New Doctor vows to regenerate hero stereotype

[TimeLady]

Whittaker, 36, said she hoped her casting would inspire young girls to aim higher.

“There’s the chiselled superhero that we’re used to seeing and we’ve all grown up with but Doctor Who has never been that, which is wonderful. It’s attainable in so many ways,” she told Radio Times. “And now it isn’t only attainable for half of the population. The other half can be the Doctor as well. Girls will no longer just think, ‘Oh, I could be a companion.’ Being the first female Doctor and showing children that their heroes in shows don’t always look the same is a huge honour for me.”

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/new-doctor-who-jodie-whittaker-promises-to-regenerate-superhero-stereotype-jsvfhx86h

The Doctor's Wife is one of my all time favourite episodes. Wonderfully inventive, sparkling dialogue, beautifully acted, fabulous to look at.

I love that when Idris finally disappears, it's not on the subtitles, but is clearly in the audio, that she whispers "I love you..." With all the fuss made over romantic relationships between the Doctor and his companions, Gaiman showed how much he understands the show by a really touching reference to the most iconic and enduring relationship in the show - the Doctor and the TARDIS.

I think we all know why Clara was there - to satisfy the needs of a certain demographic

I liked Clara with Matt Smith. The Impossible Girl storyline was fun. But once it was resolved, there wasn't much point in her character and Moff, as usual, set up something interesting in the idea of splinter-Claras and then didn't do anything with it.

Moffat is remarkably bad at follow-through, isn't he? So many potential ideas that went nowhere.

What annoyed me with the clara storm was that the doctor was prepared to do shitty things to save her.
I just couldnt see it. They treated each other like shit. What he did in the moon episode was awful.

I am so ridiculously excited about this. I love it when its a crowd of companions.
I hope bradley welsh is just playing himself really. And the two younger ones maybe more serious.

Yeah moffats twisty storylines probably lost a lot of viewers. I loved it, the river and her parents thing especially. But im a geek, they need to appeal to people who just tune in once a week.
The whole silence will fall thing was teased for so bloody long. Yet then they rushed the conclusion through in one episode.

If you wasn't listening properly you probably missed the rushed explainations.

I think they should have gone with a female doctor ages ago, I’d have preferred an older woman, but I said Matt Smith was a bit young and was proved wrong he was rather good.

Happy to get behind any recasting though. It must be a stress on the old shoulders. If this Doctor doesn’t work out it won’t be because she’s a woman, I think it’s just as easy to think of neat fits for the doctor from the ranks of british actresses as it is actors.

I worry that people aren’t going to give her a fair crack at the whip, and that would be mistake. I happen to really like Rey from Star Wars and had many long arguments how she’s pretty good.

I agree Matt Smith was good - he pulled off the trick of looking young on the outside but very old on the inside. Which is maybe why the age difference between him and Alex Kingston didn't matter in the (rather unfortunate and sexist) way it often seems to with an older woman/younger man.

I didn't object to Moffat's twisty storylines particularly. My problem was that he kept recycling the same damned ideas in different clothes.
River's mind uploaded to a giant computer? Great story. Let's do it again with the incredibly boring Mr Pink at the end of Capaldi's first series, but plot twist we'll make it a bad thing instead!

Sheesh.

I am really looking forward to her i think as long as the writing is good she woll be fantastic, not convinced on 3 companions but I am still very excited

Stephen Moffat melted my brain with his storylines I can barely remember Peter Capadis Doctor which is a real shame because I liked him.

I was getting my dc to have a toy cull today. DS1 wanted to get rid of most of his Doctor Who figures as he's really lost interest in it over the PC era. I agree they tried to appeal to the fanboys and forgot about making good Saturday night entertainment for the family. We all loved MS for the most part. He made the ropiest stories watchable. It was too big a jump to PC being a grumpy man having a mid life crisis. I don't know how they managed to make him so unlikable. He was a grumpy old git in Paddington at the same time but they managed in a couple of scenes to get warmth and humour out of him that they didn't in an entire season of Doctor Who.

DD said she's been watching the Ecclestone series in iplayer recently (when they were first shown they were a bit too scary for her) and she commented how much better they were than the recent ones.

Yes, but The Husbands of River Song is just bloody gorgeous, and Capaldi shines through the whole thing. I mean yes, he's been sold short, but there are still some gems in his his tenure.

My son follows after me as the Who fan in this house - he's very detail focused and knows all the trivia. He owns a pocket watch and cosplays in a pin stripe jacket, black jeans, fake converse trainers and a long scarf. He was heartbroken when Capaldi became Whittaker, because he already got bullied at school for being nerdy, clever and unsporty, and feared he'd get bullied because his hero had changed sex. It was really upsetting at the time - even while understanding it was great for girls to have the Doctor as a role model, it felt pretty shitty to take it away from my son in the process. Mama bear protectiveness and all that.

He's come round now, and he even he is, I think, looking forward to something fresh after slogging through Capaldi's stories.

The husbands of River Song is lovely. It has a heart and emotion. I love RS anyway. Imo his later episodes are much better but it was as if they just wanted to throw away the whole Smith/Tennant era for some reason and start again. Chris Chibnall writes quite populist stuff so he may have a different take on it.

Can't let this ridiculous derail slide by:
So, given that these things can be established ad hoc, there's no reason why a transwoman couldn't play the Doctor? By that I mean the Doctor being played as a transwoman by a transwoman.

There it is. Proof once again that TW don't want to join Class Woman, but to replace it entirely.

And you really wonder why we put up such resistance?

I do hope that the JW Doctor works out, and that it won't be an excuse to put the series on hiatus again (or use the old "but we tried one woman, didn't work out, so back to Dudesville"). There have been a few flops of Dudely Doctors over the years, never stopped them casting more.

Alex K would have made a fantastic Doctor. Loved her to bits.

I too have been watching it from the mid-60s.
(hah hah, figured out how Errol got the tardis pic!)

In my fanfic fantasies River and The Doctor had a daughter during their 24 year 'last night' who was the next companion.

Talking of daughters, do you think they'll remember at some point that the Doctor had one?

Georgia Tennant (the daughter) tweeted hi mum

I know it's some sort of Whovian reason to suggest it but I thought Georgia Tennant was a terrible actress. I didn't like the character at all. Stunt carrying case at its finest.

I'd have thought enough time has elapsed they could recast the part if they wanted? (given she resurrected maybe she can regenerate?)

Well, that's the thing with Who, and why I forgive Moffat his habit of leaving lots of threads dangling - with a history as varied and creative as Who, with so many showrunners and writers throwing their ideas in the mix, and no hard and fast canon and entirely flexible rules, there really is no saying what will be picked on by the next writer.
It's one of the reasons it had such a good comeback, because Russell T just had enormous fun playing with all the classics. I still remember the enormous adrenaline rush I got when Derek Jacobi turned to address the screen and said "I. Am. The. Master!" God, I was unbearable that day

So, the end of the first series with a female Doctor. What do we think?

Am I the only one who is disappointed, both with the banal scripts and the wooden characters?

I've watched all the series from the 60s onwards; I even struggled through the Moffat/Cipaldi era, but I can honestly say last night was when I gave up on this one.

Is female socialisation to blame for her being so bloody 'nice'?

Absolutely unmitigated crap. I hated it. Rosa was a highlight, but just showed me why I never wanted Chibnall in the first place - he's the kind of writer who can produce a Dinosaurs on a Spaceship once in a blue moon, and it's very worthwhile, but he's not got anything beyond that.

The scripts were dull and plodding, the preachiness was off the scale. I mean Who has always been able to bring certain messages through, but in an episode like The Doctor's Daughter, for example, the anti-gun, anti war message is actually part of a decent story, and 'make the basis of your society a man who never would' is an emotional high point, rather than a shoe horned in sermon.

As for Whittaker, I'm hugely disappointed. She's incredibly bland. It's like the person we've all known in our lives at some point who is all "I'm mad, me!" because they wear odd socks and occasionally pull gurning faces.

She's only ever got authority if the other characters in the story say so. It doesn't come through from her directly at all. Which might convince as a deliberate choice like Troughton's clowning but for the fact that she just doesn't have a steel beneath the forced whimsy.

And her delivery of technobabble is bloody awful. She still sounds like she's saying memorized lines rather than speaking knowledge from ginormous brain.

So yeah. I know, because certain websites keep pumping out articles about how it's the best Who evar, that some people love it to pieces and all, but I haven't disliked Who as much since Colin Baker.