It’s been exactly nine years since Doctor Who regenerated itself in the most dramatic way. Regeneration has always been Doctor Who‘s secret sauce, because it means the show can effectively reinvent itself with remarkable ease. Looking back, the first ever regeneration story – “The Tenth Planet” – was a massive gamble; would audiences stay when the main character was changing so dramatically, from William Hartnell’s grandfather figure to Patrick Troughton’s cosmic hobo?
The answer, of course, was yes; in fact, Doctor Who has officially become the world’s longest-running sci-fi TV show. If life depends on change and renewal, then that idea is now baked into the show’s format – but not all regenerations are equal. In fact, even now, one regeneration changed everything for Doctor Who.
I’ll never forget the announcement, which actually served as a subtle tease for the first two episodes – where the Thirteenth Doctor would be separated from the TARDIS, striving to recover it. Some Doctors have lavish presentations, but Whittaker had a teased video where the TARDIS key materialized in her hand. The casting wasn’t exactly a surprise; the bookies had been calling it for days, predicting her debut as the next Doctor. But it was still exciting to see history being made, with the first female Doctor (in release order).
Doctor Who had been setting this up for decades. The idea of a female Doctor first surfaced as a joke, when Fourth Doctor Tom Baker wished his successor the best – “whoever he or she may be.” It became a lot more real when Michelle Gomez joined Doctor Who as Missy, a female incarnation of the Master, thereby confirming Time Lords can switch between male and female forms when they regenerate. If that was true of the Master, it was logically true of the Doctor as well. But now, at last, it was official.
Naturally, this meant Doctor Who had officially entered the culture wars in the UK. But, to be fair, the show had history; this was the series that called out Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax, featured two stories inspired by the UK joining the European Common Market, and once did an (excellent) epic on the dangers of pollution. Bizarrely, the Hartnell story “The War Machines” feels like it foreshadows the current AI debate. Doctor Who has never been shy of wading into politics, so this wasn’t really unusual.
What was unusual, though, was for Doctor Who to be raised in the Houses of Parliament. Conservative MP Nick Fletcher argued that “female replacements” in Doctor Who robbed boys of role models, leaving them with gangsters the Krays and Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders. “Is there any wonder we are seeing so many young men committing crime?,” he asked, in a particularly memorable contribution. This view was echoed by Fifth Doctor Peter Davison, who said he felt “a bit sad” that the Doctor might no longer be a “role model for boys.”
On the other hand, Sixth Doctor Colin Baker declared that view “rubbish.” He insisted you don’t have to be a specific gender to be a role model; “Can’t you be a role model as people?” Davison himself has since stepped back from his previous criticism, won over by Whittaker’s portrayal. But not everyone is persuaded, partly because the Whittaker era coincided with a period of weaker writing and cinematography, with viewership dropping like a stone after her debut. The debate remains live.
Tabloids regularly claimed Doctor Who had gone woke during the Whittaker era (“go woke, go broke” became the somewhat unoriginal criticism). Helmed by showrunner Chris Chibnall, this was actually a time when the Doctor struggled to hold authority figures to account, and seemed to lose her progressive edge. The worst was the story “Kerblam!,” which – as Darren Mooney put it memorably in The Escapist – “finds the Thirteenth Doctor saving space Amazon while insisting that ‘the systems aren’t the problem.’” “Rosa” made the Doctor a mere observer to racism, and worse – with the Doctor forcing her companion to become complicit in a moment of prejudice so the pattern of history would be sustained.
Looking back, Doctor Who went on to do something truly strange over the next few years. Chibnall is most noted for his “Timeless Child” retcon, which revealed there were incarnations of the Doctor who predated William Hartnell. One of these was Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor, a character I absolutely love – but who also sits rather uncomfortably on a thematic level. Chibnall introduced Whittaker as the first female Doctor, then effectively undermined the moment’s significance by revealing she wasn’t the first at all. It’s such a strange creative choice, oddly incoherent.
Mooney ran a critical eye over the entire Thirteenth Doctor era, and reluctantly concluded that “Doctor Who is more conservative than it has been in decades. It respects the police, it tempers the Doctor’s anarchist tendencies, and it largely rejects dramatic systemic or social change.” The Whittaker era was woke on the surface level, because of casting, but the progressive politics only went skin deep. The debate still rages in the fandom, perhaps indicating something about media literacy itself in the culture wars. So often, the much-complained about progressivism is only skin deep.
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