneration is completely random with regard to sex. Furthermore, it hasn’t even been established that the Master’s latest female incarnation was the result of regeneration; given that the Master has a history of stealing bodies, and that his last body in The End of Time was basically an imperfectly reanimated corpse in a state of irreversible decay, it can’t be discounted, without further clarification, that Missy’s body was also stolen in the same way he stole the body of Tremas on Traken.

So sex-change regeneration is possible, but, until it is established otherwise, it can be assumed it is anomalous or unusual, rather than the norm. Personally I entertain three theories (which are not mutually exclusive) as to the circumstances in which Time Lords can regenerate into the opposite sex. The first is that same-sex regeneration is the norm, and that opposite-sex regeneration is a very rare, freak occurrence. The second is that, when Time Lords can control their regeneration (as Romana and the Master, and even the Doctor, it is implied, have been shown to be capable of doing), they can, if they have a sufficient degree of control, choose to regenerate into the opposite sex. As to why the Doctor’s regenerations have always (thus far) been random, I expect he either doesn’t know how (perhaps he snoozed through that class in the Academy), or doesn’t care enough, to control his regeneration. My third theory is that there needs to be an external influence on the regeneration to bring about a sex change, such as the potions the Sisterhood of Karn offered to the Eighth Doctor to control his regeneration. The three theories are not mutually exclusive, but the point is that sex-change regeneration at least seems to be unusual, and that some explanation is needed.