Future Doctors

[dalekboy]

By now most of you will have heard that Matt Smith is to be the 11th Doctor.

I trust Moffat and co. to have chosen carefully, but I am a little worried about the future if recent trends continue. At this rate, another fifteen years we'll have a foetus behind the console!

Comments

[angriest.livejournal.com]

IMO there is no reason not to have a female Doctor other than:

(a) being against change in general,
(b) being sexist.

[waylanderpk.livejournal.com]

I'm going to have disagree with you. You can't just yell sexist or racist because some one believes that the Doctors character is essentially a white male.

IMHO the Doctor is male and white, and should remain that way. That isn't to say that a black woman couldn't (or wouldn't) be great a Doctor, but the Character is what he is, you shouldn't just chuck out 30 years of back story on a whim. It would seem that your advocating change for the sake of change.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

What I am saying is that we're talking about the only long-running TV drama where you can do *anything*. Having the central character collapse in the TARDIS in '66 and wake up as Patrick Troughton was revolutionary. It's a show where one story is about an alien war on another planet, another can a historical adventure in the 18th century and a third could be about the Doctor having conversations with Gulliver and Rapunzel, and you could run all three in a row and it would not only not look out of place, but would seem like par for the course.

And for parts of the viewership to look at a show that changeable, random and gloriously mad, and to say "X could not ever happen" or "Y would be a terrible, terrible idea", is something that I think runs very counter to the spirit of the programme.

[waylanderpk.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree that anything can happen, I question why something should happen. I believe that show has to remain internally consistent, I really don't see that gender swap would be anything but a stunt. Fundamentally the Doctors character is asexual (at least until recently) being male/female or anything else shouldn't affect the character. So I just don't see a need mess with it.

I'm sure a talented writer could give a plausible reason for any change you might want to make to the Character. But I've been watching since I was 3, it is in fact the first thing I remember watching, so I want his future direction and decisions to remain consistent with all (well maybe most) of his previous choices and actions.

Is there some reason you think the Doctor should have been a woman?

[angriest.livejournal.com]

People react in different ways to people of different race and gender - there are story possibilities. That's the reason to do anything in Doctor Who - because there's a story in it.

One of the problems Doctor Who has is that due to its structure - educated middle-aged man accompanied by audience-surrogate young woman - it's effectively Pygmalion in space. It's an inherently sexist programme. The production team can adjust it a bit, they can work on making the companion more of an equal (which has only been properly done once with Romana II), but the structure is always there. Having the Doctor be a woman with a young male companion for a few years would be a refreshing break out of the box in that regard.

But the bottom line? Because there's a story there.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

Also I have to say that if I was in charge of the show, part of me would want to cast a woman just to watch a good third of Who fandom implode.

[waylanderpk.livejournal.com]

Well its probably my selfish streak, how many shows have a white male flying through space solving problems with intelligence and compassion, a principled caring man doing good things.

In this post-whedonesque sf world their are very few strong male characters for young boys to identify with, I think keeping the Doctor the way he is worth doing for that reason alone.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

Certainly not non-violent ones.

[(Anonymous)]

The Doctor is a parental figure. A female Doctor would be, to me, like a parent getting a sex change - great if that's what they want, but more than a little confusing to me as a person. That is, fair enough, ultimately my problem, and it's a concept that's worth exploring in a fictional setting, but I'm ultimately coming to Doctor Who because of its tradition of exploring macro-social issues through the allegory of monsters rather than its tradition of exploring psycho-sexual hangups through the allegory of regeneration.

Put that stuff in Torchwood and I'll quite happily go watch it there, but let the Doctor do what the Doctor does without complicating things, please. A show does not have to do everything a little and be brave in every direction - it needs only do what it was designed for very excellently, and go about that focus without fear.

And I don't think it's fair to levy sexism as the only possible reason for the opinion. Gender-swapping a character does a lot more than change its societally implied competencies (which I am agreed is a thing it does not have to do at all, in fact). The goal of gender equality is a society where people of any gender can display their individual skills to their fullest potential without labouring under the gender-fuelled misapprehensions and presumptions of others; it is NOT to create a sexless society where genders are interchangeable and only determinable by reference to physiology. A female Doctor DOES create a different character and a different dynamic, it doesn't draw on the same archetypes that have fuelled the doctor over the show's history, and it sits poorly with much of what has made the show work over its long history.

Do feel free to point out to me non-continuity or fanfic stuff with a female Doctor that proves me wrong, though.

[greg tannahil (from livejournal.com)]

Oops, that above thing was me, by the way. Stupid OpenID.

- GregT

[angriest.livejournal.com]

A female Doctor DOES create a different character and a different dynamic

As does the shift from Hartnell to Troughton, or Eccleston to Tennant, etc.

I'm still not convinced it would be any different.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and as I've noted previously - Doctor Who is a show about change. Why should so many elements be open to that, but not gender? Makes no sense.

Of course if they'd just bring back Romana and give the Doctor an intellectual equal again, all would be forgiven. : )