Doctor… what?

There is to be a new Dr. Who. He’s male again, and black this time. Naturally this has polarised the internet into the Woke (‘It’s the perfect choice’) and the Purist/Racist (‘the Doctor isn’t meant to be black’) with those like me in the middle who couldn’t give a stuff what the Doctor looks like as long as he’s in character in the show.

I’ve watched Dr. Who since William Hartnell’s days. I watched his appearance change dramatically when Patrick Troughton took over. I think Patrick was the only incarnation to get a choice of what he’d look like after regeneration. The rest, it was all pot luck. He changed entirely again when Jon Pertwee took over. And then Tom Baker, and so many more. When they later inserted John Hurt between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston, that made Matt Smith the twelfth incarnation (assuming that William Hartnell was the first incarnation). Which worked, he was dying, he had run out of regenerations until the Time Lords sent him more.

So he had gone through twelve incarnations as his original form, a white man with a massive array of different faces and characters. Then he gets more regenerations. This goes against the nature of the Time Lords so it’s likely to screw things up a bit. Okay, regeneration 13 was Peter Capaldi, another grumpy old white man and it did give the impression they were starting again with a grumpy old white man as they had in the beginning.

However, the ‘fixed’ rules of regeneration were blown when he got a new set. So the next up was Jodie Foster Whittaker (corrected by commenters – at my age they all look the same anyway). I watched some of her shows. She was good at the role, she had the latent lunacy of the Doctor well established but…

The scripts were full of PC/woke shite. She could have been great in the role but the determination of the scriptwiters to push a woke agenda ruined the show for me. The final straw was the giant spiders episode. The ‘Trump clone’ (yeah, it was really obvious) was actually right to shoot the big spider that was suffocating, he gave it a quick death rather than slow suffocation. The idea of locking all the spiders in the ‘safe room’ was pure cruelty. The big ones will eat the little ones until there’s only one left, and that one will starve to death. And yet it was pushed as the ‘kind solution’. I hear people say that ‘Jodie Foster Whittaker had the worst ratings ever’ but it wasn’t her. It was the scriptwriters. Their determination to push political correctness and wokeness into the entire show – which was designed to be pure escapist entertainment – utterly destroyed it.

A female Time Lord is no big deal. The President of Gallifrey was a woman in many of the early episodes. There were also black Time Lords. None of the current changes are out of canon. Breaking the ‘twelve regenerations’ rule means anything goes now. In fact, it gets the show out of a hole it had dug itself into.

Colin Baker, as the Doctor, was placed on trial and his accuser, the Valeyard, turned out to be a future incarnation of himself who wanted to steal his remaining regenerations. In the original canon, that should have been Matt Smith – the last incarnation gone bad. That storyline is now open again and could yet be brought back (although the actors would need to be lookalikes – the storyline aired in 1986).

I know nothing about the new actor brought in to replace Jodie Foster Whittaker. I saw a clip from an interview and he seems keen to take on the role. I hope he’ll be good at it.

But if it fails, it won’t be because of him, just as the current collapse in ratings has nothing to do with Jodie Foster Whittaker.

It’s all down to the scriptwriters. If they keep pushing the woke shite, the show is doomed no matter who takes the title role.