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A new trailer premiered yesterday for an upcoming season of Doctor Who. There's nothing very remarkable in it but I can't think of any season trailers ever really capturing any of the things genuinely interesting about their seasons. Aside from the appearance of the Cybermen and the Judoon, it could almost be a trailer for Jodie Whittaker's first season for as much as it shows.



The Doctor's in trouble, she wears an ill-fitting tux, something's coming for her. Same old gaggle of intensely dull companions.

I loved how the Cybermen were used in the Twelfth Doctor's era, both in his first season and his final season. I liked how they supported the ongoing theme about military in Twelve's first season and the theme about conformity in his third. It's disappointing to see Thirteen's Cybermen are going to be relying on the Power Rangers look instead of going back to the Tenth Planet look. Though I never really found the Cybermen effective after The Invasion, certainly not in the 80s, though I quite like The Silver Nemesis.

I guess it's kind of remarkable there's nothing noticeably new in the trailer. Though with Thirteen, I've come to expect banal.

I find myself not especially eager to discuss yesterday's Doctor Who Christmas special. There were moments I did enjoy but, speaking as someone who feels Steven Moffat doesn't deserve half the hate he gets, the special left me feeling very glad he's stepping down as showrunner.

Spoilers after the screenshot



I would have assumed Moffat would have devoted a little extra time to writing his final episode as showrunner. But my complaints about "Twice Upon a Time" can be summed up in much the way I'd sum up a review of most of his episodes from the past couple seasons--there are some very good ideas delivered in frustratingly bad ways. Often whether or not one of his episodes succeeds depends on how much stronger the ideas are than their deployment. In this episode, while I experienced some of the intended emotional highs, it wasn't quite enough to compensate for weak foundation.



1. Having the Twelfth Doctor meet with the First Doctor to provide perspective during a psychological crisis over regeneration--good idea. Making the First Doctor more sexist than he actually was to make this point--bad idea.

My friend Brian on Facebook, who's rewatched the classic series more times than I have, remembered that the First Doctor actually did have that "Smacked bottom" line in Invasion of the Daleks. And, as Brian pointed out, the difference in context is crucial.



Susan is his granddaughter, not a random young woman he's just met. One could argue that striking a child is never a good parenting technique but that's not the issue Moffat is trying to discuss in "Twice Upon a Time". Certainly there's never anything in the classic series like the nasty laugh David Bradley's First Doctor shares with Mark Gatiss over the idea that all women are "made of glass."

The fundamental problem here is even more depressing, though. Moffat has often, by some of the more unreasonable voices on the Internet, been accused of sexism himself, based on more and more impressively contorted logic. But it obviously affects him because he's constantly doing things trying to placate the implacable--the premiere of the Twelfth Doctor's second season went for almost twenty minutes without sight of a male character, giving us a scene featuring an entirely female UNIT staff dealing with Clara and Missy--that's female protagonist and villain with female support characters, all without any rationalisation about it being an alternate Woman dimension or something. I could list other examples, I've written about this before--but I mention it now just to say the fact that he's re-imagining the First Doctor is a depressing sign that he's trying so hard to quell an outrage that, like any outrage not based on actual evidence, can never be satisfied. So it's not strange that in doing so Moffat has to manufacture evidence that didn't exist.

One might argue that by making the sexism more apparent it provides a method for more plainly discussing institutionalised sexism in the 1960s. But one of the great things about the audio plays is hearing the Fourth through Eighth Doctors visiting the 2000s--the Doctor is a time traveller, after all. So why make the Doctor more dated than he ever actually was? Of course, it's a reflection of inaccurate perceptions of the past.

The twentieth anniversary episode, "The Five Doctors", featured a scene where the Fifth Doctor is embarrassed when he has to apologise for the First Doctor casually telling a woman to make tea. It's a moment created with much the same intention as the similar moments in "Twice Upon a Time" and it similarly feels like an inappropriate amount of self-loathing that forgets moments like the Third Doctor sharing a bitter laugh with Liz over an officer's sexism in The Silurians--that was just four years after William Hartnell left the show. There's no reason any Doctor can't be a hero in a story about sexism.



2. Using the World War I Christmas Armistice for a Doctor Who Christmas special--good idea. Having the Doctor alter time to save Captain Lethbridge-Stewart's life by moving him in time to the day of the Christmas Armistice--bad idea.

The whole episode had been about how the Captain needed to die at that point, otherwise it screws everything up. Given that we learn he's none other than the father of the Doctor's friend, the Brigadier, it makes the integrity of his part of the timeline presumably even more crucial since, as the Doctor makes clear at the beginning of the episode, a disruption in his time stream could have particularly bad consequences. But maybe the Brigadier's father was always meant to survive--that still clashes with the whole reason Testimony needed him to die at that point.

I felt good watching soldiers from the two sides in that bitter war shaking hands. The Doctor talks about how it's his job to create the fairy tale, something which is entirely undermined by the arbitrary way he got there. It doesn't seem so much the Doctor's doing as the teleplay's.



I really loved Peter Capaldi as the Doctor, and I look forward to seeing what Jodie Whittaker does with the role. Her first words, "Oh, brilliant!" weren't, well, brilliant, but maybe stepping back from overly clever lines is a good direction for the show. For most awkward line in the show's history I would like to nominate, "You're the very first Dalek that ever got naked for me." Maybe it's not such a good idea to always try to think of something clever to say.

Here are a couple Doctor Who cosplayers I met on Friday, dressed as the Twelfth and Seventh Doctors. Apart from that there's not a whole lot of Doctor Who at Comic Con I can tell you about that you can't experience yourself by watching the full YouTube videos of both panels:





I took notes for the Classic Doctor panel figuring that one might not go online. Of course, it did. I am glad I managed to post a clip of Peter Davison, Sophie Aldred, and Colin Baker discussing the first female Doctor as early as it did, particularly with respect to Peter Davison who seems to be getting thrashed for having a past preference for a male Doctor despite expressing full support for Jodie Whittaker now. I kind of knew trouble was coming when, while Colin Baker was enthusiastically putting out tweet after tweet about how great it was to have a female Doctor, Peter Davison's first tweet on the subject was only one about how we should be encouraging to fans who are "uncertain about change." I'm sad to see now that Davison has deleted his Twitter account over the backlash he's faced. Though I think this may have been an overreaction on his part the rancour that has been aimed at him, even though he has more than once expressed his support for Whittaker, is disappointing and I can see how it might make him want to stay away from social media.

At the same time, the reason I do think Davison's initial tweet was a blunder was that it doesn't seem to reflect the nastiness with which people were reacting against Whittaker, posting flagrantly misogynist and sexist comments and commentaries. I have yet to see, apart from Davison himself, anyone expressing an articulation of "uncertainty" about a female Doctor that's truly respectful.

One of the problems I have with the vigorous efforts of so called Social Justice Warriors--I know many who self-describe that way, so I don't know if it's a pejorative anymore--is that there's a tendency in their publications to respond aggressively and dismissively to people for not knowing the definition of a term that's only current in Social Justice circles. For example, I saw an article recently that blasted an article in the New York Times that spoke in favour of cultural appropriation. The response to the article was to say that the author didn't understand that what he considered to be positive instances of cultural appropriation were in fact something called "cultural engagement". So I often see this seemingly unconscious, but aggressive and sometimes belligerent, conflation of an inevitable ignorance of niche or new definitions of terms with racism or sexism. It's no wonder when people are put off by what seems to be obnoxious pedantry.

I want to say this in preface because it seems Peter Davison is exhibiting the kind of misunderstanding that reflects white male privilege. He's not been forced to have the perspective of a woman and he evidently hasn't spent time trying to imagine what that perspective is like. Otherwise, he might be responding more like Colin Baker. Six remains my least favourite Doctor so it's somewhat awkward that I seem to be agreeing with him more in terms of social politics than with Davison--Colin Baker counters Davison's only really articulated argument so far, that it's a shame boys are losing a role model, by saying that there's no reason a woman can't be a role model for boys. Though I wonder if the realities of gender role barriers in English playgrounds support the viability of boys looking up to a woman.

Personally, I find the idea of not wanting the Doctor to be a woman to be difficult to imagine. Not just for statistical or political reasons but simply because I've always liked female protagonists and I like Doctor Who so it follows I should like a female Doctor Who. But since a young age I've been resistant to ideas of behaviour prescribed by gender so there's a whole lifetime of experience in trying to create oneself as a particular gender identity that I don't really have. People who have had that experience might support the idea of a female Doctor on an intellectual level but have to deal with residual feelings from that lifetime of experience.

In my first post about Whittaker, I casually referred to people who didn't like the idea as sexist, Davison's tweet made me wonder if this was the right tact for me to take. I think Davison failed to consider the issue fully but on the other hand I do agree with what I think is at the heart of what he's saying. The Doctor, after all, walked up to the Silurian and extended the hand of friendship. I'm not saying I feel the slightest sympathy with anyone expressing outright hostility to a female Doctor. But I find myself hesitant to express hostility myself when it might push away anyone for whom this upcoming season might be the thing that changes their minds about what--or who--women can be. This is the sense in which I think Davison advocated being "encouraging".

Someone has compiled a nice video of former Doctors reacting to the concept of a female Doctor:

It's Jodie Whittaker, aka the Thirteenth Doctor, seen here where I first saw her in the first season of Broadchurch. Her casting was announced to-day after the Wimbledon Men's Final (I thought it was funny they chose to do it after Wimbledon Men's Final) with this kind of cheesy video:



Here the young Doctor can be seen foraging and she has a lot of work to do laying up acorns for the winter. It's kind of like Planet Earth: Time Lord. Time Lady? I guess "Time Lady" is considered sexist but I'm not really clear on why.

I'm really happy to see a female Doctor. I look forward to seeing what happens in the next season and where new showrunner Chris Chibnall takes the series. I had varied reactions to his previous episodes of Doctor Who but I really liked the first season of Broadchurch, which he created and wrote every episode of. I don't see him approaching the heights of Steven Moffat or Russell T. Davis at their best but I'll be happy to be proved wrong.

I think Jodie Whittaker's a good actress and I look forward to see what she does. And yet . . .

Well, she's kind of normal. Theoretically, being a good actress means she can put in an appropriately weird performance for the Doctor. I don't know. It feels to me like another baby step--throughout the past few seasons, despite the impression you might get from the ravenous Moffat haters, the show has been seeded with little things to build up to a female Doctor, repeatedly confirming a Time Lord can change sex with a regeneration, changing the sex of the show's second most prominent Time Lord character, the Master, and finally the recent finale which is loaded with big hints about a more female future. Hopefully all this helped coax some of the more sexist fans into being a little less sexist and, to make a really optimistic statement, make the world a little less sexist generally. But there's something kind of default about Whittaker. I don't know, maybe it's too much to ask for the first female Doctor to have bug eyes, a big nose, and/or prominent teeth. Or someone like Michelle Gomez who has a wonderful, intense weirdness.

But I'll keep an open mind. I hope she at least gets a weird costume.