Doctor Who: Jodie Whittaker

I’ve waited a while before imposing my opinion about the upcoming changes for Doctor Who. Knee jerk internet jerks are no doubt still frothing and bubbling in their mother’s basements about the fact that the Thirteenth Doctor is to be played by a woman. Or, worse, rubbing their knees and nethers in disgusting boyticipation. Mostly they are decrying what to them is a step too far for a science fiction show.

Science fiction, lest anyone has forgotten, is all about fantasy, imagination and the possibilities at the edge of probability. In the shape of Doctor Who science fiction has always, absolutely always, been about breaking rules, imagining the impossible and making fantasy seem so almost-real that young kids who get hooked on it are still obsessed when they are approaching their dotage.

As one such uber-nerd I should like to point to the very first edition of the show, all the way back in 1963: An Unearthly Child. And who was that child? It was the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan, a woman, no less. A Time Lady, dontcha know. I'd wager that while she was mostly a damsel in distress sort of character, as was common back then for most females in action-driven shows aside from the odd possessor of her own agency such as Honor Blackman, she was also canonical proof that Timelords do both genders.

And when the Doctor eventually visited his homeland onscreen in the seventies Time Ladies were in evidence, despite the ‘Lords’ still being more front and centre. Until Romana, that is, the second longer-term Time Lady incumbent in the Tardis. Both male and female characters, even The Brigadier, played second fiddle to Tom Baker’s Puckish Fourth Doctor, so it's no surprise Romana was often also somewhat damselly and distressy.

All of this long before Who was rebooted by a generation of screenwriters infected by a more modern ‘political correctness gone mad’, as some are still assuming is the reason for casting a woman in the role of the Doctor for the first time. It's as if those who most loathe the idea of a female Doctor are privileged white male misogynists who may well suffer with varying degrees of homophobia and racism, isn't it? 

Hmm, whatever. If they don't like the direction the show is going in they could always choose not to watch it and save themselves from some kind of seizure.

Jodie Whittaker, like Matt Smith before her and even David Tennant to a degree, is a moderately well known purveyor of the acting arts yet to make the step up into being a big name. Like both of them, Peter Capaldi and Christopher Eccleston, she is also a brilliant purveyor of said arts, despite only being moderately well known thus far. She has range, she has a unique energy, she can totally inhabit the roles she plays: all perfect qualifications for being the Doctor. Does the lack of a penis create a demerit so enormous that those facts about her as an actor are irrelevant? No, knee jerk internet jerks, it does not.

I'm going to miss Capaldi. But I was also going to miss Smith. And Tennant. And Eccleston. And McGann. And…skips a bit here to the next one I really, really was going to miss…Tom Baker. And Jon Pertwee. I’m not quite ancient enough to remember watching Troughton and possibly never did more than hear Hartnell’s bumblesome tones from my pram. The point is, virtually every actor who has played the Doctor made the role their own; Jodie Whittaker will do exactly that too and not because she’s a woman but because she’s brilliant.

And when she leaves the show to be replaced by a robot fish I will miss her like heck too. Until halfway through the first episode of the Fourteenth Doctor’s adventures.

Doctor Who: The Doctor Falls

It is the end, but the moment has been prepared for. 

Tom Baker’s final words as he began to morph into Peter Davison have been quoted a fair deal in the run-up to Peter Capaldi’s last season finale before he regenerates in this year’s Christmas special. However, as he lay on the floor of the Tardis towards the end of the episode, apparently dead beyond regenerative trickery, it was Jon Pertwee’s last scene I was most reminded of. From the dandified cuffs of Capaldi’s shirt to the bat-splayed red lining of his ragged jacket to the creased face and bedraggled silver locks, the Twelfth Doctor mirrored the Third with Moffat-fuelled accuracy.

That he later quoted his more immediate predecessor’s last words would have been no whimsical notion nor a spot of nostalgic fanboy onanism from the outgoing show-runner. The moment when it is (of course) revealed that he's not dead after all harked back to the flashbacks Davison had when it was his turn to hand over the sonic screwdriver but let's not dwell on that as the Sixth Doctor was a multi-chrome clown in all the wrong ways.

The Doctor Falls deliberately draws on iconic imagery from Moffat’s own tenure too but more in the spirit of a greatest hits package than the feel of the regeneration echoes (I will grant him kudos for inverting Eleven carrying Amy during Asylum of the Daleks and having CyberBill hold the failing Twelve in the same tragic pose). By alerting long-time fans of the show to the ripples of so many other Doctors running through the energy of Capaldi’s oncoming regeneration it led us to the final twist of the season: Twelve looks to be spending Christmas with the first incarnation of The Doctor.

If you want to nitpick it's the third incarnation of the first incarnation of The Doctor: William Hartnell and Richard Hurndall being far too real-life dead to appear so David Bradley has stepped into the role. It's only fair, he did play Hartnell and thus Hartnell’s Doctor brilliantly in the 2013 anniversary drama about the genesis of the show itself.

My reaction is mixed. It is a thrilling prospect indeed for the Christmas special to feature the original Doctor as well as a soon to golden-glow his way into somebody else Twelve. But the prospect of incoming show-runner Chris Chibnall deciding to reset the entire programme by somehow having Capaldi regenerate as Bradley’s version of Hartnell lurks at the back of my mind like the stench of a rotten cucumber lingers in a refrigerator.

The concept is fine but I pray it's not one that Chibnall has given any serious thought to. Anniversaries are one thing, a great excuse to gather up a couple of previous Doctors and let them squabble their way to harmonious solutions to some devilish alien plot, but a Marvel Spider-Man style reset would most likely lose fans rather than push the show onwards towards 2023’s 60th jubilee.

I've loved every minute of Capaldi as The Doctor and applaud Moffat for bucking the previous trend of recruiting younger and younger actors to the role, seemingly to ensure fangirls came along with the fanboys, but the best regenerations and smoothest transitions in the show’s history work when a proper contrast of personalities (rather than vomit-hued jackets) is set up. Since returning to our screens no Doctor has been too similar to the previous one; there would be a danger of chiming many familiar Capaldi notes if Bradley becomes the next Doctor full time.

I don't know that anybody else is squawking about this or even considering it a possibility. I may be putting Twelve and One together and not coming up with Thirteen. A cryptic Moffat statement about this regeneration being rather different to those we’ve seen before and the continuing lack of announcement about Capaldi’s successor are the fragmentary foundations of my thesis, not really enough to give credence to the idea, right?

Or maybe that's exactly what Chibnall hopes geeks like me will be imagining, the better to help us accept a female Doctor this time? Personally I've been fine with the idea of a woman taking on the role for most of my adult life (once I'd got past the prepubescent ‘girls are pooey’ stage) so I don't really need subterfuge to help me cope with gender changes in a science fiction series.

Hey ho, on with the show. Only it seems like on with the show minus Pearl Mackie, John Simm, Michelle Gomez and Peter Capaldi as the Master/Missy double act reversed the polarity of multiple Doctors by killing one another towards the end, and Bill Potts looks like she’s off to snog around the universe with her romantic interest from the first episode of the season. Talk about regime change.

Doctor Who - Smile

Future cities, The Doctor likes taking his fresh companions to future cities so it's no surprise that Bill gets the same treatment from Number Twelve in her first proper Tardis outing. Viewers have already seen that all is not well in the apparent paradise they find themselves in and it doesn't take the time travellers long to suss this out for themselves.

Swarms of flying nano bots are apparently linked to emoji-faced base-station droids, and their insistence on happiness from human occupants of the city would add sinister overtones to everything if it wasn't so reminiscent of both The Beast Below's 'smilers' and the 'this is a kindness' robots from The Girl Who Waited. I wasn't a huge fan of Frank Cottrell-Boyce's first Doctor Who script (In The Forest of the Night) and am not entirely convinced by this follow up. 

I do, however, like the intention of making it largely a double-hander to more fully embed Pearl Mackie into the role and into public consciousness but there is a danger of straying too far towards the late excesses of Tom Baker's time at the helm when wordy exposition regularly supplanted action. Not to worry, action does happen once the duo begin to integrate with the robots and the newly awakening citizens of the colony.

It's a morality tale disguised as a thriller, just like Cottrell-Boyce's previous fare: the robots have achieved a degree of sentience that entitles them to be considered a new species. Not only that but, as they have constructed and maintained the city out of themselves (literally, they form the buildings and break out of the walls only to deal with crop necessities or damage control) the city is arguable more theirs than it is owned by the emergent humans.

Yes it is true that damage control to these new life forms somehow translates into killing off unhappy humans but once The Doctor turns them off and on again (I'm still hoping the Kris Marshall rumours are untrue and that Richard Ayoade can be persuaded to take over when Capaldi regenerates) they have no memory of that unpleasant murdery business and seem willing to tend to the needs of the newcomers. Peace in our time.

In the bigger scheme of things this is all about as likely to affect the story arc of the season as little as Rose's first trip with the newly regenerated Doctor Ten affected season Two's grand narrative but buried right at the start of the episode an exchange between Nardole and The Doctor may prove more meaningful. Whatever vow the time lord has made to stay on Earth and guard the mysterious vault in the basement of St Luke's, Nardole appears to be integral to holding The Doctor to his promise. He also appears to be crap at his job and easily distracted with tea making errands.

Bill continues to ask the questions nobody ever seems to have asked. She continues to get few direct answers but that's ok as we love it when companions work stuff out for themselves. I'd now like to see both her and The Doctor given a meatier story to chew on: we've met her, we like her, it's time she was thrown properly into the deep end. London frost fairs anyone?

Doctor Who -The Pilot

Doctor Who is back. Peter Capaldi's final season kicked off with a new companion, a fairly rubbish alien lifeform, a robot other companion who has robot alopecia, apparently, and some bonus stuff thrown in for the fans. Well, it wouldn't be Easter without Easter eggs, eh?

The fan stuff included Daleks fighting Movellans (very Fourth Doctor); photos of River and of Susan on display in The Doctor's office (he has an office now, offices are cool); many sonic screwdrivers; montage of Bill's days echoing the montage of Rose's life before she met the Ninth Doctor in the first episode of the rebooted series; Leela running around naked in the background.

No, that last didn't happen but I wasn't sure you were paying attention.

Reboot. An interesting concept. Effectively Steven Moffat rebooted Doctor Who for the second time in five years in 2010 with the Eleventh Doctor and Amy meeting in her garden when she was a tiny. And now he's once again provided a season opener that could serve as a kicking off point for brand new fans. There is often a hint of the new every time a fresh companion hooks up with our favourite time travelling nutjob and through Bill we get to remind ourselves how out of this world the Doctor truly is. 

Only Bill isn't quite like most of the other newbies we've met down the years. No, I don't mean because of her ethnicity or sexual persuasion, those are just her being her. I mean the questions she asks that somehow nobody has quite got round to asking in 54 years of the show. Like, if he's from another planet why does the acronym which gives his time machine its name work in English, not Gallifreyan? No, you can't go back to the real first ever episode and say Susan came up with it because that ignores the fact that every Time Lord we've ever encountered refers to the machines as Tardis too. Tardises? Tardi? 

Bigger questions not yet answered mostly revolve around why Doctor Twelve is loitering with very obvious intent at St Luke's college. There is a vault he's guarding in the basement. What's in it, why is he guarding it and why did he locate it at the university (if indeed he did)? Will the answers to such questions have anything to do with Hartnell style cybermen or double incarnations of The Master/Missy later in the season? 

As I said, this week's alien was pretty rubbish, a sentient puddle that took on the form of a girl Bill fancied in such a way as to remind me of the scary aqueous life forms in The Waters of Mars from 2009. The aliens can often be lame when the season starts with a new companion being bedded in (Prisoner Zero was fairly shit, the Adipose were terrible, The Judoon looked scarier with their space helmets on). The big bads come later. The more we get to know a companion the more we truly feel the jeopardy their travels with The Doctor place them in.

For now we have a madman with a box, a robot Matt Lucas whose purpose has yet to be defined or justified and a crazy-haired new girl. And all of time and space. Good enough for me.

Doctor Who - The Return of Doctor Mysterio

The BBC are mean. They are cruel and heartless and they smell bad. They didn't commission a Doctor Who series for 2016. Of all the years to need a Doctor Who series, 2016 is up there with 1990 for definitely needing one (but for quite different reasons). The Doctor would have saved Prince and Alan Rickman and Bowie and, and, and...

Or Moffat is mean. Maybe he was busy with Sherlock. Someone was mean and they smell bad.

Hey ho. Christmas special which makes 2016 a not entirely devoid of Doctor Who year. Yay!

Matt Lucas is back from last year's Christmas special too. Ha, they didn't ask David Walliams back for more, did they? Lucas will be fun in the Tardis but I can't help wanting him to romp around it in his onesie, banging on drums and insisting his name is George Daws.

A real life superhero, in Doctor Who? Sort of. A real life comic book superhero style boy who eats a thing he shouldn't eat and becomes the Clark Kent of the nannying world. And fancies the woman he nannies for. Well, he nannies for her baby, not for her. She can burp herself.

And the splitty head freaks also return from last year's Christmas special. Lots of references to that episode if we're honest which allows for plenty of Doctory emotion. Capaldi can leap from terrible puns to manic activity to deep-eyed sadness in a heartbeat. As regenerations go he somehow manages to channel pretty much all of his previous incarnations yet remain entirely unique.

Forget the plot, it's a Christmas special (did I mention that?) and what matters most is that the spirit of an intergalactic pantomime is invoked and some snow happens at some point. What, no snow? The BBC are mean. They are cruel and heartless and they smell bad. They didn't let Moffat include snow in the budget. Possibly. Or he forgot to ask. He's mean.

Charity Wakefield is a lot more fun than her turn as Mary Boleyn in Wolf Hall led me to believe. Justin Chatwin didn't try to sell anyone drugs like he does in Orphan Black. And Moffat clearly hates hospitals as this is the second time he's made masked medical folk in scrubs get all silent and dangerous on us (The Power of Three, in case you were wondering - actually written by Chris Chibnall who will be taking over as show runner after next year's Christmas special so the surgeons can't relax even though I've got my facts wrong.)

Between now and next year's Yuletide offering is a brand new series coming in the Spring. With a new companion in Pearl Mackie and more Matt Lucas (see that, Walliams, they really like Lucas, don't they?). And I can't wait. So I'm not going to; let me just fix this chameleon circuit first then I'll pop ahead and see what Doctor Twelve is up to with Bill from the chippy.