{"id":30678,"date":"2013-08-12T19:33:09","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T09:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/power-up.space\/?p=30678"},"modified":"2013-08-12T19:33:09","modified_gmt":"2013-08-12T09:33:09","slug":"why-isnt-the-new-doctor-a-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/?p=30678","title":{"rendered":"Why isn\u2019t the new Doctor a woman?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why isn\u2019t the new Doctor a woman?<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Chris Tyler<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So the new doctor has been announced and although the choice of actor has been approved of fans so far there is still a group of people out there going \u201cBut I wanted it to be a woman\u201d<\/p>\n

In story there are good strong reasons why the doctor (as far as we know) has never been a woman for the same reason why the doctor has never been an ethnic minority (unless you count Scottish) or an Alien (although, if the doctor can regenerate into anything but a humanoid biped then it has never been described or seen on screen with any Time Lord, perhaps they simply can\u2019t or it\u2019s not \u201cthe done thing?\u201d)<\/p>\n

But whilst other time lords (Romana for one) have demonstrated a particular talent for picking and choosing regenerations as well as the transition from one regeneration to the other being smooth the Doctor has never been particularly good at this, every regeneration has been pot luck, every regeneration has been fraught with difficulties and the doctor has had about as much control over it all as he has had over the Tardis. So in story the regenerations cycle isn\u2019t really under the Doctors control, maybe he wants to be a woman but it\u2019s just never happened in much the same way that he wants to be Ginger.<\/p>\n

Or perhaps it is a choice, perhaps the doctor has no control over who he ends up being but can control gender and is perfectly happy not to be a woman since he spends a lot of time on earth and doesn\u2019t want to have to deal with all the ridiculous sexism that happens there.<\/p>\n

Out of story much as Peter Capali is bound to grow on me (I think he\u2019s a better choice than Matt Smith was)\u00a0 but it\u2019s a safe decision.\u00a0 Good, dependable, slightly interesting but not brave in any way shape or form. Of course no matter what your politics the person who takes on the shoes HAS to be a great actor first and foremost, fortunately there are lots of great actors. You could argue that Matt Smith was a brave decision and I\u2019m all for older Doctors but I must admit that my favourite choice was Chiwetelu Umeadi Ejiofor who is also not a woman but at least is of a different ethnicity and also a fantastic actor the only downfall would be having to learn how to pronounce that name, then Tilda Swinton an extraordinary actor who I thought would be able to bring some authority and androgyny to the role and therefore satisfy everyone. And then James May but only because I\u2019d like for the new companion to go \u201cIt\u2019s bigger on the inside?!?\u201d excitedly and for the Doctor to go \u201cYes, it is! And I\u2019ll tell you something interesting about that\u2026\u201dand then spend the rest of the episode explaining dimensional mechanics to an increasingly bored companion. The other advantage of that is that you can then cast Jeremy Clarkson as the Master. (What\u2019s he after? POWWERR!!)<\/p>\n

The real reason that we probably didn\u2019t get a female doctor this time round is that the writers don\u2019t know how do to it. Of course the best way to do it is it just cast a woman and then simply never draw attention to it, the doctor is now a woman, so what? The most intelligent and mature reaction we can have is no reaction because on a galactic scale gender simply isn\u2019t important. Unfortunately on Earth in a writers room it still is and so I think they just went \u201cWe don\u2019t know how to do this\u201d. On forums I saw exchanges like, but if the doctors a woman then she can just get it on with the Master then right? And someone else replying \u201coh I\u2019d like that\u201d which is why fans shouldn\u2019t be allowed to write the show. I\u2019m fairly sure that the doctor\u2019s objection to snogging the master isn\u2019t his current sex but the fact that he\u2019s an evil megalomaniac who\u2019s tried to kill the doctor repeatedly. Just because it\u2019s science fiction doesn\u2019t mean that just anything\u00a0 can happen. Does it Mark Gatzis?<\/p>\n

On the other hand some people need to take a good hard look at why they want the next doctor to be a woman, I\u2019m not sure that \u201cit\u2019s about time\u201dor \u201cBecause we have established that time lords can regerate into women\u201d are really good enough reasons. In the end the only question a writer should ever ask is \u201cDoes this serve the story\u201d and that\u2019s a question only they can answer although I\u2019m not sure how it wouldn\u2019t provided they got the right actor and that\u2019s a caveat that applies to anyone who might potentially be the doctor.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There is this test for sexism that gets trotted out every so often because people continually get it wrong, overwhelmingly.<\/p>\n

\u201cA boy and his dad they get into a severe car accident. They were rushed to the hospital where they were put in separate rooms. The Doctor goes into the boy\u2019s room and says I cannot operate on this child, he is my son. How can this be?\u201d<\/p>\n

The answer is of course that the Doctor is the boy\u2019s mother but surprisingly few people get that at the first pass. That\u2019s because in society there is still an ingrained notion that women are nurse and doctors are men and it looks like that\u2019s the way it\u2019s going to be for a while.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why isn\u2019t the new Doctor a woman? By Chris Tyler So the new doctor has been announced and although the choice of actor has been approved of fans so far there is still a group of people out there going \u201cBut I wanted it to be a woman\u201d In story there are good strong reasons<\/p>\n

Read More\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mind-news","category-movietv-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30680,"href":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30678\/revisions\/30680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.impulsegamer.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}