Canadian Politics Today

I HOPE YOU ARE HAPPY KIM !

I don't follow Dr Who in the slightest, and I think Dr Who is a rather small corner of geek fandom, as opposed to a mainstream success in the way Wonder Woman has been.

Nonetheless, I have been following some of the reaction this has generated on the Interwebs, and yes, I am pretty tickled.     It's fun to see the howls of the Trumptards and MRAs and Gamergaters and others who are outraged that the downtrodden straight white male is being erased from the pages of history.



From what I can gather, the Doctor is part of a race of powerful alien entities who adopt human form when they wish to interact with humans. In the show's mythology it has been established that they aren't limited to manifesting themselves as one gender or another, and that in their regular existence human sexuality and gender are completely unimportant to them.  And they have had characters who were male in one incarnation return later in female incarnations already.   So the potential for casting a female in the role has been established, and the reason for casting the Doctor as male is a result of writer and audience preference, not of anything inherent in the show's established mythology.

And yet there seems to be legions out there claiming the show has been RUINED FOREVER by this move.

Happily there are at least as many mocking the outraged with mock outrage of their own.   One popular howl of mock outrage is that they did not cast a ginger; gingers are up in arms in mock outrage over yet another non-ginger being cast as the Doctor.

is part of a race of powerful alien entities who adopt human form when they wish to interact with humans.... in their regular existence human sexuality and gender are completely unimportant to them.

Often in science fiction we see entities trying to masquerade as humans for a variety of reasons.  I once watched a similar show called Sapphire And Steel, starring Joanna Lumley and David McCallum, which is similar to Dr Who in the sense of proposing a time-traveling being adopting human form to perform tasks.  Sapphire (Lumley) and Steel (McCallum) were two extra-dimensional entities who adopted human forms to prevent malicious beings from entering this dimension by causing disruptions in the continuity of time... it was all rather confusing. Lumley and McCallum both portray their characters in a way that seems somehow unearthly.  They way they interact with people creates a strong impression that while Sapphire and Steel may look like humans, they aren't. 

 -k