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Doctor Who: Black or Wack?
🕑 Added 2023-12-28 13:39:04 +0000 UTCDoctor Who, a series that was ruined forever, has returned. Can it possibly redeem itself? No. No it absolutely cannot. But I suppose it can try.
As much as i hate to waste my energy saying things that a bunch of nerds have already said for me, just this once i'll add my voice to the choir and say that yes, everything to do with the Chris Chibnall/Jodie Whitaker era of this show is indeed dreadfully unwatchable dogshit, for reasons too multitudinous to get into, and as an extra middle finger they made sure to fuck up the entire lore of the show on their way out. The nerds were right this time, it was real fuckin bad.
Attractive Woman Ruins Beloved Nerd Thing - Part 1 of 10,000
I'm gonna have to be the bad guy and go against the grain on one thing though. Too many people still try to defend Whitaker as the Doctor. "You can't blame her" they say. "She gave a greeeeat performance, the writing let her down". I say thee fuckin nay. She's equally responsible for the assness of the whole assy era. Jodie proved everyone wrong who assumed a woman could be The Doctor convincingly, and it looks like I'm the only one stunning and brave enough to say it.
She was fucking terrible in this role. Jodie sleepwalked through this performance, giving little more than a thoughtless pastiche of the most superficial quirk and whimsy from previous Doctors. Throughout her entire run she conveyed zero of the character's depth and mavitas, and the only personality traits unique to her incarnation were unlikable ones.
It doesn't exactly send the message they were going for when the first female Doctor's defining characteristics are extreme moral hypocrisy and blindly following emotion over reason. I want the show to be fun, not based.
It's one thing to say the problems have more to do with the writing than the acting but that alone doesn't exonerate such a bland performance. Surely Whitaker can take her share of the blame for failing to endear this already beloved character. I'm sure it sounds like I'm launching an assault on all women everywhere, but i know my critique is fair or else i wouldn't be typing it. I am a professional after-all.
My point is she was really fucking bad in this role, just completely boring, lame, uninspired and unconvincing the whole way through, whether as a supposedly wise and incorruptible timelord, or even simply as a person you'd want to be around for more than 5 seconds.
The directing, scripts, general direction of the entire show did her no favors, but she could have been the one redeeming factor of it all if only she had attempted some fucking acting. You know you've really beefed it and queefed it when the only way to save the show is to bring back the male doctor people actually liked. More like Jodie Shit-actor.
She was Good in Broadchurch though. Yes, I've seen Broadchurch. Both versions, because I'm a grown up. I don't just watch baby shows like Doctor Who.
Don't even get me started on the absolute ignoranimous-ness of retconning The Doctor's origin to make him not a mere Timelord, but a one of a kind super-being and the most special-ist baby in the whole entire universe. This is the equivalent of Zack Snyder trying to make Superman into a Christ allegory. It's no longer the same character, he's been robbed of what made him unique. Superman isn't mean to be Space-Jesus, he's meant to be Space-Moses. Likewise Doctor Who is not Space Neo, He's British Silver Surfer. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about.
The Doctor doesn't need to be some mysterious extra-dimensional immortal being to be compelling, he's compelling enough as simply a guy with a strong moral compass who stole a time machine because he didn't want to work for the Government. That's inspiring and relatable at the same time. But no, that wasn't enough. He's gotta be Cthulu now or something, and also he's been lots of women before and even some black people, he just doesn't remember. Kind of undermines Jodie's place in the show's history when you think about it. If nothing else she was the first female doctor but now even that has an asterisk.
I've seen some boneheaded retcons in my day but this here is one of the all-time blunders. For Chibnall to throw this wrench into the show's history on his way out honestly strikes me as a little selfish because now the poor saps writing the show are stuck cleaning up his disgusting mess. He's like the little asshole at daycare who wouldn't put the Legos back where he found them when his mom picked him up.
You can't just ignore something like this. It fundamentally changes the entire identity of the show. But at the same time, it's such a stupid pain in the ass to have to deal with at all that everyone just wants to move on and have the show be fun adventures again. So you're fucked in the mouth if you do address it and fucked in the ass if you don't. Either way, you're gay.
So far this new batch of episodes has been subtly attempting to incorporate these retcons in such a way as to make them actually somewhat meaningful while also doing some damage control and mopping all the bullshit off the floor any way it can. The overall success of this brave but foolish attempt at smoothing over the wreckage is yet to be determined, but if nothing else it's been a fascinating study in the art of the reverse-retcon.
Part 1: BINARY BINARY BINARY BINARY BINARY BINARY
This episode opens with one of the weirdest and most uncomfortable sequences in the show's history. The rest of the episode isn't terrible or anything but i can not imagine a more bizarre intro. I'm not even sure i can explain it. The Doctor is standing in the Tardis's green screen room, all the way back so his whole body is oddly in frame, awkwardly standing on outer space. He's also got the poofiest, spikiest hair for some reason like he was experimenting with being a mid 2000s Square-Enix teen for this regeneration. Then he starts telling you about Donna Noble for some reason and hamming it up about his face, meanwhile Donna is sitting in her kitchen and also randomly starts eyeballing us from beyond the 4th wall and aggressively monologues about how something is amiss from her brain. This intro made me fart.
Blah blah DoctorDonna nobody fucking cares.
Donna has a black trans daughter and a happy cuck husband now because of course she does. If she remembers the Doctor she'll die, but then she does remember him and she doesn't die because you see, The DoctorDonna is binary. Donna's daughter is not binary. She's non-binary. The DoctorDonna juice passed through her DNA or something and made Donna's daughter trans so that the DoctorDonna power could be shared in one body without killing the body.
I'm not making this up, it's what happened. The episode explicitly gives this cockamamie revelation as if it's meant to have some kind of deeper message, but i don't wanna waste any brainpower trying to decipher it. Kind of seems like one of those ideas that seem super progressive on paper but is actually kind of regressive when you think about it. Obviously the show is trying to represent and celebrate everyone but it's also kind of implying that a person was influenced to be trans by outside forces. I'm not saying i care, I'm just saying i don't think they said what they thought they were saying, know what I'm saying?
Anyway this episode does briefly allude to the Timeless Child retcon, almost begrudgingly. The doctor says to his new wheelchair friend, because of course he just has to have one of those now, that he's no longer sure who he is or where he's from or some vague shit to that effect. It's trying to ease the viewer back into this Timeless Child shit. The show is saying "yeah, we're sort of gonna try to address this down the line maybe, but for now let's just give it one line and move on". There's a lot of dragging it out to come, but it is inevitable.
Perhaps more curious are the numerous attempts here to spin Jodie's time as The Doctor into a net-positive for the character in terms of emotional development. The Doctor says things like he loves this and that person and reacts with surprise when he catches himself saying it. The implication here is that being a broad has broadened his emotional intelligence and made him more open with his affection. In order to accept this we must ignore that Jodie Whitaker's Doctor was perhaps the most emotionally unavailable, strange and awkward sociopath the character has ever been. If anything the 10th doctor was already vastly better able to relate to people emotionally and that was more than a few regenerations ago. Even Grumpy-Old-Scottish-Bastard-Who was more empathetic and affectionate with people, including when he was insulting them.
Ironically they seem to be trying to present Jodie as affectionate and empathetic like society's typical image of a woman, but the real joke here is that her actual portrayal was expressly cold and non-empathetic, very much like an actual woman.
Part 2: Scary Gumby Guys
Me on a hot date having an acid flashback and thinking I'm in Silent Hill 4
This is palette cleanser between the 14th Doctor's introduction and Regeneration into The 15th Doctor. A classic style Doctor Who creepy derelict spaceship episode. The Doctor and Donna have a little adventure to the edge of the universe or something. I don't know, i wasn't really paying attention. They have to fight some ugly floppy monster doppelganger guys who shapeshift and do yucky contortions. There isn't too much of note here, it's a very basic, standard Doctor Who episode which is nice to have after years and years of trying to reinvent the wheel.
But we can never fully escape the Chibnall Era. It hangs over everything like a black cloud and must be acknowledged at least once per episode. The Doctor for a moment begins rambling about "The Flux" which apparently was an event in which he somehow allowed HALF THE UNIVERSE TO BE DESTROYED.
WHAT. Excuse me. WHAT. This must have happened in Jodie's 3rd season because i gave up on watching that shit entirely the moment i saw fuckin dog people like in goddamn Spaceballs. Nobody told me first female doctor, in addition to her many other questionable moments, has now also accidentally done a Thanos. I can't say i'm surprised, but what the fuck? This poor show is even more irreparably fucked than i thought.
Part 3. Well That's Alright Then.
Real Neal Slapdick Harris The Ferris Wheel Heel
This episode was genuinely decent. Not merely acceptable. It also features the least clumsy attempt at dealing with Chibnall's ruinous machinations so far. Ancient Who antagonist The Celestial Toymaker is re-introduced and re-established as a trickster-like character with God-like power a-la Q, and with this established he manages to come as close as one possibly could to making the Timeless Child retcon ever so slightly palatable. Not forgivable, but palatable.
This all powerful being simply states "i made a jigsaw of your history". There we go. Done. You did it. Please just stop there. I can headcanon the rest, you don't ever need to say anything about the Timeless Child again. A wizard did it, that's all you had to say. Don't ruin this by explaining it any further. Any and all possible inconsistencies in the Doctor's history have now been accounted for and settled for all time. Right?
He also says some nonsense about keeping The Master trapped in his gold tooth, which then gets stolen at the end by a mysterious whoever-the-fuck. Neil Patrick Harris is fun in this role and i wouldn't mind seeing the character return. The Toymaker has earned my respect by canonizing that the show no longer makes any sense and thus saving it from itself.
A bunch of crap happens and finally Toymaker just rolls up on The Doctor and murders his ass with a laser cannon. Then for reasons that I'm sure are mostly external The Doctor BI-Generates, which is just a thing he can do now i guess. The way the show explains this is that The Doctor has accumulated a lot of trauma and is burning out, so he gets to take it easy with Donna on Earth for a while Black Doctor does all the Black Doctoring.
This is how it feels to receive an n-word pass
It also seems to be implying that Black Doctor is further down The Doctor's personal timeline somehow, so all the time 14 gets to spend healing and finding inner peace is already a part of the new Doctor's history. This is the show's way of skipping a bunch of long, boring trauma porn and slow character development that we've already seen a dozen times so it can just get on with being a vibrant reboot with a more carefree and adventurous feel. I'm sure it was also done so they can keep the extremely beloved and popular David Tennant in their back pocket for spin-offs and guest appearances. An elegant solution, if you ignore how clumsy and random it is.
They beat the Toymaker together by challenging him to a game of catch, which is anticlimactic and lame. If it were me i would challenge the Toymaker to Mario Party 1. I have a strategy for the Yoshi level that makes me unbeatable, and i know Neil Patrick Harris's weak palms couldn't handle the spin games.
Part 4. We Black now.
This dude looks like an 1800s root beer baron
Ncuti Gatwa, whose name i will surely learn to pronounce at some point, is both queer and black so I'm assuming he didn't even have to audition. If he had been in a wheelchair the network would have coomed themselves. He's already a better Doctor than Jodie, this is immediately an energetic performance with a unique charisma about him. He jumps and dances and wears a different outfit in every scene like a combination bohemian space-punk and flashy gay guy.
The episode was fun, and a decent enough first solo outing from this flamboyant-ass new Doctor. His new white girl is very hot, and the new space-goblins were very not. In fact they were quite disturbing. But remember the new rules, at least once per episode the fun must come to an abrupt halt so we can all remember the Chibnall years existed. The Doctor has a moment where he starts crying upon hearing a story about children being abandoned. The show is drawing a direct parallel to his new origin as the Timeless Child and making a point to show us that lingering trauma from these revelations is going to be a factor for this Doctor.
Yeah sure, fine, whatever. But hadn't we sort of already dealt with that? Or at least side-stepped it. It was literally the whole point of how the previous episode ended. I thought 14 was living through a long healing process so 15 and by extension the show could go on baggage-free. I know trauma isn't that simple in real life but it almost retroactively changes 14's decision to stay on earth from an important message of self-care, to something that comes off more like him just continuing to not deal with his problems in a different way.
Are we making the point here that 14's presumably long healing vacation actually didn't help him to get him over his baggage at all, and only delayed dealing with the root of his trauma? Well what should he have done then, continued ignoring his pain and flying around like always? Because apparantly slowing down and chilling the fuck out for a while wasn't the answer. Oh whatever, it doesn't matter. I'm not complaining about The Doctor Being emotionally affected by stuff, but of all the things for him to cry about it didn't have to be this goddamn Chibnall shit again. On the other hand i guess i do understand, cause i'm traumatized by that horse-shit too.
But it feels like the show is actively contradicting it's own message in order to shoehorn all this Chibnall era bullshit back in, even though it was already effectively dealt with by the Toymaker's artful lamp-shading. Enough had been done to address it that we could have moved on and not had to deal with it anymore. They were so close but they blew it. The previous episode's message is now "Don't bother making a change and taking care of yourself, just continue the same old destructive patterns that made you a wreck in the first place because you're already fucked and you'll always be sad anyway".
That's a miserable message, but I'm probably overthinking it. I don't really care. I'm too old to have strong opinions on television programs. I'm just doing my job. Here, let me put on my intellectual critic pants and try to spin a more positive moral from all this. Surely there's some deeper meaning i can pry that will uplift you, and make the knowledge that we're all mentally programmed slaves in a prison of entertainment a little more bearable.
I guess the main thing to take away from all this is... Thank God The Doctor is black and gay, and no longer a woman.
Final Verdict: BLACK.
Comments
HALOHEAD
Good one with 'mavitas'
