The Mothership Time For The Upgrade by Tony J Fyler

It’s hard to know, really, where the idea of a female Doctor first came from.

Oh no, wait, actually it isn’t. It came from the very idea of regeneration itself – every cell in a Time Lord’s body being renewed, rearranged, changed in times of great physical stress. The idea that the process leaves the Time Lord with an entirely different body – different height, build, hair, teeth, kidneys et al – and with different traits coming to the fore of the same fundamental nature - means anything is technically possible when a Time Lord (or Time Lady) regenerates. If it weren’t, every Doctor since 1966 would have been more or less William Hartnell’s First Doctor in a different physical form, and the challenge of the role would have been stunted early on.

Perhaps the first time we saw the potential of this on screen was in The War Games, back in 1969 (just in case you thought this was all part of some Moffat-driven Social Justice Warrior plan to rob you all of a great peaceful male role model), when the Doctor is offered a series of potential bodies, rejecting each in turn as unsuitable – too fat, too thin, too old, too young. The clear implication there is that the process can in some cases be precisely controlled, the new form chosen in fact. All it would have taken to resolve the whole supposed controversy of a female Doctor would have been for the Second Doctor to reject one more body-sketch as being ‘too female for Earth in the seventies (or eighties)’ That would have established the sex-swapping potential of Time Lords, right there and then, but this was 1969, and society wasn’t ready for it. But the implication of that scene, and in fact of regeneration at all, is that everything can change.

We saw the potential again in Episode 1 of Destiny of the Daleks, where Romana, trying on a range of bodies for size and style, changes age, size, skin colour and interestingly, species-template – clearly, the fact that humans look Time Lordy is little more than coincidence, and Time Lords, when they regenerate, can choose  or simply get a species-template from across time and space – never mind a female Doctor, we could perfectly reasonably have a Draconian Doctor, a Silurian Doctor, a Sontaran Doctor, even (now that would have been a different take on the War Doctor!). People who believe there can be no such thing as a female Doctor will point to the fact that with all the changes she makes in Destiny, Romana never tries on a male body, but as arguments go, that’s both presumptuous (we can’t know the truth of it), binary-normative (in the vastness of time and space, we’re assuming there are only two sexes, which even a cursory glimpse at even Earth medical history disproves) and spectacularly missing the point – she changes species-template; in any genetic sense, that’s got to be harder work than changing sex within the same template, meaning Time Lords must surely be able to change sex when they regenerate.

Then of course came the flurry of Moffat-era instances to which people point by way of building the claim that the idea of a female Doctor is a recent one (despite the use of it to gain controversy in the eighties by John Nathan-Turner and the much-touted memo from series creator Sydney Newman at around the same time, advocating the Doctor change sex). The Eleventh Doctor’s initial self-assessment includes his squeaky declaration that ‘I’m a girl!’ before he checks his Adam’s apple to disabuse himself of the notion. The Corsair, a friend of the Doctor’s, is said to have had a tattoo replaced with every regeneration, male or female, in Neil Gaiman’s The Doctor’s Wife. Annnnd then of course there’s Missy – who some fans of the show still don’t believe is what she claims to be, a perfectly normal, stark raving bonkers incarnation of the Master. Some fans persist in the idea that something particular ‘happened’ to the Master to trigger the Missy incarnation, because such a thing never having happened on screen before must mean it can’t happen in the ordinary circumstances of regeneration. Some fans of course are wrong, and inventing the straws to which they’re clinging, more or less exclusively to deny the very idea that Time Lords can change sex.

Even then though, in modern Who, there’s no hiding place for those who maintain that wrongness. Originally, Big Finish held out what might be seen as a fig leaf for them, since its ‘Unbound’ tale, Exile, in which Arabella Weir plays a female Doctor, invents the idea that Time Lords only change sex when they regenerate as the result of suicide. Interesting idea in its own right, but as the company saw the way the series was tending in the Moffat era, they came out with the Troughton Early Adventure The Black Hole, in which it’s categorically stated that a Time Lord character has regenerated into a female incarnation, not as a result of any extraordinary stress, but more or less just…because. Big Finish beat the TV show to such a simple, practical reality by weeks or months, because of course, there really is no getting away from the ‘Let’s settle this once and for all’ visual of the Time Lord General – an older white male – regenerating right there in front of us, on-screen so no-one could quibble – into a younger, black female.

More or less End Of.

So let’s see – there’s no real in-show reason why the Doctor shouldn’t be female. It’s always a mistake to think of the character as human, limited by our human notions of…well, anything at all, really. But yet there’s been such a vehement strain of reaction against Jodie Whittaker’s casting from some fans.

We’ve heard that ‘young boys are losing a peaceful male role model’ as though this is some sort of crime against their mental development. Because having a peaceful female role model is of course unthinkable – what, we’re forced to ask, do they think the situation has been like for young girls all this while? Bear in mind that throughout much of the Classic era of Who at least, highly effective actresses were reduced to ‘looking decorative’ and ‘asking questions of the Doctor.’ Certainly there’s been a shift in the dynamic in New Who, but very often the companion has been stopped from being a fully realised role model by the necessity of peril in the storytelling. Now there will be a Doctor who is female, and still the cleverest life form in the room, and still, at her core, the same character played by all the others – a beacon of intelligence, of rationality, of kindness. There’s no betrayal of young boys inherent in that. At most, there’s a relocation of it in a female form, to tell new, old, exciting, dramatic stories that inspire them. And as a side note, it’s worth mentioning that none of the whining about Whittaker’s casting appears to have come from young boys. No, it’s mostly grown men and women who have had an issue with the idea, so perhaps it’s not ‘young boys’ who are ‘losing a peaceful male role model’ but grown-ups.

If it’s grown-ups who feel the loss of their role model, two questions arise – firstly, have you not had enough of a turn to let at least one actress embody your hero? And secondly, what difference can it possibly make to you that the Doctor is female now? She’s been a male for fifty years, she’ll be a male again at some point in the future. Declaring that you’re not going to watch her be a Time Lord because now she’s shaped like Jodie Whittaker and so she doesn’t ‘count’ is cutting off your nose to spite your prejudice.

We’ve also heard that the casting of a woman personally hurts some fans who used the Doctor when they themselves were children as an avatar of safe, good men when they were personally in difficult circumstances. As an argument goes, there’s more weight to this, but again the point emerges – he was there for you when you were small. She’ll be there for young people when they are small. Ultimately, as long as someone’s there to save children from the screaming evils of the universe, why does it make a difference what sex they are? If the situation’s bad enough that you need a distinctly male role model…again, if you’re watching Doctor Who, it’s difficult to escape the knowledge that he’s had thirteen previous bodies (fourteen if you include the two Tenth Doctors, but let’s not, because that way, madness lies), all of which were male. This is merely the first step towards achieving an equality of Time Lord role modelling.

Oh yes – there’s that. We’ve heard that this move is ‘political correctness gone mad,’ ‘the victory of the equality police,’ and a ‘Social Justice Warrior plot to appease the feminazis.’

Number 1 – political correctness is merely open-mindedness in action. It doesn’t go ‘mad,’ it merely goes beyond your comfort zone. If this is beyond your comfort zone, that’s for you to conjure with, not for a major BBC show to pander to.

Number 2 – this is not equality. If you want to know what equality looks like, it looks like the next fifty years of Doctoring in female bodies. We don’t even get near equality till that happens. One female incarnation after 55 years of males is not some great victory for equality – it’s late, and it’s courageous, but it’s one in fourteen. If you have fourteen pounds and I have one, do we have an equal amount of money?

And Number 3 – well…ok, if you’re against social justice, it begs the question of what the hell show you think you’ve been watching for all of those years. The Doctor is, right down to her fundamental chromosomes, the quintessential warrior for social justice. Curious about the universe and its people, she left her home to experience society in all its forms, and she put herself between the little people of the universe and the people and creatures that would do them harm. Is there something about that that confuses you in to thinking the Doctor’s ever been anything but a Social Justice Warrior, and if so, what could it possibly be? Furthermore, if you’re not down with social justice, how come you idolise or admire a character so thoroughly steeped in equality viewpoints and the rights of the downtrodden to live their lives to the full?

So is there no valid reason to oppose the casting of Jodie Whittaker?

There may be, but the fact that she’s a woman isn’t anywhere among them.

People have expressed concerns that neither this particular actress, nor incoming showrunner Chris Chibnall, is actually good enough to deliver the first female Doctor – because apparently, the stakes are higher for a female Doctor than a male one, because this is some whacky notion from Alpha Centauri that has to be smashed out of the park in order to be valid. No surprise to women anywhere that they have to work twice as hard as men to be taken half as seriously, though surely by 2017, we should have left some of our societal gynaephobia behind. But as far as it goes, this is a relatively ‘clean’ argument – Chibnall’s Who career has been less than spectacular. His Torchwood career is better, with a couple of hard-hitting episodes…but then, and always, there is Cyberwoman. His latest success, Broadchurch, appears to be mostly comprised of moodiness, secrets and long shots of people staring into the distance as a substitute for character. Certainly, its conclusions are about as gripping and logical as the evaporating ending of The Power of Three. So if you say you have qualms about the new production team’s ability to do the idea of a female Doctor justice, you have something to back up your argument. Similarly, while I bear her no ill will in the world, audiences have been split before now by Jodie Whittaker’s portrayals, and have every right in the world to think that, if there’s going to be a female Doctor, she might not be the best fit for the role. This is perfectly ordinary fan-behaviour when a new Doctor is cast – there was little that the mainstream audience knew about Sylvester McCoy that let us guess his performance would go down in history as one of the darkest of Doctors. Nothing about that nice young man from the vet programme that made Peter Davison a natural shoe-in for a sarcastic, contained Doctor who would be a joy to watch. Nothing about Jon Pertwee, come to that, the man of a thousand funny voices, to suggest to the audience at large that he would be an action man dandy Doctor who would match olde worlde chivalry with very contemporary concerns. Nothing – almost literally nothing – that qualified Matt Smith to be the Doctor as much as the daily experience of Being Matt Smith did. Not being sure about Jodie Whittaker is fine, perfectly normal fan-behaviour. The point is, this is a role that makes careers, that stretches actors in ways other roles can barely guess at. It’s a time-space Hamlet that only a few actors have ever got to give us – and it’s potentially among the best pension plans in the acting world. It’s by no means easy, but everyone who’s so far earned the role has gone on to deserve it, to wear it and to be the Doctor to at least a generation of fans.

Not being sure about a female Doctor on principle though is one of two things – three at a push. It’s either anti-woman prejudice, or it’s the kind of idiocy that raises the idea that ‘You wouldn’t like it if Wonder Woman became Wonder MAN, would you?!’ – screeeeeamingly missing every conceivable point along the way. Or, most forgiveably, most personally, while at the same time still completely wrongly, it’s adherence to a comfort blanket sensation that your particular experience of the Doctor is the only real, right experience of the character. That the only line beyond which the Doctor cannot go is the line of sex. If that’s your position, you’re entitled to it, while still being wrong. The Doctor is a character of constructs, up there with the gods of myth and legend, in that there’s nothing, literally nothing, she can’t be. Because the fundamental truth of the Doctor isn’t maleness. It’s curiosity. It’s compassion. It’s enthusiasm for the universe and its people, and the thrill of being out there, as opposed to being trapped in the prison of convention that her home planet would have forced on her. That’s the spirit of the Doctor, and that has nothing to do with how her body appears to us from a subjective human standpoint. That’s why, when the first Doctor of Colour arrives, they’ll be the Doctor too. When the first trans Doctor is cast, they’ll be the Doctor. And why Jodie Whittaker (with honourable nods to Joanna Lumley, Arabella Weir and, as some have suggested, Catherine Tate) will be the first female Doctor – but absolutely not the last. Even if the doomsayers are right and the programme folds on her watch (it won’t, but even if it did), her casting unlocks the idea within the main, ‘canon’ show, that the Doctor can be female. That means whatever happens next, girls will grow up knowing they can be the Doctor too, and that the Doctor can speak to them directly. It’s not the idea of a female Doctor that’s matured, from the days when it was a joke on John Nathan-Turner’s noticeboard to try to win press attention. It’s society that’s matured, to the point where a female Doctor is now an in-show reality that will forever broaden what it means to be the Doctor, and what it means to be a Doctor Who fan. The Doctor’s universe just got much, much bigger – and it’s time for the upgrade.