By the end of Christmas Day, The Doctor will officially be a woman (none other than the fabulous Jodie Whittaker.) I was ecstatic when I heard the news, another genius bit of casting for the show, but not everyone agreed. Unsurprisingly the casting of the first female Doctor proved to be somewhat controversial, with a few fans saying they’ll never watch the show again (they almost certainly will, but that’s beside the point!)
I personally don’t really understand it. How can you watch a show about a two thousand year old, shape shifting, time travelling alien with two hearts but find switching the gender of the character the thing that kills your suspension of disbelief?
Quite frankly, I think the casting of Jodie Whittaker isn’t just acceptable, it’s exactly what the show needs right now. Here are five reasons why:
1. Doctor Who needs change
I love Doctor Who, more than I should really (in fact I even argued that it’s as good as any religion, and I was only half-joking), but even I would say the show has felt a little…’stale’ the last few years. Don’t get wrong, Capaldi has been great and there have been some really amazing episodes with incredible thematic depth way beyond what should be expected of a Saturday teatime TV show, but the ratings have been in decline. It’s not doing bad by any means, but it’s some way away from the highs of the Russell T Davies era. And again, I don’t think that’s because of the quality of writing, so much as the ‘new’ incarnation of Doctor Who is now twelve years old, and has had the same creative team behind it for the last seven years. No matter how good the writing has been, it feels like the show has had the pedal fully to the floor but is still only going at 50mph for the last few years.
Doctor Who’s biggest strength is it’s basically an anthology show. Unlike Game of Thrones, Doctor Who is largely designed so anyone can watch an episode at any time and still get something from it. But also unlike Game of Thrones, it can’t rely on the momentum of an on-going story to bring people back each week. So, if people start to think of Doctor Who as ‘same old, same old’ (a term that featured in the trailer for Series 9 for some reason known only to the BBC marketing department), they’re not going to tune in.
The new creative team next year, headed by Chris Chibnall, will almost certainly give the show an organic ‘freshness’ that it hasn’t been able to artificially generate, try as it might have with Series 10. Again, I don’t think the show will necessarily be better, but it will feel new once more.
But what better way to tell the audience that this is not business as usual than by casting a female Doctor? With the news making the front pages today, the show feels more in the public consciousness now than it has since the 50th Special in 2013.
2. It only makes sense
Steven Moffat might not have cast a female Doctor, but he’s certainly done his fair share in making the mythology of the show ready for a woman lead.
One of his first lines for the show as head writer was having the newly regenerated Matt Smith question whether he was ‘a girl’. He then added the line about The Corsair (another Timelord) being a female in one of his regenerations to a Gaiman script, and in Series 9 he showed a balding, middle-aged male Timelord regenerate into a black woman…gee, do you think he was trying to tell us something?
Of course his ultimate move was casting a female Master. If everything else was just lip service to the idea of a female Doctor, casting Michelle Gomez as Missy was a test-run…and what a success it was! Gomez owned the role and being a woman didn’t detract in the slightest. It was almost audacious to have her and John Simm (the previous incarnation of The Master) appear in the same episode for the recent finale but there was no need to fear, they totally felt like the same person (at least in the same way all The Doctors have when they’ve met.)
With hindsight the speech The Doctor gave to Bill in the penultimate episode about Timelords rising above humanity’s petty obsessions with gender works as a beautiful build up to the reveal we had yesterday.
In fact, Moffat didn’t just make the idea of a female Doctor compatible with the show’s mythology, he essentially made it a plot hole to not mix things up. If The Doctor can take any form, any colour, any gender, then why does he keep appearing as a white man?
Moffat claims he didn’t know who the Thirteenth Doctor was, but The Doctor’s reply to The Master questioning if the future ‘is all girl’ with ‘I do hope so’ certainly suggests Moffat had a sense of the show’s future….
3. Representation is important
Finally it looks like mainstream entertainment is beginning to realise they don’t need white male leads to be successful. Just look at the most recent two Star Wars films – both had a female lead and Rogue One, in particular, had a really diverse supporting cast as well. The recently released Wonder Woman has also shown just how much of an appetite there is for female-lead superhero movies.
Things certainly aren’t moving fast enough (I’m looking at you MCU – God knows how many films and they’ve still all been lead by white guys!), but it does feel like the cultural zeitgeist is changing.
I love Doctor Who and everything it represents (I’ve been proud of the show’s portrayal of Bill’s sexuality this series), and casting a woman Doctor feels like tapping into the mood of the time. That’s not ‘political correctness’ by the way, just the simple acknowledgement that ‘white male lead’ doesn’t have to be the default.
If I had one concern about casting a female Doctor, it’s that I love the role-model Doctor Who offers to young boys – he’s a hero who isn’t remotely defined by his physical strength, but by his intellect and his heart(s). But hey, we’ve had twelve male Doctors, let’s share our hero. And besides, perhaps the message that gender doesn’t really matter at all and is largely irrelevant is better anyway!
4. Think of all the interesting questions it raises
Will we have our first proper male companion? (I love Rory and Jack, but they were never the main billing, let’s be honest.) That would mix things up! Or will we have our first all-female TARDIS team? That would be exciting too.
And how will they handle The Doctor’s sexuality (so much as he/she has a sexuality)? Although The Doctor is often shown as being at arm’s length from sexual desire, there’s no doubt that his relationships with Rose, Madame Du Pompadour and River Song all had a romantic element to them. Will a female Doctor feel the same? Will she be a lesbian? Is the Doctor bisexual? Does his/her sexuality change when they regenerate? Do these labels even matter anymore?
The casting has opened up the floodgates to a whole load of interesting questions for the show to explore.
5. We get Jodie Whittaker!
Frustratingly, all this talk of whether there should be a female Doctor has almost overshadowed the fact that Jodie Whittaker is a damn good actor. In Broadchurch she gave an anchored performance whilst having to portray such extremes of emotion – I always thought she was overlooked in many ways, with all the praise going to the equally brilliant David Tennant and Olivia Coleman.
But sometimes a casting just feels ‘right’, and this certainly does to me. As a fan, I can’t think of a male actor I’d rather have play the role, and that’s really all that matters in the end – the best actor got the part.
And hopefully, in a few decades time, when some geeks of the future look back at previous Doctors, the fact Jodie Whittaker was the ‘first female Doctor’ will be a mere footnote, a piece of interesting trivia, and ultimately she’ll be judged on her performance.
The last episode of Doctor Who ended with the Twelfth and the First Doctor both certain they don’t want change. This is something I’m sure a lot of fans will be able to empathise with at the moment, even more so than usual. But, I’ve got a feeling The Doctors are going to work through their issues…and the future of Doctor Who is going to be just fine. I can’t wait!
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