Thoughts on: The Ghost Monument

Now this is more like it. I was worried, for a moment, that The Woman Who Fell to Earth was going to set the tone for the rest of the series. It’s not that that episode was rubbish – it was okay, as far as openers go – it’s just that it didn’t do anything especially interesting. It didn’t do anything that made me excited about the direction Doctor Who was being taken. But I needn’t have worried. I’m pleased to say that this week’s episode, The Ghost Monument, has roundly dispelled my fears. This is much, much closer to the Doctor Who I wanted to see this year – which means that it put a lot of clear blue water between itself and the Doctor Who of Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies and steered into exciting and heretofore uncharted expanses.

This is, really, a very different Doctor Who. I’m really happy to be typing those words, because a “really, very different Doctor Who” is what I wanted from Chris Chibnall’s new regime this year, and what Doctor Who itself desperately needed. It’s difficult for long-time fans to appreciate how far the show has come, because although it’s a visible shift from what the show was doing in Series 9 and 10, it isn’t a huge one. But I’d recommend watching something from Series 1 – say, Aliens of London – and The Ghost Monument back-to-back. You can discern how much the show has changed not only by how different it looks, but especially by how different it feels. This is a much more mature and grown-up Doctor Who. The characters are less cartoonish and more layered, the dialogue is more mature, the plotting is more thoughtful; most visibly, everything just looks so much more sumptuous, although budget has a lot to do with that. This feels closer to a show like Firefly than it does to early New Who – there’s a strong grounding in characters and relationships, but the sci-fi is gritty and serious. In a word, this Doctor Who is real to a greater extent than any version of the show has been yet.

I hoped I wasn’t getting ahead of myself with my excitement over this episode, but my impressions not only stood up but were reinforced by a rewatch. If this is any harbinger of the series ahead, then we’re surely in for an exciting eleventh series, and hopefully a twelfth and thirteenth after that. No doubt, there’s the possibility that this episode isn’t any indication of what lies ahead, but the series goes back to doing whatever it was doing in last week’s underwhelming opener. I really hope that isn’t the case.

The other thing that’s better in this episode is Jodie Whittaker and her Doctor. Last week I wasn’t convinced by a first look at a Thirteenth Doctor that came off as a somewhat cringey David Tennant tribute act. There are still bits of that left here, and it’s still jarring and cringey when she shifts into that mode. But the whole performance has been toned down, and she’s much the better for it. I noticed that Jodie Whittaker seems to be at her best in the role when she’s not trying too hard to play “the Doctor”, but just playing her lines the way she feels they ought to be played. She’s much, much more Doctorly when she’s just playing her natural game rather than trying to ape David Tennant or any other Doctor. She plays “feisty Yorkshirewoman” (which, I’m sure, is how Jodie Whittaker would describe herself) much better than she plays “manic and quirky”, or “David Tennant”.

That’s the other thing about Whittaker’s Doctor: that she’s the first female Doctor, so there are no precedents she can easily riff off. A female Doctor can’t not be played materially differently from a male Doctor – Whittaker has to forge her own path in this respect. I think she’s going about it the right way: rather than apologising for being a female Doctor and trying to be a male Doctor in women’s clothes, she’s embracing her femininity and making it part of her character. Sure, Whittaker’s Doctor is strong and assertive in the way that the male Doctors have always been, but she’s more emotionally present and open, especially in the way she interacts with her companions, in a way that none of the male Doctors have ever been, but in a way that women generally are but men aren’t. Unless you’re looking for it you might not notice it because Jodie Whittaker is a woman, but this is something very new and different, and very interesting, for the Doctor.

Finally, can we say a word about Chibnall’s superb character writing? I was sceptical when it was first revealed that the Doctor would have an entire Scooby Gang tagging along after her this season, but Chibnall really has excelled himself with the companions so far. Testament to this is that – although I haven’t visited Gallifrey Base yet – I can’t see how any fans could actively dislike any of these companions the way virtually every companion since Rose (bar Wilf) has had their own sizeable contingent of haters. And what’s interesting about at least two of these three companions is that they’re carrying around the emotion of Grace’s death last episode, emotion that, as we’ve seen, is clearly infecting their relationship and is bound to boil over at some point later in the series. That’s a bit more interesting than the Ten-Rose-Mickey love triangle in Series 2. Even the grizzled, battle-hardened side characters in this episode were highly memorable and thoughtfully put together, which should come as no surprise: character writing has always been what Chibnall excels at, as anyone who’s seen Broadchurch and Born and Bred would know.

If there’s a criticism I’d make of this episode, it’s that the Moral Lesson of the Week (“we’re stronger together”) is laid on just a bit too thick. I think maybe the Doctor scolded Epzo pointedly for his Randian outlook just one too many times, and delivered just one too many syrupy soliloquies about working together. It all felt a bit patronising. Maybe this is Chibnall’s feeble gesture towards the idea that Doctor Who is still for children, in arguably the most grown-up version of Doctor Who yet. I’m not opposed to Doctor Who pushing ethical or philosophical lessons, or even trying to appeal to children, but I don’t like feeling like I’m being patronised. Neither, for that matter, do children.

Oh, and the Tardis looks nice. Not at all what I was expecting, but I suppose I was expecting something a bit more like the Eleventh Doctor’s or the Twelfth Doctor’s Tardis, and I suppose it’s a bit difficult to do that without looking like you’re just riffing off Moffat’s Tardises. I suppose it fits what looks like it’s going to be the tone of this series though: it’s grittier and grungier and more alien. Bring it on.

Rating: 8/10.

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.