[TV] Doctor Who (spoiler alert)

Doctor Who returned last week with another first: Sacha Dhawan’s casting as the first person of colour to play the Doctor’s arch nemesis, the Master. The decision was broadly met with praise, but in darker corners of the internet the argument that the show has become too politically correct rages on.

“Too PC” has become a familiar jibe levelled at the sci-fi hit since 2018 when Jodie Whittaker became the Thirteenth Doctor and new showrunner Chris Chibnall took up the mantle. As well as the first woman to play the title role, their first series featured two BAME companions and episodes about Rosa Parks and the partition of India, written by Doctor Who’s first ever BAME writers. The show quickly found itself embroiled in a culture war, with talk of its apparent political correctness becoming commonplace (see the Twitter hashtag #notmydoctor). Whittaker and Chibnall were forced to defend the show against these claims before this series began: Whittaker reminded viewers that there’s “still racism within our current society”, and Chibnall added that “the Doctor and the show are beacons of compassion and empathy”.

Now, though, a different group of fans are railing against Doctor Who. Far from being too liberal, many believe this iteration has actually lost the morality that made the character so unique, and become problematic on social issues – engaging with them to an often offensive degree.

Dhawan’s debut, for example, was soured by a scene in which the Doctor weaponised his race against him. The episode, Spyfall, saw the new Master posing as a Nazi soldier in German-occupied Paris. The improbability of an Asian man being able to do this was explained by a “perception filter” – a device commonly used in the Whovian universe to cause others to see what they want to see, in this case hiding the Master’s ethnicity from the Nazis. The Doctor escaped the Master by framing him as a British double agent, then jammed his filter, leaving him open to both the retribution and the racism of the Nazis.

It’s not the first time the writing of ethnic minority characters has seemed questionable; Sharon D Clarke’s character Grace O’Brien and the mother of Lenny Henry’s character Daniel Barton, played by Blanche Williams, were both fridged almost immediately after being introduced. Henry has also spoken about the limitations of Doctor Who’s diversity; in a radio interview in December, broadcast prior to his appearance in the New Year special, he said the bosses “would rather have a dog do Doctor Who than a black person”.

Elsewhere, there’s an often apathetic engagement with the political climate. In the finale of Chibnall’s inaugural series, the Doctor’s companion Graham, played by Bradley Walsh, told the Doctor he wanted to kill Tim Shaw, a genocidal alien who had murdered his wife. The Doctor argued that even if done in self-defence, this would make Graham “the same” as Tim Shaw. It was an especially uncomfortable message at a time when those fighting fascism are often condemned as being as bad as the fascists themselves, for example in Donald Trump’s remarks after Charlottesville, when he equated white nationalists with those speaking out against them.

Another episode focused on Kerblam, an Amazon-a-like delivery company. The story reflected real-world mistreatment of workers, but while many viewers expected a satire of exploitative capitalism, the real villain was revealed to be a maintenance man, who was killing in protest at poor working conditions. This led the Doctor to claim that “systems aren’t the problem”, just people who “use and exploit the system” – thus refusing to engage with real-world suffering.

Doctor Who has had a strong history of LGBT+ representation since its return in 2005, including series-long lesbian companion Bill Potts in 2017. Executive producer Matt Strevens promised the show’s LGBT+ representation would continue, with characters from “across the spectrum”. However, representation in Chibnall’s era has been severely lacking so far. Characters have repeatedly been introduced as LGBT+, only to be promptly killed off. In the 2019 New Year special, a security guard referred to his boyfriend in his second line – and was killed by a Dalek just seconds later. The most prominent LGBT+ character in a Chibnall-penned episode, Angstrom, revealed her sexuality by referring to her dead wife. This is an unnerving pattern, and a common trope in media representation of LGBT+ people more widely. An episode featuring an alien man giving birth was criticised as being part of the “PC agenda”, when in reality it felt more like a lazy attempt at trans inclusion.

The fans decrying the show as too PC have been lost – and it’s a loss that should not be mourned. But the show has many loyal progressive fans, too. The Doctor may always have been a beacon of compassion and empathy, but too many of us are wondering where it’s gone.​

“WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MAGIC OF DOCTOR WHO?”

This was the question posed – in full caps – by the president of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society in its magazine, TARDIS.

The year was 1977, and the story under scrutiny was The Deadly Assassin. Today, this Manchurian Candidate-riffing conspiracy thriller is regarded as one of Doctor Who’s all-time greats, from the height of Tom Baker’s stripy scarf imperial phase. But you’d never have guessed that from Jan Vincent-Rudzki’s hatchet job, which railed against its tautological title and the rewriting of Whovian lore.

If this seems like a funny way of showing your “appreciation” for something, the DWAS, as it was known, wasn’t alone. Over at the rival Doctor Who Fan Club, the story also came in for a kicking. So fed up was DWFC secretary Keith Miller with the way “the programme has degenerated”, that in 1978 he shut up shop altogether, asking: “How can you be president of a fan club for a programme you’ve lost faith in?”

Pretty easily, as it happens. Because since when has liking Doctor Who been a prerequisite of being a Doctor Who fan? If you don’t believe me, try braving Twitter after any episode airs. This series, there has been hair-pulling over everything from whether the Doctor was right to betray Sacha Dhawan’s Master to the Nazis to her frozen response to Graham’s cancer fears (the latter prompting the BBC to issue a rare clarification on a character’s motivations).

Even an episode as lauded as last month’s Fugitive of the Judoon, in which Jo Martin was revealed as a hitherto unseen incarnation of the Doctor, infuriated a vocal minority, aghast at how it might impact the show’s continuity. Similarly, The Haunting of Villa Diodati – which even the most stubborn Who refusenik must concede was a banger – has upset some by contradicting a previous hook-up between Mary Shelley and Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor in Big Finish’s audio adventures.

There also exists a small but noisy rump of fandom committed to broader wailing about how “woke” Doctor Who is now DEAD TO THEM (some – though not all – are fully-fledged #NotMyDoctor misogynists).

But it was ever thus. In 1966, the BBC’s own audience research department published a report on the negative response to Patrick Troughton’s puckish Second Doctor, with complaints that he was “idiotic” and “a pantomime character”. A few years later, Baker – the great godhead of Doctor Who – was described in the same forum as “too stupid for words”.

The 1980s were a particularly choleric period. The BBC even provided disgruntled followers with a platform to air their grievances, with “superfan” Ian Levine condemning Doctor Who as a “mockery” of its former self on the review show Did You See ...? (Levine also posed for an infamous press photo in which he smashed his TV with a hammer.)

When Sylvester McCoy debuted as the Doctor in 1987, the DWAS’s top dog penned a damning op-ed for the Daily Mail in which he concluded that the show was “slowly, but surely, being killed.” Shortly afterwards, a rare peace broke out, with fans agreeing that McCoy’s later adventures were the finest the show had produced in years. Obviously, that’s when the BBC cancelled it.

When Doctor Who did eventually return 16 years later, it proved a ratings smash, under the guidance of Russell T Davies, especially the three series with David Tennant as a rock star Time Lord.

But Doctor Who fans weren’t put on this Earth to enjoy Doctor Who – or, god forbid, agree with mere viewers. There were complaints about burping bins and farting monsters. There was endless bellyaching about “Davies ex machina” – the term fans adopted to describe Davies’s fondness for hand-waving plot resolutions. And the outrage at Catherine Tate’s casting as companion Donna Noble was so vociferous Davies was forced to speak out against “those dark corners” of fandom that “react as if the world is ending”.

His successor, Steven Moffat, endured similar barbs from the so-called faithful. His watch was deemed “too complicated”, though it also coincided with the rise of Twitter, a forum that has done more than anything else to amplify bizarre grudges. Naturally, when current showrunner Chris Chibnall came in and dialled down Moffat’s knotty plotting, fans protested that it had become too simplistic again.

If Doctor Who seems like a show that has been disappointing its devotees for 56 years and counting, perhaps that is to be expected. After all, no other TV series in history has shown such a wilful disregard for anything approaching a house style, happily pressing the re-set button every week and leaping between planets and time zones, comedy and tragedy, psychodrama and space opera.

Besides, it can be healthy to mock the things we love. Half the fun of being a Doctor Who fan is celebrating those moments where the show falls short of its vaulting overambition. Which, when you’re trying to map an entire universe of wonders and terrors on a BBC budget, is often. (This is the show, lest we forget, that once staged a Concorde hijack in BBC Television Centre.)

Case in point: in 1986, two of Doctor Who’s writers were subjected to a handbagging from a group of “diehard fans” on BBC feedback show Open Air. Among them was a teenager who offered a quietly devastating critique of the “cliched” scripts full of “running up and down corridors and silly monsters”. His name? Chris Chibnall.

In 2018, Chibnall dismissed his younger self’s words as “a load of nonsense”. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Either way, it’s a comforting reminder that, whenever anyone lifts a rock to expose those darker, damper corners of fandom Davies warned about, chances are what emerges will be a load of nonsense as well. Any show that continues to provoke such passionate debate is clearly doing something right. It’s when the arguments stop he needs to worry.​