The problem with the latest season of Doctor Who is easy to label, but will be harder for its creative team to fix. This version of the Doctor, while abundant in her personality, is lacking an inner life. She knows what she believes in, and the show’s writing this season refuses to challenge her in any meaningful way, now that it seems like she’s achieved some kind of mental peace.
And without that innermost life of moral conflict, which has long been the show’s second heart, Doctor Who may simply spin its wheels in perpetuity.
Doctor Who is a show about change
Doctor Who triumphs decade after decade because of a unique harmony between one of story’s core conceits and the needs of a long-running TV show: As the Doctor regenerates, so too does the storyline. Regeneration brings about a new personality for the Doctor, which often comes with new companions, enemies, overarching plots, and even new music and opening titles. The Doctor doesn’t stay the same for long, which frees the show from having to be locked into one theme.
“We’re all different people all throughout our lives,” Matt Smith’s eleventh Doctor said just before he regenerated. Much of that speech was a series of winks at the show’s essence. The show succeeds precisely insofar as it embraces each change, and that willingness to change has created a universe that turns plot holes into wormholes, leading us from one adventure to the next.
Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor continues that grand tradition, but she has labored under a titanic change indeed: a new showrunner, Chris Chibnall, who brought in an entirely new stable of writers and crew.
This led to a hard reset that’s left the show a bit like The Good Place’s Janet after a reboot: slowly recouping all the knowledge in the universe with awkward charm.
Despite how brilliant this season has been in some ways, something feels off, and it probably won’t be fixed until Chibnall finds more certainty in his footing.
Chris Chibnall: From can critic to showrunner
There’s no doubt that Chibnall is a fan of the series. A 1986 BBC Open Air panel interview shows a 16-year-old Chris, a member of the Merseyside Doctor Who Fan Society, grilling Doctor Who writers Pip and Jane Baker.
“It hasn’t improved that much … it could’ve been a lot better,” he says, damning the then-most recent season.
“It could’ve been slightly better written,” he continued. “It was very cliched; running up and down corridors and silly monsters … It has the capacity to be very adult, very entertaining, very dramatic.”
Like so much television, Doctor Who grew up a bit in the years since. It was darker — the Doctor carried with him the knowledge that he’d effectively committed genocide against the Daleks and destroyed his own people to save the universe — and the drama was amped-up.
There were undoubted excesses from this period that the BBC was wise to move past. The days of former showrunner Steven Moffat’s puzzle-box master plots are behind us, as is the unrelenting trauma porn of the Time War and the Doctor’s agony over his actions. In some ways, twelfth Doctor Peter Capaldi’s tenure was a bridge between these two eras. He wondered whether he was a “good man,” and the quest for certainty about his soul drove much of his first two seasons as the Doctor. Doing good is one thing, but trying to prove your goodness to yourself is another, much harder one. The drama came naturally from this tension.
There’s a certain ironic punishment, I think, in Chibnall becoming showrunner once the question of the Doctor’s goodness was put to rest. Chibnall was able to work on the show he wanted as a child, a show that has since delivered what he hoped it could be. But given the chance to make his own “very adult, very dramatic” Doctor from scratch, at the end of his first season he seems to have barely started.
A time lady in search of her moment
But the timing was perfect for Whitaker’s much less-troubled Time Lord, in terms of character progression. She knows she’s a good person and sets about bouncing around the universe to do what she can for others. Not as penance, but because it’s who she is.
“When people need help, I never refuse,” she says in the season opener, which set viewership records. This echoes words said by literally every Doctor, but the confidence is striking. It sets a tone; there is no doubt, no trauma and no overwhelming sense of having to prove something. She is simply there, and it is, in its way, a validating triumph of all the previous seasons. The Doctor has grown. All the pain and conflict that had driven her has ultimately led her to a place where she can say those words without agony. It’s enchanting.
But the show still needs conflict to work. Every story does. What replaces the doubt and pain that have defined the character for so long? So far, there isn’t much.
There are hints of it something in “The Witchfinders,” when a puckish King James, having condemned her as a witch, needles the Doctor about hiding behind the vague title. There’s a pained look in the eyes of Whitaker’s Doctor; at last we see she is still the woman who keeps running. She is still lonely, and is all too eager to let not one, but three new humans into the TARDIS. Surely this callout from King James is it — a moment. A moment of doubt, or reckoning, or something that will add complexity to the character.
But it’s an ordinary moment, there and gone. We have precious little idea of what she’s feeling, or why. We can guess that maybe she’s left wrestling with her need for a home and family now that her other central doubts have been put to rest, but the text doesn’t do much to support this reading. It’s just a guess.
Opting out of the moral maze
None of this season’s failings are Whitaker’s fault, much less that of the oft-scorned “diversity” it has embraced. The bitter, angry bigots are clearly in the minority, and in any event they’ve ignored the actual problems of the series in lieu of whinging about pregnant men.
Indeed, a willingness to be open-minded and bold with the subject matter — continuing Doctor Who’s long running trend towards broadening its perspective — leads Whitaker’s Doctor to her best moments in “Rosa,” “Demons of the Punjab,” (historical dramas that tackles “thorny” subjects that the show previously avoided) “The Witchfinders” and “The Tsuranga Conundrum,” which both deal with gender in interesting ways, through both historical and science fiction.
But the Doctor still needs to be challenged, from within and without. The season finale, replete with dexterously averted moral quandaries, underscores this point. Tim Shaw, the villain from “Woman Who Fell to Earth,” returns to taunt the Doctor with the fact that her earlier mercy has allowed him to commit genocide for three more millennia. The pacifism of Whitaker’s Doctor, relentless even by the standards of the series, is ripe for confrontation.
Except that never happens. Instead of killing Tim Shaw, he gets put in a permanent coma, which is morally superior for … reasons.
Whitaker’s Doctor chooses not to intervene except when the plot requires her to, and even then, her attempts at taking action are treated as a joke that quickly becomes tiresome.
When they’re taken seriously, they act as a tedious sermon on why punching a bad guy makes you the bad guy. Even this would be interesting if the new Doctor’s passivity were revealed to be a flaw: if she’s unwilling to truly fight for what she believes in, what is she afraid of and why? But this is left to the idle speculations of the curious viewer rather than handled directly by the story, and it wastes the immense talents of a brilliant new slate of writers like Malorie Blackman, Joy Wilkinson, and Vinay Patel.
The end result of this Doctor Who season is one that seems to condemn fighting evil directly, a strange take from a season that has been almost courageous in its willingness to lampoon bigotry and strong-man nationalism — including having Chris Noth star in a brilliant turn as a delightfully spineless Trump-analogue.
But according to the overall arc of the show, true virtue lies in this almost-smug liberalism that sees the Doctor fall on her sword time and again; after a while, it becomes moral slapstick. While the Doctor has often taught us that one can’t fight fire with fire, just as often we’ve gotten lessons in brutal necessity. The tendency to avoid the conversation about balancing direct action with becoming a monster yourself is graceless and even dangerous in 2018, a year that has all but demanded direct action in the face of hatred and bigotry.
Doctor Who’s most recent season suggests that the world will give you a way of removing each threat without harming the people responsible. The question of whether you can fight evil while keeping your hands “clean” is as pressing as ever, and yet Doctor Who has never worked harder to avoid answering it.
Whitaker’s Doctor needs doubt, she needs an inner life, and she needs to be truly tested. That struggle is the stuff that moral reasoning is made of — and it’s what made past Doctors, for their many flaws, relatable. Following the Doctor through her past moral mazes was half the fun, and nearly all of the poignancy.
The broad outlines of the thirteenth Doctor character paint a strong picture, and Jodie Whitaker herself has given us a real gift in her performance. But she’s put everything into a role that’s holding her back.
We know Whitaker’s Doctor is a “good woman,” answering her predecessor’s agonizing question. Now she needs to show us how she stays there.
Source: Polygon
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