The Woeful Wokery of New Doctor Who

Fans were ecstatic when the showrunner who spearheaded the BBC’s 2005 revival of Doctor Who, Russel T. Davies, announced his return. Davies had the unenviable task of retrieving the show from the depths that current director Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whitaker had sent it to. But recently, news has rolled in that the new season may be as bad as what came before. New Doctor, a Rwandan migrant named Ncuti Gatwa, will use ‘They/Them’ pronouns for the role, while black transgender actor Yasmin Finney will play his new companion ‘Rose’ (a play on Billie Piper’s beloved character). But nostalgia will not be enough to return new-Who to its former glory. Sequential showrunners have made the Tardis a battleground of the culture war, and these latest politicisations are unlikely to win alienated fans over. Why do progressives continue this suicidal skin-suiting of fans’ beloved franchises?

Given the shared name, fans have speculated as to whether Finney will be playing a race-and-gender-swapped version of Rose Tyler. It’s much more likely that Finney will be the offspring of Catherine Tate’s Donna Noble, who will reportedly return to the Tardis alongside David Tennant for the sixtieth-anniversary episode next year. Donna married fiancé Shaun Temple (played by Karl Collins) in the 2010 New Years’ special The End of Time: Part Two, and likely named their daughter as a tribute to Piper’s character. Another possibility, that Rose is the child of Freema Agyeman’s Martha Jones and Noel Clarke’s Mickey Smith, is unlikely, as Clarke’s career was capsized by #MeToo allegations last year.

If the character is indeed a different version of Piper’s Rose Tyler, however, fans will not take kindly to their childhood being used as a Trojan Horse for Davies’ gender politics. In an award speech for his recent work It’s A Sin, Davies accused the LGB Alliance of transphobic genocide, stating “To cut out the T is to kill.” Coinciding with this, Doctor Who’s long-standing audio drama series recently launched a “Very Gay, Very Trans” podcast.

This is not to say that Doctor Who has not been historically topically contentious, nor had a diverse cast. The Doctor has had companions of both sexes, various ethnicities and sexualities, and even alien species. Episodes have confronted issues like discrimination, fascism, and utilitarianism. Aside from a few pro-Marx comments in in Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffatt's scripts for The Empty Child and Robot of Sherwood, the Doctor has traditionally confronted moral and philosophical dilemmas, rather than prescribed political ideologies.

But now, the story is subordinate to moral browbeating by our betters at the BBC. The Doctor’s travels through time are now politically correct reconditioning to cure the audience of their bigotry every Saturday night. It’s easier to suspend our disbelief at Cybermen taking over Canary Wharf than it is the casting choices made by creative teams who are reaching through the screen to slap us into accepting the doctrine of diversity and inclusion. No wonder audiences are escaping what used to be escapism, and dropping the show in droves.

Of course, there will be dismissals similar to that of Star Wars: ‘Why do you care, it’s a movie about space wizards intended for children?’ Nick Fletcher MP was mocked when he said Doctor Who going woke robbed boys of role models. But I care because my love of stories like Doctor Who inspired me to write. I care because the politicisation of various properties is making them unwatchable and unprofitable. And I care because the propagandists hijacking established artistic licences for their political ends seem to care enough to change it, too. We must criticise what we love to save it from the Leftist scrapheap.

Critical race theorist Charles R. Lawrence III argued that raising the racial consciousness of non-white people in order to reject the “abstract ideal [of] the ‘colour blind’ society” required “flood[ing] the market with our stories […] to shape a new public discourse.” This gave the formally legal-focused doctrine of CRT a cultural dimension: a persuasive power which transcends the “limitations and distortions of narrowly constructed traditional legal analysis.” Lawrence argued that “Narrative [is] a Form of Knowing”; meaning that controlling narratives controls what people believe. ‘Representation’ in media is, therefore, a pedagogic political tool for reshaping an audience’s perception of reality until they accept the creator’s revolutionary worldview. This academic literature is what informs anti-racism training, which companies like the BBC spend thousands on each year.

We can see this transformation of reality at work in the historical revisionism conducted by prior showrunner Steven Moffat. In season ten’s Thin Ice, a disproportionate number of black actors were cast to participate in the Victorian Frost Fairs. When pressed on its historical inaccuracy, Moffat claimed “History is always whitewashed,” before telling the BBC:

“We've kind of got to tell a lie. We'll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn't have been, and we won't dwell on that. We'll say, 'To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we'll summon it forth'.”

We see here how Lawrence III’s concept of speaking racial equity into being through fiction is being conducted by Moffat. Moffat then said that it would be “amazing” if both the Doctor and his companion were “non-white” one day. He blamed the delay in a female Doctor on viewers who “voted Brexit.”

Later, in Chibnall’s The Timeless Child, the Doctor was retconned into being the first Timelord, and his first incarnation having always been a black woman. What a disgrace to the legacy of William Hartnell.  This racially conscious casting has continued with Gatwa, who hopes his casting allows black and gay people to “feel seen” by his Doctor. Identity politics infests every unpopular creative decision by the showrunners.

Gatwa and Davies’ argument for ‘Representation’ means prioritising the superficial identities of characters on the screen, page, or stage, while gutting the plot of any progression or depth. Characters should be flawed; they should struggle to earn and exercise virtue in order to be called heroic. Now that ‘marginalised’ peoples’ purportedly deserve their turn in the spotlight, they must make up the overwhelming majority of leading heroic roles. But because they are ‘protected classes’, they cannot be allowed to undergo any hardship during the course of the story. They therefore become avatars for innately perfect people who strain against the villainous society which seeks to rob them of their power. Abiding by Rousseau’s maxim, progressive storytelling tells us that “[Wo]Man was born free, and everywhere [s]he is in chains.” ‘Representation’ doesn’t create characters: it presents us with brand ambassadors for whichever supposedly oppressed group is celebrated by today’s hashtag.

All this rests on a nasty premise: if all moral legitimacy resides in characters who are non-white, women, or part of the ever-expanding LGBT acronym, then who are the villains? By process of elimination, they are those who are not ‘protected classes’. In a woke story, straight, white, heterosexual men are no different than the Daleks.

Representation robs us of the agency to think critically when engaging with the moral quandaries in fiction. This reconstitution of our morality and beliefs about the world may produce dangerous consequences. Reality may be denied, but the consequences of denying reality cannot. Run around with your eyes shut long enough, and your nose will discover brick walls. As Aristotle wrote, the mimetic quality of media spares us the fate of tragic figures by showcasing “universal truths” of causality from which we may all learn. To paraphrase Jordan Peterson: our characters die so we don’t have to. Replacing the replicable behavioural archetypes of our fiction with banal stand-ins for the Universal Men of identity classes cripples us of a chain of inherited cultural wisdom. Culture is the progressive’s war against intergenerational conservatism, in the Burkean sense.

So, the new Doctor Who may be as bad as the last few seasons. But believing Davies could have saved it was folly to start. The property, and many other franchises like it, are lost to the managed decline of being mouthpieces for Leftist ideology. We can only produce and protect our unapologetically conservative cultural artefacts instead. If we build it, they will come.